Reconciliation: An Exercize in the Arts

By Katherine Wright, ‘11

I had slept through the border crossing. My sleepy eyes awoke to snow-capped hills and small farmhouses in the distance, and it seemed as if a fairy tale was unfolding before my eyes. I looked down at my watch to discover that we had been driving long enough to have officially reached the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, or the North of Ireland– however you choose to define it.

As we pulled into a rest stop, I quickly stuffed Euros into the back of my wallet and desperately grasped for British pounds so that the waitress would not suspect I was traveling from the South.

An hour later, we reached Belfast; until now, this was a city I had only known through song; as a child with an Irish-American heritage I knew of the ‘Bell from Belfast city with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes’ as early as I can remember.

Our bus had license plates from the Republic and our bus driver explained that had it been a number of years ago, he would have been nervous to drive into Belfast with a bus from Ireland. Now, however, he explained in a thick Irish accent, “Oh don’t ya worry, you’re just fine traveling anywhere in Belfast now. I reckon it’s safer up here than Dublin.”

Despite this reaffirming statement from our knowledgeable driver, my nerves grew as I exited the bus and looked around at the cold city streets as the bright winter sun cast its shadow on the sidewalks. I could feel tension in the air. But was this all in my head? It had been years since violence was a daily reality of Belfast, but not long enough for ‘The Troubles’ to be considered remote, forgotten history. By political terms, the conflict between Catholics and the Protestants, often refereed to as ‘The Troubles’, was over by way of a peace agreement signed in 1998. Since then, the area has stabilized. However, the city streets still seemed to tremble with the stories of lost lives, car bombs and police riots.

I traveled to Northern Ireland with a delegation of seven other students from Occidental College through the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life in order to examine ‘The Troubles’ and the critical role that religion played in the conflict between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. We worked to identify the core issues that underlie conflict as well as the methods used to establish peace and embrace reconciliation.
Through our partnership with the Irish School of Ecumenics, we were able to meet with peace and reconciliation organizations and hear from victims and survivors of the conflict. Through these firsthand accounts, we were able to begin to unpack the difficulties, frustrations and successes entailed in the long process of rebuilding Northern Ireland.

In order to further examine the process of reconciliation, I conducted independent research on the murals that surround community walls throughout Belfast. These murals were used as a political and social form of expression during the conflict in order to mark territories, honor fallen heroes, or to voice opinions publicly. To this day, the tradition of mural painting still continues, but instead of spreading staunch political and cultural views, it is starting to be used to promote peace and reconciliation.

As you wander through Belfast’s residential streets, large, colorful murals adorn the walls of this severely divided city. Many of the murals tell the history of the conflict, as dark shadows of paramilitary men, IRA slogans, Bobby Sands, and Union Jacks drape simple architecture with vibrant messages. In order to allow space for other stories to be told, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland has designed a program to aid the process of reconciliation through public art with the Re-imaging Communities Program.

The Re-imagining Communities Program is “rooted in the building of a shared future for Northern Ireland, which is peaceful, inclusive, prosperous, stable and fair.” In order to achieve this goal, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland is engaging communities to re-imagine their communities without images of violence and hateful words once used to define their neighborhoods and identities.

This work requires a long process of community outreach, workshops as well as the actual creation of the art. Deborah Malcolmson, a local artist involved in the project, explained that “it is a community led project. We don’t go to communities; they come to us, and you cannot just come in and tell them what to do. You must really work with the community before hand, but there is no template for this.” One of the many facets of this project is to allow people to feel that they are in power of their own lives and communities. Peace and reconciliation through community involvement is necessary to ensure that the time of violence and hatred is redirected in a way that empowers and secures lives within these communities.

However, the violence that lived within these streets is not one that can be easily silenced or forgotten. In light of this, Anne Ward, the Director of the Re-Imagining Communities Program at the Arts Council explained that the project “encourages people to look at the history of their immediate areas” in order to support meaningful cultural expression and to allow “pride” without causing violence or animosity so that communities can “celebrate old traditions in new, more peaceful ways”.  Art has been a useful means to achieve this because “it is a open and safe way of exploring ideas and it helps to transform through its experimental nature.”

Through this brief study of art as a means of reconciliation, I was able to gain insight into a violent chapter in Northern Ireland’s history highlighting both a community’s prideful heritage and its painful losses. Despite its recent violent past, Northern Ireland is moving forward. This project represents Northern Ireland’s path towards reconciliation, but, as Ward explained, “we [in Northern Ireland] have a long way to go, a really long way…we are ten years into the peace process but we have only dipped our toes in the water.”

Katherine Wright is Diplomacy and World Affairs major and can be reached at wrightk@oxy.edu. Support for this project was provided by a Richter-ASP award from Occidental College.