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Awake in Belfast
| Article
# : |
20201 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
3,017 Words |
| Author
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Patrick J. Sweeney
Patrick J. Sweeney is vice president of corporate
communications at the Caliper Corporation. He resides in
Yardley, Pennsylvania. |
In the middle of my fourth night in Belfast, lying in a sleeping bag on a mission floor, I thought about my quiet, ever polite, painfully private grandmother, who, as a teenager, earlier this century, left this bleak, divided, violent city by herself because she just couldn't take it any more.
When I asked if her parents also left Ireland, she quickly said, "No. No. They passed away." But she refused to tell a living soul on this side of the ocean how they died. "It was just something she didn't want to talk about," my father explained. "So, we knew to let it be."
As a child, I'd occasionally prod her with questions about what it was like growing up in Ireland. But she'd dodge them all. "Now, now" she'd say, "let's talk about what you're doing in school."
Only once, when she was much older, did she let down her guard. "I remember being very young, and woken in the middle of the night, and told, in hushed tones, to keep quiet, as we rushed out of the house and huddled in a nearby field, as soldiers ransacked the neighborhood, turning houses inside out, looking for who knows what." Then, with the memory of shadows menacing the night, she caught herself and closed up like a telescope.
As my train of thoughts began to fade, before nodding off on the hard mission floor in East Belfast, I flipped thorough some pages of a book by the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heanney. "What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak . . . It was born the moment when we accumulated silent things within us."
And then a bomb exploded. I bolted to my feet. Sirens blared in the distance. A tightly barricaded, steel fortressed police station in the middle of the Short Strand, a gray Catholic ghetto, was being bombed, as it had been for the three previous nights. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) was either responsible or had nothing to do with it, depending on which newspaper you read.
Sleeping in various rooms of the mission, three blocks away from the police station, were seventeen black, white, and Hispanic teenagers from New Jersey. They had come to spend three weeks in the land of troubles, trying to glean some insights into prejudice in Northern Ireland and bigotry in the United States. They had been there only a week but had already grown used to the sounds of the Belfast nights. Nobody
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