Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  Dee Street is a narrow double row of two-up-two-downs built in the last century for shipyard workers in the shadow of the yellow cranes of the Harland & Wolff shipyard. On the bare walls of the roads that lead into it, there are painted slogans: “Ulster says NO!” “Dee Street says NO!” “Yukon Street says NO!” (When one of the local children paints me a picture of the street, the voice balloon he puts on one of the children says “NO!” too.)

  All the front doors in Dee Street stay open, day and night, and kids wander in and out, from house to house. Unemployment is high and a lot of men in their twenties, heavily tattooed, hang around the front doors, drinking and watching for strangers. On the wall facing the bonfire at the end of the street there is a mural of three Protestant paramilitaries wearing balaclavas and pointing automatic weapons.

  Almost everyone I meet in Dee Street has lived there all their lives. One man who tells me he is “a newcomer” finally admits that he has lived in the same house for twenty-five years. He’s only a newcomer compared to his wife, who was born in the street.

  Dee Street has its wild men. There is Morris, who has tattoos up and down his arms and a heart tattooed on each earlobe, who wants to offer me his protection in return for a consideration. Then there is Lennox with his goatee, small narrow-set eyes, and shaven head. People in Dee Street will tell you he is “short of a slice for a sandwich.” He and Maddy, his girlfriend, had a child, and the mothers in the street offered to help them out, but the social services came and took the child away when Maddy was still in hospital. When Lennox found out, the neighbors came upon him storming up Dee Street with murder in his eye and a can of petrol in his hand, shouting as to how he was going to burn “the social” down to the ground.

  Dee Street offers belonging with a vengeance—compassionate, warm, and welcoming to its own; as unyielding as a stone to its enemies. It takes me days to convince them I mean no harm. I tell them I’ve just come to talk to the boys about the bonfire, but Mrs. L. takes some persuading. Loyalists, like Serbs, brood on the way they are misunderstood.

  Collecting for the bonfire begins in March. The Dee Street boys, ranging in age from seven to twenty-three, scour the streets, parking lots, and factories and drag their trophies back in supermarket trolleys. By early July the collection is so large that they have to camp out all night to keep it from being stolen by the bonfire boys in adjacent streets. By July 10, the Dee Street bonfire is an astonishing sixty-foot-high pile of cable drums, pallets and old sofas, boxes and barrels, railway sleepers and tires.

  Like the Rathcoole boys, the Dee Street boys have only the haziest idea of what goes on in the British mainland. Stewarty, who wears a Chicago Bears leather porkpie hat and a Rangers scarf, says he’s heard of Guy Fawkes Night, but he couldn’t tell you when it was. “We have our bonfires and they have theirs, like.” Stewarty’s best memory of the mainland was of going to a Rangers game in Glasgow, and of how the Ulster chant “We are, we are, we are the Billy boys!” rang around the stadium. But the rest of Britain, at least to judge from a couple of visits, seemed strange to him. Everywhere he went “they called me a Paddy, as if I were Irish and responsible for all them bombings.”

  Besides, he says, patting a neighbor’s Rottweiler, which has come up and is nosing about in the garbage at the edge of the bonfire, the English projects seemed cold and unfriendly. “No kids playing out in the street, like here in Dee Street. Nothing going on, like.” To tell you the truth, Stewarty admits, “I get nostalgic three streets away in Belfast.” Dee Street is all he knows. He’s got two children of his own, and he’s never worked a day in his life. He couldn’t anyway. If he did, the social might dock his “brew”—Belfast for unemployment benefit.

  I ask him where the Catholics live and he points behind him up the road, about four hundred yards. What would happen if you went up there? I ask, and one of the other boys says quickly, “Kill you, sure.” And what happens if they come down? “They’d get a good hiding,” Stewarty says. It’s just the way it is. They would do it to you if you were walking past. “A couple of them might start doing the heavy. So you have to do the same. If they came down here they’d get a terrible hiding, not to kill them, mind, but just so as he remembers.” None of this is said with any venom. Indeed, Stewarty seems a bit embarrassed by it all, and wants it known that it might all be different if you lived in a mixed area. But not in Dee Street.

  And what about those men? I ask, gesturing to the paramilitary mural. A lot of the bonfire boys look away, uneasily, and one boy, the son of a British soldier, says quickly that they’re illegal and you don’t talk about them. But Stewarty says, digging at the ground with a stick, that they’re there to punish “rogues and thieves.” As far as Dee Street is concerned, punishment should be kept in the family: the police, or the “peelers,” as they are called, should stay out. Like if you steal a car, or if you “do houses,” then you get what’s coming to you. And what’s that? A kneecapping. Are you scared of them, then? Stewarty looks at me shrewdly. “You wouldn’t expect me to say I wasn’t, now would you?”

  I come back on the night of the eleventh to watch the Pope and the Tricolor being stuck on the top of the bonfire, and to watch the Dee Street boys marching up and down, with Lennox at the head, waving his Ulster flag like a madman and Mrs. L’s boy, Alex, beating out the rhythm on a cracked snare with only one skin. But word has got back to Mrs. L. that I had been talking to the boys about Catholics and about paramilitaries, and she calls me into her sitting room. “They’re just kids,” she says. “They’ll say anything. But they don’t necessarily mean it.” She’ll have me know that she has to live here when I’m long gone, and it isn’t easy. “Look, I do my shopping up the road at Crazy Prices. With the Catholics.” If they get word of Stewarty’s talk about giving them a good “hiding,” who knows what’ll happen? And as for the paramilitaries, she says, “I thought you were going to stay off politics.” We both know that if I don’t get back in Mrs. L.’s good books, I won’t be long at the bonfire. I do my best to make her feel easier and she hears me out, smoking cigarette after cigarette in her front room, her face drawn and thin. She forgives me eventually and the word gets passed to leave me alone. At the stroke of midnight, the Dee Street boys’ petrol bombs splatter against the pallets, and with a slowly gathering roar, the bonfire rises into flame. Lennox is waving the Red Hand flag, Morris is drinking from two cans of McEwan’s at once, a huge crowd is eddying backward from the rising heat of the flames; two men are cheerfully swearing at me for working for “those faggot republicans in the flicking ITN [Independent Television News].” When the Pope catches fire and the Republican Tricolor pitches down into the flames, the crowd lets out a low, visceral roar. Oblivious to everything, serenely drunk, Mrs. L., surrounded by her kids, is last seen slowly circling the bonfire, twirling around with anyone who will dance with her, softly singing to herself:

  It is old but it is beautiful, and its colours they are fine

  It was worn at Derry Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne.

  THE FIELD

  “God is a Protestant,” the Ulstermen say, when explaining why weather on the annual Orange parade is usually clement. And so it is. The morning of the Twelfth of July dawns fair and bright. As the bands and lodge brethren gather in their thousands in front of the Central Lodge, Tommy Doyle is in fine fettle, greeting old friends and sipping a cup of tea. Eighty-five thousand Orangemen march across Northern Ireland on the Twelfth. Dick and Ernie Sterritt will be marching in Portadown. Actually, “marching” is the wrong word. “Walking” is the preferred Orange term, suggesting as it does the right flavor of decorum and decency. But “walking” is not how the Catholics see it. The thundering bands, the steady tramp of feet, and the verse from the Billy Boys song telling about how they’re “up to our necks in Fenian blood” are enough to keep most Catholics inside on parade day.

  Orangemen will tell you nostalgically about the days when Catholics used to come and watch. As in Serbia and Croatia, both sid
es have an interest in conjuring up a lost paradise of inter-ethnic accommodation in which each side had amused respect for the other’s rituals. It’s easier for Loyalists to believe this than admit the truth, which is that Orangeism has always had a fiercely anti-Catholic edge and that the God-fearing, law-abiding side of Protestantism has always loved the intimidating and violent thunder of its own drums.

  They march or walk to send a message to the other side, to say: Here we are in our mighty throng; take heed and stay indoors. But they also march to send a message to themselves, to reassure and comfort the faithful. For Loyalism is much sapped with doubt about its long-term survival. The statistics from the 1991 census tell a gloomy tale. Twenty years ago, the Catholics stood at 34.7 percent of the population of Northern Ireland. Today the figure is 41.4 percent and rising rapidly. It is rumored that among school-age children in Belfast the Catholics are up to 50 percent of the total. The statistical picture of Protestantism is of an aging population in decline, faced with a slow but steady hemorrhage of its best and brightest to the mainland. These numbers haunt the faithful, so much so that in the Twelfth of July booklet the Grand Master of all Ireland warns his fellow Orangemen not to put faith in “deliberately falsified census figures,” just as he warns them, darkly, that agents provocateurs may be lurking about the parade, wearing Orange Sashes.

  So as they march up the Lisburn Road, heading toward Edenderry Field, with their banners held high—the Duke of Manchester’s Invincibles and Cromwell’s Ironsides, the Lame Protestant Boys and the Ballygally Flute and Pipe, the Rising Sons of the Somme, Carrickfergus—you count every Orangemen under forty and you wonder how long the Order has to live.

  But they do make a magnificent sight, the pipe and drum bands, the accordion bands, and the bagpipe bands, as they stream beneath the great oaks flanking the downward-sloping cow pasture at the edge of Belfast that is known as the Field. Down at the bottom is a small raised platform to hold the dignitaries, and a few rows of chairs to hear the speeches, but of the thousands who march into the Field, perhaps only a hundred bother to listen. The rest sprawl about on the grass, with a Union Jack or an Ulster Red Hand flag covering their faces from the sun, drums piled together, uniforms, leggings, socks, boots, all in a tangle, among the chips and the crisp packets, the beer cans and the cigarette packs. Even the police take off their bulletproof vests and lounge on the grass with their heads against the bumpers of their Land Rovers. The speeches drone on, the age-old religious invective rises from the podium: “Roman Catholicism is a perversion of true religion. Irish Catholicism is the most perverse of all religions,” I hear one reverend gentleman bellow. Another speaker thunders: “The Protestants of Ulster are going to make Ulster great again and restore the greatness of Britain which has been sorely declining these past years.” Again, no one seems to be listening. While their elders thunder impotently on, young bandsmen fall fast asleep.

  CARGO CULT

  The great king from across the water disembarks from his white ships. In a great battle, he delivers the natives from their tribal enemies, in victory guarantees their religion, and confers on them master of their island forever. Having accomplished these magic designs, he departs, never to return. Ever after, the natives venerate his name, paint his picture, decorate their drums with his face, carry his portrait in their processions. They hold his memory sacred long after all trace of him has vanished from the traditions of the land whence he came.

  According to the Encyclopedia of Anthropology, a cargo cult is a millenarian movement of native peoples who believe that the millennium will be ushered in by the arrival of great ships loaded with European trade goods or cargo. The goods will be brought by the ancestral spirits and will be distributed to natives who have acted in accordance with the dictates of one of the cults. Some cult leaders call for the expulsion of all alien, colonial elements as a precondition of salvation, while others insist on the abandonment of traditional ways of life and the adoption of European customs.

  According to anthropologists who have studied such cults in the Pacific South Seas, the critical feature is that “cargo cults are movements where whites lose control of their ability to police and direct the desires of their subjects. Having harnessed and in part created those desires for whiteness as part of a project of motivating villagers to take up development, the administration is horrified when those desires come to be turned against itself.” Anthropologists define the cargo cult as the result of an “uncontrolled mimesis” in which native peoples take over the rituals and behavior of whites only to subvert them and transform them into an object of worship that actually emancipates them from the European original.

  British cargo cults are among the most tenacious and enduring in the world. In the Canada of my youth—in the salons of the Ritz in Montreal, the Royal York in Toronto, and the Empress in Victoria, British Columbia—but also in the Raffles at Singapore, the Mandarin in Hong Kong, from the tea plantations of Sri Lanka to the hill stations of India, tea and cucumber sandwiches continue to be served and the rituals of a defunct empire float on in their ghostly afterlife. Here the loyalism implied by the ritual is merely nostalgic or elegiac. But there are insurgent cargo cults of Britishness— for example, as practiced in the whites-only Rhodesia of Ian Smith after it declared unilateral independence from Britain in 1965. Here was a Britishness in revolt against Britain itself.

  The sashes, the bonfires, the burning Popes and Tricolors, the Lambeg drums, the marching bands, the Red Hand flags, the songs: in all my journeys, I’ve never come across a form of nationalism so intensely ritualized. At one level, the reason for this is obvious. Here Britishness is ritualized because it is up against its antithesis and nemesis: Irish Republicanism

  Since the enemy are “nationalists,” Loyalists are barred not merely from using the term but from thinking of themselves in this vein. Yet perhaps that is what Loyalism is—a nationalism that dares not speak its name. Loyalism, on this reading, is really loyal to itself, but since it cannot say so out loud, it says so tacitly, in rituals of belonging which elaborate an identity all its own.

  The Red Hand sums up all of this ambivalence. You see it everywhere, on flags, on paramilitary murals, in candy replicas sold in every sweetshop. According to Celtic legend, two Scottish kings were swimming to Ulster. Whoever touched Ulster soil first would win the race and earn the right to rule the province. As the swimmers got closer, the one losing the race cut off his left hand and, with his right hand, threw it to the shore, thus claiming the prize.

  It is a grimly appropriate symbol, especially in the way it consecrates the province as the bloody prize of a sacrificial struggle. It is both a respectable and an insurgent icon, figuring both on the official emblem of a province and on the paramilitary wall paintings that lionize Loyalism’s thugs. Celtic in origin and unknown to mainland Britain, the Red Hand shows just how tensely poised Loyalism is between identification and rejection, between fidelity and rebellion. Ulster worships at seventeenth-century Protestant shrines that mainland Britain no longer recognizes as its own. It elaborates a Britishness which it believes its mother has betrayed. It cannot pass into nationalist rebellion, since that would give comfort to its republican enemies, and it cannot subside into contented obedience, since that would trust the mother too far.

  Yet it is also specifically British, above all in its imperial memory of being masters once, and thus in its inability to conceive, let alone accept, becoming a minority in someone else’s nation. It is also specifically British in its injured assertion of rights denied and betrayed, and in its inability to translate the sense of democratic injury into a genuinely democratic nationalism. This is true of mainland British nationalism as well. British national consciousness as a whole continues to see the nation embodied, not in the people, but in the Crown. The British think of themselves as subjects, not as citizens, and popular commitment to the civic achievements of British history—the rule of law, the sovereignty of Parliament, the stability of the state—t
ends to express itself in an infantilized idealization of the monarchy. A nation of citizens, it could be argued, might prove more resolute and courageous defenders of these achievements than a nation of subjects.

  Cargo cults are caricatures of their original. Yet caricatures reveal a truth, as fairground mirrors do. If Ulster is unable to decide what it is loyal to—its own people or the Crown—this may be because Britain as a whole no longer has an answer to the same question.

  In the cargo cult of Ulster Loyalism, the ethnic and civic components of British nationalism are beginning to uncouple. Loyalism is an ethnic nationalism which, paradoxically, uses the civic symbols of Britishness—Crown and Union Jack—to mark out an ethnic identity. In the process, the civic content is emptied out: Loyalist paramilitarism, for example, makes it only too clear what a portion of the Loyalist community thinks of the rule of law, the very core of British civic identity. In the end, the Crown and the Union Jack are reduced to meaning what they signify when tattooed on the skin of poor, white teenagers. They are only badges of ethnic rage.

  The same uncoupling could easily occur, indeed is already occurring, in Britain. Symbols of identity like the Union Jack and the Crown that once stood for the rule of law and the civic integument of a nation-state come to be debased, by disillusion, injustice, and oppression, into pure symbols of whiteness. If a society no longer teaches its children that Britishness has a connection, not to ethnicity, but to justice, then its symbols are bound to figure on the placards of hatred.

  As can be seen in Canada, India, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and elsewhere, Britain is not the only place where the civic and ethnic components of national identity are uncoupling. Most multinational, multi-ethnic nation-states are discovering that their populations are often more loyal to the ethnic units that compose them than to the federation and the laws that hold the state together.