Text Message #2

Text Message #2

a ghost in the throat

By Doireann Ni Ghriofa

326 pp. Biblioasis

The words “This is a female text.” begin and end the memoir A Ghost in the Throat by Irish writer Doireann Ni Ghriofa. A text about women, for women, interesting to women, focused on women’s topics? All of those things, yes, but something more. Using the story of her research into an 18th century Irish poet, Ghriofa contends that a female text is one of absence. Not of erasure, but rather of never having been, as opposed to a male text in all its presence. Female texts, songs, poems, records of births and deaths, of lives lived, are passed from one woman to another, said, recited, sung, keened, wailed, but not considered important enough to be transcribed for the future.

Ghriofa struggles to find information about the poet’s life, information that is not a recitation of male relatives – wife of, mother of, sister of, aunt of – but rather answers questions about the poet herself, seemingly basic questions like the date of her death and whether she is buried in the family crypt with her well-recorded husband and sons. Ghriofa tries to dig up details about the poet from the male texts that have been preserved – a stash of letters penned by the poet’s brother, for example - searching for any mention of the poet or the women in her life (her mother, her twin sister).

Through the telling of her story as it unfolded during this research, Ghriofa illuminates other female texts. Housework, with all of its scrubbings and tidyings, is a female text. A baby girl’s sweater, knitted by a grandmother, stitch by stitch, a female text. The author’s body, naked after a shower, with its sagging breasts, caesarean scars, and stretch marks, like the bodies of so many women before, the history of pregnancies and births and feedings written on this sacred female text. Through all these texts, Ghriofa presents an account of womanhood and motherhood that resonated with this woman and mother and, I suspect, many others.

One of my favorite quotes is: “In books I find the dead as if they were alive…” written by Richard de Bury in The Philobiblon. The male dead, that is, Doireann Ni Ghriofa might add.