Richard Murphy’s The God Who Eats Corn: A Colonizer’s Critique of British Imperialism in Ireland and Africa

J.R Sackett

doi:10.47631/ijecls.v2i3.220

Abstract

With the passing of Richard Murphy in 2018, Ireland lost its last poet of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Yet his poetry often displays the poet’s sense of unease with his background and features attempts to reconcile Ireland’s colonial history with feelings of guilt and self-consciousness as an inheritor to the gains of the British imperialist project. A dedicatory poem to his aging father who had retired to what was then known as Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe), ‘The God Who Eats Corn’ draws parallels between Irish and African colonial experiences. Yet far from celebrating the ‘civilizing’ mission of British imperialism, Murphy deftly challenges and questions the legitimacy of his family legacy. I argue that rather than reinforcing the poet’s image as representative of the Ascendancy class, ‘The God Who Eats Corn’ reveals sympathies with the subject peoples of British imperialism and aligns Murphy with a nationalist narrative of history and conception of ‘native’ identity. For this reason, the poem should be considered a landmark of modern Irish poetics in its articulation of trans-racial anti-colonial solidarity.

Highlights

As a member of the Protestant aristocracy, with deep historical and familial ties to British imperialism, Richard Murphy wrote from a privileged position that distanced him from his majority Catholic, nationalist countrymen of the Irish Republic
For a definition of ‘colonial identity’ in its Irish context, we turn to Boyce who states that ‘Colonial identity [...] is felt by those members of a group whose national identity takes its origins in the mother country, but whose cultural identity has been shaped by their new environment’ (18-19)
Black Africans did not tend to respond to white settler calls for paid employment as laborers since such a practice was out of their cultural norm (Vambe 100), but given few other options, we find them hard at work on the Murphy property, bestowed an education after a long day at the plough

Summary

Introduction

As a member of the Protestant aristocracy, with deep historical and familial ties to British imperialism, Richard Murphy wrote from a privileged position that distanced him from his majority Catholic, nationalist countrymen of the Irish Republic. ‘The God Who Eats Corn’ was trumped by a story about the pope’s surprise visit to Jerusalem; it was eventually broadcast by the BBC and published in The Listener and The Reporter before its inclusion in The Battle of Aughrim(1968) It has been one of the most overlooked and misunderstood poems in Murphy’s oeuvre. Patrick Cotter has posited that such lazy misapprehension and misreading of the poem’s enduring theme of colonial guilt as unreconstructed

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Conclusion