The National Civil Rights Archive and the Murals of the Bogside Artists

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261
The National Civil Rights Archive and the Murals of the Bogside Artists:
Examples of Culture of Memory
Andrea Ferrás Wolwacz*
Abstract: This paper analyzes the Museum of Free Derry: The National Civil Rights Archive. This museum
opened its doors in 2006. In the museum, we find banners, photographs, artifacts, posters and all kinds of
historical documents donated by the local population as well as accounts of people who experienced the
political crisis of Northern Ireland (1969–1997). The goal of this museum is to narrate the unofficial history
of the citizens of the Bogside, and their struggle for civil rights. To enrich this analysis, photographs of
murals painted by local artists known as “The Bogside Artists” that portray the civil rights movement and
complement the museum collection were included.
Keywords: Totalitarianism. Civil rights movement. Memory. Identity. Subjectivism.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the Museum of Free Derry: The National Civil
Rights Archive in order to comment aspects related this place to memory, subjectivism,
and identity. The Museum of Free Derry is located in the Bogside neighborhood outside
the city walls of Derry1 – Londonderry in Northern Ireland. This is a Catholic
neighborhood and one of the various areas divided by peace lines during the period called
the Troubles to prevent inter-communal violence between Catholic nationalists and
Protestant
unionists.
In
fact,
the
Troubles
started
in
this
area
with
a
clash that lasted two days, from 12 to 14 August 1969, called the Battle of Bogside.
The main source of my critical support is Beatriz Sarlo’s Tempo Passado: cultura
da memória e guinada subjetiva (2007), for she performs an interesting analysis about the
redirection of history by focusing on the subject. I also use some concepts by Seamus
Deane, Benedict Anderson, and Paul Ricoeur. These intellectuals performed studies related
to subjectivism, nationalism, archive, and history. I have chosen The Museum of Free
Derry to be analyzed because the museum collection is an impressive experience with its
*
Licenciada em História e em Letras pela Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS),
mestre em Letras, na área de Literaturas Estrangeiras Modernas, pela Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do
Sul (UFRGS) e doutora em Teoria da Literatura pela Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul
(PUC-RS). Professora titular da Faculdade Porto-Alegrense (FAPA). (E-mail: [email protected]).
1
The city Walls were built between 1613- 1619 during the Plantation of Derry, under a Royal Charter of King
James I, to help control the local Irish rebels. The walls have very important historic significance because,
first, they withstood a number of sieges against the Protestant settlement, being the last one, in 1688-90,
decisive for the victory of the Protestant King William the Orange over the Catholic King James II at the
Battle of Boyne in 1690. Second, the Walls are a symbolic representation of the political, cultural and
religious differences in Northern Ireland. Third, the original Walls are very well preserved today, making
Derry one of the best examples of a walled city in Europe.
Ciências & Letras, Porto Alegre, n. 56, jul./dez. 2014.
Disponível em: <http://seer3.fapa.com.br/index.php/arquivos>
ISSN 1808-043X – Versão eletrônica
262
artifacts, videos, posters, recordings, and writings from the people who lived the decades
of “the troubles” that started after partition and culminated in the “Blood Sunday” and
were affected by these events. After partition the Protestant government ensured Protestant
control of all state apparatuses turning Northern Ireland into a state with a totalitarian
government until the late twentieth century. In fact, totalitarianisms, authoritarianisms and
dictatorships were common all over the world in the twenty century. For instance, in Latin
America, convinced that a Communist dictatorship was in the offing, our senior officers
staged a successful coup suspending our political rights, arresting citizens for no reason
other than political dissent.
Therefore, the purpose of the museum organizers is to tell the history of the
Bogside from the point of view of the local people, for they believe it is “the community
story told from the community’s perspective”.2 Keeping archives of facts which deeply
traumatized this community is a way of healing their wounds. And, although this part of
history can be seen from different perspectives, it has its own legitimacy.
In order to enrich this work, I could not leave aside the murals of the Bogside. The
murals, which are known as “The People’s Gallery”, are twelve large wall murals on view
in the Bogside by Tom Kelly, Kevin Masson and William Kelly, a group known as ‘The
Bogside Artists’. These men have lived in the Bogside and have experienced the conflict,
so they have registered the events they have seen for the last thirty years. According to
these artists “In telling this story they have served a pressing need for their community, and
Derry people in general, to acknowledge with dignity, if not pride, the price paid by those
who became victims of the struggle for democratic rights.”3 As Beatriz Sarlo writes, “o
passado se faz presente” (2007, p. 3).
So my analysis is based on these monuments which are also documents of people’s
stories against the official history of Northern Ireland with its several contradictions.
Beatriz Sarlo (2007), asserts that historical reconstruction needs to include in its narratives
individuals’ memory of lived experiences and their necessity of justice. It is impossible for
totalitarian governments to prohibit their people of telling their past because the silence is
more apparent than real. As long as people are alive, they will keep telling their histories.
For a long time, intellectuals were concerned with the official history. This history would
silence the ahistorical production of life. Modern historians, aiming at a fuller picture of
2
3
Available at <http://www.museumoffreederry.org/introduction.html>. Access on 04 July, 2010.
Available at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bogsideartists/statement.htm>. Access on 04 July, 2010.
263
the past, have dislocated their studies to the margins, modifying the notion of the subject
and the hierarchy of the facts, and have tried to reconstruct records of ordinary human
activities and practices. Individuals’ oral stories are acts of disclosure of the past based on
memory operations and the past plays an important role since it is impossible to be
forgotten. Beatriz Sarlo (2007, p.12) writes:
[O passado] é um perseguidor que escraviza ou liberta, sua interrupção no
presente é compreensível na medida em que seja organizado por procedimentos
da narrativa, e, através deles, por uma ideologia que evidencie um continuum
significativo e interpretável do tempo. Fala-se do passado sem suspender o
presente e, muitas vezes, implicando também o futuro. Lembra-se, narra-se ou se
remete ao passado por um tipo de relato, de personagens, de relação entre suas
ações voluntárias e involuntárias, abertas ou secretas, definidas por objetivos ou
inconscientes; os personagens articulam grupos que podem mais ou menos se
representar como mais ou menos favoráveis à independência de fatores externos
a seu domínio. Essas modalidades do discurso implicam uma concepção do
social e, eventualmente, também da natureza. Introduzem um tom dominante nas
“visões do passado”. 4
Therefore oral stories and testimonies restored individuals confidence since they are
able to narrate their lives in order to remember, heal, and preserve their identity.
Subjectivity has given the possibility for individuals to bring their personal story to the
public view and these testimonies are not only manifestations of the self but also of the
public. Besides, testimony presupposes experience. It is when personal memories are
communicated.
When Seamus Dean (1991, p. 380) writes about autobiography, he states that “it is
not just concerned with the self; it is also concerned with the ‘other’, the person or persons,
events or places that have helped to give the self definition”. Not only autobiographies but
also testimonies are necessities of self-examination and reconsideration of historical events
that have made individuals become self conscious so that they are able to, at least, give
some possible explanation in order to understand the past. Dean (1991, p. 390) asserts that
in a country like Ireland, which has been a colonial and neo-colonial country, it is
impossible not to talk about the dark moments of oppression, the loss of identity and
4
The past is a prosecutor that enslaves or releases, its interruption is understandable in the extent that it is
organized by narrative procedures, and, through them, by an ideology that evidences a significant and
interpretable continuum of time. There is talk of the past without suspending the present and, often, also
implying the future. We remember, narrate or refer to the past through a type of story, characters,
relationship between voluntary and involuntary open or secret actions, defined by aims or unconscious; the
characters articulate groups that can more or less be represented as more or less favorable to the
independence of external factors in their control. These modes of discourse imply in the conception of the
social and, possibly, of the nature. They introduce a dominant tone in the “views of the past”.
264
freedom since they are obsessive marks of cultures which have urged to bring into
legitimacy their own existence. Autobiographies as well as testimonies are not only stories
about individual experiences but also a group experience. By narrating their experiences,
individuals find freedom from social and political pressures.
Derry is a place where opposing superstructures (politics and religion) and
paramilitary groups developed sectarianism and implemented ideologies which alienated
both communities. The Northern Irish struggle has built two opposing ideologies. Derry
was divided in two sects: the Protestant Unionist sect and the Catholic Nationalist sect.
And, although individuals from both communities did not take both sides, they got
involved in one way or another due to the policies developed in this region. The Unionist
Government established a regime in the six counties of Ulster with privileges for Protestant
citizens wherein Catholics were discriminated. This policy resembled to the Apartheid in
South Africa. By being denied the rights of voting and positions in the government as well
as by suffering from unemployment and poverty, the Catholic minority developed their
policy inside their religious sect. This also helped the IRA’s influence in the area. By being
discriminated and by suffering attacks of Unionist paramilitary groups, a great number of
Catholic citizens joined the IRA, since the group protected the area. Individuals from both
communities ended up being involved in clashes that took place for more then four
decades. So, when the pacific protests took place in the Bogside, they were considered
clashes and acts of guerrilla and were put down by the British Army, most of the time with
the help of Unionists paramilitary groups.
Benedict Anderson (1991, p. 6-8) writes:
Nation is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently
limited and sovereign. “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest
nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of
them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. [...]
‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents
nations where they do not exist. […]Communities are to be distinguished, not by
their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. […] for so
many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited
imaginings. These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem
posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history
(scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe
that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.
(ANDERSON, 1991, p. 6-8)
This is exactly what happened in Northern Ireland, the development of two distinct
political unities influenced by religion have created the worst clashes which destroyed so
265
many lives. Nowadays, the local community needs to tell their stories, their individual
memory of lived experience which is also a group experience. Telling their stories is a way
of healing and avoiding future clashes, for they know false ideas Unionism and
Nationalism have created sectarianism and have traumatized thousands of people in Derry
from both sides.
The Museum of Free Derry covers the most important clashes: the Battle of the
Bogside, the Stormont, the years of internment, the Bloody Sunday, and the invasion of
Free Derry, among others. It is located in the heart of the Bogside in Derry, where these
events took place. For instance, the museum walls are kept with marks of bullets. It is a
small building in which one is able to see 25,000 individual items like photographs,
banners, posters, garments, written and oral recorded testimonies as well as letters written
to family, relatives, friends, and beloved ones by people who experienced those events,
some already dead, others still alive. All of these items have been donated to the museum
by local residents. The organizers state that the stories are told from the community’s point
of view for they believe that it is important for their people to have the “opportunity to tell
their own stories in a subjective but honest way as a first step towards a greater
understanding a all the elements that led to the most recent phase of the conflict in
Ireland”.5 They also state that these events cannot be told by the official history, because
these events will be distorted. A homogeneous story will not consider the local identity and
experience. They also believe the museum is a means of educating the current and the
future generations.
Paul Ricoeur states in his Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), that without
memory, there is no history. There is the individual’s memory, but there is also the
collective memory in which a group of people has access to past events and deeds that
have been reconstructed and recounted to them by someone who has experienced. Theses
stories of living experience support the collective memory, show that there is a social bond
among the group's members and form the basis of their trust in one another's words.
Ricoeur (2005) also states that the historiographical operation is to support, correct
or refute collective memory. This operation does not, necessarily deal directly with
individual memory, so the archival work (documents), is an interpretative activity.
Historians, librarians, etc., guided by their interests, determine which traces to preserve.
Archives do not correspond directly either to what actually occurred or to the living
5
Available at <http://www.museumoffreederry.org/introduction.html>. Access on 04 July, 2010.
266
memory that an eye-witness. Facts are established only through the researchers’ questions
and thus are themselves interpretations of the archives. The historiographical operation is
that of explanation/comprehension, the activity by which researchers relate facts to one
another. It is the activity of producing a verbal representation of some part of the past in a
text. A well made substitute is faithful to the available evidence and so deserves to be
called true even though it can be always changed or modified.
Archives, such as the museum in Derry are there to be interpreted and either
supported, or corrected and refuted by researchers. But one cannot forget the fact that some
of these documents correspond to what actually occurred. In spite of the fact that there are
some testimonies from people involved in earlier clashes and are already dead, most of the
living memory is still there walking in the streets. The researcher who wants to study the
historical process in Northern Ireland must be attentive to this fact. Even though memory is
closely involved with what was forgotten as well as to the fact that there can be biased or
false testimonies, it is still possible for the researcher to reconstruct an objective account of
the Bogside community’s experience if s/he interviews living witnesses and then study
testimonies in the archive of the museum. Besides, researchers have to bear in mind that
even biased and false testimony refers to a world in which something actually occurred to
this specific group and their past experiences created a strong social bond.
The Bogside is a very small area in Derry. If you walk around the area you will see
wall painted murals by the Bogside Artists. These Murals complement what you see, watch
and listen inside and outside the museum. There are 12 murals depicting different events of
the Troubles” in the Bogside. Some of these murals will be commented bellow.
267
The petrol Bomber: Battle of the Bogside
Available at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bogsideartists/mural1/>
Access on 04.07.2010
Mural number 1 shows a scene from the ‘Battle of the Bogside’. A young boy in a
gas mask, which he used to try to protect himself from the CS gas used by the Royal Ulster
Constabulary – RUC, police force in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 2001. The RUC was
accused of being biased and being colluded with loyalists paramilitaries against the
Catholic community of Northern Ireland. The boy was probably trained by IRA to use
petrol bombs against RUC and the British Army. The mural was painted in 1994.
Bernadette: Battle of the Bogside
268
The mural number 2 shows Bernadette McAliskey addressing the crowds on the
streets of the Bogside. McAliskey was a socialist, feminist and Catholic activist in
Northern Ireland as well as one of the founders of People's Democracy. In 1969, after
being elected to Parliament, she was sentence six months prison for her part in the Battle of
the Bogside in 1968. The bin lid in the foreground was used by women and children in
Catholic areas throughout Northern Ireland to alert people of an impending raid by the
British Army. The mural was painted in 1996.
Bloody Sunday Mural, January 30th, 1972.
Mural number 3 shows the ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Derry on 30 January 1972. The It
portraits a group men, led by a local Catholic priest carrying the body of Jack Duddy, one
the 14 people who were killed in this struggle, from the scene of the shooting. In the
background are the marchers carrying a 'civil rights' banner. The same banner became
bloodstained when used to cover the body of one of those killed. This banner is exposed in
the museum.
269
Bloody Sunday Commemoration: Bloody Sunday Victims
Mural number 4 shows the 14 people who were killed by the British Army on
‘Bloody Sunday’ in Derry on 30 January 1972. Most of them were teenagers and young
adults. In 1992, an investigation, called Saville Inquiry, was set in order to review the
killings. It took 12 years and became the most expensive investigation in British legal
history. The Saville Inquire reached to the conclusion that all victims were innocent and
were slaughtered by the British Army.
Besides the murals, the Bogside artists also have produced a range of works of art in
different mediums. One of them is street art. The following street art was placed on the
Walls of Derry. This is an enormous wall that divides the Catholic area from the Unionist
area. Behind and above this wall there used to be The British Army Watchover. The art is a
series of soldier puppets that represent the Parachute Regiment who were considered to be
responsible for the shooting and who opened fire against the Civil Rights Demonstrations.
270
The bloody Sunday Protest (2) street art.
Available at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bogsideartists/bsprotest2.htm>
To close this paper, it is important to say that the “the Battle of the Bogside” is a
recent history. In fact, these communities are still developing the peace process. So when
you walk around the area, you find living experiences, that is, people who have been and
are involved with this struggle. The museum and the art are what Derrida states in his
book, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995, p. 6), “the absolute impatience of a
desire of memory”. They are great examples of Post-modern historiography and aesthetic
work because the participants have dislocated their aims to their community. By
reconstructing records of ordinary human activities and their practices, they have modified
the notion of the subject and the hierarchy of the facts. The works developed in the
museum and by these artists have brought the possibility for individuals in Northern
Ireland to bring their personal story to the public view. These testimonies are certainly
both, manifestations of the self and of the public. They are there due to the necessity of this
community to self-examine and reconsider the historical events that have made and are
making them become self-conscious , able to give some possible explanation of their past
and heal some of the wounds left from four-decade conflict killing 3,700 people in the
whole province of Ulster.
Recebido em novembro de 2014.
Aprovado em dezembro de 2014.
271
O Arquivo Nacional dos Direitos Civis e os murais dos Artistas do Bogside Derry: exemplos de cultura da
memória
Resumo: Este trabalho faz uma análise do Museum of Free Derry: The National Civil Rights Archive, que
abriu suas portas em 2006. Lá se encontram faixas, fotografias, artefatos, cartazes e todo o tipo de documento
histórico doados pela população local, assim como relatos de pessoas que vivenciaram a crise política da
Irlanda do Norte (1969–1997). O objetivo desse museu é relatar a história não oficial dos cidadãos do
Bogside, e sua luta pelos direitos civis. Para enriquecer essa análise, foram incluídas fotos dos murais
pintados por artistas locais conhecidos como ‘The Bogside Artists’, que relatam o movimento pelos direitos
civis e complementam o acervo do museu.
Palavras- chave: Totalitarismo. Movimento dos direitos civis. Memória. Identidade. Subjetivismo.
References:
ANDERSON, B. Imagined Communities. rev. ed. London: Verso Books, 1991.
CAIN
Web
Service.
The
Bogside
Artists.
Available
<http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bogsideartists/menu.htm>. Access on 04 July, 2010.
at
DEANE, S. General Editor. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. III. Derry:
Field Day Publications, 1991.
DERRIDA, J. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
GUILDFORD
Press.
Derry’s
Walls.
Available
<http://www.derryswalls.com/index.html>. Access on Dezember, 2014.
at
O’MALEY, Padraig. The Uncivil Wars, Ireland Today. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton
Grifflin Company, 1983.
RICOEUR, P. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Katheleen Blamey and David
Pellauer. Chicago& London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.
SARLO, B. Tempo passado: cultura da memória e guinada subjetiva. São Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 2007.
The Museum of Free Derry: The National Civil Rights Archive. Available at
<http://www.museumoffreederry.org/index02.html>. Access on 04 July, 2010.

The National Civil Rights Archive and the Murals of the Bogside Artists

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