A Ghost in the Throat

The etymology of the word 'text' lies in the Latin verb 'texere': to weave, to fuse, to braid. The Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies, a phenomenon that seems to me cause for wonder and admiration, rather than suspicion of authorship.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa's remarkable first prose work, as befits a poet, is itself a weaving, as it braids to and fro in its consideration of texts and the textures of life, female bodies, erasures and absences, rooms, ghosts. Here is another book in an amazing run of Irish writing about the female body, like Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations and Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self (also from Tramp Press, who have a seriously impressive hit-rate).

At one point, Doireann Ní Ghríofa revisits the 'dissection room' she attended as a medical student and signs a form pledging her body to the facility after her death; she thinks of the strangers who would be the last to touch me and when she gets a tattoo

I knew then that I must choose the words of Eibhlín Dubh. The fragment I chose occurs when she awakes suddenly from a dream in which a prophetic vision is revealed to her, 'Is aisling trí néallaibh' which I translate as 'such clouded reveries.'

Quite so: throughout this woven text there is a sense of semi-dreaming, of reveries in which the cloud only intermittently clears. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill was the author of the famous poem 'The Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire', a cry of loss and desire by his widow, who Ní Ghríofa searches for relentlessly throughout her own text. Eibhlín Dubh has suffered an erasure by so many male voices, until by the age of 48 she is reduced to a pet-name, a quick scratch of a quill within a male text. Her own words have been translated from Irish by many others since the poem first appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, but Ní Ghríofa writes:

Many of the translations I find feeble - dead texts that try, but fail, to find the thumping pulse of Eibhlín Dubh's presence - but some are memorably strong. Few come close enough to her voice to satiate me, and the accompanying pages of her broader circumstances are often so sparse that they leave me hungry. Not just hungry. I am starving.

The metaphor is of the body, and as Ní Ghríofa starts on her search, she is breastfeeding, at once hungry herself and giving sustenance to her baby son:

My weeks are decanted between the the twin forces of milk and text, weeks that soon pour into months, and then into years.

That sense of restlessness extends through the book, as her family regularly moves home, as more children come, and as she tries to hunt down the texture (the same origin as 'text': the weft of everyday existence) of Eibhlín Dubh's life. In Chapter 15, A Sequence of Shadows', she becomes almost frantic in her flailing attempts to pin down even the slightest scrap of Eibhlín Dubh's existence (and of her sons and grandchildren) as she pours over more historical texts (newspapers, marriage records, even examination papers). She is a detective, and the narrative becomes a form of 'whodunnit', or rather a 'whereisshe'. If she can somehow locate the true person,

Perhaps I could honour Eibhlín Dubh's life by building a truer image of her days, gathering every fact we hold to create a kaleidoscope, a spill of distinct moments, fractured but vivid.

This perfectly describes this book, which is also a spill of distinct moments, fractured but vivid. Among the most vivid are brilliantly intense episodes in the milking parlour (the neo-natal ICU), in the dissection room and during a terrifying motorway near-miss. These are woven together during the course of the book just like the description of the starlings which decorate her regular teacup:

How deftly they regurgitate strands of true, remembered sound, weaving into their own melodic bridges: a fusion of truth and invention, of past and present.

Another Latin derivation: bridges are forms of 'translation', from the verb 'fero, ferre, tuli, latum': to carry across.

Through these moments, Ní Ghríofa tries to find the presence which will bridge or 'fuse' the fractures:

I have learned that the element I cherish most of all in Eibhlín Dubh 's work does not lie in any of the rooms I spent hours deliberating over. No, my favourite element hovers beyond the text, in the untranslatable pale space between stanzas [from the Italian for a 'room'], where I sense a female breath lingering on the stairs, still present, somehow, long after the body has hurried onwards to breathe elsewhere.

By the end her frustrations finally tell her that letting go would be the first true kindness I have shown Eibhlín Dubh. Even in this, I fail. This kind of 'failure' is the inevitable 'failure' of all literature: it powers the search into such lacunae, pale 'untranslatable' spaces, driven by the urgency of an author's imagination. And in this book the author’s imagination triumphs.