Haunting sounds

I have been working for some time now on sounds of the Troubles in Belfast and it seems almost eerie to hear how someone else's description of the aftermath of an explosion echoes with my own.  In one instance, a recording features the noise of a bomb with the blast and the breaking glass and a man who had witnessed the blast, which happened at a bus station, describes the moments after the explosion, 'It was so quiet, not a sound of a bird or anything'  -  my poem After starts with the line 'and no birds sing'  -  my own experience echoed in another's.

Another person who experienced the same bombing goes on to say how there was 'lots of smoke and fire from the building  . . .  people seemed to be going in and out, as if they were going in and out of clouds'. Again, I experienced several times over how people would disappear into the smoke of a blast and you didn't know until afterwards if they were alive or dead.

A woman describes an explosion that she experienced when she was only a child, going to the sweet shop to buy sweeties. Of the moments after the blast, she says, 'I just remember this deadly silence, you know, like deafened, I felt really deafened and I couldn't hear, I really couldn't hear but I know that we were screaming and panicking . . . and I think we held onto each other, we just screamed at each other  . . .  as nine year olds, we thought we were going to die in the shop'.

I felt this sense of silence, especially after one explosion when I fully believed myself to be dead, when I didn't hear the blast, just felt the push before I blacked out. When I finally came round and did hear again, which didn't happen for a while, it was like bursting into a world of sound and technicolour all at once.

Now I have been working for some time on my large piece which is as yet untitled.

 

This is a detail from the piece which will take some time to finish, so this is just the beginning. Images from a black and white photograph have been blown up in size and inkjet printed onto A3 sheets of cotton fabric prepared for printing. All these cotton sheets have then been stitched onto a calico background and stitching has begun, as with my recent work, all by hand. With a colour scheme of burnt browns to indicate the area singed by the fire of an explosion, some silk-painted organza fabrics have been laid down.

 

This image is not of a particular car explosion that I had experienced but I am stitching my memories onto a detail which I extracted from a photograph of an incident of the time, in this case, what became known as the Miami Showband Massacre. A land rover which was involved in an incident which I was very close to, had held four occupants, police officers, two men and two women and it was reduced to a heap of mangled metal; they were taken to hospital and I do not know if they lived or died.

 

 

 

 

PhD - The Beginning

This is another poem which I wrote after starting work on my visuals. I am listening to other survivors' stories from the height of the Troubles and, stitching and painting about some of the things that happened, memories come back to me of my own experiences.

There was one particular event when I completely believed myself to be dead and was somewhat surprised to find myself still on this side of the grave! In truth, this experience has never left me. One of the no-warning bombs went off and I felt the push of the blast. I was at Queen's University in Belfast to attend a lecture but the lecturer had been delayed in London so the lecture had to be cancelled. This turned out to be quite providential, as the room where the lecture was to be held caught the full force of the blast  -  afterwards, it was a complete mess of broken glass and splintered wood. I had only recently graduated, so I went instead to a nearby room to consult career journals.

As the bomb went off, everything in the room seemed to melt like jelly, steel shelves shimmering and running like liquid, and I blacked out. I have no recollection of hearing anything, I was probably temporarily deafened but I felt a great excitement when I thought I had gone into death and no thoughts came to me of any anger at the perpetrators. It seemed an amazing thing that I had just died! My presumably last thought had been in connection with the Futurist painters and was, 'Are these molecules actually jumping apart or only appearing to jump apart?'  I went down into blackness and emerged into a white light, peaceful, like milk, where I existed purely as thought with no sensation of physical being at all. I waited to be met and to become or be made aware of what existence I now had. It was only when I realised that the little gold sparkles which appeared in the light after some time  -  I had always hoped it would be pretty!  -  slowly twisting and turning, really were dust motes shining in the sun that I foun I hadn't died after all! My emergence after this time in the white light, I don't know how long it was, into what was this mortal life, then seemed like the other side of the coin.

What had happened was that I had been pushed forward into steel shelves housing the journals and had then been hurled backwards, finishing up feet away against a wall. It took some time to think myself back into a physical body, miraculously in one piece, which could move. I had lost consciousness because I had hit my head first at the front and then at the back  -  I remember the pain and the blinding headaches for days afterwards  -  but I was alive, I am alive, I have had so much life since.


For the Others

          In the white light,
                 
                         I survived;

       I didn’t meet the others then,
       those who had gone on that day,
       or on other days, cruelly

      catapulted    from      
       frame of bone and tissue;

       ingestion in the mother’s womb;

       the first breath, cries, smiles, growing,

       running, laughing, discovering  -  all

       the sing-song days of life bloodily

       torn a -p - art, ripped and sh -  re - dd ed into

                       silence;

         no, I didn’t see the others
        then, nor those who died of
        grief and consummate sorrow;   

                  I survived;

        but I hear their cries sorrowing
        in my head, so I stitch paths of
        remembrance, red veining in
        lines of silk and cotton,    

        blood red  threads   that are life and

        death and hope
                                         and grief

                      and  resurrection.