The Stories We Tell Ourselves
On a recent trip to Ireland, my host gave me a guided tour of the Belfast murals. A whole section of that city, like Chemainus, the city next door to my town, tells its history in pictorial form: large bright depictions of key events and personages emblazon the sides of buildings. But unlike our sister city, the Belfast story is grim, bloody, and heavily slanted on one side of the sectarian divide or the other. It is a montage of outrage and vendetta, almost entirely preoccup