Mourning the Troubles: Anna Burns’s Milkman as a Gendered Response to the Belfast Agreement

Abstract

The past two decades have produced extensive criticism of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement’s (1999) progressivist logic in its proposal of a “fresh start” as the best way to honour the victims of the armed conflict that took place during the Troubles (1968-1998). In this paper, we argue that, by refusing to forget and to move on without exposing its grief, Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) mourns the Troubles in the public arena, undoing the Agreement. With special interest in Burns’s narrator and protagonist who evades the reality of violence by “reading-while-walking”, we read Milkman as a gendered response to this enforced forgetfulness. If walking the city frames this young woman’s trauma within the collective trauma of the Troubles, it also offers the nomadic possibility of refusing the sectarian identities available to her.

Unstated Rage and Undefined Identity in Anna Burns’ Milkman: A Feminist Post-Structuralist Reading

“…It is perfectly all right for the milkman or anybody, male, in the middle sisters' community to go around with Semtex (a bomb) whereas it is not okay for her to read Jane Eyre in public (Burns, 2018). Brigida and Pinho (2021) find Burns' narrator and protagonist of Milkman to fight shy of the reality of violence by "reading while walking" among other strategies to evade troubles. She never spells out the names of the city, the district she lives in, the time the events mentioned in the narrative took place, or the neighboring countries she calls "the country over the waters", "the country over the border" (Brigida & Pinho, 2021;Reynolds, 2021).…”

“…Brigida and Pinho (2021) find Burns' narrator and protagonist of Milkman to fight shy of the reality of violence by "reading while walking" among other strategies to evade troubles. She never spells out the names of the city, the district she lives in, the time the events mentioned in the narrative took place, or the neighboring countries she calls "the country over the waters", "the country over the border" (Brigida & Pinho, 2021;Reynolds, 2021). The narrative of Milkman, as it appears, is set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles (from the late 1960s to 1998), but the identity of the setting is never mentioned, just connotated with tailored phrases like "the great Seventies hatred", "renouncer-of-the-state", "the country over the water", and the like (Mc2, 2019;Reynolds, 2021).…”