Early in her powerful essay, The Silent Treatment – one of a series of arresting new texts brought together by James Conor Patterson in The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border – the Fermanagh writer Maria McManus captures the reality of life in a society that cannot function properly.
An unwanted visitor comes to the family home: “a man is screaming like a wounded animal at our door in the night-time”. This is the countryside near Belcoo, on the Fermanagh-Cavan border, where doors cannot simply be opened – not at midnight, not without a calculation. This might be an ambush; the family might open the door to face death. Eventually, the decision is made to open the door – and now another problem looms. The howling man is a member of the British security forces – but nobody will come to look after him. No ambulance, no police, no paramedic – not to these borderlands, at midnight. The social contract, then, has not simply broken down; rather, it never, in any normal sense, existed here in the first place.
McManus’s essay exemplifies the deeply disturbing character of life as lived along the Border, where moral codes fray and altogether different rules apply. This same sense of the extraordinary thrums through what is a compelling and remarkable collection – and a timely one, in this moment when the Border has assumed an ever more urgent geopolitical relevance.
In his introduction to the collection, Patterson’s view is clear: this border “has done more harm than good” – but not all his contributors need agree, and this latent diversity of opinion only serves to enhance the strength and authority of the collection. The Irish borderlands are, after all, incorrigibly plural: there are no more simply “two communities” in these varied landscapes than in any other corner of Ireland or the world.
Plurality of identity
This sense of cultural complexity, richness, plurality of identity is brought out in a mosaic of ways. Micheál McCann’s poem ----Derry (this a nod to the long tradition of editing certain signposts on Northern Ireland’s roads) “daydreams about songs where lyrics don’t matter, and days where my ma laughs about my kissing a lovely Protestant boy”. Maureen Boyle’s poem Strabane looks coolly and without sentiment into an economic past in which the Ulster flax industry brought forth linen, prosperity, model villages, a sense of collective pride and a modicum of personal dignity – the trade-off being sickness and death in the form of “Byssinosis, the price the workers paid, for the privilege of a wage and a tiny street house”.
In her luminous essay, What Crisp Water, Jill Crawford moves smoothly between jurisdictions and sails between islands – these jurisdictions and islands now her own politically complicated south Derry landscapes, with its jigsaw-jumble of Protestant villages and Catholic villages; now along the coasts of Ireland and Scotland that have so long been connected by the sea. One need only glance at these writings to be aware of a marvellous layering of history, a swirl of class, gender and sexual identities – and this in turn gives the lie to the hoary notion of two peoples endlessly at loggerheads amid a forest of dreary steeples.
Clenching anxiety
Actual Border security infrastructure, of course, has vanished from sight these days as though it had never existed – and as Darran Anderson suggests in his vivid and expansive essay, Time Moves Both Ways, this was surely a mistake: the violence, now real, now implied, of these liminal zones ought in some form to be remembered. Indeed, the clenching anxiety which accompanied a border crossing in the course of the Troubles – homeward-bound, perhaps, from a day at the beach, hair filled with sand, ice cream “pokes” in hand, only to be met by a soldier pointing a rifle – this is repeatedly alluded to in this book. Indeed, how could it not? – and such harsh memories underscore the presence of a psychological distress in Northern Ireland the depths and eddying consequences of which have not even begun to be addressed.
The Armagh writer Stuart Neville recently reflected in this newspaper upon a long, inglorious tradition of keeping Northern Ireland – its taut strands, its labyrinthine complexities – firmly at arm's length. In this discourse of abjection, the people of the region are persistently othered, and a society and its sorrows are viewed with distaste from the far side of a high, enduring border.
Yet as the world changes, as Brexit, the climate emergency and other presences bring about undreamt-of strains and unravellings, it is these narrow, unempathetic voices that seem now, suddenly, to be on the wrong side of politics and of the future. The great gift of The New Frontier is to suggest ways of seeing in which borders might be decoded or reimagined – or smoothed away.
Neil Hegarty is co-curator of The Impermanent Way project, forthcoming from the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris
