Tag: ireland

Restoration dialogue with a Hibernian twist

Posted on by minorhistory

Actress by Anne Enright

At one point in Taylor Smith’s Miss Americana, there’s a montage of scenes from her previous album tours. Each tour is a world apart from the previous. The entire performance is rechoreographed. All costumes, sets and dancers are reimagined. Swift tells us that female artists must reinvent themselves constantly to remain relevant, to remain palatable. At the time of filming Miss Americana, Swift was 29 and fully aware of her impending expiration date. She knows she’s on borrowed time. Regardless of the work it took to reach such heights, most female artists either fade or crash out of view after a certain age. A lucky few move into production roles. Female writers might be spared to some extent, but as Anne Enright has documented, very few female writers break through in the first place.

Taylor Swift is one of a long line of global stars. Her tribulations play out in real time on a billion small screens around the world. The global star phenomenon is relatively recent. In her latest novel, Anne Enright explores the life one of the first generation of global stars, Katherine O’Dell, who came of age in the post-war era and was an Irish theatre giant of her time. She performed on the West End, Broadway, and in Hollywood films. The story begins with O’Dell long dead, her later years mired in controversy. When Holly Devane, a postgraduate student arrives at the home of O’Dell’s only daugher Norah, she amuses and annoys Norah in her attempt to label Katherine O’Dell’s “sexual style”. This confrontation compels Norah to tell her mother’s story.

Enright’s Katherine O’Dell reads like a metaphor for the modern Irish state. We begin with the revelation that O’Dell was born in London to English parents – a fact that managed to remain out of the public domain. O’Dell’s father was the son of a British solider in Fermoy. Her father’s Catholicism functioned as the main cultural connection to Ireland. O’Dell came of age in the post-war period in the years in and around the declaration of the Irish Republic. She concocted her own Irish identity as a teenager on tour around Ireland with her actor parents on the rural theatre circuit. In a stage review of a Broadway show, a critic referred to her as O’Dell rather than her mother’s surname Odell. “Odell” went through a similar process of transliteration – an Anglophone’s impression of an Irish name – that all Gaelic surnames suffered at the hands of British colonists. As her star rose, she played an Irish woman so well she passed as Irish. No one ever questioned her Irishness. She became the global idea of Ireland, starring in butter ads and singing at Irish emigrant events. Later in life, after the major incident that led to her demise, a Garda from Gweedore reported that she spoke to him in a gibberish she claimed was Irish. Her gibberish, the Garda said, was a fairly good impression of the Irish language.

Some people are born stars. O’Dell had early opportunities to emerge as she stepped in to replace actors on her parents’ tour. The other players recognised her for what she was. She arrived in the acting world fully formed. She understood how to work the camera better than the directors. When she stepped out on stage, everything fell into place. Despite her rare gift, like every woman, she too had an expiry date. She left America for Ireland with a small, “privately” conceived child that does not appear to be the product of her stage-managed marriage to a gay co-star.

Enright’s novel moves recursively through key events and characters as Norah tries to make meaning of her mother’s life. In telling the story of Katherine O’Dell, Norah tells her own story. Norah cycles through a series of concerns, her unknowable paternity, her mother’s mysterious sexual life, the men that gathered around her in support and in judgement, and the bizarre event that led to her mother’s incarceration.

Taylor Swift knows she’s on borrowed time because of the Katherine O’Dells who went before her, their lives carefully studied and deconstructed. No solution has been found or proposed for the fact that our culture has an appetite only for young females. Half the Internet’s energy consumption goes into serving up images of young females, with an ever sliding scale of how young. We’ve long been sold the idea that the global market functions as some objective measure of value. Blame for something so abstract isn’t easily assigned. The market wants what it wants, we are told, as if we have no hand in the fine tuning and marketing of wholesale desire.

O’Dell makes failed trips back and forth across the Anglo-American world. She goes on smaller touring circuits. She is stubborn and ego-centric. At the same time as she finds herself written off as expired goods, male figures install themselves in the arts and literary world without having to work to maintain their position. These men emit no creative light of their own. They never deem themselves too old or undeserving of any pleasure or opportunity. They build their own empires off networks of artists. They manoeuvre themselves into positions where O’Dell has to seek their permission to work. They sit behind the camera and whisper about her and dismiss her. They laugh at her attempts to reinvent herself. She succumbs to heavy drinking and a cocktail of prescription medication.

Norah keeps pushing and uncovers a source of darkness in O’Dell’s past. In true Irish fashion, blame remains nonassignable. Even during Katherine O’Dell’s trial, responsibility for her own actions is diminished. Injustice seems societal and unspecific. Enright writes injustice into the very air we breathe.

Every now and again, Norah speaks directly to a “you” – her husband. Their union seems like the centripetal force tethering Norah to a life of stability compared to her mother’s. The “you” of this novel had encouraged Norah to write about her mother. The “you” of this story gave her permission. This reminds me of ancient Greek novels I studied such as the Aethiopica, where the story is female driven, but all successful female characters had a network of supportive men guiding them at all times. Women like O’Dell, who lived without male blessing, had negative outcomes.

O’Dell and Norah’s story unfolds to reveal not only their own story but a cultural history of Dublin. Each scene, sentence and phrase builds an impression of modern Ireland with all its porter bellies and rebel tunes. Enright’s writing style comes close to achieving what Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk does in his novels: a gentle unfurling of the soul of a nation disguised as a book.

Is that all there is?

Posted on by minorhistory

Diving For Pearls by Jamie O’Connell

The plot of Diving for Pearls centres around the death of Hiyam, a young Emirati woman. The novel flows through the voices of several characters. Through them, we discover her fate. For the most part, Diving for Pearls concerns itself with the actions and choices of one Irish family. The heart of the novel rests within the shifts of consciousness in Trevor, the troubled younger brother of Siobhán. Siobhán summons Trevor to Dubai where she has been living with her husband and children since the 2008 economic collapse. Like the dead Emirati woman, Trevor too ended up in open water as a result of a misspent evening. Siobhán thinks she can save Trevor without realising that she’s more lost than him.

Dubai feels like something out of a Mark Fisher book. It manifests as an expression of pure capitalist realism. Within its city limits, the global caste system is on full display. Public space is so inhospitable that if you attempt to spend time outdoors, you risk being seared to death by the sun. Refuge of any sort can be found only within the private shopping malls and hotels.

While O’Connell writes complex Irish characters, the foreign characters lack a certain dimensionality. On this point, I give O’Connell the benefit of the doubt. Diving For Pearls seems less interested in rendering characters’ rich inner worlds than in demonstrating that for every northern indulgence some southern family pays the price. This book has strong parallels with Jordan Peele’s film Us, where the Wilson family confronts the horror of their doppleganger family. The Wilson’s material gains result in torment and hardship for their counterparts who exist in a parallel underworld. O’Connell’s characters of non-white descent suffer endlessly and needlessly so that the white characters’ good fortune continues.

Within this novel, those with money are godless while the impoverished are pious. The worship of both capital and god relies on higher powers. These higher powers remain abstracted and unaccountable but widely believed. In the end, everyone relies on little more than hope. As Siobhán’s good fortunes flip from one moment to the next, in what is a comical scene, she tries to remember how to pray. In Diving for Pearls, Christianity provides a quiet sense of community. The Christians of diverse nationalities gather together to worship but also to commune with one another. The consumers seek individuals with whom they can binge in tandem. Both have a price.

O’Connell’s writing becomes urgent and compelling when he writes about faith. This seems a feature of the latest generation of Irish artists. While their fluency in Christian doctrine probably came through involuntary indoctrination, its immutable presence shapes their art. O’Connell’s writing expresses a final exhalation of Irish Christianity.

The Siobhán of this novel embodies the archetypal sleepwalking consumer of capital. She names her children Rocco and Milo after the new global deities. When Trevor enquires about the palpable inequality evident in Dubai, she’s quick to rationalise this as a law of nature. Someone has to slave! A certain comedy arises when Siobhán passes comment about Gete, her Ethiopian housemaid whose prospects of making a living in her homeland were robbed by foreign interests and whose entire fate rests in Siobhán’s hands. Siobhán thinks Gete fails to understand what is important in life, aka designer goods. Gete, knowing better than to ever comment, seems pregnant with opinion.

When Siobhán drags her family out to witness an actor scale the Burj Khalifa, the supreme moment of bearing witness fails to offset the discomfort of the voyage. Worship stripped of its religiosity splits Siobhán open for a moment. She realises that her entire life has been built on a lie; she chose luxury over ever knowing true desire. Her life’s milestones are garnished with disappointment. Nothing in her life has lived up to the hype. After this brief confessional moment, she returns to normal. Despite experiencing a great change in fortune, she doesn’t have the wherewithal to become conscious of the source of her malaise. Siobhán, as an embodiment of the general Irish population, and some might argue the entire global north, demonstrates comedic acts of cognitive dissonance.

Dublin and Dubai fail to differ enough to draw a strong contrast. Moving thousands of miles from one to the other offers distance rather than difference. For Trevor, Dubai might lead to a life post-Lucy Quirke. For Aasim, Dublin allows him the liberty of sharing a bed with a man without fear but also without love. Outside of that, both men know nothing but excess. Trevor tries to steel himself through building a thick muscular exoskeleton. Aasim flashes money to court friendships.

The one question I have is whether O’Connell could have written Diving For Pearls without Trevor. While O’Connell animates Trevor’s awakening with great skill, Trevor reads like a metaphor for the Labour Party or the American Democratic party. Although his lifestyle leads to the death and destruction of the global south, he retains the capacity to display some awareness and remorse. He understands the ills of the world enough for the rest of us to buy into him as a form of hope. Ultimately, he might change course but the change isn’t radical. A Diving For Pearls without a Trevor to add empathy would have been more realistic but less palatable.

Siobhán’s husband Martin remains voiceless throughout the novel. Everything that happens, happens because of his sense of entitlement. His shady dealings both stand up and tear down the lives of Siobhán and the boys. Martin lies beyond reach. He is both guilty and conscious of his actions. He may not mean to murder but he still robbed Hiyam of her life. Capitalism doesn’t mean to tear the planet to ribbons. The destruction of life and the environment is an unfortunate byproduct. Following the same natural order that necessitates modern slavery, Martin will never see the inside of a jail cell. His steady cash flow tethers him positively to his offspring even after all he has done. Even after her confrontations with reality, Siobhán continues to accept his money. The entire planet will plunge into flames and every one of us will die before Martin’s air conditioned apartment will experience mild brownouts. Martin represents everything that happens in the shadows. Deep down, we all know that the deals that Martin makes keep the known world spinning on its axis. Deep down, we’re all varying shades of Siobhán. In a metaphorical sense, we all choose Martin. If ‘he’ were to stop, some of the global north’s luxury would cease to exist. Martin goes unprosecuted because to prosecute Martin would mean confronting our own culpability.

Nothing is real. Nothing is certain or eternal. As quick as all this has been created, like Sodom and Gommorah, it can come undone. As much as Emirati wealth can couch them in luxury, the bodies still pile up. Sometimes they find their own family members among the casualties. As the fire grows nearer, the smoke will engulf us all.

What a masterful first novel from Jamie O’Connell.

Lesbians in the Fairyfort: Strange Flowers

Posted on by minorhistory

In Donal Ryan’s latest novel, Strange Flowers, a twenty year old Moll Gladney, the only daughter of impoverished parents living at the mercy of Castle Catholics in North Tipperary, goes missing. Five years later, she returns with a black British husband and their white baby. You read on for another hundred pages until you learn that Moll went missing because she’d gotten an intercaste kiss off the Castle Catholic wife, Ellen Jackman. C’est ci.

Most people I know who read, are reading Donal Ryan. RTE declares that with Strange Flowers, “Ryan reaffirms his place amongst Ireland’s greatest wordsmiths”. The Irish Independent describes it as “an expansive and thought provoking parable”. In an interview with The Irish Times, Ryan mentions that he “casts no shade”, aka, makes no negative comments in public about other writers, and taking its cue from him, The Irish Times refrains from evaluating his latest work. Friends have said to me that in Ireland – where so much depends on your network, who your parents are, and whether or not you are alumni of one or two universities – no one writes negative reviews. No published writer gets a roasting in a broadsheet or by the national broadcaster. A former colleague of mine, someone’s son and a Trinity graduate, confessed to me that he did not have the courage to write a negative review even of mainstream American bands for a local paper. Across the Irish Sea, after lavishing Strange Flowers with praise, The Guardian goes as far as to admit “Strange Flowers may be the weakest of Ryan’s novels, but it is still a gorgeously wrought book”.

The first Donal Ryan novel I attempted to read was From a Low and Quiet Sea. I opened the book at the boarding gate in Vienna Airport and drank from its pages until they called my flight. On a sentence level, Ryan demonstrates pure mastery. He is the foremost contemporary writer of the Hiberno-English sentence. His words flow in a natural North Munster vernacular. The levity of his writing zeros out the length of his sentences as he carries you through page after page at great speeds. In Vienna, by the time they called my flight, I had almost made it to the end. However, once I boarded the flight, I forgot all about it and never opened the book again. Despite not having made it through From a Low and Quiet Sea, I continued to read Ryan’s books because everyone who reads seems to be reading Ryan. And here I am, bewildered and reluctant to express what I think about this book because in Ireland no one takes such risks, do they?

Was it through this same lack of courage that Ryan arrived at the careful plot of Strange Flowers? His sentences meander through themes of interracial relationships and lesbianism but he seals them within the safety of a 1970s time capsule. The main characters, who subsist on the good graces of their wealthy landlord, never question their lot in life. When their mind wanders, it waxes lyrical about the beauty of the North Tipperary countryside, never to fantasies of seizing the means of production. Ryan grazes on themes of inequality, class, and race but never bites.

Because of the black characters, the publishers went as far as to hire a sensitivity reader who flagged and removed some issues from the manuscript. Despite this extreme caution, if Strange Flowers had been the work of a white US or British male writer, its flatness would have courted controversy. The portrayal of the black experience in Strange Flowers reads like a caricature of a Zadie Smith novel crossed with the British soap Eastenders. While Ryan does orbit the issue of black fragility, his continued reticence leaves the text both ignorant and ineffective. The black characters seem too hot to handle in any meaningful or insightful way to the extent that if there had been no blackness in this novel at all, would anything have changed?

In lieu of the roast of Strange Flowers I feel bubbling within me, I offer the Internet a few key insights into Irish life as gleaned from its pages:

  • The Gardai remain invisible in cases of sexual harassment, attempted murder, or rape. They materialise only if a black man comes to town, if a teenager has a tiny quantity of hash, or if the person who killed the one black man in town needs consoling.
  • Sexual intercourse occurs indoors only in London. In Ireland, sensuality remains restricted to the riverbanks and the Fairyforts.
  • The Castle Catholics, the 1% whose expansive inherited wealth means they determine the fate of those around them, are the only people who dwell on and lament the loss of even vaster fortunes they once held.
  • A shift between two Irish women lasts a lifetime.


Milk Drunk: A Ghost in the Throat

Posted on by minorhistory

In a short space of time, Tramp Press established itself as a publisher of books that capture the modern Irish experience. Over the last few years, its publication of both fiction and non fiction, such as Solar Bones, Notes to Self, and Handiwork, has raised the bar so high that I’ll gamble on reading anything Tramp Press puts out regardless of subject. For me, reading, A Ghost In The Throat was one of these gambles. If A Ghost In The Throat had not been published by Tramp Press, I’m not sure I would have read it.

Without knowing the first thing about Doireann Ní Ghríofa, the subject of this book would have been enough to dissuade me from reading it. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose keening I was unfamiliar with, lived in a period of Irish history that I find unbearable to read about. I struggle to read accounts of both early Irish civilisation and Ireland under British rule. I have vivid memories of the despair I felt sitting in the library pouring over a battered copy of Maire and Liam de Paor’s Early Christian Ireland among other books that were prescribed reading in first year of university. I avoid reading books about early Ireland because it saddens me to read of a culture that didn’t survive. I avoid reading books about Ireland under British rule because I don’t enjoy reading the mechanics of how the culture didn’t survive. Ní Ghríofa’s work explores the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose husband Airt Uí Laoghaire was gunned down by British soldiers in 1773 in rural Cork. The historical timeline, setting, and backdrop are all laced with a politics that I avoid in my leisurely reading. However, Ní Ghríofa has managed to deliver a text so maternal that it shields the reader from the politics of the era. She has wrapped her words in a warmth that is uniquely feminine. At the beginning of the book, Ní Ghríofa asserts that this is a female text, and she does not exaggerate. This is a female text that is swimming with the deranged and milk-drunk optimism of mothers who continue their daily tasks regardless of the era and crises that erupt in the outer world.

Some people whether real, fictional, or historical, stay with us for a lifetime. Regardless of whether we knew them or ever met them, we encounter them and elevate them to an eternal pedestal. There’s a window of time in which this is more likely to happen. As children, with one foot still in the dreamworld, we’re too removed to form this kind of connection. As adults, we’re too busy or broken, too cynical or distracted. During those tender years between childhood and adulthood, in a haze of hormones, we run a high risk of imprinting upon someone and carrying them around in our heads for the rest of our lives. Ní Ghríofa encounters Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill at three stages of her life. As a child, her first reading of Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire fails to leave a dent. As a teenager, she identifies with the pain of lost love in the way only teenagers can. As an adult, forced to leave Cork city as the rental crisis made life there unsustainable for her and her young family, Ní Ghríofa drove through the unfamiliar countryside that was now her home and realised she was living close to where Ní Chonaill spent her married life. Somewhere between her third and fourth child, between the school runs and the household tasks, Ní Ghríofa found herself compelled to attempt a narrative of the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. She found herself haunted by and haunting Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. In trying to shed light on the life of a female poet in 18th century Ireland, Ní Ghríofa sheds light on the life of a female poet in 21st century Ireland. In painting a portrait of the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Ní Ghríofa paints a portrait of herself.

A Ghost in the Throat is a series of parallels, of cycles, of paying it forward in words, deeds, breast milk, and pony tails. While Ní Ghríofa searches for Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, we travel with her between Muskerry and Derrynane, between her and Ní Chonaill’s own rebellions and lust.

The lives and deeds of Irish women are as poorly recorded and appreciated as any. Although Ní Ghríofa leaves no stone unturned in her pursuit of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, we only have of Ní Chonaill what Ní Chonaill willingly gave. Very little else remains of her: no artefacts or accounts of her life outside of her keening. While she searches for Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Ní Ghríofa cherry-picks intimate moments from her life that reveal her own sexuality, sorrow, lust for life, and a maternal instinct that threatens to envelop everyone in its path. This account of her own life is probably the account she would have loved to read about Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Despite the fact that we now live in the year 2020, the revealing nature of A Ghost In The Throat is still a brave act. In a country with a small population, often with one or two degrees of separation between people, texts this intimate are few and far between.

If I hadn’t read this book, I would have missed out. Ní Ghríofa created a work so powerful that I can imagine some future youth, tender in age, imprinting onto Ní Ghríofa, elevating her to a pedestal, and in mining Ní Ghríofa’s life, discovering herself.