I grew up in Northern Ireland and was 16 when hunger striker Bobby Sands first refused food. His action electrified Belfast's Catholic enclaves like the Falls Road, where my mum grew up and my granny and uncle lived. I remember the frozen spine of the streets on those days. The warmth of my granny's welcome, her homemade soup, Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks on the telly are sutured in my memory to the sound of women banging bin lids on the streets in protest. This was our ululation, our way of piercing the air.
Bin lids, whispers that the "Shankill butchers" pushed out the eyes of their victims and stuck rosary beads into the sockets, fear of the feral aggression of parts of the IRA: these things came flooding back when I read Susan McKay's brilliant new book of interviews with those touched by the war in Ireland, Bear in Mind These Dead. I loved its even-handedness (my dad was a Prod). I remembered when I first moved to Scotland: being on Stirling University's leafy campus at night, walking past a parked car. I became convinced it contained a bomb—as kids we were told to stay well away from parked cars. Blood rushed to my head. I imagined the car exploding beside me, my arms blown off and my chest pierced by shrapnel. I thought I was going to faint. I started to cry.
Imagery was part of the problem of such panic attacks—I'd seen loads of car bombs on the news—but also part of the solution. As I've said before, cinema was like Valium for me during the war in Northern Ireland. It calmed my nervous system. I tended to body-swerve war movies—coals to Newcastle—but sought out almost every other genre. Then, in 1982, the year after the hunger strikes started, I saw Neil Jordan's film Angel, which was set right in the world I knew, but was about the relationship between a saxophonist and a mute young girl. Here was my grey war married to jazzy, sensuous scenes of strange poetry and pink lighting. I loved it. It remains the first great film about the Troubles. Seven years later, Alan Clarke made the almost wordless featurette, Elephant, which rigorously followed gunmen as they travelled to kill. Clarke had excised everything good about Northern Ireland—the homemade soup, as it were—except the shooting. He rubbed our nose in our own murderousness. The result was the second great film about Northern Ireland.
By the end of Hunger I was shaking, like when I'd seen the parked car in Stirling. This was anti-Valium cinema. It is the third great film about Northern Ireland, as good as the movies of Derek Jarman, Bill Douglas, Powell and Pressburger, and Terence Davies. The old BFI production board used to make such films, but they are long gone. Instead this was funded by Channel 4 arts. How incredibly brave of them to let McQueen loose on this subject, and allow him such stylistic freedom.
In the months since, I've read accusations of hagiography or propaganda, suggestions that this film is an offence to the IRA's victims. This wasn't the movie I saw. For a start, Bobby Sands is not the entire focus. One of the most moving scenes shows a security officer crying alone at the brutal abjection of his job. He's thinking, "is this what life has become?" There's very little politics or social context. Atrocity is equal opportunities: all sides suffer. There's no political romance, but what is romantic in the movie is the idea that when you strip away the words, strip away the clothes, strip away the clichés of Northern Irish politics of the 1980s, you are left with battered bodies, piss, shit, flies, feathers, blood, bruises and tears. This isn't an argument about victimhood or blame, about what or how to remember. The province's 50-plus memorials and reconciliation bodies can try to deal with that. To read Susan McKay's book is to realise that somewhere amid the ceasefire boom, the yuppification of Belfast, the emerging chutzpah of the socially different, the investigations of the disappeared, space must be found for forgetting in Northern Ireland. Forgetting how angry we were. Forgetting the simmer.
If this is so, then a film about the hunger strikes would seem like the last thing we need. But I believe that this remarkable piece of cinema doesn't inflame old animosities precisely because it rigorously strips Northern Ireland of the poison of the early 1980s, smashing away its fuselage and showing what lies underneath. Bodies. Bloodied knuckles. Physical agony. Roland Barthes said that an image of a missing thing is the delayed light from a distant star. Hunger is not an ululation, a banging of bin lids. Its delayed light is deeply moving.
