Lost Lives, Remembered Stories

We'll begin Monday's class with U2's performance of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" at Slane Castle on September 1, 2001. The date is significant in many ways: Bono pleads with the audience, "three years after Omagh," to "turn this song into a prayer." The proximity to a national tragedy just ten days later in our own country adds another emotional charge. And then there's the fact that Bono's father had died the week before. It's a super-charged moment, and it makes his reading of the names of the victims of the Omagh bombing that much more poignant and haunting.

On the heels of the Fountain Street bombing in Eureka Street, where McLiam Wilson offers a similar emphasis on naming, narrativizing, and humanizing the victims (finding a new, more humane language and means of representation for violence may be a prerequisite for developing a language for peace), I do want again to recommend the book Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of Northern Ireland's Troubles (2001, editors David McKittrick, Sean Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton, David McVea). From the new-born baby to the IRA recruit to the RUC officer to the abducted father, every victim of the Troubles has his or her story told in this 1600+ page book. One thinks, too, of the "Portraits of Grief" series that ran in the New York Times after 9/11.

Here is how the editors of Lost Lives describe what you'll experience: "We have set out the tales of those who died in a manner in which is as unemotional and objective as we could devise. Yet the facts, even when presented as dispassionately as possible, have great intrinsic power. The words we have written may read like journalism, but readers will quickly become aware that between the lines lie much grief and tragedy. We hope readers will be affected, as we have been, by the powerful message they convey of what violence can do to individuals, and families and communities.... Within these covers are more than 3,600 lost lives, testimony to what happens to a community which sets out to resolve differences through violence."

By the way, I also still hope that we might have an opportunity to look at Seamus Heaney's great poem, "Casualty." Please keep at the ready!

As for Eureka Street, onward. Although the narration begins Chapter 12 with the line "but Fountain Street is an incidental detail" (232), we think differently. The horror recedes, but if we've been reading with the proper empathy than we know that this episode must never be incidental, must never be allowed to become merely a date in a chronology, or to be described with a phrase like "collateral damage." We resolve to remember those names: Rosemary Daye, Martin O'Hare, Kevin McCafferty, Natalie, Liz, and Margaret Crawford, John Mullen, Angie Best, William Patterson, et al. "The pages that follow are light with their loss" (231). Indeed.