Abstract
The past two decades have produced extensive criticism of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement’s (1999) progressivist logic in its proposal of a “fresh start” as the best way to honour the victims of the armed conflict that took place during the Troubles (1968-1998). In this paper, we argue that, by refusing to forget and to move on without exposing its grief, Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) mourns the Troubles in the public arena, undoing the Agreement. With special interest in Burns’s narrator and protagonist who evades the reality of violence by “reading-while-walking”, we read Milkman as a gendered response to this enforced forgetfulness. If walking the city frames this young woman’s trauma within the collective trauma of the Troubles, it also offers the nomadic possibility of refusing the sectarian identities available to her.
Highlights
The past two decades have produced extensive criticism of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement’s (1999) progressivist logic in its proposal of a “fresh start” as the best way to honour the victims of the armed conflict that took place during the Troubles (1968-1998)
In “Recovery and Forgetting: Haunting Remains in Northern Irish Culture” (2016), for instance, Shane Alcobia-Murphy cites and reaffirms Graham Dawson’s argument that “the attempt to overcome the ‘legacy of the past’ in Northern Ireland, by consigning it to oblivion, is problematic” (Alcobia-Murphy 199), as “it leaves intact deep sources of grief, grievance and antagonism that are rooted in the recent history of the Troubles” (Dawson 2007, 77)
Alcobia-Murphy further asserts that a “determination to archive the past and foster shared amnesia is not closure for the victims, but rather the accentuation of their trauma” (199)
Summary
Anna Burns’s Milkman brings, in its first sentence, an announcement of the denouement of that which could be one of the plot’s biggest points of tension. Artistic reactions against the underlying progressivist discourses that looked to split Northern Ireland’s history into old and new abound, and we would offer that while Milkman has been read as a Troubles novel, it is as much a work that exercises the tensions inherent to the aftermath of the Peace Process It can be aligned with other works of post-Agreement literature that remain acutely aware that the ‘staked’ past can still sting and that the Peace Process may have created a rather different and more narrow corridor than that envisaged by Longley: one that, in its complicity with a ready-made futurity of global consumerism and neoliberal economics, resembles more a one-way street, as insinuated by the strategic street sign for the Agreement’s ‘Yes’ campaign, reading ‘Vote Yes. It’s the way ahead’. The nomadic impulse of the narrator is exercised and manifested in the novel through her refusal to adhere to the categories available to her, and through her disappearance into literature in the public space, “reading-while-walking”, engaging in flânerie and, disarming the Troubles’ power over her
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