‘I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders’: Post-Brexit Representations…
By: Jessica White
Tags: Brexit, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Derry, Michael Hughes

‘I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders’: Post-Brexit Representations of Irish Republicanism and Abjection in Country by Michael Hughes

Written early 2020

Jessica White, University of Liverpool

Keywords: Northern Ireland; Ireland; the Irish border; Kristeva; Abjection; Michael Hughes

Abstract

Due to Brexit, the Irish border is now the only land border between a non-EU country and an EU country. In the wake of the 2016 referendum, questions about trade and border checks that respect the 1999 Good Friday Agreement while adhering to Britain’s status as a non-EU country have been the subject of debate between officials (and are still not fully resolved). Many Northern Irish citizens have feared that Troubles-era levels of violence will be revived because of such debate, particularly by those living near the border; this has been realised on at least two occasions in The Creggen, Derry in 2019. Within this culture of uncertainty over another split in Irish identity, Northern Irish writers have responded by producing literature that explores their national history through the body, identity and emotion, returning to the Troubles as site of both internal and external conflict. These texts are characterised by their utilisation of Julia Kristeva’s theory of Abjection in their consideration of nausea, death, eating and the concept of “I” in relation to outside forces. In his 2019 novel Country, Michael Hughes retells Homer’s The Iliad in a Troubles-era borderland town, evoking the war glory of the framework text while exploring the self in abject terms. This is achieved particularly through images of food and eating, especially in proximity to bodily fluids and corpses. Country’s ambivalent ending that diverts from the Homeric text signifies the context it is written in; the violence does not end and new and existing divisions continue to manifest in the borderlands. Brexit has become a catalyst for a new era of Northern Irish writing.

‘I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders’: Post-Brexit Representations of Irish Republicanism and Abjection in Country by Michael Hughes

On January 31st 2020, the United Kingdom left the European Union. The four years since the Brexit referendum proved to be an uncertain time for Northern Ireland and Ireland, with valid questions asked about trade and if there would be a return to border checks on what would become the only land border between an EU and non-EU country. Fear that life on the borderlands would become unstable at the introduction of a possible hard border and a concurrent fear of revived violent republican activity has led writers to respond with fiction and poetry that considers this unease. Michael Hughes’ 2018 novel Country evokes both the past and the present in its consideration of the self in violent settings. At the imminent threat of another division in Irish and Northern-Irish identity within the Brexit negotiations over the Irish border, Hughes returns to former sites of division in Northern Irish history. His clear focus on internal borders during a period of violence and conflict can easily be read with Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection applied to it. Ideas of disgust, death and selfhood (integral to Kristeva’s writing) pervade the novel in ways that are related to Hughes’ contemporary writing period and its fears over division and identity. This is especially apparent in food and eating, something that Kristeva specifically points out as a site of disgust and death in the abject experience, and something that both creates and disrupts internal borders of being. By using the framework of Homer’s The Iliad, Hughes places his Troubles setting within a rigid plot structure that he disrupts significantly by changing the ending. This is emblematic of how he uses several facets of tradition and history to think through the post-Brexit referendum era in a way that considers the new challenges that Northern Ireland faces.

Julia Kristeva’s theories on abjection are set out in her seminal work Powers of Horror, published in France in 1980. Within Powers of Horror, Kristeva describes being presented with a corpse and she states, ‘I am at the border of my condition as a living being.’[1] Faced with such a blunt signifier of death, she realises what she is constantly rejecting as a condition simply by being alive and she becomes physically repulsed. This pertains to an ‘abject’ experience, which Boldt-Irons, Corrado and Virgulti elaborate on in the introduction to their edited collection Beauty and the Abject:

The abject disturbs identity, system and order, and draws one toward the place where meaning collapses. The abject threatens to dissolve boundaries separating self and other, the clean and the filthy, the living and the dead […]. The sight of a corpse, of menstrual blood, or excrement and sewage all produce a violent reaction associated with abjection.[2]

Abjection as a theory is useful when looking at historical events which are concerned with the Irish border and assessing how this manifests in contemporary literature on the Troubles. Identity, system, order, boundaries and selfhood are all concurrent themes for both Republican and Unionist people either side of the border, especially apparent in the violence which articulated dangerous anger towards one another’s political standpoints. Literature produced on these historical events often evokes this violence as its subject, drawing on abject-like experiences of killing and disgust to express individual feelings of disturbed identity, order and collapsed meaning, as in Hughes’ Country.

Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, there has been an escalation in Irish and Northern Irish literature that has explored the boundaries of self in abject terms. Country is therefore part of a growing tradition, along with Anna Burns’ Milkman, published in 2018 and a poetry series entitled ‘Border Voices’ in literary journal The Stinging Fly which explores borderland identity. This is, of course, not to say that this is a completely new phenomenon. There are many examples of writing on both the border as a site and on boundaries of the inner self published before 2016 in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Examples include Enniscorthy novelist Colm Tóibín’s 1987 memoir Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (originally named Walking Along the Border), and Belfast native Medbh McGuckian’s multiple collections of dreamlike poetry which explore identity and selfhood. Texts such as Country and Milkman therefore carry on already established traditions. However, the threat of yet another division in Irish identity in the establishment of the only land border between an EU and non-EU country has brought ideas about the borders of a nation and borders of the self as a shared concept to the forefront. Both Milkman and Country use different facets of abjection to discuss militant Irish republicanism, specifically the Provisional IRA and the Troubles. While Milkman focuses on a young woman’s struggle with family, the body and sexual harassment in an unnamed Northern Irish city steeped in male-dominated conflict that she is at odds with, Country is set in the borderlands with mostly combatant protagonists. This essay will focus on Hughes’ novel because of its focus on the borderlands as a setting, and it will especially focus on the republican paramilitary characters. Despite this novel having a broad representation of people involved in the Troubles, from British Army soldiers to political informants, the experiences of republican combatants is where the abject is outlined in its fullest detail, with food, bodily fluids, disgust and signifiers of death abounding as part of their day-to-day lives.

Why, then, are writers like Hughes returning to the Troubles as a subject for their writing in the post-Brexit referendum era? At least one answer can be found in the ongoing fierce debate surrounding policy changes either side of the Irish border, and an escalation of violent dissident republican activity since 2016. By the time Britain left the EU on January 31st, negotiations had resulted in a Withdrawal Agreement that outlines a transition period lasting until December 2020, with a protocol that illustrates the need for avoiding a ‘hard border’ between Ireland and Northern Ireland. At the time of writing, there are gaps in the specific details on this, which will eventually be decided by a Joint Committee.[3] However, prior to these agreements, it was apparent that a no deal Brexit could result in a hard border, which could have led to physical checks for those wanting to cross into either country. The threat of this would have resulted in significant changes for people living in both Ireland and Northern Ireland economically, personally and politically. During the October 2019 negotiations U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid out his plan for Northern Ireland to leave the EU customs union along with the rest of the UK, meaning that checks and controls would come into effect on goods passing through the Irish border.[4] Commenting on the plans, director of Northern Ireland Retail Consortium Aodhán Connolly said: “This will lead to complexity, delays, tariffs, VAT and cost rises that will make NI goods less competitive and squeeze our household budgets. The measures are predicated on intrusive surveillance which will put a burden on business and be disruptive for border communities. In short these proposals are unworkable and unpalatable.”[5] A few weeks later, former MI5 operative and undercover Troubles spy Willie Carlin stated in a BBC interview that he believes young dissident republicans are “ready to do whatever they think they need to do” should a hard border be implemented.[6] This followed on from riots in The Creggen, Derry (a border city) in April 2019, which resulted in the murder of journalist Lyra McKee. The New IRA, a dissident republican group formed in 2012, took responsibility, but apologised publicly as McKee was not their intended target.[7] Similar violent activity broke out in the same area in September of that year, after police targeted suspected dissident republican homes and discovered a mortar bomb.[8] Clearly, the very recent violence so close to the Irish border had no real effect on Johnson’s Brexit 2019 negotiations that were almost roundly criticised in both Ireland and Northern Ireland.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to make any conclusions on whether this dissident activity happened (and may continue to happen) as direct protest to the then real possibility of a hard border, or the ongoing Brexit negotiations were simply an excuse to revive existing tensions (or a combination of the two). The sheer point of fact is that violent activity is now once again a real concern in the day-to-day lives of people living in Northern Ireland, especially in cities like Derry which sit so close to the border. In his 2019 book The Border, Diarmaid Ferriter assesses the 100 year history of debate, activity and negotiations concerned with the Irish border, and why Brexit is placing new life in old and existing tensions for both unionists and republicans. He paraphrases historian Darach Macdonald from his book Hard Border, stating that, for negotiators in Brussels, the border ‘was not… just a logistical problem with economic consequences; culture, disrupted lives, history and sociology also had to be considered; because of its intrusions it was always a ‘hard’ border before the political and military situation improved.’[9] He also quotes the short 2018 film Brexit: A Cry from the Irish Border, written by Clare Dwyer Hogg and narrated by actor Stephen Rea (former husband of now deceased Provisional IRA operative and hunger striker Dolours Price):

Roads that start here and end there, somehow allowing a wound to heal … a gentleness in the mundanity … daily travel across political lines; work, school, grocery shops, back again … there, but not there; a line of imagination that needed imagination to make it exist while unseen … we live here and we’re holding our breath again.[10]

What becomes clear from this narration is that there is a suspicion that the minutiae of daily life, the ‘gentleness in the mundanity’ will be disrupted by by a no-deal Brexit, not just in changes to border crossing controls, but in the expectation of violence in the ‘holding of our breath again’ (which since the film’s release has become a reality in The Creggen.) Ferriter himself concludes that the history of such tension is an ‘oppressive weight’, which has been brought ‘aggressively back into current affairs’[11] because of Brexit. It makes sense, therefore, that Irish and Northern Irish literature written after 2016 uses the history of the border as a subject, with escalated feelings of fear and division as central themes.

Country is a relatively distinct novel within Northern Irish writing trends as it is not predominantly about Provisional IRA members attempting to distance themselves from the conflict, although it does become a brief plot point in two sections of the novel. Stephanie Callan argues that, although writers have responded to the Troubles with ‘astonishing creativity’, narratives about unapologetic combatants are quite rare in Northern Irish and Irish literature. She states:

In fiction, there are multiple examples of young men who are sympathetic because they struggle to get out of their associations with the IRA, such as Cal in Bernard MacLaverty’s novel of the same name or Brendan in Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on Our Skin. However, there are few attempts to imagine the mind of a person who does not want to get out of such a paramilitary organization, who is convinced that fighting is the right course of action.[12]

Country, published in the post-Brexit referendum era, focuses on republican paramilitaries as well as informers to the police and members of the British army, most of whom are convinced that they have taken the right course of action just as negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement are beginning. Within the network of associations between characters, aspects that are distinctly abject in tone, such as communal eating and murder, display the complexities of feeling that run concurrent to apparent righteousness and conviction. Although individual characters may feel that they have taken the correct path during the Troubles, what Hughes’ novel successfully does is illustrate the ways in which singular people may have reactions that conflict with their outward beliefs. This is where the theory of abjection can be applied, as Hughes navigates the borders of what people can cope with and their bodily and emotional reactions to them.

As previously mentioned, Country uses the framework of Homer’s The Iliad, which both gestures towards long-established Irish literary traditions in James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses and current trends in fiction. Retelling Classical stories is, like Irish and Northern Irish fiction that explores the Troubles and borders of self, a growing tradition in contemporary writing. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018), as well as Melissa Broder’s The Pisces (2018) use the plots, characters and themes of Classical writing and mythology to examine contemporary concerns of LGBTQ+ representation, feminism, sexual violence and emotional abuse. Like Miller’s The Song of Achilles, also a retelling of The Iliad which reexamines the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, Country mainly focuses on the male characters of the original story. In Miller’s novel, this is used to explore a romantic relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, reframing the narrative of war to include representation of gay characters. In Country, the framework of this story of war and violence allows the Provisional IRA volunteers to be these unapologetic, but nuanced combatants that Callan argues are lacking in representation. By utilising a story in which the fate of each character is fixed by the original text, Hughes can explore the internal struggle of individuals in their journey to their inevitabile position at the close of the narrative.

In the opening paragraphs of Powers of Horror, Kristeva outlines such conflict and complexity within the individual as part of the specifically abject experience:

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.[13]

The revolt of being, she says, does not allow desire as its outlet, and instead rejects the rebellion with shame and disgust, but ‘from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master’.[14] A good example of this is being faced with, and then being repulsed by ‘an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung.’ Protection from these loathsome items can be gained by vomiting or having a body spasm, because ‘the repugnance, the retching […] thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery.’[15] Within the act of vomiting, ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself.’[16] And from this:

It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you — it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my” world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.[17]

For Kristeva, there is, within each of us, a division, a border that we must negotiate with that we become all too aware of when we are faced with death. Country has different characters face this border, this ‘death infecting life’ as part of the borderland, republican experience. Hughes emphasises food as part of this experience, with communal eating, food preparation and contaminated food at the forefront, alongside bloodshed and murder. Abject disgust therefore becomes an inherent part of republican acts of violence, as food becomes a major factor in how combatants, especially protagonist Achill, negotiate their internal borders with their acts pertaining to the physical Irish border.

In Ferriter’s The Border, he often speaks of the border, republicanism and Northern Ireland itself in bodily and abject terms. He speaks of ‘ruptured’ communities in the establishment of arbitrary lines when Northern Ireland was created[18], which he later refers to as a ‘bloody birth.’[19] He quotes George O’Brien, Professor of Economics at University College Dublin from 1926 to 1961, who wrote in his book The Four Green Fields about the ‘northern disease’:

‘It would be most regrettable if the sectarian dividing lines between the parties in the North were to spread to the South, and it is hard to see how the infection could be prevented from spreading if the border barrier were destroyed. At the present, sectarianism is safely confined in its Ulster quarantine.’[20]

Ferriter criticises O’Brien for his statement, calling it a ‘self-satisfied example of the partitionist mindset in the south,’, insinuating that he is a hypocrite as ‘this assertion also came from someone who regarded partition as a national amputation.’[21] (Indeed, a major theme in Ferriter’s book is the frustration among Northern Irish politicians at the generally ambivalent attitude of the Republic of Ireland’s leading voices towards a united Ireland.) What is important for this particular reading of the border and its literature is how, in the conversation and debate as a whole, there is a recognition that it heavily involves an abject experience. Ferriter also outlines the history of smuggling over the border, as he builds up to the more modern day debate over which products will be legally allowed to pass through the possible EU customs border in the event of a no-deal Brexit and a hard border. He anecdotally writes about an elderly woman who would visit relatives in Northern Ireland by train, carrying a hot water bottle. On the journey into Derry, the hot water bottle was filled with whiskey, and on the return journey it would be filled with tea leaves; each product was difficult to find on the opposite side of the border.[22] The border was once a leaking, oozing thing, expelling items such as liquids with little awareness from border control operatives; if Brexit were to signal a return to border checks, it could become this seeping entity again. The border and Northern Ireland as a political nation is, and has been, bloody, it is diseased, it is impermeable and leaking, it involves the severing of a formerly whole unit; it invites disgust. This is the core theme of Michael Hughes’ Country.

Food, one of the elements that Kristeva outlines as part of the ‘challenge to its master’ that breaks down internal borders and invites bodily expulsion and disgust, features prominently in key scenes throughout Hughes’ novel. Its presence is often in close proximity to death, either in the chronological order of the plot or physical placement near a corpse. Much of the representation of food is as a communal activity that becomes corrupted by the borderland combatant experience. For example, in the opening chapters of the novel, food and food preparation is sabotaged as a conflict tactic, highlighting both how important it is as a narrative theme, and how the gaining, preparing and sharing of food is precarious in the Troubles setting for combatants. After Pig (Agamemnon) claims a local Protestant man’s daughter as his partner, the man makes a call to a local politician who cuts off the water and electricity supplies to the farmhouse Pig and other Provisional IRA volunteers are staying in. This leads to a priest’s intervention on behalf of the local man, aptly named Crisis. Pig agrees to release the young girl back to her father, but only if he can take ownership of another one; when challenged on this, he claims ownership of Achill’s partner Brigid. This echoes the rift between Achilles and Agamemnon over Briseis, one of the central plots of The Iliad that also becomes the plot of Country. By the time the argument between Pig and Crisis is ‘resolved’ in the release of his daughter and Pig’s claiming of Brigid, the volunteers at the farm are ‘living on stale biscuits and mouldy bread … hoking through the bins for any oul bit of real grub .. drinking dregs of rainwater’. They become ‘sick as dogs’ and begin ‘puking up their rings, sweating and raving’.[23] Volunteers then question whether they should ‘call off the job and get out of this forsaken shithole.’[24]

The volunteers’ sickness and bodily expulsion of vomit leads to them concluding that the fight for a united Ireland is not worth it if they have to continue to ingest dirty water and food. Their abject disgust at what they must consume as part of the battle experience leads to ambivalence about the placement of a land border, as they themselves grasp for a border within them to control their feelings of sickness. As Kristeva states when speaking of vomiting as a reaction to contaminated food, ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself,’ and within this action, ‘it is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled.’[25] As the lives of these characters are fixed in the framework of Homer’s story, they will of course not abandon their posts as combatant Provisional IRA volunteers. However, they are allowed room to question their actions and their sense of “I” within the abject experience; the removal of a border within themselves due to their disgust and sickness leads to a complacent attitude towards the establishment of the land border in Ireland. Achill names himself the ‘Border sniper’[26]; like Achilles, he is the best fighter in the ranks and his particular skill is in being a marksman. Once he names himself as the opposition to Pig’s selfishness and reminds them of his position as the best fighter, the men become resigned to fighting again as there is somebody to improve their current living situation. In this way, his role as border sniper (emphasis on border) becomes metaphorically part of their abject experience; he attacks the land border in his combatant activity, therefore bringing to the forefront its existence to the men, as well as their internal borders of selfhood that they lost in their sickness.

A later example of food being prominent within the story is a visit from the characters Sid, Budd and Mannix (Odysseus, Ajax and Phoenix) to Achill’s home. They try to convince Achill to establish amnesty with Pig so that they can defeat the locally positioned British Army, and bring a message from him promising Achill gifts and his pick of women, including his daughters.[27] Pat (Patroclus) is asked to prepare food before they speak on republican activity and fixing relations between Achill and Pig. This is the only time in the novel that a meal is enjoyed without coming into direct contact with an abject signifier like a corpse, contamination or bodily fluids. For that reason, what he prepares is outlined in specific detail:

Pat put rashers on the big pan, long streaky ones, and thick slices of black pudding, and a whole string of the good sausages, and cracked a half dozen eggs in there too. He sprinkled on a few of his herbs, but nobody minded. When it was ready, he served it out onto plates he had warming in the over, and Achill brought it to the men. Pat followed behind with a pot of tea and a plate of toast, the red and brown sauce. They all got stuck in.[28]

This home cooked food is nourishing, especially in light of the earlier contaminated food that the volunteers had to eat, which is why it is outlined in such sumptuous, plentiful detail. Food becomes the way in which Achill echoes Achilles’ sentiment in The Iliad when he says ‘Welcome. / My dear friends have come. I must be needed. / Among Acaeans you’re the men I love the most/ Even in my anger,’[29] and then asking Patroclus to prepare a wine bowl and a ‘cup for everyone.’[30] In both texts, shared eating and drinking is a motif that implies community, even in a rift.

Achill echoes Achilles’ anger by then expressing to Sid, Bud and Mannix his discontent at the way in which the Provisional IRA is being run, and how this in turn impacts how he sees death itself. In the original text, Achilles refuses the offered gifts that Agaemmemon sends promise of should he rejoin the fight, just as Achill refuses Pig’s the gifts that Sid, Budd and Mannix bring word of. In Achilles’ speech to the convoys, he is concerned about his personal pride when Briseus was taken from him, with passing reference to how he has ‘won nothing for all I’ve suffered.’[31] Hughes, however, uses this scene to anchor the setting in the Troubles, with Achill being much more concerned with the larger structures of Irish politics and republicanism, and his place within it. When speaking to Sid he says, ‘Here’s a question I never heard asked. What difference who runs a country, if people are looked after and free to get on with their business?’[32] He goes on, ‘Why have the Irish to fight the Brits? Answer me that. Why is there any Provisional IRA at all, any Óglaigh na hÉireann? Because we love this country? […] Don’t the unionists and the loyalists love their country too? Don’t the Brits?’[33] He has come to this conclusion because he realises that there is another ‘side to the story’ and that ‘glory starts looking a lot like death’, of which he has seen too much of, describing it as ‘blood and bones and shite.’[34] He expresses discontent at the way that Pig has been running the IRA military unit in their borderland town, and he wants to go home to live with his father and live a quiet life[35], just as Achilles threatens to also do in his speech.[36] Like the discontented nameless IRA volunteers who want to give up the republican borderland struggle when they are undernourished but who eventually do not leave the ranks, Achill will still fulfil his destiny as fixed by The Iliad.

However, a major way in which Country deviates from The Iliad is that Achill does not die at the end. Instead, the novel ends with a collective reflection of British soldiers attending the funeral of Henry (Hector). Unlike the wooden horse that infiltrates Troy and brings about a great battle that ends the siege in The Iliad, the soldiers know that ‘the war would go on’ and this is ‘the way it always was’, and ‘the way it has to be.’[37] From Hughes’ perspective at the time of writing, not just after the Good Friday Agreement in 1999 but also in the post-Brexit referendum era in which many feared escalated violence (which eventually came true in the borderlands), this deviation from the Homeric text indicates that the kind of concerns that individuals struggle with internally cannot be eradicated by a neat ending. This is succinctly summarised in Achill’s name; it clearly invokes Homer’s Achilles, who is also a good fighter and who briefly wants to go home, but it also very clearly gestures towards both the history and the future of Northern Ireland and its relationship with the Irish border. On the first page of Country, it is stated that he is named this for his father’s time in the prison Achill Island, ‘though he was born and reared in Castlebar and he’d never set foot in the place.’[38] His sense of selfhood in his name is marked by the past of the Troubles which he is destined to continue forward by his fate as fixed by the Classical framework of the novel, as well as the post-Brexit demonstrations of violence that indicate they have not completely ended.

Hughes allows Achill to have internal conflict in the narrative, specifically relating it to the abject experience. Although Achilles also threatens to leave the struggle, Achill does so for different reasons. He is discontented with the larger systems at play, of which the ‘blood and bones and shite’ of death has become the norm and so he creates an internal border within himself that rejects the inherently abject experience and what has caused it. There is, of course, similar violence in The Iliad, but Hughes reframes his story in the Irish borderlands by having Achill think through the motivations of each political side, and concluding that ‘there’s no path to a united Ireland that I can see, not in our lifetimes.’[39] Achill’s abject experience is one that recognises that there is no real ending to this story of paramilitary struggle; the situation that brings about signifiers of death does not have a fixed ending and the fight is therefore futile to him. By framing this discussion as part of clean and sanitised food preparation and communal eating, there is a deliberate, attempted physical distancing by these characters from the abject experience. Unfortunately it cannot be escaped as talk turns to death as part of the republican experience and the bodily fluids that a combatant inevitably comes into contact with as part of this ambivalent, never-ending conflict. Achill attempts to expel his disgust, not through vomit, but by physically distancing himself away from the conflict by going home. Just as Achilles’ fate is fixed by prophecy, so is his by both The Iliad and the continuation of the republican struggle even after it is ‘solved’ by the Good Friday Agreement — he must return to it and kill Henry, just as other volunteers and British Army soldiers must to kill each other as part of the Troubles and beyond.

Food then starts to become physically enmeshed with such bodily fluids in the novel. After Ned (Nestor) leads an attack on a British army base, he and his accomplice Macken go back to his home where his wife ‘made a gorgeous big feed […], served it on the good china, and poured them out a dram.’[40] This time, the scene is permeated with the blood and violence that has been spilled and enacted as, for as well as eating ‘they washed, hot towels rubbing off the worst of it. Burned the overalls and gloves before she did anything else, and the towels with them. Swept up the ash every bit and flushed it down the bog.’[41] The urgency for nourishing, clean food like this for fighting republicans is later highlighted by Sid, when Pat has been killed by SAS operative Henry (Hector), and the volunteers are planning their revenge mission. Sid points out that ‘these men need a bite to eat first’ because ‘nobody can take on the Brits without a full stomach’’ as ‘a man with a good feed in him will keep his focus and strength all day.’[42] Achill, mourning Pat and ready to fight, is angered by the idea of eating because:

There’s one good man lying cut up and cold, that the SAS brought down,and ye want to fill your bellies! If I was in charge, we would get cracking on with the job and earn our feed, once we have something to be proud of behind us. Until then, I’m not swallowing a bite. That poor boy is lying dead in my front room, the whole crowd in there weeping and wailing, and it’s far from my mind is eating and drinking. Blood and pain and the moans of dying Brits is where my head is at.[43]

Kristeva points out that corpses are the ‘utmost of abjection’ and ‘death infecting life’.[44] However, it is not necessarily disgust at this signifier of death that compels Achill to not eat, but rather, his new role as what she terms the “exile”. Whereas before Achill wanted out of the republican cause because of the ‘blood and bones and shite’, he now completely embraces the abject. The Kristevean conception of the exile is a figure who allows the abject to exist, rather than rejecting it by repressing it with internalised borders and/or by expelling it through vomit. The exile is ‘the one by whom the abject exists [and] is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings.’[45] Instead of being disgusted by the corpse of Pat and trying to decrease encounters with situations that may give rise to disgust (killing somebody and coming into contact with bodily fluids) as he attempted before, he actually craves it as a violent act of revenge. He does not, however, embrace eating as part of this experience, instead seeing it as a reward for enacting violence. This sharply contrasts with his earlier declaration that he wants to go home and retire from combatant life, which is where the dictation of the Homeric framework comes into effect; he is allowed ambivalence and to question his situation, but in the end Achill must become the exiled individual who embraces the abject experience as an exile.

An inevitable reading of Achill’s refusal of food is its similarity to the hunger strikers that have been at the forefront of republican resistance during the Troubles and before.[46] It is not just the refusal of food that signifies this, but also the real life examples of Provisional IRA volunteer’s long-standing issues with food later on in their lives as a result from striking that echoes Achill’s sentiments. Dolours Price, who went on strike with her sister Marian in 1974 at Brixton men’s prison in protest at being incarcerated in London and not Northern Ireland, spoke some years later of her struggle with food throughout her life. In an interview for the audio documentary The Chaplain’s Diary by Lorelei Harris, she stated that ‘we didn’t ever have a normal relationship with food or eating,’ something that stemmed from the mindset she and her sister had to adopt in which ‘your body is telling you it wants food [but] we will not win this struggle if I give you food.’ The Price sisters underwent force feeding, which she says ‘further alienated us from the process of sustenance, the whole process of putting food in your body.’ This led to them both finding ‘it very difficult to re-establish a proper relationship with the process of eating.’[47] Achill’s refusal to eat is, on a superficial level, rooted in both his grief and in Homer’s Achilles telling Odysseus ‘for my part, I’d lead Achaea’s son to war / right now, unfed, with empty stomachs’[48] to satisfy his ‘enraged’ heart.[49] But when reading Country in its setting and context, it becomes apparent that food becomes a way to think through the ways in which combatants during the Troubles were, and continue to be, psychologically burdened by their actions. Just as the Price sisters internalised complicated narratives about failing their struggle should they ingest food, Achill denies his body the type of clean nourishment that formerly was part of his clear thinking about the political structures of Ireland the Provisional IRA. When he consumed a good meal made by Pat, he was able to speak on his internal conflict. Now that he has become the Kristevean model of the exile and rejected negotiating with any such internal conflict, he denies his body the same kind of ‘reward’ in his pursuit of revenge.

Read in a post-Brexit referendum setting, this denial is a rejection of yet another imposed border; Achill does not repress any disgust at Pat’s corpse with shame, he ‘strays instead of getting his bearings.’[50] He does not stop to feed himself despite how ‘every man in the place tried to get Achill to take a bite, they begged him, they would have shoved it down his gullet if they could.’[51] Like the Price sisters also being threatened with force-feeding (and who actually were), Achill is pressured to eat but denies his body in the same way that the hunger strikers approached their relationship with food, telling them, ‘I have no stomach for it, and I won’t take a thing until sundown, when all this is finished.’[52] To fully exemplify how he has not initiated an internal border that represses disgust towards an abject signifer, he tells Pat’s corpse:

It used to be you, Pat, laying out the food on the table, and fussing and footering at your wee biscuits and buns, and making sure I had enough in my tummy before I’d go out on a job.The heart of me wants nothing to pass my lips. It wants nothing only you.[53]

Achill speaks of food to the corpse of Pat, instead of expelling food through vomit in disgust at such a direct signifier of death. He even tells the corpse that he ‘wants nothing only you’; he has substituted consuming food for embracing the abject experience. Interestingly, Hughes intercepts these scenes with descriptions of the Good Friday Agreement meetings in Stormont which notably feature food. The meal that the politicians and meeting attendees have is a sanitised version of the meals and meetings shared between republican combatants. Hughes emphasises how the colonnades of the governmental building are ‘polished’ and ‘hardly an hour’s drive away’[54] — while republicans and the British Army engage in bloody warfare, a short distance away politicians meet in a clean setting. They have a breakfast meeting, where there are ‘jugs of fresh-squeezed orange juice, plates of croissants, trays of bacon and sausage and beans, tomatoes and mushrooms and hash browns, and steaming pots of tea and coffee.’[55] Food on the borderlands is contaminated, either by actually being unhygenic as it was at the beginning of the novel in the farmhouse, or it is in close proximity to signifers of death.

It is important to note that the conversations in which Achill is encouraged to eat and in which he denies himself food occur in The Ships pub. In one regard, the pub mirrors Stormont in that both British and Irish people, of any political background, can be there at the same time, but in The Ships they can be there without meeting as there are segregated areas of the building. Crucially, it also straddles both the north and the south, as it ‘sat right by the border, from long before there any such thing […] the original wee building had been extended again and again so the most of the premises was now in the South.’ The British army entered it from the north and ‘the front bar was their jurisdiction, with prices in sterling, but the rest of the place was out of bounds.’[56] There are physical, political and economic divisions within the same building, highlighting how disrupted areas of Ireland have become by the implementation of the border. Within this space, IRA volunteers explore how their internal boundaries have also been disrupted, and this is no better presented in the climax of the novel in which Pat’s wake is held at The Ships, after Achill has killed Henry. Mourners arrive at the pub, ‘balancing a plate of egg sandwiches and a cup of stewed tea,’ while the women ‘were buttering and cuttings like the blazes’, but nobody was eating or talking.[57] The reason is because ‘Achill had set Pat up at the bar, a flat pint in front of him. Slumped down as if he was having a snooze. Achill sat beside, hand on the shoulder, dead sober, but talking to Pat as if he could hear him.’[58] By rejecting the corpse as a corpse at all, even at a wake, and treating it as if it is a live person, Achill has fully taken on the role of the Kirstevean model of the exile, in which he completely rejects the abject experience. He is not disgusted by this dead body, the ‘utmost of abjection’[59] as those around him are. They are clearly uncomfortable, signified in how they are not eating in the presence of such a spectacle, and in how Sid tells him that he needs to move and get ‘cleaned up’.[60] But Achill refuses, telling him that he enjoys being soaked in Henry’s blood as it shows Pat that he has avenged his death.[61] Sitting in The Ships, a place literally straddling the physical border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, soaked in the blood of an SAS operative and talking to a corpse, Achill rejects boundaries that have been placed on his day-to-day life by embracing a borderless existence in which he does not feel disgust.

Achill eventually does start eating again, and this is after he has a dream that Pat tells him to let him go. In this unconscious state, he tries to reach for his dead comrade but his hands only meet ‘nothing, only cold waxy death.’[62] He wakes up, and in the mirror he sees the face of a killer, soaked in blood and it takes a moment for him to recognise this person as himself.[63] This is his breaking from the figure of the exile, after which it is stated that he becomes ‘more like himself’[64]. He tries to do the ultimate act as an exile; he is not only not disgusted by death and a signifier of death, but he tries to touch it, not physically, but within his unconscious state where he is supposed to be building boundaries against such actions. When he does touch it, he finds that it is both ‘nothing’ and ‘cold and waxy’ as it occupies both a physical place in the corpse and a liminal space in the state of nothingness. Achill awakes, shocked by his unconscious actions and shocked by the fact he is covered in a bodily fluid, a signifier of death. As the novel draws to a close and it becomes apparent that this war will not end as it does in The Iliad, Achill finally draws the boundary within himself to ward off the abject experience, as he goes back to accepting that the physical boundary of the Irish border will not be eradicated by the republican efforts. When a soldier comes to collect the body of Henry, Achill tells him:

You’ll eat with me before you head. Napoleon always said an army marches on its stomach. It’s right to fast at the right time, but there’s no shame in feeding again when that time is over. Save the tears for when you have him home. Inside in the kitchen, Achill cooked the food himself. He did it lovely, just how Pat always did for him. He hadn’t forgot.[65]

The lasting image we have of Achill is his repetition of Pat’s food preparation, and not of his death as it is in The Iliad. When we last saw Pat cooking food for communal consumption, Achill spelt out in detail what he did not like about the Irish political landscape; he is doomed to repeat these practices, drawing more abject boundaries as more boundaries are drawn up over time, most recently in the Brexit referendum. Some of his practices as the exile figure are still present in his awakened state, as he holds off on eating until the business of Achill orders the preparation of Henry’s body, and only then is it ‘time to eat.’[66] Like the Price sisters not allowing themselves food until their actions are completed, a practice they carried on throughout their lives, Achill is not fully recovered from his borderless condition. Instead of dying as Achilles dies, he is destined to continue these preventive measures, just as Northern Ireland and the republican struggle will never be completed until the border is eradicated, should that ever happen.

Borders can be hard, borders can leak and ooze, borders can be ruptured, borders can be strengthened; both the history and the present day in the Northern Ireland borderlands show us the core, contradictory nature of anything that keeps things in and keeps things out. What is fixed in Michael Hughes’ Country both draws on and rejects Homer’s The Iliad, just as the abject experience draws on and rejects elements such as death, food and violence to establish and disrupt boundaries. Abjection pervades the text to its very core; from the characters proximity to corpses, to consuming and expelling food, to the setting up and breaking down of internal boundaries that are exemplified in the external boundaries that caused and upheld the Troubles. The ambivalent, inconclusive ending of Country reflects the current situation since Brexit; the violence has not ended (such as in The Creggen), and there is a fear that it will continue in the future should Brexit negotiations remain as inconclusive as they are currently. For Hughes, the ruptures in boundaries cannot be neatly ended by a Trojan horse as it is in his Homeric framework because they have been revived since the real-life ending of the novel, indicated in the move towards the Good Friday Agreement. Country has been written within several traditions in Ireland, Northern Ireland and beyond, but it is distinct in its consideration of the individual as an abject being in our contemporary political climate.

[1] Julia Kristeva Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection Translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) p. 4

[2] Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, Federici Corrado and Ernesto Virgulti introducing Beauty and the Abject (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007) p. ix

[3] NI Direct ‘Brexit — NI advice on leaving the EU’ < https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/brexit-ni-advice-leaving-eu > [accessed 24/01/20]

[4] The Guardian ‘Brexit: dismay in Brussels as Boris Johnson finally reveals plan’ 3 October 2019 < https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/02/boris-johnson-unveils-brexit-plan-for-alternative-to-backstop > [accessed 24/01/20)

[5] The Guardian ‘Brexit plan ‘disastrous betrayal’ of pledge to avoid hard Irish border’ 2 October 2019 < https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/02/johnsons-new-plan-for-border-disastrous-say-northern-irish-leaders > [accessed 24/01/20]

[6] BBC News ‘Dissident republicans ‘ready’ if Brexit means hard border’ < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-50223435/dissident-republicans-ready-if-brexit-means-hard-border > [accessed 24/01/20]

[7] The Irish News ‘New IRA admits murder of journlist Lya McKee and offers ‘sincere apologies’ < https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2019/04/23/news/dissident-republican-new-ira-group-admit-murder-of-journalist-lyra-mckee-and-offer-sincere-apologies--1603611/ >

[8] The Guardian ‘Northern Ireland: petrol bombs thrown at police in Creggan’ <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/10/northern-ireland-petrol-bombs-thrown-at-police-in-creggan-derry > [accessed 24/01/20]

[9] Diarmaid Ferriter The Border: A Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics (London: Profile, 2019) pp. 141–2

[10] As quoted by Ferriter, p.142

[11] Ibid., p.146

[12] Stephanie Callan ‘The Making of a Terrorist: Imagining Combatants’ Points of View in Troubles Literature’ in Humanities, Vol. 8, Issue 27, 2019 pp. 1–10 (P. 1)

[13] Kristeva, P. 1

[14] Ibid. pp. 1–2

[15] Ibid., P. 2

[16] Ibid., P. 3

[17] Ibid., P. 4

[18] Ferriter, P. 10

[19] Ibid., P. 17

[20] As quoted in Ferriter, P. 37

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid., P. 46

[23] Michael Hughes, Country (London: John Murray, 2018) P. 6

[24] Ibid., P. 7

[25] Kristeva, P. 4

[26] Hughes, P. 19

[27] Ibid.,pp. 180–1

[28] Ibid., pp. 179–80

[29] Homer, The Iliad Translated by Ian Johnston (Arlington: Richer Resources Publications, 2007) Book 9, ll. 241–3

[30] Ibid., ll.247–50

[31] Ibid., l.401

[32] Hughes, p. 182

[33] Ibid., p. 183

[34] Ibid., p. 185

[35] Ibid.

[36] Homer, ll.447- 50

[37] Hughes, p. 314

[38] Ibid., p. 3

[39] Ibid., p. 185

[40] Ibid., P. 212

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid., P. 252 This echoes, almost word for word, Odysseus’ speech in The Iliad when he says: ‘Though you’re a brave man, god-like Achilles/ don’t encourage Achaea’s sons to fight/ against the Trojans on empty stomachs./ If so, the fight won’t last for long if troops/ engage right now.’ (Homer, Book 19, ll. 194–98)

[43] Ibid., P. 255

[44] Kristeva, P. 4

[45] Ibid., p. 8

[46] Patrick Radden Keefe notes that this is a very long-standing tradition in Irish history before the Troubles, dating back from the Middle Ages. In the 1903 play The King’s Threshold by W.B. Yeats, the seventh-century characters invoke a hunger strike with Yeats describing it as ‘an old and foolish custom’. IRA volunteer Terence MacSwiney, imprisoned in Brixton prison died from a hunger strike in 1920 after refusing food for 74 days. (Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing (London: William Collins, 2018) Pp.166–7)

[47] As quoted by Radden Keefe, Pp. 200–1

[48] Homer, Book 18, ll.256–7

[49] Ibid., l. 252

[50] Kristeva, p.8

[51] Hughes, p. 258

[52] Ibid.

[53] Ibid., p. 259

[54] Ibid., p. 263

[55] Ibid.

[56] Ibid., p.39

[57] Ibid., p. 291

[58] Ibid.

[59] Kristeva, p. 4

[60] Hughes, p. 291

[61] Ibid., p. 292

[62] Ibid. p. 293

[63] Ibid.

[64] Ibid., p. 294

[65] Ibid., p. 311

[66] Ibid.