Imaging the Great Irish Famine

Representing Dispossession in Visual Culture

Niamh Ann Kelly

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781838608712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

The depiction of historical humanitarian disasters in art exhibitions, news reports, monuments and heritage landscapes has framed the harrowing images we currently associate with dispossession. People across the world are driven out of their homes and countries on a wave of conflict, poverty and famine, and our main sites for engaging with their loss are visual news and social media. In a reappraisal of the viewer's role in representations of displacement, Niamh Ann Kelly examines a wide range of commemorative visual culture from the mid-nineteenth-century Great Irish Famine. Her analysis of memorial images, objects and locations from that period until the early 21st century shows how artefacts of historical trauma can affect understandings of enforced migrations as an ongoing form of political violence. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of museum and heritage studies, material culture, Irish history and contemporary visual cultures exploring dispossession.

1

Figuration and the Site of Famine

The Place of Pain: Vulnerable Bodies and a Portrayal of Starvation

In a short time the face and limbs become frightfully emaciated; the eyes acquire a most peculiar stare; the skin exhaled a peculiar and offensive foetor, and was covered with a brownish filthy-looking coating, almost as indelible as varnish. This I was at first inclined to regard as encrusted filth, but further experience has convinced me that this is a secretion poured out from the exhalants on the surface of the body.

Dr Daniel Donovan, Skibbereen, 1848, article for
Dublin Medical Press¹

Bodies suffering starvation degenerate from the effects of hunger following internal malfunction and even disintegration, the signs of which eventually become externally identifiable. Margaret Crawford details the visible symptoms of hunger and diseases among children, such as marasmus and kwashiorkor arising out of nutritional deprivation.² Some outwardly obvious symptoms of these are, respectively, shrunken frames with premature marked ageing, and oedema in the stomach and lower limbs. Both illnesses in advanced stages give rise to browned pigmentation of the skin and the appearance of downy facial (lanugo) hair. At the Johnstown Famine exhibition room in a wall panel titled ‘Disease Epidemics’ oedema is described as follows: ‘swelling of the limbs until the body finally bursts’. The connection between starvation and vitamin deficiencies is in evidence.³ By extension, the susceptibility of famine victims to fever epidemics as well as more ordinarily avoidable conditions increases, such as scurvy, described at Johnstown as: ‘Also called “Black Leg”, caused joints to become enlarged, teeth to fall out and the blood vessels under the skin to burst. (Lack of Vitamin C)’. Laurence Geary notes that so-called ‘famine fever’ had several names, but included typhus fever and relapsing fever, noting that ‘subsistence crises and famine create the ideal environment for the generation and dissemination of fevers and other infectious diseases’.⁴ Though the Fever Bill of April 1847 was aimed at reducing spread of epidemics by promoting burial of bodies and related hygiene practices,⁵ by this time, an over-dependence on a limited pattern of food consumption prior to the Irish Famine in the 1840s had in part predetermined the starkness of the effects of bodily deficiencies from its outset.⁶

In Famine folk history there are witness accounts of desperate actions arising out of starvation, such as the frantic searches for food cited in Cathal Póirtéir’s collection of accounts gathered by the National Folklore Collection (NFC, initially known as the Irish Folklore Commission, 1934–71), housed at University College Dublin.⁷ The archive’s ‘oral narratives’, to use Niall Ó Ciosáin’s term,⁸ are the memories of mostly elderly informants who had a vicarious sense of this history, given their generational closeness to the events of the 1840s. Mícheál Briody writes that by the mid-1940s the commission ‘had as a result of its extensive collecting, undertaken on an unprecedented scale, amassed a very large archive of folk tradition, reputedly one of the largest in the world’.⁹ Kevin Danaher instigated the format of the questionnaire used for many of the informant interviews in the archive.¹⁰ In an evaluation of the relation of folk memory to historical understanding, Cormac Ó Gráda argues that such ‘evidence, despite and sometimes because of, its biases and silences, has something distinctive to contribute to our understanding of the Great Irish Famine’.¹¹ Of the NFC specifically, he suggests, ‘At its best, the record is vivid, eloquent and compelling.’¹² Guy Beiner writes that the ‘primary value of folklore sources is not only what they can offer for a study of historical events but rather the interpretative insight they allow into how people throughout Ireland subsequently recalled their past’,¹³ and notes that ‘such vernacular historical engagements’ do not simply ‘complement existing historiography’ but are ‘inherently polyphonic’.¹⁴

Quoted in Póirtéir is Dáithí Ó Ceanntabhail, national teacher, Croom, County Limerick, who heard of ‘by the wayside, emaciated corpses, partly green from eating docks and nettles and partly blue from the cholera and dysentery’.¹⁵ The hope of finding sustenance was in many instances, such as these, defeated by undernourished and physically weakened bodies. The antisocial, or even dehumanizing, effects of hunger are also indicated in the NFC’s collection. Crawford describes this as a total breakdown of family ties and discusses Dr Donovan’s Famine-time accounts of mothers snatching food from the hands of their children and a son and father engaging in a fatal struggle over a potato.¹⁶

As the effects of severe hunger are highly visible on a starving body, and internally impacting on physical and psychological health, resulting in enormous changes in social behaviour, how have representations of the place of pain, the famished body – its appearance, actions and context – been developed during and since the nineteenth century? To explore this, it is helpful to look first to a twenty-first-century imaging of hunger through the medium of film: Hunger (2008, 96 mins), by British artist and film-maker Steve McQueen. While the film is not about famine, the depiction in it of a hungry body reflects and trades on representational strategies apparent since nineteenth-century work on the Famine: the primary response of horror, the stirring of empathy and linkage of geo-specific cases with universalized concepts of the suffering body. The film does so through innovative medium-driven techniques, but as film is usually also cinematic, its locating of hunger as spectacle links it to a wider politics of perception. Any circulation of images, including filmic, constitutes spectatorship, or social viewing, as part of a visual economy which relates representations of a specific suffering subject to the making sense of a hungry body.

In the final sequence of Hunger, 27-year-old Irish Republican prisoner Bobby Sands dies after 66 days of hunger strike in the Maze/Long Kesh prison near Belfast in Northern Ireland on 5 May 1981.¹⁷ Scenes of a remembered rural landscape of Sands’s boyhood as alluded to earlier in the film are interspersed with abstracted sonic and visual representations of his agonizing death. Viewers catch glimpses of lively breathless boys running in verdant countryside as Sands’s adult body degenerates in a blindingly bright white clinically sanitized atmosphere. The death of Sands was a watershed moment at a very violent point in the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.¹⁸ He was the first of nine hunger strikers to die at that time, and his subsequent iconic status in nationalist ideology is echoed across murals, flags, art, ephemera and clothing. He was elected an MP in April 1980 and reportedly 100,000 people attended his funeral the following month.¹⁹

The film’s ‘three-act structure’²⁰ denotes the firstly incarcerated and then wilfully starved body ‘as site of political warfare’.²¹ Punctuated silences and abstracted noise in the latter parts of the film accentuate the affective nature of the vivid visual portrayals of prison brutality, a series of protests undertaken by Republican prisoners and, finally, of the terrible failings of Sands’s body in the drawn-out painful death throes of starvation. McQueen’s intense representational style, including abrupt structural turns, situates his visceral depiction of the hungry body in the contested space between mainstream narrative cinema, documentary style and art film which is, arguably, a reflection on the gap between events and their mediation. Barbara Pollack notes that McQueen ‘blurs the distinction between documentary and art film’. The final filmic moments seem to defy the very gap between representation and realism: ‘[i]t is as if the very act of dying were transpiring in real time before the camera’.²²

Hunger stretches the medium of film in lieu of conventional cinematic narrative disclosure. In the film’s claustrophobic prison world, there are unflinching passages of violence, ritualized degradation, utilization of orifices for covert communications amid surprising moments of empathy alternately with prisoners and prison guards. In the absence of ambient music to guide emotions, disconcerting viewpoints, lingering close-ups, sonic fluxes and impressionistic imagery of spaces and bodies give rise to uncomfortable viewing.²³

The only context provided of the political circumstances is presented in background radio clips of Margaret Thatcher’s unmistakable voice. The main departure from McQueen’s then stated resistance to language in film is the prolonged dialogue of the ‘middle act’ scripted by Irish playwright Enda Walsh.²⁴ Sands and a visiting priest debate the ethics of wilful self-dematerialization resulting in suicide.²⁵ The 22-minute sequence is centred on Sands’ prophetic philosophy of martyrdom.²⁶

John Lynch writes that McQueen ‘operates on the ground between what we can define as meaning and sense, where meaning is what is shared in a communication, but sense has to do with the grounds of intelligibility as such’.²⁷ These grounds are first roughed up by the film-maker’s reluctance to provide explication through language or adherence to narrative norms in order to focus on the production of affect with unexpected and often uneasy sensory effects. While this clearly displaces the work from a historical theme or a portrait of, to appropriate Lynch’s term, a ‘militant subjectivity’, it emphasizes a wider politics of spectatorship. This occurs both in its maker’s stated imperative and the sense its viewing public makes of it.

International print media interest in and televisual spectatorship of the Northern Ireland conflict was at its height in the 1980s, with the conflict then at its bloodiest.²⁸ McQueen recalls having watched, as an eleven-year-old boy, the news coverage of the hunger strikes and Sands in particular and cites this as a compelling inspiration for making the work. The film’s title denies a specific political narrative in favour of a more universal, even humanist, consideration of the hungry body, as does reduction of the ethics of a complex political situation to a bare conversation between two men. Described as ‘humanist’ rather than political in approach,²⁹ McQueen’s film has been linked in its subject matter to Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, which were much in the news at the time of the film’s early circulation.³⁰ The film’s association with generalized incarceration and struggles over the body as a site of political freedom accentuates its meaning as decidedly shaped by an unavoidable politics of perception.

With the body in pain constituting the grounding force of Hunger, the work discloses how representations of suffering bodies are contingent on the historical, social and political circumstances of the circulation, as much as on the making, of their image. While Elaine Scarry and Susan Sontag raise useful complexities attendant on thinking through the impact of images of hungry bodies discussed in the Introduction, and in particular implications of ubiquitous representations for so-called ‘compassion fatigue’, Hunger seems to answer that concern by questioning the very efficacy of spectacles of suffering. The framing lack of language in Hunger may relate to Scarry’s observation that pain is the point where language breaks down and so is inadequate to the task of description.³¹ However, it is the overall prioritizing of experimental filmic possibilities that nonetheless forms a cause-and-effect narrative – situation, decision-making and death – and, most importantly, highlights the contingency of spectatorship. Perceptions are then at once located and temporally contingent, connecting the secondary witnessing of the image-maker to the social process of making sense of the scenes presented.

Comparable to this reading of Hunger, concepts of secondary witnessing, audience awareness and cultural and geographical relativisms have shaped representational strategies deployed in imaging the hungry body in the commemorative visual culture of the Fami...