The Turn of the Hand: A Memoir from the Irish Margins Book

Recent decades have seen an enormous resurgence in the arts of memoir and life writing. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Ireland and other postcolonial countries where memoir has functioned to regenerate and re-present meaningful incidents and events in the past of a particular individual or a cultural particular group. This memoir, written by an 'insider' recalls the lives of various members of the Irish Traveller community during an era of enormous social and cultural change, a community whose history has often been forgotten, elided or relegated to the cultural margins. We live in an age of testimony, an era where first-hand accounts and personal experience challenge us with respect to our suppositions of the past. It is only by engaging with memory and the stories which have gone before, as this book does, that we may become true custodians of our individual and communal identities. It is through the 're-imagining of our cultural histories and identities' that we may preserve our individual identities for future generations and come to a better understanding of what it means to be truly human.Read More