Between the lines: Republicanism, dissenters and the politics of meta-trauma in the Northern Irish conflict

Based on in-depth life story interviews contextualised by fourteen months of fieldwork in 2003–2004 and using a person-centered ethnographic approach, this article provides a case study of an exemplary informant from Catholic West Belfast, Northern Ireland, regarding his traumatised sense of identity. The article first characterises the profound ambivalence this person experienced when identifying himself as ‘Irish’ against the backdrop of his traumatic experiences in the course of the Northern Irish conflict. It is subsequently argued that these difficulties should be interpreted as resulting from this person’s specific position within his socio-cultural setting rather than being misinterpreted as merely individualised failure to cope psychologically. This specific position is thereby characterised as one ‘between the lines:’ the informant’s ways of handling traumatic experiences did not square up with the locally hegemonic Republican trauma narrative but rather read ‘between the lines’ by filling in the blanks in Republican representations. Thereby de facto establishing a counter-narrative, this individual also positioned himself ‘between the (front-)lines’ of power, producing local encounters that were characterised by incomprehension, threatening silence and repudiation. The article concludes by suggesting that this mutual interaction between hegemonic Republicanism and individual dissent led to what is identified as the informant’s ‘meta-trauma’: that is, the psychosocial trauma of repeatedly failing to socio-culturally integrate his own traumatic experiences within a politically hostile environment. This term may possibly function as both a description of the specific socio-cultural place of such an affliction and as a means for thereby integrating and overcoming it.