Abstract
Previous studies on the Blanketmen, the republican prisoners of the former HM Prison Maze, few kilometers away from Belfast, have largely insisted on the centrality of the body as a significant aspect of their protest (Feldman 1991; Ellmann 1993; Alcobia-Murphy 2008). Due to the prisoners’ conditions of material deprivations, their own body turned into a political instrument to be used for subverting and resisting the prison regime, therefore gaining an unprecedented visibility for the republican struggle.
This semantization of the body inscribed in the material flesh not just a set of political messages, but also a cultural memory rooted in previous historical episodes of hunger striking and, especially, in a Christian and Christological iconography. The mythology of the suffering body, still largely dominant in the contemporary representations of the Blanketmen, further mediates the already symbolic body of the prisoners; yet, this iconography is to a great extent responsible for the impoverishment of the personal and intimate experience of the protest, an extremely difficult event to be represented.
The question that arises is if and how an “authentic” collective body memory (Fuchs 2017) of the Blanketmen really emerged, and if it is genuinely imaginable beyond the private experience, particularly when it comes to the final stage, the Hunger Strike. The present intervention investigates the emergence of sense from the material flesh and the limits in terms of its representability, an aspect which raises the question of the future memory of the events for the republican communities.