I’ve been thinking about varying degrees of detachment recently, particularly in terms of femininity and womanhood and specifically with regard to resoldering the links by reading more women, to forge new bonds with femininity and weave the threads of a female genealogy. Peig is an interesting case. Like Socrates, she never wrote down a word. So, there’s a disconnect from the get-go and an almost fivefold detachment to contend with in this autobiography. First of all, her story was dictated to her son in her native Irish, composed/written down by him and then further edited by Maire Ni Chinneide for publication, it was translated into English and further edited for use as a mandatory text for teaching Irish on the secondary school curriculum, and that, according to historian Finn Dwyer, was modified to reflect the Free State’s version of the quintessential Irish woman. In essence, the true spirit of the woman’s life seems to have been diminished and reconditioned in a way, so through that tarnished mirror of masculinist historical archive, we kind of get an inappreciable sense of this vibrant, enigmatic and complex woman. While it’s a miracle that a woman’s personal history was preserved at all - and Peig was unique in that sense being a Seanchai and contributing an inordinate amount of material to the folklore commission - it grates that her reminiscences are curated by men. Brian McMahon in his introduction say’s ‘that to convey the tone and spirit of the original of this ‘simple’ but ‘moving’ autobiography I have tried to ‘imagine’ how she would have told her story’ - so a woman’s words are not great or significant or fascinating, they’re simple, moving and ripe for reinvention by much more creative men. By virtue of the fact that the woman was a Seanchai, I’m curious about the degree to which some of her tales might be embellished for the reader. That said, I found the book very interesting, so much of it resonated with me as these were my ancestors, too who lived an extremely harsh life, albeit by the sea in Ballycroy, Co. Mayo. Peig could have been my great-grandmother with her black shawl and clay pipe, her dead husband, lost babes and perceived heart of stone. Incidentally, so often throughout the book, there are references to rigid, coarsened women indifferent to kindness and a torment to their husbands. What wonder, in such a hardened and poverty-stricken world where women were the adhesive, the called upon figures intrinsic to the community's survival, if they crumbled so would it. And the only place they had agency if they had any at all was in the home. There are many references to women having to pull themselves together, to reconcile themselves to service, to an unwanted marriage, emigration, the deaths of so many of their infants - Peig’s mother lost nine children and never recovered to full health again and this woman would have survived the famine. Acceptance or that kind of silent resignation was key to life and it permeates the book. Peig herself speaks of having to control her feelings. Sentiment was often borne alone and internally. At all times Peig’s hope kept her up, and her faith. Almost every salutation, every wish and farewell is about God directing her to the right path. She recalls her grandmother always telling her to call on God when she’s in trouble. So when death gores her, she calls on the Virgin for strength to wash and clean her son, Tomas and lay him out for death. She describes herself as being an instrument in the hands of the divine in order to do that. I suppose, to a degree, she symbolizes the nation, its political struggles and religious devotion. Peig’s form of stoicism can be seen a gift and illuminated for me where my own feminal resilience comes from - my mother, grandmothers, that long line who endured so much and I felt the links resoldering as I read. I was also reminded of the philosophy of Keats that life must be undergone. And it must, no time to dwell. Although she does discuss the violence and hostility associated with the Land Wars, Peig doesn’t reveal much about the Rising, WW1, and the War of Independence which were also ‘gone through’. Again, it seems the effects of these devastating events were conceded, suffered and borne, privately. In a similar way, the great Famine is impossible to face out loud, it’s referred to as gorta mor, the great hunger or is often reduced or minimized by the people who survived it to the bad times or an droch shoal. Similarly, the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland is referred to as the Troubles.
Tragically, women were reared to expect little and so they received little: service, emigration or marriage, and Peig herself says she was convinced a harsh life lay in store and she’d have to harden herself to it. Things were accepted as they happened because there was little expectation of anything better. Inconceivable, to contemporary Irish women who have choices, passions and professions, who are free to aspire to be and expect nothing less than the best versions of themselves. There’s a palpable sense of wonder and longing in those liminal moments she spends standing in the doorway, daydreaming. She went to the doorway a lot to ponder her future. A kind of threshold between her old life and the new or between reality and the imagination. In these moments she is lost to herself, absorbed in the chatter of rooks, the sun rising or seabirds over the harbour; her interest in folktales, vividly recounted, all signify the necessity of the imagination in a constrained world, I suppose, and they are rare instants of self-deference for she deferred in all other aspects to the men in her life. She would have bailed the ocean for her brother and to her father at her marriage meeting: ‘whatever pleases you, pleases me’. Thankfully her betrothed was an ‘even-tempered, honest boy and a good man’ because marriage was forever, irreversible.
Peig, would have been back on the mainland by the time the second world war was gone through, nonetheless, these national and international events would have socially, politically and economically impacted the island and a way of life that was declining there. No doubt after she had her last child reared for export, Peig knew she was among the last generation of islanders. Incidentally, contrary to widely held notions of ignorant islanders, these were an intelligent and engaged people with signs of modernity - the intertwining of the local and the global all about. As Joseph Cleary points out in his essay on Ireland and Modernity: ‘modernisation via colonisation preceded modernisation via industrialisation’. So there were advances and strong American connections, import and export of flour & lobster to the UK, cultural tourism arriving in the form of visiting linguistic scholars such as JM Synge (who also visited Aran and found more examples of modernity than he expected) and Robin Flowers, and Peig talks at the end of the book about doing her share for the Irish language, concluding also that people like her will never again be here, they’ll be stretched out and the old world will have vanished. She was right in many respects and it had been vanishing away also with the OS - the British mapping project of the 1830s, that sought to plot the country, rename its places and preserve its disappearing culture. I thought the toponyms were lovely to read about, the Road of the Dead, Whitefield, Black Head, Glenagalt - the glen of the mad which makes you wonder why places were named the way they were and the haphazard and crude nature of anglicization that deprived them of their meaning. Some things haven’t vanished though. The sense of cohesion and the collective attitude to life Peig describes the islanders as having is still to be experienced in many rural communities. The idea of the meitheal is a tradition still very much alive.