The afterlife of Troubles’ memories
by Allan LEONARD
10 December 2024
Why do survivors of the Troubles conflict in Northern Ireland recall what they do when providing their oral histories to interviewers? What is the collective effect? In a seminar, “The Afterlife of Feelings in Oral Histories of the Troubles”, Ulster University INCORE visiting professor Graham Dawson explored the emotional dynamics in Troubles life stories and their impact on “memory politics” and societal conflict transformation.
Prof. Dawson began by describing his background and previous research, which includes investigating inter-relations between memory, narrative, subjective experience, and identity. Since 1994, he has been researching memories of the Troubles, especially life stories created through grassroots work, for the “possible transformation of wartime memory cultures” after the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.
Dawson continued by explaining that in his book, Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles, he explored a history of conflict memory in two case studies: (1) Irish nationalist and republican memories of Bloody Sunday; and (2) British unionist/loyalist memories of IRA terror along the border with Ireland.
Analysing subjective memories
He told the audience that in his subsequent work — to be published in a forthcoming book, Afterlives of the Troubles: Life Stories, Culture and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland — he has moved away from the framework of trauma to explore alternative ways of understanding the complexity of feelings and emotions that is attached to memories of conflict, which is “in the past” but is often felt years and decades afterwards.
Dawson’s recent work wasn’t to interview participants themselves, but to analyse the interviews done by others, in two collections: (1) The Dúchas Oral History Archive at Falls Community Council in west Belfast; and (2) the histories recorded for a project, “Conflict, Memory and Migration: Northern Irish Migrants and the Troubles in Great Britain”.
The Dúchas archive was conceived as “a tool for learning and for conflict resolution”, as Dawson described it, and a pioneer in the development of oral history has a means, according to its director, Claire Hackett (in attendance), “to build relationships across division and to acknowledge and deal with a conflicted history”. There are about 300 interviews in the Dúchas collection.
The Conflict, Memory and Migration project was a three-year research project that ended in 2022 but continues now informally. The project seeks to analyse the specific history of those who have emigrated from Northern Ireland to Great Britain in the context of the Troubles, and their descendants,, with interest in interviewees’ narratives of departure, settlement in one of three cities (London, Glasgow, and Manchester), in relation to conflict memory. Prof. Dawson’s particular interest concerns how their memories of the Troubles persist and shape the subjective feelings of first-generation migrants. There are about 80 interviews to date in the collection.
Prof. Dawson outlined the approach he took when interpreting the interviews in the two collections. He called it “the Portelli tradition”, with four key ideas: (1) memory is recalled from a particular perspective of the present (i.e. where you are today will affect what you recall of the past); (2) remembering is subjective, a way to make sense of the past and its significance to you today (i.e. not just a playback of all facts of a point of history); (3) memory is a subjective experience, with emotions, feelings, meaning, and bound up with your sense of identity; and (4) memory is done through available culture, such as verbal and visual (body) language, shaped by who is interviewing you and what emerges in that conversation.
He said that he has become interested in the emotional dynamics of an interview, and how this lends itself to the non-linear recollection of events (an interviewee jumping back and forth in their timeline) and certain memories “bubbling up” and “flooding back”:
“I’m searching for a critical vocabulary… for the feelings that arise in, and direct, the process of remembering.”
Dawson described his conceptual approach on what he called the “afterlife” of an emotion — the ways in which emotions “live on” dynamically over time:
“Emotions are durational and involve complex relations between the past, present, and future. Their temporality may be fluid rather than fixed once and for all, and has various characteristics, including the potential for longevity, but also for recurrence, re-emergence, ebb and flow, repetition, as well as a capacity for mutability.”
Oral history interviewees respond to questions and prompts by interviewers who are often interested in establishing a chronological history of their experiences. While interviewees usually try to keep to a linear narrative (this happened, then that, then the next), the feelings aroused during the interview process itself give rise to memories that jump about from one moment to another.
Dawson is particularly interested in this complexity of “the jumble” of emotions in one’s storytelling — the flow of feeling within the course of an interview.
He shared his analysis of some interviews from the two oral history collections.
The tangle of feelings
The first example was an interview from the Dúchas archive, with Olive Maguire, a 32-year-old mother of two when her family was displaced from their home on a west Belfast interface in August 1971. Her displacement was one of an estimated 2,000 people that followed an eruption of intensive rioting and armed combat after the Northern Ireland Government’s introduction of internment without trial.
Dawson read out extracts from Olive’s interview, including a passage in which her remembering flowed rapidly across several time-spaces, chronologically both earlier and later in relation to the moment that she began recalling:
“First backwards in chronological time to her ‘big house’ in Merkland Street; then immediately jumping forwards in time to the moment ‘when I came back’ to Belfast to live in the ‘wee kitchen house in Braemer Street’; backwards much further to her childhood home in Ton Street; forwards from there to her more recent past experience in Ballymurphy; before settling back into that moment in Dublin ‘when I was away and realised I had no home’.”
Olive’s shifts of time, Dawson argued, were caused by the emotional dynamics of her losing her home with a comparison of her childhood home. Dawson called this a “confluence of emotion”; in this case, Olive’s dispiriting and annoying memory of finding her new house in Dublin to be so small, in comparison to the “much bigger” house she had in Merkland Street, and also in comparison to the small, overcrowded family home in Ton Street where she grew up. Olive also spoke about her empathy with Protestants who were also displaced at the time, and her future correspondence with such previous occupants of the house that she acquired. So, Olive’s non-linear story of displacement reflected her emotions aroused during the interview.
Another of Dawson’s examples was from the Conflict, Memory and Migration project, an interview with “Siobhan”, born in 1962 and from a Catholic, urban background in west Belfast. Central to her life was her lesbian identity. She moved to Cork, Ireland, in 1983, before moving to London in 1986 then to the north of England in 1999. Siobhan remembered in detail aspects of her childhood and early adulthood, in which memories of turbulent family relations are closely interwoven with her memories of the Troubles.
Siobhan explains that when she went to London, she began to understand more her “not normal” upbringing. For Dawson, the new social spaces that she occupied in late 1980s London — multicultural, feminist, queer, therapeutic — gave her the language that she lacked in Belfast to “name” her experiences and identities. Furthermore, from a position of being a queer migrant, Siobhan was able to make sense of and reassess her conflicted childhood feelings about family, sexuality, and the Troubles, with some measure of “reparative remembering”.
New kinds of conflict social histories
Prof. Dawson concluded his presentation with four points for consideration.
First, he referenced the work of Sara Dybris McQuaid, a cultural analyst of the Troubles, who has called for conflict historians to reflect more on the methods they use, with a focus on the problem of “how to extract, critically evaluate, contextualise, and interpret memories and histories as part of peacebuilding processes”.
Second, Dawson suggested that the type of “secondary analysis” that he demonstrated in his presentation might be used in making “new kinds of social history of the conflict”. For him, this goes beyond oral histories to the wide range of storytelling projects and practices about the Troubles that have flourished in Northern Ireland.
Third, while testimony as a storytelling practice is valued in transitional justice procedures — as a means to establish objective truth about events (what happened, how and why, with what consequences and effects) — a comparable case for the value of storytelling concerned with subjective experience (what it has felt like, how it has been understood) “is yet to be fully articulated”.
Fourth, Dawson offered his presentation as a contribution to the endeavour of exploring the complexity of conflict-formed subjectivities and the afterlife of feelings in oral history interviews, as well as to challenge the “prevailing positivism of legacy policy-making”.
A “usable past” of oral history
During the Q&A session, Prof. Dawson was asked about the psychology of identity and why individuals remember different salient points than others: “Why doesn’t everyone just answer like a reporter’s question — A, B, C, D? Why is it so variable? Why do some people talk about their childhood? Who do other people talk about their emigration?” Dawson replied that his approach is a psychoanalytically informed understanding of memory, in which identity — for the sake of having a stable sense of yourself in this world — is constructed on the basis of a much more complex, contradictory, conflictual subjectivity, with flows of affect, feeling, and emotion. In this way, “We’re making sense of our inner processes, which is a lifetime of ongoing, never-ending, never-completed part of what it means to be a human being.” He cited Alistair Thompson’s phrase of fashioning oral history as a usable “past that we can live with”, in constructing our life story. For Dawson, this is particularly important as a means for those who have gone through horrific experiences to deal with them:
“That’s one of the reasons why I’ve moved away from trauma theory, because I don’t think it gives you very much to help understand those processes of what people are doing to try and make sense of, bind emotionally, these unresolved issues and feelings.”
Dawson was also asked about the implications of the dynamic between past-present and reconciliation. He answered that people who’ve lived through conflict (and those who have been born into a memory world of one) are on a journey that is variable. Citing Brandon Hamber and Grainne Kelly’s work (both in attendance), Dawson said that reconciliation would involve a process of acknowledgement of the experience of the other and taking that into one’s own inner world, to shift your own understanding, “your own coordinates”:
“That happens at different times for different people, and it happens in different times as a general process to the other kinds of temporalities of reconciliation, like through policy development or… truth recovery processes.
“I think we need to understand more about the character of the journey… and what are the conditions under which particular people have been able or not… to understand the specificity of people’s different routes and journeys, to see that as a really fundamental shift in attitudinal change… People are reconciling with themselves as much as, if not more so, than with anyone else.”
Another attendee said that many involved with oral history interview projects aren’t really persuaded by a declared status of Northern Ireland as “post-conflict”, because the subjective layers of people’s experiences “haven’t really been looked at in a deep way, and it surprises me that so little work has been done on that”. She described the launch event of a project involving ex-prisoners, with family members who had suffered stigma from being in the community:
“It’s all these tiny little events or things that are key life moments, key turning points for people that caused them into one type of action or maybe another or maybe not doing something. We have very little grasp of the ensemble of them as a society.
“How do we as a society ever want to deal with the actual, ‘How does post-conflict feel, what is it all about?’ Because it doesn’t feel like there’s a deep enough understanding of what people as individuals, as families, as communities actually lived through and what they felt and what they continue to feel, three, four, five decades ago.”
Dawson responded that he found the term “post-conflict” problematic, because that it is based on a premise of a linear temporal framework (chronological) “that doesn’t help”. As a comparison, he said that in England they still speak of “post-war” since 1945: “The ramifications continue in all kinds of ways and they continue across generations.”
Rather, Dawson preferred the term “conflict transformation”:
“Because it’s a challenge which doesn’t assume the conflict is over. It also suggests that there’s always more to be done in terms of the kind of lack of engagement with addressing questions of subjectivity.”
He remarked how various storytelling archives are neglected resources:
“These are treasure troves, not just for history but for living memory… It’s so important that you raise the question of resources… to support access… to all interviews you’ve done…
“It does come down to the sort of sclerosis in legacy policy… that don’t address these issues in anything like a meaningful way.”
Prof. Dawson called for a need to develop “new interpretive frameworks and models in language”:
“We’ve got to think about what’s going on in this material in a different kind of way. That has to be, in my mind, informed by some theory about subjectivity and transformations in what goes on in [one’s] inner world, how emotions work. Not just for that to be corralled into psychology departments, but for it to be brought into relationships with the culture, social, and political debates.”