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- Gray, Billy, 1961-
(författare)
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“A thrilling beauty”? : Violence, Transcendence and the Shankill Butchers in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man
- 2014
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Ingår i: Estudios Irlandeses. - 1699-311X. ; :9, s. 54--66
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Shankill Butchers, a small group of Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.) members based in aprotestant enclave in Belfast called the Shankill Road during the 1970’s, acquired areputation for indulging in pathological violence to a degree unparalleled in the annals of‘Troubles’ related murders. Led by a prominent U.V.F. member called Lenny Murphy, theShankill Butchers became notorious for the kidnapping, torture and murder of randomlyselected Catholics. As Conor Cruise O´Brien has noted, the Shankill Butchers “remain uniquein the sadistic ferocity of their modus operandi” and according to Feldman, the extremity oftheir actions push all conventional notions of violence in Northern Ireland to the backgroundand mark an “outer limit” in relation to what he terms “the symbolics of sectarian space andthe radical reduction of the Other to that space”.Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man, while unable to lay claim to being the first literaryinvestigation into the atrocities carried out by Lenny Murphy and his associates, isnevertheless a text which has been accorded the greatest degree of critical attention in relationto the controversial manner in which it has attempted to remediate the Shankill Butcherlegacy. My paper will attempt to prove that the novel’s metafictive universe, self-consciousreflectivity and innovative generic hybridity, represents an attempt to transcend the spatialborders of Northern Ireland in order to present the conflict as an allegory of existential,postmodern alienation. Moreover, the violent psychopathology of the Shankill Butchers is, inMcNamee’s text, of universal as opposed to local, significance. Violence is portrayed as asearch for intimacy and transformation, a performative act that conveys agency in a worlddefined by virtual reality
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- Gray, Billy, 1961-
(författare)
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From the Secular to the Sacred : The Influence of Sufism on the Work of Leila Aboulela
- 2021
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Ingår i: Narratives Crossing Borders. - Stockholm : Stockholm University Press. - 9789176351437 - 9789176351406 ; , s. 145-168
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The contemporary Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub has used the term ’Transcultural’ to describe a specific form of Literature which he argues: demands more, both of reader and writer. It does not have the support of those cheering, waving crowds who would like you to be European or Third World, Black or African or Arab. It can rely only on that crack of light which lies between the spheres of reader and writer. Gradually that crack grows wider and where there was once only monochrome light, now there is a spectrum of colours. (Mahjoub, The Writer and Globalisation 1997) Leila Aboulela, whose first novel The Translator (2000) is a contemporary writer whose fiction has been defined as embodying predominant elements of the transcultural experience. Daughter of a Sudanese father and Egyptian mother, born in Cairo in 1964, Aboulela grew up in Khartoum but currently resides in Aberdeen, Scotland and her fiction is attuned to emerging female Muslim voices within the migrant communities of the West. Aboulela’s experience of Britain and British culture provides her with a terrain against which she attempts to articulate a specific identity: the Muslim Arab/African woman in exile. In her novels, the migrant experience serves as the foundation for a mystical but nonetheless assertive religiosity that functions as an antidote to hegemonic Western materialism. This religious frame offers not merely consolation and a firm sense of identity; it also, according to Geoffrey Nash (2012) ‘shapes an emerging awareness of difference and helps articulate an alternative to Western modernity’. According to Lleana Dimitriu (2014), the last decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest, both theoretical and creative, in the complexities of what she terms ‘faith based subject positions’, particularly in the context of global crises and mass migrations and Leila Aboulela’s fiction suggests that in the midst of postcolonial ruptures and mass migration, there is the possibility of alternative forms of ‘re-rooting’ and belonging, with ‘home’ perceived as a state of mind and identity as anchored in the tenets of religious faith. My article will engage with the manner in which Aboulela is preoccupied with the ethical dilemmas faced by Muslims currently residing in secular societies and how a mystical form of Islam –in particular Sufism – serves less as an ideological marker for her characters and more as a code of ethical behaviour and a central marker of identity.
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