The same goes for the The Troubles, which may no longer dominate the news cycle in the way they once did, we are asked to consider what is women’s place in the national struggle in the post-Hunger strike era in Northern Ireland? A number of pieces we have seen or read this semester abroad have suggested the answer to this question is up for debate.
Certainly, pre-hunger strike, women were not just discouraged from taking up arms or even action against the British, they were downright forbidden. Pernell disbanded the women's auxiliary of the IRA, ostracizing his sister to the point that she never spoke to him again. In countless other films and stories we've read, women were simply mules or couriers, involved just on the periphery of the fight, but never in the midst.
Yet it's the women who are left to clean up the pieces after the house falls. Some Mother's Son, Hushabye Baby, The Wind That Shakes the Barley … all showed the repercussions of their sons, fathers, and husbands losing lives, coming home maimed, or locked away in some heinous British prison. It is the women who wear the yoke, but yearn to carry more. If it is they who must hold the family together after tragedy, and they who must work to provide a roof over the heads of their children and food on their plate, shouldn't they have a larger stake in the battle for a united Ireland? Shouldn't they have a larger say in the unfinished revolution?
Ourselves Alone by Anne Devlin asks these questions. My initial reading of the play was a completely different interpretation until in the midst of the class discussion, the tungsten wire of cognition was lit in my brain. While I'm no expert on feminist critical theory, Devlin is not as much concerned with the the unfinished revolution in terms of a united republic of Ireland. Her interpretation is of the inequality of women in modern Irish culture.The last scene in the play confirms this as close friends Frieda and Donna discuss their relevant past and expectant futures. Frieda, desperate to leave a land she has come to resent, informs Donna of her plans to leave, even as unsure of of them as she is.
DONNA: … (Pause) So you're saying goodbye.
FRIEDA: (Nods) I left him sleeping. i walked out just as I am. If I'd taken the suitcase he'd have known and stopped me.
DONNA: Have you somewhere to go?
FRIEDA: England.
DONNA: Why England?
FRIEDA: Why not? It's my language.
DONNA: Why not go South?
FRIEDA: I'm not that kind of Irish.
Frieda reveals a provincial worldview that excludes Ireland altogether. Even though she could move to Dublin or even further south in County Cork or County Wexford, she wants to leave the country completely. It's too constricting, too suffocating, and in her eyes, even with the colonial oppressor England, despite the obvious backdraws, the shared language is enough to satisfy a move.
Just after this conversation, the two young women reflect on happier times back, where just the girls had a grand time at the beach. Free from men, from societal convention, and the rule of law from the church, they stripped naked and swam in the ocean where the luminescence of the stars and the phosphorescence of the waves shone so beautifully. It was just them alone in the dark still waters, free from all that held them back as women; it was liberation. This is the Ourselves Alone of which Devlin writes. And in a sense, it's always been HER unfinished revolution, hasn't it?
The Christy Moore ballad, “Unfinished Revolution,” says it best,
Soldiers kicked down the door,
called her a whore
While he lingered in Castlereagh
Internment tore them apart, brought her to the heart
of resistance in Belfast today
Her struggle is long, it's hard to be strong
She's determined deep down inside
To be part of the unfinished revolution.
She holds the key to the unfinished revolution.
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