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The day I first set foot on Irish soil in the long-ago summer of 1992, yet another bomb had exploded in downtown Belfast, with the usual aftermath of victims, property damage, mutual accusations, funerals, and political maneuvering by both sides. Today, slightly more than two years later, there is talk of laying down arms, implementing a cease-fire, negotiating major issues. The controversial leader Gerry Adams travels throughout the world as a legitimate political figure, presenting Sinn Fein policy before legislatures, parliaments, and political groups of diverse ideologies. More than at any time in the last quarter century, it is possible to glimpse a solution, one that would not involve more deaths, adding to the painful reality of life in Northern Ireland. This crisis, resulting from a brutal occupation, has involved iniquitous legal subterfuges, and has been shrouded in a painfully prolonged campaign of disinformation orchestrated by Downing Street. It has been a long wait. Political signals seem to mark the end of that wait, but violence-- political, military, religious, sectarian violence--has left generations of Irish people so deeply traumatized that the current situation can only be approached with a large dose of skepticism. Skepticism was precisely what characterized my visit to Ireland in August, 1992, a visit with two main objectives: to get closer to tracing my own family tree with roots in Ireland, and to learn about the political and social situation of that conflictive place. The first objective was not fulfilled. Where I live I am the only one with my surname; in Ireland Brennans are as abundant as Garcias are in Mexico. Having lost touch with my origins at an early age due to the death of my father in 1960, I never had enough facts to carry out a productive search. In Belfast I found an information center with substantial archives devoted to helping foreign descendants of Irish forebears. With a little luck, one could track down one's ancestors. All I found was the etymological origin of an old surname, O'Braona'in, which means either "sadness" or "crow," and two different versions of a coat of arms in which lions occupy a prominent place. After my failed search, I was left with the impression that at least my surname would serve as a mantle of protection in Ireland, that being a Brennan in the land of Brennans would give me a solid sense of belonging and identity. I was disabused of this notion a few days later. In the early hours of the morning after a long night of music, politics, and beer at the Dungloe Pub in the city of Derry, on the way back to the house where I was staying, a British army patrol stopped our car for a routine search. Threatened with an enormous automatic rifle barrel held a few centimeters from my nose, I handed over the identification that the sullen soldier asked for. He opened my passport, shone a powerful flashlight across it and, as he contemptuously threw it back at me, I heard him growl: "What? A fucking Mexican with such a name?" The second objective of my trip, at least, was more than achieved. During the three weeks I spent in Ireland, I was bombarded with facts, information, points of view, lectures, videos, visits, interviews in what was literally an intensive course in the recent history of Ireland, with special emphasis on the conflict in the North during the last twenty-five years. Over the course of twenty days, my traveling companions--Rubén Ortiz and Manuel Rocha--and I were able to experience the situation, and meet with some of its protagonists. At each point of our journey, we had the good fortune to be able to rely on knowledgeable, committed, passionate friends as our guides in that intense, fascinating, and painful journey: Stephen and Locky in Derry, Liam and Valerie in Dublin, Brid and Paedar in Belfast. Their voices--in fact, the voices of all we met in Ireland--form part of a vast and eloquent chorus that has asked for peace, for justice, for democracy for a long time . . . and it was very evident to me that the Irish are tired of waiting. In Derry I found a highly politicized community, sharply divided, covered with the scars of a war that is harsh, savage, interminable, marked by many milestones and monuments commemorating endless atrocities. In Dublin I found a timid, conservative city, wrapped in false tranquility, populated by Irish who seem not to want to know anything about what is happening in that other Ireland which, though they deny it, is also theirs. In Belfast I found the most hardline expression of sectarian violence which, ostensibly or secretly, marks every inhabitant of the city, every day, every hour, everywhere. In Belfast I also found West Belfast. . . . Enclosed between a highway and a mountain, harassed and surveilled day and night by its own police and the British Army, West Belfast is both a community under siege and one of the most intensely politicized neighborhoods in the world. In West Belfast it is impossible to be apolitical, because here, as in no other part of the country, are reminders of the violence, injustice, and discrimination caused by the artificial division of the island and the unwelcome presence of a force of occupation. If we look more deeply into the history of Northern Ireland in recent years, it becomes difficult to categorically define the conflict as a struggle between Catholics and Protestants; it is more accurate to say that the community is basically divided between the republicans, who demand the unconditional reunification of Ireland and the departure of the English, and the unionists, who do everything possible to maintain their links with England and the obvious advantages that occupation has meant for them. West Belfast is a republican neighborhood of Northern Ireland's capital, where all the absurd contradictions brought about by the last vestiges of the declining British Empire are concentrated. And though it may be true that many of the manifestations of republican thought are repressed and censored, it is also true that in spite of the unblinking eyes of their Orwellian Big Brother, the inhabitants of West Belfast always find a way to create a channel of expression for their political and social concerns. One of the most interesting forums for republican expression is the West Belfast Community Festival, a variety of artistic and cultural events, all with intensely political content. Each and every one of the festival events is planned and executed with a common goal: to throw into relief for residents and outsiders the terrible situation experienced by people in the North and, at the same time, to make it clear that the republican community is working ceaselessly for the cause of liberty, justice, democracy, and the reunification of their nation. Music, dance, theater, exhibits, conferences--these are the raw materials of any cultural festival. But, unlike other festivals, each event in the West Belfast Community Festival lends itself to multiple interpretations going far beyond the mere discussion of its artistic and aesthetic merits. Even the historical explorations have a burning timeliness. Thus, a play about the life of Tom Williams (a patriot of the Irish Revolution) and his execution at the Crumlin Road Jail acts as a contemporary reminder that this prison is still the fate of many current fighters for the republican cause. A photographic exhibition consisting of images of Belfast and Berlin provides an eloquent visual discourse about what it means for the individual to live in a divided country, in a geographic, social, and political area surrounded by artificial borders, fences, stockades, barbed wire, and military and police blockades. A reading of republican poetry gains another dimension when the poems have been written by republican activists during their long imprisonment in English jails, the same jails in which the highly symbolic handicrafts exhibited in various locations as part of the Festival have been laboriously manufactured. Even the West Belfast Community Festival's sports tournaments have a highly political content; they are named after important personalities from the republican cause, such as Mairead Farrell, one of the victims of Gibraltar, or Bobby Sands, the first to sacrifice his own life in a prison hunger strike. These and many other activities were carried out under the common stamp of community participation, collective commitment, and cultural identity. This last aspect was emphasized by the fact that the official language of the West Belfast Community Festival was "Irish," that mysterious, lovely, and euphonious language that we erroneously call Gaelic, and that in the republican community is simply Irish, one of the strongest links with the community's Celtic past and one of the most powerful symbols of Irish republican resistance and identity. While it is true that this fascinating festival took social, political, and cultural cohesion as its main theme, it also had a striking current of multicultural participation. In this aspect, what was most important was the presence of a numerous and combative Basque contingent, which brought to the Festival a solid Euzkadi political, cultural, and artistic dynamic, including intense sessions of exchange of ideas with the Belfast republicans. Less visibly, there were also groups of Corsicans and Catalans present as guests of the Festival. This multinational collage made my friend, the composer Manuel Rocha's ever-sharp humor blossom with the affirmation that all that was lacking in West Belfast was a solid contingent of Yucatecans. . . . In terms of the multicultural exchange, the principal component of Mexico's presence in the West Belfast Community Festival was the responsibility of Rubén Ortiz, a Mexican visual artist who in recent years has been working closely with Chicano communities in Southern California. The task set for Ortiz was, in principle, very simple: to paint a mural in West Belfast, where one of the most common forms of communication is the political mural, with functions analogous to the murals in the border area of Tijuana-San Diego. The creation of the mural, however, was not easy, given the particular conditions of the place. In collaboration with Gerard Kelly, the most outstanding of the West Belfast muralists, Ortiz designed and executed an authentic multicultural mural in which, in addition to other symbols, he combined the images of the revolutionary Mexican leader Emiliano Zapata, James Connolly (a principal figure of the 1916 Irish uprising), a cholo, and an IRA volunteer. The combination of rainy weather and police supervision made Ortiz's and Kelly's job difficult, both for them and for those of us who collaborated by mixing paint and painting large areas of the wall based on Ortiz's original designs. I will always remember Rubén and Gerry, each perched on a ladder, painting their mural on a wall in Springhill under the ominous vigilance of a military helicopter and with the periodic presence of the armored vehicles of the police and the British army patrols, both armed to the teeth. During the intense week of the West Belfast Community Festival, the main headquarters for the artistic and cultural events was Cultu'rlann --an old church located on Falls Road and converted into a culture center--which on a daily basis is the most important social focal point for the Irish republican community. There, in one of the Cultu'rlann areas, one of the most intense political-theatrical-musical sessions I have ever witnessed took place. The show featured an Irish rap group called the Sceanchai Rappers. At first I was skeptical about the presence of this group in the West Belfast Community Festival, mainly due to my conviction that when rap is decontextualized it becomes nothing more than a mere stylistic imitation. What comes to mind as proof of this is the sophisticated and anodyne rap of people like Hammer and Vanilla Ice, or the ridiculous attempts at rap in Spanish currently performed by the amateurish, spoiled adolescents of commercial Mexican television. And more: since authentic rap is a very specific artistic and social expression of the black communities of the large cities of the United States, how can we conceive of an Irish rap group, and how can we measure the scope of their particular mode of communication? My skepticism vanished immediately on first contact with the four Sceanchai Rappers, who demonstrated a rare intuition for adapting the seed of black rap to their own purposes, in their own context, with their own means of expression. Maighread Medbh, Rick O'Shea, Gerry McGovern, and Marcus Alasdair have formed a group that distinguishes itself more by the individuality of its members than by their work as an ensemble, and this gives their work a very special variety and richness. In that long intense session performed by the Sceanchai Rappers, one thing was clear above all; each of their raps was conceived, written, structured, and performed in terms of the political and social context of the Irish republican struggle in Northern Ireland. That night there was no room for anything but the raw, direct, emotional, powerful expression of the issues important to the cause of a free and united Ireland. As was logical to expect, many of the raps performed that night referred to politics, the military, and the police, but the members of the Sceanchai Rappers were flexible enough to also include in their repertory a series of raps dealing with the more individual and human aspects of Ireland's crisis. Many of these raps turned out to be, in all their rawness and violence, deeply moving. In "Walk Faster," the Sceanchai Rappers explore the permanent insecurity experienced by Irish women, doubly oppressed in a police state and a society that still has not overcome much of the irrational behavior and atavistic traits of the machista culture of underdevelopment. In the rap entitled "Paddy is a Terrorist," they allude directly to the stereotype created by the English for purposes of propaganda: the false notion that everybody who is Irish is a terrorist, and that the conflict can only be analyzed and finally resolved in military terms. In one of the show's most dramatic moments, the group performed "Nothing but Rain," a rap that paints a desolate portrait of idleness, job discrimination, and hopelessness, all in the context of the oppressive and suffocating Irish climate: humid, overcast, rainy. . . . Throughout this fascinating and impressive Irish rap session, the members of the Sceanchai Rappers explored some of the specific issues of the Irish republican struggle in particular and of the Irish situation in general, such as the brutal unemployment; the tragedy of emigration; the troubled relations between the communities and the police and paramilitary forces; the absurd laws that London has imposed on Northern Ireland. But they were also able to deal just as lucidly with the universal social problems that assume special significance in the six counties forming the northern part of the island. Thus, with photographic images from newspapers as well as other images created for the occasion, plus a few simple stage props, the Sceanchai Rappers attacked both the British Army and the Irish unionists, the conservative politicians, and the Catholic Church (which has taken the deplorable role of standing in the way of a real peace process and protecting the status quo). In the context of all these sounds and images, so impressive in their expression of the fundamental aspects of the political and social situation of the six counties, one presence shone with its own intense light: Maighread Medbh, the sole female member of the group. Already known for her poetry and activism for women's rights, Maighread Medbh gave the Sceanchai Rappers' performance a special dynamic that made their raps highly effective in combining the general aspects of the Irish Republican cause and a desire for unification with the specific concerns of women. In fact, it was Maighread Medbh who was responsible for expressing the most intense and powerful moment of the session. At the beginning of the show she delivered a solid, compact poem of her own, a committed and synthesizing vision of what Northern Ireland is today, and of the aspirations of Irish republicans for their unjustly divided nation. The last line of the poem, forceful as a high-caliber bullet, echoed in the dark and cavernous hall of Cultu'rlann on the Falls Road in West Belfast like a warning. That line seemed to sum up not only the larger purpose of the West Belfast Community Festival, but also the challenging attitude of an entire occupied, oppressed, and rebellious people: I am Ireland, and I'm not waiting any longer. Translated from Spanish by Ellen Calmus
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