In 2009 I visited Belfast. It was a kind of emotional landmark for me. Walking through the streets made even a tourist like me feeling the presence of something, the people suffered there. And that was something like walking through Sarajevo.

I like to read, when I am travelling. On that trip I was reading „Kultur der Lüge" („Culture of Lies") by Dubravka Ugresic. Once Mirjana and me left Belfast, heading seaside, going to Bangor. At the shore, standing on the Eisenhower Pier, I asked Mirjana to write a quote of Ugresic on the wall: „Jugoslowakei".

[THE SCENE]

In a way I cannot explain, this word was about the confusion I felt there, facing those heavy drinking people at night, passing by police stations looking like a fortress, thinking on Sarajevo, on all those disturbing processes I have been reading and talking about.

I remember a scaffold that attracted me like it were a piece of artwork, a real Objet trouvé, like a sad and beautiful statement on those moments. And I remember, that I noted another quote of Ugresic’s book: „Only the dead don’t lie".

[THE SCENE]

I went to the Belfast Cathedral, which is a big monument, commemorating those who died in the Great War and on some battle grounds far from Europe.

Europe.

How could I not think on those words of Kavanaugh on The Great Hunger?

Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.
[...]

But this, he was writing about, happened in the 19th century. And I hat to face this presence, consequence of a powerplay, my people had passed not as followers, they had been actors and offenders. This was not about poetry, it was about massacres.

Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit
Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.
He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body
Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ's Name.
[...]

This is, what my folks said: Should others starve out and die of grief, if only we survive, if we survive, survive, no matter what the price will be. That was the deal I inherited and the debt I found. So as I walked through Belfast Cathedral once and twice and again, I thought about how to pay back something and which part I could take, I could bear, some of the burden of debt.

The twisted thread is stronger than the wind-swept fleece.
And in the end who shall rest in truth's high peace?
[...]

All the quotes in Courier:  „The Great Hunger" by Patrick Kavanagh

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