The Books: Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001: ‘Belfast,’ by Seamus Heaney

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001.

My father gave me this beautiful volume in hard-cover. I refer to it all the time, one of the most important books in my library. It is a collection of prose writing from Seamus Heaney from 1971 to 2001.

As a poet from Northern Ireland, who “came up” in the late 1960s, Heaney often found himself at the center of political upheaval. Heaney has written about that quite often: a poet has to write what he wants to write, there has to be a personal feeling behind the poem, a sense of a voice, an “I”, etc. But that was made complicated by the situation of Irish poets living in Northern Ireland at that time of war. Your “I” is attached to the larger group, whatever group that may be. How do you identify yourself? How do you understand yourself? Heaney grew up as part of a hated minority. As a child, he was not strictly aware that anything was different, although his awareness of borders and county-lines and last names and religion was part of the warp and weft of his childhood. He may not have understood, but he knew. He was always reminded that he was Irish, and yet the entire culture surrounding him was so insistently British that there was no room for the Irish to maneuver. This is particularly interesting when it comes to writing. Heaney grew up with the accepted literary canon. There were very few Irish voices represented. There didn’t seem anything really wrong with that, not to a boy who was 11, 12 years old. But as Heaney grew older, as he started to pick up his own pen, he searched around for precedents, for voices other than the accepted British voices. There are many. The Irish are a literary people. You know, you put James Joyce on your fiver and that tells you a lot about what the culture values. (Take that with a grain of salt because Jimmy had a very conflicted relationship with his home nation: he could not live there. And yet … it was all he could ever write about. So, you know. Layers.)

In Northern Ireland, all publishing outlets were British-run and British-owned. (Heaney’s generation of writers would change that.) So you were shoe-horned into British-ness if you wanted to be heard. There was no sense of accepted Northern Irish-ness. Heaney’s awakening to that happened to him as a young man, when he started gathering together with other young writers in Northern Ireland at that time, a collection of Irish writers known, informally, as “The Group.” These people would end up dominating the literary world. They were not political, they were literary, but the point remains that everything in Northern Ireland is political, language most of all. Heaney gets that. And so poets and writers, once the violence exploded to the surface in the late 1960s, were put in the unenviable position of feeling obligated to “weigh in” on what was going on. Everything one wrote was seen in that context. And the context was unavoidable. Poets have always been called upon to “weigh in”, that is one of their roles since time immemorial. One may want to “rise above” the context, but in 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 … rising above was no longer possible.

That’s what this essay, “Belfast,” is all about. Heaney has written a lot about those terrible years, and of course his most well-known collection of poems is called North. The situation eventually became so painful, so horrifying, that Heaney removed himself and his family from it, and went and lived in the countryside in Ireland proper. He had to find his bearings. Writers who associate themselves ONLY with politics become mouth-pieces for their side, and often their work does not travel beyond that very specific context. Heaney had other things he wanted to do. He wanted to translate Sweeney Astray, he wanted to translate Beowulf. He did both of these things, to great acclaim. Language is always political in Ireland. A native language had been snuffed out through a near-total genocide. James Joyce was always, always aware that the language he grew up speaking was not the language of his ancestors, and that awareness separated himself from … himself, really. From an ability to connect. These are important topics, especially to writers, who work with words, who question and examine words.

“Belfast” is made up of two essays, “The Group” and “Christmas, 1971”. The first part has to do with the aforementioned “Group,” the gathering together of similar-minded people in Ulster and elsewhere, for poetry readings, writing groups, informal gatherings … a groundswell of interest in their Irish-ness. Admitting that one is Irish does not necessarily mean that one throws out all the good stuff that comes along with British-ness (i.e. Shakespeare, to give the most obvious example). But in the mid-60s, that was not immediately apparent. Irish-ness and an assertion of nationalist pride was politically dangerous and perceived as very threatening by the British. All of those pressures went into the formation of “The Group.”

The second part of the essay, which I will excerpt from today, gives a devastating and horribly vivid portrait of Belfast, in the Christmas of 1971. This is a piece published in 1976. There is very little retrospect. He’s writing about his current reality.

Excerpt from Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, ‘Belfast’ by Seamus Heaney

There are few enough people on the roads at night. Fear has begun to tingle through the place. Who’s to know the next target on the Provisional list? Who’s to know the reprisals won’t strike where you are? The bars are quieter. If you’re carrying a parcel you make sure it’s close to you in case it’s suspected of being about to detonate. In the Queen’s University staff common-room recently, a bomb disposal squad had defused a bundle of books before the owner had quite finished his drink in the room next door. Yet when you think of the corpses in the rubble of McGurk’s Bar such caution is far from risible.

Then there are the perils of the department stores. Last Saturday a bomb scare just pipped me before I had my socks and pajamas paid for in Marks and Spencer, although there were four people on the Shankill Road who got no warning. A security man cornered my wife in Robinson and Cleaver – not surprisingly, when she thought of it afterwards. She had a timing device, even though it was just an old clock from an auction, lying in the bottom of her shopping bag. A few days previously someone else’s timing device had given her a scare when an office block in University Road exploded just as she got out of range.

There are hardly any fairy lights, or Christmas trees, and in many cases there will be no Christmas cards. This latter is the result of a request by the organizers of the civil disobedience campaign, in order that revenue to the Post Office may be cut as much as possible over the joyous season. If people must send cards, then they are asked to get the anti-internment cards which are being produced by the People’s Democracy and the Ardoyne Relief Committee to support, among others, the defendants of the internees in Long Kesh camp. Which must, incidentally, be literally the brightest spot in Ulster. When you pass it on the motorway after dark, it is squared off in neon, bright as an airport. An inflammation on the black countryside. Another of our military decorations.

The seasonal appeals will be made again to all men of goodwill, but goodwill for its proper exercise depends upon an achieved self-respect. For some people in this community, the exercise of goodwill towards the dominant caste has been h hampered by the psychological hoops they have been made to jump and by the actual circumstances of their lives within the state, British and all as it may have been. A little goodwill in the Establishment here towards the notion of being Irish would take some of the twists out of the minority. Even at this time it is difficult to extend full sympathy to the predicament of that million among us who would ask the other half-million to exalt themselves by being humbled. You see, I have heard a completely unbigoted and humane friend searching for words to cope with his abhorrence of the Provisionals and hitting on the mot juste quite unconsciously: ‘These … these … Irish.’