Book name: A Ghost in the Throat
Author: Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Publisher: Tramp
Price: Rs 1,283
To call Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat a blend of fiction and non-fiction would be superficial. Its primary mode is that of autofiction, narrating the mundane life of a present-day mother with four young children, her days full of nursing and household chores. Yet the protagonist, the author’s namesake, feels an obsessive connection to a historical character. Her research lays down the strata of non-fictional components of historical narration and literary detection. Both the memoir and the thesis are rounded out by fictional elements, such as the birth of her favourite character.
The character in question is the 18th-century poet, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Eibhlín was a noblewoman, whose husband, Airt Uí Laoghaire, was murdered, leaving her pregnant and with young children. In her anguish, she drank handfuls of his blood and, later, composed a caoineadh, a ‘keening’ or lament. “Love, your blood was spilling in cascades,/ and I couldn’t wipe it away, couldn't clean it up, no,/ no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped.” Eibhlín’s lament becomes an obsession with Doireann. She empathizes with the emotions, especially after the near-death of her fourth baby, and craves the rest of Eibhlín’s life-story.
As a poet, Ní Ghríofa’s works explore birth, death and desire, with a thread of domesticity running through, and it is possible to read her namesake’s obsession in the light of the caoineadh’s appeal to her. Love, desire, and loss are woven with milk, blood, and motherhood in her text. “This is a female text,” runs the refrain, “... borne of guilt and desire.” She speaks of the historical, literary and academic erasure of women, citing the repeated references to Eibhlín as ‘wife of’ and ‘aunt of’ and the fact that her own son removed her name from the family records. The refrain seems an attempt to place her work onto the same rank as literary genres like the caoineadh, worked and transmitted by women. Like women artists before her, Ní Ghríofa declares her body, complete with her Caesarean scars, lopsided breasts, and ‘sag-stomach’, to be her text. One may be reminded of the French performance artist, Orlan.
Doireann’s days erase her existence, and she writes herself back day after day with her unrelenting research and translation of the poem. “If each day is a cluttered page, then I spend my hours scrubbing its letters. In this, my work is a deletion of a presence.” Her description of translation as a kind of homemaking is a continuation of both poetry and domesticity: “through the door of a new stanza, measuring furniture and carpets, feeling the textures of fabrics... building and furnishing room after careful room.”
This fixation with motherhood and domesticity, taking up too much of her construction of the feminine, may take away some of the intimacy inherent in the work for some readers. It remains to be seen how this apparently traditional construction sits with younger female readers or even older ones who are aware of the drudgery that domesticity can spiral down into. Can the modern-day female reader identify without difficulty with Ní Ghríofa who spent ten years pregnant and/or breastfeeding, and worrying, “[w]hat will become of me, in the absence of this labour, all this growing and harvesting?” Why is the most potent image of all — that of Eibhlín drinking her husband’s blood — invoked only in a roundabout way, when Ní Ghríofa calls ink her “dark sustenance”? Does the ‘female’ text become the female reader’s text too? Readers will beg to differ about whether a ghost in the throat frees the female voice or not, and it will be worth the debate.
