The conflict of visiting places marked by trauma

Resumen detallado

From Belfast to Belgrade, tourists consume the competing traumas of place and people, while glancing at the darkness raises its own conflicts for the author.

Rarely, I assume, does anyone go on a short sightseeing tour expecting to hear a full-throated defence of the murder of a widowed mother of 10.

I happened to visit Belfast when the last leg of a trip through Scandinavia fell over and I was looking for a three- or four-day stop within striking distance of Wales. Rolling through the possibilities, the idea hit me suddenly, and I didn’t bother having another one.

Nothing drove me there more forcefully than Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe’s propulsive, vivid book about the North of Ireland’s Troubles, anchored in the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville. When you’ve taken an interest in a historical subject, you dream of a book like that drawing the pieces together and presenting them in such colour.

Say Nothing, and other Troubles-informed media such as the television comedy Derry Girls and Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-nominated film Belfast, has driven renewed interest in Northern Ireland. The travel companies of the capital accommodate it with Black Cab tours, which take visitors around the famed murals and into the parts of the city you might not want to go poking around unguided. I booked one on the promise of hearing from “local men, from both sides of the community, who have lived and experienced life through the Troubles and have their own stories and tales to share with you”.

My early impression of the guide allocated to me proved wrong on two counts. First, he seemed oddly taciturn for a tour guide and, second, he seemed to be taking quite a dispassionate view of Belfast’s history. As the tour got going and I revealed a degree of sympathy with the Republican cause, his reserve – and his objectivity – melted rapidly away.

At the first William of Orange mural, he dutifully talked me through the Battle of the Boyne and the significance it has in Protestant history. By the time we came across another, when we were half an hour more familiar, he was telling me “the Protestants have no history aside from William of…

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