Haunting Grounds

When I was a junior in college, a friend handed me a copy of When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams. We’d been intimate with each other’s obsessions and sleep schedules, sharing a bed to save money, hardly ever using it at the same time.

“Read this,” she said.

The memoir opens with an unsettling discovery. Alone at her parents’ home, Williams finds her mother’s journals. “You must promise to me that you won’t look at them,” her mother had said before she died, “until after I’m gone.” This was her one condition. Williams agreed. She could wait. Now, on the first full moon since her mother’s passing, she comes upon “three shelves of beautiful clothbound books,” exactly where her mother said they’d be. The notebook she picks up, though, is empty. To her surprise, so are the second, the third, the fourth. “Shelf after shelf after shelf,” Williams writes, “all my mother’s journals were blank.”

How to read the unwritten? What had her mother meant to bequeath?

A year later, I made an unsettling discovery of my own. I was translating this memoir into my mother tongue – an “educational project” for which I received the publisher’s reluctant permission – when I came across a quote from Susan Griffin’s ecofeminist text, Woman and Nature: “We Enter a New Space […] where everyone is a daughter.” On first reading, it seemed straightforward. I hadn’t expected it would be a challenge to translate. But the phrase “a daughter” was a grammatical impossibility in my mother tongue, because the word “daughter,” I realized to my own surprise, wasn’t exactly a word. It was a compound. Its first part meant “girl” or “female child.” Its second was a possessive.

In Griffin’s sentence, every woman was a daughter in her own right. She was a daughter not only of her parents – who are irrelevant to the sentiment – but in the broadest, most expansive sense of the word. The contours of belonging weren’t drawn only by blood, Griffin seems to suggest, but by choice – which meant, too, that they could be redrawn. But “daughter” did not exist on its own in my mother tongue. It wasn’t an independent word, but a subjugated one. It literally hinged on the possessive. You couldn’t be a daughter; you were either someone’s daughter, or you were just a girl. The implication was disturbing: a child’s relationship to their parents could only be named through – and therefore defined by – possession.

By a similar token, I wondered whether I was possessed not only by my parents, but by my mother tongue, whose logic was the very lens through which I’d seen the world, and which, as such, remained invisible to me. Now, I wondered what else it may have distorted while – and because – it seemed transparent. I wondered, too, whether Williams was possessed not only by her mother or mother tongue, but by the white expanse of the journals – the space her mother kept buying or getting but didn’t take up. Was silence, too, a language we may be possessed by? Was it part of Williams’ inheritance?

“THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT,” reads the first line of Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat. Chapter 1 is also titled “A Female Text,” so the phrase reads, already, like an echo. “This is a female text,” insists the second line, “composed while folding someone else’s clothes.”

A braided, lyric memoir, Ghost in the Throat follows its modern-day Irish narrator in her attempts and failures to reconstruct the life of the eighteenth-century Irish poet, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. “When we first met,” Ní Ghríofa writes of the poet, “I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.” But it wasn’t until their second “meeting,” when Ní Ghríofa was a teenager, that Ní Chonaill’s only surviving work – a mournful, rhythmic kin – resonated. As did the poet’s own tragic figure: a woman who, having found her husband’s body in the woods, kneeled down to drink his blood.

The keen gushed out of Ní Chonaill at the scene of the murder, the story goes, and had been passed down orally for generations. It was later transcribed and translated from Irish into English, but Ní Ghríofa – literate in both languages – was left wanting. Even the more graceful translations were missing something essential, she felt: the timbre of Ní Chonaill’s voice. Determined to find or echo it in English, Ní Ghríofa decides to attempt a translation of her own. While she worked, Ní Ghríofa noticed the keen didn’t only inform her own female text, but began inhabiting it.

On the podcast Between the Covers, David Naimon asks Ní Ghríofa whether it was she who haunted Ní Chonaill, or Ní Chonaill who haunted her. The roles seem interchangeable, he observes; the haunted is also haunting. The very form of the oral keen – “passing from one woman to another through time and space,” he said – may itself be a “ghost in the throat.”

Was silence, too, a ghost in the throat – transferred from woman to woman? Was it part of my inheritance, too?

Keening was “a poetic form of solidarity,” Naimon says. The definition is itself poetic – Naimon is a celebrated writer in his own right – and fitting for an art form that was also a kind of protest. Denied formal education in Ireland, women who wanted to write needed to do so out loud: to repeat their work to themselves and each other, over and over: to keep embodying, with their voices, in space, what they couldn’t lay flat on a page.

Ní Ghríofa defines her memoir, too, as a keen: “a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn.” A mother of four, she describes her own life as a text shared by “countless other women in countless other rooms,” each carrying her own burdens, caring for her own households. “This is a female text,” the refrain returns, “and it’s a tiny miracle that it even exists.”

Was Williams’ inheritance, too, a “female text”? Was it a miracle, or rather, a trick – an optical illusion? Did it “even exist”?

Ní Ghríofa writes and erases the text of her life while taking unusual pleasure in acts of service and sacrifice. “There is a peculiar contentment to be found,” she states, “in absenting oneself like this, subsumed in the needs of others.” Ní Ghríofa keeps her to-do list “as close as her phone,” and draws “a deep sense of satisfaction” from each crossed item. “In such erasure,” she writes, “lies joy.”

We watch Ní Ghríofa perform, daily, reflexive vanishing acts in the service of motherhood and wifedom, her selfhood eclipsed by these roles. “It hurt and hurt,” she describes sex with her husband shortly after giving birth, “until the pain made me bite the sad skin between my thumb and finger.” Ní Ghríofa somehow managed to hide the pain from her husband – who either managed to remain oblivious or to interpret it as pleasure – but she also managed him by withholding her experience. Had she been more transparent about it – or resisted the urge to make her pain transparent – he wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with her, she assures us. In absenting herself, then, she absents him, too: his agency in their intimacy, his chance to make an informed decision. 

To further complicate matters, Ní Ghríofa rages on behalf of Ní Chonaill’s erasure. I relate to this impulse. A few years ago, I stayed at a friend’s for a few nights, watching her do all the dishes while her partner sat on the couch, on his laptop. Why wasn’t he helping? And yet, who was I to judge? I had a partner who was physically unable to care for himself, who needed me to do all the dishes, all the time. I’d consciously chosen an interabled relationship. Was it really all that different, I was forced to ask, than the choice my friend was making? Either way, it was easier to rage on her behalf, I discovered, than to say much of anything on mine.

Ní Ghríofa, I suspect, felt similarly, attempting to reverse Ní Chonaill’s erasure while still committing her own. When her research turns up a collection of letters exchanged between the poet’s brothers, Ní Ghríofa scours the book for mentions of women, then crosses out everything else. This “oblique reading,” she writes – erasuring to reverse erasure  – “will reveal, I hope, the concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink.” It did. Between lengthy discussions of male relatives, their work and concerns, Ní Ghríofa finds Ní Chonaill’s contemporaries, including a twin sister she hadn’t known existed. She sees the poet reflected in these other women, but when Ní Chonaill herself is mentioned, it’s as someone’s “mother” or “sister” – defined by her relationship to the letters’ subjects – “cast once more in the periphery of men’s lives.” Possessed, too – “sister to the grandfather of” – by these familial ties. Having read multiple letters that made no mention of the poet, Ní Ghríofa concludes, “There she is, our Eibhlín, as she always is: gone.”

“There she is” and “gone” may seem like a contradiction in terms, but it’s also a challenge to the binary of presence and absence, the assumption that they’re mutually exclusive. “Her absence,” Williams writes of her own mother, “became her presence.” To be “there” and “gone” – there as gone – is to complicate the erasure of women from male texts. It’s to push against the language that excludes them.

In my mother tongue, a gendered language, verbs in the plural are almost always conjugated in the masculine, whether or not women are present. In elementary school, I was taught the masculine was synonymous with the human and therefore encompassed the feminine. It “included” women without naming them, but men had to be named, or they were excluded. The feminine did not encompass them.

In the years since I’ve moved abroad, women have begun insisting on the feminine plural. It’s a way for them to speak as themselves, for themselves: to be present in rather than effaced by language, whether or not some dude is around. When I hear it, though, the female plural sounds “off.” A man might be present! I involuntarily gasp, the rules of grammar! This isn’t my conscious response; it’s the result of conditioning. It’s also contradictory to what I actually think and feel. I support and admire these women. I also intend to become one of them.

In this spirit, I’ve used the feminine plural wherever possible in my translation of When Women Were Birds. Not only to retrain my brain, but also because Williams’ “we” often referred to women. Recently, however, an experienced translator suggested I “revert” these conjugations back to male. I explained my grammatical straying and some part of him understood. Another part of him wanted to guide me back into the haloed, sacred safety of natural syntax. “Just make sure you aren’t doing flic flacs to justify this choice,” he said, “you wouldn’t want the translation to read like one.” I thanked him, but I was going to do the flic flacs.

When writing When Women Were Birds, Williams was fifty-four, the age her mother was when she died. Divided into fifty-four sections, the book’s structure reflects the “female text” of the women’s lives, echoing themes of voice and its absence, often returning to the riddle of the blank journals and their endless possible meanings: “My Mother’s Journals are bones,” Willaims muses, “My Mother’s Journals are a palindrome.” Was there a “right” way to interpret them? How to honor what you can’t decipher?

After it was done, my mom kept asking to read the translation. I never let her. I can’t imagine us talking about it. We’ve been close in body – sharing a bed when I was a child, hugging often, holding hands – but not in language. I’ve shared with her as little as I could about anything I thought might worry her. Even more trivial things, I’ve often had to extract by force, then make an effort to disguise my effort. I wanted to protect her not only from the facts of my life, but from the struggle of sharing any with her.

Perhaps as a result of this dynamic, my mom and I have developed a strange language. It has strange roots, too: they grow fur.

“Where’s the cat,” we used to ask each other when I was a kid. Later, we dropped the article to “Where’s cat?” Grapevine, our Siamese, was female, but we used the masculine “cat” – we “needed” some “man” at home – then switched her pronouns accordingly. Soon, we switched our own pronouns, too. We also started conjugating our verbs in the masculine. Without realizing it, we’d wiped the feminine out of the household. The way we spoke about our cat became, simply, the way we spoke.

We adapted the new language with an odd ease. It made us character-like, detached from the weight of our histories. There was a kind of freedom in speaking as if we weren’t really us, not simply by diverging from set identities and narratives, but by virtue of the license and agency of “becoming” masculine.

There was also an intimate distance to our modified language. My mom and I absented ourselves from our own sentences, discovering – as Ní Ghríofa did – not only contentment, but control. To use the masculine was to redeem ourselves from the disappearing feminine form. We did so while thinking of no one but ourselves – perhaps in order to think of no one but ourselves. If we couldn’t make language see us, my mom and I discovered, we could turn ourselves into what it saw. We could make ourselves real by a measure of unreality.

But before our absence became our presence, as Williams put it, our presence had become an absence. We weren’t masculine; it didn’t actually encompass us. It did help us share more with one another, but it may have also compromised – perhaps at the same time – how much of each other we could see. Or rather, how much of each other remained in what we saw. 

Our mother tongue was a “sex-maniac,” a famous poet once wrote. The word “male” shares its root with “memory” and “remnant” – having a lineage, a place in history. The word “female,” on the other hand, shares its root with “hole” – a space to-be-filled, a depression. But isn’t memory, too, full of holes?

In When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams quotes from The Little Prince: “Be aware of what can never be tamed.” Her husband’s favorite line. The Little Prince had been translated into my mother tongue, so I didn’t have to translate it myself; I only had to find my copy of the book, and in it, the line to be quoted. Except, I didn’t find it. I didn’t find it in the English translation, either. The phrase seemed so familiar, though, I thought it had been one of my favorites. But memory was a loose, sparse net; content flowed not only out, but in.

Ní Ghríofa had a similar experience. In a school paper, she wrote of Ní Chonaill and her husband-to-be: “She jumps on his horse and rides away with him forever.” Her teacher marked the paper with an X. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you!” he wrote. Looking back at the keen, Ní Ghríofa discovered her teacher had been right: the image she’d described didn’t exist in the text. “If not from the poem,” she asks, “then where did it come from?”

The image was real to her, even if not for her teacher. I wonder if it did exist in the text: if it had been hidden, like the line “from” The Little Prince, in the space between words. Like women in the texts of men, in the plural conjugations of my mother tongue.

In the text of my life, I volunteer as little as I can about my home. This is my own erasure project. At times, it feels like absenting myself. At others, very much like the opposite, a kind of reclamation. Most often, it feels like both.

A couple of years ago, my mom and I spent most of April in Washington, D.C. In honor of poetry month, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library put out a box of discarded cut-outs and an invitation for patrons to try erasure poetry. Sitting across from my mom, I sifted through the paper both intently and randomly. We began making texts into other texts – making others’ texts our own – making them ghosts of themselves.

Three days later, we were back, this time with cut-outs from a book in my mother tongue, so that my mom could get more playful. As we walked over, I was on my phone, texting a friend whose book I was editing: a YA novel he’d co-written with another friend. In it, four teenagers meet by chance in the hills surrounding a small border city. My friend and I lived on one side of that border; his friend and co-author on the other. In the novel, two of the four teenagers – from opposite sides of the border – are instantly drawn to one another. The other two remain suspicious, cautioning. What kind of friendship might be possible for them? What would it take for friendship to survive where so much else has been wiped off, obliterated?

The story is set in 2009, when my friend and his co-author were their protagonists’ age. They’ve been working on the manuscript for years, during which I’ve seen it shrink and expand, sharpen and sprawl.

During this recent round of edits, I grew wary of the books’ potential blind spots: the countless things it could get wrong, the countless experiences – and people – it might be insensitive to. What would today’s readers make of it? What ghosts would it wake? I was wary, too, because its premise and tone – the very architecture of its hope – seemed increasingly unlikely, if not inconceivable.

But the work has gotten more rewarding, too. I needed fiction – I needed this novel – whether or not it was plausible. It was a world unto itself, and I was lucky to experience it from within. My friend and his co-author had never studied writing, but the pieces were all there. All I had to do was rearrange them – field through a swath of characters and stories to uncover the deeper charge. I hoped to do so with something of an invisible hand, but I was there – it was my hand – and suddenly, mom was face down on the sidewalk, and my phone flew out of my hand mid-text. I crouched by her and held her head and watched the opening in her skin, and felt her fear, and her fear of my fear, and mine of hers.

For the rest of the day, the averted emergency followed us around like a cartoon rain cloud. “Good thing I’m not fragile,” my mom tried to joke. She hadn’t broken or even fractured anything, but she was fragile, and was only going to get more so. I threaded my arm through hers, and we walked like that the rest of the way to the library, to cross out more words.

Later that week, I received an author’s permission to translate his debut novel into English. It follows two men – one middle aged, the other young – on their way to commit a seemingly inexplicable act of vandalism. There are no casualties or even injuries, but the incident gets classified as a “terrorist attack.” The book is critical of what’s deemed “terrorism,” and of my home country’s politics, its legal and carceral systems.

Still, translated literature is filtered through the image and position of its source language, which, in turn, is shadowed by the places where it’s spoken, at times conflated with their politics. When I mentioned this book, on impulse, to a man I’d met at a reading, I caught myself by surprise. My mother tongue was an admission of guilt, an implicit disclosure of where I was from, what I was possessed by. In the man’s expression – a brief flash of shock I was now familiar with but not yet used to – I watched the space between language and country shrink, then disappear. “What better time,” he managed, “for literature?”

He was being kind. I was moved but not convinced. The power of stories lived not only within them, but in context, which was now complicated, in this case, by atrocities.

A day or two later, I emailed a translator who’d mentored me to ask if there was anything she’d recommend including in a pitch. “I so want to give you some useful advice,” she wrote back, “but the truth is that I’m quite pessimistic.” She was a Booker-prize winning translator with three completed, unsold manuscripts – including the winner of another prestigious award – and no interested parties. Most editors wouldn’t consider these books now, given their source language, my mother tongue. “Many doors seem to have closed,” my mentor wrote. “It’s unclear when they might open.”

A few days later, I watched subway doors close behind my mom. Hoping to distract myself, I crossed the platform and took a train in the opposite direction, towards the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library. I was riding away from a new silence, the silence of being without her, having gotten so used, for the past month, to the silence of being together. Unsatisfied by the screeching and clunking of trains, I played Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon into my earbuds at maximum volume. In an eerie echo of my own circumstance, the narrator’s mother just happened to be leaving. “While we were waiting for the bus in the square,” the narrator said, “I had the feeling that I should prepare myself for a long separation. Actually, I had the disorienting feeling that I would never see her again.”

Getting ready to leave the library, I looked out the window at the National Portrait Gallery, then found myself walking there. I wasn’t yet ready to head back to the apartment, to the two bowls and two spoons waiting in the sink.

My mom and I had walked into that Gallery together the previous week. We didn’t stay long, though, because she had little patience for museums, especially for someone who not only loved art, but studied and taught it. Though she’d recently retired, my mom continued calling herself an “art teacher.” She never said she was an artist. It was one of the ways she’d erased herself, I think, from her own life.

Inside the gallery now, I followed young voices to the second floor – further than my mom and I had gotten. The kids were standing in a small enclave exhibition, facing the centerpiece: an enormous painting. Seeing it, I understood why their voices had carried. It was magnificent. It wasn’t a portrait, though, so I didn’t quite understand how it found its way to the National Portrait Gallery. The four smaller paintings around it weren’t portraits, either. They were landscapes.

In the centerpiece, Manifest Destiny by Alexis Rockman, the Brooklyn Bridge appears as it might soon be: underwater. A futuristic-looking bridge is also submerged, as is the land of lower Manhattan. The painting imagines the consequences of its titular doctrine: the ways in which destructive past impulses may result not only in future destruction, but in their own reversal. Conquest for conquest. Expansion for collapse.

I saw my own country – which my mom still lived in and was now on her way back to – reflected in the US, its white supremacy and colonialism. I see some differences, too, but the similarities are front and center by necessity – the result of a tireless machinery of death. Differences are set aside in service of awareness and alarm. We can never discuss everything, and shouldn’t try to if we’re going to discuss anything at all. What we eliminate, though – whatever it is, and it must be something – both clarifies and distorts, at the same time, the rest of what we can see.

In Manifest Destiny, the submerged city is instantly recognizable as New York. What makes the painting as effective and disturbing as it is, I think, is this very familiarity: the fact that the ruined, decaying New York looks so much like the romanticized, living one. Because similarity haunts us just as much as, if not more so, than difference.

To the right of Manifest Destiny is Alexander Hogue’s Dust Bowl. The painting features a breached, torn barbed-wire fence in the aftermath of a storm. The land once enclosed by the fence is now indistinguishable from the land outside it; on both sides, the ground is covered by sand. “The dust storms of the 1930s moved millions of tons of topsoil across America’s heartland,” reads its description on the Smithsonian website, “wiping out farms and ranches that had stood for generations.” The storms eroded cultivated lands, erasing our erasure of their previous forms, then taking on new ones.

“There are no people in these paintings,” read the exhibition label, “and yet their presence is central to the story of each place. These works reveal that the American landscape is more than a physical setting. It is a powerful cultural symbol, constructed and manipulated by humans. They tell the complicated history of how Americans engaged with the land in pursuits of power and profit as well as veneration and preservation.”

There are no people in these paintings, and yet, our presence is recorded in them, inextricable from the land and its devastation. There are no people in these paintings, and yet, or therefore, they are our portraits. And we, their ghosts.

Much of the art in other exhibitions also seemed haunted: My Children by Abbott Handerson Thayer, The Mirror by Robert Reid, Electronic Superhighway by Nam June Paik. What I saw in these works was a reflection of my own mindset, I knew. And yet, the fewer traditional portraits I walked by, the more invisible eyes seemed to peer at me.

Ghosts were in what I was reading, too: the protagonist of a novel I’d just finished was revealed, at the very end, to have been dead all along. The ghost wasn’t only a character, but the voice of the story, its narrator. A ghost in the throat.

“The people we invent on the page are vastly incomplete,” writes Kate McQuade in an essay on a haunted faculty housing. Vastly incomplete implies that what’s missing from the page is greater than what’s on it. “Readers invent a character’s life,” she adds, “just as much as writers do. We invent just as much when we tell the truth as when we write fiction. Maybe more, because silence is a kind of storytelling.”

English is far richer in vocabulary than my mother tongue, and so, usually, far more specific. But there are a few words in my mother tongue without direct English counterparts. One of them describes the silence within conversations. It’s not the silence of wild spaces, or even that of a person alone in a room. It’s the audible form of the blank space – an essential part of language precisely because it carries no meaning of its own – because it makes words intelligible by separating them from others. It’s also the kind of silence to make room for, among other things, echoes.

“One can imagine a breathing space,” Williams quotes Johan Cage on his famous silent concerto, 4’33”. Perhaps this was what the journals offered: “a breathing space” where meaning could reverberate. “There’s no such thing as empty space or an empty time,” Cage also said. The journals weren’t empty; they were “capable,” Williams writes, of receiving her own words. Her mother may not have been a writer, but she’d known one.

Ní Ghríofa tells Naimon: “What I became most enamored of,” while working on the keen’s translation, “were the gaps and the silences between the verses – the places where there was a natural break in the speech, where we as readers, reading it aloud, also pause to draw a breath.” The poem is “an orchestration of the body,” she says; it was a song.

This is a distinction my mother tongue doesn’t make, an example of its vagueness compared to English. “Poem” and “song” are, always, the same word. My first name.

I’d “asked” for this name, my mom says, back when she was pregnant with me. I found this hard to believe. I didn’t like being asked to sing, which happened often, or whether I was writing poems. I didn’t like what the name sounded like. I also didn’t like the way I sounded. Still in kindergarten, I started modifying my voice – lowering its volume and elevating its pitch – to appease the adults around me, and, by extension, myself. I wanted to sound more like the girl I thought I was supposed to be: more feminine, more chirp-y, more less-than. To change my name, I would have had to wait over a decade, an inconceivable length of time for a four-year-old. But I could change my voice right then, without quite knowing what I was doing. I could start chiseling the brick in my throat. I could start making way for the ghost.

Like “daughter,” “ghost” is a compound in my mother tongue. It’s made of a word meaning “wind” or “spirit,” and the name of an ancient people who were often referred to as giants. Goliath may have been one of their last descendants. According to the Old Testament, these ancient people lived in Canaan before the Hebrews. In this way, “ghost” isn’t just an ambiguous phantom presence, but the specific people who’ve come before us. It’s not an ambiguous phenomenon, but a proper noun. It’s also the name of another biblical group: those “living” in the world of the dead.

Residents of the world of the dead, I read, were assumed to have healing powers. What if being haunted – even possessed – wasn’t only a form of rapture, but of restoration?

“In Irish folklore,” Ní Ghríofa tells Naimon, “the souls of dead infants were believed to return as sedge warblers, to comfort their mothers.” She talks about starlings, too, whose songs reproduce ambient noise picked up over generations. She’s seen clusters of them near houses abandoned during the Irish famine, still “mimicking the sounds of people long gone.” Still sounding like what, and who, had long been silent. Perhaps there had been a time when women were birds – a phrase that comes to Williams in a dream, as if from some other world, not unlike real bird songs. And perhaps birds, too, had once been women and their children.

Though I distrust my mother tongue, I believe its definition of ghosts. I believe in ghosts as a compound: in listening to, and for, multiple voices at once. And what better way to be haunted – and healed – than through song?

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