A Ghost in the Throat

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

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. Where it fell short for me was in the dogged pursuit of a vague historical personage, Eibhlín Dubh, and the search for a worthy English translation of the mournful Irish elegy attributed to her. I gradually lost interest in both these narrative threads. I cared about the book's author but not her personal obsession. I would gladly read more from Ní Ghríofa in the future, though, especially her own poetry.This is how this begins, but there’s so much more to her story that is about love and sacrifice, marriage, children and family, re-discovering oneself, passion, life, and more.

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. An ocean before sunrise churns vast and vivid with countless individual ripples, each in its own momentum. In the half- light beyond the beach, a farmyard grows hectic, with horses nuzzling oats, eggs finding fists, and milk tumbling from udders, hiss by hot hiss. Inside the house, a girl strides into the parlour and kneels to yesterday’s rubble- coals. Ash dances to her breath, and below, three embers begin to glow. From the kitchen, the smell of bread lifts, smooth white rolls speaking careful English for the family, brown loaves laughing in Irish for everyone else. Through each room lilts an excited murmuring, for today the woman of the house, Máire Ní Dhonnabháin Dhubh, is in labour. I make myself a life in which whenever I let myself sit, it is to emit pale syllables of milk, while sipping my own dark sustenance from ink. Sometimes writing has a kind of talismanic force drawing us into the past so that we feel enlivened and profoundly connected to the sensibility found in the text. “A Ghost in the Throat” is a book dedicated to such an experience. It's part memoir, part exercise in fiction and part process of translation. Doireann Ni Ghriofa meditates upon the life and writing of Eibhlin Dubh, an 18th century poet and member of the Irish gentry. After her husband's murder, Dubh composed the ‘Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire' which is a long poem or dirge that is a visceral cry for this agonising loss which still feels painfully real centuries later. Ghriofa connects to this voice and it fills her imagination as she goes about her days caring for her children. She sets out to translate the poem from the Gaelic into English but is also drawn into researching and recreating what can be traced of Eibhlin Dubh's life since little is known about what happened to her following her husband Art's murder except through the recorded history of her children and their progeny. The caoineadh wasn't originally written down but orally passed along over time until it was eventually set to paper so the text is also imbued with the lives of all who've spoken it. Ghriofa meaningfully describes how this makes it a uniquely “female text” and how the state of motherhood physically connects her to a wider sense of women's history. It's extremely moving how Ghriofa describes the way Dubh becomes such a strong presence in her life and how that connection is transformative.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. Shortlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2021 and I won't mind if it wins.