For a place so grimly determined by politics and religion the North of Ireland has a strangely intangible history. Questions as to where the North begins and ends have puzzled generations of artists and thinkers, and more so recently as the future of the last century’s partition comes into question.
Seamus Deane began by thinking about the North as a latter-day Atlantis, sunk by separation. Later he considered it a fifth province, which he worked to creative shape as part of the Field Day collective. Peace changed the outline of the North again, as did the acknowledgment and inclusion of women’s voices in the North’s political leadership and in its cultural landscape. Now the prospect of the future looks uncertain once more in a landscape deformed by the continuing legacies of partition and inflamed by Brexit. The essential problem of the North remains then, as Anna Burns put it in Milkman, of how to see clearly.
Claire Mitchell’s meditation on this problem of orientation is The Ghost Limb, a memoir and a meditation that reflects on her experience of growing up in and living through the late Troubles. The legacies of this time are deeply personal and inescapably social. In response there is a yearning throughout the book for those warm moments of music and conversation where strangers become friends, and where the imagination runs in front of reserve. The book begins and ends like this, in scenes that carry all the weight of the quiet times of the pandemic in between.
The past few years have led many people to reassess their lives and their friendships and their place in the world. That reformation meets Mitchell’s memories of the past with particular force, especially as she uses her time in the book to meet other northerners, many of whom are equally unsettled in their optimism for the place and its people.
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The idea of The Ghost Limb is that among the Protestant communities of the North, there is a hidden history of social radicalism that owes its genesis to the revolutionary innovations of the United Irishmen. The idea itself is not new and might as easily explain the North’s reactionary traditions as much as its republican, an affiliation that many individuals in Mitchell’s book are coming to new terms with. There is little in the book of the North’s other hidden histories of pogrom and expulsion, which have left a toxic residue at least as long lasting as the Battle of Ballynahinch. After all Ian Paisley’s paramilitary Third Force paraded the same Newtownards square as the United Irishmen did two centuries before. The Ghost Limb is a window into a society in slow transition. An empathetic listener and a careful writer, Mitchell’s observations range over similar social territory as the subtle fictions of Jan Carson.
The substance of the book is a series of conversations with people who were brought up in the North and found it wanting, which might be its abiding majority. Partition is a deep scar in this psychic landscape, having cut one generation off from another in the reduced circumstances of the “wee six”. Linda Ervine’s account of starting Irish language communities in East Belfast is a rebuke to the limitations separation placed on Protestant communities that had their own multilingual inheritances torched by the demand to conform or be condemned. Further north in Larne, Angeline King works similarly hard to amplify Ulster Scots in contemporary literature.
Ciaran Carson thought of the recourse to one language as the entry to a prison house, and I thought as I read about Ervine and King of how insightful Ciaran and his friend Aodán Mac Póilin were in their commitment to uncover Belfast’s subterranean cultural histories. Similarly in a book in which Protestant is often shorthand for Presbyterian, both would have enjoyed Ervine’s aside that her father’s family “were all Church of Ireland, but they were all atheists and communists”.
The Ghost Limb is a dreamer’s manifesto that has an unexpected precursor in John Moriarty’s spiritual explorations, which points to the possibility that Mitchell’s sense of displacement might echo across all Ireland. One of The Ghost Limb’s essential truths is the connection of so many northerners to the rest of the island, in their family histories, their education, and their affinity. Mitchell has a gift for listening and the book’s diversity of stories, from the evolution of Corrymeela as a welcoming space for LGBTQ+ communities to the general insistence that people of all persuasions are focused primarily on healthcare and education, is a window into the contemporary North that can be hard to see through the hot air blasts of the Protocol.
Mitchell’s North is a fragile landscape, stretched thin over centuries of contradiction. Remarkably, its stony soil holds within it the seed of something present and greater, the outline of which emerges from Mitchell’s commitment to listen, to reflect, and to go on. If Protestantism seems an old bone to worry over in the context of the contemporary world, Mitchell’s vital attention to the brave and moving stories of people like Stephen McCracken and Gail McConnell makes for powerful reading.
Some of the book’s ideas are quixotic, such as that Protestants are “the forgotten Irish”, and thinking more about the North as a shared European space might better build a collective peace. But its quirks are as nothing compared to the richness of Mitchell’s ethical attention to the spectrum of people born in the North who wish for something different from what history has provided. This is a book about love, Mitchell writes, and how we need more of that.
