Saying unsaid: law transformed in Annemarie Ní Churreáin ’s Bloodroot (2017)

Gearey, Adam (2022) Saying unsaid: law transformed in Annemarie Ní Churreáin ’s Bloodroot (2017). In: Hanna, A. and McNulty, E. (eds.) Law and Literature: The Irish Case. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, pp. 45-58. ISBN 9781802077018.

Abstract

How can poetry claim a ‘right’ to speak for those who cannot speak without covering over their silence? Bloodroot rejects law’s rhetoric of commonality and a discredited poetics of ‘vatic privilege.’ Ní Churreáin’s poetry subjects itself to its own ‘government of the tongue’ in order to be able to speak of others and the violence done to them. In Ní Churreáin’s lexicon, the right to poetic speech presupposes an attentiveness that allows silence to circulate amongst words; circulations that provoke transformation, re-imaginings; the possibility of a future that might be different from the past. HD’s Notes on Thought and Vision will be taken as a central text that defines a ‘love vision’ of poetry that can be traced into Ní Churreáin’s poetics. Bloodroot is an appropriations of the images used in public discourse about motherhood, family, misogynistic violence and sexual disgrace. Evoking a very dim echo of the washer women of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Bloodroot offers sympathy rather than disdain; the unsaid echoing in the said, the correct measure of words: memorialisation and invention.

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