Brexit and Peace

I am preparing to go, with my whole family this time, to both the Republic and the North in April. The news on Northern Ireland continues to be troubling, with Brexit looming and threatening to create in the land--as poet Nick Laird points out in the most recent New York Review of Books--a place with two hard borders, a Northern Ireland that is neither connected to the Republic nor to the United Kingdom.

We began teaching the Troubles in our Facing History classes at New Haven Academy because we were intrigued by a place where thirty years of war in the streets seemed to be resolved in a satisfying manner through negotiation, through political means. But history continues to move on, and no peace is ever guaranteed forever. In that same Nick Laird article, the poet sees what defined Northern Ireland in the Troubles (identity politics boiled up to the point of tit for tat violence) as having now infected the entire world that we live in today. How could Northern Ireland possibly escape what has enveloped everywhere else?

In teaching about the Holocaust, about South Africa and about the Troubles, we as teachers were trying to shine a light on warning signs from history. But when the Trump administration came in, with Steve Bannon's and Stephen Miller's Us and Them strategizing, all these frightening signals out of history were suddenly much closer to our door step. 

There is a greater urgency now than at any other point in my lifetime to teach peace. We need to understand how to live together as one human family. In this holiday season full of anti-semitic violence in my own country, and with Brexit facing much less political resistance since Boris Johnson's win, I am wondering how well the Unionists and the Nationalists will hold on to their fragile peace as the UK, led by this upper class Prime Minister who really couldn't care less, separates from Europe.

I enclose a link to a video of a story I tell about our Derry/Londonderry tour guide Gleann (who took the photo of me and Dave Senderoff that you see at the top of this blog post). I think Gleann's story illustrates the feeling of fragile peace that exists in that city: Gleann's Story

The Fund for Teachers Grant, Two Years Later

I have left New Haven Academy, the high school at which I first created this blog in 2017, when I and my colleague David Senderoff received our Fund for Teachers grant to enrich our "Troubles" curriculum through travel. I was a Humanities teacher then, incorporating Northern Ireland for many years into a sophomore Facing History course on Separation, Judgment, Justice and Memory. The course goes on, but I will no longer be one of the four educators teaching it.

I am joining the faculty of the ACES Educational Center for the Arts, as the Director of the Creative Writing department.

Besides my new administrative responsibilities, I will continue to teach, but now my subjects will be screenwriting, playwriting and live storytelling/monologues.

Ireland and Northern Ireland stay with me, and continue to inspire my work and life. The grant continues to be a part of me, and as a member of FFT's new Ramsden Project, I will continue to interact with Fellows and advise them and learn from them on how we keep this work alive in our schools.

My new show, I've Heard Those Drums All My Life, is six monologues about the way Ireland has always been an inspiration and a home-away-from-home for me. Each monologue is named for a person who inspired that story. The video below is the title story, but is named for Gleann in the overall piece. It is, of course, a story that could only have come about with the aid of Fund for Teachers.

The link to Gleann's story is here:

"I've Heard Those Drums All My Life"

Maria McManus and the Poetry Jukebox

Image courtesy of the Irish Times

Poet Maria McManus created the Poetry Jukebox in Northern Ireland. You would see these big thick jukeboxes in parks and on sidewalks and you could listen to the words of Northern Irish poets as they tried to put this particular trauma and history and war and memory and healing into words. 

This article about her project is now almost a year old, but still a tremendously powerful statement on the psyche of a country two decades into an uneasy peace. "It is as if we are the children of warring parents," McManus writes. "lying in bed at night, hearing the row (argument) going on downstairs, all over again. We want it to stop. We want everyone to be happy and just get along. We want love to win instead -- but we have no choice but to lie there, still and quiet, waiting for it all to stop. And tomorrow, we will get up and carry on -- get on with the business of not making things worse, knowing all is not well -- but still feel unable to do anything about it."

McManus then makes a powerful argument for the place of literature in all of this, that really paying attention to poetry can be a way to heal. In this week in which we see still more evidence of the power of angry words--usually absorbed on the internet--to spur violent actions, I offer this article in which Maria McManus reminds us that words can also heal us, if we are willing to be sensitive to them.

McManus's article is linked below:

"In the North, we have started to stop sleeping again": A poetry project in the North is an emotional weather report of where society stands 20 years on from Belfast Agreement