“Vistas of Simultaneity”: Northern Irish Elegies for Yugoslavia

Abstract

“Vistas of Simultaneity”:Northern Irish Elegies for Yugoslavia Margaret Greaves When asked in a PBS NewHour interview in 2000 if the “honor-bound, blood-stained, vengeance-driven” culture of Beowulf reminded him of Ireland, Seamus Heaney refused to take the bait. He replied diplomatically but unequivocally, “Well, no. Ireland . . . [is] in a different kind of cultural situation.” Instead, he suggested resonances between Beowulf and another fringe region of Europe, one often aligned with Ireland in the British and Anglo-Irish literary imaginations: the Balkans. Heaney compared the ethnic violence of the 1990s with the tribal allegiances of the Anglo-Saxon world; what does strike the contemporary reader of “Beowulf,” he said, is that sense of small ethnic groups living together with memories of wrongs on each side, with a border between them that may be breached. I mean, after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, after Bosnia and Kosovo and so on, the feuds between the Swedes and the Geats, these little dynastic, ethnic, furious battles strike a chord.1 Heaney allows that “there is of course an ethnic energy and a vengefulness from the past” in Northern Ireland, but that these impulses are “more widespread than that”—emanating at least as insistently from southeastern Europe. By displacing his response onto former Yugoslavia, Heaney suggests that Ireland’s historically specific situation should not be read too faithfully into the primitive landscapes of Beowulf. In contrast to Heaney’s insistence on cultural specificity, the mainstream media and some scholars have explained the Northern Ireland “Troubles” and the Yugoslav Wars in strikingly similar terms: as tribal conflicts rooted in the blood feuds of primordial, savage Europe.2 Indeed, this “tribal warfare thesis” has been applied persistently to these two conflicts. Since the nineteenth century, the [End Page 31] Balkans and Ireland have frequently appeared as distorted doubles in British and Anglo-Irish literature, imagined as primitive backwaters in the margins of Europe. Count Hermann Keyserling’s immortal remark in his 1928 book Europe— “If the Balkans hadn’t existed, they would have been invented”—now resonates with the opening of Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland: “If Ireland had never existed, the English would have invented it.”3 Although balkanization is most apparent in English literature through the fin de siècle, Andrew Hammond’s British Literature and the Balkans (2010) places the Yugoslav Wars on a continuum with earlier balkanist discourse.4 For that matter, it is striking that Irish Gothic readings of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which find the plight of colonial Ireland in Dracula’s Romanian landscape, became trendy just as war in the Balkans broke out and peace talks in Northern Ireland began.5 The branding of the “Troubles” and the Yugoslav Wars as tribal warfare no doubt has roots in fin de siècle balkanization. But we have yet to consider the intersections between Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia, despite the richness of the texts—particularly in poetry, a genre generally neglected in most literary studies of the Balkans.6 Yet the genre of poetry in general, and Irish-themed elegy in particular, has responded powerfully to the superficial paralleling of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia. The 1990s saw multiple individual poems and volumes of poetry dedicated to victims of former Yugoslavia that implicitly or explicitly bring in Irish, and especially Northern Irish, themes. These volumes include Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia (1993); In the Heart of Europe: Poems for Bosnia (1998); and Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia, edited by [End Page 32] Chris Agee (1998).7 Not all of these poems come from Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. But all of the poems considered here are transnational elegies that mourn the dead of Yugoslavia through Northern Irish contexts.8 In the rhetoric of tribalism in postwar Europe, the tribe is imagined as a base unit of human groups, an almost oppressively intimate collectivity. Intimacy is also an underlying concern in the theory of lyric. Intimacy takes on additional force when brought to bear on the lyric “I” and addressed or implied “you” of the elegy. Experiments with intimacy between poet and addressee—particularly the circumstances in which these overtures break...