In Belfast and Boston, facing life after violent death

Visitors take in the Boston Public Library exhibit about victims of violence in Boston and in Northern Ireland. (Evan Richman/Globe Staff)

This spring, during a break from his conflict-resolution work in Iraq, Padraig O'Malley sat down for a chat with UMass colleague Joan Becker. Becker runs the school's Urban Scholars Program, a year-round academic enrichment opportunity for Boston middle- and high-schoolers.

Any thoughts on summer programs for her charges, she asked? O'Malley mentioned his plans to help Relatives for Justice, a Belfast human rights group, display the "Remembering Quilt" at the Boston Public Library's Copley branch through Thursday.

Becker listened. She heard about the quilt's 400-plus 9-inch squares - an attempt to capture in sayings, symbols, drawings, and ordinary objects the pith of those lives lost to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. She heard about quilted squares that included a thread from a sweater worn by a hunger striker and three teddy bear buttons worn by a 5-year-old girl run over by a British Army vehicle.

She and O'Malley decided the Boston students could make their own memorial quilt.

Annya Haughton was skeptical. Director of the Urban Scholars Program and a teacher, Haughton knew her students didn't care a stitch about quilting. She also knew that violence in Northern Ireland seemed more than an ocean away from murders taking place on streets they walked daily.

Still, with Boston's murder count this year nearing 40, Haughton knew a teachable moment had arrived. She would have her students examine the significance of street memorials here - the makeshift shrines decorated with flowers, stuffed animals, and telltale trinkets - and the growing phenomenon of buttons featuring only a face and the years - often brief - between birth and death. Both attempts at preserving individuality, Haughton worried that their ubiquity threatened indifference, anonymity.

"The first question I asked my students was 'How many of you passed a memorial this week?' Just about every hand went up," said Haughton, 32, standing near a banner of memorial buttons and the street-post shrine her five students had placed at the BPL alongside the "Remembering Quilt."

"I pass these memorials all the time," said Daphne Prevot, 14, of Mattapan. She said her study of the Belfast quilt and its "almost living" details opened her eyes to the humanity of the life lost.

"Even if I don't know the person in my neighborhood, I just stand there and really try to think about who the person was," said Prevot, who hopes to attend Harvard and become a doctor. "I try to imagine their family and their friends. . . . Everything seems more real now."

Jim McAdams traveled from Quincy to see the exhibit. Though he had hoped to find mention of infighting that's plagued the city's Cape Verdean community and the neighborhood silence that cloaked murders in Charlestown for years, he was moved by the juxtaposition of Boston and Belfast. Asked what he saw as a common denominator between the cities' violence, he uttered one word: powerlessness.

"It's the worst sort of parochialism, when you have no sense of safety or identity other than a neighborhood, a block, a playground, or a porch," said McAdams, 39, a middle school teacher. "When someone who appears different comes into that space and you feel so threatened you have to kill them, that's a symptom of real powerlessness."

"It's not enough to say it's gang violence," said Jamiece Shepard, 14, a student who helped mount the exhibit who hopes to become a forensic anthropologist. "That doesn't tell us anything. Why are there gangs? Well, some black people join gangs to find the love that they can't find at home. They're looking for some kind of brotherhood or sisterhood, and if they find that in a gang, they think that [that's] their true family, that's where they belong. And they'll do anything to protect that family and its turf. Anything!

"Education, love, family, jobs - that's what we need," she added. "We don't need more of those."

Shepard gestured to a bed-sheet size banner covered with buttons containing photographs of victims of violence in Boston.

"I've seen some kids wear the buttons like a badge - like they're tougher because they had to deal with so much," she said. "We need to be proud of how we're going to live, not how we're going to die."