In Ireland

VAST

Fourth Damien Walsh Memorial Lecture

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey

7th August 2001

1st talk

"I'd like to thank VAST for the invitation to join you tonight.

Victims is not an arena I often speak in.  I have very clear reasons for not doing that, so this is quite a step for me and I'd like to first of all acknowledge the presence of Damien Walsh's mother with us tonight.  It can't be easy in terms of peoples individual and personal grief.  There are tensions around the comfort of other people's presence and sharing your grief and the intrusion of public events on your own very personal grief.  And everybody who has suffered in the context of the troubles lives with that.  So I think that we are both pleased and privileged and that it is very brave of individual families to be in the position of sitting through events that essentially are organised in memory of very personal and deep loss.  However much we sympathised at that level we didn't share the experience.

What I want to speak about tonight and I think I want to explore with you are just some of those tensions, what I want to speak about tonight is constructing victims, to speak of victim hood, and victimisation as a social construction.  And what I mean by social construction is that  sometimes society itself builds a category, a number of categories, a number of boxes or labels that society builds and changes.  In fact as society changes or changes with the context in which it is looked at and the difficulties I think that it creates for people who are in pain, for people who have suffered.  As I say, it is something I have normally not chosen to speak about because it is a very difficult and painful subject and touches on peoples real feelings and I have an aversion to people objectively dissecting other people's suffering.  I just have a difficulty with it, not least because like everybody else in this society I am not immune from that suffering, so in putting forward some of my ideas and questions rather than positions on the tensions around categorising and boxing victims, I would like to say from the outset that none of it is said in any way to diminish those organisations and groups that work with people who have suffered or that have worked with victims and survivors of these troubles or from any other suffering.

An enormous amount of good will and good work is done and most has been done at a community level and for many years done informally by individuals and small informal groups, literally holding each others head above water; their neighbour's head above water, in a situation that when we look at it from the outside scarcely bares realisation of the amount of pain and suffering that constitutes this community at every level.  And I think as we went through some thirty years of trouble, looking back now you can see different mechanisms that we used to survive.

I am always thinking very visibly and I think it is very graphically brought home to me when I look at political funerals in other countries.  Particularly, I think with the West Bank, with the Palestinian movement.  We look and I think you will have seen the exhibition of the Turkish Hunger Strikers.  The Kurds are another people resisting oppression and fighting for freedom.  But, when I look at the television coverage of these deaths and funerals I would see, as you would have seen and heard,  a great depth of weeping, a great outpouring of emotional pain in a sometimes ritual and symbolic weeping and wailing.  And then you look at our society and I think we are marked by objective outsiders.  Maybe not so objective outsiders will identify us almost as the people who did not cry at funerals.

Thirty years we stood at gravesides with our chins up and our backs straight.  Men, women and children, holding the line in a public display of strength that masked pain.  And it has always struck me as we went through those years that, that is part of how we survived, that is part of how the community with the press watching us, with the police surrounding us, having to go through military roadblocks to get to funerals.  We all towed the line and although every heart in the cemetery might have been breaking, there scarcely was a sob ever heard.  Now that the war is over, won or lost or in transition, at least now that that period is over, there is a sense of the depth of that pain that still has to find some form of expression, and that is only at a communal level, but there are tensions within that, that we have never had an opportunity to look at either, and I feel that unless we recognise a number of features we will never be able to.

I'd like to look therefore at a different hierarchy of victim, and rather than victim, a different hierarchy, a different context, a different construction of pain.  How we cope with it and the difficulties that it provides in an individual sense.  And if we set the first level , the first context of that pain as being the society which we come from, the community in which we live, what we as a community have come through and suffered.

We have survived and we can look at the major incidents, Internment, Bloody Sunday, The Falls Curfew, The Hunger Strikes, holding, as I said, our neighbours heads above water,  coping with every day to day incidents of creeping humiliation, day to day grinding humiliation, limitation.  Being treated by those who were given the responsibility of Government, in a manner that if we were in a person to person relationship, would have entitled us to claim emotional, mental cruelty, unrelenting emotional and mental cruelty...(had this been a person to person partner relationship).  So all of us are marked by that, just as any other person, predominately women in personal relationships.  Just as every thing you do is marked by that disempowerment, by that struggle to maintain personal dignity against unrelenting emotional cruelty, emotional neglect, treachery, betrayal of expectation, then we are all marked.  And if within that context we then look at the people who are individually effected, because its only to my mind, at that level that we can continually speak of equal suffering at some level.  But within that context we look at it, the same people suffering over and over again.

There are those, who if you like, had their grade one in suffering and pain, because they were an integral part of this community.  Within that context there were people who actively resisted what was happening and there is another level of pain that comes from that.  Even if, as we say in Tyrone, you didn't get hit yourself, the knowledge that you are part of a resistance movement, the knowledge that you are part of the people who said "Don't treat us like that", and didn't get hit but, that there is a connection that has to be acknowledged between our resistance, mass resistance, political resistance or military resistance.  There is a connection between our resistance and the price that we paid for it.  And the price was not shared out equally.  That's not our fault, but it's a reality that the price for resisting was not shared out equally by those who resisted.  In many cases the price of resisting was paid by those who did nothing.

There is another tension in simply defining what people suffering groups based in their community or the source from which their attack or grief came.  What if you were a member of a community where your personal suffering didn't coincide with the community context.  What if in West Belfast, you are Jean McConville's children?  Where was your support mechanism then?  What if you were Tommy Herron's family and you lived in UDA country?  What if you were Robin Hill's father and you lived in Coalisland?  How do we all deal with that pain?  How do we all deal with those tensions?  Without negating the reality of the lives that we lived, because that is the reality of the lives that we lived.

Not only from the outside do we have innocent victims and not so guilty victims and victims entitled to press coverage and victims entitled to none.  But in the context of our own lives we have exceptional definitions of victim hood that we don't challenge.  And I think the weakness of that comes from defining victim hood as a category which looks at victimisation as something that we do to people who have already suffered enough.

There is no easy way to resolve the pain we have all suffered.  Much of it we share and yet every single person in this room who has suffered knows, that their suffering is unique.  Their loss is unique, their pain is unique.  There are things that we share, there are understandings that we share.  There are ways that we can support each other and ways that we have to find our own way out of.  If we started to draw a list of all the things that have happened at a social communal level to this community it is frightening.  It is frightening to imagine that that could all have happened to us in the course of our lifetime.

Sometimes, when I hear of people talking about Post Traumatic Stress, I'm reminded that the concept is developed within the idea that one traumatic event happened to you.  The traumatic event that happened to us was life, it was a traumatic event that in fact lasted for thirty years and I remember one person saying to me "How do you suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when the trauma isn't post?"  So when do we get to post trauma, so that I can have a Post Traumatic Disorder Syndrome?  Because the trauma is my life.  I was born into this, my whole life is affected by it.  What do I do?  I don't have an answer to those questions, but I have a concern, that while the answer to them is in supporting, and in talking, and in finding our way gently through our own individual and collective pain, that there is a danger that we will do something else, construct the victim.  How long does the pain last before you stop being described by other people as a victim?  How long do you be out of prison, for example, before people stop calling you an ex-prisoner?  When you have suffered how long is it before other people let you be yourself, and define you as yourself, and not as a sufferer?  When do you stop being somebody's widow, somebody's daughter, somebody's son and when, never mind working your way through your own pain, when will other people let you be yourself?  I have concerns about those things.  I have concerns when people start to put victims into categories.  There are, as I say organisations, and each working their way through problems as best they can, and groups working on behalf of people and yet knowing the depth of the suffering.  It seems to me that most of the people who have suffered are untouched by the organisations working for victims and I try to figure out why that is.  And in doing that I have to look at my own experience.  And I look and say "That's right.  I am a class one victim.  I live in society.  I live in a nationalist community so I get marks on the first one, marks and scars and I accept that, I am a person at that level who has been deeply marked and scarred and wounded and hurt, and that's before I even get to the point where I've been shot and I've still got those marks on my body.  I'm talking about myself.  I've been hurt and wounded and scarred and marked, and I'll probably always be marked and scarred by those experiences.

I come into the category of class two, in that not only am I part of that brood community that has suffered but I have been attacked myself and so I know that pain.  But I'm still here and I know that has affected my life.  People coming into my house and shooting me and my children and me having to leave my house and live somewhere else and the style and nature of my life being determined by somebody else and not by me.  And there are others in this room who have made and had to make much bigger adjustments to their life because of what somebody else did to them.  And I know like many other people in this room, I come into category three.  Which is not were I am hit, but where other people for whom I would gladly have given my own life to protect, people who matter to me greater than life itself and who got hurt and marked and scarred and were then cared for.  And so a duty of care comes from within that suffering and watching people you love suffer.  Or you move to a category where you don't watch the people you love suffer anymore because they are killed, and your struggle is to survive in this world without them.  All of those things have happened to me, all of those things have been done to me, but I am not a victim, because people could attempt to take my life and people could take from me the people I love most in this world.  People could destroy the lives of my children.   People could take almost everything in this world from me.  They could make me weep, they could make me so angry that I could cry on God, if he might exist, in the same breath, for vengeance and for pity.  They could do all those things to me, but the only person who can make me a victim is me. And I will not be a victim, no matter how hard, no matter what I have suffered.  I am still breathing and I am still surviving.  And the day I'll be a victim is the day I'll have no breathe left.  Because when people take action against us, when people, in order to make us stop being the people we are, punish us to the extent that they will take our children, they will take our lives, they will take our homes, they will take our liberty, they will take everything, they will take the breathe in our bodies, rather than see us exercise our own power over ourselves.  So long as I have breathe I have power.  Not a lot, and with every little bit of power I have left, I have to struggle to get more back.  So the only time I become a victim is when I have no power at all left, and that's when I have no breathe left.

So in my book the victims of this period are all dead.  There is nothing, absolutely nothing they can do, not today, not tomorrow, not ever.  Nothing they can do to come back from the position to which they were forced, which was death.  But whatever else they have taken from us, those of us who still have a breathe in our bodies have a way back to being ourselves.  I'm not saying that that's simple, I'm not saying that that's easy.  I'm not saying that at many times any of us even want to do it.  Because the first battle of surviving is wanting to survive.  But I'm saying so long as we're breathing we're survivors and so long as we're surviving, there's a chance we'll survive a bit better tomorrow.  So I would ask you to be more concerned at every level, individually and organisationally with remembering.  Its not about victims, its not about survivors, its about human beings who suffered and attempting to ease the pain."