A Ghost in the Throat

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I hope that in discussion of this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize we can talk about the repeating references to rooms. For example: It is an unusual book that defies categorisation - it won a prize for non-fiction last year, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize list is usually confined to fiction. The book straddles the grey area between the two - the parts about motherhood read as memoir, and the bare bones of the story of the Irish Gaelic poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, author of the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, (The Keen for Art O’Leary) are true, but there is a degree of creative historical fiction about the way these are fleshed out. I don’t know enough about Doireann Ní Ghríofa to know whether a large part of this book is autobiography or auto fiction. Either way, our narrator is a woman who is both a mother and a poet. She tells us how she became obsessed with the 18th century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, author of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire which has sometimes been described as the greatest poem written in Ireland or Britain during that century. As she wears herself out balancing motherhood and her obsession, she comes to realise something about Eibhlín Dubh: Boy Howdy, I had been asking her this question for the last half of the book. Her obsession with finding our more about the author--Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill--of this historical poem meets so many obstacles that I had to wonder why she kept on. Like a mystery I was hoping for some big resolution in the end. It never really materialized.

A Ghost in the Throat” is a love letter to Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose incantatory words were carried out loud through centuries, propelled by female kinship and desire. A love letter to female texts, female bodies and female voices, which are all really one and the same. That poem was sparked from a love by the author not just of the poem itself but firstly a fascination with the writer as someone largely written out of history and known for her dead husband and her famous politician nephew (Daniel O’Connell) and secondly a strong sense of connection between her life and that of the poet.There is, for example, the recurring themes of rooms – including how the narrator links it (via the Italian stanza) to the construction of a poem; on the concepts of desire; of how women in Irish history are in the “masculine shadow … only of interest as a satellite to male lives” As he dreamt, I watched poems hurrying towards me through the dark. The city had lit something in me, something that pulsed, vulnerable as a fontanelle, something that trembled, as I did, between bliss and exhaustion.’ House-keeping or home-making is an aspect of the pattern these two women share, though Eibhlín Dubh's husband provided servants while our contemporary poet Doireann, has to do all the housework herself, and she makes lists of household tasks which she must then stroke off when they are completed. As the novel opens the narrator/author mixes reading, and translating from Gaelic to English, the poem with the precious daily act of breastfeeding - or rather pumping excess breast milk to be donated to premature babies (a selfless act that is to become particularly pertinent in her own life). The passage is also the one that gives the novel its title. This book – with its familiar refrain “THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT” is an exploration of a 21st Century auto-fictional narrator who reads and re-reads the poem, decides to translate it herself (the author’s translation with the original Gaelic is in the Appendix, and parts of the poem both accompany each chapter heading, give the book much of its narrative drive and appears frequently in the text.

This is a female text, written in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little.’ The author Doireann Ní Ghríofa is better known as a poet and her award winning collection “Clasp” examined the concept of palimpsest, of grief, of the joy and pain of motherhood – and featured in particular the poem “The Horse Under The Hearth” which is effectively a continuation of a famous 18th Century Irish keen (a lament) “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill – an elegy to Eibhlin’s soldier husband, murdered by an English Protestant Sheriff/magistrate over a dispute about a horse. Disclaimer: I am aware that this review can be classified as a male text. There is not a lot I can do to alter that. However, I’m afraid I found no drive or purpose to keep reading it as I didn’t connect with the narrative voice. I never felt connected or inspired, and I never knew why I should want to be on this journey, nor was I engaged in it.A number of traumatic life events lead Ní Ghríofa to recall a poem that she first encountered in school as a distracted child, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. A noblewoman named Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill composed it in 1700’s rural Ireland after her beloved husband was murdered. When Eibhlín came upon the body, overcome with grief, she scooped up his blood in her hands to consume furiously. In closing I will simply add that this book did something I never thought literature could accomplish: it made me lactose-intolerant. I do hope it's a temporary condition. And I understand at a deep level how poems such as Eibhlín Dubh's Lament survived. Such poems belonged in the oral tradition, and were passed on via women's bodies through the generations, until someone finally wrote them down. Eibhlín's Lament was written down one hundred years after she composed it spontaneously at her husband's wake. And although it was a man who finally wrote it down, he got it from the lips of a woman. This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thought that swoops, now, from my body to yours.’ So this is an uneven book for me: I loved the narrative voice and the gorgeous writing, and the literary history that feeds into the translation at the end; but the limited view of what a woman's life should comprise where 'woman' is used as a generic rather than individual signifier, is rather disappointing, and I was bored by the descriptions of domestic and maternal work.

I snap open my laptop, tip- tap the document in which Eibhlín Dubh’s words wait, and hurry through the door of a new stanza, measuring furniture and carpets, feeling the textures of fabrics between thumb and finger, and testing their weight. Then I set to replication. If I am to conjure her presence, I must first construct a suitable home for her, building and furnishing room after careful room, in which each mirror will catch her reflection.Look: I am eleven, a girl who is terrible at sums and at sports, a girl given to staring out windows, a girl whose only real gift lies in daydreaming.’ Shortlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2021 and I won't mind if it wins. Ní Ghríofa becomes obsessed with this poem and its author. She begins painstakingly translating and researching it - even travelling to the places described in the poem with her young children in tow. She finds the experience of delving into Eibhlín life rattling but invigorating, both transgressive and fulfilling at once. She finds uncanny parallels between Eibhlín’s life and her own, which only further fuels her fixation. I love the lyrical voice of this book and the fresh imagery that is utilised but, to be honest, I'm really not enamoured of a book which revels in its domestic drudgery, elevating it to a service of love - it's fine that real life is made up of school runs and lunch boxes and putting the washing on and, for some, pumping breast milk, but it's, frankly, as boring to read about as it may be to perform. And so a large part of this book consists of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s story and her writing of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Caoineadh means "keen" and a keen is a lament for the dead. Ní Ghríofa begins her book by telling us "this is a female text" and a keen was a female lament at a time when women had a very much inferior standing in society, so much so that caoineadhs were not considered worthy of being written down (writing being for men) and were passed through generations of women orally. This leads to another of the key topics in the book which is inheritance through the female line.

I wonder what I might learn of Eibhlin Dubh's days were I to veer away from the scholarship I have simply accepted thus far. I think again of those blunt brief sketches of Aunt and Wife, occluded by the shadows of men. How might she appear if drawn in the light of the women that knew her instead? I think of [starling’s] song, how deftly they regurgitate strands of true remembered sound, weaving it into their own melodic bridges: a fusion of truth and invention; past and present” The task of translation itself, however, does not feel unfamiliar to me, not only due to translating my own poems, but because the process feels so close to homemaking. In Italian, the word stanza means ‘room’. If there are times when I feel ill-equipped and daunted by the expertise of those who have walked these rooms before me, I reassure myself that I am simply homemaking, and this thought steadies me, because tending to a room is a form of labour I know that I can attempt as well as anyone." Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s mix of literary essay and autofiction focuses on an unnamed woman’s experiences of mothering. In snatches of time between feeds and school runs she reflects on the idea of a female text as much written on and through the body as one that’s reproduced as conventional, fixed composition. Time spent writing lists, doing household chores, looking after her children, including dealing with near-tragedy, all of these things accumulate to produce a rich but ultimately ephemeral story of a woman’s life, it’s a narrative that might be encountered in many forms like a gift of knitted baby clothes symbolising female craft and affection. Alongside this contemporary catalogue of days are the woman’s reflections on another piece, a classic, 18th-century Irish poem riven with the traces of desire, grief and longing, produced in the distant past yet somehow speaking to her across the years. The poem’s a caioineadh, a traditional lament for the dead, noblewoman Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill’s outpouring for her murdered lover. The poem (included here) and the poet represent something that falls between haunting, obsession and talisman as the woman painstakingly traces its origins and its author’s lost history.There is an elevation of a little known female poet and her striking poem, which is combined with a celebration of domesticity and motherhood. As well as being biography, memoir, auto fiction and history it can’t be separated from the interior life and personality of the author. There is a good deal of speculative imagination about what might have been: More interesting is the research than the narrator and, presumably, author has done in reconstructing the purported composer of the keen, and the biographical aspects worked for me - again, though, stitching this story together with the everyday life of the narrator feels rather arbitrary as the only things they share are Irishness and a love for their husbands and family, and the bond created by the keen itself. This feeling glues itself to the introductory paragraph that often precedes the translations, flimsy sketches of Eibhlín Dubh’s life that are almost always some lazy variant of the same two facts: Wife of Art O’Leary. Aunt of Daniel O’Connell. How swiftly the academic gaze places her in a masculine shadow, as though she could only be of interest as a satellite to male lives. This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores. When she speaks of lying in a hollow of the hill as a child, staring at the clouds, I'm there with her.