A Brief Look Back (FYI)

Some of you may still be contemplating a revision of the Research Review paper. I just yesterday saw this quote by Cynthia Ozick (from an interview in the May/Summer 2009 edition of The Writer's Chronicle) in response to the question of what it means to be a review writer, and I thought you might find it interesting (she finds a more articulate way of framing my assignment directive to find opportunities to turn your review into a broader conversation, making it a hybrid genre that combines straight review and an essayistic sensibility): "A review is a job of probity: of honest and honorable responsibility to a fellow writer's craft and thought. Otherwise it will be nothing more than a hit-and-run verdict, a vacuous Yes or No in a brief final paragraph. This may be why a serious review will generally turn into a review-essay, where there is space enough to engage critically, both broadly and vertically, with prior and contemporary culture. When I saw that my reviews were becoming actual essays, I wondered whether there might be some connecting theme among them that expressed, unwittingly, the Zeitgeist, or, with far less hubris, one writer's idiosyncratic perspective, whether literary or moral."

Last Orders Family Tree

Hey.

I've started reading Last Orders, and I'm really enjoying it so far. I did, however, have a lot of trouble keeping track of all of the names and places that get thrown around in the first hundred pages or so. So, I started keeping a kind of family tree on the last page of my book.  And I thought that since I have it anyway, I'd offer it up here.

I'm putting it up in the comments section following this post.  In a lot of ways, I think that figuring out the connections between people is part of the fun of Last Orders, so you may not want to read this right away.  But if you get to page, say, fifty, and you still don't know who's who, (which is about where I was when I started writing things down) it might be worth glancing at.

I think I've managed to avoid almost all major plot spoilers.

(Eric, if this isn't something you want posted, please feel free to take it down - I won't mind ^_^).

Hope it helps!

Following Friday's Theme of Forgiveness

On Friday we talked about the Good Friday Agreement and if forgiveness and hope play a big role in healing. I found this article a few weeks ago in my local newspaper. I think it does a good job conveying the sadness of loss and the ability to move forward:

Kasey Binsted, older sister of Tyler and Seth Binsted, was a University of Montana junior majoring in journalism and history when Tyler was murdered in March 2008 in Richmond, Va. She shared her thoughts about her brother, and her plans to honor him, in a letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local_other/article/BINS24G_20090323-210402/239057/

Original Richmond Times Dispatch article:
http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/crime/article/BINS22_20090321-221613/237845/

Seeing it Through with Newer Hands

My title suggests, I guess, that the lyric from the Frames's song is hanging around in my head. In any event, I hope your sense is that Eureka Street fit in well with the pursuits of our course, and that you enjoyed the novel. We rightfully praise it for creating space for non-bigoted and politically skeptical subject positions, for showing that identity is dynamic and processual (think, for example, of Peggy and Caroline's mid-life, transgressive assertions) rather than birth-given and static, for showing in the tenderest of ways (at times) that sectarianism defines neither the city of Belfast nor Northern Ireland as a whole. In terms of the broader contexts of our course, certainly we can say that the situation in Northern Ireland has forced the English to ask still more questions about themselves, as ever more hyphenated and hybrid identities supplant the more backward looking British and English identities.

Remembering Carter's point in class on Friday about the importance of looking forward, I thought I'd share this quote from Seamus Deane; once you read it a couple times and unpack it, you realize how insightful it is: "“We stand in servitude to history if we insist upon it as an explanation for the future we might have had but won’t have. Freeing ourselves from that, we can begin to anticipate, not remember our future.”

Peacing Together Northern Ireland

Here is a link (accessible via the always useful CAIN site) to the text of the Belfast Agreement (also commonly referred to as the Good Friday Agreement). Over 94% voted in favor of the Agreement in the Republic of Ireland, while over 71% voted in favor of it in Northern Ireland (though only 55% of Northern Ireland's unionists voted for it).

Some nine years later, in May 2007, when the historic power-sharing government finally got underway, the Irish writer Colum McCann published a moving editorial in the New York Times. Here's an excerpt:

The victories of peace aren’t as immediate as those of war. It is difficult to imagine the members of the Assembly’s opposing parties shaking hands and agreeing on the colors of the flowers for the Easter parade. It will be a long, rocky road. Parts of the North are still separated by 50-foot-high “peace” walls. More than 90 percent of public housing is segregated, and research has shown that even 3-year-olds still display sectarian instincts. But in the aftermath of so many decades of violence, children are out in East Belfast scrubbing the walls free of political graffiti. Fierce enemies are shaking hands. Prisons, like the infamous H-Block, have been torn down.

There is no greater moment in war than the end of it. The vague dream of getting older, for politicians and terrorists and even children, is that we can somehow still become better people. As much as anything, the move toward devolution is a glimmer of hope for the rest of the world — if it can happen in Northern Ireland, it’s possible that it can happen anywhere. Palestine. Sri Lanka. Iraq.

One of the reasons that center holds is that no one politician, or party, or popular figure is trying to own the peace. It is an international agreement that owes as much to the vision of political leaders as it does to the thousands of mothers and fathers who have brokered it from the inside.

The questions of this generation of children are yet to be shaped. With luck and vision, the “Why?” will be said with a bewildered look backward rather than with a horrified glance about.

For a nation that has shouldered so much for so long, the possibility of no more needless small white coffins is almost answer enough.

Michael Jackson, Bhangra and Bollywood

While this has nothing to do with our what we are discussing now, I just couldn't resist sharing. I stumbled across this while wasting time on YouTube and I thought you all might get a bit of a kick out of it.

This clip here, is from 2008's Britain's Got Talent, which is a talent show where the winners end up performing for the Royal Variety Show. These performers, Suleman Mirza and Madhu Singh, are Michael Jackson dance tribute artists. I know, I know, but it gets even better. Their music is also a mish-mash of Bhangra and Bollywood, and they even throw some Eastern-flavored moves in there too. It's pretty entertaining.

If you want to know more about them, look here.

I thought it was particularly interesting because of how much cultural fusion is happening. Imitation of an American musician, thrown together with various Eastern dance and music forms and it's all right there in Britain were they are competing to see who get to perform for the Queen! Wow, that's some serious hybridization.

IRA, UVA, OTG ... GFC?

OK, I'll dispense with the mystery regarding the new acronym that's appearing here as a form of cyber-graffiti (blogfiti?) and just tell you that it stands for "Graffiti from Carter." That is to say, Carter has forwarded along some interesting images that she wanted to share with you (and perhaps we can call upon her good nature, either here in this space or in class, to say a few words about them eventually). These first four -- one, two, three, and four -- are from Northern Ireland, but I particularly like these two -- one, two -- by the legendary London-based graffiti artist, Banksy, both because they're visually striking and because they seem to be ideologically aligned with what McLiam Wilson's "OTG" might stand for in some way ... And then there's this last one, which is also quite arresting.

Eureka Street

Greetings again, everyone. Here is some of the lowdown on Robert McLiam Wilson: Born in 1964. A Belfast writer. A Catholic (as a Catholic growing up in West Belfast, he might have been expected to have developed IRA sympathies). "Like that of most citizens of Belfast," he has written, "my identity is the subject of some local dispute. Some say I'm British, some say I'm Irish, some even say that there's no way I'm five foot eleven and that I'm five ten at best. In many ways I'm not permitted to contribute to this debate. If the controversy is ever satisfactorily concluded, I will be whatever the majority of people tell me I am. As a quotidian absolute, nationality is almost meaningless. For an Italian living in Italy, Italianness is not much of a distinction. What really gives nationality its chiaroscuro, its flavor, is a little dash of hatred and fear. Nobody really knows or cares what they are until they meet what they don't want to be. Then it's time for the flags and guns to come out."

Eureka Street (1996) is his third novel, following the highly regarded and prize-winning Ripley Bogle (1989) and Manfred's Pain (1992). You'll gather very quickly that he's a striking urban writer and, indeed, Eureka Street will remind us of other great urban writers like Dickens and, more appropriately, Joyce. As you read, think about how his Belfast is mapped: is it mapped according to the confining logic and segregated spatialities of the Troubles (no-go areas, Catholics here, Protestants there)? Or is there a different logic at work? Having read de Certeau should help you to think about mobility and identity in McLiam Wilson's Belfast.

As I'll hope to mention in class on Monday, the dominant literary genre during the Troubles has undoubtedly been the thriller -- there have been many hundreds of them. They very often have quite grossly simplified the nature of the conflict; if one didn't know better, they would cause one to think that Northern Ireland has been utterly consumed by war (a war fought by two crazed, tribal groups, fighting to the death). One thing McLiam Wilson sets out to do in this novel is to represent the ordinary citizen, the citizen who is more concerned with the mundane realities of day-to-day life. In fact, McLIam Wilson once said that "an awful lot of people in Northern Ireland simply don't care whether it is Irish, British or independent. Yet no one speaks for them and no one reflects their views or even demonstrates the fact that they exist."

The other big part of the historical context for this novel is the fact that the peace process had started to gain a kind of tenuous momentum by 1993. It was a time of ceasefires, broken ceasefires, fits and starts, persistent but cautious optimism ... It's this new spirit of hopefulness that may be causing the classic Troubles thriller to mutate into something noticeably different in Eureka Street. Think about how you would characterize the tone and the genre identity of this novel. What is this novel's attitude towards the contemporary conflict? Towards politics? How does it interpret Irish and Northern Irish history? What is its vision of the future? Where does Britishness fit in when we talk about identity in this novel?

Irish culture and British Colonialism

This is a little off topic, but I wanted to share a little Irish/ English history with the class. After starting Eureka Street I decided to do a little research on the long and rocky history of Irish and English relations. Thanks to professor Kane in the English department I found an interesting book by Theodore Allen called The Invention of the White Race.

Allen's novel focuses on the English presence in Ireland starting at the first attempts of takeover in the 11th century. He writes that between the 11th and 17th centuries the English failed to overtake the Irish because the two cultures kept molding together. Marriages between Englishman and Irish women spawned a whole new population. Allen suggests that these mixed generations prevented the complete assimilation of the Irish into British culture. Also, religious beliefs changed and spread as a result of the mixture of English and Irish customs. After the 17th century the "Irish case" under British Colonialism evolved into a need for the separation of the two populations (at this point the mixed generations are no longer considered). This is a result of British frustration stemming from the continuos string of failed attempts to control the Irish. The English began to vocalize the idea that there is a physiological differential between the two populations. This suggestion of basic physiological differences lead to the formation of two "races" -English and Irish. This came from several hundred years of searching for justifiable and legitimate reasons for the takeover of Ireland. The British wanted the Irish to live in "English" homes with fences and gardens in order to be civilized. Similarly, the nomadic people in Ireland were seen as the extreme "other" and must be civilized. Existing in a fixed space is fundamental in British settlement policies. The idea of the dark and scary forest is a common theme in tons of early Colonial literature. In order to bring these people into the light and away from the darkness of nature, they must submit to civilization the British (or "white man's") way.

A Week in the UK

I was fortunate enough to spend spring break in the UK, and though I spent most of my time in Wales, I did get to experience some of the London we've encountered this semester. Upon flying into Heathrow, my fiance and I were faced with the task of navigating "the tube" we read about in Lonely Londoners. It was confusing as hell! I couldn't imagine an immigrant from the West Indies, especially an old lady, attempting to make her way around London on the tube. While an efficient way to travel, it is also extremely hectic and you could easily end up in the wrong place.

While we didn't get to experience the eastern-London boroughs encountered in The Satanic Verses, some of you might've had the chance to read up on the G20 anti-globalization protests. The summit was in The Docklands where much of Thatcher's urban reclamation projects, which created the housing squeeze that benefitted the Shandaar Cafe in The Satanic Verses, were carried out. Indeed, there were something like 150 groups of protesters, many of them race-based and immigrant groups. The coverage of BBC was interesting.

While multicultural England was mostly on the periphery of my trip, I did enjoy a Bengali curry restaurant in Wales. It was mostly very interesting to try and get a feel for the city we read about so much in Selvon and Rushdie's work.