Poetic Justice: The Representation of Bloody Sunday’s (1972) Victims’ Narrative in (Northern) Irish Poetry.
On the 30 January 1972 the Parachute Regiment of the British army deliberately shot and killed 14 innocent civilians during a civil rights march in Derry/Northern Ireland. Minutes after the shooting, it is evident that the eyewitness accounts of survivors could not differ more from the army’s version of the events. Eyewitnesses maintain that the 14 men and boys who were shot were unarmed and trying to escape the shooting or aid those who were already injured. The army claims to have targeted only identified gunmen and terrorists. Hence, British government launches a tribunal soon after the massacre that is to investigate the events of that day. Despite forensic evidence and eyewitness accounts stating the opposite, this tribunal backs the army’s version of the events which is then accepted as the British government’s official version of Bloody Sunday. This leads to outrage and protests by eyewitnesses, survivors and relatives of the dead who campaign for decades challenging the wrong accusations against the dead and demanding a second independent inquiry. In 1998, the British government launches a second tribunal that investigates what led to the massacre. In 2010, this second tribunal revokes the version of the first tribunal and accepts that none of the dead or injured posed any threat when targeted and shot by the army. To this day nobody has been prosecuted for the shooting on Bloody Sunday.
Bloody Sunday remains a painful turning point in the context of the civil war in Northern Ireland and has therefore attracted many reactions from artists inside and outside of Ireland. Ever since the massacre took place, poets from Ireland, particularly the North, have been using their poetry to deal with the massacre and the injustice against Derry’s Catholic community. In my thesis, I focus on Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ (1972), Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Road to Derry’ (1972) and ‘Casualty’ (1979), Paul Muldoon’s ‘The Year of the Sloes, for Ishi’ (1973), ‘Herm’ (2002) and ‘Dirty Data’ (2015), Seamus Deane’s ‘After Derry, 30 January 1972’ (1972) and Medbh McGuckian’s ‘The Statement of My Right Honourable Friend’ (2015) and ‘The Questioning of Solider L’ (2015). The detailed and in-depth analyses of these poems underline which images and motifs are used in order to establish a counter-narrative to the ‘official’ version of the British government. By doing so, the focus will remain on how the victims are portrayed and how claims against the victims made in the first report are disputed in poetry. Some poems directly quote and include eyewitness accounts and thus, maintain and highlight these testimonies. Most of the poems also include anticolonial positions and aim at reclaiming the massacre site for the locals and by doing so also reclaim the narrative authority. The focus on Bloody Sunday in so many poems by well-established poets underlines the fact that the massacre is part of the cultural memory and identity of the Catholic community in the North.
The poets faced different challenges and had to negotiate the possibilities and limitations of speaking about the massacre and representing the victims’ narrative. Although the poets are well-known and well-established at the moment of publication, the poems dealing with Bloody Sunday remain mostly unknown and neglected in the context of their entire works. While most of the poets felt morally obligated to respond to the massacre through their poetry, they were faced with accusations of political bias and propaganda. It is also remarkable that the Bloody Sunday poems receive mostly worse reviews and criticism than other comparable poems by the same poets. This raises the question whether the portrayal of political events compromises the aesthetics of poetry or whether literary criticism in Ireland displays a political bias by dismissing poetry about Bloody Sunday by default. In order to answer the question, I will explore the postcolonial and revisionist juxtapositions in relation to Irish writing and literary criticism and the position of art in a political context.