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Using the body to resist

‘I never thought I’d die’: Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington’s letter recalling being on hunger strike, 1928

This, the third post in our Trinity Week series on the subject of silence, addresses hunger striking as a form of communication in circumstances in which silence is being enforced, usually by imprisonment.

Hunger strikers use their bodies to communicate because no other channel is permitted. The pace of the process – played out in the glare of publicity – reconfigures the dynamic between ‘powerless’ and ‘powerful’ by weaponising the body as a site of resistance to control and forcing public attention onto the private act of dying.

The Samuel Beckett papers in the Library are being used this Trinity Week to draw attention to questions of enforced silence.

There are many suffering and malnourished bodies in Beckett’s novels and plays but he rarely makes direct reference to historical or political events. However in Malone Dies, published in French in 1951, he wrote the following:

‘That reminds me, how long can one fast with impunity? The Lord Mayor of Cork lasted for ages, but he was young, and then he had political convictions, human ones too probably, just plain human convictions.’

This is a direct reference to Terence MacSwiney (1879-1920), who died on hunger-strike in Brixton Prison. The character Malone seems to neither support the politics of MacSwiney’s cause nor oppose them. He prefers to focus, almost absent-mindedly, on the ‘humanity’ of the act.  During Bobby Sands’s hunger strike, frequent reference was made to MacSwiney’s action to promote the idea of an unbroken historical link running through Irish political dissent, and also to the fact that they had endured for so long – Sands lasted 66 days, while MacSwiney succumbed after 74.

Apart from the Bobby Sands letter, now on display in the Long Room for Trinity Week, the Library has another letter, this time from one hunger striker to another. Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington (1877-1946) was a founding member of the Irish Women’s Franchise league which promoted female suffrage. She was arrested on a number of occasions and went on hunger strike. Over a decade later, in early 1928, she wrote a letter to Frank Gallagher (1893-1962) recalling her views of the experience. Gallagher, a founder member of Poblacht na hÉireann and a member of the Irish Volunteers was imprisoned several times during the War of Independence and the Civil War, and partook in the hunger-strike campaigns of the republican prisoners, the longest lasting for forty-one days in 1923 and the shortest for three.

Letter from Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington to Frank Gallagher, c. 1928. (TCD MS 11121)

In her letter Sheehy-Skeffington suggested that Gallagher had a more difficult experience. “I never thought I’d die,” she wrote. “And that makes a difference.” Rather touchingly, she notes that they were ‘supplied with hot water bottles which are a great comfort.’ However, the fear of being forcibly fed was something she dreaded. Forcible feeding, used against the suffragettes, attraction public opprobrium. It was only in the 1970s hunger striking campaign, during which the Price sisters famously endured a 200-day hunger strike, that forcible feeding was described in terms of rape.

Dr Jane Maxwell (with Dr Feargal Whelan and Dr Julie Bates)