Open AccessMourning the Troubles: Anna Burns’s Milkman as a Gendered Response to the Belfast Agreement
Author(s) -
Marcela Santos Brígida,
Davi Pinho
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
ilha do desterro
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.223
H-Index - 6
eISSN - 2175-8026
pISSN - 0101-4846
DOI - 10.5007/2175-8026.2021.e74608
Subject(s) - honour , undoing , criticism , psychoanalysis , grief , sociology , law , psychology , political science , psychotherapist
The past two decades have produced extensive criticism of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement’s (1999) progressivist logic in its proposal of a “fresh start” as the best way to honour the victims of the armed conflict that took place during the Troubles (1968-1998). In this paper, we argue that, by refusing to forget and to move on without exposing its grief, Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) mourns the Troubles in the public arena, undoing the Agreement. With special interest in Burns’s narrator and protagonist who evades the reality of violence by “reading-while-walking”, we read Milkman as a gendered response to this enforced forgetfulness. If walking the city frames this young woman’s trauma within the collective trauma of the Troubles, it also offers the nomadic possibility of refusing the sectarian identities available to her.