The Nuanced Sensuousness of Being Irish
7 minute read
My frequent longing for Ireland is cellular. It’s in my bones, my soma. Deeper than that, it’s in my DNA. It’s a longing to feel as I do when I’m in Ireland, my cells start dancing, vivified by the vibrational vortex that is Ireland.
But what exactly am I longing for? Certainly the green, oh God that green. There’s nothing like it. Especially when you live in Los Angeles. I love LA, could wax lyrical about it for some time, but it simply does not have the lush green of Ireland.
Irish rain, the topic of much conversation and complaint, is precious. Before living in Los Angeles it never occurred to me that Irish rain might have an erotic, sensual component. Now I understand that eros is not always sexual, that liquidity itself, the moisture of rain is a fertile elixir.
Lush green and damp fields, blackberries caressed by morning dew are evocative doorways to places beyond verbal description. That this lush fecundity is there for the taking in Ireland but so often we see the damp and rain as a problem not knowing the harshness of drought, the utter barrenness of land that has gone eight months without rain. Here in the American West, we are in the driest year since record-keeping began twelve hundred years ago.
From my forty-nine-year-old vantage point on the cusp of the great threshold that women cross into our own drought, I have enhanced appreciation for the beauty, the sheer fecundity of Ireland. It’s everywhere! But coming up in the 1980’s I think most of us saw our climate and much else about Ireland as deficient, problematic, hampered as we are by limiting beliefs about our culture and land. We certainly didn’t have notions about any of it. Notions were for posh people, those who didn’t know their station. Most of us were content to have a miserable good time roughing it out in rain-sodden caravan parks and eating soggy chips on our summer holidays in Courtown or Kilkee.
Look, I’m not saying that I went to spend a holiday shivering on a beach in 16-degree weather secretly pretending I’m in the Canaries. I’m saying that the beauty and richness of Ireland is a thing to behold and savour and I for one have a renewed appreciation.
Maybe I’m wrong about the whole notions thing. Maybe younger generations than I came up feeling great about themselves and their (our) culture. Those who were no longer hampered by the claustrophobic ubiquity of the Catholic Church, the official narrative of no premarital sex, heteronormativity, and the sublimation of anything sniffing of the erotic.
Prior generations lived in outer conformity to the strictures of Irish society which were imposed from the top down, from the church, and enforced by teachers, doctors, and all manner of officialdom. But also by self-appointed custodians of propriety. Just think of the shopkeeper in ‘Brooklyn’ the brilliant book by Colm Tóbín, made into a film starring Saoirse Ronan. How almost effortless her ability to flex the might of social opprobrium grounded in Catholic Irish Morality that forsook nuance and was unforgiving of human nature at best, cruel and punitive at worst.
I recently read an article that quoted Fintan O’Toole on the paradoxes and complexities of how previous generations had to straddle the gap between official and unofficial Ireland. People like our parents and grandparents who, as he said, were forced to consign to a private realm ‘the quiet kindness of human acceptance, of loving and liking people even when their lives were not as they were supposed to be, even while paradoxically presenting to the world a face of intolerance that was never really their own.”
O’Toole was talking about the fact that in 2015 Ireland became the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage by referendum. I think that Gen Xers like myself and those younger than us, this was a no-brainer. We had been living in an Ireland that was increasingly unmoored from the strictures of Catholic doctrine, were globalized in a way that our parents and grandparents weren’t, even if they had travelled quite a bit outside Ireland.
Many of us have lived outside Ireland – studying abroad, gap years, backpacking around Europe, or the world, and returned home bringing our more open minds with us.
But maybe it’s a lie that our parents and grandparents didn’t have open minds, maybe Fintan hit the nail on the head. Maybe our parents had to pretend to toe the party line, to bow to orthodoxy while at the same time bucking convention in their own private ways. I know for sure that my parents used contraception and encouraged us to also whilst we were teenagers. I also know that I had a great-uncle who was gay, though perhaps celibately so – how heartbreaking. My Mam told us but beyond that, it was never talked about.
What I’m trying to get at here is the gap between what is presented as real and what is actually happening that so many of us Irish are familiar with. A threshold of sorts. Maybe being Irish quintessentially means having the ability to navigate the midline between reality and appearance in some way.
Ireland is a lush country of opulent beauty, of vibrant greens and electric blues. Our music is soulful, melancholy but also joyous, sexy even. Think of the throbbing of the bodhrán, the way the Hothouse Flowers fused trad with soul, gospel and rock & roll and how that felt and feels so right, so intrinsically Irish. The Riverdance revolution that unleashed the latent sexual undertones of Irish dancing.
Who fed us the lie that our cultural heritage is asexual? Who propagated idealised notions of robust homemaking women who, having paid their dues as comely maidens dancing at the crossroads, were now at home baking soda bread, turning out Irish-speaking children on an annual basis and their male counterparts, strapping fellows who worked the fields and stopped for a creamy pint after a solid day’s labour conversing about politics in the local with fine upstanding doctors and solicitors? Keepers of the cultural flame all.
Bloody DeValera and the Catholic Church, that’s who! Even more than that, the political was harnessed to this idea of cultural purity, being Irish meant not being English, being attached to the land, not talking about sex. Mind you there could be innuendo. And how much damage did the sublimation of sexuality do to so many? Think of the pain, the suppressed longing, the cruelty and alcohol abuse portrayed in Martin McDonagh’s plays.
There is a thread of the sensuous, the explicitly sexual running through our literary heritage: the ‘Midnight Court’, Edna O’Brien’s ‘County Girls’, the mythologies of the Tuatha De Danann, Gráinne Mhaol, the pirate queen herself. Here are found stories of empowered female sexuality and complex characters. The Midnight Court, Cúirt an Mheán Oíche , written in Irish by Brian Merriman in the 18th century is an homage to empowered female sexuality and celebrates sensuality and opportune lovemaking. It’s also a religious satire that pokes fun at the restrictive scaffolding imposed by priests.
So why weren’t we taught that in Leaving Cert Irish instead of being forced to deal with the interminable misery of Peig Sayers? No, we read ‘Peig’ in school, or tried to, and so learned disdain for our native tongue, many of us unaware of its beauty and lyrical descriptive qualities. I mean, just listen to Liam Ó Maonlaí speaking as Gaeilge and you realise that it's downright sexy. No, they didn’t teach us that in school. They were too busy teaching us to pretend we weren’t going to have premarital sex and training us to be good Catholics.
Balancing across the threshold. Straddling two worlds, the public and the private, the spoken and unspoken. Sometimes I think this is what it feels like to be an emigrant, but also how it feels to be a woman who has just turned forty-nine.
No spring chicken but definitely not hanging up my dancing shoes. Occupying the threshold between fertility and sterility. I hate to put it in those terms. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become much more comfortable in the grey zone of nuance.
The truth is that on the other side of menopause, I will be sterile, barren by the metrics of childbearing. But there’s a deeper fecundity, a liquidity that arises from creativity, the expression of the primal life force through physicality, through the sculpture of language, the evocative qualities of artistic endeavour. Many women say that they became even more creative in their post-menopausal years, they entered a new phase of empowerment and sovereignty of self. I say this anecdotally having talked to many older women mentors, but I’ve also read much about it. Think of Helen Mirren, Dame Judy Dench, Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem.
In South Indian philosophy there is a schema of a woman’s life divided into three parts: the innocence of the princess who has not yet begun to bleed, the auspicious one who is fertile - live-giving - and she who is victorious, who has reabsorbed the blood and entered a new phase of integration and wisdom. This last iteration is the salty woman, the one who knows something the younger ones don’t because she’s lived and learned. She’s integrated the lessons and emerged the better for it.
I like this, it makes me feel better about crossing the threshold. There’s a nuance that’s missing from the pre / post-menopausal binary. That binary seems too crude, too stark.
And it calls to mind the discrepancy between the eros of Irish culture: the lushness of the landscape, the moistness of the rain, the lyricism of the language, the bodhrán’s throbbing rhythm and the austere presentation of that culture: pre-Riverdance Irish dancing, St Brigid instead of Síle Na Gig, Peig Sayers instead of Cúirt an Mheánoiche. Comely maidens dancing at the crossroads before leaving to look after hearth and home, instead of empowered women seducing men and revelling in their sexuality.
The truth has always been more nuanced, more complex, as Fintan O’Toole pointed out. Irish people have always had secret lives that bucked the official story line of celibate priests, chaste teenagers and long, happy marriages oriented around raising children, Sundays roasts after mass. The truth is more complex and more interesting. The official Irish narrative suppressed complexity in the name of conformity and homogeneity.
That narrative has been substantially weakened if not completely replaced by a new generation who are proud of their non-binary sexuality, who welcome immigrants from around the world and children with brown skin, Irish accents and big Afros. As for their relationship to the Catholic Church and its suffocating dogma? Well, they’re making different choices.
I love this. Love this Ireland of nuance and heterogeneity. But maybe the complexity was always there, just hidden beneath an outer pretence of conformity.
My forties have shown me beyond a doubt that complexity is our natural state. That I myself am not one thing and I’m okay with that. I don’t really care anymore about trying to fit into a box. My wellbeing and peace of mind are more important. Being true to myself means acknowledging my messiness, my multiplicity.
Maybe being authentically Irish is also acknowledging the messiness of our history, our present and our collective self-conception. We’re not just a country of red-heads with freckles or ‘Black Irish’ down the ‘Wesht’ with green eyes and olive skin. We’re a diverse country with a diverse population and a history and heritage that is so much more complex and juicy than many of us were led to believe.
We come from a lush, beautiful country with a rich, lyrical and sensuous sense of self-expressed through the traditional arts and language. That message may have been dampened by the dominant conservative ethos of an earlier Ireland, one dominated by the Church and the struggle to be independent of England, to be ‘purely Irish.’ But that’s not the case today. Many sacred cows have been relegated to the secular, been shown to represent false Gods of purity, chastity, heteronormativity and abstinence.
From what I see and read Ireland is embracing diversity, LBGTQ rights, and increasingly secularity. And just as I realise that the complexity of my womanhood, my particular eros, can’t be reduced to a simple metric of whether I’m menstruating, ‘still fertile,’ the nature of Irish identity can’t be reduced to a binary, a simple either/or. Irish history and identity are multifaceted, complex, rich and juicy. This calls for celebration, for welcoming the multiplicity of Irish identities, the narratives that fell (still fall?) outside the supposed societal orthodoxy.
I’m proud to be irreducibly of Ireland, just as I’m proud to be irreducibly me – complex, messy, sexy, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly, but always grounded in intrinsic belongingness. When I was younger, my Dad always told me to remember who I am and where I come from. His advice has kept me in good stead. I’m me. From Ireland, a rich and luscious country with a variegated history, something to be proud of, to celebrate and integrate. Maybe even to learn from.
Dearbhla Kelly, April 2022
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