A Ghost in the Throat

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A Ghost in the Throat is a colloquialism, and Ní Ghríofa is fascinated by the traditions of old, revelling in her discovery of ancient words and expressions. Another direct link to the past. is a refrain throughout this book... but what does that mean? That the inset caoineadh or keen which is the subject of the narrator's interest and the text that she translates from Gaelic is composed by a woman? (I'm not sure we have evidence of that). Or that it is ventriloquising a woman's voice?** (a more likely and common position in literature before the nineteenth century). That it expresses the emotions of women across time who have lost a beloved husband for political reasons? That women have, conventionally, been written out of both history and, largely, from literary history and that this is an act of feminist recuperation? Or that the framing story which is written by a female author and told via a female narrator is 'a woman's text' - though, I'd say, it expresses one very traditional construction of femininity which is almost totally bound up in motherhood, a rather limiting position, surely, for 2020 when, finally, women are starting to speak out about not having a so-called 'maternal instinct' and embracing other options for being.

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 a female text, which is also a caoineadh: a dirge and a drudge-song, an anthem of praise, a chant and a keen, a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn. Join in.’ She’s less confident when it comes to delving into archives. “I am merely a woman who loves this poem,” she says. But she also happens to be a published poet, and when it comes to prose, is incapable of delivering a dud sentence. This is a text that glints with treasures, from ruminations on the connections between “stanza” and the Italian word for room, to descriptions of “a shiver-bright day” and the “buttery hellos” of nodding daffodils.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. An invitation to get quiet, very quiet, and listen to the voices of the past as they beat furiously like a heart in the midst of our days. As they flutter like ghosts in all of our throats.

Doireann has achieved something wholly original here. Stitching together a number of genres, AGITT tells the stories of two women; Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill and Doireann Ní Ghríofa herself. Tracing Eibhlín through her murky past, Doireann does so much more than map her life, she embraces it, mystery and all. At the same time Doireann writes of her own life with language that is so beautiful I found myself rereading sentences three or four times, memorising word after word. 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.’

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 honestly don't think I have the right type of critical, analysing mind to talk about this book properly in the way it deserves but all I can say is, it's a masterpiece. 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” This is also a book about motherhood and the giving and sacrifice involved – a U2 song (which the author hates but cannot dislodge) and its lyric of “you given yourself away” captures this idea and the narrator’s wider interest in sacrifice (the book starts for example with her pumping breast milk for premature babies – something which later takes on a much greater meaning for her; she continues to breast feed her daughter until almost forced to give up; she riffs on the Rapunzel Foundation – where girls grow their hair long before donating their ponytails to make wigs for those with hair loss). The translation of the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire used in the book is by Doireann Ní Ghríofa herself.