I Know Love, I Know Loss

Artistic emigration in a peripheral city

Sketch 160A, Wassily Kandinsky, MFAH

To her desolate shore--where the emigrant stands
For a moment to gaze ere he flies from his hearth;
Tears fall on his chain, though it drops from his hands,
For the dungeon he quits is the place of his birth.

The Irish Avatar, Lord Byron, 1821

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I walk down the Stranmillis Road, past the artisanal coffee shops and university buildings, and dream of love. Under the green shade of the leafy maple trees, glowing and earthy, I deem such things possible. How could I not? I know love as I fling myself over puddles, water droplets staining my silk ballet slippers, and smile anyway. I know love as I watch my flatmate bake a carrot cake in a heart-shaped pan (moule à cœur, the label says) and feel the warmth of it engulf me like a rugby tackle, like a car crash, sudden and all at once. I feel almost sick with it. I’m brimming.

But it is becoming autumn, and the lease is up. I stand back as the people I love pack their bags and walk into the mist, above me a roaring Aer Lingus cutting the sky in half like a verdigris butter knife. The shamrock mocks me. This year I will be the only one to watch the trees turn orange.

Belfast is a place to be from, not a place to become. My Irishness trickles down to me from three generations of Byron’s Avatars: my father in the 80s leaving the Troubles behind, my maternal great-grandparents fleeing the Civil War, my great-great-great-great grandparents abandoning a country ravaged by famine. I am made up of people fleeing. It’s about time that someone comes back.

But people are still leaving in droves. All the musicians, directors, actors, poets, painters, playwrights, filmmakers I know are slowly making their way to London, Paris, Berlin, New York. Every day the pub benches feel emptier, lighter; every weekend it becomes easier to find a seat. The opera singers are becoming office workers. The artists are practicing their German. Einen eisgekühlten Karamell Latte mit Sojamilch, bitte. Belfast is in crisis.

Sometimes I wonder if I should fly away too; sell early, flip my position, short my stock, walk away with half-dignity. Like Michael Burry, I can feel the waves lapping at the shores every time another listed building is firebombed. But the problem is this: those avant-garde cities are bloated with bon vivant beatniks — nepotism kids with shaved heads and patchwork sleeves, bleached eyebrows and Limited Edition Adidas Sambas. There is a fear, maybe, that there people wouldn’t look at me in the street. Wouldn’t find me a spectacle, an oddity, a creature from another century. Every time I step on the Tube and see another dazzling Bright Young Thing reading the LRB or The New Yorker, I find myself threatened. MUBI tote bags send me into a territorial frenzy. Tabis turn me into a fainting Victorian woman. No such thing happens in Belfast City. Here it is easy to claim creative genius and never really have to prove it.

Writing is one of the few arts you can do alone. It’s something done in the dark, by secret candlelight, scrappy and breathless and frustrated, Franz Kafka obsessively scribbling in his nightclothes. There is a freedom in this, but also loneliness. I find that everything I write I sullenly push off into the world, like a paper boat across the water, and turn my back. There is shame, there is fear, and overwhelmingly there is a hope that no one will ever read it. It is like this: a need to be recognised, but also a need to hide. To never be seen. For someone to spot something in me without having to beg for it. Without having to try. To pack my mind away in a box and shove it under the bed, stowed between the socks and ski jackets.

Belfast is a chronic sufferer of what the Oceanians refer to as Tall Poppy Syndrome; it’s hard to be outlandish, vocal, different, without being swiftly scythed down. Mocked, ridiculed; writing at night, in isolation, becomes a habit. Back in February, I hid my first published poem from loved ones like a closely guarded state secret. The mortifying ordeal of being known, et cetera, et cetera. It’s no coincidence that there have been very few ‘movements’ here — except the Movement, the loose confederation of nostalgic 50’s and 60’s poets across Britain and Ireland obsessed with the mundane. There is no Bloomsbury, no St. Ives, no Harlem, yet I love it here all the same. Belfast is to me what Hull was to Larkin. It is so much more interesting, I think, to choose a place on the periphery, a corner of the world away from searching eyes, and trying to make it from there.

And so I roll up my Persian rug, pack up my books, take down my hanging glass lanterns, bubble-wrap my Turkish paintings, think of the four flights of stairs I have to wrestle down everything I’ve ever owned, take a swig of Moët, and grimace. I’m only moving a 10-minute walk away. My folly continues, and the songbirds keep singing.