Notes

1 This article was first published in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2023.

WOMEN'S STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2023.2278166
© 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Academic Acrticle:
“This is a female text”: The Mediumship of Creative Histories in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat

Read the introduction below:


Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat begins as “an unscientific mishmash of daydream and fact, concocted while scraping porridge gloop into a bin” (75). It is a text produced by living with a text, a situation where body and page, domestic and literary, other and self, become inextricably intertwined by experiences of reading and writing. Ghost charts Ní Ghríofa’s obsession with the eighteenth-century author of Ireland’s most famous caoineadh, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire: Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Touched by Ní Chonaill’s expression of grief following the murder of her husband, and incensed by her near-total absence from the historical record, Ní Ghríofa’s narrator embarks on a mission of repossession. She pursues the poet’s ghost in scant traces – the words, children, objects, and landscapes she left behind – in the hope that she might collect these fragments and “imagine extrapolating a whole from [them], unbroken and vivid” (209).

Ghost directly confronts the conspicuous absence of the female voice within the historical record, a lack which many researchers of women’s studies will be all too familiar with. This article explores how a project such as Ní Ghríofa’s thus necessitates a very different kind of research, one involving entry into the lacunae of liminal space hidden below male-authored texts. The openings which these gaps offer become spaces in which to remember, remake, and reimagine differently. In diving into these gaps at the intersection of history and women’s experiences, the article seeks to contribute a nuanced examination of domestic labor, embodied epistemology, and the multifaceted nature of women’s collective experiences. It hopes to reveal the transformative power of creative mediums in reclaiming such silenced voices, whilst also emphasizing ethical considerations on collaborative storytelling within feminist scholarship.