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Butcher's Dozen
作者Author  /  Thomas  Kinsella  湯瑪斯 金瑟勒

Butcher's Dozen

 
 Timeline of Bloody Sunday and "Butcher's Dozen"

 Bloody Sunday and "Butcher's Dozen"

 History and Geography of Derry (Londonderry) in "Butcher's Dozen"

                    Beginning: Opening Stanza in "Butcher's Dozen"

                    Finale: Ending Stanza

                        Geography and History: From St Colmcille to Derry Walls

                   Map and Photographs of Derry (Londonderry)

 

 
 Timeline of Bloody Sunday and "Butcher's Dozen"
 

 

Time 1972 Jan 30 1972 April 1992 Jan 30 1996 1998 2001 2002 Jan 30
Bloody
Sunday
Bloody
Sunday
The Widgery Report published
The 20th anniversary of Bloody Sunday
 

The Saville's Inquiry launched

 
The 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday
"Butcher's Dozen" in history
 

Peppercanister
Pamphlet

Reissue of 1972's Peppercanister
pamphlet
Revision in Oxford's
Collected Poems
 
Republished in Carcanet's Collected Poems
 
Politics in Northern Ireland's
History
1. Interment, Hunger Strike, Civil Rights Movements.
2. Car Bombings happened in London, Dublin, and Belfast
3. 'Direct Rule' from Westminster
4. Anglo-Irish Agreement on November 15, 1985
Anglo-Irish Talk (Brooke / Mayhew Talk) among Northern Ireland, Irish Republic and Britain from April 1991 to November 1992
 
 
 
1. The Irish Peace Process launches from 1990s to the present
2. The Irish Government's assessment of Bloody Sunday and the Report of Widgery Tribunal presented to the British Goevernment (June,1997)
3. Northern Ireland Peace Pact on April 10, 1998.
4. P.M. Tony Blair announced the re-examination of Bloody Sunday on January 29, 1998 in the parliament. The Saville's Inquiry launched on April 3, 1998 and is still going on now.
Other Text
On Bloody Sunday
 
 
1. Brain Friel's play The Freedom of the City published in 1973 / reissued in 1992.
2. U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" released in 1983's War album
 
 
 
Paul Greengrass's film Bloody Sunday--Golden Bear Award in Berlin Film Festival
Location/
Place
Derry (aka. Londonderry) London/
Dublin
Derry (Londonderry)     The Saville Inquiry is held respectively in-between Derry (Londonderry)---Londo

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 Bloody Sunday and "Butcher's Dozen"
 

Introduction:
"Butcher's Dozen: A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery," first published as a Peppercanister pamphlet in April 1972 after the release of the Widgery Report, is a representation and a rewriting of the historical event of Bloody Sunday by depicting and eliciting voices and appearances of the thirteen demonstrators who died as a result of the military suppression of the protest.

Bloody Sunday happened on 30 January 1972 in Derry. Injustices of colonial politics and jurisdiction lead to the successive human rights marches, activities of radical violence, assassinations and car or pub bombings intensively in the streets of Belfast and London. Violating the six-month ban of public demonstration and protesting the 'internment without trial,' thousands of people mainly conducted by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) departed from the Creggan at 2:50 in the afternoon. (See the route map) Around an hour later, the crowd moved to William Street and then turned into Rossville Street for a meeting at the Free Derry Corner. At the conjuncture of William Street and Rossville Street, the clashes and confrontation between rioters and soldiers happened at the 'barrier 14' where Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) had already been stationed and blocked William Street in advance. Later on, at 3:55, soldiers proclaimed that they were under attack and started to fire at so-called rioters or 'identified' gunman from the deserted building and flats (Mullan 24). While the first Battalion Parachute Regiment with armoured cars stationed in this area forcibly practiced the arrest operation at four-ten, marchers immediately spread in different directions and fled to Free Derry Corner, flats, lanes, and blocks around Rossville Street. During forty-five minutes of confusion and chaos, thirteen rioters were killed and thirteen others injured. Consequently, on February 1 the Westminster parliament in London established a resolution and under the Tribunal of Inquiry Act in 1921 convened the Widgery Tribunal for independent investigation and objective inquiry into the events on that afternoon. Controversially, the Tribunal Report was issued in April 1972.

 

Notes
1. Route of NICRA's March on Bloody Sunday, Jan 30, 1972 (Guardian Unlimited Special Report on Bloody Sunday 1972)
2. Route of NICRA's March on Bloody Sunday, Jan 30, 1972
(BBC Bloody Sunday Inquiry Special Report)
3. On-line Photographs Exhibition: Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972
(UCR/California Museum of Photography)

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 History and Geography of Derry (Londonderry) in "Butcher's Dozen"
   
 
   Beginning: Opening Stanza in "Butcher's Dozen"
The opening and the ending of "Butcher's Dozen" are a preliminary framework that reconstruct such a historical horizon of Bloody Sunday 1972 in Derry, and further contextualize the town Derry as being between the present and the past historically and geographically.

The poet's walk in the streets implicitly brings out the historical horizon of "Butcher's Dozen" and the context of Derry. This poem begins with the poet's descriptive observation of the scene after the occasion:

I went with Anger at my heel.
Through Bogside of the bitter zeal
-Jesus pity!-on a day
Of cold and drizzle and decay.
Three months had passed. Yet there remained
A murder smell that stung and stained.
On flats and alleys-over all-
It hung; on the battered roof and wall,
On wreck and rubbish scattered thick,
On sullen steps and pitted brick. (NLD 77)

The poet demonstrates his promenade vision of the shooting scene around Rossville Street in Derry (so-called Bogside) after Bloody Sunday. The poet walks through these flats and alleys and recalls this occasion when the "murder smell" still "stung and stained" over "flats and alleys" in the streets. This perspective of the Bloody Sunday scene introduces the sense of "cold and drizzle and decay" and then simultaneously reconstructs the demonstration on 30 January 1972 in the Bogside area of Derry. This introductory observation deliberately depicts and then symbolically penetrates the problematics of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This aftermath-account metaphorically delineates the poet's position among the crowds of two thousand marchers on the scene of Bloody Sunday. Like journalists' reports on newspapers and television, this poetic account also unfolds the consequences of constructing historical truth in accordance with the Widgery Report. In addition, the poet's observation unexpectedly elicits the hidden and erased parts of Derry history, uncovering the devious trajectory of historical discourse embedded in the streets of Derry as well as in this poem.

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 Finale: Ending Stanza

Through the descriptive vision of ruined streets, the ending of the poem diachronically invokes the recurring reminiscences of Derry in the past and a historical horizon of lived moments in Derry. The implication of the Derry Walls in the ending of the poem further suggests this historical perspective upon the genealogy of Derry history and represents its fictional relation with Bloody Sunday. "Butcher's Dozen" ends with four lines of descriptive representation of this historical town:

The gentle rainfall drifting down
Over Colmcille's town
Could not refresh, only distil
In silent grief from hill to hill. ( NLD 83)

Bloody Sunday, for Kinsella, is the starting point of the historical retrospect, which creates its fictional position and symbolic representation of the history of Derry. Here "Colmcille's town," referring to the old town of Derry, implicates the historical development of Derry and the meaning of St. Colmcille's monastic town in the modern area of Creggan and Bogside. Derry has experienced a series of recurring bloody scenes and cannot easily be refreshed among the hills. For its name, Derry, the Irish word doire with its meaning of "oak grove," is now politically anglicized with the prefix "London" as "Londonderry" for the official documents of both British and Northern Ireland governments. The re-naming of Derry indicates the struggles between colonial politics and history. The name "Colmcille" not only revives the patron saint of Derry, but also re-justifies Kinsella's account of Derry's history and geopolitics in the Gaelic context.

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   Geography and History

The physical geography of Derry correlates its historical link with words like "wall," "hill," "Colmcille's town." Here the word "wall" implicates an important connection or a fictional relation between this observation and the historical significance of the Derry Walls, parts of Old City of Derry on the 120 feet-high hills above the Lough Folye. The Derry Walls on the hill, "the heart of the city," was established in 1610 as the new town of King James I's plantation in between the bog and the lough. This new town Londonderry, strategically functioned as the fortress, and it was constructed in the original site of the monastic town of Derry Colmcille in the sixth century (Thomas 69). Hence, the Derry Walls, part of Londonderry in the present, are the historical remains of the colonial plantation. According to geography and the history of Derry, the Derry Walls represent not only the symbol of British colonization in the late 17th century, but also later on are significant for surveillance and domination in the event of Bloody Sunday.

Tracing back to the obliterated parts of history in the Gaelic context, around the mid-sixth century St. Colmcille established the monastery in Doire, which is described as the "angel-haunted" city with St. Colmcille as the patron (Deane 13). With two verse stanzas attributed to Colmcille and selected from Latin poems around the 11th or 12th century, Colmcille explicitly praises the beauty of Derry:

The reason I love Doire:
its calmness, its purity
and the number of white angels
from one end to the other !
.……………………………..
Our Doire, with all its acorns,
Sad, spiritless, sunk in tears:
it hurts my heart to leave it
and turn toward alien people. (NOBI 67-8)

At first St. Colmcille describes Doire/Derry as being calm, pure, and bright, which is apparently far different from the bleak, bloody and dark scene on Bloody Sunday 1972. The monastic town is full of blessings, hopes and angels that contrast to the hatred, violence, and death in modern Derry. For the second part, Colmcille not only depicts the natural scenery of Doire as "oak grove," but also metaphorically delineates Doire as the ruined town as "spiritless" and "sunk in tears." Though these poems present feelings of St Colmcille's exile to Scotland and Britain, the second part still suggests a prophetic message of the recurring colonial experience in the local history of Derry. These two short stanzas implicitly point out the Viking's invasion between the 9th century and 11th century, and the Norman's settlement around the 12th century. Furthermore, this poem initiates a process of uncovering the history of Derry and colonial experiences from its founding period to the moment of Bloody Sunday in "Butcher's Dozen."
-----

The second part of the Widgery Report offers the "physical background," or geographic fact as well as the socio-political situation of Londonderry from the interment period to the occasion of Bloody Sunday. This section of the report simply focuses on the area along the Bogside, where the Bloody Sunday event mainly happened, and further investigates the geopolitics and demographics in the Catholic communities of Derry:

This area, which is shown on the map and is in the north-east corner of the Bogside district, is overlooked from the south-east side by the western section of the City's ancient Walls, which encircle the old heart of the town and which have major significance in Orange tradition because of the successful defence of Londonderry against James II; and from the west by the Creggan, a largely new district built on rising ground. Creggan and the old town look at one another across the Bogside. The Bogside and Creggan are predominantly Catholic districts, their population amounting to about 33,000 out of a total population in the City of Londonderry of about 55,000. The Bogside contains a number of old terraced houses and buildings, many of them derelict or nearly so; but also a large number of new blocks of flats and maisonettes. The small area with which the Tribunal was concerned lies on flat ground at a meeting point of old and new buildings. All flats so frequently mentioned in evidence -the Rossville Flats, Glenfada Park, Kells Walks, Columbcille Court, Abbey Park and Joseph Place-are very modern buildings. . . . A notable feature of the area is that it contains a number of large open spaces which have been cleared of buildings, on both sides of William Street and of Rossville Street, as well as the courtyards and the open spaces arising from the layout of the new blocks of flats. (WR11-2)

This narrative of geography in Derry seems to focus on the strategic perspective of the town for British authorities but rather unfairly deals with the historical development and context of the two opposing communities in Derry as well as to simplify the conflicts between Britain and Ireland. Though this report did mention the history of the Walls, this historical account of Derry is still fragmented and intended to obliterate as well as to break down the Gaelic context of Colmcille's Derry, the founding period of the monastic town. Compared with this official investigation of the Catholic community in Creggan and Bogside districts of Derry, "Butcher's Dozen," akin to St Colmcille's poem, makes rather a sympathetic response and a diachronic implication of this town, its people, and this occasion through the events of Bloody Sunday. Kinsella's historical discourse in "Butcher's Dozen" not only represents a series of silent witnesses and latent historical realities on Bloody Sunday, but also questions a recurring pattern of Irish history-the constant invasion of foreign forces and the influential impact of colonialism on the Irish people and culture. In other words, this poem pinpoints the continuous hostility between Ireland and England; the Derry Walls are a symbolic barricade between Irish Catholics and British/Scottish Protestants in Northern Ireland.

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 Map and Photographs of Derry (Londonderry)
 

http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/maps/towns/derry.gif

Illustrations (Please click the number on the map and see its photographs)
1. City Walls of Derry (Butcher's Gate) (1/5/6)
2. Bogside (40)
3. Free Derry's Corner (41)

 


Gate of Derry's Old Town

Derry's Walls

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