It seems to me that the focus on the historical arguments about how the Famine has been represented in history is actually a way of avoiding facing the terror at the heart of the event. (Though this begs the wider question of whether it is ever really possible to represent trauma.) I remember something that the historian Brendan Bradshaw wrote, which touches on this: ‘the trauma of the famine reveals, perhaps more tellingly than any other episode of Irish history, the inability of practitioners of value-free history to cope with the catastrophic dimensions of the Irish past.’ In the same essay he questions an entire approach to Irish history which he feels had always valued academic dryness over emotional and moral responses, and he concludes by making this exceptionally powerful argument – Mary Daly’s strategy, like others who’ve written about the Famine, he asserts, is to distance herself and her readers from its stark reality: ‘by assuming an austerely clinical tone, as befitting academic discourse, and by resort to sociological euphemism … thus cerebralising, and thereby desensitising the trauma’ [my emphasis]. This approach is dangerous, Bradshaw argues, because it ‘denies the historian recourse to value judgements and, therefore, access to the moral and emotional register necessary to respond to human tragedy.’fn11
But the aspect that Bradshaw touches on here surely goes far beyond the issue of historical representation. It raises the question of whether historiography is capable at all of communicating the reality of traumatic events; perhaps we need to look to other disciplines, other forms of representation, to truly understand cataclysmic events like starvation or genocide. I think here about the way that Lanzmann’s film Shoah radically affected our understanding of the Holocaust when it came out in 1985. A film which managed to achieve things that had eluded the most brilliant historians of that genocide for decades.
I climb higher on the path above the cliffs. Where the sea below is shadowed now it has changed to a slate grey-blue. I can just see the island three miles further round the coast, but beyond that now all is hazed. Another rumble of thunder far off, barely audible. A group of black birds are hunched on fence posts and rocks ahead of me just off the path. Too small for ravens, surely? I get closer, so near that I can see their curved, dark pinkish-red bills – choughs, eight of them, sitting in pairs, perfectly happy for me to share their space. Choughs that ‘wing the midway air’ at the end of King Lear, choughs the wild acrobats of the cliffs here, sometimes reminding me, as they fall vertically, thrillingly, pulling in their wings, of children, holding their knees, leaping, shrieking, into swimming pools. I walk on; the choughs slip off the cliffs as I go.
And suddenly something else comes to me – perhaps you’ve had the same thought – virtually all of the testimony concerning the Famine comes from eyewitnesses, from bystanders. The victims are viewed, the witness moves on and later writes down their account. This, again, creates an inevitable distancing, even in the most vivid accounts. Here, for instance, is a passage by Mitchel in The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), describing what he sees from the windows of his mail-coach in 1847:
In the depth of winter we travelled to Galway … and saw sights that will never wholly leave the eyes that beheld them: – cowering wretches, almost naked in the savage weather, prowling in turnip-fields, and endeavouring to grub up roots which had been left, but running to hide as the mail-coach rolled by … groups and families, sitting or wandering on the high-road, with failing steps and dim patient eyes, gazing hopelessly into infinite darkness … Sometimes I could see in front of the cottages, little children leaning against the fence when the sun shone out – for they could not stand – their limbs fleshless, their bodies half naked, their faces bloated yet wrinkled, and of a pale greenish hue – children who would never, it was too plain, grow up to be men and women.
Again, even through Mitchel’s sympathetic eyes, we have the collectivised groups of anonymous, suffering humanity – who, under the fleeting glance of the narrator, remain objectified, ‘wretches’ – unable to emerge as recognisable individuals, to be seen by us fully. In all that I have read on the Famine, I have not come across a single account from a survivor themselves, in their own words, whether written or transcribed.fn12 This seems like a startling lacuna in Famine testimony. That there exists no equivalent of the electrifying testimony of Simon Srebnik, Abraham Bomba and Filip Müller in Shoah – those direct, unmediated voices. Or the words of a Primo Levi or an Otto Dov Kulka. It seems that there is no book, or lengthy account of the terror of the Famine, written from the perspective of one who survived. Curiously, this means that the Famine feels more distant from our times – not only compared to the Holocaust, but also to slavery, about which many powerful survivor accounts exist. This lack of words from the survivors’ direct perspective creates huge imaginative challenges, not helped by other realities. In the 1840s, no visual or audio recording existed, and photography had barely been invented, so we have not a single photograph. Just those awful, generic pen-and-ink drawings, which you see reproduced wherever the Famine is written about.
What, then, if anything, can transmit to us today the real trauma of the Famine? Art? Theatre? Sculpture? Film? Possibly. Or perhaps we have to go to words and music; maybe they can take us closer? Poetry in particular seems to provide us with the rapid revelations of grief and pain that is beyond the reach of fiction. To read Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ is a visceral experience. Though written in 1942, nearly a hundred years after the Famine, the event shadows the entire poem. It is as if his protagonist Patrick Maguire has internalised his ancestors’ pain completely, the stony impulse to survive at all costs. We see him and his men moving like ‘scarecrows’ over the potato field at the opening of the poem, and at the end, many years later, after another October harvest has been brought in, we see him ‘patting a potato-pit against the weather / An old man fondling a new-piled grave’. More than twenty years later, Seamus Heaney takes up Kavanagh’s linkage in ‘At a Potato Digging’ – though now it’s a mechanical digger that splits the soil, with the labourers swarming behind ‘Like crows attacking crow-black fields’. Seeing the potatoes piled in pits takes Heaney straight back to ‘Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on / wild higgledy skeletons / scoured the land in ’forty-five / wolfed the blighted root and died’. Later, ‘Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard / faces chilled to a plucked bird. / In a million wicker huts / beaks of famine snipped at guts.’
There are also remarkable poems by John Hewitt and Brendan Kennelly which more directly link to their ancestors. In ‘The Scar’ Hewitt transmits the memories of his great-grandmother, with an unforgettable image of an encounter during the Famine:
There’s not a chance now that I might recover
one syllable of what that sick man said,
tapping upon my great-grandmother’s shutter,
and begging, I was told, a piece of bread;
for on his tainted breath there hung infection
rank from the cabins on the stricken west,
the spores from black potato-stalks, the spittle
mottled with poison in his rattling chest.
In ‘My Dark Fathers’ Kennelly contrasts the sounds and images of music and dance with the silences that fell ‘when winds of hunger howled at every door’: