Displacement, identity and language in Hugo Hamilton

Abstract

Focusing on the memoir The Speckled People and the novel Sad Bastard, this article investigates Hugo Hamilton’s attitude to some central issues in Irish culture and literature, namely the idea of displacement, the nature of Irish identity and the language question presented in a surprisingly new way. Born into an Irish-German family, brought up speaking German and Irish, forbidden from speaking English at home, Hamilton is interestingly different from other Irish authors. In his writing the traditional confrontation with an external cultural, literary and linguistic authority takes on a new meaning. The Speckled People explores how his father’s language dream of an Irish Ireland was inflexibly enforced on his family. His father’s unflinching pursuit of an abstract model of Irishness shifted the focus of displacement, resulting in the child’s painful condition of ‘dislocatedness’. In Sad Bastard the author looks into the same issues from the exhilarating perspective of a grown-up, mentally fragile, ex Garda who is likewise ‘dislocated’.