‘Lost, Unhappy and at Home’: The Impact of Violence on Irish Culture

Maria Gaviña-Costero

Introduction: The Impact of Violence on Irish Literature

No one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs, and it is at first glance rather surprising that violence has been singled out so seldom for special consideration.

(Arendt 1969: 8)

As a country under the colonizing yoke of the United Kingdom, Ireland has suffered many different types of violence over the centuries. The decolonisation of part of the island after the War of Independence (1919–21) and Partition led first to civil war and, from 1969 onwards, to the conflict known as the ‘Troubles’ in the North. In the recent centenary celebrations and commemorations, events that had been consciously or unconsciously relegated from popular memory have been re-examined. The Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre, celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the first Bloody Sunday in Dublin in November 2020, rescuing its victims from oblivion in 14 Voices from the Bloodied Field; in Derry, the fiftieth anniversary of the second Bloody Sunday was widely commemorated in 2022, with exhibitions, documentary theatre made with the victims’ families, and even a piece of musical theatre, The White Handkerchief, staged at Derry Playhouse.

Brexit has refocused attention on the border, also celebrating its centenary recently, and brought the identity debate in Northern Ireland back to the forefront of political discourse. The ongoing conflict over the ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ border, the maritime ‘border in the Irish Sea’ between Britain and Ireland, and the outbreak of violence that it generated in 2021, showed the difficulties inherent in maintaining the peace process and evidenced the endurance of sectarian violence, as demonstrated by the ongoing activity of paramilitary groups in peacetime. Successive works of culture have engaged with the questions relating to the legacy of violence, with the success of a novel such as Milkman in 2018, or the series Derry Girls, which premiered the same year on Channel 4, offering a settling of accounts with the past, albeit in a comedic form, and once again highlighting the difficulties of healing the wounds of the conflict.

However, it would be inexcusable reductionism to focus solely on war or armed conflict when talking about violence and its personal, social and political consequences, particularly since the beginning of the century has seen a shift ‘towards an identification of violence in its daily, invisible, or ‘banal’ forms’ (Roy 2008: 318). The presence of violence permeates all aspects of our socialisation: the imposition of a language on a population brought about by colonisation; inequality – which the crisis and collapse of the Celtic Tiger and then the economic consequences of the first the COVID pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have only aggravated; violence against women, exercised as a strategy of domination through their bodies; violence within the Catholic Church, with the exposure of child abuse cases and the Magdalene Laundries; LGBT+ phobia, aporophobia¹ (Cortina 2017), ableism and ecocide or violence against the planet, are just a few examples. Consequently, referring to a spectrum or continuum of violence is definitely suited to the reality of any society, and more apt to prevent the risk of ignoring everyday violence owing to the extreme nature of war or acts involving physical harm. As Roy cautions in her discussion of ‘ordinary’ violence in the midst of ‘extraordinary’ political terror: ‘The concept of a continuum is especially productive for an analysis of situations of conflict in which ‘spectacular’ political violence tends to deflect ‘unspectacular’ forms, contributing to the social invisibility and normalization of the latter’ (2008: 319).

The response to violence and its consequences generates debate in all spheres of a country’s society and culture. Indeed, Arendt’s words on the scant attention afforded to this subject in the late 1960s may appear to have prompted an overabundance of responses from the fields of literature and art criticism which address a subject that had traditionally been confined to the fields of history and psychology. The dialectic between the imperative to remember and the imperative to forget that is reproduced in the face of every traumatic event is also posed in cultural terms. Thus, while we find the emphasis on trauma studies and its effects, the routes of memory and the need to articulate the voices so often silenced, there is also the need to tackle current issues without allowing the past to contaminate the discussion of the present, as the playwright Rosemary Jenkinson argued in her polemical appeal to writers in Fortnight Magazine in 2021.²

At the core of this debate is the difficulty of the – more often than not – problematic distinction between victims and perpetrators. Indeed, the delimitation of the two sides in a violent act, despite its apparent simplicity when one is affected by it, actually implies a double conundrum in conflicts that are close in time and have not reached a real closure, such as the Northern Irish conflict. On the one hand, we may encounter what Primo Levi called ‘the grey zone’ (2017: 25–56), referring to the blurred distinction between victims and perpetrators that can occur in any conflict – and certainly did in the Troubles – when the possibility of role reversal is real.³ And on the other, collective beliefs in victims can lead to the justification and legitimisation of violence (Hirshberger 2018: 11).

As studies on collective trauma⁴ have revealed, when the process of meaning-making begins in the aftermath of the traumatic event, perpetrators can adopt two contrasting attitudes: either choosing to deny it, thus ‘closing the door on history’ (Hirshberger 2018: 1), namely refusing to deal with the traumatic past for the sake of peaceful coexistence; or acknowledging their responsibility, which, according to Hirshberger, ‘may be devastating for a group’s moral image and for its sense of meaning and significance’ (2018: 10). This is where literary works can be useful advocacy instruments to deal with both sides of the conflict in a way that facilitates the creation of meaning for both victims and perpetrators, while also offering the opportunity for reparation and healing, as Hirsch once more emphasizes:

Commemorative artistic practices can themselves function as the connective tissue between divergent but related histories of violence and their transmission across generations. The arts offer a fruitful platform to practice the openness and responsiveness that allow such connections to emerge for the postgenerations. (2019: 174)

Hirsch’s definition of postmemory as the manner in which the ‘generation after’ – that is, the descendants of the ones who experienced the trauma – remember it through the ‘stories, images and behaviours among which they grew up’ (2019: 172) can easily be applied to the way Irish people remember the histories of famine, diaspora, evictions, the loss of the mother tongue, the long history of imprisonment and abuse at the hands of the British state or the oppression carried out by the Catholic Church. O’Donoghue favours an understanding of postmemory as a means for the transformation of ‘a painful and destructive past into something socially beneficial’ through art (2018: 6). Unfortunately, the current situation of extreme violence in different parts of the world does not allow for an optimistic attitude towards the ability of the arts and academia to influence global geopolitics. Gluhovic notes that, for instance, the recent fixation on trauma has contributed little to the cohesion of the geopolitical landscape and cites Traverso in his objection to ‘the perverse consequences of a politics of memory that […] silences or trivializes the memory of the victims of colonial violence’ (2020: 4).

This tragic paradox reminds us that the adage about the need to remember history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, which motivates the growing popularity of trauma and memory studies, in order to counteract violence inflicted at the personal and community level,⁵ may not be, in the twenty-first century, as effective as one would wish. In Traverso’s view, our time has been sequestered by the memory of the past in ways that preclude our projection into the future (2016: 7). Indeed, the Irish people have largely protested against the ongoing war in Gaza (2023–4) by drawing on their postmemories of the harm inflicted by the colonial powers, with demonstrations in Derry, Belfast, Dublin and Cork demanding a permanent ceasefire, to no avail. The activist connotation of postmemory advocated by Hirsch can be seen in action here,⁶ although, tragically, its effect is null and void when confronted with reality.

Thus, since humanity has shown itself incapable of preventing the occurrence and reproduction of violence, creativity may prove more beneficial in the treatment and healing of trauma. The arts, and literature in particular, with its role as a mirror of the profound truth of a community, in its past, present and even desirable future, can aspire to mediate between a society and its trauma. The literary works analysed here go in the direction of bearing witness to different kinds of violence, not with the motivation that the atrocities of the past will never be repeated, but in the hope of helping people to cope with the individual or collective suffering the historic acts of violence have provoked. It is in this sense that Dinesh’s reflections on the effectiveness of using theatre in places affected by warfare or suffering from collective trauma⁷ or Gluhovic’s observation about the pivotal role of theatre in recovering ‘lost, or blocked, memories’ (2020: 46) can be understood.

On the other hand, although Gluhovic argues for ‘theatre’s capacity to serve as a shared ground for empathetic encounters between former enemies’ (46),⁸ the treatment of the results of violence often embodies the victim’s point of view and very rarely that of the perpetrator – an important difference can be seen in novels discussed here, such as Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End or Jan Carson’s The Fire Starters. What the vision of the repentant perpetrator can offer in terms of the creation of meaning described by Hirshberger will depend on the compassion deployed by the author in dealing with these characters.

Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘The Tollund Man’ (1972), the last stanza of which opens this volume, denotes the poet’s intimate and personal battle to make sense of the relentlessly absurd violence of the Northern Irish conflict. The parallel he draws between Iron Age Jutland, ‘the old man-killing parishes’, and the Northern Ireland of the Troubles, underlines the eternal prevalence of violence, not only extra-tribal, but, especially, the sacrifice of one’s own for a higher cause, be it gods, ethnicity or land. John Hewitt’s poem, ‘Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto’, was published in the same year as Heaney’s, but, although it too focuses on the victims, his is an imperative to bear witness, regardless of conflicting memories, as can be seen both in its title and the first stanza:

Bear in mind these dead:

I can find no plainer words.

I dare not risk using

That loaded word, Remember,

For your memory is a cruel web

Threaded from thorn to thorn across

A hedge of dead bramble, heavy