Essays: When Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was five years old, her mother, a native Irish speaker who was a successful GP in Lancashire, sent her "back home" to live with her sister in the Ventry Gaeltacht so that her daughter could grow up fluent in her tongue. From the outset then, Irish was for Ní Dhomhnaill both the cause of separation from a mother who years later told her she was "mad" to write in the language, and the source of a deep understanding of this maternal legacy.
This complex biography resonates throughout this brilliantly intelligent, highly enjoyable and scholarly selection of essays which starts out with a question posed to the author by the New York Times, "What is it like to write in Irish?" The answers she provides both in prose and in poetry are hinged around the belief that "in Ireland, everything, including personal and collective history, gets subsumed into the mythological" and that the spoken word "by its very nature and spontaneity, has a plumb-line into the subconscious".
The book's centrepiece, fittingly titled 'Cé Leis Tú?', disputes Seamus Heaney's comment that her early move has gifted Ní Dhomhnaill with "a capacity to live in two places at the one time and in two times at the one place, a capacity to acknowledge the claims of contradictory truths without having to choose between them". The poet herself gently disputes this, instead she wonders whether it might not more accurately be described as "the cause of mental astigmatism and blurred vision, a sense of displacement, a deep anxiety".
By attending to the fractures of living a bilingual, or in this case (with Turkish) a trilingual life, Ní Dhomhnaill rejects the consoling vision of the Irish language as a repository of native wisdom which can be comfortably accommodated to our sense of a bilingual national culture. The question "Cé leis tú?" or "Who do you belong to?" addressed to her by an elderly neighbour shortly after her arrival in Cahiratrant, is robustly answered by her five-year-old self, "Ní le héinne me. Is liom féin mé féin" ("I don't belong to anyone. I belong only to myself"). As she goes on to argue, this answer applies equally to the language which has been serially appropriated by "linguistic gauleiters" whose "kind of Irish has been practised over the backs of silenced women and children", fetishised by government policy, and whose contemporary literature has been overlooked by some of our foremost writers and cultural commentators (her examples include Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Deane and Fintan O'Toole). The worldview posited by her neighbour's kind curiosity is one where no individual goes "unattached" to family and place and which the little girl counters by asserting the sovereignty of the individual safeguarded by "inalienable rights". The task of negotiating between these two conditions goes beyond the personal as the adult poet charts the ways in which modern Ireland slips one way and then the other in this tug-of-love.
There are many riches to be gleaned from this collection of essays that travels from the dinnseanchas and holy wells of west Kerry, through the "ghostly Alhambra" of Famine memories, to the legends and daily life of Anatolia. Chief among them however is Ní Dhomhnaill's own quest in understanding the reasons why "in moments of impossible crisis, poetry in Irish is what pours out of the recesses of my being and helps . . . structure a personality that is maybe so deeply fractured that otherwise it might not survive as a thinking entity". Her guiding lights are typically various: Máire Mhac an tSaoi and Caitlín Maude who proved that becoming an Irish poet was possible for a woman in the late 1960s; John Berryman's Dreamsongs, which showed how by assuming a character different fragments of the self might be rescued for the page and sing; in their philosophical analysis of female creativity and mythmaking, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray supplied forms of analysis with which to unpeel another layer of her own imagination.
Ireland's patriarchal literary culture, and more importantly the wider repressive society of the 1970s and 80s, has necessitated such self-examination, the movement out from the self into society which Ní Dhomhnaill in these essays so vitally attains. This is clearly demonstrated not just polemically but by direct experience supported by scholarship. Where others have turned to the Celt's celebration of goddesses and queens as emblematic of a pre-Christian embrace of all things feminine, Ní Dhomhnaill observes that despite the comparatively powerful role of women in Celtic society, Medbh and Macha are praised not for their nurturing roles but for the qualities of stamina and warrior-ship associated with their male counterparts. The enduring power of the cailleach archetype suggests to her that "a strong male bias [ exists] in the consciousness of the Celts" to which early Catholicism simply had to appeal.
Such unorthodox angles are typical of Ní Dhomhnaill's profound originality. Oona Frawley is to be warmly commended on at long last assembling a selection of essays that will stir, enlighten and inform in equal measure.
Selina Guinness is lecturer in Irish literature at IADT, Dún Laoghaire and editor of an anthology, The New Irish Poets, published last year by Bloodaxe
Selected Essays By Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Edited by Oona Frawley New Island Books, 222pp. €12.99