“This is a Female text”: The Mediumship of Creative Histories in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat

Introduction

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat begins as “an unscientific mishmash of daydream and fact, concocted while scraping porridge gloop into a bin” (75). It is a text produced by living with a text, a situation where body and page, domestic and literary, other and self, become inextricably intertwined by experiences of reading and writing. Ghost charts Ní Ghríofa’s obsession with the eighteenth-century author of Ireland’s most famous caoineadh, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire: Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Touched by Ní Chonaill’s expression of grief following the murder of her husband, and incensed by her near-total absence from the historical record, Ní Ghríofa’s narrator embarks on a mission of repossession.¹ She pursues the poet’s ghost in scant traces – the words, children, objects, and landscapes she left behind – in the hope that she might collect these fragments and “imagine extrapolating a whole from [them], unbroken and vivid” (209). Ghost directly confronts the conspicuous absence of the female voice within the historical record, a lack which many researchers of women’s studies will be all too familiar with. This article explores how a project such as Ní Ghríofa’s thus necessitates a very different kind of research, one involving entry into the lacunae of liminal space hidden below male-authored texts. The openings which these gaps offer become spaces in which to remember, remake, and reimagine differently. In diving into these gaps at the intersection of history and women’s experiences, the article seeks to contribute a nuanced examination of domestic labor, embodied epistemology, and the multifaceted nature of women’s collective experiences. It hopes to reveal the transformative power of creative mediums in reclaiming such silenced voices, whilst also emphasizing ethical considerations on collaborative storytelling within feminist scholarship.

Different mediums: The Caoineadh

A caoineadh was an oral expression of grief performed primarily by women, from the seventh century until the beginning of the twentieth. A central element of Irish death rituals, the caoineadh occupied “a liminal position between poem and song,” functioning to help individuals and communities process crises associated with death (Brady 59). Originally an oral tradition, the caoineadh’s performance of grief – often including insensible screams, chest beating, and wailing – was one which gestured to the unspeakability of the mourning experience. More than that, it allowed women to “make political points under the guise of personal grief,” which entailed “taking possession of space and demanding attention, as much as arranging words in order” (Bourke 1366).

As a literary form, it has become symbolic of what Andrea Brady describes as “a commitment to indigenous religion and culture and resistance to colonial repression” (61). British colonial rule resulted in a blanket suppression of Irish language and culture, including any pre-Christian pagan rituals like the caoineadh and other keening traditions (Brady 60). Women, once the main performers of the caoineadh, were “systematically silenced by the combined might of church and state and relegated to the status of passive onlookers in all aspects of social life, including funerary rites” (Ní Éigeartaigh, “Performing Grief” 220).

Poignantly, keeners were also long associated with the supernatural figure of the Banshee, a ghostly female spirit in Irish folklore, whose violent keening was supposedly a harbinger of death (“Banshee”). The Banshee serves a mediating role between life and death, a liminal figure whose perspective is always outside, always other. Such ghostly entities act as voices for the voiceless: “whenever history falls silent before inexplicable horror or injustice, the ghost embodies the haunting presence of the silent, invisible victims from that past” (Ramos 50). As Molly Ferguson suggests, Banshees thus remind Irish women writers to think outside of the realist – often colonial and phallocentric – narratives that try to “circumscribe their perspectives,” and invite them to “imagine multiple worlds” where “subjects and speakers transform to evade fixation” (648).

The Banshees’ act of haunting also has profound implications for notions of linear time – it reveals time to be interwoven, folded, and layered. David Coughlan, informed by Jacques Derrida, says a ghost “begins by coming back … so that every future appearance is a reappearance, and every arrival is a return” (3). Essentially, the voice of the specter or Banshee can intrude at any time to disrupt an accepted narrative in the same way a text is never limited by its creator, but rather is “always haunted by the other and open to being reworked by the other” (Coughlan 3–4). This is particularly relevant to Ghost as one of its central threads is Ní Ghríofa’s attempted translation of the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire into English. There is, however, always a sense that there is something lacking in the efforts of translation, and indeed it is because of her dissatisfaction with other translations that Ní Ghríofa embarks in her own effort.

Due to the physicality of the caoineadh performance, much of its lived-in, extra-literary significance was lost when it stopped being practiced. Modern readers can access caoineadhs only through textual iterations, reducing that which is “performative and constantly changing” into a “single, authoritative text” (Marren 49). To transcribe such a performance necessarily limits its flexibility and liminality, imposing a static form on a tradition which was intended to be able to evolve (Ní Éigeartaigh, “Performing Grief” 221). Ní Ghríofa maps the transition “from voice to hand to paper,” lamenting that

a body holds so much beyond the visible. Before it was ever transcribed or translated, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire was preserved in oral folklore, reverberating through a succession of female bodies, from female mouth to female ear, over years and years and years. (41)

The caoineadh’s attention to an embodied epistemology, a method of transmitting knowledge through recitation and repetition, is posited by Ní Ghríofa as a way of living with and keeping a text alive within a body.

Like the Banshee and caoineadh, Ní Ghríofa, as an Irish language translator, also occupies a liminal space between languages which transforms her into a mediator between different versions of texts and between pasts and presents. In the endless versionality of translation, meaning is never fixed, never fully dead: the translator becomes a medium through which the “voices of the dead are kept alive in the present” and each articulation becomes a space where multiple voices fuse together, adding new meanings and interpretations (Ní Éigeartaigh, “Transforming Trauma” 37). And just as the translator and Banshee are the medium between dead and living, so too is the poet. As Margaret Atwood writes, the poet is shamanistic, “double natured” – able to visit the world of the dead and return to tell the tale (173). “All writers learn from the dead,” she says, “the dead get blood, the poet gets clairvoyance, it’s an old arrangement” (Atwood 174). In the same vein, Ní Ghríofa often employs occult language, adopting a certain oracular attitude in her search for the long-dead poet. She sees omens and signs everywhere: on coming across a “blue-green rock, fist-sized, split by three intersecting bands of quartz,” she writes, “I choose to read it as an omen, a metaphor for intersecting existences, a sign that the three women I follow once walked here too” (89). This method of reading – of reading as scrying – has something of the paranoiac and something of the pagan in equal measure; pointedly, both are motivated by a desire to pick out meaning, causality, and patterns from the “stuff” of reality. But Ní Ghríofa does not employ a clairvoyant lexis unconsciously; indeed, she asks, “what is an omen if not a translation of the past to fit a new form?” (193). By integrating this way of “reading the world” with her historical research, Ní Ghríofa offers the reader an alternative mode of reading, a method outside of reason and phallogocentric certainty, one more open to the world’s magic.² As fellow poet Rebecca Tamas says, “poetry, like the occult, embraces the necessary irrationality that exists squashed up against rationality in the material world. It does not reject the rational, but it does extract what else is there, the elements which don’t fit” (1).

Just as Atwood nods to the longstanding “shamanistic role of the writer,” so too does Ghost exemplify the magical nature of the literary medium (175). When listening to the caoineadh for the first time as a schoolgirl, Ghost’s narrator describes how recitation can conjure another time: “Her voice makes it a fine day in 1773 … . Her voice generates an echo strong enough to reach a girl in the distance with dark hair and bitten nails. Me” (17). The distance of time here becomes spatial, and it is the voice – the animated breath of recitation – which conjures the scene, not disembodied text. A spell is cast: words spoken aloud are thrown out across distance like a hook and line. Using the caoineadh as this line, Ní Ghríofa adopts the role of a medium who can hear the silenced voices of history’s oppressed – represented by her repeated references to “echoes” – adopting this role as a poet, as one who can “descend to where the stories are kept” and bring them back to the land of the living, allowing them to “enter time once more – which means to enter the realm of the audience, of readers, and of change” (Atwood 174).

Ghost posits practicing keening traditions as an act of resistance, one specifically located within the female body. As a form which recenters on the body, rejects phallogocentric ideas of canon and archive, prioritizes the liminal and fluid, and grants agency back to female voices, the caoineadh is reclaimed as a form of radical resistance for contemporary Irish women writers.

Gaps in the body of the text

Ghost opens with scenes of erasure – the narrator crossing off lists of domestic chores, only to write a new list to erase the next day – reflecting the elisions which permeate the history of the Irish female experience.³ Ní Ghríofa, a poet and a mother, is caught between identities and, in an effort to avoid confronting this schism, loses herself in domestic work: “I make myself so busy chasing lists that I never need to look beyond the rooms through which I hurry … . I don’t examine the face reflected in the mirrors I polish so hastily (33). She spends her brief moments of rest pumping breast milk and reading her “scruffy photocopy of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, inviting the voice of another woman to haunt my throat a while” (16). As she reads, she writes in the margin, so that her “pencil enters a dialogue with many previous versions” of herself, creating “a changeable record of thought in which each question mark asks about the life of the poet … but never questions” her own (16).

Ní Ghríofa becomes haunted by more than the dead poet. The lyrics “and you give yourself away” repeat through her prose like a spell-song, an uncanny hybrid sentence of active and passive. To be a medium or conduit for another’s voice, for a developing fetus, for a family unit, for a reader, is also an uncanny mix of active and passive. As Adam Plunkett asserts, in the process of writing, one is “bombarded by other voices,” so that you “kind of don’t have a self now” (1). Ní Ghríofa knows that “there is a peculiar contentment to be found in absenting oneself like this, subsumed in the needs of others,” but she is also aware of the dangers of giving the self away (38). She recounts instances from early adulthood when she drank too much and suffered from poor mental health, how she “only felt like myself when I saw want in a stranger’s eyes,” how it “felt good to be carried elsewhere” (107). In the same paragraph, this once ecstatic elsewhere becomes ominous, defined by “a cold surge” and a dangerous absenteeism of self: “I wasn’t in the room the morning after I tried to give my body to the river. I wasn’t in the room. I had left” (108).

Now, in the present of the text, she notes how “I have made an invisibility of myself, neatly concealed in rooms made by female labour and repetition and milk” (214). This instance, less extreme though still deeply moving, reflects the invisibility of Eibhlin Dubh and the long line of history’s forgotten women. But, instead of letting this weigh her down, Ní Ghríofa is able to locate her own trauma within “a continuum of women who experienced huge grief but also transcended it by vocalising and thus reclaiming their subjectivities” (Ní Éigeartaigh, “Transforming Trauma” 35). Where Ní Ghríofa had once used the caoineadh as a means of self-erasure to avoid scrutinizing herself, she now starts to see resonances between her own invisibility and the void of extra-textual information about Eibhlin Dubh.

The text then becomes a mission to recover similar occluded stories of Irish women throughout history, and despite the narrator’s own erasure of her identity, she throws herself into examining another’s: Eibhlín Dubh. But the more she researches, “the sharper [her] rage grows” (74). She finds only “flimsy sketches of Eibhlín Dubh’s life,” lamenting “how swiftly the academic gaze places her in a masculine shadow, as though she could only be of interest as a satellite to male lives” (74). However, Ní Ghríofa does not ignore these gaps, but draws attention to them:

Here: silence.

How I wish that someone had thought more women’s words worthy of a place in that old secretaire. All the diaries and letters and ledgers I imagine in female handwriting, they must have existed once, until someone tidied them into a waste bin. (95)

Creative histories

This conspicuous absence of the female voice within the archive thus necessitates a very different kind of research, involving entry into the lacunae of liminal space hidden below male-authored texts. Ní Ghríofa begins to draw on what Corbett, Compton, and Pooley call “creative histories”: practices which “preserve silences in history, speak in metaphors, juxtapose, hint, elaborate, or embroider in ways that are particularly valuable when trying to preserve the mysteries’ (7). Traditional historiographical practices, which prioritize “objectivity” and accuracy, are part of the phallogocentric order: a hierarchical ideology of binary oppositions – speech over writing, male over female, presence over absence. This logic of partition conceptually polarizes the world into opposites, negating anything which does not fit easily into its binaries. By consistently prioritizing that which is, that which is not has been systematically ignored. Such an ideology creates a specific historical narrative which it naturalizes as “what really happened.” As Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserts, “the naming of ‘fact’ is itself a narrative of power disguised as innocence” (114). Creative histories, on the other hand, argue for replacing “historical accuracy” with “historical literacy” as a way to draw attention to the “creative choices” and even “deliberate distortions” that occur when attempting to grapple with archival gaps, silences, and inaccuracies (Hornby 1).

This methodology is exemplified in fellow poet M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem Zong! which explores the many silences within the silence of a historical text. Philip’s poem, an account of the 1781 slaughter of a ship of African enslaved people for insurance reasons, is composed entirely of words found in the legal document of the case. The words are violently torn apart to emphasize the disjuncture and confusion of the historical record, even reenacting the event on the page: “I murder the text, cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, like some seer looking in the entrails of an animal” (Philip, qtd. in Corbett et al. 194). Philip describes Zong! as “a work of haunting, a wake of sorts, where the spectres of the undead make themselves present” (qtd. in Corbett et al. 201).

Ghosts are a pregnant subject for creative histories as they signify, as Fionntán De Brún warns, that “the past cannot be relinquished but rather, lingers and erupts in the present” (25). Ghosts become symbols of those who, dispossessed or disenfranchised in life, now refuse to be forgotten or moved on from. Creative histories encourage writers to become mediums, to “listen to silences, represent multitudes, and speak for the dead” (Corbett et al. 9). Literary form thus becomes a tool of necromancy, a way to reanimate the disenfranchised dead, which Ní Ghríofa reflects on when she describes how the writing of the caoineadh must have felt for Eibhlín Dubh: “how powerful such a cataloguing must have felt in the aftermath of his murder, when each spoken detail conjured him back again, alive and impeccably dressed” (24). A kind of life can be granted by writing creatively: as Atwood writes, paraphrasing Borges, “the entire Divine Comedy was composed by Dante mainly so he could get a glimpse of the dead Beatrice, and bring her back to life in his poem. It is because he is writing about her, and only because he is writing about her, that Beatrice is able to exist again, in the mind of writer and reader” (Atwood 172). Likewise, Ní Ghríofa revels in the power to conjure with writing, to make an empty room “busy with women” and “charm the air until it fills itself with steam, gossip, and the smell of warm bread” (203).

Historians warn that any imagining of “what the past was really like” will inevitably be subjectively filtered through modern understanding, and is therefore always warped into inaccuracy. However, Ní Ghríofa finds empowerment in the imaginative freedom of creative histories, even if she is constantly wary of the ethics of her literary reanimation. She asks herself questions historians don’t often bother with: why she is “clattering around in the intimate life of a stranger, without permission,” and “who will gain from this labour?”; she asks herself if all this research makes her only “a nosy woman on the internet” (144). She is ethically attentive to the processes of research and reanimation; she is motivated to do Eibhlín Dubh justice, to “make her feel true,” not to turn her into a marionette in a period costume who is fundamentally “unable to surprise and unsettle” (Roper 11). She begins to see her power to grant “mercy” emerge in her creative treatment of Eibhlín Dubh’s life, a mercy that “lies in how I choose to unspool the following events,” allowing her to “gift her some ordinary peace” through creative reimagining (154). Likewise, Ní Ghríofa finds empowerment in committing “an act of wilful erasure” by “whittling each document” down until only the sparse and ghostly traces of female voice and action remain (80).⁴ By “performing this oblique reading” – oblique in the sense of approaching the historical record at a different angle, specifically the slanted perspective of side-lined female voices, rather than a conventional phallocentric focus – she hopes the “reversal will reveal … the “concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink” (80). In this way, she creates a new text by obliterating the old text which surrounds it, giving new life to a dead document.

This erasure of the text mirrors Ní Ghríofa’s wider argument for the links between the “shadow-work” of domestic labor and literary translation, both of which she terms as “a deletion of a presence” (38). She reminds the reader that the “word stanza means ‘room,’” enabling her, during her translation efforts, to “reassure [herself] that [she is] simply homemaking” (42). In her seminal work, “The Second Sex,” Simone de Beauvoir discusses how, in the societal construction of femininity, women have often been symbolically linked to cyclical time due to their traditional roles associated with reproduction and domesticity. De Beauvoir sets linear and cyclical time in opposition, observing society’s gendered distinction between “time’s arrow” (masculine time) and “time’s cycle” (feminine space), the former societally associated with perceived progress, the latter with torpor and repetition. De Beauvoir encourages women to break free of such imposed limitations by escaping domesticity in order to access their own creative potential, suggesting that, in society’s eyes, women who cling to routine can have no creative flow, rather only “repetition” and a future which is “only duplication of the past” (610).

For Rita Felski, however, routine can constitute a source of strength and resilience: “repetition, understood as ritual, provides a connection to ancestry and tradition; it situates the individual in an imagined community that spans historical time … the means of transcending one’s historically limited existence” (20). Like Felski, Ní Ghríofa is “struck again by how often moments of my day are lived by countless women in countless other rooms, through the shared text of our days” (6). The repetitiveness of her own domestic labor connects her with other women across time and space, through a mode of thinking distinctly alternate to the phallogocentric historical tradition. Furthermore, she uses domestic language – specifically textile-related – to discuss her literary process: “for months I work methodically, deliberating between synonyms, stitching and re-stitching the seams of curtains until they fall just so” (44). In this way, Ní Ghríofa highlights the parallels between domestic shadow-work and text creation, going on to explain that “the Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women” and that consequently a “literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies” (78).

Ní Ghríofa thus conceptualizes her body as a text: her “body replies in its dialect of scars” and “develops its own account of these weeks, a vocabulary of bruises, aching breasts, dressings, stitchings, and a slow, tender limp” (220, 65). Even her milk becomes “a pale text in pale sheets,” a reference to Helene Cixous’s ećriture féminine, written in the metaphorical “white ink” – an oral, embodied way of writing that evokes breast milk and invisibility – rather than the ink of phallogocentric writing. Cixous encourages women to “write through their bodies” and “invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations, and codes” (877).

Ní Ghríofa’s fragmented, embodied text hears this; the narrator even elects to donate her body to the medical school she once attended, getting a tattoo in “white ink” specifically to “leave a message for the strangers who would be the last to touch me” (117). By describing this, she inscribes her body into a posthumous text which attacks both the linearity of time and the separation between body and writing, creating “a moment of my future in which my body will echo a moment from my past” (118).

It is, then, wholly appropriate that she directs her research efforts not toward libraries, but to the landscapes and buildings Eibhlín Dubh once inhabited, prioritizing physical engagement with the text, rather than allowing the stale, phallogocentric texts of the historical record to mediate her reading. This is, however, logistically difficult: old Irish homesteads, their associated social structures and cultural traditions, were systematically erased by English colonizers, just as written accounts of female experience were discarded. The narrator visits Eibhlín Dubh’s childhood home, hoping to find a trace of her there, but instead she looks “at the empty air where a poem of beautiful rooms once stood, each stanza holding its own careful litany … . Now: nothing. Another grand deletion, this. Another ordinary obliteration of a woman’s life” (128). Both the physical and textual remnants of Eibhlín Dubh have been erased by their male custodians, and yet Eibhlín Dubh feels as real as any other unseen presence – “as real as the disembodied voices on the radio, as real as the human chorus of the internet, as real as the roots stretching unseen under weeds … she is as real as I am” (96). In situating her own invisibility in continuum with that of Eibhlín Dubh, Ní Ghríofa finds empowerment through shared embodied experience, something Cixous suggests that women have innate interest and sympathy for (881). Just as her “female text … swoops now, from my body to yours,” the caoineadh itself has been transmitted through repetition in the female body, standing as “a celebratory acclamation of female unity and strength, a communion of thought and emotion embedded in the female body, that invites all women to join in its expansive jouissance” (Ní Éigeartaigh, “Transforming Trauma” 36). By accepting the body itself as a text, a medium, Ní Ghríofa is able to understand embodied practice as a “way of knowing, storing, and transmitting knowledge” (Taylor 16).

Hilary Mantel states that the task of a historical writer is “to take the past out of the archive and relocate it in a body,” and Ní Ghríofa has done just that (“Can These Bones Live”). Ghost is flecked through with images that nudge the reader into opening their minds to a newly embodied epistemology. In one passage, she marvels at a bat in flight, a creature who uses “a complex system of echolocation to navigate the night” (128). Like a medium and a writer, the bat listens out for traces and voices, locating itself through relational feeling. Ní Ghríofa’s bat is female and, like the author, is “guided by the echoes that answer her voice” (27). So, when Ní Ghríofa looks at the erasure and invisibility in text and land, she knows that even though “I am looking at nothing,” “I am also looking at everything” (128).

Conclusion: A chorus of braided voices

At the text’s beginning, Ní Ghríofa wants to locate Eibhlín Dubh in a phallogocentric methodology and restore her to the canon – she chases archival traces, visits libraries, and sends e-mails, trying to find Eibhlín Dubh’s burial place so that she can lay flowers on her grave – but to no avail. The historical record has forgotten Eibhlín Dubh; Ní Ghríofa’s mission fails. However, “instead of resenting the many lacunae” where she cannot find her, Ní Ghríofa learns to “hover over those gaps in awe” (285). In being unable to localize Eibhlín Dubh in time and history, Ní Ghríofa keeps her free to interpretation, allowing her to live again and again through others. Any source that is too tidy is also flat and unlived in: the danger of a single story is not that it is untrue, but that it is always incomplete. To succeed in the chase, to catch Eibhlín Dubh and fix her in language, is to consign her to the past. Instead, Ní Ghríofa does as Donna Haraway advises and “stays with the trouble,” and she celebrates how her “attempt to know another woman has found its ending not in the satisfaction of neat discovery, but in the persistence of mystery” (Haraway 285). From the start, Ní Ghríofa’s favorite element of the caoineadh lies in the “untranslatable pale space between stanzas” where she can “sense a female breath lingering,” and thus Ghost is ultimately a celebration of that very elusiveness (46).

Finally, we return to where we began: the caoineadh. As a collaborative utterance and the heartstring of Ghost, the caoineadh remains a poignant model for how Ní Ghríofa’s mediumship of creative histories plays out in her text. Given that women from all across the community would participate in the caoineadh, “both synchronically taking turns to weep … and diachronically: remembering and quoting each other’s laments” over many generations, the caoineadh is a distinctly multivocal medium (Bourke 1366). In Bourke’s description, women collaborate by voicing their own original comments, and also repeating verses from past laments. Such “entwining strands of female voices” remind Ní Ghríofa that “the etymology of the word ‘text’ lies in the Latin verb ‘texere’: to weave, to fuse, to braid,” which again grounds the caoineadh as an embodied and domestic text (78). As Ní Éigeartaigh points out, this is also reminiscent of the cyclical model of time discussed earlier, suggesting that “returning to past exclamations of mourning does not indicate an entrapment in one’s personal grief, but rather an expansion beyond one’s grief to include the voices of those whose traumas may now be forgotten” (Ní Éigeartaigh, “Transforming Trauma” 37).

This is, then, Ní Ghríofa’s lasting contribution. When she imagines Eibhlín Dubh’s pain at the discovery of her husband’s dead body, she does not only feel Eibhlín Dubh’s grief, but also grants her solace through the offering of her own words,

words that somehow summon the voice of her mother, and her mother’s mother, a whole chorus of female voices from her throat, all articulating the pain of this moment … . Some alchemy turns this private moment public, turns a raw sound into articulation, into art. (155)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In Ghost, Ní Ghríofa as narrator is nearly indistinguishable from Ní Ghríofa as author, and thus the terms will be used interchangeably.

² Hélène Cixous’s words are relevant here: “Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism … . Because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffmann would say, fairies” (889).

³ Though this essay is looking specifically at the Irish female experience, I see Ni Ghriofa’s “female” as defined more as Kristeva’s “Other,” i.e., that which cannot be represented by phallogocentric and nomenclatural ideologies. “Woman” to Kristeva represents not so much a sex as an attitude of resistance to conventional culture and language: “feminist practice can only be … at odds with what already exists so that we may say ‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it’” (Jones 262). As such, “female” extends to more than cis women, but for this essay it becomes especially relevant to the lived experience of Irish women, specifically the suppression of their voices and Irish pre-Christian, embodied ways of being.

⁴ See also Mary Ruefle’s “On Erasure,” in Quarter After Eight 16.