“A ghost in the throat”, by Doireann Ni Ghriofa: an Irish literary lineage

We are a little afraid of having come across a book by tradwife : this very fashionable movement, coming from the United States, which advocates a return to the model of the housewife of the 1950s. The first pages ofA ghost in the throatthe first novel by Irish poet Doireann Ni Ghriofa, is a manual for good wives and devoted mothers: “This is a feminine text, composed by folding someone else’s clothes”writes in the preamble the author and narrator, born in 1981 in Galway.

She continues by unrolling, in almost automatic hypnotizing writing, like slam, the list of her daily actions, once her beloved husband has gone to work. “ First I feed our sons, then I load the dishwasher, I pick up the toys, I clean up the spills, I check the clock, I take our oldest to the school, I come home with the little one and the baby, I sigh and I scold, I laugh and I kiss…” Add to these introductory details the narrator’s taste for to-do lists and the satisfaction she feels in checking off each of the accomplished tasks, and the picture seems complete.

But we would be far from the mark. If it celebrates the joys of repeated childbirth (four babies in six years!), the splendid text of Doireann Ni Ghriofa is above all a long declaration of love to another woman and poet: Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill , author, in the 18th century^e century, of Lament for Art O Laoghaire, one of the most famous Irish poems. In this long caoineadh (funeral chant), a masterpiece of oral tradition, this aristocrat expresses her desperate love for her husband, killed by an English nobleman, under the regime “terror and cruelty” criminal laws imposed by the British government, which took away all power from the country’s Catholic majority.

After becoming passionate about the poem as a teenager, Doireann Ni Ghriofa rediscovered it as an adult and reread it in the light of her motherhood: its author, whose beloved is buried near her home, near Cork , she also talks about her sons, and a new pregnancy. An intimacy that Ni Ghriofa had not suspected then takes shape with the poet.

Obsessive quest

At night, when everyone is asleep, she plunges back into the caoineadh between two feedings, two pregnancies, two milk pumping sessions, and even in the hospital incubator room where her fourth child, a little girl, is struggling to survive. Convinced that “no one will ever achieve [s]we level of fervor », she has only one idea in mind: to retranslate the text from Gaelic to English, to give it life and breath again. But, to do this, we must get as close as possible to Ni Chonaill, understand how she wrote and who she was, about whom we know nothing, until the date of her death.

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