Tá Súil Agam: Deadly Visions of History in Ireland

Abstract

In Antigone the unburied dead, and the too quickly buried narratives of their deaths are more than a ghostly present-absence or absent-presence, they are an undead over-presence that haunts/ consumes/destroys generation/s. Trauma is never about episodes, so much as how episodes cannot be symbolised, therefore remembered/known. The Irish lost over two million people within five years, but more significantly, their language, their capacity to linguistically symbolise their loss. The Great Irish Famine known in Gaelic as ‘An Gorta Mór’ evokes both the word gort, (crop/field) and more significantly gortaigh, (to wound/injure). Nationalist Irish history proffers narratives of suffering that can only be incorporated within a dead filled history, a deadly present with horrific statistics and frequencies of child abuse, endemic national alcoholism, suicide and depression. The historical legacies inherited within the Irish unconscious, are forged through narratives of suffering, while disavowing re-memorying, silently repeatedly denying the transgenerational trauma of Irish subjectivity.