Written in Invisible Ink

“I will commit an act of willful erasure, whittling each document and letter until only the lives of women remain…I’ll devote myself to luring female lives back from male texts. Such an experiment in reversal will reveal, I hope, the concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink.”

The “I” above is the narrator of a beguiling book with a rather creepy title, A Ghost in the Throat by Irish author Doireann Ní Ghríofa. The narrator is a homemaker and mother who, as she nurses her infant child and then pumps more milk to donate to a milk bank for those in need, becomes obsessed with an elegiac poem Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire written in the 17^th Century by Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill. This “keen” or dirge or lament is also an anthem of praise for Eibhlin’s murdered Catholic husband in the times of the harsh Penal Laws in Ireland. It first fascinates and then obsesses the narrator, not because of the heroics of the husband, but the hidden world of his wife who wrote the poem. 

The novel, or “autobiographical fiction” as it is labeled, focuses not only on Eibhlin’s (Eileen’s) life which the narrator saw as hovering “in the untranslatable pale space between stanzas, where I sense a female breath lingering on the stairs, still present, somehow….” but also on the story of the 21^st Century narrator/author herself who, in the process of making Eileen’s life known and understood, holds up to herself and to us her own life as well.

Once again, I see in narratives like this one which tell of the subsuming of women’s stories to those of men (by cultures, traditions…churches!) compelling insights into how  the loss of feminine and other-gendered  perspectives can affect all of our lives. This narrator, for example, revels in the quotidian of a historically traditional female life. She loves the everyday housekeeping tasks; she loves feeding and nurturing and nourishing her children; she adores her husband as he does her; she feels fulfilled and satisfied by sacrifices she makes for the sake of others, hours pumping breast milk for sick babies, cutting her children’s and her own beautiful hair to donate for wigs. How refreshing! 

But that is not all. She also takes on that larger task of bringing Eileen Dubh to us. She spends countless hours in libraries, ploughing through documents and letters and arcane snippets of information, foregoing her own sleep, even compromising her own health, to bring Eileen out of the shadow of her more famous husband, Art O’Leary, and even more famous uncle, Daniel O’Connell. She embraces Eileen’s life as her own and brings both as a gift to us for our enjoyment, appreciation, and, most importantly, enlightenment

This task, however, costs the author/narrator a great deal. She loses sleep, weight, time with family, sense of well-being. Little by little, she learns her feminine concept of self-sacrifice and devotion to others has a dark side. In working so hard to bring out Eileen, she is simultaneously erasing herself and her responsibilities in her own life. At one point, for example, she directs her husband to stop their car at a dangerous curve and immediately rushes out to help people who have been in a car accident despite the fact that other drivers had already pulled over on the road ahead and were adequately providing the help needed. Only on her return to her own car did she realize the tremendous danger she had just put her own husband and herself in by forcing their stopping on a blind curve. More slowly she also comes to realize that even her diligence for years in pumping her own milk for others had worn her out, reduced her capacity for intimacy with her husband, and lessened her interactions with her own children. 

I’m telling you so much of this particular novel because it shows that our stories, as well as our lives, can never be reduced merely to “complementary” expressions of our feminine selves existing parallel to those of males. They are to be celebrated as unique, yes, but never as descriptions of mere roles to which we should be assigned and limited. They are instead to be trumpeted as universal to all genders and for all genders to embrace, understand, and, most importantly, expand in any direction we desire. If we want to celebrate our quotidian homemaking, hooray; if we want to sacrifice for others, hooray; if we want to be leaders and ordained and recognized as such, double hooray! All of our special gifts as females or other-gendered need to come forth in all their complexity so that they can join in contributing to an ever more spacious, growing, and radiant human story.

In the end, the narrator has exhausted her powers of exploration of Eileen and her poem. She has accomplished her goal of creating a new translation of the Caoineadh. She has brought out and celebrated the life of a woman in the shadow of men. Mysteries about Eileen, about the narrator herself, however, will always persist. And so, she does what we all must do. She gives over Eileen’s story and her own to others to explore and ponder so that now she – and we – can learn from them.