1. Beginning: Opening Stanza in
"Butcher's Dozen"
2. Finale: Ending Stanza
3. Geography and History: From St
Colmcille to Derry Walls
4.
Map and Photographs of Derry
5.
Bloody Sunday 1972, Derry, and ¡§Butcher¡¦s Dozen:A Lesson for the Octave of
Widgery¡¨(complete chapter,abstract,appendix, and bibliograpgies)
Beginning
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:
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 !
.¡K¡K¡K¡K¡K¡K¡K¡K¡K¡K¡K..
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."
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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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