Belfast is a city of many faces. Division is sown into its geography, politics and art. Thanks to the division integral to its founding and the ensuing centuries of conflict twisting up and down Belfast’s streets and neighbourhoods, the city is ever-changing. Polarization and a sense of keen observation by external forces seems to necessitate the synthesis of Belfast and cultivate a desire from local communities to define themselves. When outside forces constantly classify and label the city, Belfast locals search for a way to identify their home. The elusive character shape-shifts again and again, dependent on the writer and events surrounding their lifetime. As Eamonn Hughes wrote, ‘If poets flicker in and out of Belfast, then Belfast itself flickers in and out of vision. Like the Ireland in which it may or may not be located, it is caught in an endless chain of signification, self-divided and always deferred’.

     From the outside, Belfast is hard to describe without falling back on easily recognizable tropes and buzzwords: Troubles, murals, conflict, sectarian. These terms are all relevant and important parts of Belfast’s history, but they do not sufficiently capture the identity of the city, and local poets writing from within the community and context of Belfast seem to yearn for a way to describe their home both with and without these allusions. A tension arises between how to properly characterise Belfast as it moves further into the post-Good Friday Agreement era while still acknowledging and engaging with major formative events that occurred during the Troubles. In doing so, poets publishing work about Belfast after 1998 have had to deliberately choose how they want to represent their city, both to their local community and to the world around them. Belfast’s Peace Process was global news, and pushed the squirming city under the microscope of global attention. These elements worked their way into Belfast’s identity-in-flux, a dynamic character that takes the forefront of exploratory poetry.

     The term auto-exoticism comes from Joep Leerssen’s work on nineteenth century Irish novels. He describes it as ‘a mode of seeing, presenting and representing oneself in one’s otherness’. That is, when individuals internalize outsiders’ perspectives of themselves and their home and then reflect those views in their own characterisations.

     When trying to self-identify, especially in the hopeful yet turbulent time around the ceasefires and Good Friday Agreement, Belfast poets did the same. However, the definition of auto-exoticism has expanded beyond its original, cynical boundaries due to the connection between economics and identity representation that is evident in the work of three poets writing about Belfast. Sinéad Morrissey, Leontia Flynn and Alan Gillis are not expressly writing for outsiders; they are writing within and for a community of local Northern Irish artists and residents. Auto-exoticism still has its place in their work, however, because of Belfast’s redevelopment and transformation in the face of the twenty-first century global economy. There is a certain desire in auto-exoticism to be marketable—both literally to make financial gain and figuratively to grow social or cultural capital—that makes the post-Good Friday Agreement poets unique in their transition to writing to a local audience.

     The Good Friday Agreement opened up Belfast to new characterisations. In fact, according to Miriam Gable, ‘Three decades of civil war have held Belfast in a vacuum of uncertainty, the capital of a province which, emphatically, cannot see its future’. Belfast’s poets are still seducing the reader, but just as much, they are writing in an attempt to understand the changes occurring in their previously familiar city, and find a way to grapple with their own identities.

     This attempt at characterisation is linked to the city’s uneasy image during the Peace Process. Tourism, reframing Belfast’s identity around the history of the shipbuilding industry (most notably its notorious product, the Titanic) and gentrification/quartering of the city are all part of Belfast’s attempt to get a handle on how the world should see it, and how its citizens should see themselves, in a new, hopefully peaceful century. As Belfast (and Northern Ireland in general) went through a major political and economic change, the poetry of the city reflected it, confirming the traditional relationship between Irish politics and poetry.

     In Sinéad Morrissey’s ‘Tourism’, the role auto-exoticism plays in Belfast’s economy is described quite clearly. Published in 2002, four years after the Good Friday Agreement and eight after the paramilitary ceasefires, this poem addresses the emerging tourism industry in Belfast. Morrissey describes how ‘the Spanish and the Dutch are landing in airports/ and filing out of ships. Our day has come’. A sectarian allusion can be made here in the echoes of the Irish Republican motto: ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’, meaning ‘our day will come’. But, the day that has come, instead of being a nationalist victory, could be the potential for increased peace and prosperity brought by the economic injection Belfast received from post-Good Friday Agreement industry, tourism and redevelopment.

     This sense of validation given by the presence of European tourists has to do both with the money that flows into Belfast from the tourism industry as well as the sense that it legitimises Belfast as a city post-conflict. When tourists from abroad visit Belfast, Morrissey sees the hope that their travels imply: ‘infect us with your radical ideas; be carried here/ on a sea breeze from the European superstate/ we long to join, bring us new symbols’. When people see Belfast as a desirable travel destination, there is a sense that the risk of violence is lessened, if not completely eradicated, and that the city has moved into a new political climate. Morrissey sees, however, that this new phase—a capitalistic, tourism-driven iteration of Belfast—relies heavily on the legacy of the Troubles, ironically enough. Describing a familiar sight for anyone who has spent time in Belfast in the past two decades, Morrissey wrote about the Troubles bus tours, which drive through working-class areas like the Shankill and Falls Roads: 

          We take them to those streets

          they want to see most, at first,

          as though it’s all over and safe behind bus glass

          like a staked African wasp.

Tour buses bring people to murals and peace walls where they can sign their name and draw a heart—putting their stamp on a piece of history that appears, from the comfortable position of a tourist, to be over. The allusion to an insect from a distant location brings exoticism into play—the wasp symbolizes Belfast or the Troubles and thus sets the city and its history apart as a foreign object—though she is is writing about it from the insider perspective. Morrissey turns the characterisation on its head, however, by acknowledging the façade the people of Belfast are putting up for visitors, pretending the conflict and danger of the Troubles is finished and resolved—a thing of the past, safely ‘staked’, like an artefact in a museum exhibit—because it can seem so when viewed from the safe environment of a plush coach. In this poem, Morrissey uses auto-exoticism in her descriptions of Belfast, but she does so with self-awareness. She is marketing the city with this characterisation, both for paying customers and for herself and other locals as they try to come to terms with their changed city.

     The fact that Belfast’s unique history becomes its source of profit is not a surprise. Though the minds behind Titanic Belfast may wish otherwise, to tourists the most significant characteristic of Belfast’s identity is the history and legacy of the Troubles, often on a tour bus or walking tour. Or, maybe a black cab driven by a former player in the violence that is now flogged like souvenir t-shirts and keychains. The identity of Belfast has been ‘co-opted and commodified’ in part by leaning into the Troubles tourism industry. With the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Belfast was steered into a new role on the world stage. The ensuing exploration of Belfast’s character by outsiders relied (and still relies) mostly on Troubles stories. Morrissey explores the presentation the people of Belfast knowingly produce for visitors, describing the transaction: ‘They bring us deliverance, restitution,/ as we straighten our ties, strengthen our lattés,/ polish our teeth’. Belfast becomes like any other global capital, with everything from coffee to a business man’s suit standardised to the point of interchangeability. Miriam Gamble wrote that the redevelopment actions occurring in Belfast ‘bespeak the shift from a city which, however problematically, held fast to its own defining marks…into one that is indistinguishable from anywhere else in the developed Western world’. It seems that this is what Morrissey craves for her city: an identity in the increasingly globalized world that does not have the words bomb or terrorist attached as a matter of fact. Yet, she acknowledges that to get to that point, and to potentially profit within that system, Belfast must sell itself as the world perceives it, perhaps even caricature itself in order to get a foot in the door of twenty-first century capitalism.

     Morrissey’s awareness of auto-exoticism in Belfast’s tourism industry also coincides with and at times presages the gentrification and quartering of the city. She mentions the Titanic, the ship whose name is synonymous with a maritime and humanitarian disaster, which in recent years has been reclaimed by developers, oddly, as a tepid identity for Belfast to rally around and use to entice paying tourists. The Titanic Quarter emerges from the former shipyard as a bland, shiny ghost town. Seven years before construction of Titanic Belfast began, Morrissey described the area as ‘the festering gap in the shipyard/ the Titanic made when it sank’. Morrissey’s shrewd observations about the direction of Belfast’s path towards economic growth via tourism seemed to predict the Titanic Quarter. Ironically, the adoption of an ambiguous, (falsely) non-sectarian symbol for Belfast in the Titanic is yet another example of auto-exoticism, precisely because of its aggressive negation of the concept. (Harland & Wolff, the shipbuilding and off-shore construction company responsible for the Titanic and other ocean liners, was extremely favourable towards Protestants and discriminatory towards Catholics. Even after legislation to ensure fair employment practice, H&W remained primarily Protestant.) That is, rather than characterise their city as an unattractive, troubled, polarising place of sectarian violence, the developers of Belfast instead chose a vision that essentially does not capture any personality or character at all.

     Leontia Flynn also addresses the tourism industry and redevelopment of Belfast. In her poem ‘Belfast’ she lists aspects of the ‘new’ city because, as she writes, ‘Belfast is finished and Belfast is under construction’. Her description of the transition from old to new focuses on the tangible symbols of neoliberalism in the new Belfast: ‘What was mixed grills and whiskeys (cultureless, graceless, leisureless)/ is now concerts and walking tours (Friendly! Dynamic! Various!)’. The exclamative words here show the energy of the transformed city’s new character—hyperactive, even manic, forced cheerfulness—but readers know that the context of these walking tours is the dark tourism that spawned prolifically in the past two decades. Although Belfast is expected to transform politically, the major change comes with the profit from redeveloping the city after deindustrialisation. Thus, the economy takes the front seat in the transformation of Belfast post-Good Friday Agreement, despite what the outside world perceives to be its primary driver: a conflict-resolution-centred peace process.

     Where Morrissey auto-exoticises, Flynn is more straightforward. She melds the old with the new, showing the cracks in the construction that betray Belfast’s history behind shiny new assertions of itself as a global capital. Speaking in terms of imperialism and colonial economics, Belfast has been a global capital for a long time. Participation in the linen trade, shipping industry and more made Belfast an integral part to Atlantic and global economy. When deindustrialisation occurred, however, the city’s calling card to the rest of the world became overwhelmingly Troubles-related.

     In Flynn’s poem, the redevelopment of Belfast is in-process: ‘The sky is a washed-out theatre backcloth/ behind new façades on old baths and gasworks;/ downtown, under the green sails of their scaffolding’. The redevelopment of Belfast was not an accident, but was deliberately enacted to forge a path into the global economy. Troubles tourism is an integral part of Belfast’s redevelopment. The money brought in by tourists helps pay for the quartering of the city, which entices more visitors, which pays for more cafés and chain stores. While travel companies might try to leave sectarianism in the past unless neatly packaged on a bus tour, Flynn’s interactions with it show the place this conflict still holds in the character of Belfast when it is not being used to generate money: ‘At two a.m. the street erupts in noise./ I listen as “We are the Billy Boys”/ gets mixed up, four doors down, with “Crazy” by Patsy Cline’.

     It must be acknowledged, as well, that Flynn’s reaction to Belfast’s re-emergence onto the global economic stage is not necessarily a happy one. Cynicism seeps through her work: ‘There are 27 McDonalds, you tell me, in Northern Ireland/ (“but what are we supposed to do with this information?”)’. Whereas Morrissey’s ‘Tourism’ shimmers with hope for the future, the dissolution of puppet-master-like control of paramilitaries and politicians, entry into the European Union and ‘new symbols’, Flynn questions the significance of some of the physical manifestations of Belfast’s new place in the shrinking world. Does the presence of McDonald’s or other global chains really mean a city is post-conflict? Flynn implies that it does not, and herein lies the reason for her lack of auto-exoticism. What is Belfast gaining by caricaturing itself in return for foreign currency? If the city has to distil its character into one easily digestible version to present to visitors, is it worth it for a Big Mac and identical skyscrapers that transform the city into something unrecognizable to locals but eerily familiar to foreign travellers? 

     Alan Gillis asks a related question in his 2004 poem ‘Progress’. He responds to the outside perception of Belfast: ‘They say that for years Belfast was backwards/ and it’s great now to see some progress’. When academics, the media or outsiders discuss Belfast’s progress or describe it as post-conflict the focus is on what the city has gained, primarily through redevelopment. Post-Good Friday Agreement economic growth in Belfast disproportionately lands in the middle and upper classes, not working class. Aaron Kelly explains this further: ‘This geopolitical eclipse is most clearly exposed in the current redevelopment of Belfast. The recent redrawing of Belfast into stylised quarters—the Cathedral Quarter, the Titanic Quarter, Queen’s Quarter—belies the economic and commercial imperative that underpins not only urban redevelopment but also the Peace Process itself. This drawing and quartering of Belfast by urban planning, private enterprise and the state also hangs upon the occlusion rather than the inclusion of working-class experience and participation in civic and commercial life in Belfast.’

     A great majority of the victims of death and destruction of the Troubles were from working-class Belfast, and the working class is included in Belfast’s new economy as a prop. In addition to the opportunity for all citizens of Northern Ireland to identify as Irish, British or both, the Good Friday Agreement affirmed ‘the right to equal opportunity in all social and economic activity, regardless of class’. However, the redevelopment and transformation of Belfast so far has hinged upon gentrification of working-class neighbourhoods and voyeuristic Troubles tours through working-class areas. This irony is not lost on the poets of Belfast.

     Gillis’s poem describes violence happening in reverse, to belie the notion that by ‘progressing’ Belfast can be purged of its violent history. While outside audiences see only what is gained by the development and economic growth of Belfast, the people living there see what was lost in the Troubles and what continues to be gone. Gillis describes explosions and deaths occurring in reverse, as that is the only type of progress that would be the opposite of the so-called ‘backwardness’ of Belfast in-conflict. ‘So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes/ from the earth’, Gillis wrote, betraying a skepticism about the concept of progress as a solution to events that cannot be undone. Bombs cannot un-explode, people cannot un-die and a community cannot be un-traumatised just because people outside looking in see coach buses instead of military tanks on the news.

     Gillis writes about the transformation of Belfast in multiple poems, including 2004’s ‘To Belfast’. In this poem he outlines the tension between his desire for the city to change and the discomfort with its next iteration. He describes Belfast as a Hollywood film, but his reaction is conflicting, both comforting and hostile: ‘I would finger your trace/ in that other city’s face, and bite its free hand/ as it fed me, or tried to soothe the stinging of your rain’. The poets of Belfast have a difficult task in synthesizing and expressing their feelings about the redevelopment of their city. On one hand, of course they wish for the violence and trauma of the Troubles to truly end, but on the other hand, the new Belfast is an alien entity, becoming less familiar with each passing day. Street names are the same but scaffolds rise and fall, buildings change, new neighbourhoods emerge.

     The external influences of global capitalism have a long reach, and this includes the commodification of tragedy for their benefit. Troubles tourism is an obvious manifestation of this. Gillis is not directly engaging in auto-exoticism, but by alluding to Hollywood he acknowledges the practice. However, he gives an element of control back to the city by writing that it has ‘the grace/ of a diva on a crackling screen, you never stem/ to their cameras, you’re forever getting out of hand’. Here, like in Morrissey’s assertion that ‘Unabashedly, this is our splintered city’, Gillis rejects auto-exoticism, saying that Belfast does not portray any particular likeness purely for the benefit of the voyeur, but simply is what it is.

     Morrissey, Flynn and Gillis took up a monumental task in trying to describe a city in metamorphosis. What made the task even more complicated was their personal relationships to Belfast, though that is also what makes their poetry so important as cultural artefacts. As Peter Shirlow wrote, ‘The fate of the city lies somewhere between the uniformity of corporate globalization and the continual Balkanizing of social and cultural life. It is peculiar that globalization can distort the cultures of Irishness and Britishness as well as creating new social divisions, but that few people understand this as threatening’.

      Morrissey, Flynn and Gillis mark a very specific moment in Belfast’s ever-changing identity, when economic transformations brought on by the Good Friday Agreement began redeveloping the city, and they did so by engaging with the history that has and will continue to haunt Belfast. The poets grappled with portraying the city honestly and acknowledging its troubled core without exploiting it. Therein lies the tension of auto-exoticism: how does one remain hopeful for continued progress while staying honest about historical and present realities and cognizant of the cynicism integral to existing within a globalized, capitalist economy? Although sometimes perceptions of Belfast’s new steps into globalization allow for hope—towards a future less tied to pain, violence and inequality—the poets of Belfast see the danger in allowing an expensive façade to become the characterisation of their city.

Isabel Crabtree is originally from Rhode Island, USA and now lives in Belfast. She studied Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College followed by a Master’s in Public History from Queen’s University Belfast. Her writing on arts and culture has appeared in Esquire, Loud & Quiet, and L’Officiel USA.