In Going to the Territory, Ralph Ellison’s collection of essays on American national identity, the author of the masterpiece Invisible Man challenged the way cliché and stereotypes are attached to a particular region or people. ‘Stereotypes’, he wrote in 1964, ‘are fabricated from fragments of reality, and it is these fragments that give them life, continuity, and availability for manipulation’.
It is a telling point from one of 20th century America’s greatest writers, made at the height of the civil rights movement for racial equality in the United States. Fast forward barely a decade and the struggle for civil rights in Northern Ireland is mutating into a shockingly vicious local war.
The Belfast-based, Irish-American poet, Padraic Fiacc recounts, in one of his best known and most contested poems ‘Glass Grass’, attending a poetry reading with John Hewitt and the west Belfast priest Des Wilson, ‘on a promise’ ‘otherwise I wouldn’t venture forth again/Into this too-near-to-the-knuckle disaster…’
I read my poem about
The ‘icons and guns’ and ask ‘Now is
That “sectarian”?’
‘We’re all “sectarian” here!’
Some honest person replies.
(The poem Fiacc is referring to here, ‘Credo Credo’, is an extraordinarily graphic indictment of ‘the Military Machine’.) I grew up in a society which was sectarian but were all its people ‘sectarian’? I think not.
I think of the single-parent family that was my early experience of life in Belfast. My mother was a brave young woman who faced down in the fifties and sixties some deep-seated prejudices of the time – single women didn’t separate from their men, for starters.
I also recall, as a very young boy, a stirring conversation with one of her long-time, slightly older women friends who visited us regularly and who had been supportive during my mother’s young married post WWII life in north Belfast, and of my becoming aware that some ‘exchange’ had happened as they sat having afternoon tea.
It had something to do with a comment made about ‘the other side’ and my mother was having none of it. During an election in the early sixties, a lorry rumbled down the avenue with a band playing as the wife of the politician seeking re-election called for local support, my mother briskly shuffled us back indoors.
It was a coded sectarian plea, and she was having none of that. She faced down in her own way any slight signs of prejudice; a lesson stood by example.
Later on, I started to experience the realities of sectarianism and learnt how best to circumvent these when they reared their ugly head: Belfast’s second sight. But it is not possible to ‘audit’ the pain and suffering the Troubles brought to ordinary people.
Looking back over fifty or more years the history of that time simply doesn’t get any easier to read or write, never mind relive for those caught in the maelstrom. But ‘all’ sectarian?
There was another, if you like, ‘parallel’ or pre-world, one which I have tried to recover from the sixties and a little beyond when Belfast, and the wider northern province, had a momentary opportunity to redress some of the civic, economic and cultural injustices which would eventually fester and provide the ammunition for what would follow.
Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles is an attempt to describe a little of this moment from a personal viewpoint and describe what it was like growing up in Belfast in the mid to late nineteen sixties, and encountering the excitement of a new kind of popular culture – beginning with the music and lyrics of The Beatles, discovering as a young pupil at Orangefield School in east Belfast the poetry of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath along with all the black blues musicians and singers whose influence was powerfully present in the dance clubs of the city at the time.
So that some idea is given of what it was like to be part, without really knowing it at the time, of a hopeful and exciting younger generation, freed from the shackles of sectarianism and content within themselves to be part of a transatlantic culture which embraced music and style and the sense of being in their own place, and not one festooned with bigotry or triumphalism but keen on finding out where the big world was and how best to enter as it was on our doorstep, or more likely, on our black and white TV screens, blaring out of our radios and ‘gramophones’ and on the stages of our favourite dancehalls and concert halls.
Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles by Gerald Dawe with photographs by Euan Gebler, is published by Merrion Press, 10 August.
Gerald Dawe is a Belfast-born poet. He was professor of English and fellow of Trinity College Dublin until his retirement in 2017. He has published twenty collections of poetry and literary criticism, including most recently, The Last Peacock and The Sound of the Shuttle: Essays on Cultural Belonging & Protestantism in Northern Ireland.
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