The Politics and Ethics of Collective Memory and Forgetting in Christina Reid’s My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name?

Abstract

This article explores the relationships between personal and collective memory, especially transgenerational memory, within a Protestant, loyalist family in Northern Ireland in Christina Reid’s My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name?. Forgetting plays a vital role in the communal memory of loyalism and unionism within the world of the play. The female protagonist, Andrea, actively unsettles that forgetting by challenging the mainstream loyalist commemoration exemplified by her grandfather Andy via alternative narratives and commemoration. The ongoing contestation over the collective memory of the Battle of the Somme, one of the pivotal historical events in loyalist remembrance culture, reveals the peculiar temporality of loyalist memory and uncovers problems inherent to the eternal cycle of loyalist memory and its oblivion. Through its treatment of these themes, I suggest that My Name conveys an ethical imperative to remember for the future instead of the past.