Famine Haibun

This is an excerpt from my Famine Haibun, available to read in full here in issue 9 of Tolka.

Historian John Kelly writes that, with regard to the Irish famine, ‘British relief policy was never deliberately genocidal, but its effects often were.’ There may be some truth to this. Current definitions of genocide require intent on behalf of the perpetrator. According to the United Nations Genocide Convention, for example, genocide occurs when any of the following are carried out with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, and other things. Genocide is also said to occur when one deliberately inflicts on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. All this seems clear enough. Uncontroversial. Non-genocide, genocide through negligence, through nation-building, economics, an Anglo-liberal shrug in the face of providence: there doesn’t seem to be an appropriate way to refer to what took place on our island or the incompetence to stop it. To stop suffering for the sake of mercy and not as the means to an imperial end. That is what proved undoable.

scratched with fingers

into cold earth

—coffinless hollows