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The Wake: And What Jeremiah Did Next is a novella by Colm Herron
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The year is 1968. Jeremiah Coffey is a twenty-seven-year-old teacher – Catholic, conservative and plagued by guilt on account of his relationship with a beautiful bisexual called Aisling O’Connor.
Aisling is everything that Jeremiah is not – feisty and radical, angry and committed. She is a leading figure in the Irish civil rights movement and is planning to help organize a potentially explosive protest march inspired by the US black civil rights activists’ Selma to Montgomery marches of three years before. The scene is set for a brutal confrontation to match the 1965 Bloody Sunday in Selma.
A Word from the Author
Two things drove me to write this novella: chance and emotion. A few years ago I read in a book here in my native Derry – Spirit of ’68: Beyond the Barricades – that African American civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael had said back at the time of the march on Washington: “The only position for women in the civil rights movements is prone.”
I was outraged. I had seen the same Carmichael mentality on the part of many male agitators during our own civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland in the late Sixties and early Seventies and the memories of that began to surface. Now outrage is as good a reason as any other to write a novella and outrage at the treatment of women even in the twenty-first century was what got me started. So I set my story in Derry. Write what you know, they say. And I knew plenty.
(Colm Herron, June 2016)
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