What Foremothers?
As a child I knew
How, beyond the lamp’s circuit,
Lay the shadow of the shadow
Of this darkness,
April 2016
Nun’s Island Theatre
Cúirt International Festival of Literature
In 1992, Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill asked this question in response to the suggestion that female Irish poets have “a long healthy chain of foremothers” available to them. She could well have been forgiven for doing so, as the project of nation-building in the early days of the Irish State played a huge role in the construction of a male-dominated literary canon, and it is only in recent years that the erasure and cultural depreciation of female voices has begun to be redressed. A whole segment of poetic lineage that our culture could be drawing on has been wiped out.
This ensemble performance deals with a group of female poets writing in the early decades of the Irish State and dramatises their body of work and the context it emerged from. It gives voice to experiences that have long been stifled, and questions what a canon is – a pantheon of literary treasures judged solely by artistic merit, or a sustained political project which dissolves what does not serve it into dark matter as an idea of a nation marches relentless forward? What has been lost and why?
Performed by:
Megan Vine (Blanaid Salkeld), Sarah-Jane Scott (Temple Lane), Sarah Healy (Mary Devenport O’Neill), Yvette Picque (Sheila Wingfield), Deirdre Bhreatnach (Freda Laughton), Leticia Diaz (Rhoda Coghill)
Directed by:
Sarah O’Toole
