Re-membering Easter 1916: Homosexuality and Irish History in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys

Abstract

While the benefits brought to the LGBTQ+ community through the legal reforms enacted in the last two decades are undeniable, paradoxically the contribution of this community to Ireland is still largely absent from official narratives of the past. This article discusses Jamie O’Neill’s novel At Swim, Two Boys (2001) as a response to this absence through its reconstruction of Easter 1916. The narrative that the novel presents on the Easter Rising differs from national and nationalist accounts of the event in that it is not a mere recollection or remembering of what happened, but rather a re-membering of it. Drawing on the approach of the Easter Rising as a moment of possibility, the novel reassembles the narrative of the rebellion on the basis of gay experience, an experience that has been absent not only from the historiography on the Easter Rising, but also from the national imaginary as well. Through this reassemble and resignification of the rebellion, O’Neill’s novel provides a retroactive as well as future-oriented counter-memory of Irishness that materializes the need to reorient of Irish historiography and the political body based on a non-heteronormative affiliative understanding of the sovereign country.
 
 Keywords: LGBTQ+ Voices; 1916 Easter Rising; Memory; Jamie O’Neill; Irish Historiography.