WarTrauma - 3 Quarks Daily

by Barbara Fischkin

John Hume, Nobel Prize Laureate — John Hume—who won the Nobel Peace Prize, for his work in Northern Ireland—as I imagine him looking down today from the heavens.

“John Hume would not have tweeted. He would have been on Kinnaird Avenue.” —As stated by Sara Morrison in conversation with Jenny Holland

A twenty-first century version of the Northern Irish “Troubles” erupted this month on Kinnaird Avenue in Belfast. This was not a continuation of the centuries-long war between Catholics and Protestants. It was about race, not religion. The attacker was a Sudanese immigrant. The victim and his main savior were white men born in Northern Ireland. The attacker brutally stabbed his victim, gouging out an eye. The savior ended the attack with a hurley stick, the Irish version of a baseball bat.

The riots that followed—labeled as anti-immigrant which sounds correct to me, if over simplified— involved masked mobs, weaponized bricks, petrol bombs and the ensuing arson, burnt homes, displacements and similar decibels of the fear that has engulfed Ireland for centuries, albeit with different enemies. And then, of course, as happens everywhere riots occur, the police arrived: The Police Service of Northern Ireland, with its riot squads and water cannons.

This happened between June 8 and 11. On June 13, thousands in search of a happier ending, gathered outside City Hall to condemn racism in Northern Ireland.

The above is what I think happened from reading news reports. And social media. Most not from Belfast, itself.

Northern Ireland has long been a place reported on from afar. My husband and I, as American journalists, moved to Ireland to live in both Dublin and Belfast in 1984, as that sectarian violence—religion-based with many eruptions over centuries—was underway. We went on a grant my husband was given from St. John’s University in New York, pushed by Irish-Americans who felt the current “troubles,” were underreported. Despite knowing this, it was shocking to find out that so many other international foreign correspondents reported on Northern Ireland from London. Or from farther away. A New York Times reporter based in London, described how terrified she was to finally spend an overnight—or perhaps more—in Belfast. This was something my husband and I did regularly. Read more »

by Muna Nassir

Sitting on the sill, head slightly resting on the pane, The Dubliners in hand, I look out the window, much like the eponymous Eveline, at the start of this particular short story. The darkness, in this case, is ready to invade not an avenue with concrete pavement and rows of redbrick terraced houses in Dublin, but an empty playground with bright coloured slides, swings, seesaws, and a roundabout in South Manchester. My vantage point allows me an eye level view of the giant oak sitting at the closest corner of the park, across the street. Unlike the slanted view from the living room, here, I can almost see the tiniest ferns sprouting on its bark. The oak’s tip points towards the sky with its thick branches spread out like the arms of a dervish in a trance. Bearing the weight of the subject in mind, I sigh in, inhaling the evening breeze. My nostrils detect not the smell of dusty cretonne but rather the scent of fallen leaves imbued with the myriad hues of autumn. From green to lime, to orange, red, maroon, and brown. The tree sits on a sideway, a space that seems to have been added as an afterthought, giving the park an irregular shape. Basking in another worldly silence, the oak exudes a stillness befitting the day’s retirement for the night. Read more »

Tag: WarTrauma

New Troubles In Belfast

Monday, July 3, 2023

In-between Spaces and Silences : A Reading of James Joyce’s ‘Eveline’ and Akhedr Ahmedin’s ‘The Remnant’