Halloween in Belfast

A fire juggling stiltwalker in the Colours Street Theatre Halloween parade in Galway city centre, October 31st. Photo:Joe O’Shaughnessy.

Halloween in Belfast was for me, a night full of contradictions.

According to Wikipedia (yes yes, I know it’s not the most reliable source of knowledge), Halloween is the offspring of pagan and Christian traditions. On the Christian side of the family, Halloween falls on the eve of All Saints Day, on which Christians in heaven are remembered. The next day in the Catholic calendar is All Souls Day, when the focus is on those still waiting to enter. On the pagan side, it is linked to Samhain, a Celtic festival that marked the end of the harvest; the end of the lighter half of the year and the beginning of the darker half.

I find that history strangely comforting because looking around on Saturday night, I was struck by how many opposing things I thought I saw lying side-by-side. The first was the idea of dressing up as all sorts of spooky things in a country whose two main communities identify themselves as Catholic and Protestant. Maybe it’s because folks there actually believe in things like witchcraft and evil spirits, but you’d be hard pressed to find members of the African Christian community dressed as Beetlejuice. The two things, Beetlejuice and Christianity, are thought to be diametrically opposed.

And then there were the fireworks. Have you ever thought you should be very afraid but then pretend to be unfazed because everyone around you is going about business as usual? That’s how the fireworks that I could hear but not see made me feel. The fact that there was the occasional siren in the background - not to mention police on foot patrol (in their bullet-proof vests) and standing besides vehicles that looked like they’d just returned from Basra Province - none of that helped. It was only made worse by the fact that no-one else took notice. Not only did they not take notice, they were happily lined up in their witch, ghost and Frankenstein costumes, patiently waiting to get into clubs.

I suppose Halloween was odd for me because I kept seeing the wrong thing. When I looked at the guy dressed as a vampire, I saw the response his costume would have evoked in rural Zimbabwe, or the Vatican for that matter. The fireworks, the sirens, the police…

My grandmother had some furniture ruined during Zimbabwe’s independence war. When I was young, I kept trying to get her to tell me what had happened and to talk about the past. She didn’t want to do that, she wanted to live in the present and focus on the future.

I suppose a morbid fascination with the past is an outsiders prerogative. The owners of that past tend to prefer to leave it there.