The Casement Files: Imperialism

Who is Roger Casement?

Many knew of the slave system in King Leopold’s Congo rubber plantations– but British Consul Roger Casement was the first to make the world take notice. He created the 20th century's first international human rights movement, and was knighted for his work. Two years later, he was hung for treason, after an abortive plot to enlist German aid for Ireland’s Easter Rising. A widely-popular clemency movement had collapsed when Britain secretly circulated private diaries alleged to be Casement’s. Shocking if true, the diaries are still a matter of passionate contention, a century after Casement’s death.

Friday, September 2, 2016

The Ghost of Roger Casement

William Butler Yeats knew Roger Casement from Dublin; Yeats' Abbey Theatre was one of the many causes associated with the Gaelic cultural and political revival to which Casement contributed.

Casement Memorial
Ballyheigue, Co Kerry

"The Ghost of Roger Casement" was one of two Casement-related poems Yeats wrote twenty years after Casement's execution -- inspired by the publication of a book that rigorously challenged the "Black Diaries" authenticity and insisted upon Casement's heterosexuality.

Yeats said he didn't care whether Casement was gay or not, but he was outraged at Britain's use of private materials -- stolen, at the least, if not actually forged -- to blacken his reputation. In this poem, he envisions Casement as the moral conscience of the British Empire, standing in judgment of all of imperialism's crimes.

O what has made that sudden noise?

What on the threshold stands?

It never crossed the sea because

John Bull and the sea are friends;

But this is not the old sea

Nor this the old seashore.

What gave that roar of mockery,

That roar in the sea's roar?

The ghost of Roger Casement

Is beating on the door.