Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  Fires rage through the city – death threats and the constant undercurrent of violence are back on the scene once more – petrol bombs are made and thrown from the city’s walls. I watch the scorched land try to steady herself; I take notes – I try to drink in her courage, to mirror her resilience. We are a month away from Brexit, now, apparently. The moment of the General Election has arrived. The United Kingdom is far from united; the divisions seem to deepen, to widen, as the days run away as if towards an invisible horizon. The countdown here – at many border-places on the map – has begun to morph into an unimaginable confusion. All the while, the larger world spins – quicker, more uncontrollably, towards the edge.

  As has been the way, over and over again in times of sorrow, my darkened mood took me into the landscape, into the belly of the untamed, ever impartial Atlantic Ocean, and into places as thin as winter light, as thin as the mist above the sea. To come from a place where speaking – where the telling of your own story – can be taken out of context, twisted, coiled over upon itself into a serpentine mess, is sometimes a hard thing to bear. Many of us who lived through the Troubles in the north-west of Ireland buried our head in the sand and tried to pretend we were impervious to the things that had seeped down into the parts underneath our skin. We slithered away from our past – from our experiences – like eels.

  There are places, though, in which, no matter how much sand you might find in which to try to disappear, you will meet yourself at every given point on the compass; you cannot hide from your own story in certain places on this map of ours. The Troubles in Ireland were, for me, utterly categorised by the loss of safe places. I am not ready to feel unsafe, to feel that there is no place for me to shelter, ever, ever again.

  The politics that have played out on the island of Ireland for centuries now have left many of us here a little wary of imagining a safe future. Who are we to vote for? Who will steer us through? Where – if there even is one – is our safe harbour? The poverty, fear and trauma hidden in the folds of my small Atlantic rock, its lands to the north, south, east and west, those sharp fault lines of division between my kinfolk: these things are not completely removed from the larger issues on the table, on our planet as a whole. We are losing blackbirds. We have lost fathers, mothers, children, friends, teachers, homes, schools, places of worship, identity, compassion. We are losing our young, though some of them have not died. We are losing our way. We are losing the way. We have lost; we are losing. We are, though, still here. The blackbird is still here. There is still so much left here for us to protect, to nurture, to preserve, to hold dear.

  Blackbirds symbolise reincarnation in many corners of our world. In Ireland, blackbirds sit in close company with the element of water. Two blackbirds seen together means good luck. They are also regarded as messengers of the dead. In the same vein as the crow and the raven, the blackbird is often considered a bad omen. In Ireland in the nineteenth century, blackbirds were said to hold the souls of those in Purgatory until Judgement Day. It was said that whenever the voices of blackbirds were particularly shrill, it was those waiting souls, parched and burning in the fires, calling out for the rain. The rain always followed. The whistle of the blackbird at dawn warned of rain and mist for the coming day. We have been listening to, and looking at, these birds that we share space with for many moons.

  My favourite tale of the blackbird is about St Kevin, an Irish sixth-century saint who was at one with the natural world around him. It is said that in the temple of the rock at Glendalough, St Kevin was praying with his hand outstretched upwards when a blackbird flew down and laid her eggs in his palm. Old words passed down have it that the saint remained still – unmoving and resolute as the earth herself, for as long as it took for the eggs to hatch and the brood to learn slowly how to fly the nest that he held safely within his hands. St Kevin, many centuries ago, may have already been attuned to a concept we view now as an imperative one, one that worries us right into our depths, growing more and more relevant as each day passes: that of ‘ecological grief ’. St Kevin, like many of us in this age, simply could not allow for any more loss.

  We have a somewhat difficult relationship with the word ‘tradition’ in Ireland, particularly in the North. The way that religion has latched itself onto the politics of this land has left many people with no desire to look at the imagery of their ancestors: the story of their past. We have lost, broken, murdered, burned, stolen, hidden and undone – all in the false name of tradition. Lives, places, and stories have been ripped out by their roots because ‘that’s how it has always been’. I wonder, I wonder so very much these days, what wealth of imagery and meaning was lost when we became so focused on our differences here, that we buried the things that had once tied us together, the things that might still know a way through, for us all.

  Once, twenty years ago, when I was not quite sixteen, my grandfather and I had a conversation that has stayed with me for almost two decades. My grandfather ‘called on people’, and I see now how lucky I was to be taken along with him on his trips in and out of various homes and workplaces, greeted many times a day by so many different people from various backgrounds that I lost count. He was drawn to people who looked after those who needed to be cared for. He counted amongst his friends people who rehomed pigeons and canaries, and an old woman whose ‘two-up-two-down’ house had so many dog baskets that she had to keep her kitchen table folded up beside her ironing board and hope meal times would be dry enough that she could eat on the street outside her front door. My grandfather had friends who worked every hour sent to them volunteering for the Salvation Army, the Churches Trust, St Vincent de Paul, the Men’s Mission and more. I never understood until very recently why my grandfather was never happy to be in the house he so dearly loved, in the comfort of his own sitting room. Why, after decades working himself to the bone, did he not just want to slow down and begin to enjoy his time at home, to relax in his own place with his own family? I know what drove my grandfather towards showing the care towards others that he did, now. I think that growing up without a parent – perhaps particularly your mother – as a constant, reliable source of support, protection and love, does something to a person over which they have no real control. It changes you so drastically, so fundamentally, that you have to make a choice: what am I to do with all of this hurt? My grandfather chose to find his own way through it, to stop it from taking root and turning into bitterness and anger. My grandfather found the courage to step out of the cycle. My grandfather took his suffering and he turned it into empathy, into compassion; he gave those around him that which he had never been given.

  I remember that day that my gentle, inspiring grandfather and I talked about knowing people as clearly as though it were happening right now, this very moment. It was in October, two decades ago. It was, in fact, on the day of my father’s birthday. He was spending it how he always had done since he’d moved out of our house – with his new family, without us. Somehow being on the verge of turning sixteen – hurtling headlong towards adulthood – was what made the loss of him really sink in, despite the fact he had, by that point, already spent many other birthdays away from us. I’m not sure exactly why it affected me so deeply on that particular one, and maybe I never will. That bit doesn’t really matter so much now.

  I remember telling my grandfather that day that if my father – his son – were to die, I would not attend his funeral. I appreciate that statements such as those – extreme, sweeping, black and white – are normal as a teenager. However, that feeling I voiced to my grandfather that autumn afternoon would end up settling in under my skin. It warped and morphed and left me feeling desolate and empty. It stayed for over a decade – it created a void in a place I could not locate. I felt so angry with my father for leaving and not helping us in ways I thought he should have. I placed the blame for that petrol bomb on his shoulders, childishly. For many years I blamed him, and everyone else around me, for the fact that I never felt safe – for the loss and the g
rief. For all the grief, for all the grief I could never quite find words for. My grandfather did not show any anger, place any judgement or try to change my mind. Instead, after listening, he placed his soft, cracked hands over mine and asked me if I wanted tea. He made it, and then he talked.

  He talked about birds. He talked about how once when he was a little boy he’d stood beneath an oak tree while a small bird flitted between its branches. He talked about how the bird was golden, like the earth on fire, with red flames and wee black bits like coal spat back out onto the hearth. How he’d jumped up and down in excitement, convinced they were from another place – blown in on the Atlantic winds, of another world than his. The man he was along with, the next-door neighbour of the two sisters (not relations), who were ‘rearing’ my grandfather, said: ‘Goldfinch, lad. Wait de ye see a charm o’ them. Quare brings a smile de yer fis, I’ll tell ye that.’

  The next time a single bird ever brought such joy to that wee face of his was almost two decades later. He was in his early twenties then, he told me, and had only just arrived on Canadian shores, fresh off the boat from the port of Derry. His older sister was waiting for him. Zipping about in the air above the port were iridescent birds the like of which my grandfather had never seen before. He had been held in a big ship by the belly of the sea for weeks, unable to sleep or hold food down properly on the journey from his impoverished homeland to this new land of promise, a place full of the future. The birds flew all around his tired head, twittering and chee-cheeing, as though they had come out as his welcome party.

  He talked about how they looked – so beautiful – midway between a magpie and one of our own migrant birds. They were dark and metallic with bronze-green upper parts, a violet rump and tail, the latter slightly forked, with white underparts. Like an oil-slick puddle painted onto a showy wee Canadian bird. It was not, strictly speaking, he told me, a Canadian bird. It was a migrant. The birds he was welcomed onto Canadian soil by were violet-green swallows, who had only just arrived on the same shore themselves. The violet-green swallow is one of the first birds to arrive in Canada in springtime, and is amongst the first migrant birds to depart in the summer. Those early spring migrants, like my grandfather had done, tend to follow the coastline as they journey.

  The scientific name for the violet-green swallow is Tachycineta thalassina – meaning ‘fast moving’ and ‘of the sea’ – alluding to the sea-green colour of their backs. My grandfather watched them for less than a week before giving in to the soft, still call of his homeland. My great-aunt told me years after about how her younger brother had woken the travel agent up in the middle of the night, at his home, to make sure he could secure him a place on the first boat heading back to Derry that very morning. Canada was not the place – nor the life – for him, and he left it quicker than even those wee migrant birds. He never saw a violet-green swallow again for all of the decades he lived but he spoke of them to me often, right up until the week he died.

  As he prepared to pass over into that unknown place, in his mid nineties, my grandfather named the birds right outside the window with me as he made ready for the next realm. Everyday garden birds, the same ones he had heard for nine decades in that very city, never more than a few miles from that very bed. The whole time, as I held his speckled, paper-thin hands, he asked me to tell him about places, about all the places I had been, about all those places that he hadn’t seen.

  There are places where there are no boundaries between things, people, places or time, in which all that we once knew can still dance right before our eyes. All that we once held dear and true – all that we once placed such immeasurable value upon – we can know again; we can learn to hold those things in deepest respect, once more. In some places there is room for more – for so much more – to find its way onto our grateful, echoing insides. My ancestors believed that to behold the divine, all that was other than our own selves, you needed to be ready. Those who stood in a line too long, too far back for me to see the end-point, believed that place and time came together, in those delicate moments, to meet your own willing self. They believed that they were not alone in that line, neither was that line one that only embraced that which was human. As my grandfather began the process of dying, I dreamed of him on innumerable nights and untold days as a winged creature. I watched him crawl through dirt and grasses, searching for food. I watched him lift up from broken, fallen branches. I watched him soar and hunt and circle. And in only one dream I watched him sleep, above a golden, empty desert, on the wing.

  I think so much in these troubled, dividing days, about what it might mean to live as the birds do, as the moths and butterflies, as we once did ourselves maybe: free from border and barrier – in a place where the veil is so thin that we are reminded what it means to really be here – in this glorious world.

  Place is a whistling, slippery eel, too, though, and it has haunted us here on this island for centuries. It is so intimately linked with our trauma and our failings, our rapes and our losses, bloodshed and undoing. People not from here often ask about the root of the Troubles. For a very long time, I struggled to join it all up, to make connections between the lines that history cast – as black as crows, as tall as ships – across my path.

  Our kinfolk killed each other over a single oatcake during an Gorta Mór – the Great Hunger of the Irish Famine. My ancestors sent their children away to lands they knew they would never return from. My ancestors have watched themselves and those they held dear fade to bone before their eyes, shades of what they once had been. They watched their words lose all meaning – snuffed with the last of the light of all that they had once held true. How could we – the most recent offspring of folk who were put through this – have ever been expected to move on from it all without guidance? This level of inter-generational trauma takes time, so much time, to leave the gene pool. It surges through bloodlines like an ancient river.

  This is our legacy of loss. We are – those of us born of this island – without any doubt, ‘The Children of the Famine’. That Famine is, in my eyes, directly and intrinsically linked to the Troubles. That Famine reverberates even still, and I feel, inside my body, the ripples such loss leaves in its wake. Derry has one of the highest suicide rates in the UK, one of the lowest levels of breast-feeding, one of the highest obesity levels. The River Foyle has observed more loss in its time than I can even begin to comprehend. More of our lives in the North of Ireland have now been lost through suicide than were lost to the violence of the Troubles. How to even start to reshape a land that has spent centuries telling a dark story of loss? How to tell a new story of resilience and hope? Is this history of loss held in the soil? On the river itself? How can we honour the suffering of our ancestors – of those who came before us – but still try to unravel the chains we find ourselves bound by? Is the answer held within the very soil that failed them? Is the answer held in the residue the ghosts leave behind? The feathery ash of their snowy skin fluttering leeward, the blood that once swelled in their plumed veins seeping elsewhere, always coursing somewhere else. These days I am learning new ways through grief, different ways to hold it in my hands. I am trying, always trying, to honour those I have lost – no matter what the circumstances may have entailed.

  The scale, and indeed scéal, the story, of Irish emigration in the port town of Derry remains, even to this day, without any proper or respectful record.

  We know, in that old Irish way, of course, without it having ever been written down. It has been passed down, over and over, a palimpsest of loss: eisimirce – emigration.

  We know as well as the fractured land.

  We know as well as the land of other places. Places that had to expand, to make room inside hidden folds, to embrace our lost children when they turned up at their borders. We know as well as those children, those ones who have never known anything other than displacement.

  We know in our bones, in our marrow and in our flesh.

  We know in our skin and in our teeth. />
  We know in our bellies, deeper than that; we know in our guts.

  We know in our wombs. We know in our births and in our unborn.

  We know in our living and in our breathing.

  We know in our leaving and in our dying.

  We know in our sleep, in our dreams and in our spaces in between these.

  We know in our thin places.

  This year, the people of the port of Derry wait with bated breath to hear what their future holds, as a border town caught up in the trauma of Brexit without their votes ever having been regarded whatsoever. There is, as of yet, no solution for the ‘problem’ of our border: that invisible line we have never even seen. Recently family members of peaceful protestors whose lives were taken on Bloody Sunday – back when the Troubles began, on a day painted the blood-red of violence – were told only one person would be tried for the actions of many more. The past is a harrowing place; it drags us back, even as we try, ever deeper, to bury it. During an Extinction Rebellion March this year, in the same week as the Bloody Sunday trial, I took my place in Derry’s Guildhall Square with dozens of other peaceful protestors, using our voices to speak for the future, for our planet, for our home. From where we stood we could see the River Foyle and the quay from which – not much more than a century and a half ago – we lost a million and a half of our kinfolk. The young lad leading the environmental rally on the steps of the Guildhall was the only representative from his school at the protest. He stood tall and defiant, upright against the biting winds, like that solo little egret in the silt, in the same place that the President of America had stood when I was a child.