a landscape for forgetting

I hold a single white sheet, a map traced edges of this country, its counties and borders: there is no blue for rivers, no red for roads, no elevations or compass to orientate only the flat outline of terrain and black circles, so many, they form thick clouds to the West. There is a single legend to decode: cillínunderneath spaces, ground to forget, beyond words or maps. Here, under seeling night and hard stars where mists shroud and winds wipe meaning from weathered stones, wind-bent hedgerows twisting from trunks as if to look away, a place where everything moves to forget the men came between dusk and dawn delivering their unnamed infants to the clay, unwilling midwives at boundary ditches, crossroads, holy wells, outside churchyards, beneath standing stones, in fields with lost names –

Infants’ Hollow, Corpse Field, Strangers’ Hill. There are other rifts lost tellings held in the sediment here, all that mother ache from dark rooms still humid with the heat of birth and blood their weightless bundles, like birds’ pneumatic bones, taken from them, small bodies they never held names they were told they could never speak. Their grief shadows this place is mist, seeped into stalk and blade is the soft ground all they were told they could not say sod-choked and searching, the map’s black circles, deep wells we can never know. But we have these dark coordinates because they could not but remember and sought others, troops of lost children, to lay theirs beside and set stones in the gouged ground to say you were mine. Alone with the spade and the night they spilled the sun’s stones, the grianchloiche gathered from the riverbed, around the small bodies planted there, seams of glinting silver to light their infants’ sky to blink towards others lost there to map them on a landscape, to say they were here.

by Una Mannion

Tommy Weir Cillín Sessuegarry, Sligo, 2018

There is ambiguity in everything interesting: memory, thought, language creates ambiguity…it’s what it means to be human…it’s what it means to be woman. That is why they burned our sisters at the stake, after raping and mutilating their bodies. That is why they locked our pregnant sisters away, disowned by family and society. Those people were an enigma; could not be tamed nor contained within the proscribed diktats of patriarchal power. Inquisitions don’t need a reason other than power to control.

So, to the question, ‘How do I describe myself?’ My own process of ‘selfinquisition’, not of control but of rediscovery.

Stripped down, naked. An automaton? No! A cyborg, programmed with all the infectious ideologies to fit the social credit system? No! A voice, yes, sometimes weak; to speak a truth to a people fear-filled, corralled. Cattle prodded into submission. The ‘over 60s’, the ‘over 60s with underlying health conditions’, ‘the under 60s with chronic illness’ - each group already identified and branded - not with a Star of David, but with up-to-date ‘Covid’ vaccine cert. Dispensable: their morbidity already programmed and recorded: cause of death, COVID.

The V sign, no longer a symbol of defiance, but of compliance. If I do not fit into this social credit system, then who am I? Within this system, ‘I am not’. I am ‘the other’, one of ‘them’, ‘they’, ‘the outsider’.

To ask a question has become an offensive endeavour. How have our human and civil rights been allowed to be so quickly and grossly eroded over a three year period? Where has my voice been? How has the voice of reason become ‘unreasonable’? Silence is the deafening echo of a dying people: a silence that ricochets back from the tombs of our ancestors. Bare-boned, ragged people call from the shadows: Beware! Beware!

Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist-painter describes herself thus:

‘I don’t give a shit what the world thinks. I was born a bitch. I was born a painter. I was born fucked. But I was happy in my way. You did not understand what I am. I am love. I am pleasure. I am essence. I am an idiot. I am an alcoholic. I am tenacious. I am; simply I am…’

I was born a teller of hidden, secretive stories; stories begun before I was conceived. A writer, a stripper of pretence, a precocious child who didn’t learn her place. To those who do not know me, I AM what you see. Bare bones and shadows.

by Sheila A. McHugh