On Belfast, an excerpt

The sixteen of us were used to Irish bus rides on roads that never seemed wide enough. We would doze in and out, feeling guilty for sleeping instead of staring out into all that, the sheep like sleepwalking ants walking up and down the steep hillsides; the innumerable shades of green; the weather that changes too quickly from sun to sideways rain to something in-between. We grew used to it all because we were in these buses too much that summer.

It is a two-hour bus drive from Dublin City Centre to Belfast City Centre. One hundred and two miles or one hundred and sixty-five kilometers. We were crossing a disputed border into a disputed land, but you wouldn’t notice it from the drive unless you were looking for it. I was too tired to sleep so I was looking for it. I saw no border control, no slowing down, no passport presentation. Instead, the lines on the road changed from yellow to white, the kilometer disappeared, signs were only in English. Welcome to Northern Ireland the sign didn’t say and don’t forget, Welcome to the United Kingdom. Enjoy your stay.

Close to the city, British flags. Strewn over streets, glued to windows, flying outside homes, these Union Jacks mark Britishness, Protestantism, Unionism, Loyalism, of all these words we use to differentiate Northern Irish ideology, words on one side of The Northern Irish Binary. From the bus, all of this wakes me up. From the bus—because it seems to always be from the bus—we watched the subjects of that lecture from July 27th when the whole thing was laid out for us in easy terms. Through the dusty windowpane, they become fuzzy zoo animals used to the busloads of students, the new influx of tourists snapping photos of the murals, flags, segregation, them. They are white and I can’t tell if they are Protestant or Catholic. I can’t figure out if they are the murderers and bigots we learned about. Maybe they are the sons and daughters of IRA men or UFF men or maybe they are peaceful people, somewhere in the middle of all this, praying for harmony, not just for the two sides to get along but for the two sides to become one people.

Few people will say that Belfast is a beautiful city. The majority is mostly right. There is too much concrete and the sky is always grey. A port city on the eastern side of the island, Belfast thrived on industry into the early twentieth century. Shipbuilding and linen making brought capital and labor to Belfast making it one of the most industrious cities in Europe at the time. The industries fell and the rest of the twentieth century was defined by conflict, World War I, the Irish Revolution, the Civil War, the Irish Partition, and the Troubles, with small periods of peace in-between. Belfast slid into economic despair.

 By the docks, the two yellow gantry cranes rule the Belfast sky. Called Samson and Goliath, they still function today, they still build ships. They are a sign of a prosperous past, industrial instruments with symbolic importance, bright in the sky. At interfaces, the peace walls are still there, too. These symbolic in a different way, functional in a different way. The gates on these walls close at six each night and remain closed on the weekends. If you want to blow something up across the wall or if you want to murder somebody, you just need to take another route or make sure it’s before six on a weekday. Since the peace agreement was signed in 1998, they have grown tall, taller and taller to protect homes from flying objects, flying war. Protective metal cages adorn houses close to the wall. These barriers remain in Belfast because the people want them to stay, because they feel safer with them. Belfast is not Berlin.

The architecture of the city is a mix of old and new, not as a design trend, but as a result of the rebuilding that occurs when a building is blown to pieces by paramilitary groups and the concrete and cement gets all mixed up with broken body parts and burnt t-shirts. One must bury and one must rebuild.

From a larger memoir piece on my experience in Belfast and Dublin in Summer 2015. Informational footnotes omitted.