The Trouble with Words: Milkman by Anna Burns
A phrase like “sectarian violence” or even “civil war” is expansive — hard to envision in the mind’s eye, hard to really feel. I picture men lining up on either side of a line and shooting at one another. I picture indignant, proud people spitting at one another, hateful, their differences too chasmic to ever bridge.
And then there’s the euphemism used to describe the sectarian violence that plagued Northern Ireland from the late sixties until the late nineties: The Troubles. With Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping bestseller, Say Nothing, published this past year, along with the TV favorite Derry Girls, it seems that The Troubles, that unofficial civil war, are making a comeback in popular culture. Compared to a term like “civil war,” “troubles” sounds like what a prudish aunt might call your period, or how Victorians would refer to mental illness.
But as Keefe’s book details, starting with the riots in Belfast in 1969, the divisions between the outnumbered Catholics and the “unionist” Protestants had rankled for centuries. They were truly existential, civil rights struggles. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Catholic paramilitary/guerrilla group organizing to resist Protestant and UK-loyalist domination, was stamped a terrorist organization, and terror was certainly among their weapons. But they were also a gang that had formed in defense against other gangs: unionist ones, who’d been terrorizing Belfast for decades and had, in the 60s, driven 10% of the population of the city out of their homes.
Troubles, yes. “Political problems,” the narrator of Anna Burns’ Milkman calls them. It’s a term that does not nearly encompass the scope, the gravity. But that’s what it’s like to live through history: it’s claustrophobic. It’s the size of your neighborhood — as far as you can walk, or in the narrator’s case, jog. Your universe, especially in the 1970s before internet, can be as small as that, and can feel like hands around your throat. And maybe that’s why a term like “The Troubles” is fitting. It’s provincial. Almost...petty. Diminutive. And when terrorism, mutual surveillance, disappearings, and surprise bombings make up your ammunition, perhaps nothing could be more powerful than a euphemism.
Milkman is not only geographically claustrophobic, following the wending walking and jogging paths of its nameless narrator. It is also psychologically constricting, edging us through the story on the narrow track of her serpentine thoughts. Its voice and style imitate the interiority of a person who is not even allowed to fear the things she fears. She’s 18 years old, and she loves to read classic novels, and she loves to run for exercise. She takes French classes in town in the evenings. She lives with her mom, but she spends one night a week with her maybe-boyfriend. That’s his name: Maybe-Boyfriend. He doesn’t get a real name. No one does. Everyone is “first sister,” or “third sister,” or “third brother-in-law,” or “neighbor.” Or the eponymous milkman: a sobriquet for a known paramilitary in her neighborhood. He’s the guy with whom she’s photographed (bushes and hedges “click” with the shutters of cameras; they’re always watching) just because he starts jogging alongside her during one of her daily routes around the park.
You can’t be careless in this kind of a place. You have to be alert, attuned. But you also can’t be too attuned, nor too discreet, or else you’ll seem like you have something to hide.
“These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody. You could have a nice wee conversation with someone here, then go away and think, that was a nice, wee unguarded conversation I just had there – least until you start playing it back in your head later on. At that point you start to worry that you said ‘this’ or ‘that,’ not because ‘this’ or ‘that’ were contentious. It was that people were quick to point fingers, to judge, to add on even in peaceful times, so it would be hard to fathom fingers not getting pointed and words not being added, also being judged in these turbulent times, resulting too, not in having your feelings hurt upon discovering others were talking about you, as in having individuals in balaclavas and Halloween masks, guns at the ready, turning up in the middle of the night at your door” (27).
Burns writes these long, breathless sentences, carrying us through the anxious spinning mind of a bystander whose innocent jogs in the park have quickly turned. Thoughts jump out of her head like the needle of a lie-detector, like the spikes on a heart monitor. Maybe what makes this kind of war so terrifying is exactly that: you aren’t drafted into it. You simply show up in your own life one day and find you have a target on your back: “‘Wrong place, wrong time, wrong religion’” (110).
What this kind of trouble does, Burns shows us, is chill not only the outer, real, perceptible world; it chills our inner worlds, too. It makes us put up fences in our own minds.
What this kind of trouble does, Burns shows us, is chill not only the outer, real, perceptible world; it chills our inner worlds, too. It makes us put up fences in our own minds.
It’s the kind of climate in which words themselves are dangerous. And when words are dangerous, then thought is dangerous, too. One of my favorite scenes in the book occurs during the narrator’s French class, which she takes with other locals. It is in this scene that we are able to get a sense of what it’s like to live in a riven community, where the landmines are words, or misconstrued words. “Teacher,” the narrator’s nameless French teacher, reads the class a passage in French that describes the sky. “Thing was though, the sky in this passage she was reading from wasn’t blue.” The class, collectively, becomes disgruntled about this, so much so that a “spokesperson for the rest of us” interrupts her. “‘I’m confused,’ he said. ‘Is that passage about the sky? If it is about the sky then why doesn’t the writer just say so?’... ‘Hear! Hear!’ cried us or, if some of us, like me, didn’t cry it, certainly we agreed in sentiment. ‘Le ciel est bleu! Le ciel est bleu!’ shouted many of the others.”
As a teacher, I can relate to this moment. It happens once in a while: you throw out an idea that is so strictly anathema to your audience that a small uprising breaks out; a cultural clash, a power struggle if you will. And the only thing a teacher can do in this situation is attempt some kind of Socratic method that might help the students to see things another way, break convention and try a new way of seeing.
Teacher tries. “‘So, class,’” she finally chimes in to ask, after laughing quietly at the brouhaha, “‘is it that you think the sky can only be blue?’ ‘The sky is blue,’ came us. ‘What colour else can it be?’” And here, our narrator explains the nerve that Teacher has struck -- why, indeed, she has offended them with her florid descriptions of the sky:
“Of course we knew really that the sky could be more than blue, two more, but why should any of us admit to that? I myself have never admitted it. Not even the week before when I experienced my first sunset with maybe-boyfriend did I admit it. Even then, even though there were more colours than the acceptable three in the sky – blue (the day sky), black (the night sky), and white (clouds) – that evening I still kept my mouth shut. And now the others in this class – all older than me, some as old as thirty – also weren’t admitting it. It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility?”
What I love about this scene is that we begin by laughing along with Teacher at these provincial simpletons who refuse to indulge their imaginations. But soon enough, with our narrator’s insight, we are chastened. If any misplaced word, any wrong-place-wrong-time-wrong-religion, can set off a bomb, then sticking to three colors – blue, black, and white – is a tenuous peace.
To give us such a close first-person account of The Troubles in an environment like this is perhaps Burns’ own anti-terrorism effort. But the pressure closes in on our narrator over the course of the novel. The space her life can take up -- already small, as a young woman -- tightens and tightens. And what would you do in her place?
Milkman, the title, conjures up images of a bucolic, simple life. Celtic fiddles play as a man in white delivers your fresh cow’s milk in a bottle each morning. No one could be more innocent; nothing could be more ordinary. The sky is blue. And you’d do best to agree, unless you want to turn out like second brother-in-law.
