the cultural foothold of the Celtic revival, the poet and his literary circle’s effort to develop a shared heritage on which the new nation might be forged. And if that fusion of religiously-oriented revolution and artistically-inclined autonomy offered a complex idea of Irishness in 1916, the waters had only muddied a century on: in a year where the geopolitical order was shaken by a resurgence of nationalistic assertion, Ireland wrestled with its multiple legacies and a heritage forged on violence, a liberty wrested from oppression, an identity born of… of what?
Self-conception is multifarious, the personal no less than the political, the individual no less than the national, the retrospective no less than the right now. So it is with Casement no less than with Ireland, his identity a mire of lingering legacies selectively summoned to suit the needs of whomever had cause to invoke him. With its early pairing of voiceover excerpts from the British government’s autopsy report, which drily recognises rectal dilation as evidence of “the alleged practice to which the prisoner was addicted”, and its nude male dancers engaged in tactile congress, I’m Roger Casement from its outset emphatically embraces its subject’s queerness, that unwieldy aspect of his legacy which variously doomed and defined him across the decades to come. What the extraordinarily evocative, emotive physicality of the film’s performers does is to dispel the notion that Casement’s queerness is a complication of his character and argue rather its essence to his stature as an emblematic figure of Irishness then and now.
To consider Casement the revolutionary in isolation, even in opposition to Casement the queer, as so many have done across the decades of debate over his detailed diaries of sexual relations in the Congo and Brazil, is to deny the very liberties his life was laid down to achieve; from the British government’s use of the diaries to quash clemency pleas, to the Irish government’s efforts in repatriating him a half century on to represent him a sexless martyr, to the insistence of leading scholars like Angus Mitchell that his sexuality is but a distraction, conceptions of Casement that elevate the political while ignoring the personal fail altogether in addressing the question of the man, and the country his sacrifice has been exploited to create.
I’m Roger Casement is nothing short of a radical reconciliation of its subject’s disparate legacies; as its dancers here writhe with the convulsions of death, there tremble with the thrill of sex, we are forced to realise Casement neither as the horny homo he was painted in 1916, nor the asexual idol he was interred in 1965, but the man equally given to desires and ideals it is imperative we recognise him now. We are implored to regard neither
CinÉireann / December 2017 27