Word: belfasts
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...CITIZENS OF BELFAST GATHERED in Donegall Square last week to stand in the cold wind and hearken to the words of a man making an unprecedented visit. "It's truly grand. I've never seen anything like this before," said Paul Thomas. "Everybody's come together." Indeed they had, by the tens of thousands, Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Republican. They carried babies, waved flags and cheered with abandon when Bill Clinton, the first American President ever to visit Northern Ireland, flipped the switch that lit up a 49-ft. white pine Christmas tree, flown in from Nashville, Tennessee...
Such sensations were Heaney's birthright. The oldest of nine children, he was raised on Mossbawn, the family farm some 30 miles northwest of Belfast. A Protestant estate adjoined the Catholic Heaneys' land. "I was symbolically placed," he said later, "between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience, between 'the demesne' and 'the bog.' The demesne was walled, wooded, beyond our ken; the bog was rushy and treacherous, no place for children...
Heaney left the farm to study English at Queen's University of Belfast, and then to teach. As his poetry began to attract attention and praise, a succession of academic posts beckoned; between 1989 and 1994, he was both the professor of poetry at Oxford and the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. And he attracted hordes of acolytes and admirers along the way, a bearish, affable bard equally at ease in faculty room...
They notice him, the sectarian haters who suck whiskey and resentment in Belfast's bars, and they accord respect. Victor Kelly is a young swaggerer, a gifted thug with the flash and cold nerve to force a terrified man of the opposing tribe to his knees, then cut his throat with a filleting knife. Kelly's bunch are Protestants, and the enemy tribe Catholics, though it matters not a Mass or a damn because pure enmity on both sides, cherished and nurtured from childhood, now and forevermore, is the city's religion...
...which of course are normal, that makes the city uneasy and somehow complicit. It is the gaudiness of the knifework, the unseemly calling of attention, that feels wrong. As the killings continue, the language of official statements quoted in news reports slides instinctively toward euphemism. People speak in ambiguities. Belfast does not want to know its own nature, not with any discomfiting precision...