Dr. Rebecca Graff-McRae
Email: rgraff@ualberta.ca
Twitter: @PoliScIrish
Nearly two
decades after the Good Friday
Agreement was signed in Belfast on 10 April 1998, the past is still omnipresent
in Northern Ireland.
This Easter
weekend, nationalist communities in the North and many in the Republic of
Ireland will commemorate the centenary of the Easter Rising – the failed
insurrection that provided the latent catalyst for both independence and
partition. The Good Friday Agreement will have no parade for its eighteenth
birthday: it is easier, somehow, to remember violence (“theirs” and “ours”)
than to celebrate the painful compromises of an incomplete peace.
It has been
called a “permanent ceasefire”, and a “peace without reconciliation”; the
paradoxically named “peace walls” divide more communities today than at the
height of the Troubles, and political attitudes remain polarized.
In
post-conflict societies, memory is like a ghost that lingers – neither fully
tangible nor fully absent. Rather than strict recall, collective memory of the
past is a construction, somewhere between recollection, history, and myth. And,
like the neighbourhood estates still bifurcated by razor wire, memory too
remains divided and divisive.
In Northern
Ireland, it often seems as though there are two versions of memory: “ours”,
which is “true” and “theirs” which is “not”. These monolithic narratives of the
past are inextricably tied to ethno-political identity, and allow little space
for alternative approaches to the past to emerge. Gender, in
particular, is an axis of identity that is still obscured by, or subsumed
within, the ethnopolitics of the past. As Sara McDowell attests in her 2008
work, “Commemorating dead
‘men’: Gendering the past and present in
post-conflict Northern Ireland,” on republican memorial spaces,
Commemorative landscapes, particularly those which
evoke the memory of war, are among the most gendered, as they largely document
(and subsequently reproduce) the experiences and narratives of men, [...] and
often elide or complicate the interpretations of women (337).
The history of
the conflict – the Troubles specifically and the tensions between British and
Irish identities generally – has been constructed as male by default: it is a
militarized history of armed rebellion, struggle, or all-out war, with men at
the centre. Not only does this version of historical memory neglect to
recognize the contributions of women to the conflict and overlook other
significant events to which women played a pivotal role, at the same time it
serves to legitimize the power relations of the present – one as militarized
and male-dominated as the past.
But some are daring to remember the conflict, and Northern Ireland’s long, difficult history, otherwise. How does remembering gender – and gendering remembrance – challenge and deconstruct the entrenched versions of the Troubled past?
Part of this
approach is to expose the near absence of women and their experiences from
commemorative discourses and landscapes. A stark example is that of Jean McConville, who was “disappeared” by the
Provisional IRA in 1972. A widowed mother of 10, McConville was abducted at
gunpoint in front of her children and driven across the Irish border, where she
was “executed” as an alleged informer. While her case has been high profile,
particularly since the discovery of her remains in 2003, her story has been
framed in relation to the legal and political implications for high-ranking
members of Sinn Fein – namely, the party’s leader
Gerry Adams.
Outside of
family vigils, there has been no effort to officially commemorate her death. While
McConville’s case has been politically mobilised, she herself is often
portrayed solely as a widowed mother of ten. Yet in a world of clearly drawn
lines, she transgressed many boundaries: McConville was raised a Protestant but
converted to Catholicism upon her marriage; she was known for helping her
neighbours regardless of their background – and the allegations of “informing”
came after an incident in which she offered aid to a wounded British soldier
outside her flat. By acknowledging the complexities of Jean McConville as a
person and as a woman, her role in the history of the Troubles can become much
more than a helpless victim.
The second strategy
is to challenge the co-option of women’s experiences into stereotypical roles
and symbols – either as saintly mothers, innocent victims, or militant soldiers
for the cause. To do so is to reclaim the complexity of women’s experiences of
the conflict, and to acknowledge the ambiguity of multivalent identities beyond
Irish nationalist or republican versus British Loyalist or unionist. It also
means permitting men and boys to reconceptualise their histories beyond these
confines.
The
commemoration of Provisional IRA volunteer Mairead Farrell is doubly complicated: her role as
leader of the Armagh women's no-wash protest and hunger strike (1980) is
subordinated to her martyr's death in Gibraltar (a seemingly easier martyrdom
with few of the ambiguities of self-starvation: this death allows for a clear
distinction to be drawn between the 'legitimate' IRA mission and the illegal
actions of SAS). The scripting of her remembrance was further complicated by
attempts in 2008 to commemorate her death on Stormont grounds – to celebrate
International Women's Day. This rewriting of Farrell as a feminist republican
icon obscures the ambivalence between the two terms – feminist and republican –
that remains lodged within republican politics; and erases the role prominent
republican figures (including Adams) played in subordinating the Armagh women's
strike in favour of the Maze protests.
From the
unionist perspective, as a 'terrorist', Farrell could not (and presumably could
never) be remembered in a democratic setting, (even and especially) under the
auspices of 'peace'. In a further escalation of commemorative politics as 'war
by other means', Jeffrey Donaldson of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) proposed
a counter-commemoration – of the Special Air Services (SAS) unit that had
carried out the Gibraltar killings. Thus the attempt to 'celebrate' Farrell's
memory recreated predictable conflictual responses along republican-unionist
lines, even as it exposed significant ambiguities within mainstream republican
politics.
Finally, remembering
gender means creating space for the marginalized to speak and be heard. Young
women in the nationalist community are often incorporated into a version of
republican history and identity that is also predicated on the shame, control,
and abuse of women. Two examples expose the potential for gender considerations
to disrupt and dismantle the discourse upon with the republican past is based.
The high-profile cases of sexual violence against Mairia Cahill (elected in 2015 to the Irish
Seanad), and Aine Dahlstrom (Gerry Adams’ niece), were
repeatedly suppressed and repudiated for decades – not merely to mitigate the
legal liability for the criminal acts alleged, but more significantly to
protect the image of republican movement. While these two women challenged the
accepted narrative of republicanism as the benevolent 'protectors' of the
community by exposing their traumatic and abusive treatment within it, that
very 'community' worked to contain and rewrite their experiences through denial
and deferral in the case of Dahlstrom, and through victim-shaming, in the case
of Cahill.
So what would
it mean to acknowledge these ghostly silences and absences of gender, long obscured
and contained by the dominant discourses of the past? To pry open the cracks
and fissures and zero in on the ambiguity and discontinuity they expose
therein? What would a post-peace-process Northern Ireland look like if the
conflict experienced by Jean McConnville, Mairia Cahill, Aine Dahlstrom, or
even Mairead Farrell was commemorated equally, rather than the one reified by
the memorialization of paramilitarism? What if history and memory could be
viewed from the perspective of those whose positions were complicated,
undecided, not able to be neatly packaged? Instead of rewriting the past in
support of those who have a vested interest in owning the conflict, let us
allow the stories of these women to expose the contradiction, to hold open the
pages of history just long enough for their own voices to be acknowledged, and
a new story to enter.
Even attempts
to “honour” the role of women in conflict can be complicated.
No comments:
Post a Comment