This book explores the lengths taken by veterans to testify to their civil war experiences in light of the emphasis on silence in official discourses: they adopted fictionalised disguises, located their writings in other places or in other periods of time, and found shelter behind pen names. For many, the urge to tell about these difficult experiences was motivated by a therapeutic aim to ‘heal’ the ‘spiritual wounds’ of civil war.
The retreat to these less conventional forms of life writing also enabled veterans to testify to experiences that were sidelined in mainstream commemoration: the suffering of women during war, revolutionaries’ frequenting of brothels, the realities of Irish-on-Irish violence, sexual violence against men and women, and the discomfort of post-civil war demographic displacement due to emigration or partition. Furthermore, the mask of fiction enabled veterans to testify not only to the suffering they had endured, but also to the violence they had committed themselves.
Ultimately this book reveals that the silence of the Irish Civil War was not necessarily a result of revolutionaries’ reluctance to speak. Rather it reflects unwillingness of the architects of official memory – journalists, historians, politicians – to listen to the testimony of civil war veterans.
