Deuils : accompagner de la mort à la vie

This article investigates the notion of community in short stories by Wendy Erskine. The definition of community is somewhat capacious, ranging from a social group whose members reside in a specific locality, or a group sharing common characteristics or interests, to a place inhabited by any such group, and when it is used in the North of Ireland, the term can even be potentially divisive. Against a strong semantic and political tendency to preserve divisions while appearing to resolve them, the short story collections Sweet Home (2019) and Dance Move (2022) offer a spectrum of imaginaries of the multiple valences of community in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Wendy Erskine presents a re-signification of “communities,” depicting different groups (and the spaces between them) as capable of fostering discord or even violence and/or an ethics of care. It is not so much in the political realm but in fiction such as that produced by Wendy Erskine that these new imaginaries of “community” can be sketched out, where differences can be accommodated and unsuspected alliances, however temporary, can be celebrated.