‘And You Give Yourself Away’
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 326 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Arthur O’Leary was the scion of a high-born Irish Catholic family in County Cork who, in 1773, ran into trouble with a local English magistrate, Abraham Morris. Morris either took colonialist umbrage at the impudent O’Leary—who had also been a hussar in Empress Maria’s Austro-Hungarian army—or simply coveted his prizewinning mare, which, under Great Britain’s oppressive Penal Laws, he was at liberty to seize for the insulting sum of £5. O’Leary taunted Morris and escalated the conflict, but before he was able to escape to the continent, Morris’s men shot him dead. The tale is immortalized in the “Caoineadh
Airt Uí Laoghaire,” or “Lament for Art O’Leary,” which was composed by his wife, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill (though as an oral form, it was not written down for some years). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics describes it as “a poem of passionate grief . . . in the keening [tradition], but made memorable by its sustained and moving eloquence.”
For the bilingual Irish Gaelic– English poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, there is something invincible about the thirty-six stanzas of the “Caoineadh,” in which Ní Chonaill narrates the cruel story of her short marriage to Art O’Leary: from love at first sight to elopement to domestic bliss to grief. On the day her hot-tempered young husband’s mare galloped home with blood on her saddle, the poet took “three leaps” to land astride her and tear back to the scene of the crime. Crazed at the sight of his corpse, she threw herself on his body and drank his blood. As when, in ancient times, drinking from a bowl of blood in the underworld allowed heroes (Odysseus, Aeneas) to behold prophesies from the dead, Ní Chonaill’s necrophilic act seemed to bestow on her the power to compose her “Caoineadh,” in which a call for vengeance is as intense as her grief-stricken love. O’Leary’s brother in due course shoots Morris, wounding and eventually killing him.
Ní Ghríofa remembers the “Caoineadh” from her schooldays; it didn’t make an impression on her until adolescence, when her own dangerous desires burgeoned. In college she’s reckless, burning the candle at both ends, given to compulsions that rob her of sleep and appetite. She gets drunk, she gets skinny, she gets dark circles under her eyes. When adults nudge her toward a teaching career, she rebels and goes in for a year as a dentistry student. (It is in her nature to rebel against even her nature.) Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill also was a black sheep (“Dubh” is Irish Gaelic for “dark”) who dismayed her family by eloping with the dashing but dangerous Art; her brothers would all but disown her.
Yet when we meet Ní Ghríofa at the start of her memoir, A Ghost in the Throat, her life is distinguished by its mundanity: she is a housewife and mother to two young sons, a third on the way. In short order she has three young sons, with a fourth child on the way. The family is struggling to get by on one income, and rising rents drive them from one apartment to the next. “The baby sleeps in a third-hand cot held together with black gaff tape, and the walls of our rented bedroom are decorated not with pastel murals, but with a constellation of black mould.” To keep up with chores, she makes lists and takes satisfaction in crossing off tasks as she completes them, a kind of parody of her vocation where writing a line and scratching it out is standard practice. She reads The Very Hungry Caterpillar aloud a hundred times, plays an old mixtape with Radiohead’s “Karma Police” as a substitute lullaby to get the baby to nap, and takes that opportunity not to get some shut-eye of her own but to close herself in a room with a breast pump so she can donate to a national milk bank for infants in neonatal ICUs. The milk bank takes on metaphorical importance, as does the idea of donation—female donation—in its many forms. She points out that in pregnancy, a woman’s body will leach itself of its own nutrients to ensure the health of the fetus. This is not a complaint. As Ní Ghríofa finds herself humming a U2 lyric from her adolescence, “And you give yourself away, and you give yourself away,” she contemplates the nature of altruism with some ruefulness, but never resentment. For one thing—as per “Karma Police”—she believes in cosmic reckoning.
When the fourth baby, her first daughter, stops growing in utero, and Ní Ghríofa must undergo her fourth C-section early because of a sickly placenta, the universe holds mother and preemie in a terrible balance in the neonatal ICU for many weeks before vindicating Ní Ghríofa’s faith. She had “banked” her donations against disasters of this kind, and perhaps it even worked. By her hospital bed she had kept a photocopy of the “Caoineadh” for comfort; now she plans to donate her time and mental energies toward a new translation. Drawing out the facts of a bereaved noblewoman—who left almost nothing behind but two sons and the keen for their murdered father—becomes a feminist quest not in opposition to traditional roles (wife, mother, housekeeper) but as an extension of them.
Soon, having moved by chance to a new rental in Kilcrea, the seat of the Ó Laoghaires, Ní Ghríofa starts taking drives to various locations associated with the dead poet and her family (some of them guesswork based on matching old maps and satellite photos), either with tots in car seats or left behind with their father for the afternoon. She is haunted on either side: by the vanished poet (when she’s at home) and by her own family (when she’s on her quest).
Ní Ghríofa is a poet through and through: in this prose work she writes lyrical sentences that make the physical world come alive, and repeats the word “sing” as if it were in chorus with her: “We are lifted over the river by a bridge so narrow that it sings less of engines and more of hooves.” “My heels sing me from gravel to paving stones, into wet leaves, and then onto sparser winter grass.” She notes with equally sensuous pleasure the origins of words: “The word ‘souterrain’ holds its roots in French, drawing itself from sous (meaning ‘under’) and terre (meaning ‘earth’) . . . . The sense of an ancient form constructed over a hidden architecture of depth.” “The word scutcheon is new to me. My phone explains that in the eighteenth century, it referred both to the ornate metal panel surrounding a keyhole, and also to a marking behind a cow’s udder.”
But even more tellingly, almost everything Ní Ghríofa notices gains significance by rhyming with something else. Metaphors and metonyms are her metier; omens and dreams are mirrors of deep mind. As she explicates her metaphysics of housekeeping, she asserts that writing is also a kind of metaphysical bookkeeping:
Every day I battle entropy, tidying dropped toys and muckelbowed hoodies, sweeping up every spiral of fallen pasta and every flung crust, scrubbing stains and dishes until no trace remains of the forces that moved through these rooms. Every hour brings with it a new permutation of the same old mess .... If each day is a cluttered page, then I spend my hours scrubbing its letters. In this, my work is a deletion of a presence.
In order to balance out the cosmic order, she must conjure a presence out of a deletion. Of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill little is known; her bones are probably buried with those of her husband, but there is no marker with her name, and Ní Ghríofa resents this deeply. The injury to Ní Chonaill threatens her personally as a woman and mother defined by altruistic acts: it is one thing to donate (“gift”) yourself, it’s another for your name to be entirely subsumed. Thus the first sentence of the memoir: “This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes.” Text, of course, is related to textile, just as a line of a poem creates a “thread” and stories “unfold”:
I know how unqualified I am to attempt my own translation—I hold no doctorate, no professorship, no permission-slip at all—I am merely a woman who loves this poem. The task of translation itself, however, does not feel unfamiliar to me, not only due to translating my own poems [from Irish Gaelic to English], but because the process feels so close to homemaking. In Italian, the word stanza means “room.”
Dredge, drudge, dirge: compartmentalization is impossible for the poet. To the gatekeepers, Ní Ghríofa doesn’t make a convincing figure, with her suckling infant and toddlers, as she petitions descendants and archivists