"The Turn of the Hand"

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 pasts of particular individuals or cultural groups. 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. The Irish Traveller community are a group whose history has often been forgotten, elided or relegated to the cultural margins. We currently live in an age of testimony, however, an era where first-hand accounts and personal experiences challenge us with respect to our suppositions regarding the past. It is only by engaging with memory and the stories which have gone before that we may become true custodians of our individual and communal identities. Books such as the The Turn of the Hand allow us to begin the process that is the “re-imagining” of our cultural histories and identities. In this manner we can preserve our cultural identity for future generations and come to a better understanding of what it means to be truly human.