By Chris Cotter 

In May 2016, I took a short flight from Edinburgh to Belfast to sing in a farewell concert for my secondary school’s retiring Head of Music. It was quite an emotionally charged evening and, fittingly, the final piece on the programme was an arrangement of “Anthem” from the musical Chess. The final lines of the song run as follows:

“Let man’s petty nations tear themselves apart

My land’s only borders lie around my heart “

(Rice, Andersson, and Ulvaeus 1986: 64)

Before we sang, my former teacher suggested—perhaps joking, perhaps not—that this should really be “our” national anthem (whatever “our” might mean in a Northern Irish context), rather than the rather uninspiring God Save the Queen (now “King”). In a place as politically and culturally layered as Northern Ireland, that comment carried weight. It also stuck with me.

In this post – which is a blogified version of Cotter (2017) – I’ll attempt to unpack that moment and reflect upon the notion of identity: how we construct it, perform it, and shift it depending on context. I’ll return to Anthem (the final eight words of which I now have tattooed on my forearm) after I have offered some reflections on my memories of growing up Northern Irish, living in Scotland, and learning—slowly—that identity is never quite as fixed as we might think.

History and Memory

I don’t remember really learning much, if any, Northern Irish history at school. I could tell you about the Great Famine, and I could say a bit about the First World War, but beyond that, my formal education feels oddly silent. Given Northern Ireland’s complex and often painful past, that silence feels significant. I now suspect that this wasn’t accidental. Teaching recent, politically sensitive history is difficult, especially in a divided society. And maybe my parents were keen to keep sectarianism at arm’s length and didn’t go out of their way to fill in those gaps at home either. However, this remembered absence is worth reflecting on, especially when I think about just how present sectarian divisions were in my everyday life.

I grew up in the 1990s in what I’d describe now as a middle-class Protestant (Church of Ireland) household. And like many Northern Irish people of my age, I was aware of “the Troubles,” even if I didn’t fully understand them. I knew about the violence. The murders, the bombs, the annual tensions around marching season. I remember the visual markers such as flags and painted kerbstones which marked different territories. And I remembering being puzzled that so many of my primary school classmates supported Glasgow Rangers (the ‘Protestant’ team) when I didn’t think Scottish football was that good (sorry!), and being teased for supporting the supposedly ‘Catholic’ Manchester United.

More positively, the cul-de-sac we moved to in the mid-90s was roughly half Catholic, half Protestant, and I don’t remember this fact causing any issues. Far from it. However, importantly, this information was still known, even if not really mentioned, and we also learned to be careful with using certain friends’ ‘Irish’ names when we crossed the bridge to go to the shop in the nearby ‘loyalist’ estate.

 

 

Looking back, I have to acknowledge that these memories aren’t neutral snapshots of the past. They’re shaped by who I am now: someone who likes to think he’s a bit more “above” sectarian divisions; someone who has gone on to specialize in Religious Studies and even authored some materials on Northern Ireland for OU’s new module – DA332: Religion and Global Challenges in the Past and Present– which has just finished its first presentation.

Did school actually avoid Northern Irish history, or have I just forgotten it? Were my classmates consciously expressing (their parents’) religious or political identities through football, or am I projecting that on to them? What I can say is that identity mattered, even when I didn’t fully grasp why, and I had my own tactics for navigating it.

Two Flags, One Photo

A wonderful illustration of this comes from another memory of a 2003 family holiday in Normandy. The owner of the holiday home we were staying in had a quirky habit where she would fly the national flag of whoever was staying in the cottage from a flagpole in the garden. Misunderstanding our “Northern Irish” identity, she first raised the Republic of Ireland flag and then, upon realising her ‘mistake’, she added the Union flag below it on the same pole.

For what might have been the first time in my life, I saw those two flags – each of which I associated with violence, bigotry and claims to territory – flying together. So, I took a photo. And, as many teenagers did at the time, I immediately set this quirky image as my MSN Messenger profile picture when we returned home.

Not everyone appreciated the symbolism as much as I did, and I can remember a ‘friend’ almost instantly berating me for displaying it, stating that she would rather die than see the Union flag flying beneath the “tricolour”. I asked why this bothered her so much, and she said that this display was offensive to her “religion”, which was “Protestant,” as she put it. I pushed back, questioning what she meant, especially when she admitted she didn’t attend church. In my mind, I had “won” the argument. Much like I had decided that my classmates didn’t “really” support Rangers, I decided that she wasn’t a “real” Protestant but was just someone using the label as an alternative to “loyalist”.

Looking back now with my Religious Studies hat on, I can see that I fell right into the trap of what Aaron Hughes calls the rhetoric of authenticity (Hughes 2015: xv). This rhetoric dominates in much public discourse about religion, where “the operative assumption seems to be that ‘religion’ or a ‘religious tradition’ must be essentially good and just, and, a priori, anything that is bad or unjust must therefore be an aberration of religion” (Martin 2010: 3).  I thought I knew what Protestantism “really” meant. I thought I was above the politics. But, of course, I now know I was playing the same game, but from a different standpoint. As my doctoral supervisor, Kim Knott (2005: 125), has argued, ‘there is no “bird’s eye view”’ from which ‘we’ can study religion (or, indeed, many other social categories).

Strategies and Tactics

When I moved to Edinburgh in 2004, things became even more complicated. My accent was gently mocked, and I gradually lost much of my Northern Irish twang. At the same time, due to “Chris” being such a common name, I quickly gained a new nickname – “Irish Chris” – which I readily embraced. On the east coast of Scotland, “Irish” came with positive associations, such as friendly, sociable, easy-going, independent, whereas “Northern Irish” still seemed tied (in my mind at least) to conflict and division. So, I leaned into the version of identity that felt more comfortable: I started celebrating St Patrick’s Day, hung an Irish flag in my flat, and began – in Michel de Certau’s terminology – to tactically identify as Irish.

In de Certeau’s (1984) social theory, strategies are approaches to situations that are utilized by the powerful, whereas tactics tend to be more reactive and improvised. For example, we can think of the strategies of the war room versus the tactics of the battlefield, or the strategies developed in the training ground versus the tactics on the pitch. A passport, or a census form, or a social researcher might strategically place each of us in a fixed identity container. However, as we navigate the world, positioning ourselves and being positioned by others, each tactical act of identification fabricates a particular authentic self, one that is suited to the particular context.

Over time, my relationship with identity—and with the UK—has become more complicated. Living in Scotland, studying social science, and experiencing political shifts (like the 2014 independence and 2016 Brexit referenda) have all played their part. I have found myself becoming increasingly critical of many aspects of what the United Kingdom represents (historically and in the present) and am increasingly comfortable aligning myself with Irishness (helped in no small part by my post-Brexit claiming of my Irish passport).

So where does all of this leave me? Returning to that concert in 2016, of course I cannot comment on whether Anthem could or should be “our” national anthem – although there is something about national anthems that makes me profoundly uneasy – but it does seem to scan quite well with how I have now come to think about (national) identity after two decades of studying ‘religion’. ‘My land’s only borders lie around my heart’ because, just like any other aspect of my “identity”, my (Northern) Irishness isn’t a stable essence, but rather it is the product of a series of “operational acts of identification” (Bayart 2005: 92).

And this aspect of identity is something we could all do with remembering as we interact with the never-ending cycle of news out there in the real world, whether we are considering which bathrooms people can or can’t use, what factors have affected police officers’ decision-making when making an arrest, or what team to support at the football World Cup.

 

References

Bayart, Jean-François (2005). The Illusion of Cultural Identity. London: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd.

Certeau, Michel de (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cotter, C. R. (2017), ‘You’re Greek? Well … I’m (Northern) Irish, Kind’a’, in R. T. McCutcheon (ed.), Fabricating Identities, 34–41. Sheffield: Equinox.

Hughes, Aaron W. (2015). Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity: An Inquiry into Disciplinary Apologetics and Self-Deception. Sheffield: Equinox.

Martin, Craig (2010). Masking Hegemony: A Genealogy of Liberalism, Religion and the Private Sphere. London: Routledge.

Knott, Kim (2005). The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. London and Oakville CT: Equinox.

Rice, Tim, Benny Andersson, and Bjorn Ulvaeus (1986). Selections from Chess Songbook. Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard.