Tending to a room
Forget tradition, since it sure doesn't care about you. Instead, write as a form of home-making.
“This is a female text…”
So says poet and author Doireann Ní Ghríofa, not just about her own book - the lyrical and glorious and press-upon-everyone-you-know-brilliant A Ghost In The Throat - but also about the extended poem she celebrates within it and throughout it, a ‘keen’ written by an 18th century Irish widow called Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.
To ‘keen’ in Gaelic means to cry or weep. The widow, who is the ghost of the title, and the writer whom Ní Ghríofa familiarises for us as ‘Eibhlín Dubh’, cries or weeps her way through a multiple-stanza epic, a portrait of a woman at the moment of bereavement. She tells us everything. How tragic her husband’s death is. How good-looking he was. The strength of her desire for him. The strength of the vengeance she feels towards his murderers. How overcome she was when she found his body. How she drunk his blood in an act of wild grief. How she didn’t mind the hungry looks other women gave him when he was alive. How much she longs to sleep with him now he’s dead.
For a woman who tells us everything, the life-shaped hole in history left by Eibhlín Dubh is largely made of nothing. Ní Ghríofa, a contemporary poet living in Cork, and a woman working unpaid as a mother of small children, is frustrated by the blanks left in the version of the writer’s story as told by scholars, and by the bloodless translations of the old poem taught in school. Amid her to-do lists and drop-offs, a life of motherhood defined as much by logistics as emotional fulfilment, the writer becomes fixated on the real-life Eibhlín Dubh, and by the poem she wrote in memory of her murdered husband. The resulting book - a female text about a female text - is one I tore through. It pulls powerfully - by which I mean artfully and emotionally and lyrically - in different directions, but coheres around something beautiful and profound, a truth both messy but potent.
The book is a celebration, but it’s also angry, and rightfully so, because it is concerned with the aspects of experience which too often go unrecognised. Female experience, that is. It’s about the lives poets lead as well as the language they play with - we might say it’s about the mundane as well as the sublime. It’s about the drudgery of motherhood, not just the joy. It’s a book about female erasure and female desire and the relationship between the two, about women’s bodies and women’s voices, each their own kind of female text of course, part of the ‘oral tradition’ of storytelling, with women’s bodies and voices used as vehicles for the transmission of stories that men deemed unworthy of reading, and indeed this was true for Eibhlín Dubh’s poem, which passed down through the generations before it made its way to print. This is why there are blanks, not just in Eibhlín Dubh’s story, but in that of her female descendants, which seems a result of more than a lack of effort to write things down. But that’s the thing with conspiracies of silence. They never explain themselves.
Ní Ghríofa’s book, then, is an echo of a story gone untold, and in a way it stands for all other stories which suffer that fate. It’s about the validity of experience and the frustration that comes of not recording it. This book is one poet giving voice to another. It’s the sound of a ghost in the throat.
I’m not a poet. I’m also not a woman. Both states feel out of reach to me. I’m not being facetious; I simply mean I wouldn’t presume to know what it feels like to be a woman, and therefore say how accurately or authentically the book captures that experience, and likewise, the notion of ‘being a poet’ is another rubicon I can’t conceive of crossing. To me, ‘being a poet’ is vocational. I find it daunting to even write something that looks like a poem. As for the prospect of finishing one - of being able to look at it or hear it and say, ‘it’s done’ - well, that’s a superpower I wouldn’t even dream of possessing. And yet, there’s something in Ní Ghríofa’s book that I presume to find empowering. Perhaps, now I think of it, it’s because all writing feels like this. The act of it, certainly. But also there’s the promise and the threat that hangs over any of us who presume to pick up a pen. The enticement and the malign force of tradition. Of posterity, which has the depth and breadth of an ocean, your words barely a drop. What does it matter? Why write at all? What is there for me to say, our lizard brain demands, that hasn’t been said before? And by better writers than me?
Sometimes, to write is to wonder whether it’s worth it. Can I match up?
The thrilling message of Ní Ghríofa’s book is that ‘can I match up?’ is entirely the wrong question. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem is read in schools. It so fired a millennial poet’s imagination that she wrote a book about it that deserves to be on the syllabus too. Yet, even to the most dedicated of scholars, Eibhlín Dubh’s life is a mystery. The dance between affirmation and posterity is, essentially, meaningless. Being denied either can feel unfair, structurally-speaking, but in personal terms each is vanity, and entirely beyond any writer's control. Yes, this affects women worse than men. The tyranny of the English also hangs over Ní Ghríofa’s story; her frustration at erasure is plain and righteous and correct. But the beauty of her insight and her empathy, and her commitment to the power of language to connect lives, leaves her reader feeling - knowing it, even - that every life is worthy of examination. Future scholars don’t own the past, no matter what they say. But if they are looking for clues, perhaps it’s the duty of any writer to write their present as best they can.
There’s a passage early in the book where Ní Ghríofa herself feels the pressure of tradition. She wonders about her credentials as she attempts a translation of Eibhlín Dubh’s poem. Striking her way through her daily to-do list, the expressing and the feeding, the cleaning and wiping, the rushing everywhere and the holding firm, all of it part of the manic drudgery of young motherhood, it causes her to question what right or ability she may have to step into tradition, let alone presume to correct it. Can she match up?
Then she remembers something:
A stanza as a room makes the act of imagining one or tending to it feel more achievable, doesn’t it? It is poetry on a manageable scale. Writing as a smaller denomination. All of us tend our home, know how we want each room of our life’s house to be. Maybe we should write that. Maybe we need to remember that writing isn’t about entering the land of posterity, but about the world we already know. Its point is not the inheriting of some bounty or fortune, or gaining access to the locked vault of tradition, but to spend the everyday currency we carry around with us.
That stuff is everywhere, and it’s unique to you. Look at your life. Look at your home. Look at your desk, the photos on your phone. Look at your collection of experiences. Your collection of books and friends and jobs and hobbies and pleasures and dreams. These are artefacts and memories and perspectives and ideas that have never in the history of the universe existed together like this before. The permutation only makes sense when viewed through the unique and incredibly unlikely bundle of atoms that is you. You, of course, who is temporary. You who will be gone soon. As all of us will. So, perhaps to write should not be to ask ‘can I match up?’, but instead to ask ‘what can I leave behind?’ To write is to know that someone somewhere will want to know what it felt like to wipe Weetabix off a table when it’s dry, or the feeling left in your body after expressing milk for hours, or the surge of pride as you watch another woman look at your man, or the taste of your husband’s blood as he lies dead by the side of the road. All of it is worthy. Each moment, each feeling, each thought is a room. That’s why the writing of it never ends. The job is slow and laborious. We strip and we sand, prepare and paint, dust and tidy, arrange and make beautiful. We make a space, at first for ourselves, and later so that someone somewhere sometime may sit thoughtlessly within it and feel something.
And that’s it. It is everything.