Pádraig Ó Tuama is an Irish poet, writer, conflict mediator, theologian and Pod cast host of On Being's 'Poetry Unbound', as well as a life long and dear friend.
We’re delighted and excited to give R O O M to an inspiring artist we trust. Pádraig’s path and work very much aligned with our own research, we’re grateful for the expanded understanding we have thanks to Pádraig’s rich reflection included here. At the end of Pádraig's R O O M you will find all links to his work and publications.
What does coalition look like, I think is an enormous question within peace and democracy.
There can be an idea sometimes in that peace will come and then we'll all find it easy to cooperate with. And it'll be a it'll be so evident to everybody that we'll all cooperate with it straightforwardly and whatever whatever comes, it requires coalition, whatever improvement comes.
And I think it's easier to coalesce around the negative and the destroying than it is around the constructive.And that's not just that's not because people are idiots. It's because, you know, step one matters and some people will want to go well, step one should start out with the premise as to who was in the wrong before. And other people go and no, step one should start out in a gathering kind of approach. And other people will say, you know, step one should take in mind the circumstances of the most abjectly disenfranchised up until now.
And other people would say, well, step one should be about addressing the past or reframing the future. And all of them have deep intelligence in that. And so building a coalition is a very important thing.
And some people will say that automatically requires compromise. I'm not entirely sure it has to, but it's It certainly requires some kind of cooperation, definite communication and a vision for where you're going and knowing that, look, whatever order we get to, we're going to have to do this.
And the building of trust in early stages is vitally important. In order to get to step 10, you need to have enough trust to go through steps one to five and five to nine. So I think that coalition is absolutely vital.
And I do think that, to speak crudely about the right and the left are progressive and conservative; I think progressives who give voice to the idea of tolerance so often, I think progressives are the ones who are least demonstrably capable of banding together in some kind of coalition because there's such an easy, quick way to say, well, you know, you did this wrong, you did that wrong. The valid faculty of criticism can sometimes mean that you break something because it's not perfect when it's at the start. Nothing's perfect at the start. It has to evolve into being good enough.
Like, coalition could lose its potency very quickly too If it was overused, you know, so I don't think that it's necessarily that any of these words in and of themselves are wrong. It's the question as to how they're employed and what, what power associations gather around them. like certainly in the North, you know, for some people when they talk about peace and reconciliation or reconciliation, they'd say, well, reconciliation to what? To the status quo that led us to this current state, this current experience. And my guess is that in any live conflict zone, cause there isn't such a thing as a conflict between parties, where 50% of the power lies on one side and 50% of the power lies on the other side, and they're, they're arguing about right in the very middle. What we're talking about really is the question of, you know, gross power being used by an already powerful group, who have the capacity to threaten. And it isn't to say of course that there aren't victims on both sides, there absolutely are you know, it's it's a terrible thing. It's nice and easy to think that the powerful don't suffer, they do. But there's this question as to the level at which suffering happens and then the depravity to which a population of people sink in their daily circumstances, as well as in their ambition for their future. You know? All of the universities in Gaza are bombed. So like where do you get educated? You know, for instance. You know? so that's not only bombing the present it's bombing the future, as a result of that. Not that everybody's going to go new to university, but Gaza is, per capita, one of the places that is the most educated in the world, an extraordinary place of learning and scholarship and interdisciplinary studies and all of that. So there is a way within which the flourishing that was there, for the future, as well as the present, was targeted.
And so I sometimes think about the word flourishing. You know, what are we talking about when it comes to trying to put something together? But I understand for some people, they might go, no, we want to talk about justice. And then sometimes I think, well, how do we do that in such a way where you can get people to the table at the start, you know, getting people to the table and keeping people at the table? Sometimes that is the thing to go, look at step six, we're going to have some very difficult conversations about inequity. But let's do step one to five so that by the time we get to step six, people might stay until step seven. I totally get that as a negotiation tactic too. And that is what the you know, the Qataris and the Egyptians and all of the people involved in the negotiations that are happening currently, you know, just about Gaza and Israel. Never mind then all the other ones. They're caught between the thing to say, look, here's where I think we should, here's what I think we should get absolutely clear from step one. And then they're holding that with the pragmatism to stay. But you know what? If we want people to stay until the subsequent steps, we're going to have to do some things before that. And some of that will be about hearing from somebody - Well, yeah, I know we we killed people in a way that was terrorising for you, who we consider to be the terrorists. You know, these kinds of levels of dialogue of acquiescence, and often you have bland statements as statement one, two, three and four in order to say, look, what we have in statement one, two, three and four is at least the beginning where no matter how you interpret it, all parties to this conflict can agree that these four things are true.
And people might go, oh, God, that's bland, and it's absolutely ineffective. But it isn't ineffective, it's getting people to a table. I've heard of some protests against the current peace process that's happening in, you know? the 42 day one that was signed into place last week. And I understand why people might be upset with it, but part of me thinks, given that we know that every lasting peace process has had to go through at least 39 iterations, let's find a way to think, well, let's make sure that step one or, you know, peace process attempt number one, just gets us to peace process attempt number two. You know, rather than saying nah, we need to start again, it needs to be perfect before we see that it's a vehicle that can move us on. And that that's going to look different in every day in every single iteration.
What are the things that most of the time can't be agreed on, that still need to be tweaked, that still need to be reworked, that still need to be reworded?
Fault, blame, time. Threat.You know, cause I mean, one of the reasons why I think that the Hebrew Bible or maybe the whole Bible is so interesting, it's not because of its claims about God, but it's ancient literature that depicts the human condition.And right from the early mythology, you have the Adam and Eve character, you know, the second telling of the story of the Garden of Eden. And then, you know, you have this thing where they eat the fruit that they're not supposed to eat and all this kind of stuff. And then the God character comes down and says to them, who told you that you were naked? And the first thing, and up until that point, they're these strange, parentless and childhood free adults. You know, they're just, they're these weird creatures, they're not human at all. And the God character says, “Who told you you were naked?” And the Adam says “the woman you gave me.” And in that situation, I always think, okay, now we're human. The woman yougave me. So you've got misogyny, you've got blame, and blame going in multiple directions, d’you know. At that stage, the Adam character is blaming the woman and blaming the God, you know, it's amazing. And I think there's such insight there about fight or flight, about freeze, about blame, about this desire for innocence, a desire for justice to all of these things, if you if you expand out from that, all the circumstances within which we have this desire to, to iterate where it is you think this began, which is a question of time, of course. And, and time, and our interaction with it, there’s always a question, therefore of innocence and blame. And I think in that situation, you might, you know, you have so many different measurements of time. Claire Mitchell in Belfast, a great sociologist, who's a fantastic writer, has a line in one of her books where she says, she's speaking about the north particularly, and she calls it a meta conflict. And she says, because there's conflict about what the conflicts about. And therefore, somebody might say, well, this began yesterday. And somebody else might say, no, yesterday is the same as what's been happening every day for the last 10 years or 100 years or 300 years, or whatever. And so in that situation there's a question of time, a question of blame, a question of beginning, and each of those things will manifest what it is you expect from the other party and maybe from yourself. Justify from yourself and expect from the other party.
Can I ask in your experience of mediation and trying to bring people into what I would now call a coalition as opposed to a peace process. what worked, what succeeded and what didn't work and what made it even more divisive. Sorry there's three parts. And also, did you notice a difference between the response of women and the response of men, in the trying to be in that coalition space?
So what worked, what got in the way of anything working and then any gender recognitions within that? What worked was when there was a moment where people were gathered in some kind of em, I think what you'd call in literature, defamiliarising experience. and defamiliarising is a time where what you think is perfectly laid out and straightforwardly in front of you, suddenly becomes unknown to you, where you become alien in a mindset or a thinking or an experience, em, that upsets you. So, for instance, in one group of people that I was working with, there were there was talk about a group of Protestant women and a group of Catholic women, each of whom had been through these processes of learning and dialogue, meeting together finally. And one of the women from one of the groups said, well, look, no, I won't go to that because my first husband, she was speaking, you know, had been killed and she said, I'm going to make up the date so it's not clear. My first husband was killed in 1970. And then she said, I married again and my, and that man was killed in 1980. And then she said, and my son was killed in 1990. And she said, everybody from that other group will know who did these things because they all happened within the context of a geographic area. And she said, people will be embarrassed if I'm there. They'll find it hard to look at themselves when they know that I'm there to remind them. So it wasn't that she was saying I'm holding it against them. It was that she was saying, look, I,I represent for them the image of of their own unforgivability. And I thought that was very brave and generous and good and intelligent and all of the things from her. And so I did ask her if she'd write a little bit about it, though, so that we could explain that to people. And what she hoped was that people would have group experiences that would help them and she didn't want to be in the way of that. And that, I think, was defamiliarising to people because there was a huge, for everybody, people in her own group, people in the other group, there was such a huge, there was such a huge level of profound respect in the hell that people had coexisted in.And that, I think, those kinds of gestures are often the shock of the heart that allows something fruitful to occur.
Well for me it was the presence of her absence was so generous. And I think all art is a negotiation between presence and absence. Um, the presence and absence of a line on a page or space on a page in poetry, the presence or absence of of audible music within, within a musical performance or within choreography - the ways within which, there’s the presence of absence in choreography, all of them, you know, that that everything is about the negotiation of those things. Which is about summoning God and not God. Summoning about, summoning about hope and not hope, you know, it's summoning about death and life. And and in that way, I think she reenacted for us the presence of a generous absence, which was a guiding absence and a benevolent one. But a warning also to say, look at what we're capable of.
She was on the unconscious competence, that was about living with the aftermath of horror. And, I think in her, like if she were to call what she was doing peace, I'd believe her because she knows what it's like to carry it. You know peace sounds like a lovely thing if you haven't had to get there, and if you don't have to walk on afterwards. I think, and all language will be limited, the question is as to what is it we understand the cost of peace to be? And she understood the cost of peace.
There's a theory in peace studies that it's right after a war where you can make serious, serious policy change and get all of the people around the table that need to be around the table. The statistics, I don't have them to call to mind, but they are predictably shocking and terrible. The statistics of women's signatories to peace accords around the world are terrible. That's something like, is it, I don't know, is it 2% of peace accords around the world have a woman's name written at the bottom of it? And the implication is that, well, we'll get on to talk about the gender stuff later on. So, you know, and of course the gender stuff is right there from the word go. The gender is part of the entire thing. And so like, you need to have the people around the table who you might think, no, they can come in later on once we've done the real, you know? If you think after we've done the real stuff, then the supplementary populations can come in. The supplementary populations are always the places where the power does lie, whomever it is you think is the supplementary population.
So that, I mean, I'm kind of jumping ahead to the gender stuff there, but I think that moments where there is, where something has arisen in a vulnerable sharing and some kind of recognition in pure and utter grief and exhaustion to say, Jesus Christ, we can't keep on doing this. In a certain sense there, you have a powerful moment to say, okay, actually we have common ground. So where do we start now?You know? and what you're looking for is these moments and they're filled with intellect, with critique, with generosity and with emotion and leadership. And courage and risk where you can say, we actually have here the nucleus of something that might be, that we could potentially spread. So it is about being alive to those moments. And those moments are fleeting, they come and they go. But if you're in a coalition, a process, some kind of engagement where you're having enough of those kinds of moments, you're able to say, well, look, let's create a little landscape of the moments we have, to say these keep on coming back, lets give it serious thought, you know? so those I think for, certainly other people will have other other places that they'll land with this question but, but it is being attentive to those moments. And rather than somebody going ah that's just naive let's put it away, of course it's naive! it's just been born, that's what naive means. And so let's allow ourselves to nurture the naive and allow ourselves to grow what has just occurred into something that might grow up.
Um, I think what gets in the way sometimes is peoples… and people, I'm talking about myself too, so it’s, you know, and so of course, like mediators can be, impossible to mediate. That's very important. It's not like, I mean, God Almighty the story of my life has shown my, how you know, when I'm party to something, I'm right there in the middle of it like everybody else. So, all of us are. And at the same time, all of us too have the capacity to try to bridge out in some kind of way that can help us stopping at each other's throats.
But there is, you know, the death impulses is powerful, and the desire to destroy that which you're frightened of and that which even you say you want, because it's easier to say you want something than to have to enact it.The idea of something often feels, you can keep it very far away. The model obstacle, René Girard would have called that, you know, to say peace is going to be absolutely perfect when all of us arrive with the same feelings and the same, you know, and that's if you make peace so perfect, it will never happen. You create the model obstacle, the perfect obstacle to the thing you say you want, by making it so ideal. And I think one of the things that that does, is it shows the deep resistance that can be in all of us towards the thing we say we wish we want. And that I think, that is a painful thing. So the relationship between the present and the imagined future can often be enacted in a death liturgy that kills something off before it's even started because you're familiar with the fight. And that is, to my mind, a spiritual crisis that we have. What is your relationship with that? Because we are all going to die. And that's one of the intelligences of the death impulse, is thatI'mgoing to die. But if I, if I have a discordant relationship with my own death impulse, well then I'm going to make other things die around me, other people, and things that might give life to the future. And so there is the myth of eternal life if I can make other things die and me be the architect of it.So that I think is a way in which, one of the ways, in which we're very intelligent to getting in the way of things. And when it comes to gender, I mean, there's a lot of body of literature on this. You know, the broad strokes are to say that, you know, the the architects of war and then the architects of peace accords are primarily men. And so therefore the implication is, of course, that the architects of peace accords should be women, you hear this sentiment or a lot, you know, that if governments were run by women it would all be better. I've heard a lot of scholarship from women to say, hang on a sec what are you saying? Are you saying that we're incapable of aggression? You know, we're incapable of revenge and don't have those drives too.So those big kind of ideas are often critiqued then, validly and rightly from inside. However, I do think that when you think of the traditional divides of what it is that has been expected of women and men, in traditional families, in the North, I think, especially, you know, that I know, not cause it's particular to anywhere else. It's just where I've been working in the North of Ireland. But there often were ways within which people, women who had responsibility, where it was foisted upon them whether they wanted it or not, to have certain responsibilities of rearing children, were closer to the idea of seeing reenacted in the next generation what was being enacted in amongst themselves, even if they were party to it, even if they had taken up arms and done all kinds of stuff. So, my experience and this is absolutely anecdotal, is that it took another generation for the men, that it tended to be men who saw their grandchildren develop a fascination with war, where they were like, oh my god really? And that the men, and this is completely like a sliver of a sliver of a sliver, there's no science in this, but it is a sliver of a sliver of a sliver where I saw the same tenderness occur in people um, but just it occurred at different times um yeah.
I avoid the word hope. It's one of the ones that's lost its power for me totally. Which isn't to say that it's a terrible idea, I think whatever's behind, but just maybe the word itself has become a little bit flimsy for me, what it can imply hasn't of course. Because you know so many people swear by it and when I hear people who have done extraordinary things and powerful things and brave things speak about how they connect with hope I'm with them totally, but I'm still not convinced that it's a word that I want to use.
In kitchen hymns
oh yeah
It sounds like you have a small argument, a moment of conflict with Persephone about hope.
Yes. Indeed I do. D’you wanna hear it?
Yeah I do, go on.
So this is a an argument, between Jesus of Nazareth and Persephone. Persephone, of course, leaves Hades every year and Spring arrives when she leaves. And they the the only time that Jesus of Nazareth has been to and then come back from Hades, She she waits for him as he's coming out of the gate, and they become friends and connected and lovers and arguers. They have tension. They have all kinds of, you know, experiences with each other. They're two traumatised gods, and em trying to speak about what matters. So here is a poem. It's it's a dialogue poem. He said, she said. between the two of them, and it's called Desire and Its Interpretation.
Do you have hope? She asked. He snapped in what in hope, she said.
Come on, I know you understand me.
It's the one I miss the most, he said. I used to think it was a little radio
tuned to the secrets of the universe. Then I thought, no, hopes a muscle.
Then, no, a song.
There's hope and hopes, she said. Hope in meaning.
small hopes for a nice day.
I hope for nice days, he said.
When everything was ending, I said a prayer back to myself–
one I’d learned at school. I never felt so empty as when I realized
it was empty.
She looked. Said nothing. Felt the edge of him. Felt the fray.
Understood that he was asking her for help he couldn't bear.
She saw him struggle, saw him try. Then,
I remember something else, he said, like how your name means destruction.
What does that mean? Are you the end?
Does it feel like that? she asked.
Don't patronize me, he said, I can't trust anything, and I don't know
who you are, or what you're here for. I just know that everything
I've believed is nothing now. The God I said I followed plucked me
like a golden apple, let me rot in the corner of his garden. Look at me now.
Cold on whatever day this is.Hungry too. Tonight, I'll drink water
from the mountain stream–It'll taste of heaven and sheep's piss.
And I wonder if it's worth the effort to continue.
Is it? she said, worth the effort?
He made a noise like laughter or a bark. Who's asking? he said.
I know you want to know what happened to me, why I'm bleeding.
How come you found me? Were you waiting? Am I entertainment?
Am I bait? If I talk, will you explode? Are you a friend? Are you a bomb?
Depends on what you want, she said.
...
Em, You’re using the word empty and emptiness and nothingness and there's and the nothing. There's so much nothing there and even like, there's a Paul Celan quote in there as well that brings me to that as well.
“Blessed are you no one.”
Yeah, no one, just this whole idea of the absence and the nothing and the empty. and is part of the process to emptiness, do we have to really feel what's there first before we can empty it?
I barely think that I can speak speak for myself in this never mind anyone else. But I do think that the recognising the nothing, the presence of the nothing, is absolutely vital and the nothing is everywhere. You know, every form of art begins as a certain idea and there's a space between the execution of the art and the idea of the perfect art, you know? whether that's music or dance or poetry. Um, There’s something of course very powerful and compelling, but also frightening, about hearing the point of view that somebody has when they know they're approaching their own death and we are attracted to that, but also can barely hear it. I went once to a lecture being given by a woman who was involved in starting off the first children's hospice in England, and she was a nun this woman, and she spoke about what it is that children say about their own death. And so many of my friends, rightly so, who have children of their own, said look, because I said I was going to go to this talk and it was at the Greenbelt Festival. And so many friends said well why don't you tell us afterwards what she says, I can't even bear the idea of hearing this. Understandably, they were right not to go, it was interesting that they had curiosity of course. And so what is it that we say when we know we're facing into the nothing, or facing into the unknown? And certitude I think can be powerfully appealing, it's a deep drive, and it can also be a place within which we break ourselves. And as my art has evolved, I think when I was trying to be a believer, my art was always agnostic, and now that I've given up that idea of being interested in belief, my art carries yearning. Not for certitude, but yearning to say, well, if only it can echo the sound of itself, that might be enough, because you might be able to connect on that.
There's a line in Kitchen Hymns where somebody is praying, and they're not even sure who they're praying to. They're praying to a you, and they're uninterested in defining it. Andthey call the you my favourite emptiness. And to say that that's enough, they describe the you, this emptiness as the shape of my desire. And that, I think the recognition of that is important. You need to be safe enough to be able to say that kind of stuff. You know, I don't think this that's why I'm anxious about trying to speak for anybody else. I don't think this is a prescription for what people in Gaza should be saying, or people in Israel waiting to find out of the of the various prisoners about or kidnapped prisoners about to be released, you know, will I get the live body or or the corpse of my loved one back? You know, that's torture for everybody, God almighty. So I'm not saying what I'm saying is a prescription. But I am saying that when it comes to leadership about these things, that the the perfect, the certain, is probably going to be a place that will break us, we're going to break anyway. And so a relationship with the empty, with the nothing, with the space between me and the ideal, and the recognition of limitation, all of those things are, are likely to be things that will serve us.