CULTURE Parallel patterns of migrant memories

Áine Ryan

THE sound of the instrument from west Africa, which is made from gourds (a fruit) and beads, is light and delicate, but also spell-binding and ominous. Along with a solitary drum, it provides the background music to the short-film, ‘Migrant Women – Shared  Experiences’, which is part of a unique exhibition on show at the National Museum of Ireland: Country Life.

The simplicity and understatedness of this film, in which eight migrant women, who now live in Co Mayo, speak about their mothers, melds the epic story of female immigration and emigration, past and contemporary.

The women who share their experiences are from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Latvia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland, Russia and the Karen community from South-East Asia.

It brings gentle focus on our responsibility as a First World nation to fellow human beings whose stories should disinter the parallels with our own economically deprived and politically exploited past.     

Significantly, the exhibition, which also uses story-boards, artefacts and personal possessions brought on the long journeys, is juxtaposed with the experiences of Irish emigrant girls and women who set sail across the Atlantic at the end of the 19th century in a quest for better lives.

Assisted migration

OVER 300,000 Irish girls landed in the port of New York between 1883 and 1908. Many of these were assisted by the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of Irish Immigrant Girls’ which opened in 1884.

Statistics reveal that one distinguishing feature of Irish emigration was the large number of young females. Between 1876 and 1885 the female-male emigration ratio from Mayo was 120:100 but from 1886 to 1906 it had peaked at 175:100. The Irish emigrant experience is interpreted here through the story of the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of Irish Immigrant Girls, based in New York. The Mission provided assistance to Irish emigrant women upon their arrival into New York, with mission personnel meeting the women and providing them with temporary lodgings, advice on finding work as well as spiritual guidance.  

Exploration of experiences

CURATOR Rosa Meehan explains that while emigration has been ‘an integral part of Irish life for at least the last two centuries’, the converse experience of the ‘large-scale immigration’ to Ireland over the last two decades has been a new experience. She says that this exhibition allows us ‘to explore the different experiences of women travelling in different directions a century apart’.

“Every migrant woman’s journey is unique,” says Meehan.  “Yet there are shared experiences. Migrant women are part of Ireland’s increasingly diverse society, just as Irish migrant women have become part of the diversity of other societies around the globe.   

“Through this exhibition we seek to show the collective story of emigration through giving voice to individual migrants and through the experience of a specific group of emigrants.”

‘Migrant Women: Shared Experiences’, runs at the National Museum of Ireland, Country Life until April 2016. It will be officially launched by Minister of State at the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht AodhΡn Ó RíordΡin on Wednesday, September 9 at 2.30pm.