Seal sa Domhan Thoir: sojourn in the Eastern World

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003 by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

   Ta na duilleoga ag titim
   duilleoga mora crainn plana
   ag titim ar rian do choise
   mar ar shiulais chugham trathnona. (Ni Dhomhnaill 1981:27)

   The leaves are falling down,
   broad leaves of the plane trees,
   falling on the imprints of your footsteps
   where you walked to see me of an afternoon. (my translation)

The vast distance from my own culture helped me see things in a more objective way. I could see clearly the dysfunctional family--Irish style--in a way that I'm sure I could not have done closer up. The result was two poems, "Athair" and "Mathair" ("Father" and "Mother"), (10) which described the two sides of the same shilling, the Irish family where the father was mostly absent--an absentee father--and the mother was correspondingly too caught up in her children, living vicariously through them, for she could not go out to work because of the marriage ban. (11)

Gradually I began to write more and more, and before long writing in Irish had become the core of my daily life in Turkey. I realized it was something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I found that I didn't much miss Ireland as such, and in fact in many ways I execrated it. But I began to feel that I was losing any fluency I might have had in the Irish language. The final result of that loss would have been devastating to me. There was only one thing for it: to get back home to the Gaeltacht and see if I could manage to live there for as long as possible.

I applied for an Arts Council bursary and got it. I broke up my Turkish household, sold the furniture, and decamped to West Kerry. I was very driven. Back in Ireland I managed to eke it out so that we could live in the West Kerry Gaeltacht for three years. When I finally had to move to Dublin, I was directed by Seosamh O Dalaigh, the famous folklore collector, to the collections of the Department of Folklore, University College Dublin. I discovered I had fallen into a goldmine: this was the selfsame Irish that I had learned in the Gaeltacht in the 1950s, the selfsame language that had cured the extreme pain of separation from my family when I was a very small child, sent by my parents to live with my aunt. This was the language that was a balm to my soul. I wanted never to be without it again.

Gradually I began to see the artistic advantages that accrue from this ineffable material. I found the length of my arm of a card catalogue on the topic "nithe neamhbheo agus neacha nach bhfuil ann" ("unalive beings and things that don't exist"). Well this had even me stumped: do they exist or do they not exist? But poetry, not being an empirical art, doesn't have to worry about such things. Like modern Turkish poets who also turned to their folk traditions, I just go on and use this material, and sing praises that the modern folk material available in Ireland is so rich and rare, with the early Irish material even richer still. I don't write folktales as such, but use the motifs in them to talk about the equally ghoulish specters that haunt our modern times. I feel I have enough to write about in the Department of Folklore archives for as long as I live, and then some.