Kneecap, Ancestral Memory, and Finding Healing in Unexpected Places
At first I didn’t understand the pull; I just noticed how often at the end of the day, in that downtime of choosing a show to watch after eating dinner, I gravitated toward Youtube, to see if Kneecap had posted anything new.
Kneecap is a group of three youngish guys from West Belfast and Derry who’ve made a name for themselves by rapping in Irish. They’re outspoken about freedom for Palestine to the point that they lost their US agent after voicing anti-Israel views at Coachella. The British government charged group member Mo Chara, the rap name for Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, with terror for waving a Hezbollah flag; Kneecap and its fans argue that the charges are a ploy to censor art and a distraction from the US and UK’s complicity in the Palestinian genocide.
They’re open about drug use, with one of the members, Móglaí Bap, the rap name for Naoise Ó Cairealláin, stating plainly in an interview that for men who struggle to express their emotions, drugs can function as a way to connect.
I am decidedly not the demographic for Kneecap. People frequently describe me as “gentle” or “calm", and you’re likely to find me sitting at a creek in the forest, or browsing new fiction arrivals at the library. While I admire much of their political advocacy, you would definitely not find me anywhere near the mosh pit at a Kneecap show, which would be an absolute sensory nightmare for a highly sensitive autistic system like mine.
I wouldn’t really expect a group like this to grab my attention.
So, I couldn’t help but ask myself, why has Kneecap become my special interest?
And moreover, why do I find myself so engrossed that I’m physically leaning toward the television screen, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing, mesmerized as they rapid-yell Irish into their microphones?
I took a quiet minute and considered what was driving this strange new obsession.
What revealed itself to me inside were these words:
“I’ve never heard anybody be Irish like this before.”
Suddenly, everything made sense.
In the 1800’s and early 1900’s in Ireland, during British rule, schoolchildren wore a stick around their necks called “An Bata Scóir”, the “tally stick”. Each time they spoke Irish, the teacher notched another line on the stick, and at a certain point the child would be punished, often by being hit with the stick.
Initially the English beat the Irish language out of the children, but eventually, the Irish families and communities took over as the ones policing the speech and driving the beatings. They had internalized a belief that Irish was the language of peasants, and that for pure survival, to be able to find work, they needed to abandon the language that tied them to who they were, and adopt the language of the colonizer.
Imagine being one of these kids: going to school, thinking in your native language, speaking in your native language, a language rooted in the sounds of the wild places, a language that is the umbilical cord to your culture, your land, your very sense of yourself, and then having that authentic self-expression literally beaten out of you.
It’s enough to break one’s spirit.
There’ a part of me that I’ve gotten to know in my Internal Family Systems (IFS) practice that isn’t quite mine; it’s an ancestral memory.
It’s the memory of my people and it holds the collective, amorphous pain of being severed from our own means of communication.
At the risk of sounding like a hippie who has been living in California too long, I’ve felt for as long as I’ve been alive the burden of that ancestral memory. I’ve felt it’s weight on the collective field of the native Irish and the Irish diaspora, as well as on my own system.
This is the way for some of us autistic woman: hyper empathetic to the point that we’re conduits for the energy in the field.
The ancestral burden has shown up in my own life in the vague sense that my words aren’t okay, that even my thoughts aren’t okay. That nothing about who I am or how I express myself is okay.
When I’ve inquired inside about where these beliefs came from, I’m always led back to the colonized Ireland of my ancestors.
This part – this ancestral memory – has felt so defeated, and so deflated by life.
And I’ve sensed the weight of this burden all around me – the heavy cloak of shame, draping energetically on those I know and love, like one of those lead blankets they put on you at the dentist.
So as I sat on my couch on a regular Tuesday evening for my self care routine - a weighted stuffed dog resting in my lap, sips of mugwort soothing my nervous system, watching Kneecap on Youtube play in front of a huge, rowdy crowd at the Best Kept Secret festival in The Netherlands - the ancestral memory was also watching, through my eyes.
There are a few parts of their set where Mo Chara seems to channel the energy of at least 10 people as he yells Irish lyrics into the microphone. When I really let myself take in the speed and intensity with which the Irish language was leaving his mouth, I began to understand why I was awe-struck.
Kneecap speaks Irish without self-consciousness.
Without apology.
Most importantly, without shame.
For these ancestral parts in me, who were told their Irishness was bad and wrong, who would have preferred to speak Irish all along, whose perspectives weren’t allowed in the classrooms and communities of their colonized home, Kneecap’s presence is a healing balm.
Because these guys are speaking Irish, but it’s also more than that: it’s aggressive, it’s in-your-face, its a shout-from-the-rooftops declaration that who they are, how they speak, is right and good and if you try to tell them otherwise, they will absolutely annihilate you with their lyrics, their moral clarity, and the fact that they seem to be just fine living like they have absolutely nothing to lose.
The ferocity of their delivery was the exact medicine needed to release my ancestral shame.
Because Kneecap embodies everything my ancestors didn’t get to be.
On the television, I watched as a bunch of Dutch people slammed into each other in a mosh pit as Kneecap yelled the lyrics to “Get Your Brits Out” at a breakneck speed.
On my couch, tears streamed down my face. With each tear that fell, a bit more of the ancestral shame dissolved.
My body seemed to take up more space in the room, and felt softer, too.
And I started to remember.
That Irish can sound like strength.
And that underneath the shame, the strength was there all along.
