The Subversion of Supernatural Lament in the Poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

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The Subversion of SupernaturalLament in the Poetry of NualaNí DhomhnaillMolly E. Ferguson aa Lindsey Wilson College , Columbia

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Women’s Studies, 42:643–666, 2013Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00497878.2013.802637

THE SUBVERSION OF SUPERNATURAL LAMENTIN THE POETRY OF NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL

MOLLY E. FERGUSON

Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia

Irish language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill situates the female poetin terms of the supernatural in her essay, “What Foremothers?”when she describes a common superstition from bardic traditionthat she heard as a girl in Ireland. It was the belief that a womanpoet was such a destructive force that if one turned up in a fam-ily, the family was cursed against having future poets for sevengenerations (O’Connor 14). In this myth a woman poet is an oxy-moron, whose mere existence cancels out poetry. The origins ofthis sexist curse foreground the difficulty women poets in Irelandhave had in creating a poetics that reflects the way they see theworld, offering a case of how canon formation haunts contem-porary female artists. If women, as Eavan Boland has argued inObject Lessons, have traditionally been the objects of Irish poetryrather than the authors of it, then a critical transformation mustoccur when a woman attempts to cross one set of boundaries fromwoman to poet. The artist’s passage is fraught with the danger thatonce breached, she could never go back. It is this nowhere-landbetween woman as object and creating subject that I intend toexplore using the work of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill as a guide to afeminist Otherworld.

Ní Dhomhnaill, moved by the collective memory of culturaltraumas, has developed a strategy of using supernatural femalefigures to model an expression of loss resistant to cultural hege-mony. The Irish keen is a ritualized outpouring of grief oftenconveyed through women’s wailing and poetic lamentation, tradi-tionally a feminized cry of collective suffering by a group. I arguethat the poet’s invocation of the supernatural aspects of theIrish keen displaces the violence against and neglect of women’shistorical social position in Ireland, offering instead a female

Address correspondence to Molly E. Ferguson, 210 Lindsey Wilson Street, Columbia,KY 42728. E-mail: [email protected] 643

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644 Molly E. Ferguson

image that incorporates difference and breathes imaginative lifeinto the dead. While her work is written in a language withonly 20,000–30,000 native speakers, Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetic voiceuniversalizes a specifically female experience of exclusion andsilencing. The poet herself suggests that this message underliesthe supernatural images of women in her work, asserting thattales about transformation help “break us out of the dominantpatriarchal ethos of the age” (“Mis and Dubh Ruis” 117).

The poet’s unique position as a woman writing in a minor-ity language marginalizes her in a fundamental way that haspolitically charged her artistic response. Several scholars such asGeraldine Meaney have used terms of erasure and omission toexplain how nationalist patriarchal discourse demonstrates forIrish women “the sign of their invisibility” (17). Irish women havehistorically been doubly oppressed, first by their colonization andthen further by their treatment as second-class citizens, valuedsolely for their reproductive capacities. As feminists have noted,the Irish constitution conflates the terms “woman” and “mother,”suggesting that the identities are interchangeable and that moth-erhood is women’s only role in the Irish state (Bunreacht NahÉireann 41.2).1 For many Irish women over several decades, thisconstraining role has resulted in displacement of self and a desireto break the enforced silence of their fixed gender construction.The challenge for female artists is to conceive of pathways throughwhich to encapsulate this experience and represent it produc-tively. I offer that the undead female figure glimpsed in Irishwomen’s writing mimes her position, both inside and outside,detached from yet haunting her society from within. By adoptingthe pose of mediums who hear the voices of silenced women andtell their stories, poets like Ní Dhomhnaill tap into a richly allu-sive set of images and metaphors that allow them to shape-shift, soas to cunningly escape the potential entrapments of writing aboutIrish women.

1Article 41.2 of the 1937 Constitution, Bunreacht Na hÉireann, reads as follows:

Article 41.2.1: In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home,woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot beachieved.Article 41.2.2: The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shallnot be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of theirduties in the home.

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The Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill 645

Like the image of the “invisible” Irish woman, the metaphorof the poetic tradition as a haunted house in which womenexperience fracture between body and mind foregrounds a strongtendency in contemporary Irish poetry towards the uncanny. NíDhomhnaill contributes that women are still not taken seriouslyin the poetic canon, arguing that “We are still put away in thewomen’s quarters, veiled and hidden and not given full spiritualand mental citizenship” (L. O’Connor). Her question to thosewho presume Irish a dead language also emphasizes her concernabout linguistic extinction: “So what does that make me. . . . Awalking ghost? A linguistic specter?” (“Why I Choose to Writein Irish” 48). The metaphors of spatial exclusion, the ghettoesof “women’s quarters,” become resistant subaltern spaces in herwork. Rather than exist in the disembodied, asexual state requiredby the poetic tradition, the poet chooses instead to claim a unifiedsexuality and self, even if it estranges her as Other. The femalepoet must embrace death and non-existence as a unified indi-vidual subject because it allows her to imagine that which is notthere and thus invent a history for unrecorded women. The Irishkeen is a poetic form uniquely suited to this goal, as it is a tra-ditional expression of longing in the language of the (also lost)matriarchal culture of the pre-colonial era.

In response to Sandra Gilbert’s question of how contem-porary poets can express public sorrow, Eavan Boland probedfurther, “Can societies trust any longer to the private imagina-tion of the poet what they once trusted to the public theaterof elected actors such as the keeners?” (“Can Poetry Console aGrieving Public?”). She describes a keening her father saw in1920s Connemara at the docks where an emigrant ship was depart-ing, remembered by him as “eerie, powerful, terrible.” Boland seesher own poetry as derivative of that tradition that once “[gave]unquestioned ritualistic and consensual shape to public mourn-ing,” and understands her responsibility to carry on the traditionof the keeners. Beyond the traditional function of the keeners,I argue that artists such as Boland and Ní Dhomhnaill recuper-ate their role as powerful female agents mediating the boundarybetween life and death.

Keening women were present at wakes and burials, oftenby hire, to wail, cry, and perform improvised poems that loudlylamented a community member’s death and eased his transition

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to the Otherworld. The keener’s function tellingly parallels thatof the banshee, whose piercing wails preceded the death of amember of the household whose loved ones heard them. Boththe supernatural banshee (bean sí) and the human female keener(bean chaointe) are women whose performance of grief ushersthe dead or dying into the afterlife. Therefore both are inti-mately connected with death as a rite of passage, and their mutualpositioning at the liminal border between life and death blursboundaries between the real woman and the ghostly harbinger.Boland connects the lamenting wails of the keeners to her ownwork, writing of the “eerie” image that so impacted her father:“I, as an Irish poet, would certainly want to be there on thatdock with the keeners. I would want to feel that those people—on both sides of those farewells—could count on a language fortheir loss” (“Can Poetry Console . . . ”). Given that both Bolandand Ní Dhomhnaill feel a psychic kinship as female poets to thekeening tradition, I contend that their work takes up the tradi-tional function of the keen, as artistry drawing from both the realand fantastic in the maintenance of cultural tradition.

Ní Dhomhnaill’s 2007 volume of poetry translated by PaulMuldoon, The Fifty Minute Mermaid, addresses the collective lossof the Irish language through the conceit of a group of merfolkwith defunct gills adjusting to lives on land. The title of the vol-ume alludes to a fifty minute therapy session, which will proveinadequate to address the devastating effects of “triomaithe,” theirdrying. The poem “Na Murúcha agus an Ceol ,” or “The Merfolk andMusic” includes the narrator’s explanation of why the mermaidrejects music after losing her language and way of life: “what liesat the bottom of all this, of course, is the trauma / of their beingleft high and dry” (107). In “Cuimhne an Uisce,” or “A RecoveredMemory of Water,” Ní Dhomhnaill’s engagement with trauma asan erasure is characterized by gaps in what language can express.The speaker’s description of this silence is itself a lament for theabsence of something as elemental as water:

A terrible sense of stressis part and parcel of these emotions.At the end of the day she has nothing elseto compare it to.

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She doesn’t have the vocabulary for any of it.At her weekly therapy sessionshe has more than enough to be going on withjust to describe this strange phenomenonand to express it properlyto the psychiatrist.

She doesn’t have the terminologyor any of the points of referenceor any word at all that would give the slightest suggestionas to what water might be.‘A transparent liquid,’ she says, doing as best she can.‘Right,’ says the therapist, ‘keep going.’He coaxes and cajoles her towards word-making.She has another run at it.‘A thin flow,’ she calls it,casting about gingerly in the midst of the words.‘A shiny film. Dripping stuff. Something wet.’ (31–33)

The mermaid’s loss of language to describe her longing for watercannot be evoked by the therapist’s well-meaning encourage-ments towards “word-making.” Even if her “casting about” on landresulted in catching the word “water,” that word would still be justan empty translation for what is utterly lost. Instead she must livewith the effects of the “terrible sense of stress” that the poemsdepict. These range from a high infant mortality rate due to themermaids’ refusal to breastfeed, complete denial of their past“before [they] turned over a new leaf on dry land” and ultimatelythe painful realization that they are victims of “some sort of ethniccleansing” (77, 87).

The disturbing penultimate poem of the collection, “AnMhurúch Seo ‘gainne fó Thoinn Arís” (“Our Mermaid Goes UnderAgain”), finally releases her displacement of being “neither fishnor flesh” and “drowning in air” as the repetitive moan of a keen(151). She is:

forever singing, but singing a song that has no words.There’s this perpetual ‘ech, ech, ech, ech’ throughout the dayand the night as well, coming and going

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with the great waves of panic and consternationbreaking against her mind as she feels herself draw closerto the edge of the abyss. (149–151)

Ní Dhomhnaill’s invocation of the lament “ech,” or “some versionof ‘Woe is me’” in this context is representative of how the poetborrows from the cultural tradition of keening.2 The poem voicesthe mermaid’s keen, which rises in an appropriately repetitivewave-like moan, and it contributes to the sequence in mourningthe losses of a people through a feminized metaphor. The mer-maid’s gendered body and experience of mental illness coheresthrough the supernatural, for she is both a mythical body and anactualized female subject stripped of voice.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetic reclamation of the legendarymermaid’s lost voice exhibits the resistant power of the keen,though her work more often deals with ordinary women encoun-tering the supernatural in their everyday experience. In its invi-tation to imagine multiple worlds her subjects and speakerstransform to evade fixation, whether they are ethereal mermaidsor Irish Catholic mothers. The keen framework used in her poetryconsistently addresses a challenge to individual expressions offemale energy: that all women must negotiate their sexualityamidst the terms set for them by institutions such as govern-ment, culture, and religion. In “Lá Chéad Chomaoineach,” or “FirstCommunion” the mother of a girl receiving her communionreflects on her daughters’ indoctrination into the first of manypower structures that will constrain her individuality and sexuality.The mother begins to moan in a keen-like fashion that rivals thereligious ceremony, “[making] a holy show of us” (The AstrakhanCloak 33). Like a traditional keen, her “vex[ing]” goes beyond heranguish for the vulnerability of her child, whose rite of passage willsacrifice her to society as a “little white girl-host” destined to “wan-der alone” in a “vast / void.” It is also an expression of pain oversociety’s “latter-day foxes / and wolves–greed, drugs, cancer, skull-duggery, the car-crash,” since any of those wolves could descendupon her child like Little Red Riding Hood in the forest. As the

2The repetitive “ech” may be read as a variation on “Ochón,” or “Alas!” the mourningrefrain in a traditional Irish keen.

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keen is a vehicle for both lament and imagining outside of knownreality, both purposes offer a means to express anxiety for a younggirl joining a hegemonic religion.

Significantly, her reaction to the communion ceremony is aghostly look beyond her own mortality that evokes the terror shefeels for her daughter. The child is entering an institution thespeaker no longer trusts to take care of her: her keen imaginesher child “[wandering] alone, over my dead body.” The desolateimage she creates contradicts the supposed inclusion in commu-nity guaranteed by the rite of passage. The speaker’s framing ofthe wandering child and the ghostly mother unable to help hernavigate these new evils is an example of the ghostly metaphoroperating as a concern for both lost tradition and present dan-gers. The speaker’s acceptance of the Otherworld is characteristicof the poet’s claim of these phenomena as natural to the land-scape of the worldview she writes from. She writes, “even the dogsin West Kerry know that the ‘otherworld’ exists” (“Why I Chooseto Write in Irish” 52). Readers who accept her concept of magicwoven into everyday life are poised to recognize Irish languagepoetry as an undead tradition. Recognizing this tradition, however,requires an understanding of how supernatural myth and legendhas essentialized women, in order to expand the range of real andimaginary roles for them to inhabit.

Given that ghost and fairy lore have historically been usedagainst women to constrict them into acceptable feminine behav-ior norms, Ní Dhomhnaill adopts the same traditional figuresof Irish fairy legend and mythology to subvert its violent effects.In Angela Bourke’s interpretation of the historical circumstancessurrounding a woman’s death, The Burning of Bridget Cleary,Bourke makes the provocative claim that folkloric superstition offairy abduction was powerfully performed to cover up a ritual-ized murder of the woman in question. Bourke’s study providesa compelling foundation upon which my reading of the signifi-cance of the supernatural and keening figures in Ní Dhomhnaill’spoetry builds. Violence has often been rationalized through theaccepted folk discourse of the supernatural, and yet denial ofthat discourse translates into complicity with the colonizer’s cul-tural imperialism over the colonized. When employed to givewomen individual voices and a place in Irish history, images thathave been used to fix women in a generalized state emerge as a

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revolutionary feminist poetics. The poet addresses the risks fortransgressive women who refuse to be “indoors making strong teafor the men” in her poem “Táimid Damanta, A Dheirféaracha,” or“We Are Damned, My Sisters.” The speaker vividly imagines theviolated dead bodies of herself and other rebellious women:

The hair will be torn from our headsThe flesh flayed from our bones.They’ll find apple seeds and gooseberry skinsIn the remains of our vomitWhen we are damned, my sisters. (Rogha Dánta, 15–17)

This horrific image is juxtaposed in the poem with the joy ofwomen who “swim at night” together instead of choosing to “darnstockings”: “shrieking with delight / with the coldness of thetide / without shifts or dresses.” Thus the dangers of breaking freefrom their isolated and constraining roles are weighed against thefreedom and sisterhood of charting an alternative path.

While many poets write about death and the supernatural,for the Irish this subject matter is reflective of a cultural historysteeped in wonder tales that were guarded as contraband againstthe “civilizing” project of British colonizers. For poets writing inIrish, the imperative to reflect the tension between fantasy and thereal is embedded in the language itself. Ní Dhomhnaill’s appro-priation of folklore to bring dead images to life has a more loadedpolitical agenda in some ways, because she is writing in what manyhave deemed a “dead” language, which she significantly describesas “the corpse that sits up and talks back” (“Why I Choose to Writein Irish” 49). She invites readers to suspend their disbelief bothin the characters and narrative situations in her poetry, and inthe language she uses to convey them, with its inherent “elastic-ity” of realism (L. O’Connor). To illustrate, Ní Dhomhnaill givesan example of how the language customs invite an “intellectuallycredible attitude” towards an saol eile, or the Otherworld:

Let’s say I decide some evening to walk up to my aunt’s house in WestKerry. She hears me coming. She knows it is me because she recognizesmy step on the cement pavement. Still, as I knock lightly on the door shecalls out, “An de bheoaibh no de mhairbh thu?” (“Are you of the living or ofthe dead?”) Because the possibility exists that you could be either, and

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depending on which category you belong to, an entirely different protocolwould be brought into play. This is all a joke, of course, but a joke that ismade possible by the imaginative richness of the language itself. (53)

It seems appropriate when writing in a language perceived asdead that the poet have the ability to call forth and speak thefluid worldview of its speakers, whose language assumes psychicawareness of the presence of the undead amidst the living. For NíDhomhnaill, writing in a language dismissed even by other Irishwriters, the Otherworld is “an alternative to reality” that offers her“a great source of linguistic and imaginative playfulness” (52–53).Keeping the duality of the poet’s linguistic worlds in mind, theproject of representing the supernatural becomes inherent tocentralizing a minority language.

Ní Dhomhnaill uses a feminist model of collaboration inbringing in other Irish poets, often more well-known than she, totranslate her work. In doing so, some complain that she creates anartificial barrier between the poems and her English-only readers,who only experience the poetry through the English version withits translator’s influence. I would like to suggest instead that NíDhomhnaill’s decision to invite intermediaries to adapt her workthrough translation is evidence of her role as a medium in her ownwork. The ghosts of her poetic voice haunt English translations,but live in the “dead” Irish version. Translations are merely shad-ows of the Irish language poems they interpret, and English-onlyreaders have an acute awareness that something is irretrievablylost in translation. By returning to the source language, the poetengages with it in its dying state and resuscitates it through her art.

Feminists have long discussed how integrating voices of theminority (such as the work of a female Irish language poet) val-ues multiplicity over authority. Through this enterprise, womencan tap into a positive discourse of difference that Hélène Cixousterms “la écriture féminine” (195). Cixous describes feminine lan-guage through its impossibility to define: “it will always surpass thediscourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and willtake place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjectswho are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that noauthority can ever subjugate” (200). Female-centered language isthus outside of standard language, with its authors as “peripheral

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figures” who operate purposely from the margins. Cixous’s con-cept of the language of outsiders as a boundary-breaking feministutterance lends itself to the radical linguistic choice by Irish lan-guage writers to retain the language of their ancestors, activelymourning its absorption by English.

Ní Dhomhnaill has said that she began writing in Irish as a“mechanism for coping,” scribbling in coded Irish in her diary atboarding school because “there was no privacy” (L. O’Connor).Through the covert power of coded speech, the foundation of NíDhomhnaill’s writing is its entanglement with provocative, diffi-cult issues while remaining protectively distanced from them bytranslations. Her work is always unfixed and echoing, especiallywhen the English speaking reader encounters multiple transla-tions of the same poem. I view this as a conscious design towardsindeterminacy that foregrounds the liminality of her supernatu-ral figures. The presence of multiple translations of her poemsby famous poets points to the instability of her words in English:they may mean one thing in one translation, but in a second theytake another form entirely. Therefore, English readers are alwaysreminded that the original meaning lies in the cadence and allu-sion of the Irish language, with its meanings always written in a“code.” To read these poems in translation is to acknowledge theprofound rupture of the imperial project.

In “Focail do Théama Bhranwen,” or “Words for the BranwenTheme” Ní Dhomhnaill reframes the Welsh Celtic myth ofBranwen, daughter of Llyr and sister to the King of Britain whomarried the King of Ireland and witnessed the destruction ofboth islands in her name.3 Layers of historical friction betweenthe British and Irish congeal within the poem, contributing toNí Dhomhnaill’s purpose of representing Irish women as onlook-ers to centuries of violence. Branwen asserts, “Civil Rights were

3Branwen is given in marriage to the King of Ireland as a gesture of peace, but herbrother Efnisien’s angry response to this marriage causes Branwen to be abused by herhusband. The retaliations on both sides result in Branwen’s son Gwern, heir to the Irishthrone, thrown into the fire by Efnisien. War breaks out and all of the Irish are killedexcept five pregnant women, while seven Welsh survive to return home with Branwen andthe severed head of her other brother, King of Britain. Branwen’s original lament at thedestruction is related in the tale as: “Oi, a fab Duw! Gwae fi o’m genedigaeth. Da o ddwy ynys addiffeithwyd o’m hachos i” (“Oh Son of God, woe to me that I was born! Two fair islands havebeen laid waste because of me!”). See Ford, 29–35.

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my mother” and laments being caught between her brothermurdering her son “on account of those Penal Laws” (The WaterHorse, 13).4 The poem ends with a keen verse marked as “Chorus”:

Alas that ever I was mademy sorrow is like lead.My grief for the sacrifice of dead,and the price I have paid.

The mournful chorus begins with the familiar Irish keen lyric“ochón”: “Ochón, ochón is m’ochón ó,” but even readers outsideof the Irish tradition will recognize the mythical woman’s songof pain and grief at political murder, and the costs for womenwho must helplessly watch. In the myth Branwen dies of griefupon returning home, her life a sacrifice manifested by her kin.By including references to violent encounters between Irelandand England over centuries, Ní Dhomhnaill establishes a frame-work for the female to powerfully express resistance to thepatriarchal war apparatus.

Consequently, the keen represents an attempt by thepostcolonial Irish to absorb and contend with the characteriza-tion of strangeness that was previously used against them by thecolonizer. Without an obvious racial difference to separate theIrish as Other, the British traditionally relied on stereotypicaltraits, such as Irish sentimentality, pugnaciousness and excessiveemotion.5 David Lloyd observes nineteenth-century British dis-course projecting the Irish personality as “dangerous” because oftheir tendency to dissolve the boundary between the emotionalregisters of mourning and joy, humor and horror. He discusses

4In 1695 the British imposed the Penal Laws in Ireland, a harsh body of legislationdesigned to disempower the Roman Catholic majority by denying them the rights to wor-ship, pursue education or hold public office. These laws were viewed by Irish Catholics asgrossly unjust, and a vehement abuse of power by the British. In Ireland, the Civil Rightsmovement refers to the struggle of Catholics for equal rights in Northern Ireland, whichreached its peak in the 1960s and ‘70s, marked by violence such as the Bloody Sunday mas-sacre of peaceful protesters in 1972. Branwen’s use of these references within her own taleinvoke the savage history of oppression and the subsequent war between men who shouldact as kin.

5Matthew Arnold famously espoused these views of the Irish character. See Arnold,Matthew. On the Study of Celtic Literature. London: London, Smith, Elder & Co. 1867.

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the practice of keening and how it was isolated by the colonialpower as a “focus for discourse on the strangeness and dangersof Irish emotion” (208). Lloyd asserts that “keening became acrucial index for an emergent ethnographic discourse on theIrish national character . . . a phenomenon through which thestrangeness of Irish customs and values is articulated.” I wouldadd that the inherited tendency of contemporary literature toblur the lines between these emotions is connected with theresistant nature of Irish poetic forms like the keen, which wasseditious against formalizing power structures of church andstate. Contemporary poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill includes keen-likeutterances in her poetry as traditional literary art that respondsto social ills by adapting oral forms, resisting authority, andemploying feminist critique.

The model of lament as a creative female-dominated tradi-tion inspires a grief-driven response to communal and culturalloss or absence, a contemporary keen. For Ní Dhomhnaill, theloss and degradation of the Irish language is of critical impor-tance to her art, and her poetry is an act of bringing the undeadvividly to life. Productive reinterpretations of lament operateas an alternate form of Irish poetry reacting against the male-dominated tradition. In reshaping the energy of the keen towardsher own purposes, she transforms the female body with super-natural characteristics that offer a distinctive Otherworld agencynot available to them in Ireland, given its patriarchal and reli-gious hegemonic foundation. The normalcy of phenomena likea fairy cutting down one speaker’s tree with a Black & Deckerand striking her with a fainting fit in “An Crann” (“As For theQuince”) is playfully dismissed: “These are the times that are init, so” (Pharoah’s Daughter 39). Whether mermaids, ghosts, ban-shees or fairies, her poetry looks back through a colorful andimaginative folklore tradition, while incorporating modern ele-ments that register today’s concerns. The hybrid nature of thispoetry is a feminist strategy that allows for a freedom of expressionunbound by time, reality, or the poetic form their predecessorspracticed.

The body of the keening woman represented a crossroads ofanxieties about women, power, ritual, death, and the supernatu-ral. The keen itself became a radical form of speech in Irelandbecause its ritual challenged the solemnity of Catholic funerary

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rites, introducing intense lamentation and joy in the wake ritualsthat preceded the Catholic funeral.6 It gave no reference to theChristian afterlife and undermined the power of priests to managethe funeral ritual, placing control in the voices of the keenerswho guided the procession of the body from the deathbed to theburial, and presumably into the afterlife (Lysaght 3). In colonialIreland, Catholic hegemony was concerned with presenting thereligion as more Anglicized, less uncivilized.7 The church issuedstatements forbidding keening as “immoderate grief,” and femalekeeners whose livelihood was invested in this practice found them-selves at odds with priests at burial sites.8 Verbal clashes betweenpriests and keening women were common in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, and one physical altercation betweena priest and keeners is even recorded, when a priest whippedthe howling women and his brutality effectively ended the prac-tice in that town (68). Despite the strength of the tradition, theCatholic church eventually succeeded in eliminating the ritualfor the most part when the wake period was shortened to onenight, making it nearly impossible to engage in lamentation andfuneral games.9 If keening did become folk resistance speech bywomen clinging to pre-colonial tradition, then it maps nicely onto Ní Dhomhnaill’s work as a feminist expression of autonomy inthe face of oppressive nationalist and religious tradition. Readingher poetic images of the woman’s body as a shape-shifting, slip-pery vehicle of speech connects the body firmly to a female-ledlament at the boundary of life and death, between reality and theOtherworld.

6For a striking, classic example of an outsider observing the keening ritual, see JohnMillington Synge’s account in The Aran Islands.

7Remarkably, folklore collector Thomas Crofton Croker maintains this view of thekeen as “less civilized,” betraying the prevailing view of the practice as rooted in apre-colonial tradition that was to be abandoned (Lysaght 69). As one of the few early pre-servers of folklore, his negative characterization of the female-dominated keen embeds mycontention of its radical power as a source of poetry.

8Patricia Lysaght contributes the following details to the grounds of objection by thechurch: “Death, portrayed as an outrage, is marked by the glorification of earthly life,possessions, achievement, status and so on, and is accompanied by displays of grief con-sidered by church authorities to be ‘immoderate’ and inconsistent with Christian belief insalvation” (67).

9Funeral games were held for the dead after keening and before internment, as partof the festivities of storytelling, feasting and drinking meant to honor the life of the lovedone. Games were often athletic, featuring jumping, wrestling, and slapping; or clever, usingriddles and tricks.

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Several of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems depict a conflict betweenwomen and clergy that re-create the historical clashes mentionedabove and also lament the devastating impact of the recentCatholic church sexual abuse scandals on the collective psycheof the Irish. In these poems, the keen is depicted through thepoem’s forceful message, while the female subject’s mental pain isrendered in a silent scream. “An Mhurúch agus an Sagart Paróiste,”or “Mermaid with Parish Priest” describes the brutal abuse of amermaid who used to be sent to the parish priest with messagesin vividly repetitive language: “he pushed against her again andagain” (The Fifty Minute Mermaid 109). Her agency emerges in herself-protective refusal to go back, yet it does not stem the violence:“another little victim was sent over in her stead.” When, many yearsafter being raped, the mermaid finally tells her mother about it,

the responseshe got from her was ‘Oh, the poor priest, isn’t he a manlike any other?’ ‘Well,’ said the mermaid inwardly,‘that’s the last thing I’ll ever tell you.’And, as it happens, it was. (113)

The speaker reveals the complicity of the people in coveringup abuse and shaming survivors, shown as equally horrifyingsecondary abuses by women like the mermaid’s mother. Themother’s implied blame of her daughter over “the poor priest”results in the mermaid’s coping strategy of speaking “inwardly”from then on. Like the mermaid in the Hans Christian Andersonlegend she loses her voice, but the speaker channels her silencedlanguage and thus re-values her story as a testimony of regret andanguish.

It is critical to note that the keen is evidence of a matri-archal role in the rural Irish community that existed outside ofreligious and colonial power structures, indeed beyond them intothe afterlife. Lysaght explains the powerful position women heldas artists of the keen: “The pivotal role of the lamenting womanis also evident as she presides over the public lamentation event. . . she joins the whole mourning group in the public expressionof sorrow and grief” (75). Gail Holst-Warhaft also contributes anunderstanding of how the keen fits into feminist tradition:

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The prominent part played by women in the rituals for the dead wasundoubtedly one reason for the controversy that surrounded them. . . .

the funeral was a site where women exercised a traditional and unusualauthority. As handlers of the corpse and chief mourners they were alreadykey players in the rituals that surrounded death, and their participation in“obscene” wake games was a natural extension of this prominence. (63–64)

Thus the performance of the keen ritual, in its abrasion withpatriarchal authority, aligns it with a structure of communicationthat celebrates women’s literal and figurative cries against oppres-sive censorship and exploitation. Essentially, the contemporaryartistic forms of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry that celebrate the spacebetween death and life and speak about inexpressible loss arefeminist structures of speech, derived from the keening tradition.

The Irish keen is a model of a collaborative process; multiplewomen would take turns taking up the wailing and moaning inimpromptu performance. In common belief, the corpse retainedthe ability to hear until the third shovel of dirt hit the coffin,thus the amplified multiple voices of the keeners were necessaryto guide the person into a new state of being as the ancestraldead (Lysaght 69). Their task was to express and contain griefwithin the prescribed period, bringing the community closurethrough emphatic exposure to the sounds of painful mourning.Thus the keeners were responsible for a public duty of custom,ushering the body of the loved one into the otherworld andsmoothing the passage of transition for both the dead person andthe living loved ones. As a prominent example of women’s speechas oral performance, with the added facets of collaborative andcommunity-renewing art, the keen offers an exciting model for afemale-centered poetics.

The selective forgetting of the keen, which was largelyunrecorded due to its dismissal as a woman’s poetic form, demon-strates a painful amnesia that Ní Dhomhnaill seeks to redressspecifically and obliquely in her poetry. Feminist theorist JudithButler writes in Bodies that Matter that “The ‘form’ that commu-nity takes in response to literature coheres only by excludingfrom its total vision certain exceptions, certain bodies that becausethey are visible only as ‘matter’, ‘ground’, ‘not-spirit’ do not mat-ter sufficiently to include them in the form of community” (54).As exceptional bodies that “do not matter” to the poetic traditionbefore them except as ethereal muses embodying the nation itself,

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the individualized and ordinary women in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetryare celebrated in their boundary-straddling bodies. Female poetscognizant of their absence in literary tradition assert that unre-ality is the space they will claim, re-visioning the female body aspowerful through its invisibility.

Ní Dhomhnaill directly addresses the loss of Irish traditionssuch as the ritual of keening in her poetry. Humor and absurdityabound in her poems, inverting to convey the collective forgettingof the past that she reminds readers of through ghosts. In “Oscailtan Tuama,” or “Opening the Tomb,” the accidental exhumationof the speaker’s great-grandmother’s body is a joyous and mean-ingful occasion that brings the community together. The speakerrelates the woman’s emergence from the grave she entered whenshe died a hundred years ago, upon bearing her third child:

The old woman sat up,As alive, as lively, as pleased with lifeAs the best day she’d ever been. (The Water Horse 77)

The living corpse banters with the oldest man in the group abouther looks since death, joking that “You’re no spring chicken your-self,” and establishing her character as a jovial spirit. A partycommences for “the wonder” of the woman’s visit back from thedead, but it is short-lived; in a clever reverse of the Christian res-urrection she must go back into the tomb on the third day. Thewoman warns that no speck of dirt or dust may touch her tombwhen she re-enters, or:

This world would get possessionOf the placeAnd all it containedWould rot away. (79)

If she is sealed as instructed, she will remain preserved in an alter-nate space and able to potentially participate in future parties,both in the human world and within the world of the dead. Beforereturning to the ground, she demands that the traditional funeralrites, including the controversial keen, be observed for this burial.The dead woman asks her relatives:

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To sit on a hilltopTo raise three shouts of praise,To make her lamentation,Long and musical

After participating in the celebration of her own wake with a joy-ous disorder that probably was not accorded the first time, theghost requests that her relatives lament her properly, and thatthey hold “The Great Mother’s Funeral Games” every year to cel-ebrate her spirit (81). Ní Dhomhnaill’s suggestion that the voicedmourning of death be tempered with the joy of a group festivalcalls for a reinvigoration of Irish funerary traditions that havesince been discarded. The ghost comes back to remind her rel-atives that death is a rite of passage to be celebrated with joyand sorrow, that both the keen and the wake-games previouslypracticed served a communal purpose. Notably she does not askfor Catholic funeral rites, but a return to woman-centered folktradition.

The Irish keen tradition includes both the lamentations ofearthly women and the shrieks of the banshee, a supernaturalharbinger of death. Ní Dhomhnaill presents the banshee in apositive light that reclaims her as a model of female speech,whose power to travel the space between life and death shouldbe revered. In the poem “Deora Duibhshleibhe,” or “Dora Dooley,”the narrator is inspired by a “weird light off the bay” to imag-ine an encounter with the modern-day banshee of the area, DoraDooley, on her way to keen for the Fitzgeralds of Murrargane (TheAstrakhan Cloak 47). The banshee’s keen, reserved for certain oldand high-ranking Irish and Norman families, is a harbinger ofdeath for a member of that family, and the ghostly death messen-ger would normally be regarded with fear and wonder. She servesa necessary social function for the grieving and is representativeof nationalism, since her cry can only be heard in Ireland by thosechosen to hear it. Erosion of folk tradition, a by-product of colo-nialism and globalization, has relegated the banshee to the realmof forgotten Irish spirits. However, her figuration as a terrifying,mourning woman resonates with believers and situates her as a sitefor contest. Her presence in the poem acts as a coping mechanismfor mitigating the lingering effects of colonialism.

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Rather than run the opposite way as most people would, thenarrator hopes that if she met Dora Dooley she would:

[ . . . ] have the witand the presence of mindto ask her if she happens to knowwhat it would take to lift the spellon the sunken fortthat lies here under the sea-swellwith this weird light hanging over itlike an incomplete rainbow. (47)

Her desire to engage in close, “girl-talk” conversation with themysterious woman, to borrow her magic for lifting the spell ona fairy fort suggests the narrator’s psychological movement fromthe rational world to the supernatural, like her imagined delvinginto a “sunken fort.” Instead of avoiding the banshee, the narratorimagines beckoning her closer and finding out her secrets. She isintrigued and attracted to the “weird light,” evidenced by the rep-etition of the incongruous image of the “incomplete rainbow.” Incommon folklore tales the fairy mound contained an underworldwhere fairies would live (and even harbor abducted humans) ina lacuna outside of time. Jacqueline Fulmer summarizes that ref-erences to forts or mounds in tales of the fairies often describethem as “entry points to the Underworld of supernatural beingsof human-like appearance. The human dead sometimes end upin this world, and on rare occasion in the tales, return.” In thisunderground location fairies were often indistinguishable fromthe dead, and the speaker’s awareness of the fort suggests thatshe has an affinity with spirits beyond the grave. Throughout herbody of work, Ní Dhomhnaill values the voices of speakers withthis awareness.

The potential for female collaboration with Dora Dooley ispowerful, but the speaker pulls back from her fantasy, recognizingthat she would probably just “give her a wave” like she would to anyother old woman on the road. Both the banshee and the speakerare presumably extra-sensory, perceptive to otherworldly spiritsand the dead, and there is a suggestion that this psychic kinshipcould continue beyond a shared moment on the street. Lysaghtexplains that as the family messenger of death, the banshee was

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believed to be “‘one of your own’ coming to announce death,and to accompany you, as it were, across the great divide intothe company of your ancestors” (243). Thus she acts as a bridgebetween the worlds of the living and the dead. She also representsdeath as a “communal concern” and provides her community withadvance notice to unite and mourn the loss of a member (150).That the speaker imagines a kinship with this facilitator of collec-tive mourning suggests that women must look beyond availablerealist narratives that tend to employ an individualist understand-ing of the world non-native to the tradition of the island. As analternative, the banshee myth offers images reflective of commu-nal interdependence and management of grief, with women at thecenter of a shared belief system.

The banshee is a figure who is part woman, part ghost. In herappearance and behavior, often depicted as wailing and tearingher hair, she mirrors human keening women (bean chaointe) ofIrish funeral tradition (33). Lysaght notes that many thought thebanshee was a ghost, whose “unrest is a result of rights deniedto the woman who then becomes a death-messenger or it is theresult of her own unjust or improper actions or negligence whenshe was alive” (47). With a foot in both worlds, the banshee isboth a local woman and a legendary figure embodying a dualitythat intrigues the speaker in the poem. Dora Dooley appears as achic contemporary woman, wearing what translator Paul Muldooncreatively interprets as a cloak of “green astrakhan” (a pun on theIrish word for translation, aístruichán) and carrying a Chihuahualap-dog. She embodies a hybrid of past and present associations.10

The poem’s final equation of Dora Dooley with “a little, old,local lady” she passed by demystifies the banshee’s power becausein this speaker’s mind the encounter would be the same; she willnever know her secrets. Despite an inability to fully access thebanshee’s magic, however, the narrator’s desire to connect withher represents an attraction to the world of the past that thebanshee represents. As Lysaght explains, belief in the banshee

10Astrakhan, named for a region in Russia, is a contemporary term for a fur made outof newborn or fetal lambs, which looks like a brocade or crushed velvet. This fur wouldhave primarily been used only for a black funeral coat, but Muldoon’s clever appropri-ation of the word “astrakhan” for the fabric of her green cloak begs associations withCathleen ní Houlihan in a green cloak symbolizing Ireland, while simultaneously rep-resenting death. This cosmopolitan banshee also carries a lap-dog that is non-native toIreland, the Chihuahua, demonstrating a globalized sophistication that updates her image.

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dropped sharply after electricity became common in Ireland,specifically after 1961 with the advent of television and telephones.Once people could be notified by phone that a loved one haddied, the social necessity of the banshee myth dissipated. Sheexplains, “The old custom of visiting the neighbors at night—the rambling, bothantaiocht, scoraiocht, etc. was abandoned. It wasexactly in this setting that the talk would so often turn to super-natural experiences and where those who had them were givenopportunities to convince those who were young and weak in theirfaith” (234).11 Abandonment of storytelling undermined the oralculture, and the banshee lost her relevance. The narrator’s imag-ined colloquy with Dora Dooley would therefore be a meetingof two women who are connected by a mutual investment in thedying oral culture and belief in the fairies.

Patrick Byrne’s collection Irish Ghost Stories also includes sto-ries of the banshee, in which he notes that the banshee wasoriginally a beautiful woman of the fairies (sidhe bhean) who onlylater became known as an old hag. He comments, “Perhaps it wasyears of persecution by Danes and English that turned the bansheeinto a withered, screeching hag, combing her tousled hair with abroken comb” (32). Byrne’s wry suggestion that the banshee mythwas corrupted by British influence is reflected in an increasinglynegative impression of the spirit as a symbol of death. This is theopposite view from that of Ní Dhomhnaill, in which the bansheeis a positive symbol of communal belief, a source of knowledge,and a necessary bridge between earthly beings and the afterlife.The value she places on this rescued ghost figure in her poetry isindicative of a strategy that works to reverse colonial damage usingimages from old myths.

Ní Dhomhnaill also contends with the fixed image of the eter-nally young and beautiful woman often found in the poems ofmale Irish poets by tapping into what she calls “hag energy,” anelemental vision of womanhood that predates and thus circum-vents stifling myths associated with patriarchal cultures (“Mis andDubh Ruis” 194). Irene Gilsenan Nordin explores the troublingconnection of the Irish hag figure to the real aging woman: “Themyth of the renewable earth as old hag who transforms into a

11The Irish words “bothantaiocht” and “scoraiocht” refer respectively to the practice ofvisiting houses for pastime or gossip, or enjoying a social evening.

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young queen leaves little room in traditional Irish poetry for awoman’s natural aging process . . . ” (9). Ní Dhomhnaill bemoansthis contradiction and mobilizes the formidable specter of theaging woman as angry and desirous of reckoning past wrongs inseveral poems. In “Eithne Uathach” or “Eithne the Hun,” the asso-ciation of the mythological Eithne as a Hun suggests that she isa barbaric invader, descended from a line of savage people whowere known to slash their sons’ faces on the first day of life so thatthey felt pain and bore scars before tasting their first milk. Yet thetitle character of this poem is portrayed somewhat sympathetically;she “figured children were for eating” simply because the Munstertribe she was raised in fed her “the fatted flesh of youngsters” ina plan to divest her of her land (The Water Horse 37). The men ofthe tribe intended “to bring on her menarche” and marry her to asacrificial lamb who would turn over her property. Eithne’s angeris in her blood and stomach; the men are no match for her rage.

Ní Dhomhnaill makes a sharp turn from a mythological storyabout an ancient woman into more recent politics by describingthe unintended result of the monster they created, who continuesher bloody habit of devouring “youngsters”:

but the lamb must still be waitingto be led to the altarby the mess they’ve just madeof those three in Gibraltar. (37)

The poet aligns the child-eating Eithne (who comes from a lineof savage invaders) with the British government’s handling of thedeaths of Seán Savage, Máiréad Farrell, and Dan McCann, whowere killed on March 6, 1988 by British soldiers on suspicionof detonating a bomb on British-held Gibraltar. Eithne’s unstop-pable consumption of young people is likened to the British roleduring “the Troubles” in the conflict in Northern Ireland. Theplan to stop her violence aligns with her transformation into afrightening hag, forcing her to begin menopause “before she waswell ready” to age her body beyond bearing heirs. Ní Dhomhnaill’smanipulation of the terrifying hag figure, whose story does notend with her containment in marriage, shows that violence begetsviolence no matter if the motivation is noble or malicious. Theassumption that menopause will render Eithne docile is disproved

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when the Hun continues to hunt down and consume children.The speaker in the poem is ambivalent about whether the deathsof the innocent will cease, but she mourns them through themythological framework. Ní Dhomhnaill intimates a deep invest-ment in the potency of hag energy when she insists that her poetryis intended to describe the horror and humor of the world, play-fully warning that “I feel I’m still only scratching the surface, andthat if I die without doing it I’ll come back and haunt you all—not in a positive way, either” (L. O’Connor). The threat of thesupernatural woman’s monstrous capacity to terrorize is thus alle-gorized by the poet as a representation of women’s anger andsadness at the horror of passively observing injustice.

The keen offers a metaphor for how Ní Dhomhnaill hasinvited readers to move beyond colonial approaches to construct-ing national identity by recovering elements of Irish tradition andbringing them into the present. It is both a lament for what is lostand a powerful stay against forgetting the healing power of rit-ual. The Irish worldview, expressed through the contested voice ofthe performance of keening, accommodates an Otherworld thatis parallel to the real world. In contrast, the Western worldviewinherited by the colonies emphasizes rational discourse and a rigiddistinction between fantasy and reality. Nira Yuval-Davis has the-orized that in the ongoing process of nation-formation “womensystematically play the roles of biological and symbolic reproduc-ers of their imaginary communities, resulting in their subsequentmarginalization in the systems of reproduction” (27). By enactingthe role of keening women who embodied a connection betweenthe worlds of the living and the dead, female poets expose thedifficulties of this role of “biological and symbolic reproducers.”Their work imagines figures into poetry who transcend the overde-termined female body by embracing the supernatural qualities ofthe marginalized roles assigned to women in nationalist discourse.Women’s mediating role in the process of death maintains a con-nection between reality and the fantastic rather than acceptingdisjuncture at the point of death. Linguistically and metaphor-ically, Ní Dhomhnaill celebrates the transgression inherent inexpanding the limits of the expected translation of experience.

The most complete surviving keen poem in existence,“Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire” or “The Lament for Art O’Leary” byEibhlin Ní Chonaill depicts many of the same rhetorical strate-gies Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill borrows from the keening tradition.

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In it, the wife mourns, humorously berates, imagines and argueswith a ghost, tears at her hair and even drinks the blood of herbeloved in the madness of grief (Lysaght 73). She straddles theworld of the living and the dead, worrying for her own futurewithout her husband by praising his life and begging his corpsenot to leave her. The public duty of performing lament also cod-ifies the community by presenting a collective response to loss.Ní Dhomhnaill’s work exhibits contemporary adaptations of eachof these traditional moves in her depictions of women as spiritmediums and shape-shifting bodies who draw power from theirmarginality. Her poetry takes an inventive approach, constructingdaring utterances that challenge national and patriarchal systemsof value and agency. Identifying the ghostly female figures in thepoetry of contemporary Irish artists within a framework of invisi-bility and loss is essential. Feminists must continue to assess howfemale poets have worked both within and without a tradition thathas historically excluded them.

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The Subversion of Supernatural Lament in the Poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

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