Distant Calling

Dan Crowley
11 min readJun 12, 2021

One thing about being mixed-race is that no one can ever guess your heritage. If quantum physics teaches us that a subatomic particle can simultaneously exist in multiple places, quantum ethnics teaches us that a half-Sri Lankan can simultaneously look Indian, Afghan, Iranian, Brazilian, and Greek (I’ve had people guess all 5). I like to think of myself as Schrodinger’s brown man — until you check my heritage, I exist as every possible race.

When you are so ethnically ambiguous, life becomes like that famous football chant, with a special emphasis on the last line.

“Everywhere we go-o!
People want to know-o!
Who we a-are!
And where we come from.”

Fielding that same question every day, every week, every year since childhood can feel isolating, like you’re some kind of stranger in your own country. 22 years in, it’s becoming more and more tempting to lash out at the questioner:

“So-o we tell them.
None of your fucking business
.”

But I never do. Not because I’m especially restrained, but because I know I don’t need to lash out to make my point. I don’t have to make any grand moral arguments about microaggressions, ‘other-ing’ or exoticism. No, all I have to do is answer their question, truthfully.

“What’s your background?”, they ask, and I reflexively smile.

“Irish.”

And it’s true. My background is Irish. My name is Daniel Patrick Crowley, and my great great grandfather was born in Milltown, County Kerry. My paternal cousins have bright red hair, and burn in the sun like bread on toaster setting 6. I may have dark skin, but mathematically speaking I’m as Irish as I am Sri Lankan — 50/50, straight down the middle, even-stevens.

But of course, people never find this answer satisfying. Perhaps because they’re asking the wrong question. When they ask where are you from, maybe what they really mean to ask is…

Why aren’t you white?

Why do you look different?

What are you doing here of all places?

***

“How’d ya fuking end up on Shankill Road?”, my Uber driver asks, craning his neck towards the back seats to get a good look at me. He has that sing-songy Belfast drawl that before this weekend I had assumed was just a stereotype. (If you’re reading this Sam Neill, I owe you an apology — your accent work in Peaky Blinders was impeccable.)

“Historical tour”, I reply.

“Right”, he mutters. He shakes his head for a few seconds, then snaps back into polite Uber driver routines — offering me a mint, checking if the air con is set right, confirming I’m happy to take the tollway.

22 years after the Good Friday agreement, Shankill is still the sort of place you don’t want to fuking end up in. East of Belfast’s largest ‘Peace Wall’, it’s an enclave of Protestant loyalists who hold a grudge. “SINN-FEIN/I.R.A.’S SLAUGHTER”, reads one sign on the back wall of a church, above dozens of names and faces of murdered civilians. “Jean McConville — Mother of 10 young children. Abducted and tortured for 7 days then shot in the head by Sinn Fein/IRA.”

Shankill and its surrounding streets look nothing like a warzone — this is the heart of Irish suburbia. But they were once the hunting grounds of a terrifying death-squad called the ‘Shankill Butchers’, so-named because they hacked at their victims’ throats with butchers’ cleavers. That, in many ways, is the story of The Troubles — savagery emerging from the most mundane surroundings.

If the root cause of this savagery could be reduced down to just three words, those words would be appended with a question mark: British or Irish? After centuries of British occupation, 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties formed an independent republic in 1923, while the 6 northernmost counties remained in Britain as Northern Ireland. Irish Catholic nationalists, led by the Irish Republican Army and its political wing Sinn Fein, fought to reunite the north with the south, and were staunchly resisted by British loyalist groups like the Ulster Volunteers Force (of which the Shankill Butchers were members).

The Good Friday Agreement brought a ceasefire in 1998, but in Belfast this fight still literally divides neighbourhoods: Falls Road, a Catholic quarter with Gaelic street signs, is barely 200 metres from Shankill Road, separated by a towering ‘Peace Wall’. The gates of this wall are locked each night, and the adjoining yards are cased in metal cages, to keep out grenades lobbed from the other side.

My Uber driver and I pass through these rows of houses, then out along Crumlin Road, past the old gaol that once housed hundreds of political prisoners. We pull onto the A57 towards the main airport, and soon we’re out in open countryside, free from the shuttered confines of the city — its walls, cages, gaols, and enclaves.

I have a flight back to the British mainland — to Edinburgh, a Scottish city that once staged its own fight for independence, centuries before Ireland.

“Domestic or international?”, my driver asks, as we pull over near the terminals.

Loaded question, I guess.

***

“What have you been writing?”, Dad asks me one afternoon, as we sit out in the beer garden of a Fitzroy pub. It’s a year after Belfast, and for weeks I’ve been bashing away on my keyboard in front of the TV, coyly answering “nothing much” when Mum or Dad ask what I’m writing about. Now, finally, I tell him — my Irish heritage, and what it’s like to be a brown-skinned Irishman.

“Really?”, Dad asks with a smile. He’s delighted that I see my Irish heritage as important enough to write about. His smile eventually fades. “I’ve often wondered what it must be like for you. I can’t wait to read it.”

***

In Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, the great Irish poet Seamus Heeney writes about life as a non-combatant in Northern Ireland. As “media men and stringers” hunt for sensational tales of “backlash”, “crack down”, “polarization” and “long-standing hate”, the stories of quiet, prayerful civilians are ignored:

“Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,
Expertly civil-tongued with civil neighbours…”

For Heeney and his neighbours, “cabin’d and confined” within a sectarian “siege”, anonymity is their only self-defence, and they must code and conceal their words to escape notice:

… The famous

Northern reticence, the tight gag of the place

And times: yes, yes. Of the “wee six” I sing

Where to be saved you only must save face

And whatever you say, you say nothing.”

That final line doubles as the title of a famous book on The Troubles: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, which charts the lives of abducted mother Jean McConville, and IRA operatives Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, and Dolours Price.

I started reading Say Nothing about a month after my trip to Belfast, during the first wave of COVID in Melbourne. Home yet homesick, I found comfort in reading — fiction first, then, more intensely, Irish history. I spent mornings, afternoons and nights out in my backyard, pouring through story after story about Belfast. Hunger strikes, shoot-outs, and prison breaks, psy-ops, bomb blasts, and spy heists. It was not so much escapism as ‘returnism’, bringing bursts of morbid nostalgia: Jean McConville’s abduction from Divis Tower, where my tour started, lethal explosions on Falls Road, the street I walked down, riots in the city centre, right near my hostel.

Dad is an Irish history buff in his own right, and we often traded anecdotes and observations over the dinner table, rattling through whatever names, places or events had piqued our interest that day. Provos, Stickies, Bobby Sands, BBC sound ban, the Old Bailey, inside a mattress, forced feeding, Special Powers. It was like our own little language — private, intimate, and unintelligible to the rest of our family (“whatever they say, they say nothing”, I sometimes imagined my mother thinking).

Reading these stories, memorising them, obsessing over them felt strangely comforting, bringing a faint but meaningful sense of belonging. Wasn’t I, in some small way, part of this history? The story of the Irish diaspora, the generations of emigrants who followed the Irish cause from afar — wasn’t that my story?

I live here, I live here too!”, I felt like singing. “This is my home. These are my neighbours.

***

A text from Dad, after reading my first draft:

Wow this is sooo good. Wonderful. Makes me want to stop writing. Depressing really. Deeply insightful and original. Should be published.

On p2 is it paternal rather than fraternal cousin?

I’m afraid that the situation is even worse for you as an Irishman. There’s no easy way to say this. You are partly a KERRYMAN. The Irish tell Irish jokes about Kerryman. Timothy Patrick was born in Milltown Co Kerry. I think your great great grandmother Joanna Spillane was from Cork, but anyway their home was at Ballyverane in Cork. Joanna and it’s variants is a common family name. For example, my great aunt (grandad Tom’s sister), who lived to be 100, was Nora. She looked after me for a while when I was a kid. A few have been named Honora (both are derivatives of Joanna, which is what our daughter would have been called if we’d had one).

For people of my generation the Belfast accent immediately screams “terrorist”. I love it.

***

Mum, Dad, Tom and I are eating dinner under the stars at the foot of Uluru, outdoor dining at its most splendid — candle-lit table settings, ambient Australian music, and a buffet full of local produce and seasonal native ingredients. They call this extravaganza the ‘Field of Light’, and tourists flock from all around the world to experience it. American tourists mostly. Drunk American tourists.

“Where have you lot travelled from?”, one of them booms, joining us at our table with a glass of wine in hand. She points out my brother as spokesman.

“Melbourne”, he answers quietly.

“Oh lovely. And where did you come from?”

There’s no one else at the table, but we know who she’s asking. The man who’s sitting next to us, who’s been chatting to us all night, who’s holding Mum’s hand under the table. The man who looks nothing like us, his brown wife and his brown children. The stranger.

The stranger came with us.

***

Self help gurus tell us that self-discovery is key. Find out who you really are, learn everything there is to know about yourself, really know every corner of your being — then you’ll find peace.

But since when does knowing bring peace? Since when is knowing enough? No, what we really need, what we really crave is someone to recognise us for who we are. Belonging isn’t internal, belonging isn’t inside of us. Belonging is recognition.

I remember sitting in the front row of my Year 6 history class one morning, during a lesson on the Stolen Generation. Our teacher was telling us about Anglo-Indigenous children called ‘half-castes’, when one of my classmates stuck up his hand and cut her off.

“Miss?”

“Yes Isaac?”

“What did a half-caste look like?

Isaac’s question was a thorny one, but our teacher (let’s call her Miss Informed) didn’t miss a beat. With silent conviction, she pointed right at me, then nodded for emphasis. At first I thought she was prompting me to answer Isaac’s question (it’s never too early to teach kids to listen *clap* to *clap* minority *clap* voices), but the longer the point lingered, the clearer its implication became:

Like Dan. Half-castes look like Dan.

Whenever people ask about my experiences with racism, I tell them about Miss Informed and that wordless point. It’s a powerful anecdote — the crudeness of the gesture, my youthful innocence, the broken duty of care. People rightly react with disgust. It was unequivocally, indisputably, irredeemably racist.

Yet part of me — in fact nearly all of me — remains totally unfazed by it. Even now while I write this, I can’t bring myself to feel victimised or ashamed by the encounter. My inner artist wants to tell you that I felt small, humiliated, belittled, that my teacher’s silence cut me, scarred me, severed my trust in the white world I lived in, that every subsequent racial slight has deepened the wound, inflamed it, isolated me further, because I know that would make powerful prose.

But the truth is, my reaction at 12 was the same as my attitude now at 21: indifference. As politically conscious as I have become, as steadfastly anti-racist as I continue to be, I have an unshakeable indifference towards my experiences of racism. People can point at me, shame me, scream that I’m different, but the noise is only ever external, never internal.

More and more as I grow older, the voices that hurt me are not the racist ones, but the voices that talk about racism. It’s the way our discourse treats ‘white’ and ‘non-white’, ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’, ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’ as binary categories, polar opposites defined against each other: whiteness the privilege you get when you’re not coloured, colouredness the prejudice you get when you’re not white. In this paradigm, the birth of a mixed-race child is a paradox: brown and not white, white and not brown.

A famous play by Jackie Sibblies Drury required white audience members to leave their seats and stand aside from their non-white counterparts, a metaphor about segregation, solidarity, and the isolating effects of racism. I saw a different metaphor. Because to find a place to stand, one half of my identity must be subsumed by the other. I must choose a side, in a battle where I’m my own enemy, where the two warring factions are the two halves of my whole.

And this choice — this choice you choose to give me — is no choice at all, because who ever believes that I am white? Who is ever ready to hear that answer — Irish! — and be satisfied by it, ask nothing more from me?

No, in the racial binary, the brown gene must be dominant, white recessive. Half-white half-brown becomes brown. Half-Irish half-Sri Lankan becomes Sri Lankan. I stand in the brown corner, but I am pulled in two directions, split across the room, suspended between two poles.

So if I am to write powerful prose, it won’t be about Miss Informed and her ilk, but the anti-racist progressives, who in their efforts to push back against that ilk, end up pushing me away. Me, Schrodinger’s brown man, a quantum ethnic, an Irish-Australian, Sri Lankan-Irish, Australian Sri-Lankan paradox.

If I am to write powerful prose, it’s going to be about you. Because I am brown and white in equal measure, and when you insist that I must be one, and not the other, you are just as blameful as Miss Informed, as that wine-drunk Yankee tourist, as the hordes of people who want to know-o, where I come from. You are pointing at me, singling me out from the crowd, with the same silent subtext: “This is you. This is all of you. This is who you are to me.”

I am not that. I am more than that. I have brown skin and a white father, a Sri Lankan mother and an Irish surname, large volumes of melanin and a deep passion for Irish history. None of these elements are contradictory. None of them should be subsumed.

They are me, I am them.

Recognise me now.

Kerryman.

Sri Lankan.

Both.

***

The stranger came with us.

We came with the stranger.

Together.

Apart.

One.

***

‘Irish Pub Song’

By The High Kings

Well, you’re walkin’ through a city street, you could be in Peru

And you hear a distant calling and you know it’s meant for you

Then you drop what you were doing and you join the merry mob

And before you know just where you are, you’re in an Irish pub

***

“How’d you fukin end up on Shankill Road?”, my Uber driver asks, craning his neck towards the back seats to get a good look at me. He has that sing-songy Belfast drawl that before this weekend I had assumed was just a stereotype. (If you’re reading this Sam Neill, I owe you an apology — your accent work in Peaky Blinders was impeccable.)

I heard a distant calling, I reply dreamily.

Did ya now?

Mm-hmm. I think it was meant for me.

***

--

--