This month’s edition of the Irish-language literary journal Comhar, co-edited by Mitchell Institute Sabbatical Fellow Dr Síobhra Aiken, is a special edition dedicated to contemporary women’s writing.  While women writers are strongly represented in contemporary publishing in Irish and have galvanised much national and international acclaim, there remain significant challenges for minoritized language writers in terms of funding, publishing, distribution, and reception.  This volume aims to specifically address the dearth of critical analysis of contemporary women’s writing and includes scholarly discussion of the work of 17 prolific writers.

One theme to emerge from the volume is the reoccurrence of the theme of violence against women – including domestic, sexual, and physical violence – in writing in Irish.  The writings discussed both directly and indirectly respond to the stark statistics regarding violence against women often presented in media reports.  

Does the framing of gendered violence in the media, while highlighting the seriousness of the crisis, also risk normalising violence and reducing victims to statistics? Or, as the poet Celia de Fréine asks, does the media sanitise brutalities and negate the value of human life for the sake of what it thinks is tolerable for the audience?

The statistics seldom account for the fact that women are often very reluctant to report violence.  This is explored in Waterford poet Áine Uí Fhoghlú’s poem ‘Cuardach Craicinn’ which relates to the strip-searching of female prisoners in Armagh and Maghaberry prisons in the 1980s and 1990s.  Reflecting what critic Ríona Ní Chuartáin describes as a state of ‘disassociation’, the female narrator of the poem relays the brutal mistreatment of an imagined rag doll before denying that she was subjected to any violence herself: ‘bím buíoch nár éirigh leo | lámh a leagaint ormsa inniu’ [I am grateful that today | they didn’t manage to lay a hand on me’].

The writer Máire Dinny Wren from Gaoth Dobhair, County Donegal, too recuperates the humanity often left out of mainstream depictions of women victims’ stories.  Her prose, as explored by critic Peter Weakliam, explores the emotional and practical challenges facing women hoping to flee domestic violence: her fictional narrator faces both the shame of her marriage breakdown and the many practical difficulties of achieving financial security, finding accommodation, and getting places for her children in a new school.  

The crime fiction of Dublin writer Anna Heussaff further explores the emotional dilemma of mothers trapped in circles of domestic violence and explores how technology – in the forms of CCTV, phone tracking, and audio recordings – are instrumentalised in such abusive scenarios.

As much as contemporary literature in Irish directly tackles modern life, it also explores how violence against women is embedded into received folkloric narratives.

In the novel Aisling nó Iníon A (2015), the bilingual writer Éilis Ní Dhuibhne imagines her protagonist, Aisling, as a modern Little Red Riding Hood but warns her teenage readership that real life can be harsher than fairytales.  As critic Lydia Uí Ruairc explores, Aisling does not escape like Red Riding Hood but is entrapped by her abuser, who is represented as having sharp white teeth like the wolf of the well-known tale.  Meanwhile, West Donegal storyteller Eithne Ní Ghallchobhair revisits aspects of Irish folklore, including the story of ‘An Chailleach i Riocht Giorria’ [The Witch in the Form of a Hare].  As Ailbe van der Heide discusses, the scene in the original tale in which the hare is pursued by a band of men can be read as a reflection on, or even acceptance of, violence against women.  Ní Ghallachobhair’s reimagination of the hare’s tale suggests that progress in the present demands revisiting past narratives.

Further information on Comhar journal can be found here.

 

Dr Síobhra Aiken

Síobhra Aiken is a Senior Lecturer in Irish and Celtic Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and a member of the Young Academy Ireland (YAI).  Her first monograph, Spiritual Wound: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War (2022) was awarded Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize and the ACIS Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books in Language and Culture.