Spiritual Wounds Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War

by Aiken, Síobhra

• ISBN13: 9781788551663
• ISBN10: 1788551664
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2022-04-25
• Publisher: Merrion Press

Summary

SPIRITUAL WOUNDS challenges the widespread belief that the contentious events of the Irish Civil War (1922–23) were covered in a total blanket of silence. The book uncovers an archive of published testimonies by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, written in both English and Irish. Most of the testimonies discussed were produced in the 1920s and 1930s, and nearly all have been overlooked in historical study to date. Revolutionaries went to great lengths to testify to the ‘spiritual wounds’ of civil war: they adopted fictionalised disguises, located their writings in other places or periods of time, and found shelter behind pen names. This wealth of published testimony reveals that the silence of the Irish Civil War was not necessarily a result of revolutionaries’ inability to speak, but rather reflects the unwillingness of official memory makers to listen to the stories of civil war veterans.

Author Biography

Síobhra Aiken completed her PhD at the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A former Fulbright Scholar, her publications include The Men Will Talk to Me: Ernie O’Malley’s Interviews with the Northern Divisions (Merrion Press, 2018), An Chuid Eile Díom Féin: Aistí le Máirtín Ó Direáin (Cló Iar-Chonnacht 2018), and chapters in the edited collections Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish culture (Peter Lang 2019) and Women and the Decade of Commemorations (Indiana 2021). She is a regular contributor to public centenary debates on television and radio.