This Is Where The Fiction Book Started in My Head.
It was February 2020. We had just landed in Ireland and decided to stroll around the city for the first time. I had this big military-green coat on. Coming from Portugal, the temperature felt ice cold. It was a mix of wet rain and snow.
Following the River Liffey, we walked past the O'Connell monument and kept going until we saw the Famine Memorial in Dublin for the first time.
Honestly, I knew very little about the famine. I would not exactly call myself an expert now, but I did what I tend to do when something catches my attention: I started digging.
The statues are bronze figures along the quays of the Liffey. Hollow, gaunt, mid-movement. Going somewhere they may not arrive.
That particular day I stopped.
I do not remember exactly what sent me to read more afterward. I think it was the specific quality of hunger in the statues' faces. The way they looked not dramatic but simply exhausted. Like people who had been moving for a long time and were not sure the moving was going to be enough.
So I started reading about the famine. And the famine led to mass emigration. And mass emigration led to what Irish people encountered when they arrived in Britain. And that led me to the No Irish No Blacks No Dogs signs.
And that’s when I got Intrigued.
The Signs
The signs are remembered as appearing in boarding-house and rental windows across Britain in the postwar decades. Six words, a category of person, a door that was not going to open.
I say remembered because the history is more complicated than the simplified version most people know. There is one known photograph of such a sign, and its provenance is uncertain. The question of how widespread signs bearing that exact wording were has been debated by historians.
But there is more than one piece of evidence. A 1953 Catholic handbook for Irish migrants to England described No Irish No Blacks No Dogs signs as a familiar sight in the windows of rented accommodation. There are also numerous firsthand accounts from Irish and Caribbean migrants who remember seeing them.
What stopped me was the argument itself.
The fact that the testimony of people who lived through the experience could be questioned because the physical evidence was incomplete, and that without a documented object, a verified image or an official record, an experience could be called exaggerated.
I had just been standing in front of statues of people walking away from a country that was failing to feed them. I was reading about what they found when they arrived somewhere that was supposed to be better. And the argument being made was that we cannot be sure how widespread the signs were because the surviving evidence is uncertain.
That is not only a historical question but one about whose experience gets believed, whose experience gets documented, and who decides which version of events becomes the official one.
And that question did not feel like the past.
I started following the thread.
Where the Research Went
That logic is still running. It shows up in the swimming pool that tells a woman she can swim there, just not in the swimsuit she has chosen to wear. It shows up when a person’s name, passport, religion, accent, or immigration status changes how a door opens for them.
And then I started thinking about what happens when the system stops putting signs on doors and starts putting classifications on people. When it does not just decide whether you can enter, but decides who you are before you have opened your mouth.
That is a different kind of sign.
You cannot always see it. You may not even know it is there. But someone has already decided which box you belong in.
That is where Marked came from. From a question I could not stop asking after I stood in front of bronze statues of people walking away from a country that had failed them, in a military-green coat, in the rain, on a river that did not know my name either.
If you want to follow where that question has taken the research, the Marked Research Series is where it lives in public.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
