Author: cbolivar

As the semester has gone on, one of the most interesting and intriguing points for me that our literature has explored has been the idea of witness and how one interacts with and reacts to the events that are going on around them. Whether it be the Irish writers during the Troubles or the various American actors in the Civil Rights Movement, each person’s story that we have read and discussed has provided a different viewpoint into the conflicts and conversations going on at the time. Why did each person react the way they did?

If we want to have an answer for this question based on personal experience, we can look at 2020 to provide a perspective. Why do people go out and march on the streets for BLM? Why do people beg and plead for others to wear a mask and make socially distanced decisions? There is a motivation and a desire for some sort of change or call to action. As people, we see the world around us and want to make changes where we see injustices and wrongdoing. I argue, we want to see a world where justice and peace reign supreme. Each person will make choices and decisions so that they can achieve their view of a better world.

As we read, the Chicago 8 wanted to combat the injustice that they saw in the Vietnam War. MLK Jr. wanted to end the racial systemic injustices in the United States and advocate for a loving and peaceful solution to seek change in the racial relations of America. Bernadette Devlin and Eamonn McCann wanted justice in Ireland. Each of the people we read about saw the world around them and acted in hopes of making it a better place than the one they were experiencing at the moment. This insight into their lives was an interesting way to learn about 1968 and provided the most authentic representation of the times. With all of the strife, violence, and viewpoints of the long 68, these perspectives and real experiences allowed me to understand the different forces, movements, and people acting together at this point in time.

This week in class, one of the questions that came up and stuck with me was the question, “How do you fight the system?” What leads people to make certain choices and react in certain ways? As we’ve explored the texts, we have seen how MLK’s largest approach was centered in faith and rhetoric. He sought to share his messages in a passionate way, but with keeping the peace so that he could reason and share his message with other people in a calm and conversational manner. He knew what he wanted to say and found ways to peacefully but strongly state the change that he wanted to see in the country. He urged the avoidance of violence because he thought that this would never end in a positively impactful way.

After reading Huey P. Newton’s experiences and thoughts in Revolutionary Suicide, his approach was far different from MLK’s. He saw that his job was to give all of himself and to put himself in any and all positions, including dangerous ones, to fight for his mission. He saw violence and theatrics as a way to combat the racial injustices of his time and to make his message heard. Although these were tactics of his, it is also important to note that violence was not his only avenue for change. Newton also focused on social programs and creating a clear mission statement for the Black Panther Party to show that they had a mission and not just violent intentions. However, when discussing his view on Revolutionary Suicide, he explains how he saw that he must give all of himself and be a martyr for the cause, not stopping at anything, even violence, for the movement he was trying to push forward.

In contrasting these two viewpoints, each man took a different approach to changing and fighting the system. Peace and disruption. Rhetoric and theatrics. Which one was the better strategy? It might be easiest to automatically say that the peaceful option was the better one, but is this really the case? Did the theatrics encourage more people to join the movement, thus making the movement stronger? Did it seem to some that the peaceful rhetoric would get their message nowhere? In thinking of this, I think that both movements had their strengths and their weaknesses. Maybe it was important to dramatize the situation so that more people would buy in. Maybe to really get their points across and express themselves fully, people had to go to the extreme and perform outrageous acts. I’m still trying to figure out which approach I consider better, so right now I do not have an answer to the question, but I think it is interesting to think about. Is it important to keep your friends close and your enemies closer through rhetoric, or do you want to make them so frustrated that you physically or psychologically force them into change?

The idea of looking at the relationships in Mojo Mickybo as a bad marriage was really interesting and captivated me this week. What makes a bad marriage? What are the turning points that convert troubling times into a bad marriage? As I was thinking about the relationships in the play both as literal marriages but also as various other unions, I kept thinking about being stuck in a pattern with no way out. It could almost be described as a sense of complacency mixed with no way out. A larger understanding that because of the larger problems in Ireland and their community, there was no way to escape the conflict and so it was better to just accept the conflict than to seek a way out. To me, that is why there is still conflict in Ireland today. Conflicts have become an expected part of everyday life. Resolution isn’t sought because the conflict is so tied into everyday life that without it, life wouldn’t be the same/would be so different that people wouldn’t know what to do. 

I wanted to use this idea of a bad marriage to look at the other writings we have read in class. Whether it be MLK writing speeches about race relations in the 1960’s United States or Eamonn McCann writing about his experiences between Protestant and Catholic relations growing up in Ireland, I think that when analyzed as bad marriages, this can help one understand what was going on at the time and how it is represented in literature. How the conflict was so ingrained in all relationships that it felt permanent. It felt like one could not escape it, thus leading to years and years of continuing worsening relationships and not being able to understand one another. I’m intrigued to keep using the lens of a bad marriage to analyze the rest of the literature we read and to see how this can help explain and make sense of what was going on at the time and how that impacts life today.

A lingering question that I have had on my mind after this week has been the question “Why does turning to violence become something we do even if we know it doesn’t work?” I’ve also been thinking about this in conjunction with our discussions over how a central figure/leader of a movement can affect and impact the actions that one takes during a movement and how desperation can lead to violence.

I wonder if the lack of a leader can permit more violence because without a central figure, those without leadership or direction might resort to actions and choices that are destructive to the cause itself. When there is no leadership, it is easy to split off and have different sub-groups that each have their own priorities and intentions in a movement. When this is the case, it is easy to see how some might turn to violence for their own gain. Although it is important to clarify that not all violence is a product of placing self-interest before the interests of a group, it is interesting to think how the representation of a group as a whole is changed by the actions of a few. I offer the thought that a central leader or figure might help to sort through these separate interests and re-align the group with their original intentions and goals.

Similarly, just as desperation is possible in any movement, when there is no central figure to help unite and continue to push the interests and concerns of the group, it is possible that desperation could cause the parts of the group to go their own way and resort to violence to help make their concerns known. I think it is interesting how the human mind works and how when we want or need something, we often do whatever it takes to get that thing. I think personally we often need someone to help guide and lead us in our decision making and process of making a plan and similarly, I think movements need this person as someone to help redirect and aid in the choices that a movement makes. Without this, violence becomes an option rather than something to try to avoid.

As class discussions have revealed new narratives in history that I had not previously known or heard of, I’ve realized just how much each of the stories that I expose myself to can help me paint a larger and more intricate picture of history. I’ve learned that an essential part of learning these different parts of history is to allow oneself to look into the perspectives of various people and sources rather than just the viewpoints of those that write our history textbooks or the perspectives that we are comfortable or used to.

As Matthew Reilly shared his research into the lives of slaves and indentured servants in Barbados, I realized that I knew very little about the concept of “White Slavery” and the perspectives of those who believe that Irish Indentured Servants were slaves. Learning about this perspective and the lives of both groups who shared the island at the same time allowed me to see that in order to have a better understanding of history, I must seek to learn about the various perspectives, places that people inhabited, and ways that each person interacted with society. It is essential to learn about various perspectives and experiences and not just those that are most commonly taught, have the widest reach in social networks or are the most “mainstream.” Similarly, hearing the personal experiences of Geoff Brown and Sam Lord allowed me to gain knowledge into Irish history in a way that I previously did not have access to.

It is easy to get caught up in the brief statements that we think define a specific movement or to shy away from a certain topic because it is not what we are most comfortable with, but the different conversations that we had this week provided an opportunity to explore topics and viewpoints that may often be ignored or avoided if they are not part of the narrative one is used to hearing or even one that someone does not want to hear. Matthew Reilly mentioned at one point how we can chose to embrace or ignore certain histories and after this week I have learned that rather than ignoring a certain history, we must push ourselves to ask questions and seek to learn more about that which might make us uncomfortable or might not align with what we already believe in order to gain a fuller understanding about history and why people interact with each other in the ways that they do.