Reading this collection of the late Lyra McKee’s work can be a painful experience. Not because of the writing, which is humane and curious, but because of the reader’s ever-present knowledge of what happened to the author.
McKee’s dominant theme is that of buried trauma refusing to be buried, and instead returning to harm later generations. So it is impossible to read her work on this subject without being angry at the horrible irony that she would herself become another victim of the unresolved conflict. A year on from her death, the talent evident in this volume does nothing to leaven the senselessness of her death – instead it draws even starker attention to it.
Submerged trauma of different kinds permeate this tragically short collection, which is made up of an unpublished essay along with various pieces of previously published work. Her account of the elevated levels of suicide in Northern Ireland in the years after the Belfast Agreement – “Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies” – is a mix of personal memoir and detached reportage. The death of a childhood friend– known as “Big Gay Mick” in the fairly brutal argot of north Belfast – frames her broader investigation into suicide in post-conflict societies.
And as McKee writes, there is sadly a large volume of trauma to go around in places like inner north Belfast – the area saw the highest density of killings during the Troubles. People who lived there had to navigate not just the literal death of people around them but an intimate, patchwork geography of no-go areas that dictated everyday life (the same area was memorably mapped out by Anna Burns in Motherland). Growing up in oppressed, post-conflict spaces was a kind of trauma too, and one that still shaped the childhood of someone as young as McKee – who was only eight when the agreement was signed.
Not all of this book is about Northern Ireland, but most of it is at least informed by her experience of the place. “The Fight of Your Life” is a piece of reportage from 2016 about boxers and other athletes suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of degenerative disease which occasionally manifests itself in uncontrolled spasms of violence. As with her reportage and commentary on Northern Ireland, McKee manages the tricky balance of maintaining journalistic distance without losing the thread of empathy.
Friendships relished
If chronicling submerged trauma was of one McKee’s journalistic preoccupations, her extraordinary levels of both empathy and curiosity were professional assets as well as personal qualities. She seemed to relish friendships and connections of every kind with people from all backgrounds – Orangemen and Free Presbyterians, ex-paramilitaries of all stripes. These friends were not only from “the other side” in tribal terms – though raised Catholic in a Republican area, she rejected fixed constitutional viewpoints – but often from the other side of the social questions which have also divided the North in recent years. As well as being a “ceasefire baby”, McKee was gay in a society which was for a long time the least welcoming to LGBT people of anywhere in these islands.
Indeed the most personal writing in this collection is less about the traditional Northern Irish dilemmas and much more about the dilemma of being a young working-class lesbian amid the intense religiosity and conventionality of much of northern society. “Undoubtedly, my life from the age of 11 [when she realised she was gay] to 20 . . . has been made more difficult by religion. Specifically, Christianity.” Despite having more reason than most to harbour resentment towards the overbearing religious masonry of the North, McKee appears to have been willing to reach out and look for the best in people associated with institutions that have done very little for LGBT people. She writes of her friendship with a rural, anti-equal-marriage evangelical named William and her optimism some years back when the-then DUP MP for South Belfast wished Belfast Pride marchers well.
Flawed society
Hopefulness and willingness to see the good in others are a regular occurrence in these pages, but so too is a desire to confront hard, unpleasant truths in society: the epidemic of post-Troubles suicide, the terrible treatment of LGBT people. There is a contradiction here, which appears to have existed within McKee herself. That is the tension between casting the coldest possible eye on the deeply flawed society in which you live while also finding the good even among people who embody some of the worst qualities. It is, in one sense, the tension between a writer, whose responsibility is to the truth as they see it, and an activist, whose responsibility is to a hypothetical better future they wish to see.
This contradiction enhances rather than undermines her writing. Another contradiction is one that many of us northerners are guilty of too: finding our strange region simultaneously boring and fascinating. In these writings, McKee, like many, found the traditional green/orange binary limiting and the constitutional debate tedious. But she also finds the history and warped sociology of the place endlessly interesting. “Like a scab being picked,” as she describes debating multigenerational grievances with her Protestant friends in one of Belfast’s newly gentrified hipster pubs. Of course, it is interesting – perhaps too interesting.
If our history and politics were less interesting, there would not have been a loaded gun in Creggan on the night of a riot last April. There would not be a remnant dissident republican faction manipulating unemployed youths in one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Ireland. And Lyra McKee would not have been shot while observing the rioting from what should have been a safe distance. That someone who was willing to look fearlessly at the worst flaws in the North while never losing a sense of hope for the place should be killed as she was remains an unmitigated horror. This book does nothing to lessen that horror, rather it increases it. Her writing career was going somewhere, and her contribution would surely have been significant. That this slender volume of her work is still full of insight is testament to McKee’s talent; that it is so slender is testament to the obscenity of the act that took her.
Matthew O’Toole is an SDLP MLA for Belfast South
