400. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by: Valerie Flores
Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Genre: Nonfiction, Crime, History, Foreign
pages, published
Reading Format: Book
Summary
In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders. Her children never saw her again. In her early 20’s, I.R.A. terrorist Dolours Price planted bombs in London, targeting informers for execution. Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein which was the I.R.A.’s political arm, negotiated the peace that led to the Good Friday accords by denying his I.R.A. past. The stories of McConville, Price and Adams are just part of the horrific events in the brutal conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. In Say Nothing, Patrick Keefe relates these and other stories from this black period in Irish history.
Quotes
“if you could just get people to talk, he believed, the most bitter antagonists could discover common ground.”
“The body is a fantastic machine,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College interviews, recounting the grueling sequence of a hunger strike. ‘It’ll eat off all the fat tissue first, then it starts eating away at the muscle, to keep your brain alive.’ Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, the nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves.”
“There is a concept in psychology called ‘moral injury,’ notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done during wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.”
“Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator. Should the state be accorded more leniency because, legally speaking, it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Or, conversely, should we hold soldiers and cops to a higher standard than paramilitaries?”
“the violence intensified, grandiose funerals became routine, with rousing graveside orations and caskets draped in tricolor flags. People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast anymore, apart from wakes.”
“Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.”
“But even if your parents were ardent supporters of the IRA, there were reasons not to tell them that you had joined. If the police or the army broke down the door to interrogate them, the less they knew, the better.”
“We beat them with stones at first, and they had guns. Our people had to go and get guns. Wouldn’t they have been right stupid people to stand there? Our people got shotguns at first and then got better weapons. And then the British, who were supposed to protect us, came in and raided our homes. What way could you fight? So you went down and you blew them up.”
My Take
Say Nothing is a compelling book which takes an in depth look inside The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Prior to reading it, I only vaguely knew about this period in Irish History. I came away with a much better understanding of the who, what, where and why of that conflict and the importance of forgiveness before there can be peace.
