Dirty Protests, Dirty Thoughts Michael Epp (bio) In blanketmen, richard o’rawe shares one particularly memorable account of the Irish Republican dirty protest in the late 1970s: It was a choking summer day; there wasn’t a breath of air in the cell, and the smell was abominable. A swarm of bluebottles buzzed about the rotten food piled up in the corner. I hated bluebottles; they and the seagulls, with their infernal buzzing and squawking, would awaken us at dawn every morning. Dollhead and myself were playing chess on a board marked out on the floor, using little squares torn out of the Bible as chess pieces. Suddenly my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, as I noticed that the rotten pile of food was moving. Dollhead saw it too and went to investigate. As he removed the outer layer of the decomposed food, little white insects started to emerge. Hundreds of them were wriggling their way to freedom! The insects must have had a prearranged timetable for mobilisation, because they emerged together at exactly the same time all over the wing. Lads were shouting that their cells were infested with these creatures. Hurson-Boy informed the [End Page 37] wing that they were maggots and had come from bluebottles laying their eggs in the rotten food. Nothing had prepared me for this. Cleaky Clarke, the wing oc, ordered that the maggots weren’t to be destroyed or interfered with in any way, but I made it clear to Dollhead that either the maggots went or I did. While I could take all that the screws threw at me, maggots were a different matter: these little guys had the potential to finish me off. We found it harder to kill them than we had imagined, for even when we cut them in half they still wriggled about. Eventually, we mixed the pile of rotten food and the maggots together into a hard paste with water. We then scooped up small amounts of the paste on the lids of our pisspots and threw it onto the walls, where it stuck like glue. Other men obeyed the order and woke up every morning with maggots in their hair and beards. How they could do that was beyond me. (36–37) The point of the dirt in the dirty protest—in which Republican prisoners wore only blankets in their otherwise empty cells, smearing their shit on the walls—was twofold: to make the ordinary work of prison guards impossible and to resist clumsy government policies of criminalization that attempted to cast political prisoners as ordinary criminals. Dirt was a crudely material weapon in a propaganda war fought over the more abstractly material terrain of symbolism. Symbolically, calling Republican prisoners regular criminals (as opposed to political prisoners), and making them wear prison uniforms, would mean that there was nothing really political going on in the conflict. For the state, such symbolism would reduce its responsibility to simply managing thuggy gunmen. Symbolically, wearing only blankets, smearing shit on the walls, and living with maggots meant that the Republican prisoners were anything but ordinary. This, in turn, suggested that the state might be responsible in a specifically political way for the troubles. Dirt had a distinct advantage over other materials for protest. It was, for instance, one of the materials the prison system could not ban. Prisoners needed access to food, which their bodies transformed into dirt. Smearing that waste onto walls symbolically transformed that dirt into dirtiness. Even if left unconsumed, food could be allowed to decompose and then become dirt, and dirty, too. The dirty protest was meant to register, propagandistically, both inside and outside the prison and was much more effective than more familiar Republican tactics of disruption [End Page 38] (these included breaking windows, smashing furniture, or burning down prison huts), which had little symbolic impact outside of the prison itself. The dirty protest found its ultimate conclusion in hunger strikes, which resulted in numerous deaths by starvation. Dirt in the dirty protest was produced by food, so extending the protest to hunger strikes produced a kind of material and symbolic continuity between the forms of protest (not to mention...