A Ghost in the Throat
Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s part memoir, part translation A Ghost In the Throat (2020) is, as she states from the beginning, “a female text” (3). In fact, lest her reader fail to absorb this, she titles her first chapter “a female text,” her first line of the first chapter (after the epigraph of a few stanzas of Eiblín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” or “Keen for Art ó Laoghaire”) is all in caps (“THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT.”), and then her memoir concludes: “This is a female text” (282). It is clear, she means us all to associate her text, and Eiblín’s as well, with the female. As such, it is both organic and circular, dynamic and complex.
In A Ghost in the Throat Doireann Ní Ghríofa retreads her own history as a woman from late adolescence to motherhood as she returns again and again to the power of Eiblín Dubh’s 18th-century keen for her murdered husband. Eiblín Dubh’s words, passed for generations orally among women, and eventually found their way to paper at the hand of the wife of one of Eiblín’s great, great nephews—a Mrs. Morgan John O’Connell—in 1892. A Ghost in the Throat weaves the lives of these women together; one as a contemporary, stay-at-home mother of littles, the other the daughter of one of Ireland’s great families well over two hundred years ago.
As author turns amateur historian and then translator, we the reader follow her journey in which her household chore checklists become lists of texts and places of historic note to visit. The intimacy of this scholarship is both touching and, I find, wildly reflective of any deep academic study of the sort. Even the act of translating Eiblín Dubh’s keen from its original Gaelic is an intimate act, and one which the female poet feels she can only do by knowing the previous poetess as dearly as the centuries and scant historical records allow.
A Ghost in the Throat, however, dives deeper than biography or a researcher’s reflections on her processes and methodologies. Rather, it involves plenty of detail-rich memoir that brilliantly embodies the experience of a 21st-century Irish mother, with the grace and poignance of a poet. There are moments in A Ghost in the Throat in which I—similarly aged, similarly academic, and similarly insistent on raising staying home with my young daughters—felt seen in unsettling but also comforting terms. In fact, A Ghost in the Throat, emphasizes the universality of this experience of being a wife, a mother, a poet; even as it emphasizes the intimacy of the experience. Whether the woman is an eighteenth-century woman of means or a twenty-first-century mother, the love we feel for our beloved or our children, the pain of loss, the uncertainty and boldness involved in womanhood, motherhood, marriage, are all common to each of us. It takes a female text to reflect that truth.
This book is a beautiful tribute to both an eighteenth-century, Irish poetess, but also the land, the stories of Ireland, and the Gaelic language. As I read, I found myself utterly transported and inspired, yet again, to pursue my long-held dream of learning the Gaelic language. The care with which Doireann Ní Ghríofa approaches and reflects upon historical research and ultimately translation, is both beautiful and inspiring. It also unsettles certain, perhaps deep-rooted, notions of these fields being male-dominated. Doireann Ní Ghríofa, like myself, stands in wild contrast to the traditional gentleman scholars. For all these reasons and more, I find A Ghost in the Throat a moving, important, female text; one I encourage all lovers of Ireland, poetry, history, and translation to absorb.
Bibliography:
Ní Ghríofa, Doireann. A Ghost in the Throat. Biblioasis: 2020.
A Few Great Passages:
“My daughter smiles. She is wearing a bright pink cardigan knitted by her grandmother, a female text in which every stitch is a syllable. I lift her, along with my bag, my phone, my notebook, pen, and camera, and shuffle through the stile sideways. This is the life I have made for myself, always striving for something beyond my grasp, while hauling implausibly complex armfuls” (72).
“I decide I will return to these texts [the letters of Maurice O’Connell, Eihleen’s brother] and commit an act of willful erasure, whittling each document and letter until only the lives of wo men remain. In performing this oblique reading, I’ll devote myself to luring female lives back from male texts. Such an experiment in reversal will reveal, I hope, the concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink” (76).
“In pregnancy, I read, pluripotent cells from the foetus move through the placenta and enter the mother’s bloodstream. Within her body, they cling to tissues mimicking the composition of surrounding cells, and there, they remain, long after the baby has left. A collection of such cells from subsequent siblings may be all stored within the mother simultaneously, each cluster coordinating and conflicting with a mother’s own bodily impulses” (206-207).
“We presume to know so little of what occurs beyond or within us, whether of the lived past or of our unseen cellular mechanisms, and yet, at some level we do instinctively understand something of these mysteries” (207).
“After a shower, I finally meet my own gaze in the mirror I have so often polished unseeingly, observing the purplish smudges that shadow each of my eyes. I drop the towel, and document my body with curiosity: my milk-bottle thighs split by turquoise seams; my breasts, lopsided and glorious; the hold door of my quadruple caesarean scar, my sag-stomach, stretch-marked with ripples like a strand at low tide. My bellybutton grimaces there, the invisible cord that will always connect with my mother, just as hers connects her to her mother, and on, and on, and on. I study this body of mine, just one more in a long line, and feel no revulsion, only pride. This is a female text, I think. My body replies in its dialect of scars. Ta-Dah! It seems to say, Ta-dah!” (217).
“We may imagine that we can imagine the past, but this is an impossibility” (269).
