“Mother Ireland, get off our backs”: Gender, Republicanism and State Politics in Prison Short Stories by Northern Irish Women Writers

Abstract

The dominant discourses of incarceration in Northern Ireland, those of the republicans and the British state, have been mainly male-centred. Like in other public discourses of the Troubles, women have had little part in these narratives which either omi[t] the experiences and actions of women or se[e] those experiences and actions as fundamentally undifferentiated from the actions and motivations of men in their communities (McAuliffe 2010: 171). A number of academics, however, have looked at incarceration from an alternative perspective in which gender interlink[s] with these powerful and competing 'constructions' of the same (McAuliffe 2010: 171). Elizabeth Shannon's I Am of Ireland (1989) and Eileen Fairweather et al.'s Only the Rivers Run Free (1984) explore the Troubles through interviews with women from different social, political and religious backgrounds. These feminist studies cover a wide range of issues and although imprisonment is one of them, they only discuss it in some sections. On the contrary, Megan Sullivan's Women in Northern Ireland focuses entirely on the topic of incarceration. She examines its cultural representations in female non-fictional, film and literary narratives, but she does not include short fiction as part of those literary narratives. Other academics have focused exclusively on women's direct experiences of imprisonment. Nell McCafferty, a feminist journalist who was a delegate of the Armagh Prisoners' Solidarity Committee, published The Armagh Women in 1981, the year in which the prison protests culminated with the second hunger strike. Her book seems factual but it has a feminist agenda. McCafferty centres on the idea that nationalism is a feminist issue, an opinion to which many feminists were hostile. Similarly, in her article It Is My Belief That Armagh Is a Feminist Issue she urges the women's movement to support Armagh prisoners on the basis that their struggle is a feminist matter. Margaret D'Arcy's Tell Them Everything was published the same year as The Armagh Women and has similar feminist objectives. D'Arcy, a feminist playwright with a strongly republican family background, (2) spent three months in Armagh Jail for refusing to pay a fine for demonstrating outside Armagh Jail on International Women's Day. Tell Them Everything is an account of her time in Armagh with the republican women on no-wash protest. Despite the republican prisoners' request to 'tell everything' when she was released, D'Arcy failed to put them on centre stage. Her account is self-centred and extremely subjective as she talks about her own experience rather than the experiences of the prisoners. Her deliberate efforts to enter Armagh and be moved to A Wing as well as her determination to fit in and participate in the protest make us have reservations about her neutrality. References to romantic notions of Irish nationalism (claims of unconditional solidarity, the use of terms such as revolutionaries and young warriors or allusions to to Celtic mythological figures) also evidence lack of impartiality in her supposedly factual account. Mary Corcoran, on the other hand, has published factual and detached research about female political prisoners. (3) Her study Out of Order (2006), the most comprehensive research on this matter to date, combines theory, history and sociology in order to analyse political imprisonment for women in Northern Ireland at different stages of the Troubles. The shortcoming with factual narrations like this, however, is that they cannot provide new avenues of understanding female imprisonment because they can only adhere to facts. The nature of creative writing enables to explore subject-matters at a deeper psychological level. Although the studies mentioned above have been vital to acknowledge the experiences of Northern Irish women with regards to incarceration, I believe that the short stories analysed in this article manage to throw new light on this socio-political phenomenon. …