“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”: Reading Trauma in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry

Abstract

“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”: Reading Trauma in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry Carla Anderson (bio) The Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson was born and raised in 1950s Belfast in an Irish Catholic family living on the Falls Road, which is the heart of West Belfast and an Irish Catholic community within the city. While talking about his childhood in an interview, Carson refers to himself as “a guy from the Falls Road” before even mentioning Catholicism, indicating the importance of the Falls as a geographical locator that is coded with deeper meanings of identity.1 In his poetry, too, place frequently acts as a stand-in for identity. Although both Carson’s poetry and his prose often reflects his personal experiences and history, it is also fictionalized. Even The Star Factory, a book-length essay exploration of the deep history of Belfast that includes details from his own life, is not meant to be a memoir, as he explains in the same interview: “You never really know how things were exactly. We reinvent it all the time.”2 In his poetry, Carson deconstructs and recombines bits of history, news stories, and personal experiences to create a space in which the traumatic experiences of the Troubles can be processed and expressed through his writing. Similarly, places in his poems constantly shift and change, complicating the easy security that comes out of knowing where one is from. His poetic forms often feature nonlinear narratives and stylistic structures that echo the complexities of how trauma is experienced, and thematically, his poems emphasize the generative potential of constant change, even as it can be disorienting. Rather than remaining trapped in a cycle of traumatic thoughts, the speakers in Carson’s poems make use of this generative change to regain some creative autonomy. The Troubles, thirty years of intense sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the late 1990s, caused over 3,900 deaths and has had a deep and lasting impact on Northern Irish society. One psychology study from 2013 found that the highest type of traumatic experience reported by adults in Northern Ireland was what the researchers called “network events,” a term that encompasses witnessing traumatic events that affect a “loved one” or witnessing [End Page 125] serious injury, death, or a dead body.3 This study, along with others, emphasizes the severity of post-traumatic response to secondhand traumas as well as firsthand experiences—for example, witnessing a serious injury could be traumatic just as much as personally experiencing that same injury. In this way, even citizens who did not directly experience a personal trauma were still traumatized by the Troubles. Nor did the official end of the conflict bring peace or closure: journalist Lyra McKee further points out just how deeply the trauma has influenced the society even long after the conflict had passed by noting that since the cease-fire in 1999, the suicide rate in Northern Ireland has nearly doubled and, as of 2016, exceeds the number of deaths attributed to the Troubles.4 Given the extent of the impact of the Troubles, trauma often dominates the conversation about contemporary Northern Irish history. As scholar Jim Smyth notes in his introduction to a collection of essays about the Troubles, the rhetoric surrounding this period fixates on Ireland’s long history of colonial oppression, rebellion, and violence to amplify a prevailing notion that the Irish are stuck in a permanent divide and unable to escape from a cycle of sectarian violence.5 In this cultural context, it is even more vital to discuss poetry that pushes back against a narrative of being “stuck.” In Ciaran Carson’s work, memory is unreliable, which allows the speakers in his poems to evade a relationship to history that is fixed and inescapable. References to the Troubles appear throughout the body of Carson’s work, particularly his poetry, prose, and memoir writings. This prevalence suggests that events from this time are deeply influential to Carson, who returns to similar themes from his earliest works up through his final collection of poetry. Significantly, despite reconsidering familiar themes, his work emphasizes change and evolution—both in his writing styles and in how...