neither Casement the queer nor Casement the martyr, but Casement the man in whose body resided inextricably both of these identities. We are compelled, by the graceful and forceful motions of Ó Conchúir’s choreography and Walsh’s camera, to reckon with the reality of his body, his hanged neck and penetrated ass, and to respect that we cannot have one without the other.
The overwhelming challenge of this, what we can call Casement’s true repatriation, is not in accepting an Irish revolutionary icon as queer but rather in accepting our erstwhile denial of such as an affront to the foundational ideals for which we elevated that part of him which we did not elect to deplore, in recognising that commemoration should be as much about collective reckoning as celebration, in reflecting on our national identity as a tangle of contradictions to be unwound. Denying Casement’s queerness was never so much a question of Catholic Ireland excluding that which it thought immoral as of a revolutionary heritage refusing to acknowledge the failure to extend its liberties to all those whose loyalty it claimed. Perhaps only in recognising, reconfiguring, and finally relinquishing this collective conquest over Casement’s century-old body can we hope to do the same for the many others held similarly captive in our state today. I’m Roger Casement’s bold approach to challenging our conception of its subject and his legacy is no less than an effort to reconcile and repair the Irish self-image after an as-yet-unceasing tradition of self-deception. The chorus of voices that speaks the film’s title as it opens is at once an effort to reclaim this figure’s identity and an urge to relate it to that of the nation now. We are all Roger Casement, and in the watching of this daring and desperately needed film we can see to it that conquest, at last, fails over our minds.
28 CinÉireann / December 2017