The Trauma of the Troubles - Andrea DenHoed Dissent, Volume 67, Number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 12-16 (Article) Published by University of Pennsylvania ...
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The Trauma of the Troubles
Andrea DenHoed
Dissent, Volume 67, Number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 12-16 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dss.2020.0003
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745998
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]My phone buzzed in my bag: new fire Dolours Price, who died in 2013, is a
burning in Fullerton, take a different route central character in Say Nothing, Patrick
home. Noted. The band played on. I was Radden Keefe’s best-selling history of the
tired: I still had an hour’s drive home on Troubles—the period between 1968 and
unfamiliar highways, and my daughter 1998, during which the long-standing strife
would wake up at 6 a.m. no matter what over British rule of Northern Ireland broke
time I got to sleep. So I drove back to the into a protracted guerilla war. It’s an expan-
city, past the refineries, past the flames, sive book, covering many intertwining
fortified not with promises about what kind lives, dramatic events, and intimate
of world this could be, but with a keening moments, but the detail about Dolours
about how to inhabit it. To protest by not- Price’s lingering eating disorder stands
dying, attuned to flux, to howl, to void. out. The more famous Irish hunger strikers
are the ones who died—particularly Bobby
Sara Marcus, the author of Girls to the Sands and the nine men who followed him.
Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl In a way, those men and their legacies, as
Revolution, lives in Los Angeles and is fighters and emblems, are easier to make
currently finishing a book on political dis- sense of than Price’s. Her story points to a
appointment. more complicated experience, in which the
traumas of war seep into people’s emo-
tional and mental fabric.
When Americans think of war, we usu-
The Trauma of the Troubles ally imagine some sort of divide between
Andrea DenHoed the military and civilian worlds—a pro-
D issen t · W in t e r 2 0 2 0
tective barrier, either geographic or con-
In November 1973, the sisters Dolours and ceptual, that preserves the idea that back
Marian Price, along with a handful of other home, where the women and children are,
members of the Provisional Irish Republi- is a status quo worth protecting. During
can Army, were convicted of carrying out a the Troubles, that boundary barely existed;
bombing in London that injured hundreds. the home front was also the battlefield.
The sisters immediately declared a hunger (When police came looking for IRA weapon
strike, arguing that they ought to be clas- stashes in one predominantly Catholic
sified as political prisoners and allowed housing complex, the housewives who
to serve their sentences back home, in lived there would lean out their windows
Northern Ireland. The authorities started and pass guns down to their neighbors in
force-feeding them after two and a half a chain, staying just ahead of the search.)
weeks, and the strike ultimately lasted 203 And, although the Good Friday Agreement
days, after which they were transferred to officially ended the violence, the long tail of
Armagh Prison, outside Belfast. the conflict has been increasingly apparent
Although the strike was over, the sisters in recent years: paramilitary activity has
didn’t start eating normally again. They had been on the rise; a journalist, Lyra McKee,
developed anorexia so severe that they was shot by an IRA faction in April 2019;
were ultimately released because they Brexit threatens to topple the region’s deli-
were on the brink of starvation. The hunger cate political balance; and Northern Ireland
strike had “alienated us from the process has one of the highest suicide rates in the
of sustenance, the whole process of put- world—a trend that researchers attribute
ting food into your body,” Dolours Price to widespread PTSD from the Troubles.
said years later. Their detractors accused In the past few years, there have been
them of faking it, or of being motivated by several depictions of the Troubles focused
vanity and a desire to lose weight. Dolours on examining not the blast sites of the
continued to struggle with food-related conflict but the domestic spaces that
issues for years—as subsequent hunger absorbed the fallout. These treatments—
strikers perished, as she withdrew from the which include Anna Burns’s novel Milkman,
armed struggle, as the Good Friday Agree- Jez Butterworth’s play The Ferryman, and
ment was reached. the Channel 4 show Derry Girls—center
12A still from Derry Girls. Left to right: James, Michelle, Erin, Orla, and Clare (Netflix)
on the experiences of women, children, kids together. She is, we discover, Seamus’s
and families. The bombings and battles widow. (Quinn’s wife, Mary, either severely
become a backdrop to stories about the depressed or a hypochondriac, spends
C U LT U R E F R O N T
ways in which people mold their lives most of her time in bed.) As the news about
around conflict and learn to live within Seamus spreads through the family, other
large-scale trauma. subcutaneous ruptures become appar-
ent. Long-buried grief, anger, and suspicion
start rising to the surface.
In times of war, nations often take psycho- In The Ferryman, normalcy isn’t a
logical refuge in the notion that the fight- refuge; it’s a thin plaster that hides wounds
ing is necessary to protect some stable and allows them to fester. Until the infor-
normalcy at home. The Ferryman explores mation about Seamus arrives, the only
a counterpoint: how those supposedly acknowledgement of the political situation
protective and protected domestic struc- comes from elderly Aunt Pat, who is mostly
tures can be co-opted by violence, becom- ignored as she shouts at everyone to shut
ing a medium for its dissemination. The up so she can listen to the news on the
play introduces us to the Carney fam- radio. (The play is set in 1981, in the midst
ily, whom we meet on the morning of their of the hunger strikes that killed Sands
annual harvest feast. A herd of kids clamors and the others.) Quinn shuts off her radio,
around a cheerfully cluttered farmhouse; saying that “there’s a time and a place” to
elderly relatives tease and bicker. They discuss such things, and “it’s not here, and
seem boisterous, loving, and happy. But at it’s not now.”
the end of the first act, Quinn, the head of Quinn, who was once part of the IRA
the family, receives news that the body of himself, has tried to shield the family’s
his brother, Seamus, has been found in a younger members from the Troubles. His
bog. Seamus was disappeared years ear- imposed silence was meant to block the
lier by the IRA, which suspected he was a past from invading the present, but it has
police informer, and the family has never only smoothed its passage to the next
known for sure what happened to him. generation. Unspoken horrors plant seeds
The news is delivered first to Quinn, then where new tragedies will grow. The play
to Caitlin, who, earlier in the act, you might ends in a Shakespearean bloodbath as the
have assumed to be Quinn’s wife—the two past comes back in the form of keening
of them joked and flirted and wrangled the banshees, literally haunting the family.
13The play is forceful and intricately crafted, more real than reality and where day-to-
but there is a clear Chekhov’s-gun effect day life requires being in a state of con-
at work—the gun being not only Seamus’s stant denial and semi-fantasy. People like
body but the Troubles themselves. The the milkman—a ruthless, predatory, and
detonation has the feeling of a culmina- respected resistance fighter—thrive in
tion—a sudden and final reckoning with this atmosphere.
everything the family had tried and failed Any statement or denial the narrator
to contain. We don’t see the long process makes will trigger a new chain of rumors,
through which the pressure builds. so she finds that the only weapon she
has to combat the gossip is blankness.
No matter the question, she gives the
Milkman, a knotty and disorienting novel, same flat-faced reply: “I don’t know.” It’s
which won the Booker Prize in 2018, dwells a response that recalls an incident from
in those unspectacular ambient changes 1972, in which the IRA leader Gerry Adams
that conflict causes in the psychology of successfully deflected hours of police
a society. It’s a hard book to describe: it interrogation by refusing to acknowledge
never identifies its setting as Northern that he was Gerry Adams. The police were
Ireland and, in fact, contains hardly any not in any doubt about his identity, but
proper nouns. Instead, there are “political he outlasted his interrogators by simply
problems” concerning “the place over the denying the evident truth over and over. He
water” and violence involving uprisings by used a similar tactic years later when he
“renouncers of the state.” Certain details entered official politics and became a key
make it clear that the setting is probably figure in brokering the Good Friday deal.
D issen t · W in t e r 2 0 2 0
the author’s hometown of Belfast in the This time, he resolutely denied—and still
1970s. But, as the narrator says, historical denies—ever being a member of the IRA,
context and political particularities can be despite ample evidence to the contrary.
“misleading and cumbersome” if the goal But the narrator of Milkman, as a
is to understand the web of allegiances civilian and a woman, does not enjoy so
and aversions that defines people’s lives. much control over her own story. Her “I
The narrator is a nameless eighteen- don’t know” starts as a protective cover
year-old who has attracted the attention but quickly becomes a parasite. She says,
of a person known as the milkman, a high- “Thus my feelings stopped expressing.
ranking operative in a nameless organiza- Then they stopped existing. And now this
tion that is presumably the IRA. He begins numbance from nowhere had come so
stalking her, making vague threats about far on in its development that along with
car bombs and her boyfriend. People think others in the area finding me inaccessible,
they’re having an affair and start treating I, too, came to find me inaccessible. My
her differently, cautiously; the police snap inner world, it seemed, had gone away.”
her picture with hidden cameras. The milkman’s campaign of harass-
She moves around in a fog; her con- ment and gaslighting succeeds partly
sciousness doesn’t stream so much as thanks to a society that is already alien-
it rushes and fumbles from one thing to ated from reality. The story is set in the
another, dropping the reader into a tor- midst of or just after the peak of the vio-
rent of dissociation and violence from lence in Northern Ireland, a time during
the novel’s first sentences: “The day which hundreds of civilians were killed.
Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my The narrator describes a city living under
breast and called me a cat and threat- “some distorted quality of light” that has
ened to shoot me was the same day the to do with “the loss of hope and absence
milkman died. He had been shot by one of trust and with a mental incapacitation
of the state hit squads and I did not care over which nobody seemed willing or able
about the shooting of this man.” It’s a to prevail.” In one surreal scene, a nonlocal
voice that is never quite at ease, in which teacher tries to convince her French class
the syntax never quite fits together. It that the sky is not always blue, pointing
describes a world where appearances are out the window to a spectacular sunset
14of purples, pinks, yellows, greens—every- The Troubles seem almost incidental to
thing but blue. And still the students insist, the daily lives of the characters of Derry
“Le ciel est bleu!” “Of course we knew that Girls. Set in the 1990s, the show follows
the sky could be more than blue,” the nar- four Catholic high school girls, Erin, Orla,
rator says, but to accept such deviation Clare, and Michelle, and one boy, James,
“would mean choice and choice would Michelle’s recently transplanted English
mean responsibility and what if we failed cousin. Mostly, they deal with typical teen-
in our responsibility?” comedy issues—pursuing crushes, sneak-
This question of what civilians see and ing away to concerts, trying to get out of
what it implies about their responsibility to tests. For them, the Troubles are often just
speak is crucial in any conflict. Moments an inconvenience, causing traffic jams and
of literal seeing—of photographs from graffiti. Apart from some adolescent self-
the Vietnam War, for instance, or from dramatizing (Erin proudly writes a poem
Abu Ghraib—can become touchstones of that opens, “The bullets fired on the streets
political action. But the act of witness is as I lie in my bed / are nothing to the bul-
not in itself empowering or enlightening. lets being fired in my head,” and her Eng-
In Northern Ireland, the widespread knowl- lish teacher just rolls her eyes), the kids and
edge of atrocities only served to restrict their families seem casually inured to the
people’s ability to speak. Seamus Heaney, extreme conditions that surround them.
in his 1975 poem “Whatever You Say, Say Life goes on, but in a carnivalesque kind
Nothing” (from which Keefe’s book takes its of way; the show shares with The Ferryman
name), described his homeland as a “land and Milkman a running-on-tiptoes energy.
of password, handgrip, wink and nod . . . The characters argue about whether to let
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames an IRA fugitive stow away in the trunk of
C U LT U R E F R O N T
lie wicks.” Milkman portrays this culture of their car at about the same pitch that they
silence as radiating out from the center of argue, nonsensically, about whether to
the conflict, where those with the most to take a large wall clock with them on a road
say are the ones who keep the quietest. trip. Their rare encounters with outsiders—
At the other end of the spectrum are such as when a visiting student comes
the people least bound by the codes of from Ukraine and shocks them all by not
conduct, people the narrator calls the finding Derry vastly superior to her home-
“beyond-the-pales”—those who, through land and dismissing the religious divide at
madness or stupidity or stubbornness, the heart of the Troubles as “stupid”—just
open up for themselves a space out- confirm their insular lunacy.
side the confines of society, which in turn Apart from the stowaway and a couple
shuns them. Women, just by virtue of being of crushes gazed at from afar, young men,
women, and so being “viewed as harmless, as a demographic, are almost entirely
as childlike, as objects of raillery,” some- missing from the show. There’s James,
times have greater access to these spaces. but he’s English, so he’s sent to the all-
Among the beyond-the-pales is a group of girls school for his own protection—a
women who start a feminist reading group hint at what lies on the other side of the
that meets in a garden shed. Other times, gender divide. Everyone struggles to place
women, fed up with the elaborate rules James—people he meets initially assume
foisted on them by the men’s fight, defy the he’s a girl, though he clearly isn’t, or, if he
curfew en masse, because they know that protests loudly enough, they’ll concede
neither side will open fire on them. This that he’s gay, although he’s not that either.
dynamic can also be turned on its head: James spends much of the show with his
Dolours and Marian Price, as members of mouth agape, struggling to function in his
an elite IRA squad called the Unknowns, new home and baffled by the continual
could run missions across the Northern stream of small insanities that he encoun-
Irish border more or less with impunity ters, which the girls treat as utterly unre-
because they were pretty young women. markable. Although there’s little direct
engagement with the conflict, they have
clearly been formed by it. In one episode,
15the girls stand around the open casket at IRA in 1972, on suspicion of being a police
Erin’s great-aunt’s funeral, feeling her cold informant. In the months after McConville’s
face and arguing about whether Erin once disappearance, her orphaned children
called the deceased “a dick.” James is hor- fended for themselves by shoplifting food
rified; the girls, meanwhile, can’t believe and lived in semi-squalor. The neighbors,
he’s never seen a dead body. “Christ but perhaps not wanting to be tainted by asso-
the English are weird,” Michelle says. ciation, either ignored them or complained
The second season ends in 1995, with about the noise—a particularly vicious
Bill Clinton’s visit to Northern Ireland. Clin- instance of insisting that the sky is blue.
ton’s trip was a turning point in the peace The kids were convinced that their mother
process, marking the recognition of Sinn was coming back and, for a long time,
Féin, the Provisional IRA’s political arm, led resisted efforts to take them into state
by Gerry Adams, as a legitimate partici- care. They insisted that they needed to be
pant in negotiations and paving the way to home when their mother returned.
the Good Friday Agreement. The compro- They were eventually taken from their
mises involved in making this deal, along flat and sent to orphanages and then to
with Adams’s disavowal of his involve- different homes. They were reunited many
ment in the armed struggle, left many IRA years later, in 1999, when, following a pro-
members feeling betrayed (“For what Sinn vision of the Good Friday Agreement, the
Féin has achieved today, I would not have IRA disclosed that Jean’s body had been
missed a good breakfast,” Dolours Price buried near a beach about fifty miles out-
told one interviewer). The agreement, side Belfast. The siblings gathered while
focused on securing peace in the present the search was underway, but it was not
D issen t · W in t e r 2 0 2 0
and future, lacked any formal mechanism the poignant reunion you might expect.
for reckoning with the traumas of the past, They had fought fiercely to stay together,
and so the culture of silence folded in one but after being separated they had largely
more layer of not-speaking. fallen out of touch. Some had fallen into
As Clinton takes the stage in Derry to alcoholism; one had been in and out of
make a speech, the girls abandon a hard- prison. In losing their mother the way they
won spot at the front of the crowd to go did, they also lost one another. Coming
greet James, who was about to return to together after all those years, they seemed
England with his mother but decides at the “fractious and edgy” with each other, Keefe
last minute to stay. The episode closes with writes, as they waited for news from the
a celebratory finality that might make you search. Each of them referred to Jean as
think that this is the end of both the series “my mother”—not “our mother.” Some-
and the peace negotiations—the violence thing had been broken that a ceasefire
has finally been put to bed, and the girls would never be able to fix.
have returned to personal lives unen-
cumbered by the extreme politics of their Andrea DenHoed writes about books and
times. But it took three more years to reach culture. She is the web copy chief at The
a ceasefire that would stick, and Derry Girls New Yorker.
has been renewed for another season.
Treaties and official junctures can’t E Pluribus Country
account for the slow-simmering experi- Matthew Sitman
ences of those affected by the traumatic
effects of conflict. Dolours Price becomes After living in New York City for a few
one emblem of this in Say Nothing, but, years, I noticed something about my clos-
more crucially, there is the story of the est friends among writers and editors on
McConville family, which is the other cen- the left. We all loved country music. I’m
tral narrative thread of Keefe’s history. not sure if this should be surprising or not,
Jean McConville was a widowed given how often it’s associated with con-
mother of ten who was disappeared by the servative politics—“we’ll put a boot in your
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