This week, Armagh hosted the James Hewitt International Summer School, a hotbed of dissent, subversion and some new religious ideas
AT FIRST glance, Armagh doesn’t look like the most promising place to plan an escape from the fetters of institutions and ideologies. The skyline is dotted with dreaming spires and fluttering flags, and the city’s name has been a shorthand for ecclesiastical control since that churchman of iron conviction, St Patrick, built his first stone church on its hilltop 15 centuries ago.
Inside the Marketplace Theatre and Arts Centre, however, this year’s John Hewitt International Summer School has spent the past five days examining the topic “Unfettered Thought: Belief in the Future?” from a variety of angles, many of them quietly but determinedly subversive.
Like many of his generation, the Belfast-born poet believed that religion would wither and die once progressive “faiths” such as pacifism, humanism and socialism took root. But in a world where fundamentalism is on the increase and belief in politics itself – never mind progressive politics – appears to be at an all-time low, is there a future for faith of any kind?
It sounded like a pretty gloomy topic for a sunny Thursday morning, but the BBC journalist William Crawley provoked many a chuckle as he steered calmly through the choppy waters of the “debate” between Western theism and the new atheism. In order to move beyond the philosophical stalemate that has resulted from this prolonged bout of mutual name-calling, he proposed a new kind of religion – “sensible religion” – whose key characteristic would be openness to correction. Correction on misogyny, on homophobia, on slavery; openness to atheism, agnosticism and textual revision. “It’s really important for sensible religion to do what sensible science does, and say, ‘We got it wrong in the past’,” Crawley suggested.
The theme of belief was continued in a double bill of poetry readings. "Poetry makes the world real to me," observed the Minnesota poet Joyce Sutphen, who read a number of pieces on what she called "faith or not-faith". One of the most striking, Lunar Landing, put an elegiac spin on the recent anniversary of Apollo 11, comparing the once-unsullied moon to Lucrece, ravished by the unstoppable Tarquin of human progress.
A very different note was struck by Daljit Nagra, who gave a quick-fire recital of pieces from his highly-praised debut collection Look We Have Coming To Dover!, celebrating his English-Punjabi cultural heritage in a colourful swirl that meshed The Smiths with Sikh schooling, Coronation Street with the corner shop.
Nagra's work may well be a pointer towards the kind of multicultural "Irish" writing we can look forward to in the years to come. Come lunchtime, however, it was time for a reading by an Irish Old Master. Eugene McCabe read from his new novella The Sistersand from his 1992 novel Death and Nightingales, extracts of spine-tingling immediacy which held the by-now-packed theatre spellbound.
“A lot of people just come for the dinner,” one Hewitt regular assured me as we munched our way through enormous plates of steak, chips and salad. But many also come to spend money; the bookstall in the foyer was doing a healthy business, while an exhibition of paintings by Anita Young, inspired by the Antrim landscapes that inspired Hewitt, sported a healthy crop of red dots.
“It was hard to follow last year’s school, when we had Seamus Heaney, and a huge crowd of people turned up,” admits Paul McAvinchey of the organising committee. “But we did it.”
With appearances by Claire Keegan, Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville and Claire Kilroy, among others, plus a series of creative writing workshops and a hugely popular reading group, the 22nd Hewitt school seems to have hit the cultural zeitgeist bullseye.
St Patrick would almost certainly have been startled by yesterday afternoon’s panel discussion, in which a Chinese dissident poet, a third-generation Indian and a Belfast musician, poet and critic batted observations back and forth at a speed which would have given Roger Federer pause. “Movements of social change always promise you something big,” said Yang Lian. “And for that, people agree to abandon their own individual thinking.”
“You can’t really sit on the fence any more since the war on terror,” said Daljit Nagra. “You’re either Indian or you’re not.”
“Tribal badges were great when mountains and rivers divided us,” said CL Dallat.
It was great stuff. And it sent us out into the sun-warmed stone streets of Armagh ready to continue the good fight. Unfettered thought? Let’s be having you.
