Keegan’s novel does everything except go inside the establishment to find out who is in there, why and how they are being treated. Instead it focuses on one man who is portrayed as kindly and empathetic. That man will make a righteous action, whereas the author commits the sin of omission, maintaining a societal silence that continues to bind, in neglecting to shift the narrative gaze towards anything related to those unjustly incarcerated inside. Like standing to one side at the scene of a car accident, choosing to gaze at the sheep in the fields opposite.
Girl in the Tunnel is a memoir of childhood. Of a girl from a large blended family, who is removed from abuse and sent to one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries. Maureen Sullivan’s second paragraph of her Author’s Note in the front of the book speaks volumes.
It might surprise you, or it might not, to know that there are people still pushing me to stay silent. There are people who want this book kept from your hands. People who say to me in the street, ‘Would you not get over it?’ People who tell me to shut up about it – they defend men and they defend the Catholic Church. But this is my story to tell and this is how I remember it.
Maureen was not even a teenager when she was taken from her school, from her family, from her loving Granny, without being told where she was going, only that she was to attend a new school and would have to live there. None of her questions were ever answered. She would be deposited at the Magdalene laundry in New Ross, County Wexford run by the Order of the Good Shepherd nuns. Stripped of her possessions including the new pencil case her mother bought her as she was leaving, she was thrown into forced labour, washing clothes, pressing linens and scrubbing floors, forbidden an education or contact with any of the children who attended the school there.
I changed most of the names in this book – my abuser, relatives, locals and the nuns – because I’m not out to hurt or for revenge. I wrote this book because I was silenced as a child when I was the victim of abuse and I was silenced by society when I left the laundry. I want people to know what happened. This is my history, but it’s also the history of this country.
Someone recently said to me that a great opening line of a book can foreshadow the entire story. When I go back and read the first line of Maureen’s memoir, I find so many of the reasons for what happened to her, there in that line.
I never knew my father, John L. Sullivan, but there was a photograph of him on the wall in my grandmother’s house.
Maureen’s mother was married, nineteen and pregnant with Maureen when her father died suddenly leaving two young sons and an unborn daughter. They lived with her Granny, her father’s mother, the only person in her life who ever spoke of the father she never knew. But her Granny was poor and her mother quickly married and created a new family with another man, Marty Murphy, who from very early on took out all his frustrations on the dead man’s children.
My brother’s and I were terrified of Marty from day one. He didn’t restrain himself and lost his temper in a second, sometimes for nothing you could place, and he would go for you, even in his boots, and his kicks would hurt for days. He really hated us. Or he hated himself, maybe, for what he couldn’t stop doing to us, but either way living with Marty was like living with the devil himself. We suffered every single day.
Maureen describes their lives in incredible and evocative detail. Being so poor and having so little, when she describes the few tender and joyous moments, they stand out in the narrative, as they clearly did in her mind as that child.
The way it is written is absolutely captivating, not because of the misery or injustices, but because of the emotional intelligence exhibited. It is so honest and evocative of the way a child would experience things, except that Maureen has grown up and is able to express the questions and thoughts she had as a child. But she does so, with an understanding of where her country and society is today and how it was then. Nevertheless, there is no excuse for the cruelty and lack of basic human rights she experienced. There is a lot that remains hidden and denied to this day.
It’s hard to imagine the reasons for people behaving as they did, given how fast Ireland has progressed, and it’s hard to imagine how my mother thought things through. I know now she had no choices – women were the property of their husbands. Their bodies belonged to the men they married, their children did too.
When Maureen responds to the kind voice of her favourite teacher at school and opens up to her questions, she believes that she is going to rescued, perhaps even go to live with her Granny. This idea of being with her Granny was so powerful, she told her everything.
So I told on him. I told on Marty. I sat there in that room with a chocolate in my mouth and an open heart and talked about it.
When her mother arrives after being called in by the school and sees Maureen sitting in the hallway, she asks her why she is not in class. And worse.
As she went by me, she turned and said, ‘Oh Maureen, what have you done?’ She knocked on the office door and disappeared through it. What had I done?
That same day she would be removed and taken to the laundry. She would also be told that she had a new name. They all did.
For years I couldn’t figure out why our names were changed in the Magdalene laundries. What reason had they? A number would have made more sense to me if they wanted us to be nothing and nobody. But a number is a way to trace us, and it would have been unique. It would have been remembered and displayed somewhere. By changing our names they made sure, not that we struggled on the inside, but that on the outside we had no way to identify or find each other. And how could we stand as a witness to what went on there if there was nothing to say we had been there at all? We didn’t exist.
Maureen describes all the work they do in the laundry by day and then the work they must do at night, in the tin boxes. It is revelatory and will not leave any reader unaffected.
Merely describing the day to day activities and routine of their lives, and who they were not – (at the time she was in New Ross none of the women there were pregnant), is captivating. A 1911 census referred to them as “inmates”, at New Ross they were referred to as penitents.
It means a person who seeks forgiveness for their sins. There were no sinners in New Ross. Just victims, victims of the patriarchy, victims of misogyny.
The tunnel was the long corridor that separated the sleeping area and the children’s school from the laundry. Every so often she would be locked in there. When the men in suits arrived.
Those men in suits were likely state inspectors. They were sent around to all of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland to check on conditions.
People like Maureen were not supposed to be in the laundry being used as child labour, so they were hidden.
Maureen’s story is an important record of the historical treatment of girls and young women in Ireland, and a testament to the proliferation of abuses in households and the historic risk of speaking out.
Perhaps more tellingly, as Justice for Magdalenes Research’s book notes, there were never any Magdalene laundries for men. There were no corresponding church-run rehabs for the men who abandoned their families, nor for those who put girls and women in those situations that landed them in institutions. RENÉ OSTBERG, National Catholic Reporter
In 2024 The Women’s Prize created a new prize to raise the profile and awareness of women authors writing nonfiction.
They began with a list of 16 titles, from gripping memoirs and polemic narratives, to groundbreaking investigative journalism and revisionist history. It featured seven debut writers, two international bestsellers, two poets and five journalists. You can see the longlist here.
From Sixteen to Six Titles
The longlist has now been whittled down to six books covering a broad range of subjects – from life writing, religion, art and history, to AI, social media and online politics. What links them is an originality of voice and an ability to turn complex ideas and personal trauma into inventive, compelling and immersive prose.
“Our magnificent shortlist is made up of six powerful, impressive books that are characterised by the brilliance and beauty of their writing and which each offer a unique, original perspective. The readers of these books will never see the world – be it through art, history, landscape, politics, religion or technology – the same again.” Suzannah Lipscomb, Chair of Judges
The six titles shortlisted are:
Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming (UK) (Art History & Grief)
‘We see with everything that we are’
On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch and barely a dozen known paintings. The explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career.
What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age.
This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap.
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Canada) (Mistaken Identity)
– When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity – all we have to meet the world – so unstable?
To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting ‘the children’). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.
This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It’s for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Pakistan/UK) (Nature Writing Memoir)
– Noreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes – their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world: the ‘flat place’ she carries inside herself, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain’s landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession.
Pursuing this paradox across the wide open plains that she loves, Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape – a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (US) (History)
– In 1850s South Carolina, Rose, an enslaved woman, faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few items. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.
That, in itself, is a story. But it’s not the whole story. How does one uncover the lives of people who, in their day, were considered property? Harvard historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward. All That She Carried gives us history as it was lived, a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds.
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia (India/UK) (Technology)
– What does it mean to be human in a world that is rapidly changing thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, of automated decision-making that both draws on and influences our behaviour?
Through the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Madhumita Murgia, AI Editor at the FT, exposes how AI can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency – and shatter our illusion of free will.
AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small. In this compelling work, Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity.
How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair (Jamaica) (Memoir)
– There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved.
Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where luxury hotels line pristine white sand beaches, Safiya Sinclair grew up guarding herself against an ever-present threat. Her father, a volatile reggae musician and strict believer in a militant sect of Rastafari, railed against Babylon, the corrupting influence of the immoral Western world just beyond their gate. To protect the purity of the women in their family he forbade almost everything: nowhere but home and school, no friends but this family and no future but this path.
Her mother did what she could to bring joy to her children with books and poetry. But as Safiya’s imagination reached beyond its restrictive borders, her burgeoning independence brought with it ever greater clashes with her father. Soon she realised that if she was to live at all, she had to find some way to leave home. But how?
In seeking to understand the past of her family, Safiya Sinclair takes readers inside a world that is little understood by those outside it and offers an astonishing personal reckoning. How to Say Babylon is an unforgettable story of a young woman’s determination to live life on her own terms.
The Winner
The winner will be announced on the 13th of June 2024.
Have you read any of these titles? Anything here interest you? Leave a comment below letting us know if you have read or intend to read any of these titles.
In Ordinary Time is one of those wonderful finds, when a number of your own disparate interests collide and someone has managed to put together a work that spans years, across two countries, reflecting on different events in their own life and the background of a country and culture’s history, with these continuous threads running through it, that make it almost seamless.
In a hybrid memoir, Carmel McMahon has written fragments of a family history, structuring them into four parts of three chapters, beginning with Part One: Imbolc: February, The Feast of Saint Brigid and ending in Part Four Samhain: January, Notes on A Return where the story comes full circle.
There are 21 black and white illustrations scattered throughout the text, ordinary photos that amplify the message and create a sense of travel through time. I looked back at the index page for each photo and scribbled my penciled note underneath it, such was the joy of words meeting image.
Full circle feels appropriate to describe a work that despite that linear structure of months and parts, is not that. Rather, it represents points on the spiral of life that goes through cycles; repeating cycles, short cycles, long cycles, interconnected and intergenerational cycles.
Each of the events that she describes in her family history have a shadow history in the culture and while she reflects on her own situation, she finds resonance in the voices of others who have gone before, in particular those whose story we might not have heard, or if we have, might not have been aware of the full picture.
Her story begins somewhere in the middle of her own self-imposed exile, living in New York City. It voyages through her experience with addiction, denial and recovery and ends with the heroine’s return, the learning and this book.
The city had not yet woken on the frigid Sunday morning of February 20, 2011, when the body of a young Irish woman was found outside St. Brigid’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village. The news reports cited alcoholism, homelessness, and hypothermia as contributing factors in her death. They said that earlier that month, on St. Brigid’s feast day she had turned thirty-five years old. They said she wanted to be an artist. They said her name was Grace Farrell.
She questions whether it begins here, or in 1937 when the new Irish state ratified its constitution to reflect a strengthened church-state partnership, that would have a devastating effect on thousands of lives of girls and women and their children, and the unborn future generations who might inherit that affected DNA. All those sent to the Magdalene laundries.
In 1966, her mother would live a version of the shame that surrounded pregnancy out of wedlock, managing to avoid institutional incarceration by disappearing for a while.
Women and children were not afforded the rights of citizenship, of subjecthood, of being. They lived under threat of being erased, hidden, buried. This is why my mother tells me – halting, hesitating – that in her day it was the worst thing in the world for a girl to find herself pregnant, but worse still was for her to talk about it.
That first sister Michelle, born in London, would be knocked down outside her primary school, three months before Carmel was born. Six more children arrived after her and Michelle’s name was never spoken in their house. The legacy of silence she had been born into continued, was passed on, but not forgotten.
Or did the story begin when she had her first drink at the age of ten, at a family gathering? Feelings of inferiority and shame, dulled by the dregs of the adults drinks that replaced that unwanted feeling with one of warmth, of a circle of golden light.
McMahon left Ireland in the 1990’s and did not return permanently until the pandemic era, 2021. Ironically, it seems to this reader, the return has allowed the distance to reflect on the journey and the learning and to piece the interconnectivity of so many people’s lives past, present and future into this text.
Science has proven and is now able to show how stress and trauma can be passed on biologically from one generation to the next, we read.
We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, “narratives, actions and symptoms.” The stories we tell and don’t tell, the actions we take and don’t take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.
Listening to the podcast On Being, she hears Dr. Rachel Yehuda reminds listeners that:
…we are not in biological prison: experiences and events in our environment can also make positive changes to our programming. We can consciously move towards healing.
These intertwined fragments thus reveal the events, experiences and the slow realisation of all that is working on her, the understanding and the aspects that will aid the healing.
There are the endless jobs she tries to hold down, while numbing herself nightly; the visits back home precipitated by tragedy, the road trip across America, an escape that brings her closer to understanding loss and aloneness.
The industrial ghost towns, the late spring rain, the wide, low skies. The old sadness rising. An excess of black bile, they used to say, made the melancholic personality. Freud said that mourning and melancholia are akin in that they are both responses to loss. Mourning is a conscious and healthy response to the loss of a love object. Melancholia is more complicated. It operates on a subconscious level. All the feelings of loss are present, but for what? The melancholic cannot say. This, Freud says, is a pathology.
McMahon reads and shares anecdotes and reflections on the lives of other women who immigrated before her; the young Irish immigrant Maeve Brennan who was a staff writer at the New Yorker before the disease of alcoholism colonized her life; Mary Smith, one of many Irish women used for gynecological experiments in New York hospitals in the mid nineteenth century; Grace Farrell.
After a family tragedy, she reads Anne Carson’sNox, a book of poems created from the notebook she recorded memories and impressions of her brother, in the decade after he died.
She did this, she tells us, because a brother does not end. He goes on.
She reflects on the Famine, on the role of church and state, on the complicit silences and forgetting, on the advances that were made at the expense of the vulnerable, the now removed statues, the little known memorials of the unnamed. She acknowledges the collective impact of a nation’s traumas on individuals and families with brief insights (her own and Carl Jung’s) into a way forward, towards speaking up, sharing stories, creating meaning, allowing space for healing, for moving towards the light, to enable the passing on of a lighter legacy to future generations.
Sharing her story is part of that, not just for the writer herself, but for those who might find resonance in her journey, towards their own. And to remember the forgotten, the ordinary women like Mary Smith.
I could not put this book down, despite wishing to make it last. Though it is a collection of essays, some of which have been previously published, the threads that run through it make it read like a memoir, perfectly balancing the personal stories with the background history, questioning the effect of both on a young woman’s psyche.
Highly Recommended.
Further Reading
Guardian Review: In Ordinary Times: the trials of inherited trauma, Carmel Mc Mahon uses her own story of emigration, uncertainty and alcoholism as one thread in a wider historical tapestry
Carmel Mc Mahon grew up in County Meath, and lived in New York City from 1993 – 2021, when she returned with her partner to renovate a house on Ireland’s west coast.
A graduate of CUNY, her writing has been published in the Irish Times, Humanities Review, Roanoke Review, Longreads and shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Award.
How could I not love a miniature work of narrative nonfiction that the author quotes as having being in part inspired by the opening two lines of a poem from the 18th century English poet Alexander Pope.
The heroic rhyming couplets of Pope’sThe Rape of the Lock (1712) were my optional choice for the fifth form School Certificate exam many moons ago, a memorable chapter of my own literary journey. Kerninon quotes from his Why did I write? what sin to me unknown.
Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipp’d me in ink, my parents’, or my own?
Why and How I Write
A Respectable Occupation is a short nonfiction narrative about how and why the French author Julia Kerninon became a writer and the necessity of reading.
I came across this book in a photo on author Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Substack g l i m m e r s where she wrote about her favourite books of the year for 2023.
Dochartaigh is the q u e e n of referencing creative nonfiction and nature writing in her own writing. Her second memoir Cacophony of Bone is full of literary references to little known, enticing contemporary works of narrative nonfiction.
Julia Kerninon had a unique upbringing in many ways, not least because she lived in multiple countries, Canada, England and France, but also because it is as if she were raised to become a writer, more of an expectation than a desire, so she pursues it in the same way many others might pursue a career that has been held in high esteem by their parents. Only writing isn’t like law, medicine or business.
I had an incredibly heavy electric typewriter my mother had lent me, and she had glued little labels with lowercase letters onto the keys because I found capitals confusing, and I wrote lots of stories about talking animals with my friend Pete.
The Legend of Writers
She recalls a kind of bohemian childhood and the first six years where she was an only child and the focus of her mother who she admired, and how her world tilted when they became a family of 4 not 3.
An identical monument of books had saved her as well, thirty years earlier, from a hopeless childhood, and so she spread her secret before me, she explained what she loved most in the world, in a gesture that was also a potlatch, an immeasurably generous offering, which I might be expected to return one day with an even greater gift.
Her mother had been born in a small fishing village, the eldest of four, the only girl, she had learned Russian at ten in boarding school and read everything she could lay her hands on. She passed on all she could to her daughter, who did everything in her power to satisfy her, to repair her, to recompense her for the enormous effort it must have cost her to make all this known to her first child.
I read books non-stop, in a panicked frenzy, trying to catch up on lost time, trying to catch up with my mother who seemed to know everything.
If I lost a manuscript and went crazy with panic, she would just shrug with no compassion at all and explain that in any case I would have to throw away or lose lots of books before writing a single good one. The best thing that can happen to you is a house fire.
At sixteen she had found a community of ‘old poets’ who met in an old biscuit factory in her hometown, a second education, after a house full of books.
At twenty she was reading Gertrude Stein‘s ill-conceived advice: If you don’t work hard when you are twenty, no one will love you when you are thirty.
She confronted her father and told him she wanted to take a gap year from her university studies. He agreed.
I thought that to be a writer, I had to train like an athlete, like a dancer, until it didn’t hurt anymore, until I didn’t ask myself any more questions. I wanted to possess that skill.
She takes herself off to Budapest for a year. Her life becomes a cycle of working hard, playing hard, then taking herself off somewhere for a year or six months to write.
She becomes a waitress in the summers, so she can write throughout the winter. She decides that to be poor is acceptable if she can be free instead and that she would learn to live alone, to be alone, to work alone, during those productive times of her life. That maybe these were not sacrifices at all, they were merely aspects of the life that she had created, that she loved.
Though she figures out how to live like this herself, she attributes this advice given to her by a much loved man:
the main thing is to have free time – you’ll obviously work out how to earn a crust somehow – but free time is something you’ll always have to scavenge, he told me earnestly.
It’s a wonderful little book, a digression of sorts, a reminder that the writing life comes in many shapes and forms, that the sharing of the various experiences can also provide inspiration to those who are on that path and that the pursuit of the occupation can also be a subject to write about, that people like reading about.
I write books because it’s good discipline, because I like sentences and I like putting things in order in a Word document. I like counting the words every night and I like finishing what I start.
I will leave you with one final quote from Julia Kerninon, one that applies as equally to reading as it does to writing.
I’ve been striding through literature like a field, where my footsteps flatten the grass for a moment, just long enough to see the path I’ve taken and the immensity of what is yet to be discovered.
Julia Kerninon is a French novelist from Brittany, whose first novel Buvard (2013) won the prestigious Prix Françoise Sagan in 2014.
Born in 1987, she holds a Ph.D in American Literature. She has been compared to French New Wave filmmaker Éric Rohmer for her sense of style and feeling for dialogue, and to Alain Resnais for the artful structure of her narratives. Most of all, her work stands out for its contagious joy, drive, exuberance.
Kerninon’s second novel, Le dernier amour d’Attila Kiss, won the Prix de la Closerie des Lilas in 2016, and her latest novel, My Devotion, won the 2018 Fénéon Literary Prize. She lives in Nantes.
It is early morning and I hear clack, clack, clack, a wooden sound that makes me think of the quack of a duck. A body memory warns me away, reminding me of duck shooting season at Waimatai, the farm of my adolescence. That sound a lure to less intelligent prey.
There is no lake here.
I take a different path, away from that unnatural, menacing sound, two black labradors at my heels. This forested hillside of the south Luberon is a refuge to the sanglier, the wild pig.
Too late, I discover I have taken the chosen route, they begin to arrive, stirring up dust in their four wheel drive vehicles, les chasseurs, the hunters.
Militant vehicles with dark windows, at least two dogs in kennels on the back, they pass us by, one after the other, bright orange vests and woolen hats visible through the open window. There are so many of them; it takes all my strength to hold back the young labrador Winnie, who senses the excitement of the upcoming chase.
We turn around and head back to safety just as an eighth vehicle passes by with a dozen hounds yapping behind the grill.
La Chasse #2
Safe inside the stone dwelling, the dogs fed, I tell my friend about the hunters we encountered on the track.
“We won’t be walking up to the chapel this visit,” I say when I return. “We are surrounded.”
One hunter in a small white car, an older man, had stopped in front of me and I had asked him if they were hunting the sanglier. I had seen a number of traces in the soft clay beside the track, telltale footprints and the persistent interest of the two dogs, sniffing the area intensely in certain places.
“Yes, we will be up in that area on the left,” he had indicated with his arm.
Left. The route to the hermitage, the lone chapel we had hoped to walk to later on, the area directly behind the house where we were staying for the weekend, looking after Spike and Winnie.
As we plan a different walking route, both labradors begin barking and whining. Winnie the younger dog I have been instructed to keep on a leash at all times, has her GPS tracker charging. I reach for her leash, deciding in that moment that I will keep it on her indoors, just in case. I reach for the kitchen door to secure it at the same moment that my friend is coming in from outside, carrying a jar of tapenade on a wooden board. Winnie pushes past me through the barely open door, brushing my friend aside with a force that sends the olive green tapenade flying, the glass jar smashing on the terrace. Winnie can’t be stopped, though I call and shout her name running across the lawn after her.
I watch her reach the end of the lawn and sail through the air over the top of the electric fence that has been put there to prevent the sangliers from digging up the garden beneath the oak trees. The sound of barking is close by, a frantic, feverish tone. Winnie tears up through the pines beyond the house. I continue calling, I can see the terrain she is mounting is steep and unwieldy.
I try not to think about her encountering those hounds off-leash, or the other black animal that is being hunted, of this naive young labrador moving into the line of fire, of my friends who have entrusted her into our care, of the GPS tracker still charging.
My friend walks to the end of the lawn with the lead in hand. “What are we going to do?” they ask.
“There’s nothing we can do but call her. We can’t go after her.”
“And get shot,” my friend adds.
I take a couple of steps forward to the edge of the lawn, despondent. “Winnie!” I call.
She comes bounding down through the trees towards us.
In her 2022 nobel prize lecture, I Will Write to Avenge My People, Annie Ernaux shares her motivation for writing in the particular way that is unique to her, telling us how it is at odds with the way she taught.
I had to break with ‘writing well’ and beautiful sentences – the very kind I taught my students to write – to root out, display and understand the rift running through me.
So it with this understanding, that I picked up Simple Passion (my review here) and now Shame, works of non-fiction that explore how certain pivotal events in her life affected her, by noticing her actions and reactions, how her own behaviour or perception changed.
The Origin of Shame
The book opens with a quote from Paul Auster‘s The Invention of Solitude:
Language is not truth.
It is the way we exist in the world.
The opening line begins with the pivotal event, shortly before her 12th birthday:
My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.
and then describes everything she remembers about that day in a page of detail.
It was 15 June 1952. The first date I remember with unerring accuracy from my childhood. Before that, the days and dates inscribed on the blackboard and in my workbooks seemed just to drift by.
These words were written 45 years later, around 1997, when this book was first published in French, words that she tells the reader were impossible to write about, even in a personal diary, before then.
Silence Esteemed, The Seed of Unworthiness
I considered writing about it to be a forbidden act that would call for punishment. Not being able to write anything else afterwards for instance. (I felt a kind of relief just now when I saw that I could go on writing, that nothing terrible had happened). In fact, now that I have finally committed it to paper, I feel that it is an ordinary incident, far more common among families than I had originally thought. It may be that narrative, any kind of narrative, lends normality to people’s deeds, including the most dramatic ones.
Ernaux looks back at the origin of her experience of shame, awakened to it by certain moments, exploring the change(s) as she is made to feel them, in the many areas of her life within which it dwelt, sometimes just hidden behind a door, always at risk of being discovered by others.
From then on, that Sunday was like a veil that came between me and everything I did. I would play, I would read, I would behave normally but somehow I wasn’t there.
Beginning with that traumatic event, she observes the lingering effect it had on her, the strong presence it maintained, despite the fact that no one ever talked (to her) about it.
She revisits photos and news archives from that day, that time, trying to find something.
Writing an Ethnological Study of Self
While she rejects the idea of traditional therapy, it could be said that she has created her own form of it, by bringing her deepest shame to the page, as if in doing so, she is somehow sending it away, banishing it to readers.
I expect nothing from psychoanalysis or therapy, whose rudimentary conclusions became clear to me a long time ago – a domineering mother, a father whose submissiveness is shattered with a murderous gesture. To state it’s ‘childhood trauma’ or ‘that day the idols of childhood were knocked off their pedestal’ does nothing to explain a scene which could only be conveyed by the expression that came to me at the time: ‘gagner malheur‘, to breathe disaster. Here abstract speech fails to reach me.
This text she describes as carrying out an ethnological study of herself.
Like Simple Passion, written in short fragments, it is an engaging read that centres around the year 1952, living by the rules and codes of her world, which usually required unquestioning obedience, without any knowledge that there may be others.
The more I retrace this world of the past, the more terrified I am by its coherence and its strength. Yet I am sure I was perfectly happy there and could aspire to nothing better. For its laws were lost in the sweet, pervasive smells of food and wax polish floating upstairs, the distant shouts coming from the playground and the morning silence shattered by the tinkling of a piano – a girl practicing scales with her music teacher.
A brilliant depiction of a shattering of illusion and the origins of one girls perception of unworthiness.
As the book closes, and the year 1952 ends, her attention is caught by a film/book release.
In his novel, Fires on the Plain, published in 1952, the Japanese author Shōhei Ōoka writes: ‘All this may just be an illusion but all the same I cannot question the things I have experienced. Memories too belong in that category’.
Highly Recommended.
Author, Annie Ernaux
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux (née Duchesne) was born in Lillebonne and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery store in the spinning mill district.
She was educated at a private Catholic secondary school, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time.
After a brief stint in Finchley, London, cleaning houses all morning and reading from the library all afternoon, she returned to France to study at the University of Rouen. Obtaining a degree in modern literature, she became a school teacher. From 1977 to 2000 she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance.
Her books, in particular A Man’s Place (La Place) and A Woman’s Story (Une femme) have become contemporary classics in France. These books marked a break from the definitive novelistic form, she would continue teaching in order to never depend on commercial success.
One of France’s most respected authors, she has won multiple awards for her books, including the Prix Renaudot (2008) for The Years (Les Années) and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize (2017) for her entire body of work. The English translation of The Years (2019) was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International and won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (2019).
The main themes threaded through her work over more than four decades are: the body and sexuality; intimate relationships; social inequality and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to write these life experiences.
I came across this author as she is one of the many quoted in Kerri Ni Dochartaigh’sCacophony of Bone and it fits with that book, in that it is a kind of journal presented as short essays or fragments on writing, of thoughts that occur while reading other writers’ works.
The chapters have no headings but the book has a contents page that displays from five up to nine words of the first sentence of that fragment/chapter/essay. So the first one begins:
Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts…
Through a Window of Words, I See
A number of them begin with referencing the work of an author/artist whose sentences or themes or art provoke her reflections, in particular Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras, Rachel Cusk, Marie NDiaye. In contemplating Ernaux’s The Possession, she wonders what it is she loved exactly, alighting on its urgency, the way the narrator is taken over by something – an aspect that is often present in Ferrante’s novels.
In The Lost Daughter, when Leda goes alone…
One she refers to often The Lost Daughter, the story of a woman whose daughters are absent for the summer, she takes a holiday, not thinking of her daughters,
Introspection, Projection, Finding Direction
This leads into Cain’s contemplation of the way humans project on to other things (like the sea) and people and how the act of writing encourages this. She asks why we project at all and delves into that occupation of mind with scalpel-like precision.
She reads the diaries of Virgina Woolf, which cause her to recall 30 years of diaries of an Aunt, one entry telling her that she ‘began to keep a diary because she saw that life had mystical qualities.’
Writing about authenticity gives rise to reflections on Jean Gent’s play, The Maids and Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite and the effect of maintaining roles, when mixed classes live under the same roof.
To have to maintain those class roles always, especially if they are enforced with any kind of degradation, is a violation of the sacredness of one’s life, and a violence all of its own.
The Feline Interruptor
Much of it was written during the pandemic, a period that encouraged introspection and in which humans didn’t always have other humans for company, after reflecting on solitude and the need for human connection and company, other creatures gain notoriety eliciting a chapter that begins:
As I write this my cat Trout whines loudly
It makes me wonder what phrase from this book Kerri Ni Dochartaigh made it into her own; I admit I didn’t have quite the same response on finishing it.
“Astounding…I was distraught when I finished.”
I found it more of an intriguing insight into the varied way writers analyse and respond to each other’s work. I related more to Aysegül Savas‘s blurb.
“Like light from a candle in the evening; intimate, pleasurable, and full of wonder.”
Rather than look at plot, character, dialogue or conflict, these reflections she describes as paying attention to the ‘accessories’, like animals, phrases that create a feeling of relaxation, pondering friendship, or the self. Even plants.
It’s something like finding meaning in other works, that intersects with where the reader/writer is on their own journey, whether that is life or a fictional landscape they are trying to create, looking for lessons that might lie between the lines of others who have gone before, whose words have elicited a response in that reader.
And we, the reader of this book, look through the window of another reader looking through the window of a writer looking at the world.
Author, Amina Cain
Amina Memory Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and staff pick at the Paris Review, finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Centre for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
She is also the author of two collections of short stories. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the Paris ReviewDaily and other places.
– Poor is the incredible story of Katriona O’Sullivan, a university Professor in Dublin, who overcame incredible odds to rise up through the education system, having been raised by heroin addicts in a chaotic household, dropping out of school and becoming pregnant at 15.
She charts the turning points in her life, the people and the opportunities that allowed her to change the trajectory of her life and become a major influencer in advocating for access to higher education for working class girls from poor backgrounds.
She won two Irish Book Awards (Best Biography + Listener’s Choice Award). Totally Inspirational.
– This was one of the first books I read in 2023, a beautiful memoir that shares a mother’s journey of homeschooling her son while dealing with the grief of having lost a close sibling. Much like Helen MacDonald’s H is For Hawk, the author plunges into a creative project, to help move through the emotional challenges. Here it was to create an apothecary garden in a social housing estate in rural Cumbria, built over what was an industrial site, a barren, rubble-filled, now rule-restricted, wasteland.
Each chapter began with a different plant, starting with an intriguing medieval, magical perception of it, including stunning black & white woodcut illustrations, the medicinal properties, a bit of folklore and where it might be found. The real star of the book and source of comfort though is her inquisitive son.
A quiet book that celebrates the wisdom of small children and a tribute to sisters and mothers.
– This memoir is a delightful sequel to the author’s more bleak, but exceptional, memoir Thin Places. That debut memoir was a mix of memoir and a reckoning with the after effect of a fractured childhood in a Northern Irish town.
In Cacophony of Bones, she has moved to a rural cottage in the middle of Ireland and while still in the process of healing, there is more light and poetry and inspiration from a multitude of nonfiction writers here. Written in the form of a 12 month journal, it is a book of reflection, poetic expression and of noticing, of planting, growing, of collecting objects, abandoned nests, bone remnants…
I find myself searching for the words of others as a means to fill the holes that the actions of (other) others have left in me.
In my review, I mention a number of the authors she quotes from; I spent a lot of pleasurable time looking up the many references and finding new sources of creative nonfiction to read. A great book and an extremely well-read author.
– Though it is a challenging read, this is an incredible book and tribute to the endless support, research and investigative journalism, Sally Hayden has contributed. Winner of the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, Irish Book Awards Book of the Year 2022, it tells the story of how she was contacted by refugees incarcerated in Libyan migrant detention centres, who were using hidden phones to appeal for help.
Abandoned by everyone, these people were being held in terrible conditions, treated inhumanely and often being extorted for huge sums of money in order to attempt the deadliest migrant rote of all, across the Mediterranean. While the rules of her profession prevented her from assisting them, she began to share their stories and investigate the different centres and discovered the complicity of the EU, in their policies that magnified the humanitarian crisis.
An extraordinary, detailed and condemnatory read. Highly Recommended.
– A mix of memoir, poetry, life adventure and epiphanies, I loved this collection, that stops in and visits different periods in the life of the poet/writer Jamaican author Lorna Goodison (poet laureate of Jamaica from 2017 – 2020), including first time visits to London, New York, tributes to her mother and grandmother in poetry, to her mentor, the great poet and playwright, Derek Walcott, influential theatre and film experiences and inspirational women writers and poets.
Special Mentions, The Other Two Stand Outs
These two 5 star reads are very slim volumes, featuring one essay or lecture, they are literally half hour reads, but very worthwhile and not difficult to access and read.
– Annie Ernaux won the Nobel prize for literature in 2022 and this is the lecture she gave to the committee, in it she shares her motivation for writing and an explanation of how she came to write in her very particular style.
– Very well known in France, this is the essay written by 93 year old Stéphane Hessel, since translated into numerous languages and sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. He wrote it 3 years before passing away and it is a message for youth of today, inviting them to find their cause and take action. It became a huge bestseller and long lines of young people lined up to have him sign their copy, much respect did they have for a man who had lived through it all, the war, the resistance, the concentration camp and a participant in the creation of the declaration of human rights.
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That’s it for nonfiction, let me know if you have any good recommendations for 2024! Let us know your favourite non-fiction title from 2023 in the comments below.
My Fight To Bring A New African Voice To The Climate Crisis
Vanessa Nakate is a young Ugandan woman who became concerned about the effect of climatic conditions and change on her country and in particular the knock on effect floods, crop destruction would have on women and girls, disproportionately affected, as explained in her book.
Alternative Learning Experiences for Children
She decided to organise a strike, just herself, her two younger brothers (14 & 10), two visiting cousins (11 &9) and another cousin her age. It would be the six of them, holding up a few placards they made, and they would stand in four busy locations in Kampala, moving from each place after 30 minutes when her alarm went off.
“What shall we write?” Varak, the nine-year-old asked. I wanted us to express something positive, and to ensure that my younger family members held placards they themselves would understand. We decided to pick slogans we thought wouldn’t be too threatening, and so wrote several, in English. Trees Are Important For Us Nature Is Life When You Plant A Tree, You Plant A Forest Thanks For The Global Warming (that was our sarcastic one) and Climate Strike Now We also drew some trees next to the letters.
Nothing dramatic happened, no one told to stop, but it was the beginning of an interest, of a young woman finding her cause and taking an action, that would lead her to learning and discovering more, to connecting with others, to finding local solutions and developing a presence and a new voice, on an international stage.
One woman stopped and told them of some trees being cut down to make way for a school, that they should be stopped. Each time Nakate went out and had the opportunity to engage or had a response on social media, it would often lead her to the next idea, it would put her in touch with others who genuinely wanted something to be done, their voices to be heard.
How One Exclusion Can Lead to Greater Inclusion
It is an excellent read, because it follows her personal journey, as a young person with little knowledge about activism and from this small spark of quiet daring (despite her anxieties, insecurities and fear of judgement), she shares her perseverance, her growing knowledge, the first invitations to attend international conferences and events, to a tipping point, when many more (including me) would hear about her – after she was cropped out of a photograph of young climate change activists including Greta Thunberg at Davos, Switzerland during the WEF (World Economic Forum) in January 2020.
My message was, and is, straightforward: People in Uganda, in Africa, and across what’s called the Global South, are losing their homes, their harvests, their incomes, even their lives, and any hopes of a livable future right now.
The Quiet Methodical, Cooperative Approach
What makes her message and her actions all the more interesting is that she takes a quiet methodical approach to doing things in her own authentic way, in a country where she is aware of both dangers and expectations, so does nothing foolhardy, acting responsibly.
However, when there is the opportunity for advancement of her cause and for manageable solutions she can implement herself, she steps up to those and has helped make life more amenable for many families already, while continuing to pursue the wider message, especially to young people, future leaders, for whom it will be better if they encounter this knowledge through their early education, than as adults already fixed in their opinions or influenced by position or power.
Since I’m always looking for solutions that reflect reality and the need to get the message out, I decided that instead of suggesting that students walk out of classes, I’d try to take the climate strikes into schools – where they could form part of the curriculum in a way that I’d wished climate change had been when I was a young girl.
The first school she approached in this way was open to this collaboration, the teachers assembled 100 students inside the compound, Vanessa Nakate gave a short speech explaining what the strike was about, in a way that could relate to and then lead them in a chant, the teachers encouraging the children to chant even louder.
What do we want? Climate justice. When do we want it? Now.
Genuine Efforts and Action Do Get Noticed
In 2019 she received an email from the UN Secretary General’s office in New York, an invitation to attend the Youth Climate Summit. Understandably, she and her parents didn’t think it was real, but it was, she would be the first person in her family to travel outside of Uganda and that would signify a new beginning in her self-appointed role.
The first half of the book is about the development of her role, the logistics of trying to attend events and to becoming involved in meaningful solutions at home, such as the Vash Green Schools Project (supports the installation of solar panels and building clean cooking stoves in primary schools) and to realising the need for self-care due to overwhelm.
Role Models and Inspiration, Making Connections
The second half gives a bigger picture of the wider issues, sharing information from others she interviewed and has been inspired by, including the late Wangari Maathai, the inspiring Kenyan woman who created the Green Belt Movement and made much progress (often hindered by men in power) who was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for ‘her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace’. Read my review of her autobiography Unbowed here.
Coincidentally COP28 is happening right now in Dubai and Vanessa Natake is there with others trying to get their message across to world leaders who have the power to phase out fossil fuels and support equitable and safe renewable energies. Her article appearing in today’s Guardian below.
I really enjoyed reading this book and learning more about how Vanessa Natake became a voice for her country and continent and inspired so many youth and adults to both learn and do more to try and halt the destruction that is affecting them all.
Vanessa Nakate is a Ugandan climate justice activist. She grew up in Kampala and started her activism in December 2018 after becoming concerned about the unusually high temperatures in her country. Inspired by Greta Thunberg to start her own climate movement in Uganda, VanessaNakate began a solitary strike against inaction on the climate crisis in January 2019. She founded the Youth for Future Africa and the Africa-based Rise Up Movement and spearheaded the Save Congo Rainforest campaign.
She has addressed world leaders at multiple climate summits and appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in 2021 (featuring on the Time100 Next list in 2021). She was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2022.
Nakate and her work have been featured in the New York Times, the Guardian,Yes!,Vox, Vogue, the Huffington Post, the International Women’s Forum, and the Global Landscapes Forum, and on globalcitizen.org, greenpeace.org, CNN, the BBC, PBS, and United Nations media. She lives in Kampala, Uganda.
A mix of memoir, poetry, life adventure and epiphanies, I loved this collection by Jamaican writer Lorna Goodison.
Bonding With the Irish Over Tea & Poetry
The opening essay ‘The Song of the Banana Man’and ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ totally sets the scene for the rest of the book. It is an anecdotal story of the author and her friend, excited to be in London, overhearing two ‘bobbies’ (policemen) talk about a cafe they were just passing, in a way that lured them inside.
‘Whassis then, a new tea ‘ole?’
Their schooling in Kingston, Jamaica had been heavy on all things British and European, so entering this establishment was something related to that indirect familiarity. They encounter three boys from Ireland, who ask if they are from the West Indies and they begin to banter, drinking toasts to the colonial experience, singing songs and reciting poetry.
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney, folk dance like a wave of the sea;
The poems they chose were about ordinary people, sure of themselves, of what they did, grounding words shared by these young people, whose paths have crossed, starting out on their own journeys. The exchange lasts while they’re having their tea and comes to a natural end, upon which they part ways. The author is at the beginning of her life journey, but the lines recited by them all have staying power.
And I was not sure where I belonged or what my own purpose was in life back then…. But listening to those three Irish men recite ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ that afternoon, maybe I’d thought yes, that’s what I’d like to be, someone whose artistry makes people dance like a wave of the sea.
A Working Class Teen Dares to Do Better
In, A Taste of Honey, she recounts the experience of seeing a movie in 1963, adapted from the play created by Shelagh Delaney (who was 18 years old when she wrote it) that moves her, that is a moment of epiphany. Being one of nine children, she relished the opportunity to go and see the film one Saturday afternoon alone.
Shelagh Delaney went to a play that she found boring, pretentious and condescending, and said to herself I can do better than that, and went home and wrote A Taste of Honey.
The film would win a BAFTA award.
A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman’s point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor a racial stereotype. – extract from The Guardian by Dennis Barker
Goodison reflects on why she was so moved by this film, how it gave her some of her life and writing purpose and inspiration.
Shelagh was pronounced ‘ineducable’, but was able to produce work that affected me so deeply that I ended up sitting alone in a cinema after everyone else had filed out, trying hard to compose myself enough to go outside and face a world where most people would not understand why a simple thing like a Saturday afternoon matinee could make me weep as if a close friend or relative had died.
The Daffodil Drama
Writing poetry from a young age, in ‘Some poems that made me’ we read more of this early education and a different take on Wordsworth’s‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, aka ‘The Daffodils’ poem, after she researches his childhood and life and decides to give the poet a break. See my review Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid for another reference to the daffodil drama.
Over the years I have said quite a lot about this poem, as have other writers throughout the British Commonwealth who have come to regard it as the ultimate anthem to British colonial oppression.
She will encounter may poets and poems until she arrives at the one voice that cause her to stop reading everyone else and just read his poems. In the work of Derek Walcott, who would become a friend and mentor, she found poem as a source of hope and consolation; poem as a lifeboat, anchor and safe harbour.
As she begins to think of her own place in the world, she seeks out women poets, finding nourishment in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks and other African-American fiction writers, while still searching for poetry by Caribbean women, ultimately ending up writing the poems she wanted to read and finding the right language to express them.
I learnt early in my life as a writer that if I wanted to write about my people I had to learn to listen carefully to family stories then imagine, and constantly reimagine those stories…All writer’s do this, but Caribbean writers face formidable or particular challenges because of the ways in which slavery, and then colonialism, erased or distorted so much of our lives that we have to learn to writer ourselves into the story in any way we can.
Tributes to the Mothers & Imagination
We read ‘Guinea Woman’ the poem she wrote trying to imagine a woman she had never met, her great grandmother, an elegy for her mother Doris ‘After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down’, and another poem entitled ‘Bedspread’ inspired by news of the home of Winnie Mandela being raided by police, where they seize personal effects including a bedspread, taken because it was in the colours of the African National Congress.
The collection takes the reader to different countries and places on her journeying, sharing both fun and pivotal moments, stories of redemption, of good souls that come to set the indebted free, of her own life crisis in New York, that preceded a change in direction, acting on a promise to herself.
A Musical Accompaniment
Like my reading experience of Bernice McFadden’s excellentThe Book of Harlan, whenever Lorna Goodison mentions music, like in the vignette ‘A Part for Tarquin’, I look it up and listen while reading. This one is about her friend Bernard dragging her along to a non-party that she doesn’t wish to attend, and ends with them listening into the night to the pianist Wynton Kelly playing the Miles Davis sextet Some Day My Prince Will Come.
That was the night I began to really appreciate the genius of the Jamaican-American pianist Wynton Kelly, about whom Miles himself was supposed to have said, ‘Wynton is the light for the cigarette; without him there is no smoking.’ That night I realised that if hope has a sound it would be Wynton Kelly’s piano-playing. His hope notes were like sunbeams on the morning waves coming in at Bluefields beach.
Loved it all.
Author, Poet, Essayist, Lorna Goodison
Caribbean poet Lorna Goodison was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1947. A painter before she turned her focus to poetry, Goodison was educated at the Jamaica School of Art and the School of the Art Students League in New York. She was appointed poet laureate of Jamaica from 2017 – 2020. In 2018, she received a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, and in 2019, she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
Her numerous poetry collections include Collected Poems (2017), Supplying Salt and Light (2013), Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems (2006), Controlling the Silver (2005), Traveling Mercies (2001), Heartease (1988), and Tamarind Season (1980).
She is the author of the short story collections By Love Possessed (2011), Fool-fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah (2005), and Baby Mother and the King of Swords (1990), and the memoir From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007), which won the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
In 2019, she published Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures.
Professor of English and of Afroamerican & African Studies at the University of Michigan, Goodison divides her time between Toronto and the north coast of Jamaica.
Goodison’s image-rich and socially- and historically-engaged poems often inhabit the lives and landscapes of her Jamaican homeland. “I suspect that I might always write about Jamaica,” Goodison stated in an interview with Mosaic: Literary Arts of the Diaspora. Goodison also discussed the humor in her work, noting, “Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make something of it [a hard situation], it says that you are in control. There are incidences when we have no control; all we can do is make some sort of a gesture. Sometimes, the world can throw things at you that are so cruel and so devastating that you are in no position to have any kind of real response but to make a gesture. And I think that sometimes laughter is a gesture saying that you have not completely annihilated me; you have not robbed me of my ability to respond as a human being.”
Noting that Goodison often “complements her careful observation of the physical world and her fine eye for detail with a tense, lean, elliptical style” in a review of Supplying Salt and Light, Jim Hannan observed, “At their best, Lorna Goodison’s poems observe the unsavory in history and society even as they guide us firmly toward sources of redemption. With compassion and empathy, Goodison writes about human failure and triumph in large and small measures.”
Word by Word 