The Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott was an early and heretofore relatively unrecognized exemplar for Seamus Heaney, who began reading Walcott in the 1960s and continued engaging with his work his entire career. Walcott’s example enabled Heaney to realize that he could be true to his mixed and multiple linguistic, cultural, literary, and political inheritances, and further, that dwelling amongst such identities could be a position of poetic strength. This essay shows how Walcott confirmed Heaney’s penchant for memorializing historical atrocities committed against members of minority communities across the “Black and Green Atlantic.” At the same time, Walcott’s nuanced poetry modeled how Heaney might enrich and complicate his poetry of witness by seeking rapprochement with such perpetrators through registering their common humanity through their local language. Walcott’s poetic integrity thus influenced Heaney’s continuing attempts to draw on the divisive conflict in Northern Ireland by exploring how literature might not linger on the wound of racialized resentment but finally transcend that situation and ascend into a condition akin to Walcottian song.

This chapter introduces the essays of this book and historicizes why a book on race in Irish literature and culture is of special significance at this contemporary moment in the twenty-first century. The editors signal the ubiquity of the concept of race in Irish letters and the changing iterations of that concept, especially since the Celtic Revival. Irishness has been compared and even equated to blackness to serve both colonial and nationalist agendas. However, in Revivalist and post-Celtic Tiger discourses, the racial imaginary surrounding Irishness has also been silenced in telling ways. This essay connects the dots between these divergent histories to narrativize a critical position that aids a decolonial framing of the subject of race, Irish literature, and Irish culture. Such a decolonial endeavor is especially urgent at a time when fascist nationalisms and white supremacy are becoming key geopolitical registers. It is also a time when Irish whiteness is being scrutinized and when Black Irishness is gaining recognition. This is a unique moment in the history of Ireland, and it is partly because of the growing crescendo of cultural identification by a biracial population within Ireland.