In a new essay, Hugo Hamiltonresponds to Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as part of a continuing series in association with Amnesty International to mark the 60th anniversary of the declaration
ARTICLE 27: Everyone has the right to participate in the cultural life of the community. Sure. Including writing books, making films, sculptures - singing, dancing, playing hurling, drinking, etc.
What else can I think of? Cracking jokes, self-mockery, wearing studs in your eyebrows, hanging around in public parks, spitting, cursing. Even graffiti is an expression of cultural belonging. Isn't it? An alternative culture. Part of what we become as a community, whether we like it or not. Our identity.
So what exactly is that collective cultural life of ours? Is it the sum of what connects us or what separates us? Something that makes us belong and not feel like outsiders? A mark of our unique sense of place? Every movie, every pop song, every book connects us to that free trade of ideas, often rubbing up against each other but ultimately creating that cultural diversity in which we take part, even passively, without having to write a book or paint a picture, or howl out a half-remembered song in the middle of the night on the way home.
We have the freedom to take part in our culture. Provided, of course, we don't exclude other forms of expression in our community. Or feel excluded.
We Irish understand perhaps more than most what it means to be different. We have experienced loss of identity, through history, through a dying language, through emigration and poverty, through our ultimate expression of freedom and self-determination. It is the dispossessed who need identity most, something which is replaced through songs and stories, through imaginary forms. We have become good at doing that now. We have placed ourselves on the world stage. In fact, our identity has now become a global trade mark, a commodity in many ways.
Our appeal comes from our difference, our island ways, our faith and nationhood, our lightheartedness, our ability to do business and still make it look like fun. Proud to celebrate the structures of separation, we see ourselves often as either Catholic or Protestant, British or Irish, man or woman, fish or fowl. It has been difficult to be in between. But now those boundaries have become blurred and it's possible to take on multiple forms of belonging without feeling like an outsider.
The Northern peace process is perhaps the most glittering example of this sharing of identity, the ability to step outside the electric fence which is often erected to protect each form of culture and expression. Conflict has made us different.
Peace makes us share that difference.
Nowhere have I experienced this convergence of divisions more recently than at the memorial set up in Ypres to the Irish people who fell in Flanders during the first World War. This war which played such a major role in the Irish way of dealing with the past has been explored by writers like Frank McGuinness and Sebastian Barry, tracking the great difficulties of coming to terms with this episode, including our inability grieve for those who were wrong-footed by the glorious history of our own independence.
Outside Ypres, the Irish government has since erected a monument in the shape of a round tower, commemorating those who died on the wrong side, so to speak. It is a moving place to visit. For me in particular, because I had a grandfather who died during that war on the British side and was subsequently denied by his own son because he didn't fit into the new Ireland.
A vivid memory from my boyhood is that of wearing the poppy only once in my life, bought for me on armistice day by a Protestant neighbour on our street, and ripped from my Aran sweater only a few minutes later as I proudly walked in the door and then thrown into the fire. We grew up being careful who to be sad for.
Last year, I travelled to Ypres with the Irish novelist Dermot Bolger, who has also written extensively about this war and about the life of the Irish poet, Francis Ledwidge, who met his death in the fighting there. We were taken on a tour by the director of the Ypres museum, Piet Schielens, who showed us the trenches and pointed to fields where they are still digging up bodies almost a century later. We saw the many graves, lines of white headstones, mostly belonging to boys, young men under 23.
The sky was low. The mist hung in the fields, creating a calmness that felt more like a temporary lull in the fighting. We were told that not infrequently, a grenade explodes on a farm in these parts, killing yet another innocent person so many years later. And each year brings new discoveries, such as the handwritten entry in a cemetery log book in which a family from Tipperary wrote: "So glad we found you here at last, grandfather. Go ndéana Dia trocaire air do anam."
The Belfast poet Michael Longley writes with great subtlety about his own father's part in the first World War, describing how he received a medal for bravery when he led his unit out to kill a detachment of German soldiers who had strayed into their sites, including the chilling notion of "mopping up" those Germans still left alive after the battle.
Other writers seem unable, however, to see that conflict with any such clarity, only as a great British tragedy.
British identity still requires the heroic status of victory in order to justify its own history and sense of place in the world. German grief and German limbs in trees become rubbed out by the constant reiteration of German culpability. Chemical warfare simplified by the schoolyard logic that they started it, that they were the ones who invented gas attacks first.
The lull in the fighting doesn't last long in Flanders. It feels at times as though the young soldiers underground have been conscripted to fight forever, again and again, each year, for honour, for valour, "for empire".
It is a sad place. Buses full of relatives and tourists come each year in large numbers to grieve for those who fell for their country. At six o'clock every evening, they gather under the great arch in the town where the last post is played and where poppies are laid for the dead, for the missing, for those who were never identified and have no graves.
And afterwards the British visitors wander around the town, reconstructed beautifully in spite of Churchill's wish to maintain it as a ruin. They are seen in the many pubs and restaurants; they buy souvenirs, helmets, bits of shrapnel, cartridges, bits of war memorabilia that will continue to keep the memory of this conflict with them after they go home.
In contrast, the Germans come quietly, in families. They visit the German cemetery, where, famously, a battalion of young German cadets was ordered to march straight to their death into a volley of enemy gunfire in order to demonstrate their loyalty and their courage. The Germans leave quietly afterwards. They are not seen in the town. They don't buy souvenirs and they don't talk about bravery.
Bravery, this key word which Michael Longley got from his father's citation, is not prized in German cultural expression. Because bravery - Mut or Tapferkeit - is not such a heroic concept any more, but something generic which is required for any act in the face of danger, something prized as much by the SS, a slippery virtue that can be attributed also to a freedom fighter, a hunger striker, a terrorist on either side of a conflict.
Grieving is part of our cultural life. Remembering the past and the people who died is an important element of our identity. But how much more difficult and creative and culturally imaginative is it to be able to grieve for the fallen enemy also? How much further along the road to reconciliation have we travelled when we step into the shoes of the other?
It seems as though the war in Flanders is sometimes destined to remain in the trenches. That reconciliation which I have personally had to make between my Irish grandfather and my German grandfather, both combatants in that war, both casualties, still seems hard to achieve in Flanders.
I asked myself if it would ever be possible for the British to commemorate their dead alongside the German dead in one single act of remembrance. There are poppies seen in Ypres with Irish tricolour backing. It's hard to imagine poppies combined with German flags, but who knows, it might be the kind of collective cultural European expression of grief that would give those underground the repose they deserve, to think that those above ground have come to terms with history.
ARTICLE 27
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which they are the author.
This is one of a series of 30 stories and essays by leading Irish writers marking the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The series was created by Sean Love for Amnesty International and continues next Saturday