Troubled narratives — exploring the impact of sectarian divisions in creative expression
Before drawing firm conclusions about the apparent literary renaissance in Belfast I should probably go to Hull. Hull is a city about the same size as Belfast, with much the same type of architecture and a port.
I know some of the literature that has come out of Hull but I don’t have the intimate acquaintance with the literary scene there that I have with Belfast.
Doing a brief search of Hull writers I find some that we in Belfast would claim our city had helped shape, like Tom Paulin and Philip Larkin, so maybe the idea of identifying writers by their city is a flimsy one anyway.
All the same, here’s a proposal for a research project some PhD candidate from either city might wish to take on: to what extent is it right to say that Belfast has been especially fruitful of great writing and to what extent is Belfast’s distinctive flourishing a product of the sectarian divisions in the city?
Methodology: comparing Belfast and Hull.
In Belfast we claim Seamus Heaney, a Nobel prize-winning poet and a clutch of poets around him who critiqued each other, like Joan Newman, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon.
We claim credit for a second generation wave of poets inspired by them. Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and Frank Ormsby. And from there we get a wider flowering of poets too numerous to mention.
Feargal Cochrane in his book Belfast has a chapter on the poets and writes, "Certainly if you grew up in Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s, you were probably either a poet yourself, or knew one who lived on your street.”
Yet now we are coming down with short story writers and novelists, most of them women: Jan Carson, Lucy Caldwell, Louise Kennedy, Wendy Erskine.
Among the men are Glenn Patterson, Paul Burgess, the late Henry McDonald, Michael Magee, Richard O’Rawe and, if I may be so immodest I’ll include myself.
In some, the influence of the troubles is obvious. Louise Kennedy writes specifically about a young woman doing her best in a divided and troubled society, having an affair with an older man and challenged to consider how she might unthinkingly have been responsible for violent outcomes.
Alexander Poots has written a critique of Northern Irish writing The Strangers’ House in which he argues that our writers show signs of being homesick, not at home in their home place. And for many this is about the tension over identity here.
In his introduction he looks at Tom Paulin, the northern Protestant in London who realises that he is not at home in London and has more in common with other migrants. So it’s a quaint irony that Paulin also gets claimed as a Hull writer.
Poots treats Northern Ireland as a distinct political region with a home literature and at the same time he suggests that the literature itself questions the viability of the place as a home for creative and sensitive people.
Richard O’Rawe provides a stark exception to the homesick character, or the character who fears being implicated in the cruel machinations of others. He has created Ructions O’Hare, a criminal genius who outwits the IRA. Ructions appears in two novels, Northern Heist, based on the Northern Bank robbery of 2004 and Goering’s Gold, based on an idea that Goering stashed treasure in Ireland before the end of the war.
And yet, at the heart of these stories, is that same idea that people are caught up in events the don’t understand and are living uneasy lives in contexts that implicate them but take little account of them.
Guilt and responsibility are big themes. Michael Magee’s novel, Close to Home, starts with a young man bewildered by his own violence. Darragh McKeon isn’t from Belfast but he engages with the troubles in Remembrance Sunday, about a young man who witnesses IRA men skulking in the night and says nothing. He then has to question his own possible responsibility for a murderous bombing in Enniskillen.
My own novel, Terry Brankin Has A Gun, is similarly about guilt and shame. Terry Brankin, having long left the IRA, can’t rely on the movement for support when the police come after him for past crimes.
The first of the post peace process novels was Stuart Neville’s Twelve was about an IRA man haunted by the ghosts of his victims.
Yeats famously agonised about whether his writing had generated violence. “I lie awake night after night/And never get the answers right./Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?”
These are not his most mellifluous lines but they presage a theme that runs through much modern Irish writing; have I done something stupid at some time in my life that had consequences I can’t bear to think about?
Throughout the Troubles, two conflicting descriptions of Northern Ireland were used to explain violence. These were, basically, the sick society model and the few bad men model. Either we were all implicated or most of us had nothing to do with it.
The writers agonising about responsibility suggest they are affirming the sick society model. They represent a post Troubles society examining its conscience.
