Daniela > Recent Status Updates

Being on the island was affecting me more than I thought it would. I had always had a lot of control over my life and my days. But here I was, in their hands, working at their speed and as they saw fit. I was having to learn to be smaller and more malleable. (…) we were now governed by the rain, the clouds passing over, whatever the birds were doing, and the endlessly changing light.

What ghetto hardliner, my critics ask, is going to sit down and read a version of history that will repeatedly diverge from the myths on which he or she has been nurtured?

She would never have believed, a few years ago, how little the British public know or care about unionist feelings. then she asked very sadly “has loyalty any meaning if nobody wants it?”

We are all so impressionable, and the media are on the whole so unanalytical, that even I – with all the foregoing facts stored away in my memory– had most of my disapproval focused on the IRA when I crossed the border. Yet the provisional IRA campaign is an effect, not an original cause, of the latest act in Northern Ireland 350-year-old tragedy.

But I think of them with a joy that carries me through the days, and even though I feel a faint longing – for Henry, for Thomas, for friends and family, for seasons, and a time which passes – there’s a looseness to this longing. I long and I let go.

“He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I’m guilty; but he won’t find it out that way. He doesn’t understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things that others have done to you.”