Playing Amongst Ghosts
When I was a child, I spent most of my Summers and Easters on a little island off the southern tip of Ireland called Sherkin. My family has had a home there since the ’70s, and three generations of us have forged indelible memories on the beautiful, windswept archipelago and frigid seas we learned to sail. I can take myself back in an instant, if I close my eyes.
It is also a place of not-so-ancient horror. You can see it in the sparse landscape, dotted as it is with ruined cottages. Most of the islands are deserted. The inhabited ones have few residents. Even to a child, it’s obvious that many more people used to live there than now do, and even as a child you can’t help but grasp the reason why. They died, or they left. Because of the Famine.
Many other, better writers than I — and many actual historians — have covered the Irish Potato Famine in much greater detail than I can or want to here. But suffice to say that it wasn’t a potato pathogen which starved Ireland, it was people. The men running the British Empire at the time saw the disaster as a chance to remake Irish society in the colonial mould they’d been trying to for centuries, as well as proof of the social theories of John Malthus (who argued that famine and mass-death were “natural” consequences of population expansion, just a self-correction). So when a crop the Empire had helped make the staple of the Irish population failed, and in spite of the ample supply of food available elsewhere, they not only didn’t provide any real relief but often actively exacerbated things.
It is estimated that, out of a prior population of eight million, well over a million people died of starvation and disease in the Famine. Two million more fled abroad. Men, women, and children dropped where they stood. Bodies lined the roads: no one had the energy or funds to bury them.
I knew this growing up. When exploring the islands around Sherkin as a child, I was aware every ruined house I wandered through used to be someone’s home. I had seen images of the famine, emaciated victims draped against dry-stone walls, and knew it must have been like that there too. Or there’d still be people around.
When you live alongside historical tragedy like that you tend to stop noticing its signifiers, however. And that awareness, whilst always present, obviously tended to take a back seat to just being a kid. It’s a lot more fun playing on an empty island than thinking about how it got to be that way, especially if you know why.
I haven’t been back as an adult. There isn’t any reason why except a dearth of money and time. I’ll be going back when I get the chance. But I imagine the experience will be slightly different through older eyes. When we grow up, we have to reckon with the world as it is and as it has been rather than how we wish it were. And that is often brutal.
The brutality on display in the deserted, broken houses and untended former farms dotting the islands where I learned to be a person is quiet, but omnipresent. Once humans have been driven out of an area, the signs of our passing persist for millennia. After only a century and a half, you can almost still hear the lowing of cattle as they ploughed, the clatter of pots in a family’s kitchen. It is a land haunted by the ghosts of those whose descendants should still be here, but aren’t. Evidence for a crime on a scale it is almost impossible to fully conceive is everywhere, and no one ever had to answer for it. Nor will they. Justice, after so long, is an impossibility.
That is a truly hard thing to grapple with as a human being. It touches on questions that go far beyond one historical event or even the rise and fall of empires. How do we deal with what we’ve done to one another? How do we move forward when all that suffering, all that needless death, will never be properly accounted for? What does it mean to forgive, and how can that be done with the weight of the past bearing down on us? What if there’s a part of you that bears some responsibility, however small and diluted by time or distance, for what happened? What if it’s still happening?
These are very personal, difficult questions for anyone to answer. For myself, here, it gets even more confusing. My mum’s side of the family is Irish, while my dad’s lineage is a mix of English, Irish, and Swiss in that order. So around two thirds of me is, by some definitions of identity, Irish. The rest is mostly English and about one eighth Swiss. But that isn’t how identity or nationality really work.
Having been born, raised, educated, and lived most of my life in England, I am (and would be considered by everyone else) English. In fact, by dint of the school I went to and the class to which I belong, a hundred and sixty years ago I would have potentially been in a position to make decisions regarding Ireland. But then there’s my mum’s family and heritage, and while those don’t make me any less English (whatever that means — nationalist definitions are fuzzy at the best of times), they certainly complicate matters internally. Any answer to the question “what responsibility do you bear, if any, for the actions of your forebears”, for me, would cover both perpetrator and victim in this case. And you can’t just brush that off when you used to play hide and seek in the crime scene.
I’m not sure there’s ever going to be a satisfactory answer to that question, though. Not for me, and not for anyone. We certainly do feel responsible, on some level, for the actions of those who came before us in whatever group to which we belong. This then forces us to consider the question of penance for sins we ourselves did not commit. Even people who tend to react to that idea with anger, denial, or dismissal evidence the pain of being asked to answer for actions not their own over which they feel unaccountably guilty.
It’s that feeling of collective responsibility, of guilt for things we alone can never atone for, that hurts. We can’t escape it, no matter how many corners we talk ourselves into trying. It springs from every screen, every broken ruin, every place one group ever wronged another badly enough for the effects to stick around. They all bring the evil we’ve done to each other roaring back, even centuries or millennia later. The victims can’t forget, and the perpetrators can’t stand being reminded.
When the historical wrong never really ended, as any American can tell you, this effect is compounded infinitely. It’s a truly terrible thing to be party to ongoing oppression or genocide with no say in the matter. And, right now, every single person in the United States not subjected to them — myself included — is an unwilling participant in both, albeit not quite as directly as even fifty years ago. Part of what keeps these cycles of violence going is an inability by white Americans to look at the problem, at one’s own part and place in history, and react out of anything other than searing guilt. The same is true of many people in Britain, who often respond to any highlighting of the terror we inflicted on a quarter of the world in the name of an empire we no longer even possess with bluster and defensiveness to this day. Denial is a decent enough placebo for that kind of pain in the short term.
Unfortunately, the effects of our forebears’ actions on the world are often long-term in the extreme. Averting your gaze may be an immediate salve for the sensation that one is unwillingly profiting from evil done in your name or for your ultimate benefit (say, as a person in the US benefiting from the effects of white supremacy), but all that does is make you feel less bad about it. It doesn’t stop you bearing whatever responsibility you might, nor does it solve anything outside the problem of having to consider your own complicity. Ignoring injustice doesn’t end your pain or anyone else’s. Awkward silence doesn’t answer that question of responsibility, or of guilt. It doesn’t address anything. Then again, neither does just saying sorry. Atonement doesn’t come that easy. And there are some things which can never be made right.
Ultimately, there is no good answer to the question of responsibility when we’re talking about generations of suffering and oppression. The wounds are too grievous and the pain too great. There is no fixing the past, and those of us whose ancestors (or even peers) perpetrated or perpetuated its ills can’t undo what they did. We can, however, acknowledge the parts everyone played — perpetrator, victim, bystander, accomplice, etc. — and the consequences those have in the present. And we can try to mitigate them as best we’re able ourselves. The question of guilt is a group one, not individual; and we cannot answer it on our own, nor should we try. Our responsibilities in the face of historical and continuing injustices lie only towards each other and ourselves, not the past. Part of fulfilling those duties is being honest about what happened.
That’s why post-Apartheid South Africa had a “Truth and Reconcilliation” commission rather than a “Justice” commission. You can’t hold an entire society to account by determining individual guilt or taking revenge, not in a meaningful way. All you do that way is perpetuate another cycle of violence. The only road forwards is for everyone to take hold of the pain of centuries with both hands, together.
As children, we all play alongside ghosts, even if we can’t understand what they are. It’s time to grow up.
