‘Trying to reach the future through the past’: murals and commemoration in Northern Ireland
‘Memory is more likely to be activated by contestation and amnesia is more likely to be induced by the desire for reconciliation’ (Kammen 1991: 13).
Introduction
If, as they say, the devil has all the best songs, then Irish singer-songwriter Paul Brady must have made a Faustian pact in the mid-1980s when he wrote his haunting ballad about the Northern Ireland conflict, ‘The Island’. Unashamedly escapist in its sentiments, it juxtaposes the pleasures of making love on a sandy beach with images of political violence taken directly from the conflict which then raged in Northern Ireland. Cynical and sarcastic in its lyrics about heroes and their armed struggles,[1] the song finds resonances of Northern Ireland’s experience in that of Lebanon. Thus Brady begins:
‘They say the skies of Lebanon are burning,
Those mighty cedars bleeding in the heat’.
The focus then switches to Ireland:
‘And we’re still at it in our own place,
Still trying to reach the future through the past,
Still trying to carve tomorrow from a tombstone’.
The culprit in the drama is clearly the Irish fixation on the past. The Irish are said to have an unnatural obsession with remembering, in effect wallowing in the past, constantly resurrecting it through various symbols which fan the flames of hatred, thus perpetuating a seemingly endless struggle.
‘They're raising banners over by the market,
Whitewashing slogans on the shipyard walls.’
In this view, material artefacts – banners, slogans – are not simply cultural, harmless, an innocent expression of identity, but a major part of the problem of continuing violence. Imagery becomes a form of recruitment for conflict.
The reference to Lebanon is particularly apposite – another sectarian society caught in a seemingly endless cycle of violence. And, as in Northern Ireland, fuel for the fire is provided in the form of material culture, in this case political posters which ‘help promote three very insidious features of the Lebanese political culture: sectarianism, clientelism and the cult of personality’ (Schmitt (2009: 4). Schmitt’s conclusion about Lebanon is no less pessimistic than that expressed in Brady’s ballad:
‘History keeps repeating itself, and if anything, precisely because the compulsory remembrance makes revenge a goal to be still pursued several generations after the insult. This trauma, relived and re-experienced under the excuse of being tribute, keeps not only history alive, but the wounds too, eternally reincarnating the bitterness of the old victim into the vengeance of the new perpetrator’ (Schmitt 2009: 186).
Such tributes exist in Northern Ireland too, especially in the form of parades and murals. If Schmitt’s conclusion can transfer, then such public expressions of political sentiments in Northern Ireland are a major part of the problem. Specifically, murals which commemorate dead warriors, celebrate past battles, lost or won, are tantamount to carving tombstones, a sign of political hopelessness, anathema in a society seeking political transformation. Certainly, that is one way to read a recent social experiment whereby the Arts Council of Northern Ireland headed up a £3.3 million scheme to encourage the painting out of the most offensive murals, in particular those in loyalist areas depicting hooded and armed warriors – the Reimaging Communities Programme.[2] What could be wrong with seeking to break the apparently endless cycle of violence in this way? Who in their right minds could object to an initiative to counter the negative politics of those who ‘reproduce past anxieties in the present through the process of commemoration...?’ (McDowell 2007: 729).
History and Mythology
In the 1980s and 1990s there emerged an attempt to refashion the writing of Irish history. Known as revisionism, this school of thought rested on the belief that the Irish were cursed with a surfeit of what they called history, but which was little more than disguised popular prejudice. The trend began with Shaw’s (1972) attack on what he termed the ‘canon’ of Irish history, which stood accused of ‘glorifying bloodshed, sectarian in its treatment of unionism, and pseudo-religious in its vision of the unending struggle of the native Irish over seven or more centuries against British oppression’ (Shaw, 1972: 262). By the 1990s, politicians were joining in the chorus. Tanaiste Dick Spring opined that the Irish were ‘prisoners of history’ (Irish Times 17 March 1993), while former government minister Conor Cruise O’Brien (1994) noted that ‘ancestral voices’ were goading the Irish into repetitive violence. One historian concluded: ‘Most societies use the past and myths about the past to a certain extent but some, including Ireland, seem to do so more than others’ (Walker 1996: 60). According to another historian, if there was one place where the effects of this distorted view of history were most evident it was in the North, and if there was one group which could be said to most personify this approach to history it was the republican movement.
‘Nowhere else in the European, North American or antipodean democracies does the writing of twentieth century history demand so constant a confrontation with mythologies designed to legitimate violence as a political weapon to overthrow the state’ (Fanning 1994: 156).
There was an element of ‘a curse on both your houses’ in this approach. Republicans and loyalists in the North were ‘scorpions in a bottle’ (Darby 1998), condemned to relive the past because they are locked in it.
There were numerous gaps in this portrait. Where, for example, in this account was the British state and its history, myths and cultural expressions? The revisionists in effect shared that state’s view of itself as a neutral arbiter between the warring Irish factions. And, like the state, the revisionists displayed an almost complete lack of attention to what one of the ‘scorpions’, loyalism, was up to; the main thrust of the revisionist offensive was against republicans. Conor Cruise O’Brien put it succinctly: ‘... a prevalent romantic interpretation of history long favoured recruitment for the IRA. To challenge that interpretation of history was therefore a significant part of the struggle against the IRA...’ (O’Brien 1978: 80). Republicans idolised the Easter Rising and sanctified its heroes; they ritualistically marched, sang songs and painted murals about these events and heroes. Theirs was less a political ideology than a ‘condition’ (O’Brien 1978: 47). Yet there was no equal dismissal of the 3000-plus marches each year by the Orange Order or unionism’s increasing fixation on the Battle of the Somme. In fact, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s contradictory stand on unionism and republicanism was most obviously revealed in his decision in 1996 to join the United Kingdom Unionist Party and to represent that party in the Northern Ireland Forum. There may have been two sides (rather than three), but it was the ideology and practices of only one of them that was said to be at the core of the North’s political problems.
Republicans may have prided themselves on a knowledge of Irish history, and especially Irish nationalist history, but for revisionist critics they subscribed to ‘myth’ rather than ‘history’. For some commentators, so deep was the malady that the Irish were left only with myth. ‘Ireland is almost a land without history because the troubles of the past are relived as contemporary events’ (Rose 1971: 75). The doyen of Irish revisionist historiography, Roy Foster, concluded that ‘the depressing lesson is that history as conceived by scholars is different to what it is understood to be at large, where “myth” is probably the correct if over-used anthropological term’ (Foster 1994: 144). Ultimately, the Irish, and especially republicans, could not win; either they were manipulating and distorting historical memory for their own ideological ends, or they were trapped in myths which drove them to violence (Dawson 2007: 38).
The revisionists, on the other hand, saw themselves as falling into neither trap; history, as practiced by historians, is privileged. What academic elites remember is permissible memory; for the rest of us, only distorted memory is available. We therefore need the saving hand of the elite historian to rescue us from this entrapment, whereby we are caught in an endless loop of repetitive memory, marching the same roads year after year, singing the same dirges to dead heroes and painting the same offensive images on our respective walls.
Collective memory
Entrapment, endless loops, repetition – these are terms which could just as easily be used in relation to the individual experience of trauma. It is thus tempting to take an analytical leap and see collective behaviour in the same light. In this sense, then, repeated social rituals or stirring songs of heroes are simply the collective acting out of trauma. To see how tenable that leap is, it is necessary first to consider the issue of individual trauma and memory.
Psychologists who have written about the Holocaust and other instances of severe political violence argue that at the individual level trauma means that ‘the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction’ (Laub 1991: 57). As such, traumatic memory is radically different from normal memory which is by definition about events that are past, finished, distant. ‘The person who experiences a traumatic event is still inside the event, present at it... The original traumatic event has not yet been transformed into a mediated, distanced account ... Trauma is failed experience’ (Van Alphen 2002: 211). It is not simply that the trauma survivor cannot remember or cannot articulate the memory; ‘not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal, an erasure; a destruction of form and of structure’. It causes the victim ‘to avert one’s eyes from the center of the traumatic experience, to overlook details, to misperceive, and most of all, to fail to comprehend’ (Laub 2002: 64). In the end, the survivor experiences a reversal of the everyday chronological experience of past and present: ‘The images from the past – the unprocessed imprints – are more vivid and intense than what he sees in the present’ (Van Alphen 2002: 209). In trauma the past is characterised by immediacy while the survivor is dissociated from the present. This is a psychological disorder from which it is difficult to escape. In the abstract, what is required is that the individual move beyond repetition to a stage of detachment, able to distance oneself from the original traumatic event and thereby interpret and judge it. But many of the obvious solutions – for example, articulating the past horror and therefore exorcising it – are precisely actions whose absence is central to the condition itself. The trauma survivor is unable to tell her or his story, or is trapped in ‘ceaseless repetitions and reenactments’ (Laub 1991: 69). The story does not develop, is not embellished or diminished by the passing of time or the onset of new experiences. Rather it is locked in an eternal now.
Undoubtedly one may speak metaphorically of trauma, dissociation, closure, etc. at the collective level (Bell 2006: 7); however, the suspicion must be that the collective is not merely not an individual but that it is also more than the sum of its individual parts. Is it possible to move beyond metaphor to judge collective memory and behaviour by these same insights that apply to the individual? More fundamentally, how is it possible at all to talk of a collective memory of such events?
The field of social memory studies has its beginnings in the work of authors such as Maurice Halbwachs (Social Frameworks of Memory, Univ of Chicago Press 1992[1925]. For Halbwachs, all memory is social.
‘There is no point in seeking where ... [memories] are preserved in my brain or in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled by me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them...’ (Halbwachs 1992: 38; here 109).
The very words we have to articulate memory even to ourselves come from our society. Studying memory therefore is ‘not a matter of reflecting philosophically on inherent properties of the subjective mind; memory is a matter of how minds work together in society, how their operations are not simply mediated but are structured by social arrangements’ (Halbwachs 1992: 38; here 109). Jelin concludes likewise, explaining that the labour necessary to construct memory, memory work, is ultimately social labour:
‘Individual memories are always socially framed… This entails that the social is always present, even in the most “individual” moments… all memories are more reconstructions than recollections... Memory is not an object that is simply there to be extracted, but rather it is produced by active subjects that share a culture and an ethos’ (Jelin 11 and 68).
The social construction of meaning and memory is ‘always anchored in the present’ (Jelin 2003: 66). While it carries the weight of the meaning of the past, collective memory is an interpretation which is constructed in and determined by the present. The present determines how the past is interpreted.
‘The past is gone, it is already de-termin(at)ed; it cannot be changed... What can change about the past is its meaning, which is subject to reinterpretations, anchored in intentions and expectations toward the future. That meaning of the past is dynamic and is conveyed by social agents engaged in confrontations with opposite interpretations, other meanings...’ (Jelin 26).
Crucial to the development of collective meaning is the role of ‘memory entrepreneurs’, those who interpret or reinterpret memory to suit the times. Some analysts, instrumentalists, ‘see memory entrepreneurship as a manipulation of the past for particular purposes’ (Olick and Robbins: 128). Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) are key proponents of this view, seeing traditions as ‘disingenuous efforts to secure political power’ (Dawson 108). Other analysts prefer to ‘see selective memory as an inevitable consequence of the fact that we interpret the world – including the past – on the basis of our own experience and within cultural frameworks’ (Olick and Robbins 128). Interpretation, and indeed reinterpretation, of memory are inevitable and natural consequences of social interaction. ‘Rather than viewing nostalgia as an illness, as did Freud, recent scholars have tended to see the desire to connect self with history as understandable, even natural’ (Bartel 1996: 362).