The Spirit of Retaliation: The Troubles Abroad
His was the sort of gaze that you could not forget, if you paused long enough to notice. Our task for the weekend was quite clear. Working with a group of students from a rather violent and contested part of Northern Ireland—called Derry or Londonderry, depending upon your tribe—we were to build a small scale model of a community. This creative project would be a means for us facilitators to explore notions of integration, policing, and violence with the teenage students. Most of the students took well to the activity, eventually. They enjoyed the opportunity to get their hands dirty with mod rock, clay, and paint. The students took turns building tiny schools, hospitals, youth clubs, and supermarkets. Some even relished the opportunity to speak freely about “the Troubles” and their own brushes with violence and paramilitaries.
There was this one guy who didn’t really talk, though, and he would only work on one thing: a model of a bonfire. He used all the materials he could find to build his bonfire. It dwarfed everything in the tiny town, looming large over the schools, housing estates, and hospitals. I thought this was odd, but the other students (and adults) encouraged him. They were excited about it and suggesting ways to make it bigger and brighter. When it was all done, the room was full of excitement around his creation. But something in the way this kid looked at this thing deeply disturbed my spirit.
I later learned that in Northern Ireland, they build bonfires. “They” here refers to some Protestant/loyalist communities in this quasi-free state. The large bonfires are accompanied by street parties, parades, and marching bands. The celebrations ostensibly commemorate the victory of Protestant King William of Orange over Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. I’m told by some that the celebration of the 11th and 12th of July is the biggest holiday of the year. Some communities will began collecting wood for the fires as early as Christmas. When it is time to start building, old men and children will go around to homes and businesses with wheelbarrows, vans, and pickup trucks to collect the kindling that has been stored up all year. In some communities, these fires can rise up to one hundred feet. Building the fire is a right of passage for children, and the size and sturdiness of the bonfires is a source of great pride and the occasional rivalry amongst Protestant communities. If you were to ask people why they participate in this ritual, they might tell you that it is an important part of their culture, a tradition that holds together their identity. If you were to ask these students about the significance of the bonfires, they might say, “It’s just good craic,” or Irish parlance for fun.
Others in Northern Ireland, primarily those from Catholic or mixed communities, would say there is something more sinister taking place. They would tell you that the bonfires and parades are provocative acts designed to scare Catholic communities and encourage sectarian sentiments, passing on deep hatred across generations. This interpretation is lent credence by the fact that flags and symbols representing the Catholic community are routinely burned on the fires. Frequently, violent clashes with police and Catholic communities take place during and after the fires. That violence has historically been met with violence from organized Catholic paramilitary forces and unorganized youths picking fights in the streets. They (referring now to some Catholic communities) build their own bonfires, organize their own parades, commemorate their own battles. This cycle has continued to perpetuate itself for what seems to many like forever. In Northern Ireland, ritual responds to ritual and violence response to violence.
Rituals like bonfires and parades in Northern Ireland act as containers for this transgenerational trauma and are ideal vehicles for what theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman names as the Spirit of Retaliation (SoR). Thurman suggests that this Spirit reveals itself in the “conflict between the positive and creative inclination toward community and the positive and destructive inclination toward conquest.”1 For Thurman, the SoR is not merely an occasional unwelcome occurrence in human relations. He writes, “the Spirit of Retaliation is rooted profoundly in the total history of the [human] race. It has an instinctual ground.”2 Thurman argues that the SoR is ultimately about survival and must be relaxed and overcome in order for any type of peace or reconciliation to occur.
In many parts of Northern Ireland, reconciliation has yet to come to fruition despite the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement. I suspect rituals like bonfires and parades are ways of keeping alive the SoR in people’s hearts in preparation for the next large-scale outbreak of violence. A latest example of this cyclical violence is seen in the recent death of 29 year-old reporter Lyra Mckee. As with everything in Northern Ireland, there are multiple stories. From what I can piece together, she was killed on April 18th, 2019 at the hands of the New IRA on the streets of Derry/Londonderry during what appears to be youth and young adult rioting in response to highly militarized and disruptive police searches ahead of the community’s commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising. Ironically, Lyra has written quite powerfully writing on the “inter-generational transmission of trauma.”
Many videos of the events surrounding the shooting were posted to social media. Viewing all these grainy images of broken people standing around the burning vehicles, hurting young people hurling petrol bombs at police armored vehicles, and masked men stepping out of the shadows of chaos to fire the shots that ended Lyra’s life, I couldn’t help but imagine they all shared that disturbing sort of gaze testifying to the vitality of the Spirit of Retaliation.
Photo from Groundwork Northern Ireland