Post-Colonial Theology

Finding God and Each Other Amidst the Hate

Robert S. Heaney

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532602207
  9781532602221
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532602214
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Hate is unveiled on our streets. Politics is polarized and the cohesion of communities is under stress and threat. Religious and theological leaders appear compromised or paralyzed. Robert S. Heaney grew up in a Northern Ireland where enmity paraded itself and policed the boundaries between segregated identities and aspirations. Such conflict, with deep historic roots, is inextricably linked to religion and colonization. The theologizing of colonialism, and the ongoing implications of colonialism, cannot be ignored by those who wish to understand the most intractable of human conflicts. Religious adherents and scholars are increasingly seeking to understand colonialism and decolonization in theological terms. The field of post-colonial studies, across a range of contexts and in a complex network of inter-disciplinary analyses, has emerged as a major scholarly movement seeking to provide resources for such a task. Theologians have increasingly seen the field as a resource and have made their own contributions to its development. However, depending as it does on a series of theoretical and technical commitments, post-colonialism remains inaccessible to the uninitiated. Beginning with his own particular context of formation, in this book Heaney provides an accessible introduction to post-colonial theology.

1

The Widening Gyre

The Particularity of the Author

The heart is devious above all else;

it is perverse—

who can understand it?

—Jeremiah 17:9

Post-colonial theology begins in particularity.7 The unpronounced hyphen speaks a reality that cannot be elided: colonialism. However, colonialism is plural. It is historically conditioned. It belongs to the history and experience of a variety of peoples and nations in distinct ways.8 Colonialisms evoke, provoke, and instantiate terror and fear, occupation and resistance, Christ and anti-Christ. To the extent that one can, it is incumbent, therefore, upon the author to name her or his location, to speak what the hyphen might signify (Jer 17:9) before s/he can hear the voice of others and the voice of God amidst the fear and hate. As will become clear, naming my own location consists in at least two tasks. It means heuristically engaging the work of W. B. Yeats toward taking stock of Ireland as my place of formation in light of empire and beyond empire. It means, secondly, an attempt at identifying the ways in which Yeats might have theological significance for the field of post-colonial theology and, more particularly, for this study.

Post-Colonialism Begins in Ireland

For a young person growing up on the island of Ireland and within Northern Ireland, location meant, at the very least, existential complexity and competing nationalisms. The uncomfortable and unresolvable complexity of my location was forcefully revealed to me while watching a movie in England. In 1996, the Neil Jordan film Michael Collins was released. In the title role was Ballymena man Liam Neeson, depicting and interpreting the life of the Irish republican leader of the title who, in 1921, would settle for less than a republic. After its DVD release, I watched it with a group of fellow students in North London. I was taught that Collins was the opposite of who my (Northern) Irish people were and what my people aspired to be. Yet, the people I purportedly belonged to, with all the contradictions and insecurities of a settler people, could “never be English any more than Cambodians or Algerians can be French.”9 I was “a member of the Irish ‘other’ to England.”10 This became powerfully apparent at the end of the film. As the credits rolled, a fellow student from England scoffed, “Bloody stupid Paddies, they ended up killing each other!” The reaction this evoked in me could not have been predicted, given my religious and political formation. I left the room abruptly and angrily in the wake of a retort that unexpectedly erupted from my throat: “Not so stupid that they couldn’t kick the might of the British empire off the island with little more than a few pitchforks!” I did not know in this moment that this admixture of history, myth, confusion, fear, hate, and anger in the face of such jovial jingoism bled into a series of problems and questions relating to a whole set of complex questions about hybridized identities, histories, agencies, and theologies that could be described as post-colonial.

For Patsy Daniels, post-colonialism begins in Ireland. More specifically, in literature written in English, it begins with the work of W. B. Yeats (1865–1939). In Yeats—and in resistance to the hegemonic intent and cultural dominance of England toward Ireland since at least the twelfth century—themes of otherness, inferiority, liberation, identity, hybridization, resistance, and decolonization are present.11 Each of these themes continues to remain important in post-colonial literature, including theological literature. This does not mean that the work of post-colonial thinkers and activists is simply reactionary or defined over against dominant political and cultural forces. What Vicki Mahaffrey sees as “icon-elastic” artistry, as opposed to militant and oppositional iconoclasm, is something applicable both to Yeats and post-colonial literature more broadly. Icon-elasticity is a hybridizing strategy that does not simply attempt to overthrow a very powerful rule, but attempts to “evade its power to colonize and predetermine thinking.” There is a concentration on “the elasticity of thought and language, the reach and capacity for metamorphosis inherent in constructs that have been unnaturally stabilized by the rules governing interpretation.”12 Each of the theologians in this book exhibits such elasticity as they destabilize hegemonic intent in cultural and theological exchange. For Vicki Mahaffrey, Ireland is a place ripe for “conceptual icon-elasticity,” not least because of its history of political resistance, which she adjudges to be “curiously reinforced” by a commitment to Christianity.13 This book will begin to explore why such reinforcement, in a variety of texts and contexts beyond Ireland and Yeats, is not nearly as curious as Mahaffrey imagines.14

I grew up in a divided Ireland. I grew up and spent my formative years happily under British rule in Northern Ireland. While division and bloodshed go back centuries in Ireland, it was the high period of the British empire that shaped the context and culture I was born into. Joe Cleary, well aware of the complexities of the context, is nonetheless correct to argue that “the development of twentieth-century Irish society has been most deeply conditioned by attempts either to preserve or to surmount Ireland’s centuries-old relationship with Britain and the British Empire.”15 It was particularly the First World War era that became generative for both unionism and nationalism. For the Ulster unionism I was formed in, it is difficult to imagine a signifier more potent than July 1, 1916 and the battle of the Somme. Indeed, the “blood sacrifice” of the 36th (Ulster) Division on the Western Front provides the “central foundation myth for the Northern Irish state.”16 On that day, the 36th was tasked with capturing a key German position, the Schwaben Redoubt. Their reckless courage on the day meant they fulfilled the mission, but reinforcements did not reach them. Half of the division was lost in the forced retreat.

. . . the ghosts of the Somme are never...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Widening Gyre
• Chapter 2: Implications
• Chapter 3: Things Fall Apart
• Chapter 4: Implications
• Chapter 5: The Rough Beast
• Chapter 6: Blood-Dimmed Tide
• Chapter 7: Implications
• Chapter 8: The Ceremony of Innocence Is Drowned
• Chapter 9: Implications
• Chapter 10: Twenty Centuries of Stony Sleep
• Bibliography