Embodied Memory: Performing the 1980–1 Hunger Strikes

Abstract

The Northern Irish Republican commemorative calendar marks the anniversaries of four major events: the 1916 Easter Rising, Internment (August 1971), Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972), and the 1981 Hunger Strikes.1 Both the Easter Rising and the Hunger Strike commemorations are organised around a gallery of martyred men, who died for Ireland and who inspire the fight to continue. Pearse's maxim on 'our Fenian dead', first delivered in 1915, and inscribed in the 1980s on a mural on Beechmount Avenue, Belfast, accurately prophesies the use of the dying and dead republican body as a weapon. This juxtaposition of death and life, and the idea that death can paradoxically feed a living struggle, is based on a shrewd understanding of the power of sacrificial imagery combined with the potency of Irish remembrance culture.KeywordsPolitical StatusPolitical PrisonerScript CollaborationPrison OfficerPrison GuardThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.