So, a few weeks before the lockdown, I was at a gathering for a friend's birthday. It was a relaxed affair, the usual thing of people standing around, drinking, talking. While talking to two guys I knew amicably, though I can't remember precisely how, the topic got onto the British Empire. For clarity, the two guys I was talking to are of Indian descent, and I am of Irish descent, although we are all actually born, raised and still living in Britain.
The conversation was gentle and not too serious, and fairly well-balanced - one of the guys was actually defending it, as his relatives had been soldiers in the British Army, and served during the World Wars. However, we were still pretty critical of it, and to cap off a general feeling from our discussion, and wishing to move on from the topic, I said something purposefully blunt and vulgar, along the lines of: "all in all, the British really have fucked us all over."
The guy who did not have relatives in the army paused, looked at me, and with a slight smirk murmured: "yes, but I think we have it....worse."
My response was to straightaway tell him "let's not do that, this isn't some kind of pissing contest," and he backed off whatever string of thought he was having then and there. My reaction was tamped down enough to maintain the easy-going atmosphere. I did not express the depth of my disgust with his comment, but having seen a similar "erm, I think we have it worse" comment made under a news article, I want to get out here what I would have liked to say to him had I not been worried about ruining the atmosphere of a generally nice party.
Do you know what my family went through, Ireland, during the Troubles? Because I don't. My mother refused to talk about it. She would switch the radio or the television off when it came up on a news bulletin. She would refuse to answer questions about it. She maintained a very particular distance from us, her English children, and from me in particular, her most curious and persistently enquiring child. That distance was not solely cos of Ireland, and partly because of the bizarre and unhealthy relationship she had with our dad, the seedy details of which she kept submerged right up until her death. But that's another topic entirely. No, a lot of what was dragging that woman down, she carried with her when she crossed the Irish Sea. And what it was that haunted her, I have no precise idea.
I know it was bad. Her reactions, sometimes when I prodded too much, as a clueless, empathyless child, told me as much. She cried once, begging me to stop asking about her life before she came to Britain. I got some details out of her, a few droplets of blood out of that stone. The Black and Tans had killed a whole family in a house near where she went to school, she once told me. I was so clueless as to the history of Ireland, I didn't know who the Black and Tans were, that they were the British military police in Ireland who had disbanded years before her birth. She let slip once that her father had to put in severe effort to stop her brothers from joining the IRA, my living uncles who still regarded the British with a burning, black hatred, and communicated a constant rumbling support for Sinn Fein, even after some of them emigrated to the Midlands. I can infer, from a comment made by someone at one of my uncle's funeral, that we did in fact have relatives who were active members, but I was never allowed to even learn their names. Mum herself held a fierce defensiveness of the IRA. One time, after the Omagh bombing in 1998, all the newspapers and television pundits were going on about the heartlessness, the savagery of the attack. I, a precocious-enough tween to read the paper headlines, and dense enough to miss the everpresent atmosphere in our home, parrotted some of the most condemnatory, flat analyses, ripping into the IRA as a violent, hateful group. My mother grabbed my arm, squeezed it until it hurt, her mouth thin, her eyes searing. I remember her trembling. She didn't shout, but her voice sounded strained. "Don't you dare say those things about the IRA. They were the only thing protecting Ireland for the longest time." Later on, when she realised how much she had frightened me, she tried to comfort me. It didn't work. I had no idea what had made her so angry.
A few years after, as a voracious reader of the Horrible Histories books, I read the one on Ireland. I started to learn, on the page, the history of Ireland, how the British had invaded, how many rebellions there were, and how many people were killing the other people. In the early days of Wikipedia, as well as obsessively learning about my favourite heavy metal bands, I poured through the pages on Irish history. I learnt about Michael Collins, the Falls Curfew, Bloody Sunday. It's a fucking mess. I still struggle to keep up with it. And I still don't know, precisely, what haunted my mother. I guess, just all of it? Living in a country during its most violent, frightening days? Being from that community where everyone knows someone who had joined the IRA, or who had been shot, or shot someone else? I could ask my surviving Irish relatives, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, but honestly, how can I bring up something that disturbing, painful, and bloody. I have inherited my mother's attitude in part. I feel a brief flurry of fear and panic when the topic comes up.
Your attitude is disgusting. It is repulsive, mean, shallow and self-serving. It is contingent with an attitude that uses traumatic past as little more than political leverage, and fails to appreciate the real, lived damage.
I'm not going to compare my family's trauma with anyone's, because to reduce it to some kind of metric, to turn it into a pissing contest at some party, with some eejit who has no idea what that pain is like, is not treating that trauma, or anyone else's, with what it needs: respect. I'm willling to accept, in the woke lingo of contemporary social justice movements, that my skin colour carries a certain "privilege," that I don't have to worry about certain things that non-White people have to deal with. I understand the well-meaning desire to square some circles with that approach. But honestly, carrying that blanket, unthinking assumption, and applying with a fucking mallet to every situation, every individual, is disastrous, and can only be done by someone who has no idea of that kind of pain.
This is not a fucking game. Do not chart me on your scale of "who has it worst." And grow fucking up.
