Clodagh Finn: Book of the year underlines the need to give women’s words a worthy place

'How much has changed. How little,' writes Doireann Ní Ghríofa in her award-winning 'A Ghost in the Throat'. That line sharpened a longing for the world to be sung into existence by a female voice

Doireann Ní Ghríofa, An Post Irish book of the year winner for 'A Ghost in the Throat'. She is part poet and part seer. Picture Clare Keogh

I long for the whipping wind on Kerry Head and, like so many others planning Christmas trips, I’m counting the days until we can travel outside our counties again (two more sleeps).

I want to stand on the headland with the ruins of St Dahalin’s church at my back and look north towards Clare where another female saint reputedly walked on water to gain entry to the monastery on Scattery Island in the Shannon Estuary. St Senan, keeper of the all-male holy site, wasn’t having any of it, but then, neither was Saint Canaire.

When she was refused entry, she said this: “Where did you get that arrangement? Christ… came to redeem women no less than to redeem men… Women then, no less than men, enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Why, then, would you not take women to you onto your island?”

“You are stubborn,” he responded, but he did eventually admit her to the sacred island, granting her wish to die and be buried there.

The wonderful exchange is recorded in Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore and it is one of the few, glorious examples where we can hear the voices of early Irish women echoing down to us through the centuries.

I think of her words now because I can’t wait to leave the Covid-restricted capital city and venture into the haunted landscape of my native Kerry.

There is another reason too. The words of this talking early Irish female saint came to mind last week following news that Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s exquisite book A Ghost in the Throat was named An Post Irish Book of the Year 2020.

It is a measure of her dazzling talent that this book, which weaves her own experience of motherhood with the life of 18th-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, impressed both judges and the voting general public.

But it is also, perhaps, a measure of something else. In the early pages, Ní Ghríofa writes: “This is a female text, written in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little.”

That sentence ricocheted through every cell in my body. It sharpened in me — and many others too, it seems — a longing for the world to be sung into existence by a female voice. Ní Ghríofa does not disappoint. She writes the drudge-work of motherhood on to the pages in an exceptional way; not glamourising it, but validating it.

Too often, the daily humdrum of nurturing small children is glossed over precisely because it is daily and humdrum. Yet, it is a day-to-day reality for millions of women, and men, and it is almost revelatory to see it described so hypnotically and poetically in all its messy wonder.

None of us would be here without that vital but consistently undervalued work, but how often we forget it. Or simply ignore it, pretending that it takes place in some kind of parallel universe.

What does it say about our country, for instance, that there is no provision for maternity leave for our elected representatives?

It is strangely appropriate that Justice Minister Helen McEntee has brought that glaring injustice into sharp focus with the happy news of her own pregnancy, but it is shocking that she will become the first senior Cabinet minister to give birth while in office.

Now, at least, there is a willingness to change that and do so quickly. There is talk of constitutional change and bills to allow for maternity leave and remote voting. But, as Ní Ghríofa might say, how late it is. And how discouraging it is to see the difficulties that continue to face women who dare to venture into places where decisions are made.

Nevertheless, as we have seen time and again, those difficulties do not stop Irish women getting things done. Ní Ghríofa herself is a case in point. In interviews, she speaks about how she eked out slices of time as a mother to four children under six to write a book that has touched so many.

After dropping them off at school, she sat in her car, parked on the roof of a carpark, to write not only her own story but that of another woman, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.

Working from Eibhlín Dubh’s famous poem, 'Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire', and her own research, the author manages to get closer to this historic woman than any other person has ever done before. Or so it seemed to this reader who punched the air at a writer’s ability to look at yet another partial account of a woman’s life and coax a new and exciting narrative from it.

Her account is so vivid that we are almost there, with the pregnant Eibhlín Dubh on horseback, when she comes upon the body of her murdered husband and is so overcome with grief that she scoops up his blood and drinks it.

As is so often the case, there was little to work from. Eibhlín Dubh, like so many other Irish women’s lives, had been reduced to “the same thin particulars: wife of Art O’Leary; aunt of Daniel O’Connell,” as Ní Ghríofa put it. “How I wish that someone thought more women’s words worthy of a place,” she has said.

All the same, her lifelong fascination with this woman — “when we first met, I was a child and she had been dead for centuries” — has offered us an unrivalled female text that allows us to imagine that much more is possible.

This book is exceptional, not least because it is written by a woman with a singular talent; she is part poet and part seer. Few will be able to engage as she does but what her book shows us is the lack of balance in our narratives, past and present.

A Ghost in the Throat is, or could be, a rallying cry to write a much-needed female text to describe the experience of women’s lives in all of their often-unrecorded richness.

It will certainly inform my next visit to Kerry Head when I will remember the words of one Irish female saint who spoke up so forcefully in the early church and recall another, Dahalin, whose words have not echoed down through time, but whose deeds have. The story of how she blinded a group of raiders intent on plundering her church is remembered even now, some 15 centuries after it was said to have happened.

There are several wonderful local versions of how she later took pity on the attackers and restored their sight by telling them to wash their eyes in the local well, Tobar na Súl (the Well of the Eyes). People go there still in search of cures.

I’ll be going there this year hoping that our collective eyes will be opened to the importance of reclaiming and writing female texts. In the meantime, A Ghost in the Throat is there to show us how vital that is.