Belfast on BELFAST - Gareth Higgins
I was born and raised and cinema-initiated in Belfast but I didn’t want to talk about Belfast. I had initially opted not to write about Kenneth Branagh’s movie mostly because I'm not sure I can do more than use it as a jumping-off point for a discussion about the city and our history. Watching it the first time, I saw a mirror of what I sensed growing up just a few years after the events it portrays. I also wondered what folk who know Mexico City feel about Roma - is it too close to home to be evaluated as a film? Watching Belfast the second time, I felt genuine distress about the real-life lament to come in the years after the movie's events, which impacted all of us who lived there, some of course far more than others.
I share the view that Belfast is a wee bit muted, a wee bit too quick, a wee bit too "shiny", and it has a touch of blarney too; but not a dollop - these folk really do remind me of my own, those streets are just what some of them still look like, that violence and its subtle-sinister underbelly very recognizable. Most of all, the three tributes with which the movie ends are the closest thing to a unified memorial our still-divided, yet healing community has; and the lovely contemporary images of my beloved city make me love it even more.
Belfast is an important part of the mosaic of cinema about northern Ireland*, and tells a story that hasn’t been attempted before: the one about the people who needed to leave. It joins other Irish and northern Irish movies, each of which contributes something meaningful to our understanding of the ways of that world.
Watch Belfast alongside Ryan’s Daughter and The Field for a deeper sense of the relationship between land and identity, conservatism and reactionary religion and politics in Ireland, and the generous, self-giving natures of some folks in every community; and Odd Man Out, Cal, Elephant and Five Minutes of Heaven lamenting the wound of violence done to and by ordinary people. My three favorite northern Irish films are Good Vibrations, a slightly myth-making tale of a fella who transcended the Troubles with music and community; I am Belfast, Mark Cousins’ brilliant essay film about the archetypally truthful myth of the city as a wounded healer, even of itself; and Ordinary Love, which means so much to me because while it’s a story that could take place anywhere, the particular way it takes place could only happen in Belfast. (And please, see Wolfwalkers for a magnificent poetic embodiment of both what ails us and what could heal us, with a vibrancy equal to Pixar’s and Studio Ghibli’s best, and a depth to stand alongside Watership Down, The Dark Crystal and The Fox and the Hound.)
At any rate, I think Branagh’s Belfast does feel a lot like the Belfast I know; and the film is a gift especially to those folks still tending to the wounds of generational conflict. It’s not Schindler’s List - but it isn’t trying to be. Belfast is a small and imperfectly formed sketch of an experience shared by tens of thousands of people on the cusp of the Troubles. And the Spielberg film with which it most warrants comparison is actually Empire of the Sun, for both its melodrama and magic are seen through the eyes of a child, and look exactly as they should. Cramped houses compensated for by streets where people seemed to have right of way over cars, every day a possible fiesta. Sectarian rage and physical fire erupting as if out of nowhere, though of course the reasons reach far back. Pressure to pick a side or keep your head down. Ordinary people holding back a tsunami, unable to prevent the flood. In a place where an outside toilet could become a wizardly grandpa’s throne.
My grandfather was a lot like the way Ciarán Hinds shows up in Belfast - even with the outside toilet. And my dad, like Jamie Dornan in the movie, had the opportunity to take a job “across the water”, but a literal crossed wire got in the way. Mum was reluctant for us to move, so when in the interview room in England Dad was offered the job, he asked for some time to work it out with his family. The panel told him they needed an immediate decision. He rang my mum to say they’d offered him the job, and to ask what she thought. But at that moment she was on the phone with her mum, who was telling her we should - in near-identical terms to the last spoken words in Belfast - go and not look back. So when Dad was trying to tell Mum he’d been offered the job and we could move to England, Mum was being persuaded by her mum that it would be ok. But that meant the phone line was busy, so after a few attempts, Dad went back into the interview room, declined the job, and we didn’t move. Thirty-seven years later, further bereaved and further tormented by the Troubles, but never losing affection for the place, they both still live near Belfast. Of such chance closings and openings are our stories made for dramatic retellings, for emotive resonances, for can’t-quite-believe-it-happened-that-way, but it did. And you bet: the last scene of Belfast undid me. A grandmother leaning her head on the door, knowing that even though her heart must break, love demands she set her child free - this may be one of the most common experiences, and least portrayed images in the history of Ireland’s shadows.
For the ones who left.
For the ones who stayed.
And for all the ones who were lost.
For a couple of decades now some of us have been exploring together how to remember the past in a way that honors the suffering without repeating it. Nearly 4,000 dead. More than 43,000 injured. Countless others traumatized, broken, wasted. Neighbors who turned on each other. Ordinary folks who wanted the best, falling into a hell of history’s making. Yet also victims and survivors who have given up the natural impulse to revenge and the civil right to hold their abusers accountable in exchange for the painful compromise of peace. People who harmed their neighbors in what they believed to be a just cause, laying down weapons and sharing power with their opponents for the sake of the common good.
We haven’t been able to agree a common memorial to those who died in the Troubles, mostly because we haven’t been able to agree who should be remembered and why. In short, while some future moment of deep reconciliation can be invited, for now it’s reasonable for folks whose loved ones were killed by a bomb or a gun to not want the person who planted the bomb or fired the gun to be remembered on the same wall. But I’ve never heard anyone in northern Ireland dispute that the suffering of a bereaved family is anything other than a universe, even if the suffering was to some degree self-inflicted. This is a hopeful sign. There’s no significant body of political weight nor even political opinion in northern Ireland that seeks to eradicate the legitimacy of the other, not any more. There’s no one publicly advocating that people should not be able to remember their dead in respectful ways. There’s no one who really wants to go back.
And, lately, my scrappy and gorgeous, cold and sunny city is gaining a sense of itself beyond being merely the location for a terrible thing. We’re noticing that our past always included people heroic not for their militarism, but for their nonviolence; creative in empathetic literature and music; tending to the ecosystem of which we’re all a part (the country parks and nature trails and coastal paths alone would take you years to get round). We have festivals every other day of the week, it seems. We continue to evolve a better way of doing politics - sharing power with rather than over, maximizing access to democracy, enshrining human rights and equality as a foundational standard in all legislation, making policing accountable to the entire community - and therefore not only making policing more effective at protecting and serving in ways appropriate to the trouble presenting itself, but also reducing the tendency to scapegoat the police.
It is not perfectly realized, of course - Brexit has thrown a spanner in the works, and power-sharing has been periodically interrupted when our differences become too much for us to handle by ourselves. But this is, to my mind, only a reflection of why the problem became so big in the first place: when the stewards of British power denied their responsibility for creating a mess on the island of Ireland, and when the stewards of Irish power appeared to see “the North” as akin to an embarrassing uncle you don’t invite round very often for fear of what he might do at the dinner table. The wider peace process was resourced in profound ways by the European Union, successive US Presidential administrations and US American, South African, Finnish, and Canadian peace practitioners. And more. We didn’t get into the mess on our own, and we’re getting out of it with the help of others too.
We have not yet adequately responded to the needs of victims and survivors, some of whom were bereaved or injured more than once; many of whom had no option but to scramble to make a living in the presence of physical pain and emotional torment, and in the absence of necessary healing, not to mention compensation. Yet steps continue to amend for this lack; not that such amends could ever fully be made.
The captions that conclude Belfast are the memorial we’ve been looking for. Enough for now, at least.
For the ones who left.
For the ones who stayed.
And for all the ones who were lost.
Ones. Yet not ones in the absence of others. It is community that was most lost, it is community that has saved us the most, and community is the reason I have not ever fully left. Community - connecting with ourselves and with each other, sharing what we have and asking for what we need - is what will save America too. And not only community among people - our place within the entire ecosystem is more undeniable today than at any point since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The web of interdependent relationships evoked by Desmond Tutu in ubuntu theology (I am because we all are) is mirrored - to name merely one example - by the way the roots of trees communicate with each other. Nothing is ever truly separate. Only the stories we tell convince us otherwise. Belfast - and the rest of northern Ireland - went through hell. We are emerging now into a way of being together that might help show that nowhere else needs to go through the same hell in order to get to the better place at which we’re still arriving.
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*I spell northern Ireland with a small “n” as an attempt at offering a third way beyond the winner-takes-all divided options of giving exclusive name-allegiance to the UK or Ireland. The place where I’m from is not reducible to what British Unionism or Irish Nationalism prefers to call it.
IMAGE CREDIT above to our good, much-missed friend Scott Griessel & Creatista; Scott joined one of our Ireland Retreats a few years ago and took photos of Belfast and its environs that melt my heart. We have just a few spaces left on this year's retreats - if you're interested, check out www.irelandretreats.com
