University of Revolution

 

          On our final full day together in Northern Ireland, we met with former combatants in the British army, an Ulster volunteer, and the Irish Republican Army through an organization called Coista (https://www.coiste.ie/). We walked both sides of the Peace Wall in West Belfast and then met with a panel representing all three, men who sat peaceably together, their violent careers and incarcerations bringing them before us today. 

          Our first walk was along the Shankill with half our students and Mark, a 24 year veteran of the British army. He would lead us through the loyalist, unionist side of the wall until he handed us off across the gates to the nationalist, republican Falls Road side.

Mark was righteous in honoring the crown and Irishmen who’d died during the Battle of the Somme in the First World War, and he spoke venomously of empowered republicans who’ve ever since been murdering and fighting and have paid no political price and stand in the way of peace, refusing to accept realities. But he spoke with as a great a sorrow before a wall of the Ulster Volunteer Force, masked and armed and ready to rise up once more. He called them terrorists, as willingly and bitterly as he’d branded the IRA. This meant that he clearly presented his loyalist argument to our jury of students before resting his case to opposing counsel at a Peace Wall gate—yet he laced his proud memorializing and blaming with a line he hadn’t provided two years ago, and that, for me, was his loudest and most undermining idea: How do we move us all along towards peace, he said, when we’re constantly reminding, remembering, glorifying, blaming? The little children are looking. Stop saying we had no choice when you take up arms.

The more consistent thread was an unapologetic, severe argument for British Northern Ireland: to reunify Northern Ireland, the IRA was willing to destroy its economy, its buildings, its morale, its grandmamas, kiddies and babies, and the murderers and terrorists—responsible for specific, knowable deaths and horrors—are now in Stormont, in charge; meanwhile, the Brits of Northern Ireland only ever wanted to keep homes and people safe. In a few months, the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement will arrive, and, he asked, what has it brought us?

              He came by his bitterness honestly—both his father and brother murdered, and his own body the target of three killing attempts, resulting in a seven month coma, prosthetics, and the loss of two toes.

              The most undeniable thing Mark described was that wall and its effects: On one side, 100% of the people are Protestant; on the other, 100% Catholic. Not a single Catholic on the Protestant side, he claimed, and not a Protestant to be found among the other. Everyone locked in by the wall, everyone locked out, the gates slamming shut every night at nine. Each side has its own shops, its own schools and nurseries, its own churches and even its own buses. Before 1969, Mark said, we shared drinks, friendships, and handshakes. Now there’s the wall, seven kilometers long and three meters thick, its first brick laid in 1971. And has it fixed anything? No, we just keep building it higher. First in ’93, and then, the Good Friday Agreement, did it mean the wall could come down? No, in 1998, they just raised it higher. The children are playing in their own playgrounds and taking lessons in their own schools. The kiddies aren’t playing, nor praying, nor eating, or learning together. The next generation is already locked in.

             The idea of separateness is incredibly vivid. And when he toured us through the central blocks of Shankill Road, its angry murals a little like the martyrs’ row on the other side but also bellowing in its thick-font accusations (“PROBABLY THE UK’S WORST EVER PRIME MINISTER AND HIS CABAL IN THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY,” “SINN FEIN/IRA VERSUS ISIS,” “SINN FEIN/IRA’S SLAUGHTER,” “CHILDREN MURDERED BY SINN FEIN,” “30 YEARS OF INDISCRIMINATE SLAUGHTER BY THE SO-CALLED NON-SECTARIAN IRISH FREEDOM FIGHTERS”). This vitriol of victimization made bright Mark’s words elsewhere: How do we move this along when we’re constantly reminding, remembering, glorifying, blaming?

              Mark walked us through the gates that would close at night and open at seven each morning and took us to Pader, who’d been 16 years imprisoned for killing an officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

              Pader provided not only a contrast in perspectives but demeanor, giving nods to us and laughing, and calling out to all the passersby. Haven’t seen you in a bit, Pader. Yeah, cuz’ I’ve been avoidin’ ya! Heya, Pader? How are ya? Magic, Patrick. Magic. Just telling them all about how ya fucked the British all on yer own.

              But the things Pader was describing were dead serious, too. The contrasts he provided to Mark’s story were several. First, he and other nationalists were insistent that their argument was not about religion but colonialist occupation. We saw this in the murals up and down Falls road—images touching on Palestinian plight, American civil rights and South African anti-apartheid heroes, Cuban revolutionaries, and many other peoples rising up against post-colonial structures. He wore a green keffiyeh around his neck, stark against the Israeli flags on the Shankill side. Second, he and other nationalists shared the argument that they were fighting back against the most sophisticated government and military in the world, and as such, violent acts were acts of war and political in nature. 

             Two years ago, Duncan Morrow of Ulster University described it this way: Each side says, We can’t trust the other. Here’s the proof: Awful things They did to us. And here are heroic things we did to defend ourselves: no recognition that their awful acts and our heroic acts are the same—you did it because you believed what you were fighting was much worse.

Pader also gave us a first hand account of the hunger strikers of Long Kesh, where he spent 17 years and the first person he met was Bobby Sands, the first hunger striker to die. Pader was member to the no wash protests, throwing shit and piss out cells and having it thrown back to them, forced in turn to cells burning with pure undiluted ammonia. They broke their windows for air and then suffered the blowing winter. Pader described being beaten repeatedly and intimate, violating searches that left him bleeding from his anus, and that included oral searches immediately after, the screws using the same fingers in the mouth.

But there in the prison, republicans also read and taught each other history, theory, philosophy, gaining both a principled and tactical understanding of their cause in what they called the University of Revolution. When Pader said this, I recalled the remarkably similar story I heard from Robben Island, off Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela was interned for almost three decades: Mandela and other political prisoners were brought daily to a limestone quarry where they were made to chip rock with a pickaxe and shovel, despite the useless of this limestone, which was too flaky. It was there only as a source of a hard labor—eight hours a day in any weather. There were no gloves, no eye protection, sun reflected off the white stone at every hour, and eventually the dust clogged Mandela’s eye ducts so that he was no longer able to express tears when he cried. But something very important happened at the quarry, our former prisoner guide said. Education was critical to hope and survival, and a cave, which was used for lunch and bathroom breaks, became “the classroom.” But they held their urine so they could keep the cave dignified and clean, and there, the cave became the university of life.

              We left the separated tours for an integrated panel discussion with Gerald, formerly of the IRA, Jim, UVF, and Lee, British army. What we learned there especially was how much violence and seething resentment may well have its source in economics: West Belfast presents two working class neighborhoods trapped without viable opportunities forward to security and pride but those offered freely and charismatically by the local gangs. UVF. IRA. If they’d replaced the factory at Mackey’s with a university, as once was maybe going to happen, rather than a wall, if someone had invested and provided both educational and economic opportunities rather than spending all that money on the Titanic Museum, what might have happened for these two communities? 

Lee, the former British soldier, said he had more in common with Gerald and Jim as working class men desperate for purpose than he did with his own Boris Johnson (that vile dog with a face only two cousins could create). Instead, we are drawn to these militaries and paramilitaries, where we are brutalized and punished until we learn to respond quickly to orders; we are pumped with righteous patriotism; and we learn the mindset of we’re good, they’re other.

So what’s the path forward for people steeped in absolutism? Just as we’ve been hearing all week, Lee said that dehumanization based on stereotypes can’t survive person-to-person conversation. And, he said, this is far more important than seeking or offering forgiveness: once you invite forgiveness into the room, Lee said, you invite judgment along with it, and there are far too many thorns there.

 

This post integrates material from both the entry corresponding to the Coiste event two years ago and a post from South Africa in 2018.

Mr. Harkin’s Departing Message

          At the head of the bus, Mr. Harkin gave his final farewell, quoting the man from Enniskillen to calm the devastated and terrified people running back and forth not knowing what to do when the bomb left loved ones in a bloody rubble. Faith, he told them, is a refusal to panic.

        And so I say to you, if it’s a faith in God or a faith in humanity either: Faith is a refusal to panic.

        He left us with a benediction: In your lives, may life triumph over death, hope over despair, and love over hate.

        This is a man so loved, I cannot even convey it. Last night he got ever more loopy, doing laps in an office chair and having a wide-legged bear chase with one of his students, who invited, as he invites so many, a group of students into his office for a mad hatter tea party with jester and constable and tea cozy and tiny hats and more, the office also a gallery of inspiring quotes and pictures of students and friends and the many knickknacks he’s invariably given, no secret power sanctum here, just a beating and welcoming heart.

        Students hugged and hugged him.

        I know our student visitors will miss their Oakgrove friends. They will miss this man no less, and perhaps more, but they will also carry what’s capable inside of us by the model of his embrace of sorrow and joy.

        At last, he sang a farewell song.

        The power of sincere vulnerability in music, its quiet humility and evident love, was the prayer we didn’t know we needed. Oh, did we cry to hear him and then to see him go. 

The time has come to say goodnight, 

for every road must end,
to the ones who care and they’re always there, 

our very special friends.
Let’s say goodnight to those we love, 

and maybe shed a tear,
but before we close let’s think of those

we love who can’t be here.
Let's raise a glass to absent friends,
For every road must end. 
You'll always be there in our hearts—
Our special absent friends.

Is Forgiveness Vital to Healing?

         Hands for a Bridge is a program built around a philosophy of connection, reconciliation, and healing. We do it through friendship, dialogue, art. John Harkin, the principal here at Oakgrove, is a beautiful and inspiring partner in this work, because he lives it as an educator and leader, long opening his heart to aspirations of human connection and nonviolence, connecting to artists, speakers, community leaders, and friends exuding wisdom and decency. The speakers he has brought us, and who year after year make themselves available to come, and the experiences he nurtures model over and over deep welcome and willingness to understand across experiences.

        At a minute level, he knows the students here, and seeks to get to know visitors as quickly and as richly as possible; and when we’re in the orbit of Oakgrove school, he is constantly pulling people together to learn from each other, to provide the emotional lesson as well as the intellectual, enlarging our humanity in the humanity of others.

        Yesterday, two of those speakers were Anne and Kathleen, the former IRA quartermaster and the wife of man turned by the IRA into Northern Ireland’s first human bomb, as I described in a post about Theatre of Witness a couple years ago. Their close friendship and the message they convey is about honesty and conciliation. What can happen, as happened for them, when we share our stories with those of other backgrounds and viewpoints. Once you know someone, Anne said, and once you know the reasons why they do something or how they came to their fears and feelings, the more likely you are to bring your humanity to each other. We are brought up in a world that tells us to be afraid all the time; but we have the power to bring understanding to our own fears and to those of others, bringing everything that has hurt us to bear on a changed future. 

        Kathleen had a fantasy: If one of those IRA soldiers who kidnapped her husband, tied him to a truck, and exploded it at a military checkpoint, now came to her door seeking forgiveness, she would tell him there was no chance in hell of getting that pardon from her; but, if you’re willing to answer one question for me, you can come in for a cup of coffee: Why did you do it? It’s not forgiveness on offer, but it’s openness to understanding.

        I was thinking about forgiveness after Richard Moore’s talk yesterday, the gift you give yourself, he said, and now, here was Kathleen, suggesting that forgiveness wasn’t itself the key to the kind of bridging to which John aspires. I remembered this too from my father’s battle with his publisher, who eventually won, naming his book Forgive Your Parents, Heal Yourself, in spite of what my father said were often unforgivable legacies of sexual abuse and cruelty. He said at the time the goal was never about forgiveness, but about what’s possible for adult children who come to understand their parents’ hurts and wounded brokenness as it filtered down upon them. What’s possible is not necessarily forgiveness, but a recognition of shared frailty, one that slays the personal monster, seeing through the shame and bitterness to something far softer in personal worth, humanity, love. 

        I treasure what we’ve seen modeled for us, in John and so many others, and what we’ve been able to bring to this school in our curiosity and joy, and what we can carry out of it. 

        But it is always going to be about making the small choices, as John says, to see signs of hope rather than signs of degradation, and to help, and choose kindness.

        Understanding is more important than forgiveness, gathering our signposts of strength and hope to look to when spirits are hurting.

Forgiveness is the Gift you Give Yourself

         Richard Moore stood before us with dark glasses and a sturdy stance, well acquainted with the talk he was giving us and the ninth grade (eighth grade) today. He’d lost his eyesight as a ten year old in his primary school yard, the victim of a vicious rubber bullet the size of a coke can and the shape of a missile, fired for unintentionally running in the direction of a checkpoint.

        He shares his story, over and over, in the hope that it helps others respond to the inevitable challenges brought by life, and to speak a language of forgiveness and peace.

        Last night, when students confessed there were questions they were nervous to ask because they thought they might be rude and inappropriate, and I had said that this was their bridge, their neutrality and smiling American ignorance, allowing people to speak about things they ordinarily aren’t going to talk about despite a clear need to air them. The younger kids showed what that looked like in questions Richard Moore fielded, asking wonderfully inappropriate and direct queries about his blindness and the incident itself: What’s it like being blind? What’s it like to get shot in the face? 

        Moore was born in 1961, remembering Northern Ireland and Derry before 1969, when everything seemed to change overnight. Bombings, shootings, arrests. In addition to those killed by the British army on January 13th of Bloody Sunday, there were more people killed and maimed in 1972 than any other year of the conflict.

        The police station aside Moore’s primary school was a target that brought semi-permanent military installations near the school. On the fourth of May, Moore was racing at the bottom of the school yard when a soldier fired a rubber bullet that struck the bridge of his nose. The nose was utterly flattened, his eyes hung out, and his face was a bloody mess.

        Someone ran to his house to tell his father, who told him he would be okay; he would be all right. But after two weeks in hospital, he finally learned that he would be blind the rest of his life. He’d thought it was the bandages preventing him from being able to see. He cried that night, to think that he’d never see his mother’s face again, never see his father. And the next day was his first day as a blind person for the rest of his life.

        But he thrived in life, owning a house, pubs, playing in bands, marrying, having two loving daughters, directing the city’s football club—he doesn’t even think of his blindness except when he’s giving these talks. And he gives these talks because he wants to explain what makes his positivity possible:

        Moore comes from a good family who caught him when he fell and put him back on his feet, comes from a good community and all the opportunities available because he was able to go to school. Even as a blind person, he had these many gifts, privileges, and opportunities. This realization led him to sell his pubs and turn to philanthropy, launching Children in Crossfire, helping kids who are under-resourced not because there isn’t enough money in the world but not enough will.

        Richard Moore showed us a portrait of his daughters when they were young and told us we were doing something that he would never be able to do, which was to see his daughters, who, he has been told, are beautiful. His inability to see this for himself is a legacy of war. But he never needed revenge on the soldier who launched the bullet. Revenge, he learned, is drinking a cup of poison and thinking the other person would die. He learned this overhearing a conversation between his mother and brother who was bitterly angry. She told him that if he wanted to help Richard, help Richard. But you’re not going to be helping Richard by hurting someone else.

        Moore finally met the soldier, Charles, on a stage before 2,000 people, in the presence of the Dalai Lama. Forgiveness, he learned, is the gift you give yourself; it’s about you, finding a way to be happy. Forgiveness won’t change the past or take away the future, but it does change the future.

        What Moore wants people to know is that every single person loves somebody and is loved by someone; so try to see the good in every person. Good people can do bad things. That doesn’t mean you can’t forgive them, or that you can’t see the good in them. Doing so is difficult, but it’s a thing we should try to do.

        John Harkin thanked Richard Moore and reminded us all of what we just heard: With the many choices we have in our lives, we can contribute to building up or tearing down. With every little choice, we can choose to make things worse or making things better. And so give someone a good experience with you; there’s a good chance they’ll pass that good experience on to others.

Competing Museums

          The day was full—of first day of school experience, followed by competing Derry/Londonderry narratives, from down the hill in Nationalist Bogside and within the city walls of a Loyalist Siege Museum (and what seems to be over three centuries of siege mentality), some students reeling from bloody anti-Israeli iconography as well, followed by a tense and needed debrief while our Oakgrove friends waited outside, and then a larger circle with them, where we spoke of sectarianism, American divisions, mental health and suicide, no minute of the day loose or slow.

    Daisy, a member of Sinn Fein for several decades, led us through the Bogside, along part of the march route she attended in 1972, that Bloody Sunday, when she was forever radicalized. Daisy told us of the fight for civil rights, for enfranchisement when only homeowners had a vote and businesses had two or three and Ulster Loyalist Protestants were well overrepresented in Derry despite its noted Catholic majority. She spoke of having her house repeatedly searched, and after going through to make sure no bullet was deliberately left behind and securely hidden for the sake of future accusations—harassment of activists at the very least. In the Free Derry Museum, we learned still more of the events leading to Bloody Sunday and following.

        The Siege Museum was a quiet three floors dedicated to 105 days in 1689 and the yearly pomp to celebrate them. I appreciated the counter-narratives but, as also expressed by Julia and others, I had to fight within myself to stay open to what the Apprentice Boys were serving. The difference between activism for human dignity and forces to deny it and activism towards the right to dress up and march and bang drums and the forces to deny that seems lopsided. 

        On the other hand, look how I’m articulating these points of view. We study history to get beyond simplistic comparisons and framings, so we have the richness of imagination to understand and ask the right questions and see the most compassionate, practical ways forward.

        In the evening, Roosevelt asked Oakgrove how the weight and legacy of sectarian tensions manifested or was processed or addressed or studied in an integrated school. There is not much talk, neither much tension—there used to be fist fights. And families are not likely to talk about their histories. Meanwhile, school lessons touch only very lightly such topics, if at all. Youth clubs are the most likely to highlight the Troubled times, and they will always have a very specific point of view. 

        Then, we asked, what is the issue we haven’t thought to ask you or discuss. When an Oakgrove student said mental health was that issue, there was a loud and communal Mmmmm, in recognition from all the students. Mental health. And so the silence finds its turbulent and tremulous voice after all.

Why We Visit Sites of Grief and Pain

        We met Mr. Michael Gallagher in Omagh, where he took us to the site of the bombing that 26 years ago took the life of his son Aidan. Laying flowers, reading poems, and pronouncing the names of the 29 people, including 21 year old Aidan, killed by a group calling itself the Real IRA in a thankfully failing bid to disrupt the recently signed Belfast or Good Friday Agreement, we heard a small part of the story of a man who finally now is met with an inquiry into what happened and how what he deeply believes was a preventable tragedy might be prevented in the future.

        What I remember from the docudrama on the Omagh bombing, whose narrative centered almost entirely on Mr. Gallagher’s perspective, is the quietness of the film, the lack of music to help anticipate or feel a particular way or get a sense of comforting communal spirit, the absence, the shock of the bomb and the deafening silence and then the quiet numbness and then the ordinariness of grief, and all of that quietness a reflection of Mr. Gallagher’s gentleness, manifested in a soft, quiet voice, and the leadership that nonetheless emerged out of an unshowy but profound persistence to achieve justice in truth. I remember, in the film, Mr. Gallagher wanting to get to the bomb site, certain Aidan would be there, because “He’ll be helping.” It was a certainty repeated when he arrived at the hospital, because he might be helping there. And then looking for his name on the lists. A powerful and wrenching watch.

        As we gathered at the bottom of the hill, Mr. Gallagher (pronounced Galla-her, the hard G meant for the other side), pointed up the hill to the courthouse, where the bomb was reported to be as the police guided shoppers down the hill, to where we now stood, and people complied, casually, chatting as they walked, used to such threats and small explosions. On the street side of where we stood, a car rigged with explosives; on the shop side, a clothing store where mothers and children were buying clothes for school.

        In Enniskillen, Mr. Harkin brought us to a memorial for a 1987 bombing that killed eleven.  Why is it so important that we remember, that we come to these places, Mr. Harkin said. Later I will call family members and I’ll tell them that we came, and what we did, and how many of you were hear to witness and honor the memory. We come to these places to comfort and show what happened has not been forgotten, to bear witness to the past, and to show that bad deeds are countered by our good ones. People who drive by us now will wonder what’s going on here and they’ll Google it and the past will be recovered. 

        All these families and survivors had a choice between revenge and reconciliation, and they chose the latter, because this is what you must know, that there’s more good in the world than bad. This continues to be so We’ll be Irish if that’s what it takes to bring peace. We’ll be British if that’s what it takes to bring peace. And this is where the Good Friday Agreement came from.

        Every small good deed, laying our flowers here today and summoning these memories and others, they do matter, they matter. We gather both to take heart from each other and to give heart.

        In the rubble, Gordon Wilson had his young daughter’s hand in his own. Are you all right, he asked her. Yes, Dad. But then she screamed. And so he asked her again, Marie, are you okay? Yes, Dad, she said again, still holding his hand. And then she screamed. Are you all right, he asked her again. And she told him she loved him, and fell into a coma and soon died. For Gordon Wilson, the enduring message was her last message, that of love. And that’s how he came to his line, broadcast widely, I bear them no ill will, I bear them no grudge.