Mrs Powell: “Well,
Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Benjamin Franklin: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
1787
_____
Provincia – always
near the beast’s lair.
Miroslav Krleža
_____
One day
in June 2007, I was driving from Belmullet, County Mayo, on the far western
seaboard, to Belfast, on the eastern. With me in the car were the critic
Patricia Craig, the poet Michael Longley and my teenaged son, Jacob. We were
exiting, with some relief, from a few days at a small literary festival, held
in the midst of the bleak, windswept, scraggy flatland of northernmost
Connaught. It was a soft day, as the expression goes in the West (from the
Irish, lá bog), meaning clement,
pleasant and gentle – even if, more often than not with the weather of those
oceanic parts, also cloudy and misty.
The trip across the island would take us about six hours,
perhaps more with stops, and the growing prospect of a day of conversation,
free-wheeling narratives, passing scenery, jokes, comebacks and repartees
seemed, by turns, to animate each of us. After the slight claustrophobia of
another ego-laden literary weekend – one of an archipelago of such gatherings
now dotted across virtually every county – we were freed into the vivid island
itself. We had nothing but time and the company of ourselves – and the result
(“the trek from Belmullet”) has always struck me since as a shorthand image, or
personal parable, for why it is easy, first to fall for Ireland, then to stick
with it.
In Ireland, counties do indeed still count, in a way now lost
or waning on “the other island”. They have antique roots in a remote tribal
past but are still the loci of various loyalties, from sport to creameries, politics to ancestral kinship. Likewise the
four provinces – or five, if the huge Irish diaspora is made a metaphorical coccyx.
To which, interestingly, only three of the cardinal points of the compass are
ever superimposed in common island parlance: the North, South and West of Ireland. The Irish lexis somehow
shuns the East in any demotic
self-definition; it must surely be because that zone is straddled by Partition.
But it was to the East of Ireland –
the dense population and industrial zones of Belfast and Dublin, with its long
historical tilt to Britain, a mere hundred miles apart – to which our talkative
car-trek was now headed.
Michael, in the back, got going. He expatiated on the
beauties and uses of swearwords, offering a number of choices of purely
personal provenance, then suggesting some applications. Patricia, in the
passenger seat, out of her phenomenally well-stocked cultural and literary
mind, from time to time threw a quip over her shoulder as a perfect foil. Jake,
who was attending Michael’s school alma
mater fifty years later, incited the latter into a rendition of the
transgressive school-boy ditty still in currency. And so on – and on. As I drove to this brilliant sound-track, I
must have felt – hence its sticking power – that a “day like this”, to
paraphrase “Van the Man”, was, in some ineffable way, one that simply could not
be (or be replicated) outside Ireland.
Soon enough we were travelling through the vast blanket boglands
of remote North Mayo. They are exquisite, their muted subtleties of colour
morphing and blazing through the seasons. Even in winter their rusts,
mauve-greys and bleached greens are radiant in low sunshine. They have, of
course, been hand-cut for home turf for at least four centuries; at sunset, the
resulting bank-trenches of cutaway bog are darkling pools of western light. All
over Ireland they have preserved a living museum of extreme archaicness: the
vestiges of Neolithic farmsteads; trunks of oak and bog-bodies, steeped in the
aspic of their anaerobic reticulations; hoards of golden torcs, brooches and
bowls; altar vessels and reliquaries;
even butter centuries out-of-date first buried for the bog’s coolth.
Over the past half-century, however, peat extraction has
also been heavily mechanized, for industrial purposes, by a state enterprise,
Bord na Móna. So it was not long before we entered the now-desolate, stripped prairie-zone
around the turf-fired power station at Bellacorick, even then being fed by
several tractor-towed caterpillar-tracked millers in the surreal distance. Its
huge, rusted tower looked a Lilliputian version of one of the cooling towers at
Drax, Yorkshire’s vast power complex. As our silver Cruiser sped by, Michael – the
most ecological of poets – revved up again and murmured drolly, to my son’s
huge amusement: “so this is the Irish space programme …”
“That’s the Irish people all over,” wrote Sean O’ Casey in
his play on the events of the War of Independence, Shadow of a Gunman, “they
treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.” But since this theatrical
gag is placed in the mouth of an unreliable blabbermouth, we can’t be sure if,
well, O’Casey was serious about his now-stereotypical utterance.
So too, writ large, the stereotypical “West of Ireland”:
it has become the repository of every romantic or Celticist cliché you care to
name re “the real Ireland”. Yet
despite all the over-development and atrocious imagery, the modern West is marvellous for its endless
dovetailing of natural beauties and cultural fascinations: the sea-girt
landscapes, the Irish language, the vestiges of an older material and social way-of-life – to name the obvious ones.
More, the stereotypes about the West of Ireland do point
to a decisive historical role in upholding a sense of Irish cultural and
national distinctiveness after the 1801 Act of Union. That Victorian anthem of
a resurgent Irish nation, “The West’s Awake”, by the Young Irelander Thomas
Davis, suggests as much. It could be said – and has been often – that the
Easter Rebellion would never have occurred without the Gaelic Revival, whose
living linguistic base lay primarily in the Western counties. As the Kilkenny essayist
Hubert Butler would put it a generation after independence, “the mainspring of
our freedom was not political theory but the claim that Ireland possessed and
could develop a unique culture of its own.”
Much the same discourse has now taken wing in Scotland.
On an island the middling size of Ireland, however, no
cardinal point is very far from its three fellows. This is particularly true of
the six counties of Munster, with its South-West axis; but also the nine
counties of Ulster, with its North-West axis straddling (unlike the other
points) the long, meandering and rural border between Northern Ireland and the
Republic.
The extent to which Partition was felt to be a fracturing
of not only an island, but an antique province, is perfectly embodied in the contested
lexicon for the new Northern state. The republican nomenclature – “the six counties” or (still more
old-fashioned) “the wee six” – reflects “an Ulster of the mind” that sees,
therein, the lost limb of an imagined 32-county nation. The “North of Ireland”,
tending to be shared by nationalists or centrists of all stripes, avoids the
British constitutional terminology, which, of course, is embraced by mainstream
unionists in the abbreviated form, “Northern Ireland”. Militant loyalism uses the
incorrect “Ulster” for the same native territory. Even in the rest of the
United Kingdom, it is often not appreciated that the word “United” in the
state’s name refers specifically to the Union with a rump Ireland, not with
Scotland and/or Wales. Only the rather poetic “the North” receives easy assent
across such petrified national and sectarian divisions.
I couldn’t say now whether Michael’s joke was the
trigger, but I recall distinctly that the talk turned to the state of the island,
its despoliations and follies, its foibles and stupidities, North and South
(meaning: the two jurisdictions). What is perhaps most telling about such perennial
ruminations is the instinctive, near-universal assumption that the island
somehow remains a fractured whole, a cultural and geographical unity underlying
all constitutional and economic arrangements.
More glorious Mayo landscape shot by. Michael, reaching
for the closure of a punch-line, delivered the coup de grace to our antic critiques: The Irish don’t deserve Ireland, I’m beginning to think … All caveats
notwithstanding, we knew exactly what he meant – even if, in truth, the same
might be said of every place where natural beauty is despoiled by human
activity.
If the East of Ireland seems somehow bifurcated by the
two states, the West suffers no such psychic partition. Donegal, in particular
– where the West and North crosshatch – is widely felt to be the seamless
hinterland of Northern Ireland, a fact evident in much of the most important imaginative
literature to have emerged coevally with the Troubles. In a clutch of Brian
Friel’s plays, the fictional townland of Ballybeg in Donegal becomes the Chekhovian
locus of an extended history of this “imagined community” and, by subtle proxy,
of the West of Ireland itself – in sharp contrast to several of his others
dealing overtly with the politics of a turbulent Ulster.
More widely, Seamus Heaney’s magisterial poetry volume, North (Faber, 1975) – perhaps the single
most influential book written in the shadow of Troubled Ulster – plumbs the
boglands of the North and West as a rich metaphor for the continuum of
violence, ancient and modern. Patricia herself, in her splendid memoir of
teenage hi-jinks in the fifties, Asking
for Trouble (Blackstaff, 2007), shuttles
between the gritty backstreets of Belfast and a Donegal Gaeltacht’s
authoritarian charms. For Michael too – witness a half-century of poems – Belfast
and Mayo are the twin poles of his imaginative zodiac.
As we crossed the Border, the craic dwindled and silence
descended – whether from the vanished West, conversational fatigue or nightfall
(or all three), I could not have said even then. But I have often had this
feeling of a slow landing as my son and I hurtled home on a motorway from a
spell in Donegal. In that movement from
time in the West to life in the North, would it be too much to see something
epigrammatically human? Peace and violence? The ordinary and the extraordinary
– or vice versa? The rural and the
urban? The vital and the petrified? “Days like this” and the daily grind?
In any event, the car-trek from Mayo had ended and the
mean streets of a still-troubled Belfast were the first to meet us.
I grew
up in the liberal milieux of East Coast America, but I have spent almost my
entire adult life (36 years) in Ireland. Is it strange destiny to have fallen so far from the trunk of origins?
For the first two decades or so, I often thought so,
particularly intensely in relation to Belfast. That changed, decisively, with
the birth of my two children. Now, like so many immigrants, I am much more
sanguine about the experience of departure from my life’s “first narrative” and
the unexpected arrival into a second, indeed a third. As the English poet (and
lover of orchards) Michael Hamburger once remarked – his family fled from Nazi
Germany when he was nine – it is trees, not humans, which have roots. Viewed in
the round, acknowledging the original risk of a mistaken cul-de-sac and the
many subsequent difficulties, I have no doubt whatsoever now that my Irish flit
was a good opening gambit for a second narrative. Without it, no Jacob and
Miriam – and that, of course, settles the question, especially in retrospect. Destiny Ireland, it turns out, has been
very good indeed for me. In life, says
an elderly Sarajevo friend who survived the siege, always expect the unexpected.
Why, at first, did I come? There was a push and there was
a pull. The push was from the United States in the 1970s: I had become somehow
disenchanted with those “milieux”, for a complex and suffocating mix of family,
class, cultural and personal reasons (another story!). The intense proto-professional
pressures of boarding school and an Ivy League education had exhausted me by
the summer of ’79, and indeed – I see now very clearly – I feared proceeding
further along an unknown route to a known professional fate for which
apparently I had been prepared, but to which I had never really inwardly
assented. I needed a pause. I feared above all, after graduation, I would now
say, the danger this unreflectively preordained path posed to what had already
become a central literary aspiration.
Outside the dominant familial and educational zones
before university, I had had, moreover, important extended experiences, mainly
in the summer, in rural Vermont, Rhode Island and the Adirondacks of New York,
as well as in peasant Mexico and circumpolar Labrador. These constituted a
composite alternative universe and anti-suburban formation – of which I was
very emotionally and aesthetically aware, from an early age. In such supposed
backwaters, the small-scale, the remote, the intimate, the natural and the
wild, and of course the older, were revelatorily present. From early on it
became a kind of grain within me, where I most distinctly felt more fully at
home, happier and clearer, and so more fully myself.
The pull came from Europe. I had spent a transformative
gap year (1974-75) studying French language and literature at the Université
d’Aix-en-Provence, followed by two memorable summers in Ireland (1977-78),
where I did some contact-scouting in the North for a Harvard professor writing
on the Troubles, and so acquired an incipient interest in Irish writing.
Without any post-graduation plan whatsoever, I defaulted to another summer on
Block Island, Rhode Island, where I worked as a night watchman. My plan was to
write in the wee hours; but I mostly slept on duty and wrote, I think, only a
sentence or two before my one idea expired.
But Ireland, it seemed, was unfinished business – and the
vague desire to return gelled over a Thoreauvian summer and early fall on that
ecologically radiant island. I had no commitments and made some money
renovating an old summer shack. Now or
never! I expected to stay a year or two.
I arrived in Ireland on 29 September 1979, via a Laker
flight to London and the ferry from Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire, the route used
by generations of immigrants to Britain, whether leaving or returning. It’s not
that I didn’t know that the Polish Pope was arriving in Dublin the same day;
it’s just that, like the rest of the island, the scale of the crowds and the
collective euphoria greeting him in the Republic was beyond my ken. Off the
boat, I took the last packed train through a completely emptied city, to
Phoenix Park, where John Paul II performed his first Mass, a tiny speck in the
raised distance, before 1.2 million people – the largest single mass of
humanity I have ever experienced.
Looking back, those three days of the first papal visit
to Hibernia strike me now as a perfect symbolic threshold between the old and
the new Ireland – between the 63 years succeeding the Proclamation of the Irish
Republic, and the 37 since. With further masses to the West, South and North, the
Pope’s triumphal trip did not prove the well-spring of enduring Eucharistic
renewal, as many in the Church hoped and expected, so much as an autumnal,
ebullient celebration of the mighty magisterium and its faithful grip on the res publica and much of its citizenry.
Yes, in the figure of Karol Wojtyla, former athlete and
passable poet, the Church was at its liturgical, verbal and ethical best – but
there was something, too, of the last unselfconscious hurrah for a monolithic political
Christianity, Irish Catholicism, that
had so hijacked that state and its evolution. Within a decade, its authority
was in sharp decline, rocked by a relentless series of scandals, heading
rapidly towards the Irish separation of church and state that now mainly
obtains. Meanwhile, the North – in its usual time-lag time-warp – would have to
wait another two decades for its own great glacial shift: the Good Friday
Agreement.
Four days later, I was on the train from Dublin to
Belfast, wondering whether I had made the right decision. As we passed a row of
ruined houses along a grim Portadown siding – due, possibly, to the turmoil of
the Troubles – I had my first real stab of adult fear. What was I doing here,
intending this time to stay? Why had I not stuck to the beaten American track?
Would it, ultimately, be dangerous?
That first Belfast, in 1979, was almost wholly devoid of immigration
in the usual sense. Naturally, there were numbers of English and Scots, fellow
citizens, as well as Southerners, who had come for work or personal reasons;
there was even a sprinkling of immigration from Hong Kong and the Subcontinent,
mainly centred on the restaurant business. Outside Queen’s University Belfast,
however – with its longstanding tradition of overseas students – the city had
achieved as close to nil inward immigration as would be possible in a
post-colonial, multinational state like Britain.
As the stalemate of the violence dragged on through the
eighties, a small trickle of EEC nationals did begin to arrive, often for
particular reasons – to teach as assistants
in schools, say, or to man the new cosmopolitan restaurants that began to
burgeon as the politico-military situation began to “stabilize”. Amazingly, I
remember reckoning, at some point in the early eighties, that I knew of only
two Afro-origin people living in Belfast; one had grown up on the Shankill Road
with a white mother, the other was a strikingly elegant, salt-and-pepper West
Indian residing right in the middle of loyalist working-class East Belfast.
My future wife, who grew up in Armagh, first saw a black
person when she emigrated to London at the age of 18. Ethnically speaking, the early
troubled North amounted to a near-autarky – certainly compared to the vast
polyglot cities (Boston, New York, Providence) I grew up with. Apart, of
course, from the rotating regiments of the British Army, lodged in ring-fenced
bases.
So the common joke with me during my first years in
Belfast was that I had somehow come in the wrong direction. From the outset of the Troubles in 1969, the
North had been haemorrhaging people, especially from the Protestant community,
and the young. In the early eighties, the Southern economy had tanked after the
comparative prosperity of the sixties and seventies, triggering new large waves
of Irish emigration to America, the Continent and Australia.
Metaphorically speaking, the exit/entrance was getting
crowded and I was moving against the flow. In time, though, I would find that
the Belfast cultural scene, however constricted by the Troubles, had a distinct
international dimension; and that, even earlier, there had actually been a
small but fascinating émigré artist tradition in interwar Belfast. I soon got
to know the Mexican painter Alfonso Monreal; the Iranian gallery owner Jamshid
Fenderesky; and the extraordinary Czech choreographer, writer and Auschwitz-survivor
Helen Lewis (1916-2009).
Now Belfast has “changed, changed utterly” in the matter
of diversity. Since the historic
political settlement in 1998, large-scale immigration has increased by leaps
and bounds. The obvious first arrivals were from the Balkans, Africa and
Romania; then, with the 2004 EU accession of the Eastern states, large numbers
of Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks and Roma, along with many Western Europeans
(especially Portuguese), have settled in Belfast and the North.
At the weekly market under the clock and glass-roof of St
George’s – in dereliction during the Troubles, where once over 900 corpses were
laid out after the Belfast Blitz, on Easter Tuesday, 1941 – a new and vibrant
multiculturalism shows its full face. Not since the “plantation” of Ulster by
Lowland Scots and English in the seventeenth century has there been such an
overseas influx of population to the Belfast environs; it was, in fact, this
foundational Protestant colonization that gave birth to the city around an
older native ford.
In the long-term, this enormous shift in the human
character of the city may be the most momentous of the all the changes
following the Troubles. Some of the new arrivals, especially non-European
refugees, may maintain a loyalty to Britain for the asylum granted; others from
nations characterized by independence struggles, like Poles and Lithuanians,
may come to identify with Irish nationalism. One thing is certain: they and
their native descendants will change the whole
religious-national-ethnic-sectarian dynamic that has so scarred the city for at
least a century and a half – and, in fact, have already done so.
So part of my unexpected destiny, strange or not, is to
have become an immigrant, nationally-ambiguous and, even, exilic writer. In
recent years, I have come to view this as an almost unqualified creative positive. For there is a sense in which
a writer’s true homeland is language. Within English, the global lingua franca, the interplay of the
national and transnational is now acute. For the poet as immigrant, it becomes
fruitful, as in my case, to inhabit double perspectives within a single
language – to be a “tinker of the spirit”, shifting between various cultures,
seeing what I can make out of looking both ways from the threshold of
expatriate life.
In the new Age of the Refugee that is now upon us, it is
perhaps no bad thing for a writer to be disabused somewhat of the enchantments
of “roots”, and to feel in himself, as a distant echo, the fragility of the
insular in face of the global upheavals. In a critical or reputational sense,
the danger is that you might seem to fall between two stools. In a creative
sense, the bifocal award is that you are bound by neither.
What is a city? Not, surely,
simply the material urban culture at a named spot.
A moment’s reflection makes clear that it is equally
something quite immaterial: a general atmosphere, a cultural ambience, a civic
timbre, an embodied zeitgeist, a
psycho-social pattern – the angles are legion. What is adumbrated, in short, by
the classical term civitas, the
cumulative ethos or values, or prevailing leitmotif
of self-definition or collective self-consciousness, that binds together a city
or a state (e.g., Athens or Sparta, Hong Kong or Jerusalem), especially in
relation to common purpose, shared responsibility, and/or “imagined community”.
The apparently anodyne slogan, People Make Glasgow, gets the classical
idea in exact demotic.
Cities, of course, never stay static. Like consciousness,
they must evolve, morph, segue, metamorphose. A fixed city is a fantastical
dystopia, like the frozen stopwatch episode of “The Twilight Zone”. But the
rate at which the material and immaterial cultures of any city change can vary
dramatically. With some cities, especially ancient ones, these can proceed
together in slow and stately tandem, under the aegis of tradition. In others –
subject to war, natural catastrophe, or urban planning – the two are razed,
then reborn, together. In still others, the material and the immaterial move
rapidly out of sync, with the latter often moving much more swiftly. Such has
been the fate of many Eastern European and Balkan cities after the fall of
communism. As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik remarked, surveying the East’s
dismal perspectives, “The worst thing about communism is what comes after.”
Since my arrival in Belfast, the material culture of the
city has changed not quite beyond all recognition – but profoundly for the
better. Large swathes of the old industrial working-class districts have been
renewed or redeveloped, including many tragically wrecked by the Troubles
(bombings, rioting, arson, flight, dereliction). Much of this task of
reconstruction during the Troubles fell to the Northern Ireland Housing
Executive, whose slow transformation of Belfast despite the troubled mayhem was
widely viewed as a rare early triumph of non-sectarian, municipal socialism. It
learnt from the brutalist excesses of housing redevelopment in Britain, and returned
(often quite aesthetically) to the scale of the city’s traditionally terraced
streets.
Discrimination against Catholics in the allocation of
housing had been a key grievance that led to the formation of the Civil Rights
Movement in the run-up to the outbreak of the Troubles. The whole political pH
of the city began to change as progressive urban renewal kicked in from the
early eighties. Nonetheless, a huge, rich, highly distinctive urban heritage
was lost. In her extraordinarily evocative book, Byker (Cape, 1983), the Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
provides a visual record of a cognate North-of-England working-class community
on the eve of its destruction, not by communal violence, but wholesale
redevelopment.
In the case of Belfast, this double palimpsest – the
material and the immaterial, both past and present – parses in a different
form. Since the Belfast Agreement (as it is formally known), indeed long
before, I would not be alone in seeing the immaterial lagging well behind the material. The paramilitary
cessations of violence, the removal of the Army from the streets, the full
functioning of devolution, the overall economic improvement, indeed the
totality of the new constitutional and social dispensation – all this
transformed the tone of the city and wider polity. Above all, the funereal,
tense, leaden, insular, super-bitter atmosphere of the Troubles that lay like a
psychic slab over the population has been magicked away.
Yet few here would dissent from the view that the native
territory remains deeply toxic in the immaterial dimension. One prime source,
of course, is the poisonous legacy of the vanished violence. The British and
Irish states, as well as all the major Northern political parties, may have
reached a durable accommodation – but deeper down, on the communal and
attitudinal level, “the antique quarrel” of ethno-religious, national and
sectarian division is largely intact and highly unmoderated, still bedevilling
Belfast and Ulster as it has done since Partition. This is the lurking iceberg,
instinct says, that could yet sink the New Belfast and the New North. On the
eve of his departure from the North (1972), Heaney wrote: “we must uproot or
petrify”. That choice still faces the immaterial city in respect of its
troubled past.
To a city’s blend of the material and immaterial, there
must be added a further ingredient: the subjective onlooker, yourself. Just as
that blend must change over time, so do you, its interpreter. You must search
for a city: it does not simply present its meshed palimpsest and subjective mnemonics
in vacuo. That context is your own shifting,
evolving, seguing, metamorphosing self. If that self changes dramatically, through
whatever combination of inner and outer experience, so may your view of what
lies before you. What was discounted, for instance, might now be cherished. You
might walk the same streets, pass the same buildings, meet some of the same
people as decades before. But are you “in the same place”, as a therapist might
put it?
The city’s blend has evolved. You have evolved. The perspectival
relationship between you and it must, perforce, have evolved. Perhaps this is
often why, when I am abroad on Belfast’s troubled palimpsest, I feel at home –
in a new city – on the same streets of recessional cities I no longer inhabit.
To
understand fully the Northern polity and thus Belfast’s place within it, a comprehensive
historical definition of “Northern Ireland” is always seasonable. The series of
events between 1916 and 1922 – leading to a new “Irish Free State” and the
retention of six Ulster counties within the newly named “The United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland” (the “Northern” now added) – is but the
basic historical description.
And a description, of course, is never quite the same as
an explanation. Together, these constitute a historical narrative – and the
narratives about the North, however divergent, have tended over time, in my
view, to become detached from a third but
essential historical context. They first congealed, then petrified, into the
two contending, predominant Irish-British perspectives, both in politics and
historiography; the pan-European context of Partition, I have long thought, has
generally fallen from view even in the most scholarly narratives.
I have already alluded to the Succession States, of which
the Irish Free State was formally the last (1922). With regard to Irish
parallels, the wider European situation in the immediate aftermath of the Great
War merits the closest scrutiny. The four great intra-European empires (the
Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Ottoman, the Russian) had comprehensively
collapsed; and the Treaty of Versailles and many others (Brest-Litvosk, St
Germain, Neuilly, Trianon, Sèvres, Lausanne, Rapallo, including several British
imperial agreements vis-à-vis the carve-up of the post-Ottoman Middle East)
brought into being a dramatically new, post-imperial state system in interwar
Europe.
In retrospect, this period 1918-1922 seems a gigantic
interregnum for organized-legitimate power and cartography, much as the
collapse of communism would be for the decade from 1989. The reconfigured and
reconfiguring continent was not only characterized by new, expanded and/or
revolutionary states; but nationally-ambiguous territories, condominiums,
annexations, Free Cities, minority rights, non-state armed formations,
uprisings, putsches, population “transfers”, and much else of post-colonial
descent amid the rise of the “nation-state”.
Even in Ireland, as Heinrich Böll would later write in his masterly Irish Journal (1957), referring to the
direct writerly participation in the events of Easter Monday 1916, “eighteen months before Lenin took over the remains
of an empire, the Irish poets were scraping away the first stone from the
pedestal of that other empire which was regarded as indestructible but has
since turned out to be far from it.”
Once the formation of Northern Ireland is contextualized
in this period, it immediately ceases to be a process confined simply to the
historical umbilicus between the two islands, and assumes its proper
pan-European nexus as well. That nexus is, first of all historically, the
aforementioned Plantation of Ireland and its Siamese twin, the Reformation in
Ireland. Both are what French historiography calls “la longue durée” – those deep structures that move glacially
through history. In addition to “civilizing” and commercial motivations, the
Plantation was conceived explicitly as a means of making “English-speaking” and
“Protestant” the Gaelic and Catholic fastness of Ulster, where the power of the
English crown had been historically weak. Through various historical knock-ons,
it could be said to have succeeded with the first aim, but failed partly with
the second.
One of the main architects of this policy of dispossession
and colonization, the English Viceroy of Ireland, Sir Arthur Chichester, was
also instrumental in the founding of Belfast, which remained a largely
Protestant city until the mid-nineteenth century. Even if it is maintained that
the subsequent communal polarization in Ulster had more to do with further
waves of Scottish immigration than the original plantation in the early
seventeenth century, there is also a thesis in cultural geography, known as
“First Effective Settlement”, that holds that the original successful
settlement of an empty or (as we would say today) “ethnically-cleansed” or
dispossessed territory is of crucial significance to later social and cultural
development, no matter how small the original group of settlers may have been.
Indeed, this very principle was deployed, intuitively, by
the aforementioned European empires for centuries. All over Europe, populations
considered “loyal” by the imperial authorities were “planted” in territories,
especially borderlands or frontiers, which needed to be “secured”. Such were
the Serbs of the Krajina, the Saxons of Transylvania, the Russians of Novorossiya
– and the Protestants of Ulster.
Four centuries later, the irony is that what began as an
anabasis of the migrant into the native has ended in the ostensibly
autochthonous and immutable divisions of Northern society and (lo and alas) of our
Troubled Belfast. Here I will re-join my own narrative in an earlier essay,
“The New North” (2008):
If the emergence of Northern Ireland was the
long-distance descendant of the Plantation, it can also be understood as the
terminus to a great swathe of lands shaped by the Reformation, arcing from
Central and Northern Europe, into the British-and-Irish archipelago. Likewise,
the cognate independence of the South belongs to a much later pan-European
cultural pattern; namely, the small nations of Europe, the so-called Succession
States, that emerged out of the imperial aftermath of the First World War … In
this European perspective, the creation of Northern Ireland eighty-six years
ago was, willy-nilly, the product of the very same ascendant continental
pattern that brought into existence the Succession States. Even if the North
was not itself, properly speaking, one of those states, remaining a loyal
remnant of an older multinational Union, it was nonetheless a new
constitutional European jurisdiction and, in this sense, one of the new small
succession “countries” of post-Versailles Europe … If such dynamics are
amenable to grand theories, it might be said that Northern Ireland had emerged
out of the historical equivalent of two colliding tectonic plates, one
foundational, one contemporary: the Reformation in Ireland, and the
disintegration of internal European empires.
Though
not much frequented by standard historiography, the implicit Eastern trope
here, that there are parallels between modern Ireland (and its Partition) and
the other post-Versailles Succession States of Eastern Europe – and their successors – has some pedigree in
Irish writing. Heaney often uses Polish experience as a trope for his native
ground (Ireland and Poland, he says, “have their historical roofs off”, unlike
England, where no shot has been fired in political anger since the Civil War);
whilst the ever-prescient Butler (1900-1991), Ireland’s Orwell, wrote
extensively on the close parallels between religious, national and ethnic
loyalties and tensions within Ireland (especially the North) and the Balkans
(especially Yugoslavia).
In
early 1996 I visited Sarajevo right at the end of its long siege. Through a journalist
friend, an invitation reached me from the Sarajevo Winter Festival, which was
celebrating its own resurrection and the city’s multi-ethnic survival after nearly
four years of encirclement by the war criminals in the hills. It was inviting many
of the writers, artists and actors who had actively supported, from the
outside, the survival of what Bosnia had come to represent.
I had written and edited some journalism; joined
solidarity groups in Ireland and Britain; and, with the Irish-language poet
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, spoke out at a number of literary events and public
meetings concerning “the scandal of Sarajevo”. As I wrote in one essay, Bosnia
was the Spanish Civil War of our time, representing “a clash between the open and closed society, a
modern polity aspiring to pluralism and democracy, and one predicated on hatred
and ‘purity’ – between the ideals of the Enlightenment and the dark cult of chauvinism.”
Susan Sontag, who visited Sarajevo 11 times during the war, risking her life
each time, was the best-known plenipotentiary of this global republic of
conscience – whose “embassies” (in the words of Heaney’s famous poem for
Amnesty International) “were everywhere/but operated independently/and no
ambassador would ever be relieved.” I had been recalled to Sarajevo for my
first first-hand briefing.
It was one of the key moments of my life – the beginning,
in fact, of a third narrative, and eventual subject of an essay to which I am
especially attached, “A Week in Sarajevo” (1996). Like the Pope’s day in Dublin,
it would be a decisive swerve into an
utterly unexpected course in life. By
the end of the nineties, I had edited the first post-war anthology of Bosnian
writing, Scar on the Stone: Contemporary
Poetry from Bosnia (Bloodaxe, 1998), and bought and renovated a house on
the Dalmatian coast, not far from Dubrovnik. I have since spent long periods in
both Bosnia and Croatia. To the bifocal perspectives of those first two
narratives, I managed to add a trifocal extra, with a growing influence (I
would soon discern) on the evolution of my writing, especially poetry.
Comparisons between Belfast and Sarajevo have for me
proved very fertile. In the case of pre-war Sarajevo, for instance, Muslims,
Catholics, Orthodox and Jews were entirely intermingled, with no trace of
necessitated segregation. Religious intermarriage was widespread and normal;
and although non-Yugoslav national sentiment did of course exist before the
break-up of Yugoslavia, the various Bosnian denominations were not dangerously
“nationalized” until Milosevic’s virulent Serbian chauvinism appeared in 1987,
triggering a rapid chain reaction throughout the federation that caught up with
even this most cosmopolitan of cities. Bosnia had been the most ethically
diverse of the six constituent republics; but what it tragically lacked, as the
authoritarian structures of Yugo-communism fell away, was any ready theory of state
that could secure its actually-existing ethnic and religious diversity. It fell
to a multi-ethnic citizen mobilization to defend the city for most of the first
year of the siege.
That Balkan contrast could not be starker. Since the
arrival of Catholic mass immigration to the mills from the countryside in the mid-nineteenth
century, Belfast has been a profoundly segregated city. There have been intercommunal
riots, including over Home Rule, every decade since the 1850s. It is often
claimed that the city had proportionately one of the largest working-classes in
post-war Western Europe; even now, these traditional districts are almost
completely segregated on sectarian grounds. One the first districts where
Catholics settled, Ardoyne (from the Irish, Ard
Eoin, “Eoin’s height”), remains a huge nationalist ghetto in a sea of
loyalist estates, in North Belfast, currently the most fractured and turbulent
area of the city. Working-class and rural intermarriage across communal
boundaries is still unusual.
The euphemistic “peace walls” – the city’s homespun
version of the Berlin wall – snake half-visibly through various districts,
“interfaces” and flashpoints where intercommunal violence has long flared. Some
hold, half-jokingly, that Belfast is not so much a single unified urbs as a series of contiguous sectarian
villages – and there is a certain metaphorical truth in that. Everywhere in
working-class areas there are curb-stones painted in the contending national
colours, marking (to the foot) the communal boundaries – over which, if you are
someone from “the other side”, it was (and very often still is) high danger to
cross. Nor is leafy middle-class Belfast fully immune from all this – the
divisions are simply more “civilized” behind the façade of the genteel.
What saved Northern Ireland after 1969 from anything like
a Bosnian fate was, of course, the huge power of the British state, with its
long history of Irish statecraft. After Partition in 1922, the locus of that
power may moved symbolically from Dublin Castle to Belfast Castle; but the
Westminster Parliament and its London bureaucracy, however amnesiac over the
next half-century, never quite forgot the lessons of the previous two
centuries. The essential British-London metropolitan mistake was, however, to
allow Northern Ireland to become what might be called in Eastern Europe an
“autonomous region”, outwith many of the norms, laws, developments, common
narratives and principles of Great Britain proper.
The little one-party state soon become, de facto, a Protestant-Unionist bastion,
with its own internally powerful Parliament (prorogued by Westminster in 1972),
civil service, police and auxiliary special forces; its unrelenting sectarian
ethos and authoritarian modus operandi
made it, in the classic phrase, “a cold house for Catholics”. Meanwhile, down
South, a second political monolith took shape, sustained by Irish Catholicism.
One might easily argue that the Northern Troubles from 1969 were a kind of time-lag
peregrination of violence out of the earlier “interregnum” period that led to
the establishment of the Irish Free State.
Early in the millennium, owing to my time in the Balkans,
I was asked to teach a course at Queens University Belfast on post-communism in
Central Europe and the Balkans. I had to read up, especially, on an unfamiliar
but fascinating academic literature: the theory and practice of “state
formation.” I learnt that there are essentially only four types of states
characterizing the whole of Europe and North America in the postwar period: the
nation state (centred on a predominant ethnic group, or “people”); the
ethno-religious federation (e.g., the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia);
the true confederation (Switzerland); and the federal nation (the US and
Canada).
After the fall of communism, only two true federations
had survived: the Russian Federation and, in effect – though usually not quite
seen in this light – the monarchical multinational “union” of the United Kingdom,
held together by the glue of “Britishness”.
Whilst recent events suggested the former might be fragile in the longer
term, why – I wondered (and still wonder) – had the latter been so enduringly
successful, even in the face of Irish violence? Just the tensile strength of an
evolved, self-correcting democracy?
Westminster often pays lip service to “the four nations
of the United Kingdom”. But, in truth, this phrase is almost never heard in
Northern Ireland; it is a self-defining catch-phrase in Great Britain for the
whole of Ukania that has near-zero
traction in Northern Ireland. Indeed, I have never once heard the word nation naturally, spontaneously or even
ideologically applied to our Lilliputian state. It is simply not a word,
concept or belief that feels right, ironically, to the culture as a whole.
“Occam’s razor” will clarify. For the unionist or
loyalist, the nation is nearly always
“Britain”, the overall “state formation”, within which, perhaps, “Ulster” is at
best a subordinate quasi-formation. For the Irish nationalist or republican,
the Irish nation is by definition the whole of Ireland and its peoples – so
that, ipso facto, one of its cardinal
parts can never contain its geographical whole.
Northern Ireland is a kind of
linguistic limbo which strikes neither side as the actual serious nation to which they give final assent.
To repeat: Northern
Ireland has never been, is not, and
will not likely be any time soon a fully “imagined” nation. That is because –
to crib the title of Benedict Anderson’s classic book of the same name –
Northern Ireland has not one, but two highly divergent imagined communities inhabiting the same territory. These
constitute two narratives, two “Ulsters of the mind” (Heaney) – shades of
Israel and Palestine! – in long-term historical contention.
As an illustration, one might cite the high proportion of
the North’s population that already possesses an Irish passport by dint of the
Republic’s constitution. In one of those strange historical twists that one
would never have expected, the Belfast Agreement actually guarantees (via
subsequent law) every child born in Northern Ireland after 2005 both British
and Irish citizenship. Strange destiny, indeed – the North may be the only
jurisdiction in the world that is, de
jure, in the matter of citizenship, automatically multinational.
If Northern Ireland itself is not a nation, then what is
it? The search for even loose parallels in Europe yields few pickings. There
are now two miserable Slav gangster para-states descending from imperial
plantations – Transnistria in Moldova, Republika Srpska in Bosnia (the latter
much larger than the North). My own joke – that if Scotland secedes, the North
risks becoming “Kaliningrad on the Irish Sea”, an actual exclave – is not much
appreciated here when the allusion is twigged. Both new Kosova (tensions of religion
and language) and old Belgium (tensions of language and culture) contain
contending “imagined communities” within a single state. The ethno-religious
divisions, the subsequent partition, and the current unrecognized union of the
island’s north with Turkey make Cyprus an interesting parallel. The Basque
country too has real resonances.
But perhaps it is better to take a leaf out of the
lexicon of the recent Nobel Laureate, Svetlana Alexievich, when she remarked
that her small country, Belarus, had been caught up in the “grinder” of
history. That image for the six truncated Ulster counties somehow seems right –
albeit in a much less catastrophic way.
So my bifocal credo for the Belfast home-place has become:
Look east, but then west. Fruitful as
the Eastern trope can be, it has no meaning, needless to say, shorn of the
North’s actual Western European context. In the Balkans, what historians call
“the pre-national period” in the Ottoman lands lasted well into the second half
of the nineteenth century; for example, neither the national idea nor even the
word for the state now known as Macedonia
existed in the 1850s. In contrast, “an idea of Ireland” had already been in
existence for centuries.
By the late eighteenth century, the Irish Parliament had
legislative independence within a Kingdom of Ireland separate from the Kingdom
of Great Britain, though sharing the same monarchy and under the administrative
control of the British executive power. Inspired by the American and French
Revolutions, and led mainly by Belfast Presbyterians,
the Irish Rebellion of 1798 sought, through arms, full nationhood and a clean
break with Britain. It failed; and the
union of the Irish and British Parliaments that created the first “United Kingdom” followed swiftly,
and in fear, in 1801. Even during that Union, importantly, Ireland remained a
single constitutional polity, with a strong sense of its cultural
distinctiveness – and with most of the population speaking Irish until the
Great Famine.
Ireland, then, joins England, Scotland, France, Spain and
Portugal in a very antique sense of itself as a “nation”. “What ish my nation?”
asks the drunken Irishman, MacMorris, in Shakespeare’s Henry V (c. 1599). The
island is, in this sense, and several others – for instance, the efflorescence
of early Christian monastic and manuscript culture – a core Western European
country.
So that when Partition came, within living memory of the
Famine, the shock might be likened to the screaming roots of a mandrake – a
deep cultural and political trauma. And yes, the depth and felt injustice of
that all-island trauma since 1969 added a certain Irish revolutionary and martyred
glamour (the British Left was particularly susceptible) to the intense
bitterness and extreme ugliness of violence everywhere. It is also why neither
“imagined community” – though scarred – will wither on the vine anytime soon. Bereavement,
it becomes ever clearer this century, is a world-historical political force. In
short, Northern Ireland was quite unique in the postwar West.
To description
and explanation must be added actuality. What are we left with? A very
small polity. Six counties only. “A place apart” (Dervla Murphy), a narrow
ground, a provincia? In my own mind I
would, now, often think of it naturally – if a bit ironically – as simply “the
native territory”.
We have got our Lilliput and must make it work, faute de mieux. A work-in-progress – capital, Belfast. The constitutional
dispensation is settled, human rights fully guaranteed, whatever the latest
sound-and-fury emanating from the Stormont Parliament might be. For the time being, anyway. And after
nearly four decades and three narratives, I do often marvel at the fact that I
have somehow transitioned from the West’s largest English-speaking polity to
its smallest – from the über-metropolitan to the ultra-peripheral.
Then I remind myself that living in a provincia was the common human condition
for most of Europe before the First World War. Was Bukovina really, by
definition, any less “cosmopolitan” than Vienna, the imperial capital? People
lived, loved and died in “provinces” whose boundaries have now vanished without
trace into those of other polities. Often these “native territories” and their
capitals produced artists and, especially, writers of enormous talent – like
Joseph Roth, Paul Celan, Czeslaw Miłosz, Herta Müller. Or, come to think of it,
Seamus Heaney. In this light, Northern
Ireland might be seen as a kind of “modern throwback” … To a post-globalized future?
In the wake of nearly 30 years of civil disturbance,
terrorism and counter-terrorism – and after nearly four years of arduous negotiations
– the politically miraculous occurred. A settlement was reached and signed on
the same day – and a moment of all-Ireland euphoria swept the fractured island
over the Easter weekend of 1998. It would take another decade for the
envisioned institutions to operate fully, but the die was cast.
Although the whole process is now filed in Westminster
under the rubric “devolution”, the reality was, and is, much more supple and
subtle, constitutionally speaking. In effect, in retrospect, the core
negotiation centred on none other than a new “state formation” for the devolved
polity – one that could accommodate the perspectives of the
constitutional-monarchical (the North) and the constitutional-republican (the
South). My own earlier narrative again:
But what exactly was this [new] state? For the polity
that exited the Troubles was profoundly different from the vanished unionist
bastion of four decades earlier … Is it a permanent remnant of an older Union,
the lost province of a future unified Irish nation, or one of the small
countries of Europe? In according various degrees of formal legitimacy to each
of these perspectives, the Belfast Agreement consciously foreclosed on the
possibility of a single constitutional answer. “All” or “none” might easily be
construed as more plausible answers … The natural tendency of any polity to
bolster the autonomy of its own civic life is, however, well under way. In the
current period of dramatic cultural and economic transformation, Northern
Ireland can often seem akin to a “city state” – Belfast, and all its hinterland
within easy driving distance – or even a kind of “anti-state”, where classic
sovereignty has been diluted in the name of the native ground, or common good.
Hallelujah! …To which might
be added that the Agreement, as a process, is surely a global model for other
intractable conflicts.
As I wander through the stalls at St George’s Market on a
Saturday morning, I am bound to dwell on the civic meaning of the new
diversity. Even here, in a corner of Europe, the waves of globalization and its
cousins – migration and the re-imagining of nations – are lapping strongly. I am struck,
especially, by how well Belfast has managed its immigration. Bar an occasional
incident, the overwhelming response of the city’s inhabitants to the newcomers
seems to have ranged from the nonplussed to the genuinely welcoming.
You might wonder, in light of a sectarian past and
present, why such “easygoingness” has so easily materialized. Perhaps it has
something to do with the assumption that even large-scale immigration poses no
risk to the blesséd divisions of “the antique quarrel”. Perhaps it has
something to do with a subliminal belief that this new infusion of people will,
thankfully, give relief to those very divisions. Or, precisely, perhaps both.
For myself, I tend to the idea that the city’s laissez-faire response to its new human
element has a great deal to do with Ireland’s own experience of immigration. As
the trilingual Irish novelist Hugo Hamilton once remarked (his mother was
German), “Here in Ireland, we understand the emptiness of migrancy perhaps
better than anyone else”. Not only because of the historical trauma – the
island lost half its population in the nineteenth century – but because so many
living Irish people, North and South, have worked for summers, years and
decades in the multicultural cities of North America, Britain and the Continent
before returning to the island. If Belfast’s diversity suddenly begins to resemble
that of Boston or London – and then feels quite natural – so what? And – my thought continues – if Troubled
Belfast itself is so deeply divided on the national question, what’s the point
of getting hysterical about some imagined “existential threat” to one or
another “imagined community” – the single possibility of which, even the dogs
in the streets know by now, is kaput
…
But Belfast being Belfast, the first decade of the
Agreement hardly ran smoothly. A series of provincial “culture wars”,
especially in and around the city, immediately bubbled up from the communal mantle
underlying the new dispensation. Slowly it became clear that Belfast was even
more deeply troubled than one might have imagined when focussing solely on
political and governmental solutions. Most of these local conflicts centred on
holding or extending “cultural territory”; many were sparked off by Orange
marches (like the stereophonic one at Drumcree) in proximity to Catholic
communities.
What soon could not be gainsaid is that integral to each of the “two traditions”
is a deep element of antagonism to the other.
Put another way, each “tradition” or “identity” has to decommission something within itself, if anything like real
civic-civil co-existence can be secured; to that end, if desired, each “side” has also to shift the collective focus from
self-exculpatory “prevention of the other” to self-affirming “transformation of
the inherited”. That, of course, is a
cultural archetype stretching right across the globe; writ very large, it might
even be called “the clash of civilisations”. But it is also what makes
Belfast’s very narrow ground so utterly intractable.
There are the old tensions, the old narratives, a new
diversity – and the complex psycho-cultural currents that carry it all along. There
are offsets, too, flowing from the city’s tradition of tough politics: the
struggle for gay rights, the revival of Irish, the widespread hostility to
Great Power thinking, the urge to escape a mantle of dreadful provincialism.
Yet the real puppet-master of the body politic must be, it often seems to me, the very space of the place – the intense
cabin fever of the polity, as it were. Fed up with the whole scene? You cannot
simply take a bus to Florida or Los Angeles and start afresh. If you wish to escape
the atmosphere of the North, you must leave it altogether.
That the Belfast ground is still deeply narrow is, then,
taken as read. Triumphalist Orangeism, republican martyrology, “Biblical”
Protestantism, and severe deprivation continue to weave much of its urban warp
and woof. I would say that the degree to which Northern society is equidistant
from much in Great Britain and the Republic is barely appreciated outside “the
Province”. Yeats once remarked that the North was “half-Scotch” – and a certain
“tidy-mindedness”, a certain Protestant work ethic, a certain British-imperial
industrial culture set down in an Irish landscape, does permeate the very grain
of Belfast. But the wider bifurcated polity and its intractable psychodynamics
lack utterly the common civil society and culture of Scotland – well reflected
in its civic, rather ethnic, nationalism – which may soon take it altogether out
of fractured Britain.
What then for the city-state’s republican-monarchical Lilliput?
An English dependency? The Republic’s foundling? To what will it stay loyal?
Itself divided?
____
Not so
long ago I was “driving Lilliput”, criss-crossing those same streets of former
cities. I was thinking about what a young poet had said to me earlier from a
sofa in my office: Ireland, you know, is
a literary superpower. I had paused a moment before I agreed, ticking off
in my mind a first quick roster of distinction: Shaw, Yeats, O’Casey, Beckett,
Bowen, Heaney, Butler, Tóibín… before trailing off into many others. It’s
something of a mystery – we concluded weakly, adjourning till the next reprise of the theme – that such a small
culture had produced such literary magnificence over the past century.
A moment later I was stopped at
traffic lights and an amplifying image sprang to mind: a gigantic microcosm. Ireland, that is. Not that the trope was new to me. But the
phrase was. Ireland (East, West, South, North) seemed large enough to contain “epigrammatic”
multitudes. But small enough to retain a human scale in the age of anthills – the
megapolitan cities, the authoritarian Eurasian federations, the failed states,
the neo-liberal malls. Butler’s first book, after all, was entitled Escape from the Anthill (Lilliput Press,
1985).
As with some of the other small ancient countries of
Europe, it could be said of Ireland: small
size, big space. To the metropolitan with a map, those counties, provinces
and cardinal spaces might seem a “limited” territory. But cultural space does
not exist in proportion to geographical size. Even less its global relevance.
Heaney, towards the end of his life, proffered that the world was becoming “a
big Ulster.” From Ukraine to Bahrain, Thailand to the Central
African Republic, the truth of that metaphor now seems borne home daily on the
magic carpet of the global media.
Small cultures have energies, strengths and insights that
are often invisible or largely inaccessible to the larger psycho-spatial
territories of classic “metropolitan” cultures. Precisely because the beast’s lair
is often so close, a provincia can
have a special feel for the extremist political seductions of “borderland/borderline
identities”. The North, once thought to be Western Europe’s great aberration,
seems less so now – and, indeed, more of a canary in the global coalmine.
Revving up from those lights, I recalled for the
umpteenth time something said by the very fine Shetlandic poet, Robert Alan
Jamieson. At a reading in Glasgow, he observed that whereas the so-called “peripheral”
culture could see straight to the centre of its “metropolitan” capital, the
reverse was hardly the case. As it
happened, his remarks occurred just before I attended a “Reception for
Contemporary British Poetry” at Buckingham Palace. Since I am not even a
British citizen, the invitation was perhaps a tiny example of why the “British”
Monarchy has been so successful for so long.
It was fun to cross the Palace’s gravelled moonlit
courtyard and process up the Soviet-style plush of the grand staircases. Soon
the Royals were circulating with their equerries though the Picture Gallery
hung with masterpieces. Prince Phillip approached one group of us waiting poets
and critics, champagne in hand, and asked: “In your readings, does the poet
read his own work?” He evidently had never attended a common-or-garden “poetry
reading”. Trapped at the glittering centre, the distant gossamer was occluded.
No wonder those Belfast Presbyterians had once led the campaign to break with
the remote centre.
Hence the desire to stay close to small size, big space seems instinct in many Irish writers. Perhaps
this only reflects the inspirational need of most literary artists for the
precise images and small details of known worlds. Never stray too far from your first style was Orwell’s parallel dictum.
Heaney held that his creative course was always locked into “Irish airspace”.
Beckett never left his mastery of the Dublin demotic. Bowen, who remained in black-out
London during its Churchillian hour (see under: “Mysterious Kôr”!), had an unsurpassed
grasp of her Anglo-Irish native territory. Swift created his Lilliput. Butler,
who attended Charterhouse (which he loathed) and Oxford, gets the cultural
logic of the smaller-scale exactly, in his second volume The Children of Drancy (Lilliput Press, 1988):
Yeats deliberately chose the small community, moving his
heart and his body and as much as he could of his mind from London to Ireland,
his birthplace. For him and a dozen other well-known Irish writers Ireland had
been a larger Brook Farm, a refuge whose walls were built not by some
transcendental theory but by history and geography. For a few years our most
parochial period became also our most creative.
I never left – I guess – the alternative grain of that
first narrative.
*
Chris Agee is a poet, essayist, photographer and editor. His third
collection of poems, Next to Nothing
(Salt, 2009), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, organized
by the Poetry Society and funded by the British Poet Laureate. He is the Editor
of Irish Pages, Ireland’s premier
literary journal, and The Irish Pages Press, and recently edited Balkan Essays (The Irish Pages Press,
2016), the sixth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays. His fourth collection, Blue Sandbar Moon, is forthcoming in
October 2018. He divides his time between Ireland, Scotland and Croatia.
This essay originally appeared in a print issue of Irish Pages.
