“Comrades in the Dark”: Writing in the H Blocks, 1976–1981

Abstract

This stanza from the first section of Bobby Sands’s long poem “Trilogy” encapsulates some of the most crucial preoccupations of the Republican POWs who were composing their texts in the H Blocks between 1976 and 1981. Like many texts written during incarceration, the space of the prison intrudes, the fearful interior of Castlereagh interrogation center standing in stark opposition to the beauty of the natural world exterior to jail walls. Indeed, this violent juxtaposition propels Sands’s poem: as the POW is dragged inside the cell, so is the audience metaphorically incarcerated alongside him. While the “quaking wretch” found in the cell at first may appear to be a solitary figure, the stanza insists that all of this takes place “Amidst a people’s screams.” The political prison is but one locus of a larger, shared trauma—a trauma willfully ignored, Sands asserts, by the artists and writers whose duty it is to communicate such injustice to the rest of the world.