cold morning in 2021
I first heard Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘Ceist na Teangan’ read aloud on a podcast three years ago, mid-winter. It was read in Irish and then as Berla (in English). This is the moment that led me to learn Irish.
4 August 2024
I read Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem aloud as Gaeilge on 3ZZZ’s Irish program. I was more nervous than I have been in years about any sort of public speaking, opening event, lecture or presentation of my work.
I think it went ok.
The common truism of poetry being for voice was freshly confronting as an ancestral language reverberated in the tiny chambers of my ears. I couldn’t understand it, this point of contact.
Ní Dhomhaill, the first Professor of Irish (Language) Poetry, once said that she lives with the reality that she speaks and writes in a language that could be dead before she is. This can’t be the case. In ‘Ceist na Teangan’ (1990), she references the prophet Moses’s rescue by the pharaoh’s daughter to highlight the need for language to be preserved through all means possible — through chance, through elusion, through the fraught safety provided by an enemy. There is such reciprocity in thinking about preservation here: in how a future can be entrusted to those who destroy a present. This reciprocity inhabits an economy of women and an economy of trust that imagines a future beyond imperial or systematic violence. [1]
- In 1367 the Statute of Kilkenny made it illegal to speak Irish in the presence of British colonists. In 1541, legislation was passed which banned the use of Irish in areas of Ireland under English rule.
- Three hundred years later, before An Garda Mor, close to fifty per cent of Ireland spoke Irish. After the Great Hunger, resulting in the halving and decimation of the population, people stopped speaking Irish. They taught their children English to give them a better chance of employment and survival under the colonial state.
- Republic of Ireland became a free state in 1922. It wasn’t until 100 years later, in 2022, that the Irish language became recognised as an official language in the North of Ireland.
- Dominant cultures demand assimilation in order to survive.
Sure, language is a structure, not unlike a house, but what supports the foundations?
From this foundation of resonant bones I acknowledge the violences that bring me to write. [2]
I found ‘Focal Cosanta’ (Protecting Word) while reading whatever Irish poetry I could access that was published alongside an English translation. After years of classes focused on grammar and rote learning, I’ve found this is a welcome entry point to the language.
In this poem, Irish poet Aifric Mac Aodha clarified a rumour I had read of horse skulls buried in the foundations of homes, churches and halls to increase their acoustic resonance. Dance and song were prioritised through a process of foundation sacrifice. [3] As in many cultures, until the nineteenth century Irish lived in homes built by the community. An ‘immense volume of folklore and folk belief pertaining to the vernacular house suggests that [the house] was regarded as an interface between the human and supernatural worlds and that its portals — doors, windows and chimneys — were liminal zones or points of contact between these worlds.’ [4]
5 August 2024
I’m participating in a dream writing workshop with poet and artist Manisha Anjali, who responded to a particularly detailed dream I had by saying, ‘You are exploring rooms and the built environment with curiosity. Architecture is a potent mytho-poetic space in your dreams.’
Manisha shares the entries on ‘Stairway’ and ‘Descent’ from The Book of Symbols with the group, as there is a recurring theme of subterranean spaces in the group.
The entry on Descent says that:
myth and ritual from the oldest times attest to the transformative possibilities of descent. It is return to a transpersonal matrix for rebirth, the obtaining of treasured self-knowledge from realms of luminous darkness, or a boon of understanding that brings ‘up’ to collective consciousness the genuinely profound. [5]
Manisha told me that a typical trope of descending to the depths of the underworld is a return to the realm of the living with some kind of knowledge, wisdom or object. Yet a return is not always guaranteed, and the traveller risks becoming trapped in the world below.
I think about retrieving a horse skull from underneath a house and the forgotten words resonating in its cavity.
This image is one page from Bailiúchán na Scol (The School’s Collection), which totals approximately 740,000 pages of folklore and local tradition, compiled by pupils from 5,000 primary schools in the Irish Free State between 1937 and 1939. The digital archive contains several mentions of architecturally embedded horse skulls, but this one has the most fantastic handwriting.
I want to bury a horse skull under my house. I want to dance in my house and for my dancing to be loud, I want to sing as Gaeilge and for the singing to be even louder. This desire for the skull for me captures many things — a desire for music, for mysticism, a desire to suspend the musicality of a language and culture in time, a curiosity (and fear) of what is buried below, of what violence could be unearthed.
I’ve noticed a trend towards laboured mysticism in writing and discourse associated with Irish culture. I love the way mysticism allows the inclusion of other narratives, and want to deeply honour the Indigenous Pagan, Druidic and Celtic lore that has underwritten Irish culture for over 7000 years. Yet there is a tendency to associate them through simplistic comparison with the Indigenous populations of the global south, of which I am wary. Despite enjoying much of his writing, I see it in Manchán Magan’s over-reliance on the hypothetical origin of Proto-Indo-European speakers, and in his ill-conceived alignment of Irish place names with Indigenous Australian song lines. [6] Or, in the emphasis on rural farming communities in Ireland as the most authentic of the Irish Indigenous culture, as though Indigenous language and culture can’t adapt and continue to develop in our shifting world.
10 August 2024
I saw Kneecap at the Melbourne International Film Festival tonight. Kneecap is a Belfast-based rap group, who rap in Irish and English. They formed in response to an arrest for spray-painting CEARTA (rights) on a bus stop the day before the Irish Language Act march in Belfast. The arrested party refused to speak English and ended up in custody overnight awaiting an interpreter — a situation that wouldn’t occur now that Irish is recognised in the north. This event inspired their first joke-track C.E.A.R.T.A. (2018).
It was a fun film. Integrated in their drugged exploits was a celebration of Indigenous language and self-determination outside classic pedagogic spaces and rigidity. Music can open modes for practising and celebrating minority languages and cultures — echoing hip-hop’s origins of resistance.
At the end of the film, Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó Hannaigh) explains that an Indigenous language dies every forty days. But a language doesn’t die — the last living speaker of a language does, almost monthly. [7] Their last words spoken continue to reverberate in the air as increasingly small soundwaves, inaudible to human hearing, indefinitely – how many of these words brush past me each day?
20 August 2024
I wake up from a dream that ended with this scene:
I realised I was holding a large round ice cube in my cheek, about golf ball size. I had the feeling I had been holding it there for a long time. I bent over to spit it out and had to hook my fingers behind my back teeth to get it out — struggling, I spat it on the ground. My cheek was cold from the ice. It was a perfect round orb.
I think it has something to do with orality, with a struggle to unfreeze my throat or liberate a voice. Or, with something struggling to get out.
As settlers in Australia, we cannot settle for just acknowledging our positionalities.
In The non-performativity of anti-racism, cultural theorist Sara Ahmed describes how anti-racist white subjects can perpetuate racism and privilege through the declaration of whiteness, or declaration of their positionality. She argues that such declarations are non-performative: they do not do what they say. Rather than claiming whiteness to demonstrate that one is anti-racist, what is more important is for subjects to not centre themselves (less ‘what can I do?’) and instead stay implicated in what they critique: by turning towards their role and responsibility in the histories of racism, as histories of this present. [8]
24 August 2024
I tried to direct my dreams to the horse’s skulls, and although this symbology didn’t occur, my dreaming remained situated in subterranean and liminal architectural spaces.
I want to emphasise the subterranean, or the past, as a space for multiplicity and how we can keep this active in the present through an avoidance of singularity. How by engaging with ancestral languages a productive action against colonial erasure is engaged, while also holding responsibility for one’s contributions to it. How there is a danger in romanticising a purist idea of a culture or a history; how the pharaoh’s daughter might not be the person you were expecting.
1 September 2024
I went to the Naarm Traditional Singers Circle for the first time, which takes its lead from traditional Irish singing circles but is open to all cultural song. I don’t want to undermine or intellectualise what happened by writing about it, except to say that it revealed to me the stagnant limitations of contemporary art and academia — worlds that openly value excellence, virtuosity and the smoke and mirrors of public achievement. There were songs sung in Irish, in Georgian, in French and in English.
I was the only person in the room who didn’t sing. It seems obvious to say my throat was blocked or frozen, to make explicit this buried matter of not only language but an openness to vulnerability. What I took from this was not my inadequacy, but rather the humble openness to one another that the rest of the room accessed through song. It was better than any artwork I know, because it was pointedly not directed towards any audience, not then or in the future, but for a repeated attention towards voice, the bodies in the small room, and what was created together in that moment. I’m practising a song for next month.
Jacqui Shelton is an artist, curator and writer working as an uninvited guest between Wurundjeri lands and Dja Dja Wurrung lands.
[1] She is also making a point about gender and language and the voices that are heard loudest in the canon: what Irish poets and writers do you know: Heaney, Yeats, Joyce, Kavanagh? What female poets?
[2] That is, the invasion, occupation and penal colonies imposed in Ireland for over 1000 years, in which the British honed their imperial craft. The arrival of the British in ‘Australia’ and the violence and sickness that followed. The taking of land from the Irish by British and Protestant Scott settlers and the intentional removal of grain from the country by said settlers for a profit, in the years of An Gorta Mór when food was needed so badly. The arrival of my ancestors to central Queensland following their escape from Ireland, and the forced removal of the Gidabal people, who are absent from my family lore. This silence. The shots fired by ancestors and fellow IRA at Soloheadbeg in 1919, colloquially known as the first engagement of the Irish War of Independence. The death of two Royal Irish Constabulary officers on this occasion. The war, the Civil War, and the Troubles. The ongoing violence committed by Australians of Irish descent against First Peoples.
[3] Seán Ó Suilleabháin, ‘Foundation Sacrifices’, in Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, vol. 75, no. 1, 1945, pp. 45–2. In 1945, Súilleabháin, archivist at the Irish Folklore Commission, published a survey of foundation finds in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. It revealed that throughout Ireland, horse skulls were hidden beneath floorboards, sometimes with their cavities packed with coins.
[4] Barry O’Reilly, ‘Hearth and Home: The Vernacular House in Ireland from c.1800,’ in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature, vol. 111C, Special issue: Domestic life in Ireland, 2011, pp. 193–215.
[5] ‘Descent’, in Ami Ronnberg & Kathleen Martin (eds), The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, Taschen, Köln, 2010.
[6] Manchan Magan, Thirty-Two Words for Field, Gill Books, Dublin, 2020.
[7] Gary F. Simons, ‘Two Centuries of Spreading Language Loss’. in Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, vol. 4, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–12, https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4532, (accessed 11 September 2024).
[8] Sara Ahmed, ‘The Nonperformativity of Antiracism’, Meridians, vol. 7, no. 1, 2006, pp. 104–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338719, (accessed 9 August 2024).
Image Captions:
- Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘Ceist na Teangan’ and translation, Pharaoh’s Daughter, Wake Forest University Press, North Connecticut, 1995, pp. 154–155.
- Aifric Mac Aodha, ‘Foscal Cosanta’ and translation, Foreign News, The Gallery Press, County Meath, Ireland, 2017, pp. 44–45.
- The Schools Collection, Volume 0745, p. 43. Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.