3 - ‘Fork-tongued on the border bit’: partition and the politics of form in contemporary narratives of the Northern Irish conflict

Summary

In a poem titled ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’, Seamus Heaney has written about the obligatory silences, clichés and canny evasions on sensitive political issues that are a condition of polite social conversation between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Such constraints, as well as the ambivalence of Northern middle-class nationalists towards a state in which they have considerable economic investment but little emotional stake (‘We're on the make / As ever’), together with their desire to distance themselves from republican militarism, has rendered many, Heaney suggests, ‘fork-tongued on the border bit’. The phrase resonates. Read one way, ‘border bit’ suggests a rote position on a jaded topic, an inherited and automatic rather than seriously considered response to the border issue. But the phrase might as easily suggest that the border has grown deeply into the groove of nationalist self-consciousness; that it is a ‘bit’ that chafes because, complex sentiments about it having had to be curbed for so long, a language adequate to their expression does not exist. It may suggest, that is, that various modes of censorship, including self-censorship, have generated elaborate circumlocutions that signal positions on the partition question even when they appear to side-step that controversial topic altogether.

The border that partitions the island of Ireland has a long and contentious history.