That solid body of icy water casts quite a spell. Those who have grown up with deep trauma can drown underneath it. From the age of sixteen onwards, at differing levels of intensity, I experienced suicidal thoughts that I found increasingly hard to cope with as the years went by. I felt, through both of the decades between then and now, that the only chance I stood of making it through was by staying away from where I came from. To stay away from the place where I’d lived through things that I could not even begin to process. I swore that I was never ever going back to Ireland. The worse things got the harder I swore. That city I grew up in would drown me. That city would kill me, of that I was utterly sure.
And then, one day, just as my thirties had begun, something vast broke inside me. I began to wake up every single morning feeling like I was being called back. I could hear the land trying to say my name, a thing I never imagined I would ever hear, and I could not ignore it. It came unbidden, all out of nowhere, and nothing was the same after I began to feel drawn back to this place. I awoke most mornings for close to a year with the streets of Derry mapped out on the insides of my very being, a morphed and unwarranted cartography.
Every corner I turned in my adopted home across the water transformed itself right before my confused eyes – becoming Shipquay Street, The Diamond, Carlisle Road, Fahan Street. I was being enshrouded by the geography of a city many miles across the sea. I was being haunted by places I thought had long been abandoned and buried far beneath my feet. I couldn’t – no matter how hard I tried – in the deadness and in the fullness of the night, get the view from the top of the Grianán Ailigh out of my head. The light of Inch Island on a frosty morning; a Faoilleach – winter – storm coming into rest on Kinnagoe Bay; whooper swans in a delicate V above the River Foyle. The harrowing memories were resurfacing, too, but they were no longer coming on their own. Something had changed. I was letting it all come to the surface. I had lifted my own veil, the one that had hidden things away for decades – things that I needed, more than anything else in the world, to finally look in the eye.
I felt the violence and sorrow from my past creeping up my guts, clawing to get out – and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I knew I had to let it surface, at long last, but how was I expected to cope? Fear covered over everything, leaving my thoughts coated with a blank whiteness I could never quite shake off. I didn’t know what would be left underneath – how my relationship with my homeland would look when that snow melted away. If I went back to where my faultlines were forged, would there be a new outline? Would I see beyond the sorrow – down deeper?
I gave in. More simply than that, I gave. I was the thing that had to give. I returned to Derry, ready to try to translate those words. Those words that had begun to thaw out after decades of fearful silence.
There is a power to place – a hold that is kept over us – a woven thread that never really loosens itself once we have been there, and been held by it. I didn’t realise until very recently the impact that the spaces I had sought refuge in as a child could, and would, continue to have on me as an adult. The ripples of geography continue to be traced on our inner surfaces, even if our experience there was fleeting and seemed like nothing to us at the time. No matter how long ago the experience was, its power, its healing, sits in wait, sometimes buried deep, other times just waiting to be called back from within.
When I returned to Derry, after living away for almost my entire adult life, I found that I was drawn back again and again to very particular geographical spaces. Often these were places that I hadn’t even realised were of any deep importance or meaning to me. I also assumed, for some reason, that when I moved back, the longing I felt for places – for exact spots in particular parts of my city and island – would ease, dissipate even. I assumed that the overwhelming yearning, so extreme as to be almost a physical sensation, for places would leave me once I lived on Irish soil once more. As of yet, it hasn’t left me. I feel it almost like a hunger. A hunger to be in the sea at Carrowhugh on the Inishowen Peninsula, even on the iciest days of December. To be at the outermost tip of Inch Island in heavy and battering rainfall. To sleep in my van, held within the very centre of Ireland’s beating heart, moving through the bog-land like a curlew. I have started to understand that even when standing barefoot on the soil of my homeland, swimming in any of its bodies of water, heart-deep in the caves, I am still being called back.
It is three and a half years now since I moved home, in a moment that was right on the cusp of the biggest storm to rock the island since the Troubles – the Brexit vote. We are, I fear, in the very eye of the storm. All around me shops lie empty, car bombs have started to go off again on our doorsteps, EU funding has already been pulled out of youth groups, addiction units and much more, even before the UK has officially left the EU. It is weeks yet until the General Election. Already the young folk in Derry stand even less chance of getting on in life than they did before this chaos took hold – chaos we didn’t ask for.
Where is our government in Northern Ireland? Our representation? Where is our voice? One of the main reasons our Assembly has not sat for three years is because of a row over the Irish language. When Martin McGuinness stepped down as Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland in January 2017 after holding the post for almost a decade, failure to introduce legislation on the Irish language was listed as one of the reasons he effectively ended the Executive. Sinn Féin support the restoration of Irish as the spoken language amongst the majority of people on the island of Ireland. Some unionists are worried as they see the desire for an Irish language Act as a tool to be used by the opposition in a quest for a united Ireland. Place-names in the North of Ireland, as well as the South, come from a variety of sources; however, the vast majority derive from Irish. The desire to cover over this layer of identity, to try to erase our past, is a sign of much more than an unstable political landscape. It also speaks volumes about Ireland’s terrifying loss of connection with the natural world: our unwilding. We have already lost so much, and many of the differences perceived between people are associated with language and our link with the land itself. Simple choices – to learn Irish, to try to explore parts of the history of the land that might not necessarily be deemed relevant to ‘your side’ – can be viewed as weightier than they really are. When I changed my surname back to its Irish original, long before I returned to Ireland, I felt as if it was one of the bravest decisions I had ever made given the reactions I knew I would receive from many people. Many of the things that we have fought over in the past, now that peace has arrived, have been swept away under the carpet for fear that disagreements and fighting might rear their ugly heads again.
The natural world, and our role as guardians – one so linked with the Celtic identity of our ancestors – is one also intrinsically linked with the language of this land. There is wisdom held within the Irish language, knowledge not yet lost to us, but equally as at risk right now as the creatures it has been speaking of for millennia. The Irish language is rooted in a world in which the unseen is as real as the seen. The existence of other dimensions is taken as a given, and there is an inherent understanding that both the land and everything in the natural world are bright, breathing beings. The interconnectedness of things is visible in the etymology: concepts that seem disparate are shown as delicately woven together; we see that we are not as standalone as we might have once believed. The most affecting words I have learned are a tightly knit trinity, and their closeness, for me, shows how unspoken things still dwell in the root of the Irish language, waiting to be unearthed, dissected. Dúlaoisc – a sea-level cave; dúluachair – the depths of midwinter; and dúléim – a leap in the dark, a violent jump, a plunge. I see these connected with fierce, fine thread. There are stories behind these words, human voices that have known suffering. It comes to me as no shock at all that the Irish word for melancholy is dúlionn. Language is narrative. The Irish language holds stories that, once excavated, may show us the way that things are tied
to others. It offers us, through the language of the everyday, a way to communicate, for example, that some days, even at the height of summer, might be the exact shade of grey as a sea-cave in the depths of midwinter. Communication – real, deep and honest connection – might help to keep us back from that place that makes us want to jump in the dark.
In the North of Ireland we are once more in a state of limbo when it comes to our identity, our heritage, our past and our future. We are being told that, despite the much-fought-for Good Friday Agreement, we are, suddenly, no longer Irish. There is a chance that we will once more see a hard border put in place on the land, to divide, again, the North and South of Ireland. The peace that was so hard won is now more endangered than it has been for years. We have no idea what will come about for us if the Good Friday Agreement – the deal made in the 1990s that brought the worst of the Troubles to an end – is disrespected any further than it already has been. Dissident republicans have already erupted in full and terrifying force. A young journalist, Lyra McKee, was shot dead during a night of rioting in the city. The rioters used the presence of police in Catholic housing estates as an excuse for their violence. Lyra was caught up in this violence as she was doing her job, a vital job, that of ensuring that the truth of the situation here reaches the world. She used her voice to raise issues that affected our generation – ‘ceasefire babies’ – and showed respect and openness in her work. The night she died she was making sure that those in power, those who hold a vote, those who have spent years blinkered, unaware of the debris that has been left behind on this island, might finally open up their eyes. The loss of Lyra, a young woman full of hope and deep understanding of human nature, and such an inspiring compassion for her homeland and its people, has filled our collective hearts with that same pain from the past. We were not ready for this to begin again. Now that it has, we are not ready for it to escalate any further.
The helicopters are in the sky again every night. At the start I lay awake – scared and angry. Now, like back then, I have become used to it. I sleep right through, just as I am able to walk past the red, white and blue unionists’ flags on my street and the increasingly violent graffiti on both sides of the river. I do not want, again, to become someone who just sleeps through. I do not want to be numbed to suffering again. Enough, already. Enough. Brexit, borders, barriers, identity, real and imagined. Place, the concept of home and representation of it, always massive things, now seem so much more important – even critical.
This spring, my closest friend from Derry died. Just after her death my father and I walked through St Columb’s Park together. It was the first Monday in May, less than a month after that night of Lyra McKee’s murder, the news of which had reached me in the same hour as the news that my friend – one I’d navigated secondary school and university with – had been found dead, alone, in the Dublin flat we had once shared together. It was late afternoon by the time my father and I arrived at the sheltered copse of oaks at the top bend of the woods, high above the train line that runs parallel with the River Foyle. Directly across from the tangled thicket in which we had found ourselves – now barricaded off from those of us who cannot dip and dive like the other woodland creatures – is a vast and terrifying drop known as Devil’s Glen.
There is a tattered photograph somewhere of my brother and I standing on the train line directly under this now cordoned-off spot, with tens of feet of a drop beneath us. It was taken by my father before he left our home on that first council estate. The photo was taken back in the days when people walked on the metal, sometimes just moments before a train raced towards them, forcing them to jump into the thicket, falling backwards into nettles, blackberry bushes or wild strawberry patches. The only creatures that can make their way onto that track now are winged ones: butterflies and moths, long-tailed tits and blackbirds, memories and longing.
A handful of hours before the news of the deaths reached my home, I had run along the river from the bottom of the park, alongside reed beds full of long-tailed tits and coot families, right down to the concrete, graffitied beauty of the Foyle Bridge. The sun had been full of promise and I had seen the same heron five times at different points of the river’s meandering. Seeing herons always soothes me a little. They are often viewed as an ominous, fearful bird, but I have a deep-rooted fondness for those almost prehistoric-looking waders. Seeing them makes me feel like I am in the right place at the right time, somehow. I see them as a gift from another time. There are ruins in the park from a church rebuilt on the site in 1585. The original church was destroyed in 1197. When we were children my wee brother and I clambered all over those ruins. We climbed them as if they were a pile of stones we ourselves had placed in the landscape, as though we knew them so well that maybe we had even carved them with our own hands. In those days, things were ‘let be’, as they say. Bombing, poverty, violence, a sense of the uncontrollable inevitability of things, had resulted in buildings – often historical, ancient – being left to live out the rest of their lives as best they could, unmanaged. I remember the feel of the grey, religious stone under my feet on summer days – never quite hot to touch, but warmed, as though the stone had only just come out of the earth’s belly. It might be a bit odd but I like to imagine that there was an invisible footmark of us two wee Derry weans left there on those ruins from all those years ago. I like to imagine the stones as a palimpsest, a trace left behind – layer upon layer – like strata, of all of the children that have ever stood near enough to that church to feel its heartbeat. I want those spaces and places to hold a trace of us all. I want us to hold part of those places within our bodies too – I want to believe that we are in this all together – that we are connected. I need to believe that the sea and the land – the places we have been shaped and held by – will show us how to live again, will remind us how to be. I need to believe that loss and grief are like stones, too. That they might always remain on our internal landscape but that there is a stillness that comes after, a knowledge that will be left behind – that light will still touch the stone – that we will be held in place despite the storms. There is a beauty to stone that can never quite be forgotten.
My dad and I walked up the hill on that spring day, diverging from the pathway, edging as close to the church as we can now get. It is cordoned-off these days, of course. I am not sure if the council will ever do anything with the site. I could feel its stones call to my heart, but my dad dragged me on with his silence, away from the edges.
•
Despite all of these echoes of my childhood now, there has been much change in the decades held between – change that I am very grateful for. I want to believe that there are enough of us who have had enough. That enough people now care for the future – the future of their home as well as their own lives. That there are enough people within the community now – on both sides – to protect the peace that has been so carefully crafted, the future that finally has the potential to bring positive change for us all. There was more chance of me being able to learn Icelandic than Irish in my childhood in the Waterside of Derry, due to the politics of my hometown (I still speak more Icelandic but I am working hard to redress this balance). I am allowed, finally, to unearth the words. I need to trust that the words are still there. There is a part of me that I will never be able to meet if I do not make efforts to learn the language of my home. That part of me is one for which I think I have been searching for quite some time.
•
On the morning of my thirty-fifth birthday, I woke up to an Irish Times newspaper article entitled ‘Mass extinction of species is happening in Ireland’. The article stated that a third of the species groups examined are threatened with extinction, predominantly due to global warming, habitat loss, pollution and unsustainable use of resources. A number of species are, in fact, ‘critically endangered’, and without urgent action being taken immediately, they will simply disappear entirely from this island. That morning, I spent so many hours researching what we have al
ready lost – what we risk losing any day – that I nearly wept with the sadness of it all. Some of those creatures in most danger are the curlew, the European eel, the pearl mussel, the bumblebee, the barn owl, the corncrake and the marsh fritillary butterfly.
Native species that have become extinct over my lifetime include two types of birds: the corn bunting and the corncock. Such a major downturn has taken place in the three and a half decades I have been alive, that almost thirty species of bird and almost five times that number of flowering plants are in serious decline. Over ten vertebrates, over a hundred and twenty invertebrates. Since I was at university native butterflies have decreased by almost half.
Less than two months after the Irish Times article, I read another devastating piece about species loss on a wider scale in the Guardian. I spent days utterly unable to read or write another single word.
That week I turned the radio on. Gideon Coe was on BBC Radio 6. He was reading a text from a listener in Scotland. I was rapt. The listener had been driving when the distinct feeling that he was sharing the car with something else came over him. Something tickled his ear, his head, his cheek. He batted and shooed at the unseen thing; eventually his unwanted passenger landed on his satnav. The listener said: ‘I don’t think we will be hearing from the moth again.’ Gideon Coe fell silent, as if he could find no way to respond. I sat at my kitchen table utterly aghast, angry, grieving for a moth I had never even seen, killed on a satnav in the car of a man I had never met. I turned the radio off that night, sat in a completely silent kitchen, and wept.
Thin Places Page 4