People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
— James Baldwin
My favorite line by my favorite writer, William Faulkner, goes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
White people, content with the now—consumption, recreation, and a middle-of-the-road lifestyle—believe the past is all folderol and "forgotten politics;" sound and fury signifying nothing.
People of color believe the past is unknowable and imponderable and—being little but a trail of injury and injustice—too maddening to reconstruct.
Neither group wishes to grant the past's deterministic nature; that it isn't dead—or even past.
To their way of thinking, they owe the past nothing.
Not everyone on the planet thinks that way. Europeans, for example.
Like an Irish Tolstoy, Branagh makes clear that he owes his entire life's journey to the past; that the path he took through life was ordained not by personal decisions, but by history's forces.
In Branagh's case, those were "The Troubles"—even though his family members were neutral bystanders in that 30-year war between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists.
Even today, the grievances that rocked Northern Ireland in Branagh's youth echo in Irish politics, as the opening scene suggests.
"Forgetting a debt doesn't mean it's paid," an Irish proverb holds.
If only Americans were more like the Irish.
We'd remember our debt to the past.
