Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture

Figures

Figure 8.1.“Justice Knieeboard. Hanging a Piper for Playing Seditious Tunes”

Figure 8.2.Women on stage at the “Rising Tides” concert as part of FairPlé’s first seminar, Liberty Hall, Dublin, autumn 2018

Preface

As Ireland commemorates the centennial anniversary of the foundation of the Free State, scholars, artists and commentators are asking a range of new questions about trauma and memory in a range of spheres. A violent, and invariably traumatic, internal civil war cast a long shadow after the state was established in 1922. Yet public analysis and acknowledgement of several aspects of the trauma experienced in such a divisive conflict were met with silence for decades. The impact of the Civil War on women, for example, was essentially ignored or dismissed as insignificant until very recently. The outbreak of “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, followed by thirty years of violence, likewise marked an episode of protracted trauma in Irish society. Since the 1990s, emerging evidence of physical, sexual and human rights abuses perpetrated historically in religious institutions has also opened up a dynamic field of analysis in the domain of trauma and memory (Pine; Smith). A post-revisionist interpretation of Irish history is therefore often presented as a history of trauma.

Trauma is a much-used term in interdisciplinary Irish studies. But, in reality, it is a complex vehicle both for social commentary and academic analysis that is often riddled with ethical challenges. How does one narrate, record, represent or remember a trauma? As I have observed in my research on sexual trauma and the violence women experienced in the Irish Revolution, telling the stories of “victims” of traumatic events, in particular those who chose not to “tell” or report past crimes and did not give open consent for or want their trauma ever to be publicized, must be carefully considered in violence studies (Connolly 2019a, 2019b, forthcoming). Few victims of rape, in particular, ever consent to their stories being inscribed in a public archive or forum. The study of trauma is therefore in itself rife with moral ambiguity and those who do choose to narrate traumas, especially as an observer and not a survivor, have to resolve serious ethical questions. This potential for harm places a considerable onus on researchers of sexual ←xi | xii→violence to ensure that our projects are designed with care and rigour. Moreover, as David Fitzpatrick reminds us, trauma is multifaceted and not just about victims: “Historians’ … primary function is to explain what occurred by assessing events from the perspectives of victim, perpetrator and onlooker alike” (7). In addition to the issue of consent, intergenerational hurt can also underline the cyclical potential for re-traumatization of victims, families and secondary victims. According to Cheung: “Visual art is an especially tricky breeding ground for polymorphous representation, misinterpretation, and insensitivities … There is the challenge of combining honesty with dispassion, and at the very least, of avoiding exploitation” (n. pag.).

Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture interrogates the meaning of Irish identity through the lens of trauma and memory, in a ←xii | xiii→number of contemporary Irish literary and visual works and other cultural practices. A sustained interdisciplinary approach provides a ground-breaking reassessment of received constructions of Irish identity by centralizing the place of trauma and memory studies in Irish society. Each chapter provides detailed and sustained analysis of how trauma is/was both experienced and remembered. The common connection between silence and trauma in numerous literary works by John Boyne, Edna O’Brien, Sebastian Barry, Colm Tóibín and Kevin Barry is explored in the opening chapters. An exploration of trauma and memory in the genre of film- and documentary-making, including in the context of prisons, highlights the potential for activism and empowerment in cultural production. The potential for state archives to illustrate the trauma experienced by men and women in the Irish Revolution is also demonstrated in chapters that document the psychological and gendered impact of the violence. The last two parts of the volume also contribute to our understanding of how trauma has influenced the thematic direction of Irish popular music and explores the consequences of addiction in Irish culture, including in the work of Emer Martin and Pat Boran. The application of the body of work classified as the trauma paradigm to Irish history, culture and society in this collection represents an important contribution to knowledge that will be of relevance to scholars in Irish studies, history, sociology, psychology, medical humanities, cultural studies, gender studies and literary criticism.

Connolly, Linda. “Towards a Further Understanding of the Violence Experienced by Women in the Irish revolution.” MUSSI Working Paper Series, no. 7, 10 January 2019a, <http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/10416/>.

Acknowledgements

Working on this book has been a truly life-changing experience for me and it would not have been possible without the support and guidance that I received from many people. I want to thank the Spanish government, who provided a Salvador de Madariaga Visiting Scholarship which funded my research at NUI Galway two years ago. The research on which this volume is based was also funded by research projects REGI 2018/36, EICOD 19/18 and AOCYRC 19/23 (Vice-Rectorate for Research, University of La Rioja). I am also grateful to EMYDUR (School of Master and Doctorate Studies, University of La Rioja) for their support. This research is also in line with the objectives of the Centre of Irish Studies Banna/Bond (EFACIS), which I lead at the University of La Rioja.

I would like to say a very big thank you to the General Editor of Peter Lang’s Reimagining Series, Eamon Maher, and to Senior Commissioning Editor Anthony Mason, for trusting me to carry out this project and for all the support and encouragement they gave me during the months I spent editing this volume. Without their guidance and constant feedback, this volume would not exist. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful for notification of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. My deep appreciation also goes out to Seán Crosson and Daniel Carey for their help at NUI Galway, to Eunan O’Halpin and Ruth Barton for editorial discussions at TCD, to Linda Connolly for her kindness in writing the preface to this book and, finally, to Irish writers Emer Martin and Pat Boran for their huge generosity, friendship and support.

I would like to thank all the contributors, with whom it has been a pleasure to work during this project. Each of them has taught me a great deal about their subject. I gratefully acknowledge all the contributions – thank you very much for your good humour throughout the whole process. ←xv | xvi→I am extremely grateful to all the members of the magnificent editorial committee of the journal Estudios Irlandeses who read and refereed all the contributions to this volume – many thanks for your time, unstinting commitment and invaluable comments and suggestions on the essays submitted. Many thanks also for the support I received from other academics who were willing to read the papers and to offer valuable and generous feedback for the authors. My most sincere gratitude goes to Carolina Amador, Guy Beiner, Constanza del Río, Barry Devine, José F. Fernández, Anne Fogarty, Rosa González, Miriam Haughton, Cahal McLaughlin, Angus Mitchell, Eve Morrison, Bill Mulligan, Hedwig Schwall, Laura Watson, Feargal Wheelan and last, but not least, Alwyn Harrison. Thank you all very much for your help. Finally, I would also like to say a heartfelt thank you to my family and loved ones for always believing in me and encouraging me.

Introduction

According to Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (1). The study of cultural identity, for its part, emerges out of a sense of belonging to a group and, at the same time, because of all the aspects that make that group different from others. It is also possible to examine identity as an effect of social dynamics in which other determining factors, such as class, nation, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion, play an important role. Identity is at stake in questions and problematics to do with all these issues. Thus, the study of cultural identity is “multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, with roots in social/personality psychology, microsociology, and anthropology” (Grayman-Simpson 2).

The analysis of culture from a combined aesthetic-ethical perspective is intrinsic to various critical approaches that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century, “the ethical turn” that took place “in the related fields of literary theory and moral philosophy, the most relevant of which are Trauma Studies, Memory Studies and the Theory of Affects” (Onega et al. 1). The multiple nature of trauma and memory studies, which combines aspects of history, anthropology and sociology, among other disciplines, is also extremely valuable as a means of casting new light on the notion of identity, because it is dynamic, located in time and subject to continuous renegotiation, and it implies a process.

Identity – especially national identity – is a social and historical construct. Identity, or the image of who one is, “may be either a self-composed image” or “imposed from the outside” (Buchanan 242). In the particular ←1 | 2→case of Irish women’s identity, for example, the personal and the social were closely linked and it is widely acknowledged that “women in the post-famine period were offered the role said to be the most important in society – bringing up children in the Catholic faith” (Horgan n. pag.). The Church’s social role was crucial. As O’Toole (n. pag.) argues: “the church that became such a dominant force in the State and which was largely constructed after the Famine, gave order to a traumatised society”. It is also widely accepted that literature has had a significant role in this relegation of women to invisibility in the domestic sphere since the last decades of the nineteenth century, “as the various familiar Irish Writers’ posters” show, with their lack of “even a token woman among their 12 featured writers” (Doyle n. pag.).¹ Yet, since “the famous Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing affair in 1990, which was so bereft of female writers that an extra volume had to be commissioned to atone” (Doyle n. pag.), with recent decades’ increasing “confidence in female voices” (Enright, qtd in Lavan n. pag.) and the last few years’ referendums to legalize divorce, contraception, same-sex marriage and to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, we have witnessed “the death of 19th-century Irish Catholicism” (O’Toole n. pag.) – Ireland is becoming more culturally liberal in many respects, and Irish women’s lives have attracted great attention.

The idea of “cultural memory” in Ireland has been investigated in great detail by Frawley in the second volume of Memory Ireland: “cultural memory can be analyzed not only […] through groups of people – like those in the diaspora […] – but also through particular forms: organizations of individuals, cultural mediums such as photography, architecture, music, literature” (Diaspora xxii). As far as “memory practices” are concerned, Frawley argues: