A writer of this place
Jan Carson, writer, gives her personal account to the St Patrick's Day Gala Concert marking of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
I turned eighteen two months before Good Friday. It was a wide-eyed and tottering time. I was an adult.
The better part of me still felt like a child. I did not know how to think for myself. In our house we didn’t ask questions. We took our thinking from the pulpit. Which is to say, from a man, who believed the world was best avoided. We did not mix with the other sort. We did not mix with anyone who wasn’t cut from the same dour cloth as us. We didn’t vote. We took no interest in politics. Politics was a dirty business. We trusted God and opted out. We kept our heads down because we were brought up to believe, that if you kept your head down and held your tongue, the trouble would just pass you by.
I was never taught my own story. In school they kept our eyes set across the water. We learnt London, Russia, America and did not recognise ourselves. Nobody told us history was happening just down the road. No one thought to tell us this history would come to mean the absolute world.
I did not notice when we got the peace.
I came late to Good Friday like I came late to myself.
Ten years later, living on the other side of the world, I was every other day asked- what was it like growing up there? What’s it like now you’ve got the peace? I endeavoured to distance myself. I said it was nothing to do with me. Stuck my head in the sand and refused to admit my own ignorance. To be almost thirty and still holding my story at arm’s length, felt like a shameful state to be in.
I wrote my way into myself. I wrote this odd wee corner of the world, backwards, forwards, upside down. I wrote until I fell in love with it. The more I wrote, the more I came to see there was nowhere better fit for me. Ignorant as I was and full of questions and always hoping for something more. Good Friday felt like a door propped open, welcoming me awkwardly in.
These last ten years I’ve grown into the space Good Friday created. I have become many things. A double passport holder. An Irish writer. A British writer. A writer who celebrates the homely sound of her Antrim tongue and the way it harmonises with other voices who also call this island home. A writer who’s begun to understand, our past begins a conversation with writers from other difficult parts of the world. A writer who is of, but not limited, by this place.
As Louis Macniece so boldly suggests, it’s a head-stagger of a feeling to be so very various. To be both. Between. Liminal. Free to learn. Free to fail. Free to pick myself up and grow. As artist, woman, human being it’s no small privilege to be more rather than less. I believe that being various is a freedom worth contending for.
Good Friday remains a various term. It has a peculiar resonance in every ear. To many it means peace, both in the present and future tense. To others it sounds a painful lament. An end. A beginning. A compromise. A long time coming. A fragile feathery hope of a thing. A brave attempt to house square pegs in round holes. The ultimate suspension of disbelief.
That one Heaney line, eternally quoted, hope and history made to rhyme. Each interpretation remains equally valid, equally true. Because Good Friday permits us to dwell together in our difference. It teaches us how to listen first. How to sit with each other’s stories. How to disagree well. It slowly, graciously wears us down, so we recognise ourselves in the other and in, doing so, practice the art of humanity.
I am grateful for the patience this process has had with me. I came late to Good Friday like I came late to myself. I am no longer quite so fearful. I am much freer to be. I am growing into our story. I’ve still got an awful lot to learn.