bandit country

James Conor Patterson is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022 for his debut collection, bandit country (Picador Poetry, 2022). We asked him about dialect and sense of place, politics, humour and liberation

T. S. Eliot Prize: Would you say something about Newry as a place and why it’s important to your book – as your home/the home you’ve left, its dialect, as an idea? ‘Bandit country’ is an old term, isn’t it?

James Conor Patterson: The impulse to write about Newry initially came from a desire to correct some of the more glaring misconceptions around my home, particularly in the wake of the Brexit vote in 2016. Settlements along the Irish Border suddenly found themselves in the unusual position of fulfilling tortured metaphors about the overall failure of the Brexit project, and newscasters were despatched on a near-weekly basis to warn their audiences about a potential ‘return to violence’ in a worst-case-scenario of border controls being implemented.

The Newry hinterland has a long history in this regard. In 1974, Labour-appointed Northern Ireland Secretary of State Merlyn Rees coined the term ‘Bandit Country’ to describe the South Armagh/South Down/North Louth border triangle, with the intention to stigmatise (and ultimately dehumanise) the local population. The British military had already committed atrocities in other Catholic areas of Northern Ireland – Derry’s Bogside, West Belfast’s Ballymurphy – and a certain level of plausible deniability was needed should something similar happen again. Civilians were therefore implicated in their own demise. Normal people became recalibrated as ‘bandits’, ‘rebels’, or to employ the less romantic terminology of Margaret Thatcher ‘criminals’, ‘terrorists’.

It was important, therefore, that bandit country reclaim the narrative of the area; not just by shifting focus away from the Troubles material readers have come to expect, but by rendering it in language that felt true to its inhabitants. A language as far removed from the received pronunciation and BBC English of the British State as it was feasible to use.

TSEP: In your Eliot Prize film interview, you talked about Joyce’s suggestion that if Dublin were suddenly to disappear it could be reconstructed out of Ulysses. Ciaran Carson – who was an important influence on you – had an interest in Belfast similar to Joyce’s in Dublin, but his idea was that a place could never be fixed. Have you couched the founding of Newry in ‘yew’ to signal that we are talking about an idea of a place, a phantasmagoria or myth as much as anyone’s reality?

JCP: The tension between Joyce’s idea and Carson’s idea is where bandit country ultimately lies, especially if we regard Joyce’s interest in Dublin as more personal than phenomenological and Carson’s interest in Belfast as somewhat more objective. In a sense, bandit country aims to convey both points of view, wherein my (the speaker’s) perception of Newry is necessarily shaped by lived experience.

In how this relates to ‘yew’, you’re right to suggest that when origin stories move beyond the control of their originator, they are often imbued with the personality of each new storyteller. In fact, much of Ireland’s folklore was passed along this way – through the oral tradition – and storytellers were often judged on how well they adapted or embellished a certain tale to suit the needs of their audience, or indeed, themselves.

TSEP: And yet… one of the big delights of bandit country is the powerful sense of place, its stories (some tall!), real incidents. Your use of dialect (as well as your punchy way with words and ideas) does some of that job. I’d love to hear you talk about northern Irish or Newry dialect. Had you an idea of it as a counterweight to the classical allusions in the collection, to Orpheus, the many descents?

JCP: I’m interested in Patrick Kavanagh’s notion that ‘Gods make their own importance’. That Newry – or anywhere for that matter – is as ripe for classical allusion as Thebes or Carthage or Alexandria. In ‘Epic’, the poem from which this line is taken, Kavanagh recounts a series of local squabbles in his native Monaghan, confesses that he is unsure of their significance (and thus the significance of his own life’s work), before ultimately concluding that literature and any richness of place ascribed it by its readers is only as strong as the poet making it: ‘Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind. / He said: I made the Iliad from such / A local row.’

By rendering bandit country in language which is ‘local’, therefore, the book attempts to grasp at the universal, for what appeals to readers about stories like the Iliad is the idea that it could happen anywhere. One needn’t be adept in Hiberno-English to recognise that many of the scenarios in bandit country could play out just as easily in other environs. All it takes are some different street names, a new cast of characters, and some different inflections in how those characters speak.

TSEP: Can we ask about the tall stories? There are many dark, unsettling episodes but some are treated comically. Are they part of the cityscape or the landscape or in your head?

JCP: The tall tales in the book are inextricably linked to the landscape, and in many cases perform the action of landmarks more effectively than the physical characteristics of, say, buildings or streets, flora or fauna. In order to provide a sense of fixity when it comes to place – which, as we’ve seen in Ciaran Carson’s work, is difficult to achieve through physical description alone – it is necessary to populate it with the folklore, apocrypha, urban legend, and surreal gallows humour that makes it distinctive.

In Joan Didion’s 1979 essay collection The White Album, she writes that ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’ and in a certain sense this is true of what takes place in the book. The opposite is also true, with stories providing a kind of escapism from the psychological and physical damage wrought by long periods of conflict. The speakers in bandit country tell stories to one another in order to forget the drudgery of living; preferring instead to make sense of the world through ghost stories, tall tales, and tales of the macabre.

TSEP: ‘[P]hotographs, too, fulfilled this need / to anthologize and make tangible the fleeting…’ Would you talk about the photos in the book? What do they do (for you) as additions to the poems? Should poetry collections only include poems?

JCP: The photographs initially came from an impulse to set down visual cues (or prompts) for myself, which I could then write about. Later, I had the idea of using those photographs as companion pieces to the poems themselves, perhaps in an attempt to harken back to an earlier idea of what Irish writing looked like, where neither the text nor the image around it vied for supremacy, but would be taken together to form a cohesive whole, for example the glosses in The Book of Kells, the Cathach, The Book of the Dun Cow.

I was also inspired by the multimedia approach taken by modern writers like Caleb Femi and, in particular, Claudia Rankine who uses a combination of lyric, memoir and ‘found’ photographs to devastating effect in texts like Citizen, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and Just Us. Her work demonstrated to me that it was possible to write about multiple subjects within a given theme, whilst at the same time subtly employing the image to signal to the reader that a consistency underlies everything.

TSEP: There are many cycles that are difficult to escape in the book but it seems to me to steadily progress towards a sense of liberation. Is that right?

JCP: I think a book has to strive toward something in order to fulfil its promise. Whether ‘liberation’ is what bandit country strives toward I don’t know, though certainly ‘redemption’ plays its part. For me, the ultimate endpoint is ‘love’ in all its guises; whether that’s familial love, fraternal love, love for one’s community and culture, or simply the love and understanding of another like-minded individual – reader, partner, spouse – who shares in that redemptive journey.

James Conor Patterson’s bandit country is published by Picador Poetry. Watch the T. S. Eliot Prize filmed readings and interview, and read the reviews and Readers’ Notes online to find out more.