Michael Calderbank (London) reviews Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen.
On April 9th 1981 Bobby Sands, a 27 year-old prisoner on hunger strike in “H-blocks” of HMS Maze prison (known to republicans as Long Kesh), was elected Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, having polled over 30,000 votes. This was a momentous episode not only in British (or “British”) electoral history, but in the course of the republican struggle and possibly in the future of politics in the six counties. Yet Steve McQueen’s harrowing dramatisation of Sands’ tragic story sees fit only to mention this remarkable political episode in the closing credits. This has the effective of casting the wider social context of the hunger strikes into the background, as the spotlight focuses forensically on the horror of Sands’ imprisonment and the tragedy of his self-sacrifice.
The film looks unflinchingly at the horrors of a life stripped of all human dignity, and at men’s refusal to allow the savagery and brutality of the regime to beat them into submission. To that extent, the fact that the screenplay is less than insistent upon the hunger strikes’ specific historical relation to the wider course of “the Troubles” in the six counties, allows the universal quality of the “blanketmen's” experience to suggest itself all the more compellingly: it is difficult to witness film’s portrayal without thinking of the flagrant abuse of basic human rights in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. McQueen is absolutely direct about the extremity of the force to which the republican prisoners were subjected, or the utterly inhuman conditions that would be experienced daily. This is not a work of hagiography or glib assumptions of any kind. It does not misrepresent political positions, and an audience aware of the historical and political context will no doubt find much to admire in the film’s unwavering directness.
Hunger can certainly not be described as a film devoid of politics. But its political concerns are pitched at the level of universal, trans-historical truths of the human condition. The film seeks to explore the way that in extremis the human body itself become a terrain of struggle. It can be subjected to power: policed, restrained, defined, coerced, and constrained. But at the same time the body is resistant and resilient, resourceful and irrepressible. So the film observes how ‘comms’ (communications), tobacco or miniature radios are secreted in intimate bodily places and smuggled in or out by prisoners or the wives and girlfriends who visit them, whilst periodically facing degrading body searches (the prison officers or ‘screws’ would force prisoners to crouch over mirrors whilst being anally searched). Similarly, the ‘no wash’ (dirty) protests are clearly political in intent, refusing to have their daily routines policed and choosing rather to appal and sicken their captors by smearing excrement on the prison walls of the imperial power. The unbearable claustrophobia and stench of the filth-strewn cell shared by the prisoners is powerfully recreated, as is the fury and disgust of the authorities. Such, in essence, is the context from which we view decision to go on hunger strike. McQueen encourages us to see Sands’ act as a drastic, final assertion of ownership over the body – an extreme gesture of refusal whereby the prisoner denies the captor control of the embodied subject by asserting the pure immediacy of the body as dead matter. We do not witness the glorious death of a romantic hero. We see a desperate gesture of escape from the horrific confines of an otherwise inescapable situation.
No doubt, this is an essential aspect of their experience. But it is not the only aspect. Even from within the prison walls there was a remarkable sense of solidarity, a gallows humour that survived even the worst moments, and a sense of shared political and cultural inheritance (evident for example in the use of Gaelic to converse), disciplined commitment to the IRA's internal command structure and fervent interest in news from the outside. In short there was a clear sense of “togetherness” in struggle, and an ongoing discussion about their situation and the tactics appropriate to it. This is true of politics ‘outside’ too. Whilst there is much to be admired in the film its approach does not allow the audience to situate the hunger strikes in the context of social and political life across these islands. To understand the strikes and (arguably more importantly) their lessons, we need to understand more about how the situation arose and the stakes that both the republican movement and the British government had in the outcome.
Irish republicans had fought for political status for their prisoners on the grounds that they were caught up in a military conflict and were the product of a long-standing political dispute, in which normal standards of Criminal Law could not possibly apply. This was effectively granted in 1972 when, under direct rule, the Northern Ireland Office granted republican prisoners “special category” status, which meant that they did not have to wear prison clothing, had significant rights to freedom of association with their fellow prisoners, did not have to do prison work and could determine their own educational priorities.
But key to setting the stage for the H-Block struggles, was the government policy of criminalisation”, which was intended to isolate the prisoners by removing their ‘political’ status and encouraging the community to regard republican prisoners as common criminals, themselves just tools of the elite ‘godfathers’ in the IRA Army Council. It was (shamefully enough) a Labour Secretary of State in Roy Mason who abolished special category status, and oversaw the transfer of prisoners to the notorious H-Blocks, expensively engineered units allowing more intensive surveillance. Republican prisoners were suddenly told to wear ordinary criminal garb and to submit to ordinary prison routines. It is, as Danny Morrison has reflected, highly ironic that after having been, “arrested under special laws, been questioned in special interrogation centres, been tried in special courts with special rules of evidence, the prisoners were told when they arrived at the specially built H-Blocks that there was nothing ‘special’ about them”. Hence, althought this set the course for an inevitable battle between the prisoners and the prison authorities, it would also play out as part of the wider war over the sympathies of the nationalist community.
Margaret Thatcher was displaying an unyielding willingness to deploy State power to attack her political enemies. So when the sitting Independent Member of Parliament Frank Maguire brought about a parliamentary by-election, it was felt it might offer an opportunity win some publicity for the hunger strikers’ cause. But it was far from clear that with a tide of national press against the hunger strikers, and with government ministers regularly denouncing them, the newly formed National H-Block Committee would stand a change of winning the seat, even without an SDLP candidacy. Maguire had clear Republican sympathies and usually maintained an abstentionist approach to Westminster, but would the community be mobilised behind the campaign of an imprisoned man? Community activists across the constituency and beyond worked tirelessly to raise the prisoners’ demands and build genuine grassroots support. Surely even the British government would not stand by whilst a member of its own parliament starves himself to death? Of course voting for Sands did not automatically imply support for the methods of armed struggle, but surely demonstrated deep resentment at the British government’s treatment of the prisoners and support for the restoration of effective political status. When the election result was announced, it totally shattered Thatcher’s claim that mainstream nationalist public opinion thought of republican prisoners simply as an anti-social, criminal nuisance. If prior to this intervention, republicans had tended to view electoral politics with some disdain – as though it were inherently a road towards constitutionalism and accommodation rather than popular struggle – the election of Sands would help the republican movement pursue the democratic course by developing its political wing Sinn Fein (although it would of course be some years before armed struggle would be wound down).
Today’s political scene in the North of Ireland thankfully seems a world away from the bleak desolation of the period depicted in Hunger. The hunger strike itself could not have been depicted any more graphically, and the film in no way ducks the sheer brutality of actions on both sides of the conflict. But what it leaves out is the positive element that arises from this most desperate act. In that respect, the suffering of Bobby Sands and the other prisoners who died on hunger strike lives on not only in the memory, but in the courage of everyone today who refuses to accept abuses of power. By electing Bobby Sands as an MP, the nationalist minority utilised the ballot box to defend the right to national self-determination, of freedom from oppressive authority, and called for an end to the persecution of minority communities. In so doing it opened up a vista on a new politics based on solidarity and equality. It is to be hoped that after enduring all the shit, violence, blood and emaciation, cinema audiences don’t give up hope that all the suffering might not, ultimately, have been in vain.
