Staging the Revolution: Terence MacSwiney and Guo Moruo
Jerusha McCormack (TCD)
On August 20, 1920, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney was arrested by British Crown police for being a member of the Irish Republican Army: a charge he did not deny. Protesting his arrest by what he saw as the occupying forces in Ireland, he went on hunger strike – dying in Bristol prison 74 days later.
A world away, in Fukuoka, Japan, a young Chinese journalist, translator, and poet, Guo Moruo, followed MacSwiney’s protest through the local telegraph office. Within a year of MacSwiney’s death he had published his first book of poetry, The Godesses (女神 – nǚ shén, 1921). There, in a poem titled “Victorious Death,” cobbled together from the various telegrams he had read as a journalist, Moruo honoured MacSwiney as an “Irish patriot” and “fighter for freedom”.
How was such a vivid connection made over such distances, both actual and cultural? How can these two events be said to be in any way cognate? By examining them through the perspective of various forms of drama – from self-dramatization to actual theatre, from public spectacle to media publicity – one can understand more about what the two revolutions in China and in Ireland (which eventually led to then both being declared republics) hold in common.