"One Little Slice, from a Child's Point of View": Locating Childhood Experience during the Civil War in County Kerry in Archived Oral History

IF 0.2 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY EIRE-IRELAND Pub Date : 2023-09-01 DOI:10.1353/eir.2023.a910479
Helene O'keefe
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He was eight years old in 1921 when crown forces raided the family farm about six kilometers northeast of Killarney, a safehouse for the local IRA during the War of Independence and Civil War. \"My aunt was in Cumann na mBan,\" Michael explained, \"but my father\" Gearóid Fleming, a farmer with six boys and two girls, \"could do nothing\" except \"give them shelter,\" and he \"had a couple of rooms let [to] the boys up in the mountain and bog between Kilcummin and Scartaglin.\"2 Gearóid, the first to hear the approaching lorries, \"jumped out of bed\" and \"gave the door a belt\" to alert the sleeping Volunteers, who got out and \"went for the mountain.\" Michael's account of the violent raid that followed, conveyed orally with visceral vividness, resonates with that particular acoustic of war: [End Page 35] We had to stretch there. My father and mother and all were stretched down on the floor. I heard the bullets coming through the roof of the room we were in. … They did that for a couple of hours and [then] things were quiet, but still, my father wouldn't allow us to get up. The next thing was, the old lorries, the army lorries, started clattering again and going back the road, going to Killarney. My father said, \"You can get up now.\" I'll never forget the smell of sulphur [that] was around the house. You know, I can smell it today. We were children and we were picking up the bullets. At that time the bullets bent when they hit the wall and the lumps of mortar, they knocked off of it, the smell of sulphur was in it. But we were delighted getting the bullets, you know.3 Oral-history testimonies are notoriously problematic, subject not only to what is asked during an interview and how the questions are understood, but also to the vagaries of human memory, subsequent experience, cultural contexts, and the distorting impulse to \"perform\" for posterity. Michael Fleming's memory of childhood, called up through layers of time and experience, yields few \"hard facts\" about the southwestern battleground in 1921. His powerful sensory recall, however, underscores the overwhelming nature of the event. It was an assault in every sense of the word. Uncertainty about dates, personalities, and even the duration of the raid is offset by the sound-scape of a childhood ordeal—an olfactory archive, the symbolism of domestic security shattered like slates. Across seven decades he summoned the cacophony of the \"old army lorries,\" his father's urgent voice, setting his family to \"stretch,\" the staccato of bullets, and the sulfurous residue of a raid. The recollected joy at gathering the still-warm bullets singles out the narrative as distinctly that of a child. Not all oral-history sources yield such immediacy, but eyewitnesses to revolution often concentrate on intense, highly charged episodes of confrontation or crisis. Research into the neurological and psychological processes of memory suggests that experiences engendering heightened emotion are often recalled with unusual perceptual clarity as \"flashbulb\" memories.4 While the emotion itself is difficult [End Page 36] to recall, its impact is traceable in the lines of the autobiographical narrative, in the symbolism, the sensory legacy, the fine details caught like flies in amber, in what is omitted as well as in what is articulated. Even those anachronistic or apocryphal elements, inevitable in mnemonic texts no matter how vivid, can lead us, as oral historian Alessandro Portelli suggests, \"beyond facts to their meanings.\" Oral testimony like Fleming's can open new paths of inquiry into the long-neglected lived...","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"EIRE-IRELAND","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910479","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract

"One Little Slice, from a Child's Point of View":Locating Childhood Experience during the Civil War in County Kerry in Archived Oral History Helene O'keefe (bio) "My father had us all stretched on the floor after the first rattle of the slates. … 'Stretch,' he said, 'because the bullets will come in the windows.'"1 Eighty-nine-year-old Michael Fleming moved closer to the oral historian's microphone to share one of his earliest memories of how the violence of the Irish Revolution invaded his childhood home in Kilcummin, Co. Kerry. He was eight years old in 1921 when crown forces raided the family farm about six kilometers northeast of Killarney, a safehouse for the local IRA during the War of Independence and Civil War. "My aunt was in Cumann na mBan," Michael explained, "but my father" Gearóid Fleming, a farmer with six boys and two girls, "could do nothing" except "give them shelter," and he "had a couple of rooms let [to] the boys up in the mountain and bog between Kilcummin and Scartaglin."2 Gearóid, the first to hear the approaching lorries, "jumped out of bed" and "gave the door a belt" to alert the sleeping Volunteers, who got out and "went for the mountain." Michael's account of the violent raid that followed, conveyed orally with visceral vividness, resonates with that particular acoustic of war: [End Page 35] We had to stretch there. My father and mother and all were stretched down on the floor. I heard the bullets coming through the roof of the room we were in. … They did that for a couple of hours and [then] things were quiet, but still, my father wouldn't allow us to get up. The next thing was, the old lorries, the army lorries, started clattering again and going back the road, going to Killarney. My father said, "You can get up now." I'll never forget the smell of sulphur [that] was around the house. You know, I can smell it today. We were children and we were picking up the bullets. At that time the bullets bent when they hit the wall and the lumps of mortar, they knocked off of it, the smell of sulphur was in it. But we were delighted getting the bullets, you know.3 Oral-history testimonies are notoriously problematic, subject not only to what is asked during an interview and how the questions are understood, but also to the vagaries of human memory, subsequent experience, cultural contexts, and the distorting impulse to "perform" for posterity. Michael Fleming's memory of childhood, called up through layers of time and experience, yields few "hard facts" about the southwestern battleground in 1921. His powerful sensory recall, however, underscores the overwhelming nature of the event. It was an assault in every sense of the word. Uncertainty about dates, personalities, and even the duration of the raid is offset by the sound-scape of a childhood ordeal—an olfactory archive, the symbolism of domestic security shattered like slates. Across seven decades he summoned the cacophony of the "old army lorries," his father's urgent voice, setting his family to "stretch," the staccato of bullets, and the sulfurous residue of a raid. The recollected joy at gathering the still-warm bullets singles out the narrative as distinctly that of a child. Not all oral-history sources yield such immediacy, but eyewitnesses to revolution often concentrate on intense, highly charged episodes of confrontation or crisis. Research into the neurological and psychological processes of memory suggests that experiences engendering heightened emotion are often recalled with unusual perceptual clarity as "flashbulb" memories.4 While the emotion itself is difficult [End Page 36] to recall, its impact is traceable in the lines of the autobiographical narrative, in the symbolism, the sensory legacy, the fine details caught like flies in amber, in what is omitted as well as in what is articulated. Even those anachronistic or apocryphal elements, inevitable in mnemonic texts no matter how vivid, can lead us, as oral historian Alessandro Portelli suggests, "beyond facts to their meanings." Oral testimony like Fleming's can open new paths of inquiry into the long-neglected lived...
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“从一个孩子的角度看一小片”:在口述历史档案中定位克里县内战期间的童年经历
“从一个孩子的角度看一小片”:在口述历史档案中定位克里县内战期间的童年经历“第一声石板声响起后,父亲让我们都躺在地板上。“伸懒腰,”他说,“因为子弹会从窗户射进来。’”89岁的迈克尔·弗莱明(Michael Fleming)走近这位口述历史学家的麦克风,分享了他最早的记忆之一,讲述了爱尔兰革命的暴力是如何入侵他在克里州基尔卡明(Kilcummin)的童年家园的。1921年,他8岁的时候,皇家军队袭击了基拉尼东北约6公里处的家庭农场,这是独立战争和内战期间当地爱尔兰共和军的安全屋。“我的姑姑在库曼那班,”迈克尔解释说,“但我的父亲”Gearóid弗莱明,一个有六个男孩和两个女孩的农民,“什么也做不了”,除了“给他们提供住所”,他“把几个房间租给了男孩们,住在基尔卡明和斯卡塔格林之间的山上和沼泽里。”2 Gearóid是第一个听到卡车驶来的人,他“从床上跳起来”,“用皮带扣门”,提醒睡着的志愿者,他们下了床,“向山上走去”。迈克尔对随后发生的暴力袭击的描述,以发自内心的生动的口头表达,与战争的特殊声音产生了共鸣:我们不得不在那里伸展。我的父亲和母亲以及所有的人都躺在地板上。我听到子弹从我们所在房间的屋顶射进来。他们这样做了几个小时,然后一切都平静下来,但我父亲仍然不让我们起床。接下来的事情是,旧卡车,军用卡车,又开始咔嚓咔嚓地往回开,开往基拉尼。我父亲说:“你现在可以起床了。”我永远不会忘记房子周围的硫磺味。你知道吗,我今天都能闻到。我们当时还是孩子,我们在捡子弹。那时候子弹打在墙上,打在迫击炮块上,弹弯了,里面有硫磺的味道。但是你知道,我们很高兴得到子弹口述历史的证词是出了名的有问题,不仅受采访时问的问题和如何理解问题的影响,还受人类记忆、后来的经历、文化背景的变幻莫测以及为后代“表演”的扭曲冲动的影响。迈克尔·弗莱明(Michael Fleming)通过层层的时间和经历对童年的记忆进行了回忆,但关于1921年西南战场的“硬事实”却很少。然而,他强大的感官回忆强调了这一事件的压倒性性质。这是一次不折不扣的攻击。关于日期、性格、甚至突袭持续时间的不确定性,被童年苦难的声音景观所抵消——一份嗅觉档案,国内安全的象征意义像石板一样破碎。七十年过去了,他唤起了“旧军用卡车”的嘈杂声,他父亲急切的声音,让他的家人“伸展”,断断续续的子弹声,以及袭击后的硫磺残留物。回忆起收集还热着的子弹时的喜悦,使这个故事明显地成为一个孩子的故事。并不是所有的口述历史资料都能提供这样的即时性,但革命的目击者往往把注意力集中在激烈的、高度紧张的对抗或危机事件上。对记忆的神经学和心理学过程的研究表明,产生强烈情绪的经历常常以不同寻常的感知清晰度被回忆起来,就像“闪光灯”记忆一样虽然这种情感本身很难回忆起来,但它的影响在自传体叙事的线条中,在象征主义中,在感官遗产中,在像琥珀中的苍蝇一样捕捉到的精细细节中,在被省略的和被表达的内容中,都是可以追溯的。即使是那些时代错误或虚构的元素,无论多么生动,在助记文本中都是不可避免的,也可以引导我们,正如口述历史学家亚历山德罗·波特利(Alessandro Portelli)所说的那样,“超越事实,找到它们的意义。”像弗莱明这样的口供可以为调查长期被忽视的生命开辟新的道路……
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来源期刊
EIRE-IRELAND
EIRE-IRELAND HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-
CiteScore
0.70
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0.00%
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期刊介绍: An interdisciplinary scholarly journal of international repute, Éire Ireland is the leading forum in the flourishing field of Irish Studies. Since 1966, Éire-Ireland has published a wide range of imaginative work and scholarly articles from all areas of the arts, humanities, and social sciences relating to Ireland and Irish America.
期刊最新文献
"One Little Slice, from a Child's Point of View": Locating Childhood Experience during the Civil War in County Kerry in Archived Oral History A New Ranch War?: Cattle Driving and Civil War Agrarian Disorder, 1922–23 Editors' Introduction: The Civil War of 1922–23 Neutral Northerners during the Irish Civil War: A Biographical Study Civil Administration and Economic Endowments in the Munster Republic's "Real Capital," July–August 1922
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