Last week I had a book launch at an art gallery in Belfast, complete with videotaped (!) conversation between myself and my collaborator. (There's another one in May, at the Gallery of Photography.) The conversation wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. We covered all the relevant points, and it even ran over an hour. I got a wee thrill signing the first sold copy.

//

A friend says she can't bear the idea of visiting the North; she remembers too well the bombings of the 80s. Had Belfast changed from the first time I visited, in 2006? On that first visit, I encountered shops in quare and obscure streets selling guns, Bibles, and balaclavas. The student hostel was situated on a street adjoining the Loyalist side; the curbs on either side were painted in Republican or Unionist colours. From the Loyalist side, yahoos cursed and lobbed bottles at loiterers outside the hostel. By now, the gun and Christian missionary shops are gone, or moved elsewhere. In the last fifteen years, the commercial and tourist industries had taken over the city, in the guise of hotels, bars, restaurants and high street shops, and various areas had been “regenerated”.

But those old enmities linger, despite the surface changes. IVF murals dedicated to their “war” dead. Bonfires stoked in Billy’s name. On the day of the book launch, about 2 miles away from the art gallery, Loyalist paramilitaries had forced a man to drive his van with what he believed was a bomb to the venue where Simon Coveney, Ireland's Minister of Foreign Affairs, was speaking at a peace event; the venue was evacuated, and a funeral nearby was disrupted.

One night, just before the pandemic hit the island, the husband and I wandered into a pub on the edge of one “regenerated” quarter. Obstensibly styled on the film The Gangs of New York, the pub was all rehabilitated stone and polished dark wood lit in garish colours. At the bar I sat next to a grandfatherly old man, who, after discerning the husband’s accent, pointed out the engraving on his glass tumbler: “Billy’s Bucket”. That’s my cup, he said. Then he started to say things like how the Catholics believe dinosaurs don’t exist or how the Irish didn’t know how to write until the English came and civilised them. The husband countered calmly. The young bartenders sidled away, while the bouncers hovered closer; it was apparent that our welcome had been retracted.

So when I think of Belfast, I think of The City and the City by China Mieville. Two cities in one place, or so close their streets and histories overlap, each with their own set of cultural norms and expectations, both not seeing or recognising the other by some mutual agreement, having trained their children to “unsee” the denizens and buildings and objects of the other city. As in this weird fiction, there are two Belfasts: one that is youthful, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, progressive, maybe too concerned with money, the other working-class, racist, and violent, entrenched in old hatreds, the outcome of a battle in 1690, a city that had not benefited from the money that fueled the other, far shinier city. Both cities jostle each other, with some overlap, neither of them acknowledging the other’s existence.

The weird edge of potential violence haunted me everywhere in the North. Even as everything seemed normal, the husband and I couldn't help but wonder if the bad drivers on the road were actual bad drivers or drivers who were messing with us because of our southern license plate. I felt a jolt of relief as we crossed over the border, a short bridge between villages, divided by a change in flags and signs.

<<