“Everything / we husband is always shedding”: intimacy, distance, and the politics of migration in Ailbhe Darcy’s Insistence

ABSTRACT

Ailbhe Darcy’s Insistence observes both the importance of intimacy and the fundamental irreducibility at the heart of intimacy. The collection highlights family ties, but it also concedes that there remains a strangeness at the core of those ties: sometimes “kin insists,” sometimes the child feels less “son” than uncanny “monster.” Darcy then inverts this point: if there is something foreign about our kin, we might also find kinship with beings whom we would otherwise consider foreign. Darcy’s primary concerns here are refugeeism (especially the European migrant crisis) and ecological devastation. On the former point, Insistence imagines transnational community, asking us to move beyond pity and towards motivating empathy for displaced peoples. On the latter, Darcy illuminates our interspecies interrelationships, reminding us that even our planet’s most seemingly alien creatures (cockroaches; silverfish) are the cohabitants of our shared biosphere. Ultimately, Insistence develops a deep ethic of care for all living beings.

KEYWORDS:

• Ailbhe Darcy
• Irish poetry
• motherhood
• migration
• environmentalism

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Ailbhe Darcy and to Bloodaxe Books for their permission to cite from Imaginary Menagerie and Insistence. This article owes much to their generosity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 57–8.

2. Darcy, Insistence, “Alphabet” 11.1; “Silver” 34. Additional references to the collection will appear parenthetically in the text.

3. Leslie Jamison, in The Empathy Exams, calls this sentiment “inpathy,” cautioning her readers that “imagining someone else’s pain with too much surety” – a kind of self-congratulatory claim to vicarious suffering – amounts to emotional “theft” (20).

4. Bennett, Empathic Vision, 8. The term “empathic unsettlement” is originally Dominick LaCapra’s; in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), LaCapra uses the turn of phrase to discuss how witnesses ought to respond to the testimony of trauma survivors, particularly the survivors of the Holocaust (41). LaCapra insists in this context on the “recognition that another’s loss is not identical to one’s own loss” (79). Bennett borrows the term for an analysis of trauma art, arguing for the ethical value of work that oscillates between inviting empathic responsiveness and keeping the reader or viewer at arm’s length from the site of trauma. This kind of work, Bennett suggests, tries to ensure that audiences cannot usurp a victim’s position or assume that they can vicariously feel that victim’s pain.

5. Connolly, “Review: Insistence by Ailbhe Darcy.”

6. I have written elsewhere at length about this understanding of intimacy; for details, please see Obert, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Intimacy,” Emotion, Space, and Society 24: 25–32 (2016).

7. Lanza Rivers, Review of Imaginary Menagerie, 292.

8. Darcy, Imaginary Menagerie, “Poles” 4–5. Further references to the collection will appear parenthetically in the text.

9. Connolly, “Review: Insistence by Ailbhe Darcy.”

10. In this respect, Insistence is in dialogue with Rachel Cusk’s painfully honest 2001 memoir about motherhood, A Life’s Work. Both texts are part of a growing body of literature that refuses overly rosy portrayals of birth and maternity and that restores the possibility of the maternal “I.”

11. Darcy, “Challenging the Iconic Feminine”. This turn of phrase comes from the chapter’s abstract; elsewhere in the piece, Darcy further describes the “iconic feminine” as an “asexual, maternal ideal” that combines the “virgin mother of Catholic orthodoxy” and the figure of “Mother Ireland” in an effort to lionise Irish motherhood while marginalising female sexuality (370). For a more detailed discussion of the term from Darcy’s perspective, see also her “Dorothy Molloy’s Gurlesque Poetics”.

12. 1937 Constitution of Ireland. http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/upload/publications/297.pdf.

13. For more on gendered dynamics in The Country Girls, see Obert, “Mothers and Others in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls”.

14. Johnston, “Review: Ailbhe Darcy’s Insistence.” BODY Journal. https://bodyliterature.com/2018/09/21/ailbhe-darcys-insistence-friday-pick/.

15. Darcy, qtd. in Theinová, Limits and Languages, 236.

16. Interview with SJ Fowler, Poetry International Online. https://www.poetryinternationalonline.com/maintenant-74-ailbhe-darcy/.

17. Darcy, “Or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying,” The Critical Flame.

18. Theinová, Limits and Languages, 237.

19. Wheatley, “Ailbhe Darcy,” 191.

20. Ibid., 193–4.

21. See, for example, this article in Pacific Standard magazine: https://psmag.com/social-justice/how-our-political-language-provokes-anti-immigrant-anger.

22. Bennett, Empathic Vision, 10.

23. Information on knotweed growth in this paragraph is borrowed from Henry Grabar’s essay in Slate, “Oh, No, Not Knotweed!”, which can be accessed at the following link: https://slate.com/technology/2019/05/japanese-knotweed-invasive-plants.html.

24. The full text of Powell’s speech is available here: https://anth1001.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/enoch-powell_speech.pdf. The resonances between these quotations from Grabar’s essay about knotweed and Powell’s vitriolic idiom are startling to say the least.

25. In a short craft piece for Poetry Wales, Darcy reiterates this sentiment, explaining that she walked around for a while, poetically speaking, with her “pockets full of knotweed,” preoccupied by its intense “femaleness” (PoetryWales.co.uk).

26. Darcy, “From the Archive”.

27. That said, of course, em-dashes can also be read interruptively, signalling disruptive fragmentation as much as they do connection (though I think the latter prevails in “Still”). Darcy’s sense of comfort is therefore always partial and provisional: we take it where we find it – even in the supposedly “terrifying” spectre of knotweed! – but we can never fully dismiss the existential threats lurking apocalyptically in our midst.

28. TheCriticalFlame.org.

29. Maclaren, “Touching matters,” 56–7.

30. Bennett, Empathic Vision, 20–1.