Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War

Description

Spiritual Wounds challenges the widespread belief that the contentious events of the Irish Civil War (1922–23) were covered in a total blanket of silence. The book uncovers an archive of published testimonies by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, written in both English and Irish. Most of the testimonies discussed were produced in the 1920s and 1930s, and nearly all have been overlooked in historical study to date.

Revolutionaries went to great lengths to testify to the ‘spiritual wounds’ of civil war: they adopted fictionalised disguises, located their writings in other places or periods of time, and found shelter behind pen names. This wealth of published testimony reveals that the silence of the Irish Civil War was not necessarily a result of revolutionaries’ inability to speak, but rather reflects the unwillingness of official memory makers to listen to the stories of civil war veterans.

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Unspeakable Irish Civil War?
1. ‘Ridding Ourselves of the Past’: Therapeutic Testimony
2. From Rest to Writing Cures: Testifying to Women’s Pain
3. Hidden in Plain Sight: Witnesses to Sexual Violence
4. ‘A Dispossessed People’: Spiritual Exiles and Exiled Emigrants
5. ‘I Killed at Least a Dozen Fellow Irishmen’: Perpetrator Testimony
Afterword: Acts of Reparation

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Síobhra Aiken is a lecturer in Queen’s University Belfast. A former Fulbright Scholar, her publications include The Men Will Talk to Me: Ernie O’Malley’s Interviews with the Northern Divisions (Merrion Press, 2018) and An Chuid Eile Díom Féin: Aistí le Máirtín Ó Direáin (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2018). Spiritual Wounds is based on her doctoral research at NUI Galway, which was awarded the American Conference for Irish Studies Adele Dalsimer Prize for Distinguished Dissertation 2021. She is a regular contributor to centenary debates on television and radio.

Praise for Spiritual Wounds

‘This is an original, timely, fresh and significant work.’
Brian Hanley, Assistant Professor in Twentieth-Century Irish History, Trinity College Dublin

‘Spiritual Wounds is a brilliant book that unsettles the notion of silence about the Irish Civil War…The analysis is sharp and insightful, resulting in a vividly written study that challenges critics to reconsider the relationships between literature, memory and history.’
Oona Frawley, editor of Women and the Decade of Commemorations and author of Flight

‘An excellent literary and historical review of our responses to the civil war.’
Alan Titley, Emeritus Professor of Modern Irish, University College Cork

‘A path-breaking study, which brilliantly exposes the blind spots of historical scholarship on the legacies of the Irish Civil War…Síobhra Aiken’s compelling exploration of how reticence was confronted by a tenacious unwillingness to forget is an innovative historiographical intervention that stands out among the publications of the Decade of Centenaries.’
Guy Beiner, author of Remembering the Year of the French and Forgetful Remembrance