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- [00:00]
Glenn Patterson
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:12]
John Plotz
Hello, and welcome to recall this book where we invite scholars and writers from different disciplines to make sense of contemporary issues, problems and events. So our topic today is, on one level, a straightforward one. The political situation in Northern Ireland today, 27 years after the Good Friday Agreement putatively ended the troubles, that hot war that divided Belfast especially, and sent its tentacles all over Ireland and the United Kingdom. I'm already choosing my words specially carefully, not trying to name the sides between whom the war was fought, because to say it was between the British army and Irish Catholics, or between Protestants and Catholics with the British armed backup, or the Protestant side, or to say it was Unionist or Loyalist, seems already to be picking a side and getting it wrong, especially coming from an outsider. So, from the get go, today's topic is a very complex one. It's not impervious, certainly, but it is very resistant to outside examination. And so we are super grateful to have a subtle thinker and writer here today to discuss it with us, one who's been living with and writing about the complex situation for decades. So, hello, I'm John Plotz of the Brandeis English Department. And to travel to Northern Ireland today, I'm joined once again by my beloved former Brandeis colleague, David Cunningham, now sociology professor at Wash U St. Louis. David. Hey, welcome. Thanks for coming back.
- [02:38]
David Cunningham
Hey, happy to be back. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
- [02:40]
John Plotz
Me too. So David is the author of such massively influential books as There's Something Happening Here, the New Left, The Klan and FBI counterintelligence and the award winning Clansville USA the rise and fall of the civil rights era, KK and he's a member of the City of St. Louis Reparations Commission. And he's recently engaged in exploring political signaling in public art and monuments, including I believe, a forthcoming article on the political and cultural work of murals and Protestant and Catholic communities. That's a co authored article, right. David, that is for you.
- [03:13]
David Cunningham
It is, yeah. With one of our graduate students who actually has a degree in public history at Queen's University of Belfast. So it was an interesting triangulation.
- [03:21]
John Plotz
Great. And so if you're a fan of David as I am, you can't be as big a fan as I am, but if you're a fan, you should check out earlier episodes on racialized policing in the US on January 6th and on the 2024 presidential election. So, David, welcome. And Glenn. So those of you who have watched or read say Nothing lately, or maybe you've watched the TV show Derry Girls or read Anna Burns unforgettable novel Milkman. You know how easy it is to bring heat to the discussion of rights and wrongs of Belfast and Daria and their still divided neighborhoods and how terribly hard it is to bring light. But for me, one of the most powerful sources of illumination has been the novelist, memoirist, screenplay writer Glenn Patterson, who is the director of the Seamus Heaney center at Queen's University Belfast. And I saw a lovely cowboy themed poetry reading that he maestroed on my first day at Belfast this spring. That was my first introduction to him. His best known works, by my count, I think 10 novels include the International and then also the screenplay for Good Vibrations, which is a great film about Terry Hooley who ran a non sectarian record shop and as well as the memoir Once upon in Belfast, as well as a memoir, Once Upon a Love in Troubled Times and a 2019 collection, Backstop Land.
- [04:48]
Glenn Patterson
I was just gonna say to all people who heard your introduction and the bit that you said, anyone who has seen say Nothing or watch Der Girls or read Anna Burns's brilliant Milkman will be severely disappointed to find out that none of those writers are here today, but we are instead going to talk to Glenn Patterson. So for anybody, for anybody who was getting like really, really, really excited, yeah, hi. But. And if you haven't watched Derry Girls, and if you haven't watched St. Austin and if you haven't read Anna Burns Milkman, please do watch, read all of those because they are brilliant.
- [05:29]
John Plotz
Well, that's great. Thanks, Glenn. You're starting it. That's the end. It's always the end is when we try to induce people to go out and you know, as their second choice, after listening to you, they could do those other things. I'm glad you gave us that dessert first. And I just want to say really quickly before we launch into it, the main focus is your marvelous 202006 collection, Lapsed Protestant, and also its sequel, here's Me Further Reflections of a Lapsed Protestant, which brought the collection up to 2014. And the Irish Times called it quick witted, level headed and even handed. And I think that's just such a great. All three things I think are so true about your writing. And I guess I would like to invite you, if you would like to take the bait. I want to offer you a softball question. Could you just describe the books in question in your own words, like what motivated you to write these pieces? And looking back, maybe you could say something about your key claims back then and whether they resonate today or how you see them resonating in 2025?
- [06:28]
Glenn Patterson
My first novel came out in 1988, and any people out there who have written novels, especially thinking of their first novel, it can often exhaust you and it can often absolutely drain the well. And I felt like I'd used up so much more than I thought I was going to use in that first novel. So when invitations came to write things, you know, pieces of journalism, little bits of memoir, anything like that, I just said no, because I thought I need everything for the, for the next book. And eventually I got asked to write a piece for a magazine in Sweden. And again, this would have been in the early 1990s. And if you wrote for a magazine in Sweden, even if it was translated into English, nobody outside of Sweden was going to see that. So I got asked to write a piece about growing up in Belfast. And my friend and FELLOW Novelist Robert McLean Wilson, whose first novel came out in 1989, year after mine, he got asked to do it. So he was born Catholic, I was born Protestant. We were asked to write pieces about growing up in Belfast and in the 70s and 80s, so we did. And in a way that sort of unlocked something. So I called that piece, I think it was called Love Poetry, the RUC and Me, the RUC being the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police force is the term in Northern Ireland from the 1920s through until the 1990s. So I wrote this piece and it was published in a Swedish magazine. And something seemed to be unlocked by that. I was less intimidated about writing it, writing things that weren't fiction, and also just thought, well, you know, that's just another place to write, to try things out, to put things. Put things out that you didn't have to wait a year and a half for. The late 1980s. Here we were still a number of years away from ceasefires, from peace process, and there's so much terrific new writing coming out of this place at the minute that to think of a time when. And it maybe there weren't quite so many new writers coming through. It certainly felt like in the late 1980s when my first novel came out, Robert's first novel came out, Owen McNamee, published around about the same time, Deirdre Madden. So it wasn't that there were no new writers coming through, but perhaps there was just a novelty in us. Maybe there's always a novelty. I'm just not the novelty age anymore. There just seemed to be an awful lot of invitation to comment. And it so happened that Robert and I had been living away from Belfast for a while, had, for different reasons, found ourselves back in Belfast in the late 1980s. We were knocking about together. We were. Became friends and I suppose we. Yeah, the invitation was just there to comment on all kinds, all manner of things, the political situation. And both of us had sort of grown up. He'd grown up in a Catholic nationalist Republican area, grown up in a Protestant Unionist Loyalist area. And both of us had sort of worked through, kind of critically worked through our past and that background, and at the same time didn't kind of rush to embrace what was considered to be its opposite. In fact, the thing that we sort of repudiated in our work and in our thinking and everything about us and every. This wasn't exclusive to us. This was all the people who we were drawn to as artists, as writers, as fellow citizens and human beings were people who just said, there's not just two identities, you know, there are. You can be. You can choose who you are. Your choices need not be mutually exclusive. And instead of having this idea of identity as the reduction to one, brilliantly, in Robert's version of it, reduction to the one word you'll get killed for, you just kind of exploded your identity. And you said, I'm all of these things, I'm all of them, and I embrace them and I get to define who I am myself. So that was, I think, probably where we were beginning to write out of in that period, as I say, in the late 1980s. So whether it was because we were just the newest people that particular year, or whether it was because that particular moment there was something that hadn't been said from a particular generation and we were not the most visible, but certainly visible representatives of that generation, we got lots of invitations to speak and write.
- [12:04]
John Plotz
Yeah, that's really, that's, that's super helpful. That really brings me to actually one of the questions that Dave and I were both hoping to get to. One of the essays from here's Me here, the one called the C Word about community and communities. Like you have a wonder. How did a word that has its roots in commonality, you write, end up one of the most vexed and vexing in our lexicon? What is the difference between a community worker or community practitioner and community activist and a community gatekeeper? So I feel like that's, that's such a wonderful way of thinking about that kind of upside down land logic of community as the ultimate marker of sectarian division.
- [12:45]
Glenn Patterson
Yeah. And I mean it's still a very vexed and vexing word there. And see, one of this is true in all conflicts. One of the things that happens is that words get taken out of your mouth, they get appropriated and you find it very difficult to say something for fear of using a word that marks you out. And even useful words get taken off you. And so we are kind of always. I always had this thought, I wanted to take them back. I wanted to look at what words were. I mean, I'm a writer, of course I'm going to do this, but it is, it is one of the things that you do is that you work with words. You have to think about what is the right word, what is the word I need in this situation. You have to know where the words come from. You have to know the weight of them, the connotations. And so you can also therefore look at words that are being abused or words that can be reclaimed and are they useful? Is there anything that's useful in these words that we can take back? I was saying that there were the kind of motivation for starting to write more non fiction journalism. You know, journalism isn't right for what I write because, you know, journalists are extremely, have, have skills and expertise that I just do not have. I mean, I write sort of current affairs adjacent pieces maybe is what I would call the things that I would write. But very shortly After I moved back, I sort of left Northern Ireland for a number of years, five or six years, where I was not living here at all. And then by degrees, I moved back in the late 1980s and then finally moved back in the early 1990s properly. And shortly after I moved back, there was a young taxi driver who was Catholic, and he was in a relationship with a woman who was Protestant, and he was murdered by Loyalist paramilitaries for being Catholic. And his partner went on television the night after his murder and denounced the killers and denounced. For murdering her boyfriend for his religion. And the next day, her family was put out of the Loyalist area where they lived for having the temerity to question and condemn the killers of the man she loved. And I thought at that time there was somebody who didn't have the COVID that writers very often have to write or the invitation to speak. Here was somebody who was just speaking out of that awful circumstance and having the bravery to do that and then suffered the consequences of that. And I kind of thought it was one of the moments where I thought to myself, if the opportunity is given you, then take it.
- [16:14]
John Plotz
Can I pick up on this point of those mixed marriages or those mixed couples? Because you make that point in your memoir. You talk about moving back, and I believe your wife is Catholic, I think. Right. So that you move back. Couple. Yeah. And you have this wonderful description of this. It often seemed as though the bigots here reserved a special hatred for mixed relationships, perhaps because mixed relationships gave the lie to the idea that there existed two different people peoples in Northern Ireland. But then you've got a comma, and I love that you end the sentence slightly differently, although you cannot discount possibility that in a society where housing had become more segregated with every passing year, the internal borders more impenetrable, such relationships simply offered the gunman some very convenient targets. That's a wonderful sentence because you put so many different ways of thinking about the interface into play.
- [17:07]
Glenn Patterson
Yeah. I mean, you cannot rule out the thought that it's an easy target sometimes. Yeah, sometimes the nearest person of another religion who you could kill was all that was. That was all that was required. And so, you know, I guess it's kind of a. Trying to see different ways in which that might be approached. Yeah, I think probably on balance, I come down. See, there's a. You come. So I just came across Belfast from before I started to speak to you. I was at Falls Road Library for the unveiling of a blue plaque. The Ulster Historical Society have these blue plaque commemorating significant figures in our city. And they were unveiling one today to the poet Padraig faig, born Joseph O' Connor, and not Joseph O'. Connor. Joseph O', Connor, born in Belfast in 1924 and lived for a while in the United States, but from the 1940s, I think, or early 50s, permanently in Belfast. So I was there, and I traveled right across the city. I traveled west, east to west and west to east. I passed an awful lot of monuments to paramilitary members, to the ira, to the uvf, to the uda, to the inla. There are lots of memorials to combatants. There are far fewer memorials to people who were not members of paramilitary organizations, who were not members of military organizations, whose lives were taken and looked at. In one way, this can look like what happened here in the years from 1969 through to about 1994, and carried on in various forms on a lower level after that. It can look like a war and be presented by a war. We talk about the competence it looked like in other ways. It just looks at times like a very, very, very dirty and nasty murder campaign perpetrated very often by people who knew their victims. So not. I wouldn't. I am trying very. I try very hard to imagine my way into the thinking of people, often people my own age, some people I knew who joined those organizations. But I refused to accept only their way of looking at it. And sometimes those murders up close just look really, really nasty and opportunistic.
- [20:09]
David Cunningham
I really appreciate all the ways that you make that point, the kind of lexicon that enables this from happening. We've talked about language around community, of course, and you just mentioned murals and monuments and memorials, kind of this visual language that we see in these places. And one of the things I really appreciate about how about all these things are, you know, just maybe initially to go back to the idea of community. You know, the ways in which that draws boundaries, you know, and I think we usually think of those boundaries are it's keeping people who are not quote, unquote, of the community out, or at least identifying them. But it also does something, I think you say really powerfully about murals, is it also enforces within the community. It signals, you know, by saying that this is the collective will of the community, Any deviation from that now becomes suspect. And I really appreciate how. I feel like in a lot of your writing, that point kind of shines through. And I think it's subtle enough that you don't hear it that much. It's often either celebrated as something within the community or it's seen as contentious to outside. But what it does to live in a neighborhood where you have paramilitary figures ostensibly elevating your values or at least defining those values for you, and to not be outside of that, but then be subject to that, that seems like a really difficult place to be.
- [21:32]
John Plotz
David, can I just. Before. I just want to ask. At some point, I really want to hear what you have to say. But, David, could you maybe draw that analogy out for St. Louis at all? Because I feel like we have so many ways of talking about racialized communities in America. But I never really thought about that point about the monuments reminding you what does it mean to be a good white citizen of St. Louis or a good black citizen of St. Louis? The ways in which that. That foreclosing of possibilities in the American racial economy gets policed that way, too. So that, you know, certain pathways seem valorized and others. You're just not supposed to think about that.
- [22:10]
Glenn Patterson
It's this place, you know, I. I grew up here. I thought there was no reason on earth why I shouldn't write about growing up here. And I wanted to write from, you know, not a particular viewpoint, but from a particular time that. That. That I, you know, spent living here, but also the people who informed my life. I wanted to draw those things in. So I wasn't writing about the Troubles. I wasn't writing about this place. I also wanted to understand how we compared with the world or how we could understand ourselves better by looking outside and understanding how the ways in which certain things that occurred here, even the idiom, how that had been influenced by things that were happening in the rest of the world. You cannot speak about civil rights movement here in the 1960s without thinking instantly of the United States of America. You cannot talk about 1968 and student protests here without thinking about things that were going on in Paris in 1968. You can't think about the urban terrorism of the 1970s without looking, say, Germany and the Red army faction there. Just add this to the bigger picture if it's useful. So that was the way I always thought of the pieces, thinking about the way the marking out of territory. It is absolutely the case that, yes, you know, you can see when you're crossing a border in Belfast to this day, this very day that I came across the city, I passed so many borders. I passed peace lines, I passed flagged areas. So you see all of that thing. But then once you're inside there, then it is a reminder. Exactly. That certain paramilitary organizations or a certain ethos holds sway and that can manifest right this moment in the part of Belfast where I am in East Belfast, there are people going around. Whether they have a paramilitary connection or not, I can't say. But they're acting as vigilante groups and they're approaching people who are they deemed to be migrants or refugees and asking them to justify their presence in this part of the city. So it can sometimes be overt. I'd be really surprised if there was absolutely no paramilitary connection to that, by the way. It can either be really overt or it can just be a sort of a kind of a permanent visual reminder that there are certain values that you are supposed to living in this place espouse. I always thought when I was growing up here that probably I was in more danger from what was considered to be my own community because I was deviating from it than I would be from what was deemed to be the other community, the enemy community. It would have been described as. Because when was I going to encounter people from there anyway? So, you know, for a long time when I was growing up and trying to find out how to be here, that certainly was my concern. And certain when I started to write then was coming back. My first novel came out when I was living in England and my parents were very concerned that somehow I sort of stuck my head up above a parapet and that they were anxious about me in the place that I lived or had lived, rather than kind of running the risk of, you know, kind of drawing criticism or worse from the nationalist republican community.
- [26:35]
John Plotz
Yeah. So I really want to come back to those vigilantes you just mentioned, Glenn, because David and I have been texting about that question a lot. But before we get there, can I, David, can I just connect what Glenn just said to the St. Louis example? Because the point you're making about the cul de sacs and the Balkanization and like the way that interface zones are corrected, are constructed. So the murals are a very visible way of constructing. You know, this is our side. That's your side. Oh, here's an Israeli flag over here. Here's a Palestinian flag over there. But of course, the creation of cul de sacs, or just the creation like when I lived in Baltimore, just one way street systems to keep white and black neighborhoods apart, that's intended to be invisible. So I really. What I heard you saying partly is, yeah, you're. You're talking about repertoires that. That Northern Ireland gets from the rest of the world, but you're also making a point about how what goes on in Northern Ireland, in a very visible way, can actually help us to think about problems that we also have all over the world that are about, like in group and out group differentiation.
- [27:38]
Glenn Patterson
So, yeah, the traffic is two way before the traffic is two way. We, We. We import ideas about spatial segregation from. From elsewhere. And some of some of the. Some of the things that we have, some of our own security innovations have been studied by people from other territories. And they've taken them back.
- [28:04]
David Cunningham
Yeah, I mean, along those lines, I'm always fascinated. I've now, in. In being in Belfast multiple times, I've had various folks from the US kind of join me for periods of time. I mean, John and I were there together. And I'm not referring to John with this example. Sometimes people come to Belfast, they have a vague sense of the Troubles. They haven't really thought about the landscape of Belfast. And inevitably the peace lines just seem shocking. Just this idea that you would place walls between these neighborhoods for security purposes or related purposes of separation. But you come to a place like St. Louis, as John's saying, there aren't walls, but there are all sorts of things that are designed. And I think, John, you said it really nicely that to quote, unquote, invisibly kind of perpetuate the same sort of division to ensure that you're not going to see people from particular neighborhoods or groups in particular areas. And this whole idea of urban development and redevelopment, renewal and all the language we have around that is, in effect, serving a softer, less visible sense of that same purpose. And so I always kind of get a kick out people's surprise when they see peace lines for the first time and then how that kind of unspools when they think about places they do know, well, basically having similar functions, but it doesn't look the same.
- [29:28]
John Plotz
So the architectural.
- [29:30]
Glenn Patterson
The architectural. So just to say, I mean, the architectural security apparatus, or it's not security apparatus. The softening of those peace walls, I think, is probably one of the most pernicious things that has happened in this city of Belfast in the last 40 years. The walls were erected usually where streets had divided and people had been burnt out of one end or chased out of another end. And the walls went up as kind of like temporary barbed wire that then kind of became concrete or brick and then had more barbed wire put in the top. But there was always the possibility that those would come down. Once you start building the cul de sacs, once you start. Once you take as a given that these are separate communities and start to build that into the Domestic architecture to the civic architecture, then you've got a problem because you cannot overcome those divisions as easily. And I think that I absolutely know that that is not just. That's not unique to here. And all those, you know, John, sorry, David, you mentioned there, the one way street, synanide, you know, those kinds of things that make it difficult for communication and traffic, which are talking of powerful and useful words. Two of the really, really useful ones for me.
- [31:10]
John Plotz
Yeah. So I love that. I mean, I do want to get back to the moment of the riots that have been going on now in 2425. But you called out one of my favorite books, China Miaville's the City and the City, which is great. It's so hard to describe the novel because it's like if you call it a fantasy novel, it makes it sound like it's made up. If you call it a political allegory, it gets away from the weirdness. But the idea of two cities that are just, you know, through the looking glass to one another, like sharing the same space, but you wear certain colors if you're a member of one city and certain colors you remember the other. And I love that you connected that to. To Belfast, you know, in terms of thinking about how to name this place and name that thing that's going on.
- [31:50]
Glenn Patterson
Yeah. I learned about City in the City from Kieran Carson, my great savvy night departed friend, wonderful poet, prose writer, musician. And Kieran and I used to meet every so often for a drink in Belfast city center. And he told me one night about. He was a genre fiction fan and he mentioned this novel by Channing, who I hadn't heard of at the time called the City in the City. I thought it'd been published like in the 1950s. There's a lot of that kind of sci fi and things that Kieran read had been so was really surprised to find that it had been published the year before he told me about it. But it's. Yeah, the city and the city functions the way it functions. Is that the two. What are they called? Bezel and Ulcoma? Yeah, that's the name of the military cities. And they occupy exactly the same physical space. So there are areas in them that are uniquely Bezel and there are areas that are uniquely Holcomb and then there are areas that are hatched. Is that what they're called? Cross hatched. Where both cities absolutely exist at the same time, but the way they function is that you unsee so you just don't see the other city. You Are trained not to see the other city happening right in front of you. That, to me, is just. That's growing up in Belfast because we knew that if you walked into the city down one street, it instantly identified or worse, leaving the city, rather than walking into it. Leaving the city by one street identified you as one religion or the other. So you could see that you actually had two lots of people who could come into the city center crosshatch, but then use these different ways. They used the different city completely differently and had, you know, so lots about that I just thought was a really useful way of understanding or looking at the place that I had lived. So we were always looking for these things that were helpful for understanding, for explaining, complicating pictures. Always a good thing as well. The more complicated it is, the better. We don't want simplifying is. That's the language of politicians, is to simplify and reduce our task. Is it our task? It's one of the things we might do if we are interested in language, is to look for those things that kind of operate counter to that reductive approach. Yeah, but the city of the city. It's great. It's a great book. I actually wanted to. I thought I might get. I would inquire about whether the rights were available to see if I could do a screen adaptation of it.
- [35:11]
John Plotz
Tell me about it. I think that's a brilliant idea because I don't know why it hasn't happened. Because, like you said, it has this great police procedural genre feel to it.
- [35:21]
Glenn Patterson
The reason it hasn't happened with me is because I was told the rights had already been taken. And I'm probably taken by somebody with kind of a better track record than I had, which we watch to date. It's like one which is one movie.
- [35:36]
John Plotz
Well, that is really great, though. But. But can I just say.
- [35:39]
Glenn Patterson
Yeah, no, probably. We got.
- [35:40]
John Plotz
Yeah. To that seeing point, though, David and I, like, the first day I was with David in. In Belfast, we had this experience of being brought around a foot. We were given a tour of an area in the falls road, you know, past one of the cemeteries. And then we were trying to walk back to the city center, and we asked our guide, who was catholic, for directions, and he literally couldn't think of or name this shortcut that would have saved us a mile. Because, you know, he didn't see that as part of his mental geography, even for us. No. Like, it didn't occur to him that for us it would be okay to do that.
- [36:13]
Glenn Patterson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My friend Colin Carberry, who I co write most of my screen and stage stuff. Yeah, I think I probably it's in Lapp's province than somewhere but he went to school in the Lower Falls or in the Bonhart area of Falls Rogue and. And his school more or less backed onto the Peace Line. Yeah. And the term he used for what lay over the Peace Line was Narnia.
- [36:45]
John Plotz
Yeah, that's good.
- [36:46]
Glenn Patterson
Which is such a brilliant term because again, it's drawing on fantasy. It's also drawing on the work of a. It's not always widely known or appreciated that CS Lewis grew up here, but it's just a great way of thinking about it. You know, it's as unimaginable as Narnia to go over there. You know, it's through the wardrobe. And so yeah, I think, you know that that mental map you have where you just. You don't see it, you don't go there. And I, you know, obviously this is, this is not unique to Northern Ireland, you know, and for all kinds of reasons, often to do with class, often to do with race. You know, there are all kinds of reasons why people do not think that another part of their city is. Is for them or they would say, you know, they would advise you against going to it. So yeah, that partial, that partial map, that partial reality, I suppose that, that we have. I lived away, I said, for a number of years. I went to Manchester. I lived part of the time I wasn't in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s, I was in Manchester. And on my first, first week there, a friend, the boyfriend of a woman that I knew when I'd been at school in Belfast, he took me for a walk around the city. He walked me everywhere. But it was like, we're going down onto this canal bank and we're going to walk up and we're going to pop up here in another bit of the city. And he had lure with all of the bits of the city. And I thought I couldn't do that my Belfast, because I couldn't pop up, I couldn't pop over. There were bits I just thought, and beyond there, no idea. So when I came back, I sort of set myself the task. This was before the ceasefires, before the peace process. I thought I want as much of this place as I can possibly have. I don't want to pose, I don't want to. I don't want to exclude myself, I suppose was what I thought.
- [39:11]
John Plotz
Maybe that's a way to connect back to the sort of disturbing thing you were saying about the vigilantes that you had seen, and also the things we've all read in the newspaper about these essentially xenophobic riots that have gone on not just in Northern Ireland, but in Britain generally over the last year. And I've read a couple of different accounts of how we understand them in Northern Ireland, and I'd love to hear your. Your take. So this is like a gross simplification, but like, I, I read a report put out by the Dow Jones Company which basically said it's an economic question. Basically, the places that are more economically deprived are more likely to have xenophobic reactions. Like, it's more likely to be violence because there's a lot more resentment because there's fewer jobs. People are more, you know, anxious about things being taken away. That's one account I've heard. And then I read an article in the New York Times which was more like, oh, there's a big tradition in Northern Ireland. Like, it's an available, culturally available repertoire. I think that's what your guy Charles Tilly would say, David. There's a cultural repertoire of, of, you know, having, knowing what to do when you want to blast an outsider. You know, you have a bonfire, you make people feel unwelcome. So do I know that's a huge question, Glenn, but do you have a.
- [40:32]
Glenn Patterson
Take on, like, I mean, it's, it is, it has been truly disgusting.
- [40:38]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [40:39]
Glenn Patterson
What, what has happened? And again, I'm going to say that. I mean, the particular, just when you mentioned the bonfire there, I think possibly there's a reference there to an effigy on top of a bonfire in County Tyrone. So the 11th of July, just before the big. For anybody who doesn't know this, just before the biggest day of the Orange Orders, celebrations that run kind of across the summer. But the biggest day is the 12th of July, and tens of thousands of people march and bands play on the eleventh night, as it's called, the evening before. Traditionally, bonfires are lit and in my first novel actually deals with the center of that. It's set in 1969, and it's about some kids building a bonfire. Not kids, some other people. Anyway, in a housing estate not unlike the one I grew up in, it was always the case that I can remember that there was some kind of effigy on the top of a bonfire. I think probably when we were kids, when we were growing up, it was the Pope. So that was nothing glorious in saying that. But, you know, there was always something on top of bonfires, but they were fairly Rudimentary is my memory of them and offensive undoubtedly. But so in recent times they have been really, really far, far more specifically sinister election posters of politicians from other parties. The same is true of bonfires in Republican areas at the times of year when bonfires occur there. But there are far more bonfires in loyalist areas. So yes, things like that. And then anti immigrant or migrant refugee effigies as well have started to appear. And I mean this. So there was a boat representing the small boats that come across from northern France to the south of England with figures in it representing refugees and migrants, asylum seekers, and that was on top of the bonfire to be burnt. And that's truly appalling. So I mean it's, I'm not going to say that there's absolutely no mitigating circumstances whatsoever. But this anti migrant, anti immigrant, anti refugee sentiment and violence is widespread in Europe. It's also widespread in the American, in the United States as well. And you've got a government that seems to be acting on some of those impulses and encouraging them. And likewise we have political parties here, even if they're not in government, who are certainly fueling those beliefs and those actions. So do we have a kind of a repertoire to hand? Do we? I hate being rhetorical like that, but yes. I mean, undoubtedly there's a history here of street violence, a recent history here of street violence. But the kinds of things that we saw last summer in Belfast, the riots here were not unlike the riots that happened in England. In fact, they started the spasm last summer, grew out of an event in England. What we do have here is we also have policing. We've got a fairly tooled up police force. And I wouldn't wish a fairly tooled up police force on anybody, by the way. I'm not saying that. So I think things can maybe escalate here in ways or fall into other patterns. Maybe that's the thing to say. But the violence itself was not dissimilar to violence that happened in parts of these islands, including in Dublin. But certainly the, you know, the burning of Muslim owned businesses in south Belfast, very close to the Sheamus Heaney center where I work, you know, it's within walking distance and by walking distance I mean within a minute's walk from there. So all of that utterly, utterly appalling. And I don't even know if I've answered the question there.
- [45:25]
John Plotz
I think the point about policing, you answered it and more because the point about tooled up policing is a great American question as well. That's one David knows really well, like that policing elicits certain kinds of reactions. I hadn't really thought about that part of it.
- [45:37]
Glenn Patterson
Well, you know, you've got all that equipment and I think you're probably, you know, not going to say you're itching to use it, but you know, going right back to the dawn of the Troubles, the most, the most recent troubles, because of course there were troubles here in the 1920s as well. Yeah, in 1969. And I traveled right past the spot today, coming from this plaque, the unveiling of the plaque, the public fig, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the RUC at that time had available to them armored cars with machine gun turrets. This police force, their machine guns mounted on armored cars. So when the rioting of August 1969 reached a certain pitch, and it was obviously the riding was pretty fierce, but nothing that required or would have anticipated the deployment of an armored car with a revolving gun turret. But that's what was sent out because that's what was available. And that revolving gun turret killed a nine year old boy called Patrick Rooney, who was sheltering in his family's flat in Divis Tar.
- [46:58]
David Cunningham
I so appreciate, as John said as well, you bringing the policing element into that last question. You know, where I sit in St. Louis, Ferguson, which is a key site of the Black Lives Matter movement here, the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown that led to a sustained protest campaign and also a militarized, immediately militarized policing response is right down the road from here. And so the dynamic you're describing, as you noted, is parallel quite directly here in the US and so I think John and I had back and forth around the limits of just thinking about economic deprivation as kind of explaining the whole dynamic. And we were thinking about how history matters in the repertoire way that John had mentioned. And you bringing policing into that equation, I think really is super helpful for not creating these either or kinds of debates about what's driving these things. You mentioned the walk you took today after you went to the library in Falls Road and you mentioned the murals that you see, kind of monuments, memorials, these memorial plaques that you can see. I'm really curious because the other striking thing about the visual landscape in Belfast, I mean, certainly there's the political murals that we've been talking about quite a bit. There's also the kind of street art that I know Belfast has been investing in in a variety of ways is quite striking and beautifully so in many instances. But the kind of third poll in that is that there also seems to be A really vibrant graffiti culture. There's lots of dense graffiti, especially around city center. And one thing that both John and I noted from Lapse Protestant is that you talk about graffiti a couple of times and at one point you refer to it as the 90s danger sport. And if I read that right, I was thinking about how people might overwrite political murals in a critical way. So, you know, scrawl something on top of a mural to contest it in some way, and that would be, you know, more so than the writing of the mural, which is quite controlled by paramilitaries or others, that sort of act of graffiti. But I'm curious how you think about graffiti that would typically be thought of as non political in the sense that we're talking about now. You know, people who are tagging at a large scale, you know, because one thing about that is it seems like graffiti pieces that are often quite elaborate but the writer's tag are these kind of radical expressions of individual agency. You know, they're really about promoting themselves. Their audience oftentimes is other graffiti writers. You know, it's not really about the public thinks about the aesthetics of it or anything like that. And I'm just curious what you think of the dense presence of graffiti in Belfast alongside all the more politically legible things that we've been talking about.
- [50:02]
Glenn Patterson
Yeah, I mean, I think there's so many questions in what you just said there. Probably we could talk as long as we've just talked up to now on that. I'm bound to say that probably the age I am, I'm not the best commentator on the graffiti and what's happening there and how that operates in terms of, you know, kind of the response to something else that somebody, another graffiti artist has done. But so they. That period that you were talking about, that period that you were talking about in the. In when I was in writing some of those pieces for Lapse Protestant, maybe in the 90s and into the early 2000s, where people were graffiti over paramilitary murals. And it really was, you know, go back to that thing about, you know, what's the purpose of the murals? It's to remind you who controls this place and what's the purpose of graffiti? It's to say not that much. You don't. So that, you know, all of that. So the authority figures, the paramilitary organizations, you know, if you were a teenager and you were street drinking, you know, you might get picked up by the cops, it was entirely likely that you would kind of get your, you know, be collared by paramilitaries who would, you know, take the drink off you and worse or, you know, glue sniffing, stuff like that. So, you know, that was another form of authority. And so, you know, you wanted to snub your nose to that. And I've got a line of Patrick Fake since I was at the blue plaque unveiling about I stick my tongue out at all. I think it says stick my tongue out at all the powerful. You know, there's an impulse there, if you are, you know, to. To rebel against, you know, what was in a previous moment, the rebellion. So, and then, and then there was this. There was a period where we were looking for. Softening the murals. No paramilitaries looking for cultural figures who represented or rarely represented our city as a whole, usually a particular area. So you have people being or appropriated by particular sections saying this represents us. And so there was some of that. And then there was just that maybe third wave, which was just. No, I don't care about the parallel reorganization me and getting this up on the wall. I care about what I'm seeing elsewhere, these other brilliant graffiti artists. And I want to channel some of that and do some of that. So I think probably now all of those things exist together. You know, at various times, the hooded paramilitary gunmen have made a comeback. Sometimes if there's a feud going on between paramilitary organizations, you'll see big new murals advertising one or other of them. But so those militaristic ones exist alongside the. The cultural ones which exist alongside what is, let's face it, also cultural. It's the culture of graffiti. But sadly, a generation that I am not a part of. But more power to them and more power to their aerosols.
- [53:47]
John Plotz
Okay, more power to the aerosols. I feel like that's a good motto to turn to home then. So, Glenn, the final thing we like to do on the show, if we. If you want to take it up, is we like to close by recommending as a recallable book something else that was not discussed today that that might likely appeal to readers, to listeners, if they like this, they might want to read this book. So have you got one for us?
- [54:13]
Glenn Patterson
I don't. You're going to tell me now. I did mention Milkman so many times, didn't I? Over and over and over. Okay, I know it and I've mentioned.
- [54:20]
John Plotz
Five times in previous episodes.
- [54:22]
Glenn Patterson
So yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know there's a. There's a reason. Reason for that. Well, here's a book I'm going to say because one of the. The Books that I most often do when I talk about wanting to write fiction myself. Yeah, I very often mentioned someday Midnight's children and she in particular. But actually, because you know, he was dealing with Midnight children, he's dealing with the partition of India. That moment when India comes into the moment that India comes into being and the creation of this whole new country. And for me, growing up in a place my grandmother was born in, a pre partitioned Ireland, so she lived in two countries without ever moving. But the other book that was really important to me because it had similar ambitions of trying to deal with what nation meant, was the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos.
- [55:30]
John Plotz
Oh, wow.
- [55:31]
Glenn Patterson
Okay, so. And I read that knitted all kinds of things that little, you know, it was written in the 19 from the 1920s. It's a. There are three, there are three volumes to the. It's West Clover trilogy, Glenn. There are three volumes. I read it, I read it in single volume form, but they were published in over a 10 year period. And really, you know, he had little sections that were newsreel where he kind of incorporated events. He had stream of consciousness, he had numerous characters that he was following. It excited me beyond belief. And when I started to write, I thought I would love to write a novel set in Northern Ireland that had the same kind of ambition as USA by John Dos Passos. And what can I tell you? 12 works of fiction, 5 works of nonfiction, and I have cumulatively and singularly failed. But yeah, read John Dos Passos.
- [56:37]
John Plotz
Well, I mean, it's sort of unfair. You've succeeded at being Glenn Patterson by failing at being John Dos Passos.
- [56:42]
Glenn Patterson
Yeah, well, I guess the thing is that John Dos Passos never succeeded in being me. So I suppose we have that in common.
- [56:52]
John Plotz
David, what have you got for us? Have you got a book?
- [56:56]
David Cunningham
I think I have two things actually, and I'll bring it back to Belfast. As someone who's not from there. I know you just expanded us out here, Glenn. And one of them, and I'm not just saying this because you're in front of me, so I've been really interested in Belfast, but more generally in the long tail of conflict. What sort of happens after a conflict gets directly addressed and how does it still manifest in ways that are sometimes read as a legacy and sometimes not. And I will say, like the two things I've read more recently that have really gotten me thinking hard about that. The first is your really recent book, Glenn the Northern Bank Job. So not enough, but an account of this, quite one of the largest bank heists in UK history, I'm assuming is still the case. So in 2004, and I was expecting a really engaging tale of the actual heist, which the book includes. But also the second and third part of the book are really. I read it, at least about the place and time in which it occurred. So this is after the Good Friday Agreement around thinking about the role of an entity like the ira, who's still in the process of decommissioning weapons and things.
- [58:10]
Glenn Patterson
That's great.
- [58:11]
David Cunningham
So, anyway, I felt like I learned a lot about that. And then the other book that I will say, and you mentioned his name earlier, if I'm pronouncing it right, Owen McNamee, his recent book, the Bureau, which I managed to see a reading of when I was in Belfast earlier this year, I felt like was in novelistic form, really. There were a lot of intersecting themes about the ways in which an operation that was explicitly political kind of continues to play out, whether it be through a criminal organization or just a way to address interpersonal conflicts. It kind of gets read through political capacity. And anyway, I thought both of those books were really wonderful accounts of this long tale.
- [58:58]
Glenn Patterson
Thank you. Thank you for that. And do you know what? I haven't actually yet read the Bureau and I read all of Owen's books. But when I saw it, I was waiting for the Northern bank job to come out. And when I looked at the advanced publicity of it, I thought, I'm going to read that and I'm going to be dismayed because my book's coming out after. And it felt like there were. There were certain, you know, as you said, there were maybe confluences there. So I'm looking forward to reading that once I kind of. Once I get that. That stupid thought out of my head, that there's only that. There's only that space. And maybe last thing I will say is that when I was at that unveiling of the blue plaque to Padraic Fake, I. I did happen to notice gathered around outside the Falls Library, one or two people whose names maybe pop up in the Northern bank job as maybe having some knowledge or understanding of what happened on 20 December 2004, when £26.5 million went walkabout from the Northern bank in Belfast city centre.
- [60:09]
John Plotz
Was it that dolphin? The past is not dead. It's not even passed. Yeah. So I'm actually going to pick up a totally different thread of our conversation. I'm going to recommend the Kevin lynch book, the Image of the city from 1960 because I was really struck by our discussion of the visible and invisible ways that neighborhoods are Balkanized or the, you know, the true demarcation of parts of the city. And that book is so great. Like, there's a chapter on it in Boston about the way that the image of Boston, there's certain, like, gores and triangles that people never remember, like they just can disappear. And that point about the psychic landscape and the real built landscape, you know, kind of co constituting the. The reality of the city, I think it's. It's great. And I really appreciate, Glenn, your point about helping us think how Northern Ireland and, and Belfast specifically can be, you know, its own unique place, as every place is, but also paradigmatic for things that we don't notice in other places in the world, but they're actually going on similar forces, similar divisions and class and economic divisions too.
- [61:15]
Glenn Patterson
Yeah. So I just made a note of that because. Yeah, that's one to go to. So thanks a million.
- [61:22]
John Plotz
Yeah, thank you. So Glenn and David both. It's just a great.
- [61:26]
Glenn Patterson
Yeah, thanks, David. Yeah, thanks, John. Yeah, I really enjoyed this.
- [61:30]
John Plotz
Yeah. And just thank you all. Recall this book, listeners, for listening. And tune in for more of the same folks from all of us here. Bye. Bye. Recall this book is the creation of John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferry. Sound editing is by Kamiyah Bagla, and music comes from a song by Eric Chaslow and Barbara Cassidy. We gratefully acknowledge support from Brandeis University and its Mandel center for the Humanities. We always want to hear from you with your comments, criticisms, or suggestions for future episodes. Finally, if you enjoy enjoyed today's show, please forward it to five people or write a review and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.