THE IRISH LITERARY scene has long been a source of national pride, but it’s in particularly rude health at the moment. Yet with so many books to catch up on, it can be easy to lose track of what’s out there.
Enter The Irish Read, where we feature an extract from a piece of work by an Irish or Ireland-based author.
The taster from a novel, work of non-fiction or short story should spur you on to find out more about the writer and their work.
The writer
This week we feature an extract by Cristín Leach, who is an art critic and writer from Cork – you’ll no doubt know her byline from her work in the Sunday Times Culture magazine in particular. Negative Space is her first book, a memoir about her divorce, life afterwards, being an art critic and a lover of culture, and how writing helps and heals.
The narrative moves back and forth in time, sometimes told in small fragments, reflecting Cristín’s mindset at the time of writing. It’s a beautifully written, open and honest account of her experiences. In this extract, she writes not just about how getting tattoos helped to ground her in her body, but how this grounding led to her diving into her family’s past.
The story
The first tattoo I get after my divorce is for me. The second one is for my grannies. A tattoo is a line drawn between then and now, a beautiful, purposeful channelling of pain that means something more than the ink. The outline is the least painful part. It’s the filling in that digs deep.
Life puts scars on our bodies we didn’t ask for. Marriage felt like a surrender of my body. This was stamping myself with marks I chose. Fourteen hours of good, useful pain to connect me back to my body, my home inside.
I think, this is one way of expressing, containing, transforming pain from inside to out. I think, this is also a way of feeling something else, something understandable, something that makes sense. In the same way my stomach growling because I have not eaten makes sense; there’s a reason for it, I understand the cause. Tattoo pain heals, leaving a deliberate mark and an absence of pain instead. Even better, a tattoo is art you can carry without holding. It’s art you can take with you if you need to run.
A tattoo cannot be listed, claimed, or divided up, unlike the process of splitting possessions, including works of art once selected for a home together. Post-divorce, there is also something hugely satisfying about buying art that will only ever exist on your body, and putting it in a place you know your ex will never see.
Tattoo number two is also for the possessions I can’t take with me when I leave my home on the side of the mountain, because there are some things that must stay put. These are living things, deep rooted in the ground. They’re not going anywhere. I’m the one on the move.
When the kids and I finally move into our own new house, sleeping on blow up beds and eating dinner in deckchairs because I have sold my half of the furniture left in the family home in order to maximise my cash, I paint a new mantra on the wall. It’s a sentence that came to me once when I stood on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, as I rooted bare feet into the camomile grass and stared out at the Atlantic Ocean: The ground will hold you where you stand, remember you are free. I repeat it under my breath. I repeat it when it feels like I might come untethered, and I remember how to stay heavy, and light.
A marriage ending breaks a home. After a while, it became clear to me that the most unforgivable thing I had done in the eyes of some was to take the family home apart, to destroy the very concept, almost delete the very place, by insisting on its sale. I wanted more than anything to move on. I could not move on and stay put, in a home we had built together, in a place where we had no roots.
I want to stay tethered. I don’t want to come undone. I look back, to find anchors and roots.
On my mum’s side there were journalists. My great-great grandad owned newspapers in Derry and Donegal. In December 1921, he announced that his twenty-four-year-old daughter Eily McAdam was taking over as manager and editor of The Donegal Vindicator, a newspaper printed and published from a building that was also the family home.
In London, a treaty had just been signed to establish the Irish Free State. It would draw a line that split the rest of the island from six counties in the north, along a border with Donegal, keeping that northern county in the Irish Free State. But the treaty had not yet been ratified in Dublin.
Anti-treaty and anti-partition, Eily still wrote about peace and compromise. She had been arrested for her first journalistic ‘venture’, as her father put it, by the British Army in 1920. They raided the Vindicator premises, shut the newssheet down and took Eily and her younger sister Kathleen to Armagh Jail where they were later released without charge.
As editor of the Vindicator, Eily continued to hold a Republican editorial stance throughout the Irish Civil War, which was likely the reason that the military wing of the Irish Provisional Government, the National Army, also raided the premises, by some accounts smashing the printing press. But Eily kept publishing the paper.
In her first editorial she wrote, ‘I do not think anyone can hold a conviction dear and cause his pen to be silent on the subject or to write otherwise than he thinks.’ She stepped down as editor abruptly, in April 1923, two months before the end of the Irish Civil War. I don’t know why.
She married but kept her own family name in print, writing for newspapers in London and Dublin. I found her in the 1940s in The Catholic Standard, writing a regular column called ‘Notebook’, where she observed, ‘Robert Louis Stephenson was of the opinion that no wise man would ever marry a woman who writes, because, he declared, the pursuit of the right word and the uncertainty as to whether it has been found was sure to lead to moodiness.’
The danger of words. The danger of women and words. I wonder about the unpublished personal stories of women who write, there to be found in the gaps.
Negative Space by Cristín Leach is published by Merrion Press, and in bookshops now.
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