The Library: Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

By Marcel Krueger:

According to German writer Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) and his "Irish Journal" first published in 1957, "the people of Ireland are the only people in Europe who have never invaded other countries [...]". Since the publication of his book, this view has been the mainstream view of Ireland from Germany for decades, fuelled by countless media campaigns of Fáilte Ireland , the Irish Tourism Board: a twee, harmless island of green fields, dramatic cliffs and pubs with open fires, peopled by jolly fiddlers, naive artists and buxom ginger maidens. The dark and martial history of Ireland as a whole is often swept under the glossy rug made of postcards or Instagram reels from the "Wild Atlantic Way", or only ever mentioned if it can be commodified and packaged into something visitors can consume, like swashbuckling stories of Grace O'Neill or the conflict in Northern Ireland only made accessible through guided tours of murals and "Peace Walls". The fact that Ireland did invade other countries, its soldiers employed as mercenaries by European powers for centuries, or that its people have been slaughtering each other for a hundred years with bullets and bombs, is all glossed over. 

I hope that many people from Germany will read “Thin Places” by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, which in its complexity addresses the violence all over Ireland, and offers a way of understanding and a potential way out of the spiral of violence that engulfed the north of the island for so long. Coincidentally, the German feuilleton often uses the term Seelenstriptease, literally a “soul striptease”, for a work of art, a book, an interview, a movie that reveals deeply personal and intimate details about the creator of that work, or the subject. I don't really like the word, but it is the first I thought about when finishing Kerri's wonderful work, that this book is very much a soul, and a country, stripped bare.

The book is about many things: Brexit, place, trauma, alcoholism, grief, hope and fear, and uses the structure of memoir to follow the life of the writer: from her growing up as the child of a Catholic mother and a Protestant father in Derry/Londonderry, firebombed out of her home during the “Troubles”, the civil war in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998, and then moving away to Scotland and England before finally returning to her hometown in her 30s. Whereas the many excellent essay collection that have come out of Ireland in recent years, like Sinéad Gleeson's "Constellations" or Ian Maleney's “Minor Monuments” use personal stories as starting points to establish the theme of single essays, "Thin Places" is a book-length essay in itself, one that drifts of into certain themes but always circles back to the main structure of handling trauma - and failing in doing so.

This is not a book that is easy to read. Not because of the complexity of writing or the darkness it explores, but because it does not offer easy escapism, or just food for thought that makes you utter "Interesting!" and then put it aside. Many things that Kerri writes about in here are so profound and moving that I literally had to pause after a few paragraphs, put the book down and explore what her words had caused inside of me. Sometimes I got confused by the many places and (life) times the author jumps back and forth between, but then the key themes and the overall structure remain clear and always allow the reader to climb back in.   

This island on which I was born is a wild, ancient and stirring place - a place so ethereal as to take a given moment in time and bathe it in the light of something divine, a place that was eternal and holy long before those words ever had need for voicing. [...] Ireland - this ethereal and mythical island, set down in the heart of the ravenous, tumultuous Atlantic Ocean - is black, too, coal-black, as black as to be the making of the crows. Black is the colour of many of our true loves' hairs on this island but it is also the colour of sorrow and fear - of mystery and the unknown, of so much death, and of the unimaginable depths of our grief.

The book ends on a note of hope, with the image of the winter solstice and the conviction that there is always light ahead when it is darkest, but I don't think that that is necessary. Looking at the pictures coming from Northern Ireland in April 2021, it is clear that the important thing here is balance, balance in the peace process and the self. There are only ever small victories possible for all of us, and we have to fight every day so that the needle does not  tilt back to the dark side again. “Thin Places” is a deeply personal work of art and at the same time a timely portrait of the (still) hurting island of Ireland that everyone should read. Especially in Germany.  

***

Thin Places is published by Cannongate.

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

False Mountain

By LJ Kessels:

When I think of the word mountain, I think of home. Which is ironic, as I come from the Netherlands, from Limburg in the south, the dangling leg bit, treated by the rest of the country as its forlorn relative, with a funny accent, customs, and catholicism. It is a place of poverty, corruption, melancholy, and exuberance. An exuberance generally described as bourgondisch, in reference to the enjoyment of life, wine and hearty food. The people in Limburg are an alienated people, both from one town to the next, and then together, against ‘The Hollanders’.

In the south of Limburg is the Vaalserberg, a hill just over 300 metres above sea level and the highest point in mainland Netherlands. Vaals sounds like False, or the Dutch word ‘vaal’ meaning less bright or washed out, like a shirt that was washed too many times. There are stories that the hill used to be higher, but that it sank due to mining activities underneath it. In actuality it was first mentioned in 1041, and comes from the latin in Vallis, meaning in the valley. Due to the run of history three countries (Belgium, Germany, and The Netherlands) claim part of the Vaalserberg. 

Nevertheless, it was the highest ‘mountain’ in the Netherlands, until this source of pride was taken in 2010 with the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles. The Caribbean island of Saba was incorporated into the Netherlands and with it Mount Scenery , nearly 900m above sea level and the new highest point on Dutch soil.

I only went to the Vaalserberg once, my roots are more towards the ‘armpit’ of the province, in the swampland of The Peel. I grew up in Nederweert-Eind,  a small village, close to the city of Weert. In Dutch, Weert is a piece of low land surrounded by water. During 1944 Nederweert-Eind was the front line of the war, and completely shot to bits. So much so that when my step-grandmother arrived in the village after the war, she described it as the place where the world literally had ended. 

I like that story as it describes what it felt like growing up there: life was flat and bleak, stuck in the cyclical nature that comes with life in the countryside. A life that echoed the seasons: work, eat, sleep, repeat. After Christmas comes Carnival, after Lent comes Easter. The summer ends with a fair. Repeat. For some it is reassuring, for others it gives them the feeling there is no way out. Of never making it to higher ground. 

The first question people ask around there is where are you one of? What family do you belong to? You don’t answer with your surname, as that is only how you are ‘written’, in reference to the time of Napoleon where people had to ‘pick’ a surname. Instead, you provide your family nickname. This can be a name referring back to the old family homestead, an infamous character in a family's history, or (as in my case), just a succession of patriarchs. Like an instant family tree. 

As a kid I told my teacher, I could not wait to be older, have my own place, and be able to make ends meet. I had more ambition than small town life, where everyone knew everyone’s business all of the time. I felt alienated in that place. My first escape attempt came when I decided to move to Amsterdam at 18 and study philosophy. For the daughter of a working class, illiterate single father, this was unheard of. All of a sudden I became a person. I was no longer the daughter of so-and-so, or the little sister of so-and-so. I was taken out of my context, where everyone knew your entire family history by simply knowing what family I belonged to. For everyone I met, I was the single point of reference, and became my own person. This became more clear to me the moment someone had asked me to spell my surname. A strange question when you grew up in a place where nearly every third person has the same surname. Then my second attempt to escape came in 2016, when I boarded a train with two bags and a bike, and moved to Berlin.

Remember my step-grandmother who arrived at the village of my childhood shortly after WWII? A war-torn place in the throws of trying to (re-)build. Another aspect to this story is that she was in her early thirties when she arrived at this place, around the same age I am now. She had met a widower with seven children, and decided to leave the comfort of her family home, to move to a small village, and become a mother to a brood of traumatised children. She would remain there, mainly accompanied by her mentally disabled step-daughter, until she got too old, placed into a care home, and died not long after.

Life goes on, up and down, like the outline of a mountain. Wanting to climb it, also means the risk of falling down. Something that in a flat country, where I might have stayed, rarely happens. As a reminder of my own ambition I have a tattoo of a mountain on my forearm. To give myself a push. For when I’m afraid. To remind me to listen to my own saboteur. To push myself further and not fall down the valley, or sink back into the muddy waters. 

***

LJ Kessels is a writer based in Berlin, Germany. She has a MA in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and has worked for various (film) festivals, events and whatchamacallits across Europe. Her work has previously been published in Bull & Cross, OF ZOOS, and Stadtsprachen Magazin. 

Maps in Sand

By David Lewis:

My family has passed through any number of forgotten towns and cities, losing languages and leaving our dead in overgrown graveyards.  What connects us to time and place?  Unless attachments are actively preserved, the connections become fainter with each generation.  

My grandfather William Eyton Jones was born in Llangollen, north Wales.  My grandmother Janet was born in Glasgow, but Llangollen became very important to her, and for my mother it was a second home.  When I was a child we visited the town to tidy the family graves and visit my mother’s cousin.  I felt that we belonged and did not belong; we ate ice cream in the sunshine with the other tourists, yet we had graves in the hillside cemetery and family on quiet back streets.  

I returned to Llangollen before lockdown to walk the streets and refresh the memories.  Strengthening these connections between memory, family and landscape is like maintaining maps in sand, retracing the outlines of a story to revitalise it, but what I am really strengthening is how my family feels about this town.  This was a landscape we knew for 160 years – windows, brickwork, chimney pots, the endless roar of the river; things of no importance, the secret elements of our lives unknown even to ourselves.  What stories took place on these streets? In thin sunshine I walked through love stories, family walks, chance encounters, laughter, funerals.  

I stopped at the war memorial.  The granite glinted in the sunshine, awaiting its moment of importance in November.  My grandfather knew and served alongside these Great War dead, the Hugheses, the Griffithses, the Lewises, above all the Joneses.  Family history is an emotional spotlight of memory and narrative that illuminates some people and hides others.  Many of these Joneses would be family who had faded from my story and become important in others.  Perhaps my grandfather joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the same day as these Joneses, the lost cousins from the hill farms.  Is it irreverent to think of this war memorial as a monument to unknown family?  Perhaps.  

The steep road to the cemetery was still narrow and quiet, but new houses were creeping up the hillsides, building on what was open farmland and a shaggy, gloomy playing field.  But the little cemetery was still a quiet place of yews and damp grass, wild-flowers and benign neglect, with superb views over the town and the distant hills.  My Llangollen grandparents are buried there.  This was the focus of our visits, the maintenance of their resting place; even today all my Llangollen excursions end at the grave. 

These maps in sand refresh family story and family history, but there is only so far back in time I can travel.  My most valued family connections to Llangollen are two battered 1930s photograph albums; my mother and her older sister at Plas Newydd, an uncle playing with his dog in the sunshine.  Yet one album is unlabelled, marooning the family in a permanent unknown past, their names forgotten.  Some I recognise, most I don’t.  For all the time spent reaffirming old stories, here is a bridge I cannot cross; I cannot travel back any further, and here the past cannot be reached.  

***

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside. He posts urban/rural images on Instagram -davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter -@dlewiswriter

A musical memory journey to West Africa

By Tim Woods:

It’s that warm tropical air with its overpowering scent of damp earthiness. It’s the magnificent birds and their multicoloured costumes, all reds and blues and greens. It’s the sweet relief of that first beer on a sticky evening, sipped from a sweaty bottle with the label sliding off. It’s the music that never seems to stop, whether you’re in a bar, on the beach or on the streets. These things, and so many others, are what I miss about West Africa – now more than ever. 

If the worst that happens to me during this wretched pandemic is an exaggerated case of wanderlust, then I’ll have been exceptionally fortunate. At the same time, I don’t think I’m alone in selfishly shoving larger issues aside and simply longing to escape the flat, the city, the country; in dreaming of other places; in wishing to be elsewhere. 

Last spring, as we all found ourselves adjusting to the unpleasant new reality, my yearning for the region I once called home grew stronger than ever. And so I began to travel virtually to the places I know in West Africa. While it’s not possible to recreate that heat, or redecorate Berlin’s garden birds in snazzier outfits, there are ways to take yourself there. I dug out old photos and sifted through them. I re-read well-thumbed guidebooks, picking out the places where I’d stayed and eaten. And I listened to the music, one of the best ways there is to curb the worst symptoms of travel sickness. 

West Africa has a hugely diverse musical culture, but perhaps the best-known style in Europe is the gentle, harp-like sound of the kora. And there are few kora players better than Sona Jobarteh. Her mastery of the instrument is not just admirable, it is also ground-breaking: she is the first female professional player, breaking into a livelihood that for centuries was solely for men. Born in Britain, but with proud Gambian roots, she comes from a griot family, who pass artistic traditions down through the generations. To truly appreciate the skill involved, it’s worth watching one of her concerts and admiring the speed at which she moves across the kora’s twenty-one strings. 

On a baking day last summer, I sat in the garden, listening once again to her music, hoping to be taken somewhere exotic. This time, I went to Bamako – one advantage of virtual travelling is that it’s easy to skip from Gambia to Mali in the blink of an eye – and specifically the San Toro restaurant, an oasis of calm in the chaos of that relentless city. One evening there, during a work trip to Mali, I ate falafel and drank peppermint tea from a clay cup while enjoying the sound of the kora. To my untrained ear, no songs ever seemed to start or finish, but instead the music drifted wherever the resident artist felt like going. I was even honoured with an exclusive performance: as the only customer, he was playing just to me. It felt a little indulgent, but he didn’t seem at all put out. When I left two hours later, he simply carried on. I’m not even sure he noticed me going.

Music has an unrivalled ability to take us somewhere else, often being strongly associated with certain points in our lives. It’s not just West Africa; I cannot listen to the Seekers without recalling family holidays spent driving around a rain-sodden Lake District, while any Britpop song will instantly take me to the clubs of Sheffield and my student days. It’s a welcome bonus to loving music, providing instant happy reminders of another place or time. 

Only since our ability to travel has been so severely restricted have I begun to use it actively, though. Only now, being indefinitely grounded in Berlin, do I feel a need to play this trick on myself. And, for the first time, I am starting to wonder if travelling will ever be as straightforward as it once was. I fear it may have been irreversibly damaged, whether due to the still ongoing Covid-19, or whatever virus nature has in store for us next; or maybe due to the now unavoidable climate crisis placing further, necessary, limits to our wanderings. 

It could, more simply and personally, be because that carefree period of my life is now over. I last visited West Africa on a work trip to Senegal in 2018, and back then I never once thought it would be three years and counting before I was back. My time spent living in Ghana is now nearly a decade ago, and those determined plans to return are getting hazier with each passing year. Fortunately I can go back easily enough, with a little help from the music; I just hope that I won’t need to use that trick forever.

***

Tim is an editor on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Love In The Time of Britpop. You’ll find him on Twitter here.

Sketches of China 04: Beijing by train

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the fourth instalment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

Speeding across the countryside under sulphur skies, an arrow shot for the city’s heart, the forlorn moan of the electric locomotive thundering along the tracks, cutting across the land, slowing from time to time, stopping at anonymous skylines of half-built tower blocks and cranes that tell of the rapacious pace of urbanisation, the shape of a woman emerging freshly showered onto a balcony in the evening sun as the carriages pull away once again, surveying the scene from the window, the landscape drenched in wan yellow light, the sinuous figures and sun-beaten skin of peasants who till the land, resting for a moment under a drooping tree, the red and white stripes of a chimney stack behind them, a smelter belching out smoke that hangs low in the air above fields of cadmium rice and split melons, the smog lingering over rivers whose fish have long since departed, hanging in wisps above brittle fields, their groundwater sullied, their aquifers depleted, the earth sucked dry, the train reaching the first buildings that announce the metropolis under darkening skies, the forlorn moan of the engine dying out to the creak of the carriages as it slows, snaking unnoticed through shabby suburbs, the buildings growing taller, entombing the land and climbing to touch the sky, the carriages tugging as finally they come to a halt, stepping out onto the concourse, waking into a nightmare, feeling the frenetic pulse of the city as the sun gradually sinks over the fields left far behind, the land slipping into shadow to await the new day, the televised dawn of progress at all costs.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.

Self-Portrait of City Boy as Exile

Photo by Rolands Varsbergs on Unsplash

By Alton Melvar M Dapanas: 

You wake up to a dream and this time, you are in a bed where you lost your virginity, all the stains of youth, to a closeted boy, a childhood playmate, whose name you choose not to remember. 

But you wish you would have been a colony of ants, or a skein of yellow-bellied sunbirds, negotiating slumber in the moist branches, remnants of rain drops from leaves dripping in their feathers. You wish you would have been little wings of flight, the god-spell flutter of their hearts, all the while living in the tried and tested ways of living, some rituals of disposal: the wet quietude of early September, steam of tuna in coconut milk soup, a lingering squeeze in the arm of an old friend, the call to prayer at dawn of a nearby mosque. 

You think about the escape from previous lives, an essential task to save the self from the city that swarmed on your banishment. Outside your apartment back in college, a man sells colorful balloons to a boy who keeps on clutching his mother’s bosom, a sleepless student nurse in white is on the way to hospital duty, and there, at the cul-de-sac sidewalk, an alley of stalls of street food like caked pig’s blood and unhatched duck embryo. Outside your favorite second hand bookstore, the pharmacy you frequent, a parking lot where you jog, a notorious inn. This was your city and its attendant histories.

But here in this sun-rinsed island town, in your room, by the window, staring at the empty bird cage hanging by a topiary, an absence of breeze, just still air, still life. 

You are asked to live in the now, dear grief-torn heart. 

You are asked to purge the parts you no longer need, to shed the skin you have outgrown. 

You are told the storm is over.  

***

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (them/they) is assistant creative nonfiction editor of London-based Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel and Iowa-based Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine, as well as an editorial reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine. They identify as pansexual, nonbinary, and polyamorous. Living off-the-grid since 2019, they have been based in Siargao Island in the Philippine South, in between the Pacific Ocean and a mountain range. 

In splendid isolation – the Loch Hotel

By Kenn Taylor:

Just how far out can you go in mainland Britain in terms of isolation? With a journey many miles down a long, empty, country road, an owl flying low at the windscreen at one point, and a long, single track road before you reach the destination, this place certainly felt like a candidate.

At the end of that private road there’s a luxury hotel. Not for the likes of you and me. I am here not as a real guest, but because a friend had bagged a job there.

Adjacent to a mighty loch, it is as rural a Scotland as you could possibly imagine. Scenery flowing off into the endless distance. Dramatic landscapes in every corner of your vision: mountains, forests, streams filled with huge glacial rocks. Orange highland cows. Even the multi-coloured moss seems dramatic.

In isolation, in a vast landscape, things seem to have greater visual power. A strikingly white solitary house. A lone, worn-out boat. A fallen tree. At this altitude, and with few buildings, the slightest change of light or shift in the clouds that touch the mountain tops is instantly noticeable. 

The hotel itself offers luxury in such seclusion. Old red leather chairs, worn but in the way that loos classy, not knackered. A roaring fire in a grate, the size of a small car, surrounded by dark wood and polished brass. A table lamp in the shape of a stag. The hotel itself looks ancient, but in reality is a fake. A Walter Scott image from the Victorian era.

What’s it like to live out here? I fear that the quiet and lack of stimulation would drive me mad. But there is plenty to do. Walk. Swim. Climb. Build. Read. There’s television and the internet but even then, my friend tells me, you do feel distant from everything. Terrible things happening on the news feel like dark fairy stories from far off lands, rather than things that will reach you here.

This has an allure, like some Arcadian fantasy of times past perhaps. But then this place is predicated on selling that. Charging an astronomical amount for the experience of ‘proper Scotland’. The staff, while they may also appreciate the fresh air and idyllic location, have to labour most of the time while those paying to be here can just enjoy it all. Hike the hills, fly in helicopters, drive fast cars, drink expensive whiskeys. Though labouring here is, my friend assures me, much better than some of the other places we had both laboured.

Of course, we can’t afford to even eat in the hotel. Instead we go over to the nearby inn for a pint, before driving the long way back to the nearest town to truly catch up. Nevertheless, I can see the attraction of this place, of going out to the furthest reaches. If you really have the money, you can pretend the world is not like it is. And forget, perhaps, the role you played in making it that way. 

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and arts producer. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and CityMetric to The Crazy Oik and Liverpool University Press. Kenn’s website.

Sketches of China 03: River Scene, Qinhuai by Night

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the third instalment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

The mother river, the artery around which the city’s historic heart once grew, its banks now thronging with crowds, an ancient temple from another time – all but forgotten – standing behind them, the reflections of a neon dragon shimmering on the murky olive waters, couples and families pausing for photographs on the bridge, feigning indifference to the smell of putrid waste hanging in the air, stopping to watch the pleasure boats as they pass below, all lit up in yellows and reds, swallowed by the darkness of an arch from which bats emerge, their wings tracing flights of Brownian motion in the night, crossing the bridge and turning off on the other side, off down a street lined with gift shops, running the gauntlet, avoiding eye contact and playing deaf to the hawkers’ cries as they echo off the walls, finding a moment’s respite from the humidity in the chill gust emerging from a department store before being enveloped again by the muggy air, leaving the water to drip steadily from the air conditioning unit as miles away a chimney belches out coal smoke, turning off down an alley leading to the metro, the street lined with counterfeit goods, the sound of raised voices, a slap ringing out in the night, descending the stairs, the dry click of the carriage doors, sterile, modern, and a lingering question as the train pulls away: the mother river, what will her children become?

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.