"So, what are yous all doing out here?"
It was a fair question-Belfast was frostbitten, and here we were ordering beers to drink in the patch of sun that just barely fit the two of us. I explained that we'd come up this morning on account of the rioting in the city center. The situation hadn't frightened me the day before when I'd first noticed the knocked over trams, the shattered glass in the windows on Parnell street. Only later did the full scope of what had happened sunk in: a news outlet had misreported the ethnicity of a violent criminal who'd stabbed a young girl in the city center, the mistake fueling the xenophobic ire of those vitriolic masses that one usually forgets exists when walking about in Ireland's capital city. I guess that forgetting is part of the problem, part of their anger, as unjustified as it was. My friend, working in a cafe, had cowered as a man set fire to the chairs she'd been stacking. She had gotten home alright, but I thought the day trip up to Belfast would be well-timed nonetheless.
"Mad, those riots. Still, imagine that, coming up to Belfast to escape the riots, God help you."
The pair of guys behind the counter laughed, and we moved onto other topics: they offered us weed (we declined), and one asked me to pick the song they'd play on the boombox inside the small bar (anything by Fleetwood Mac, I said, trying to be diplomatic). The dark irony of their comment about our voyage was not lost on either of us. I had gotten on a train that morning leaving from a station that had been on fire the night before. The familiar sounds of the magpies, emblematic of the chilly Irish mornings, seemed suddenly ominous.
The riots hadn't scared me, exactly, but had strengthened my dark enchantment with the fraught contours of nationalism. I had come to Belfast, at the tensest time in Dublin's recent history, in a spirit less of touristic intrigue than of exhumation. Just as the mention of riots to the two guys working the bar had unrefined the past to come crashing through the walls of the present, I hoped this peculiar kind of trouble would cause a psychic rent to open to 1972.
You can still find the peace walls once erected to keep the Catholic and Protestant communities apart. They are enormous monstrosities, dark green sheet metal and meaning black bolts. Though some are covered with words of unity and slogans of peace, these sentiments are quickly betrayed by the artwork that occupies the outlying neighborhood. Beginning around Norfolk road, murals are staggered, staccato-like, on the residential and suburban neighborhoods closest to the Shankill Peace Wall. The great diversity of their stylistic attributes finds an analogue in their varying sizes and tones: they range from colorful, impressionistic quarter-walls to entire sides of buildings covered in kitschy iconography painted in black and white. Together they detail the political and sociocultural history of the city, though perhaps not always faithfully.
The entire Shankill neighborhood is a walking tour of Ulster politics, a memorial to sectarian division and the bitter inevitability of political violence. A giant portrait of Queen Elizabeth was painted in black and white, commissioned by loyalist Ulster supporters of the Crown. Another, honoring the Northern Irish Protestants who fought for the British empire during World War 1 and lost their lives at the Battle of the Somme. Finally, a third--not so much a mural as an entire site of memorialization, complete with diorama-like displays, newspaper clippings, and memorial plaques. It's known as the Bayardo memorial arch, bought and paid for by an activist group dedicated to remembering the Bayardo Bar Attack of 1975, during which the IRA led an attack on a bar on Aberdeen Street, killing and injuring indiscriminately in an attempt to target members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. This in part was a retaliation to the UVF-led murder of four Dublin civilians, who were shot dead at a fake military checkpoint. All of this is to say the question of "Who started it?" seemed to matter far less to those memorializing the events than the question of which side of the walls the victims happened to be living on.
The language of the monument was jarring: incendiary and all-encompassing in its verdicts. Giant black lettering read "IRA-Sinn Fein-ISIS no difference," accompanied by pictures from the aftermath of the 2015 Paris terror attacks and various IRA insurgent bombings in the Belfast area. The condemnation continued to proceed by direct analogy and suggestive subtext. A poster, held up by zip ties, shared pictures of one prominent Sinn Fein party member spotted at lunch with a "known extremist." Flowers, dyed in the synthetic red and blue of the union jack, adorned a plastic grave underneath the graphic photos of the 2015 Paris bombing. The grave's script: "In proud memory of loyalist martyrs." Memorialization here proceeded alongside activism, granting the whole street corner an air of necessitated gravity when it would have otherwise appeared a site of well-funded loyalist rambling. This pattern--comparisons of IRA-led violence to other international terrorist groups (predominantly ones with roots in fundamentalist Islam), linguistic emphasis on loyalty to the Crown and on Catholic equality (with no mention of colonization, nor of sectarianism)--continued as we winded down the street.
It was strange how many murals seemed to contradict one another, even on the same side of the conflict. Images of black-hooded Ulster fighters, painted with their machine guns and murderous stares, existed side by side with posters claiming the 'outrageous' and 'inhumane' murder of innocents during armed combat, even during combat in which these same forces participated. The upshot of the militant murals was an urgent cry to 'never surrender' the loyal British strongholds in the Ulster county. Of course it is the guns and masks that alert us to the consequences of such slogans.
And yet this clear belief in the inevitability of political violence coexisted with an instinctive compassion that was violent in its very intensity. The more people they lost, the more they had to mourn, and the more remote became the possibility of surrender or compromise. They would have died for their drinking buddies and dentists, let alone for their political allies. There was something self-obliterating about the universality of victimhood on display, which extended to those who were wanted dead for their crimes against Irish civilians no less than those who were unaligned or innocent, and killed for the cause anyway. Martyrdom was everywhere if only because violence was the medium for their legitimation as a political community and as British subjects. It is in some ways the guiding principle of the place, whose geographic analogue is the peace wall itself.
For a change of pace we found a bar that seemed to cater to our generation. Gaelige stickers adorned the walls, and upstairs they were hosting a pub quiz, all proceeds donated to relief efforts in Gaza (there would be, predictably, no talk of ceasefire on the Shankill Road side of the peace wall, in keeping with mainstream British politics). We struck up a conversation with a longtime resident who had hopped between Cork and Belfast. He had lived both in the Republic and in the United Kingdom, and the heritage of disputed territory seemed to have contributed much to his political consciousness.
Most people chose to live as if there was simply no border at all, he said. He couldn't tell what was more effortful: choosing to accept the unnatural and imposed status of the border and persist in constant sublimation of their dual loyalties, or constantly needing to uphold the border as something tangible and therefore relevant, rather than the far simpler reality that the border was something deniable, a mere relic. Which one was the truth? I asked him about the Bayardo Somme Association, and if people in England seemed to remember those men the same way the association did. If there were arches and memorials all over the UK, and not just in Belfast. He shrugged.
"They are proud citizens of Britain," he said. "Britain, which treats them like shit."
the bayardo memorial arch.
It was around the time of my return from Belfast when the city emptied out of everyone I had met in the last few months. My Christmas plans had been cancelled, and as I awaited the return of my companions and my own delayed vacation, I found myself alone and facing several days with no real responsibilities and scarce methods of occupying myself productively, mostly because I was so tired.
Finals had forced me to slowly release my energies over a longer stretch of time than I had bargained for, and I had woken up on the day of deadlines and found them depleted. I had scuttled and shuffled around in my readings and spent time writing and gruelingly rewriting, only to emerge from this twilight into a city locked in a holiday stupor: streets empty and wind fierce. Another year was wearing down to a muted palette.
As the temperature dropped in Islandbridge, my mind was having its own winter. In the first few days of isolation, time stagnates. I walked a lot through neighborhoods that suddenly seemed different—their emptiness rendering them weird and lonely. Looking for something mystical feeling to match the strange, almost ancient feel the city had taken on in its depopulation, I went into churches, the bone-shaking organ and rustic keening of the parish pipes transporting me to a thousand other lonely, twilit churchyards. I was listening to The Brothers Karamazov on tape and walking through empty galleries after dark, although it was only four in the afternoon. It is hard to think of a more haunting time.
Empty time and empty spaces have a way of depressing me, and it was around this time I tried to think of systems and rules and metrics by which I could keep and pass time to prevent my nerves being frayed. I woke up early and went for runs in the pale sunlight, I left the house and went to places that still harbored traces of occupation. I forced myself to watch movies, the longest ones I could find, and burned long taper candles as if I was entertaining. The schedule I'd worked out for myself, and the zealous devotion with which I clung to it, curiously attuned me to the existence of others' systems and metrics and schedules. I found myself developing an ear for it.
I took a cab ride home once and found myself turning the interaction over in my mind. On that night the streets were busy, full of mostly drunk twenty and thirty somethings tripping over themselves and each other. In the chaos we made a joke about being his easy ride for the night, heading back early, hardly tipsy. He gave us some choice anecdotes about the states of those he'd drive home sometimes, and what happens if they pass out in his car. If its a young man he'll smack them, but if it's a woman he'll drop them off at the police station, he says, leaving the subtext out for our benefit. He mentions watching people do drugs in the backseat, and he recites the disclaimer it seems he has memorized: you can do what you want back there, but if you pass out or get sick, I'll leave you on the side of the road. Though we are both sober this makes us gulp nervously. How do the gardai wake up the drunks, we ask, trying to turn the conversation away from the cabbie's routinized response to these ethical dilemmas. They rap on the collarbones, he says, or twist the earlobes. When my friend asks why, me and the cabbie say the answer in unison: it doesn't leave bruises.
How strange it is to have such a closed and finite system. In case of drunk passenger, leave them out on the side of the street, because you know what will happen if you do not. What kinds of situations do you have to be in, and how often, I wonder, before you decide to throw out sick and raving mad people out on the road in the dead of night? How do you even begin to articulate such a principle?
I thought about that in relation to myself: writing down my little to-do lists and notes for each day despite the fact that there was nothing to do and no one around. You must vacuum and drink water. You must wear pants indoors. In case of depressive feelings, go outside on a brisk walk for forty-five minutes and do not listen to Elliot Smith. In case of anxious feelings, lie under the covers with duvet pulled over the head and watch something, anything. I had systems of my own, they just weren't tinged with the spirit of ethical quandary.
Another exhibit. I was sitting in a cafe on another night watching the light dwindle from the big window that opened into the main shopping street below. I had felt lucky to nab a spot on a couch by the window, drinking a coffee and reading my little book and enjoying the kind of endless afternoon that feels particularly pleasant only after working very very hard on things like research papers for quite a while. It was only me and a family in this particular room--they were at a four-seater table, a father, mother, and daughter. The mom read out of a book several situations and each gave a number, as if judging a competitive sport. The mother recited the following scenarios: what if someone you are at dinner with finishes the last of the communal water on a table without asking others if they'd like some, or what if you discovered a coworker was badmouthing you to a boss. Each time she finished a given situation the family would chirp out a number from 1-10. I stopped reading as I listened to them classify the scale, which I soon intuited was about rage--1 being "this situation brings me almost no rage," and 10 being a situation that renders you completely, irrevocably enraged. For most of the situations, the party agreed with within a range of 1 or 2 numbers, but others became points of debate. In particular questions of domestic life sparked the greatest chasms in choice of integer. Their rage ratings for these situations--leaving the lid off a jar of peanut butter, forgetting to lock the door--gave me unique insight into what kinds of people they might be to live with or be with in a family dynamic. The father is messy, cold, perpetually busy. The mother is overbearing, perpetually among others, and very often in their faces. The daughter is self-centered and withdrawn, sullen and attention-seeking.
At one point I almost expected her to storm off, so heated was their discussion. I imagined her shaking the rain of her good black coat from its crook on the door, opening the latch and going out into what was left of the afternoon sunlight. She stayed put, but I made a note of it anyway, imagining what her parents might say. "5," The mother would cut in, sighing as her daughter stormed off. But the father would shake his head, resigned.
"3. We could always see it coming, after all."
another lovely lonely churchyard with ancient cobble.