"Conquest, my lord, gives no title, and if it exists over the body, it fails over the mind."
So in his “Speech from the Dock” proclaimed Roger Casement, the conquest of whose body far outlasted his own life and offered a glimpse at the nature of the soon-to-be state for the formation of which he was to lay it down. Captured in a doomed effort to attend the Easter rising, condemned as traitor to a nation of which he considered himself no subject, denied clemency by the circulation of records of a
homosexual history, Casement in his last chapter at once succeeded wildly in facilitating the national liberty he sought for Ireland and forecast the selectivity with which that liberty would be meted out to its new body politic. From the undercover extradition and the invasive autopsy inflicted upon it to, five decades on, the repatriation of its bones and, five more still, the reverence in which it is now held, Casement’s body has over a century come in many ways to function as an emblematic object of Irish independence and identity.
It is the audacious invention of I’m Roger Casement, a centenary short directed by Dearbhla Walsh and derived from the dance choreography of Fearghus Ó Conchúir, to recognise the complex contradictions inherent in Casement’s legacy and to render it in a manner intimately physical, innately cinematic, and intensely challenging to our collective conception of who he was, and what that says about who we are. This is no unremarkable feat in itself, success or failure notwithstanding: the Irish are precious about their martyrs, not lightly do we take it to have to reckon with them anew. In forcing us to do so via the mixed media of dance and film, through a lens at once violent and erotic, Walsh and Ó Conchúir have produced a work of a revolutionary character fully befitting their commemorative brief.
Those sixteen dead men, as Yeats eulogised them, have their names and sentences of death dutifully and dramatically read as Walsh’s camera cranes far above the beach-bound bodies that dance their tribute. It was famously the severity of sentencing that united the nation to-be rather than the rising itself; Irish nationalism, then, was forged as much from
26 CinÉireann / December 2017