“In my son's veins flowed the blood of Irish Rebels”
We stand in small groups in the empty parking lot, uncertainly shifting our feet or milling around as our tour bus drives off down the road. The modest houses that stand in rows throughout this neighborhood are primarily in colors of white, tan, and black, and the sky has the foreboding, overcast appearance typical of Ireland early in the year. This makes all the more startling, then, the splash of red paint on a large wall mural, and, near its bottom, the bold, poetic statement, “In my son's veins flowed the blood of Irish Rebels.” The face of a beret-wearing, bearded man stares out from its center, with colorful flags and Gaelic inscriptions to either side of him. In bold white letters, his name arcs over the image: “Ernesto Che Guevara Lynch.”
Few of us, by now into our second week travelling through Ireland, can have been expecting our first sight of the day to be a beaming Che Guevara. At the moment we are in the the city known alternately as Derry (to opponents of British rule) and Londonderry (to supporters of the British regime). The disagreement over place names masks deeper, more bitterly contested conflict, one that Derry, situated as it is right on Northern Ireland's side of the border, has tended to draw. Both the high old walls ringing the city's wealthy, hilltop Protestant enclaves and the political wall murals decorating the Bogside, the poor Catholic neighborhood below where we are now, bear silent, eloquent witness to these divisions.
In respect to the decidedly Republican sympathies of Johnston, our travel coordinator and guide, we use “Derry.” At this moment Tony, a middle-aged man habitually clad in tweed and a cloth cap, is convening us around him to explain exactly what Derry has to do with Che Guevara. It can't be revolutionary fervor; today the violence that for many years attached naturally to Derry's name has largely (though not totally) vanished. Certainly we didn't get any sense of simmering tensions in the bus ride from the old renovated farmhouse, maintained by Tony on the rural and secluded Inch Island across the border. At one time this trek would have required traversing Army checkpoints armed with guns and suspicions; now we can make the trip without fuss, the only border demarcation a bare stretch of land.
The Bogside has long been free of gunshots and explosions, but it defines itself still by its troubled history. Most of the murals are angrier and more political than the romantic Che Guevara tribute, depicting the notorious “Bloody Sunday” massacre of unarmed protesters by British gunfire that took place here in 1972. Tony, a man of generally reserved demeanor, is clearly moved by the memorials, and he speaks with passion and not a little anger of that day's victims. Nonetheless, like most Irish people he habitually refers to the violence as “the Troubles,” as if positing it as something beyond agency and blame. Walking around the neighborhood, we see images of kids running away from tanks, a radical MP standing on the barricades, and, most poignantly, the faces of the day's fourteen victims. A large white scene in the middle of the Bogside announces, “You are now entering Free Derry,” a startling and dramatic recreation of a famous moment of political theater from the protests, just a bit undercut by the oversized, cherry-red Santa hat perched atop the sign.
Venturing up from the Bogside to the prosperous shopping districts on the hill affords us a relief from all that grim history but also the rather eerie sensation that all of it, so vivid and present in the streets below, up here has simply vanished into thin air. If anything, this serves as reminder that- despite that ridiculous Santa hat and puzzling Che Guevara shrine- the creators of the “Bloody Sunday” memorials understand exactly what they're doing; they're defining and keeping their history alive in the form of images and narratives. Today we have only been the latest group of outsiders privileged to hear a very old, still ongoing story.
