‘There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.’
—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
In my early pregnancy, my daughter makes her presence felt as a hard knot in the very base of my stomach. The feeling of something coagulating beneath the skin and fat and muscle, something firm and carapaced. Then, as she grows, movement comes in, the odd ripple or slither, like a sea-creature finding its tentacles. My bones shift. My shoulders broaden. My chest and ribcage push towards my chin. My skin itches. From her earliest moments, I imagine her as a girl. I feel that I should be worried about miscarriage, or at least try to prepare myself for the chance, but there is something about her that feels fixed, immovable. The certainty that she will outlast me.
*
Two months after leaving my job, I’m at home, racked with morning sickness and trying to work on my second collection of poems. I’ve left a job I loved due to workplace bullying. This fact—the sting of it—steals my sleep at night. I spend hours rerunning potential scenarios in my head like I’m testing equations. In response, the mind-computer spits out another disastrous scenario. I can’t even fantasise a way that I could have made my situation better. As dawn slithers through the curtains, these thoughts morph into the livid dreams of early pregnancy. When I wake, a brief lightness before failure settles on my chest and the morning sickness blossoms in my gut. In my writing day, I’m finding it hard to access the wistful lyric register of my first collection. There’s a panic quivering just above my expanding ribs. Inside me, a strange energy is collecting, like a star imploding. I fill many hours walking around my neighbourhood on pointless small errands. Moving seems to be the only way to keep the knot in my chest from fusing with the morning sickness churning in my gut. If I keep walking I hope I can somehow digest the anger, absorb it into my bloodstream until I can’t feel it any more. I’m sick of the sour taste it leaves in my mouth, but I can’t seem to get rid of it.
One day, between hours spent scrolling through sparsely populated arts job pages, the idea comes to me to let the anger be. I wonder if there is perhaps a moment where it is healthy to indulge the rage, to allow it to be just about my own hurt. I think that maybe I have finally come across a circumstance where I have been wronged, and there were no mitigating circumstances that are in any way excusable. I don’t feel confident that trying to take this person on publicly will do me or my mental health any good. But as the singularity in the base of my stomach grows, as its cells divide and subdivide, as its electric flutters intensify, I start to think of other practices and rituals that might offer some kind of outlet for my anger. Can anger be anything other than dysfunctional, destructive? Can it be graceful, artful?
*
Most Irish people will be broadly familiar with the idea of the curse. The bones of it are lodged in our psyche, although as individuals we may know little about the bardic culture from which it emerged. We may not be able to recite a curse in Irish, or even summon a line from a bad English translation, but it lives within the Irish tradition of insult; our valuing of quick-witted, damaging speech. Thomas Waters, in his 2020 article ‘Irish Cursing and the Art of Magic, 1750–2018’, makes an extensive and illuminating survey of how the art form evolved, flourished, and lingers still in the popular imagination. The curse tradition comes from the long medieval era in Ireland when bards (filídh) were living repositories of learning, history and culture. Afforded a special place in society, they recorded and praised the great deeds of their patrons, and satirised the failings of their enemies. This was a written tradition, but its key expression was oral. And the curse poem coexisted with the Christianity of the day, bad prayers plummeting to hell as the good ones drifted up to heaven. Curses, in Waters’ words, are ‘a righteous occult attack, a dark prayer for terrible pains to blight evildoers.’ They are earned. And they are meant.
*
As my pregnancy progresses I find myself writing a sequence on witches, exploring the history of the women in my own family, whose dynamics are probably representative of the experiences of many women in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. My mother is the youngest of seven, and although her upbringing was middle class, there was no expectation that any of the women would have a career. Marriage was the aim, and child-rearing. Strangely, this was a step back in terms of ambition; my grandmother, born in 1916, had at least joined the civil service, though she was forced out by the marriage ban that existed until 1973. Some of my aunts worked for a while, and all pursued different professions later in life, but there was a disconnect between schooling and career, a university-shaped hole. As a collective these women were acerbic, volatile, hilarious, chaotic, and sometimes a little frightening. The men they married made jokes about this collective of women, the implication of which was clear—they were harpies. Bitches, but we tolerate them. There was a dangerous glamour to this. A knife-edge tension. When the women got together, they’d be indulged for a while with shrugs and quips about ‘the coven’. They would talk over each other in an exhausting performance of fun. I would watch their husbands drinking their whiskey, their faces getting sourer, their muttering louder. Then the shouting would start. It was petty, repetitive. Witches and cursing again. I picture a dwarf star in a box, slowly compacted until it inverts into a black hole. Or Schrödinger’s Cat, there and not there within the confines of the known and unknown.
*
In her rather optimistic 1975 paper ‘Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance’, Susan Carol Rogers makes reference to the powerful figure of the ‘sabia’ or wise-woman as studied by Julian Pitt-Rivers in his book on Andalusia, People of the Sierra, proposing: ‘that women possess supernatural sources of harm gives them real power through the threat of dangerous reprisals if crossed.’ It’s tempting to think of these wished-for but ultimately non-existent supernatural powers as codified, mythologised versions of the very real but difficult-to-grasp power struggles we all engage with on a day-to-day basis. We are all the keepers of our own small hearths; when others cross the threshold, a negotiation takes place. My work in the field of dramaturgy and playwriting have taught me this more than anything—how quotidian negotiations are fossilised in story. When we place the frame of narrative onto our lives in order to tell our stories, it is our power struggles that provide these stories with their nervous systems, their firing synapses, their heartbeats. In terms of my own worldview, formed by experiences of childhood bullying and a household that was often riven by argument, I try to be attuned to the power exchanges I see taking place around me. And at this moment in my life, having turned my back on the work that has not only paid my bills, but defined my identity for the past decade, I’m finding a pattern emerging: of flight as the only option that has ever seemed open to me when threatened. By taking myself out of the path of harm in this instance, I have lost something important to both my material and emotional happiness. I find myself very much wanting some kind of public retribution, but I’m silenced by considerations of how my actions could rebound negatively on me and my family—the curse can always backfire. But as a poet, subterfuge is part of my craft. And who am I harming by putting these ill-wishes, these hexing words, down on paper? There is no god looking over my shoulder.
*
In his book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, James C. Scott makes a study of a rural Malaysian village in the early 1970s, and the social relations that exist there between the rich and poor, with reference to work by Bloch, E.P. Thompson, Zola and the plays of Brecht. He talks about the small means by which the disempowered protest their lot in life. This study focuses not on revolution, which he posits as outside of the norm, but on what Scott terms ‘the small arms fire […] in a cold war of symbols between the rich and the poor.’ When rich but miserly men go to their graves, the local commentary recounts the smoke of hell rising to meet them. One says, ‘When they enter hell, they will swim in blood.’ What is this, if not a curse?
*
The year before my pregnancy I read Gogol’s Dead Souls in fits and starts to distract myself from passages of turbulence on the many flights I have to take for work. In it, a blackly comic dissection of the gulf between the rich and the poor—the powerful and the disempowered—is offered up to the reader. The titular ‘dead souls’ are peasants whose lives are more valuable on paper than in the flesh. Chichikov, our morally bankrupt protagonist, takes a tour of decaying rural estates, buying these ‘souls’ from their grotesque owners. The society presented to us is a reflection of the inner rot brought about by vast systemic inequality, where the serf’s only recourse to injustice is to do a poor job. The stupidity and mendacity of the peasants is discussed at length by their owners, themselves the real subject of Gogol’s scorn. Although the rich survive the rot, they are indelibly tainted by it. The poor, of course, don’t survive, but at least they can revel in small acts of disruption.
My aunts took joy in disruption, but ultimately were not content. They grew up alongside the Women’s Liberation Movement in Ireland, though I don’t know if any except the youngest would have felt a conscious sympathy with it. Curses flickered in the corners of their mouths. Their anger was electric and palpable. They all left their husbands in the end, these women, once divorce was legalised in Ireland, but not before their youth had been spent in a constant grapple with a system that gave them worth only as wives and mothers. And they drew down their Widow’s Curses on their partners in advance of their leaving.
*
The tradition of cursing in Irish society lingered until the end of the twentieth century, carried through famine, eviction, emigration, political and religious suppression and the modernisation of the country. Waters finds instances of cursing as recent as 2018. Of course, the seriousness of these more recent curses is debatable; a driver arrested by a guard threatening a curse upon the guard’s family is the stuff of comedy. But it’s interesting to see we still fall into these ritualised forms of retribution, this eloquent payback. The tradition of the Widow’s Curse, calling down vengeance on one who has done her and her family wrong, is particularly interesting. This form of oral expression, alongside the keen or caoineadh, represented a powerful emotional outlet for a sector of society who had few forms of public expression. It’s interesting to think that the very society that kept a woman within the shackles of household and family-rearing, who viewed her as weak-minded, emotionally incontinent, untrustworthy, could also harbour such deep fear of her hidden powers. Even when evicted, thrown out on the roadside, stripped of the male protection of a husband, her children starving, the widow can still speak. The curse she draws down might give little consolation, and bring no tangible relief. But at least the words have been spoken. This must mean something. ‘The curse of my orphans, and my falling-sickness [epilepsy], light upon you,’ a woman is recorded as saying to a court who convicted her of theft in Athlone in 1835.
*
When is it justifiable, I wonder, to direct bad feeling towards another person? And what happens when that bad feeling is not justified? Raised in a Catholic ethos, though within a lapsed Catholic family, the message was always clear: turn the other cheek. When I was bullied as a child, overt retaliation never seemed a sensible option. It leaves the victim of the bullying open to accusations of being bullies themselves, and bullies are generally skilled at playing the court of public perception to their advantage. Retaliating against injustice by cursing can have dire consequences. In Waters’ article, he recounts an incident recorded in the National Folklore Commission in 1972 of a man talking about the Widow’s Curse rebounding on a woman, striking her down with kidney disease: ‘It come back on herself, back on herself… I’m telling you she suffered for the curse she gave to other people.’
*
Justified rage makes for a good story. Movies use this convention all the time. Generally, an innocent woman is sacrificed so her lover or husband can go on a murderous revenge spree; see the ‘Women in Refrigerators’ trope, a pattern from comic books identified by Gail Simone in her 1999 website of the same name. Think Mad Max, The Crow, Gladiator, Se7en (although the femicide-as-plot-device comes at the end of Se7en, rather than at the beginning). And of course, it is a common device in all kinds of crime fiction. It works because it carries a narrative template that is familiar from the real world—femicide is an issue, to varying degrees, in all societies—and applies a corrective that smashes the problem with a hammer, rather than suggesting real systemic change. A curse is like this; the fantasy of a dispute with a brutal but clean ending. Systemic change is hard to dramatise.
The problem is that all of these revenges are overblown fantasies—the kind that offer no nuance, no satisfaction. I think about what I would like to happen to the employer that had made my life so difficult. On reflection, I don’t believe this person is capable of change or growth; the misery that they’d inflicted on me was part of a larger pattern of abuse. I doubt they were particularly aware of what they were doing to me; I was collateral damage rather than a sole target. I hear through the grapevine that this person is making another colleague’s life miserable, but that they are pursuing a settlement through HR routes. I send a message offering moral support—even public support, if it is needed. They are kind enough to come back and tell me that they hadn’t realised the extent of the negativity until its beam had been turned on them. My colleague also ends up out of a job, but I’m happy to hear they will at least get some financial compensation.
*
After working for several weeks on the sequence of witch poems, I feel there’s something still missing, some expression of what I’m feeling about anger and how we dispose of it. I begin to write a curse.
Writing a poem is a strange mental balancing act. I let two scripts run through my head; the ‘framework’ script, and the ‘specifics’ script. The framework is trying to access my own accreted knowledge of the Irish cursing tradition, the pieces of text and information I’ve stored in my subconscious. The ‘specifics’ script is a searchlight shining over my current emotional landscape, the memory bank of image and sensation that comprises my own situation. The details that emerge from the weave could be a remembered gesture, a captured impression, or, in this case, my sense of my subject’s worst fears. I indulge in a series of fantasies about what this person would hate most; a series of private and public tortures tailored exactly to the shape of their particular narcissism.
These two scripts run simultaneously. Occasionally a word or a phrase matches up, like lemon juice revealing a message written in invisible ink. The next step is trimming for more clarity, and a cleaner form that will allow this poem to echo something of the form of the historic curse-poems I have read. Inside my womb, my daughter is jabbing and roiling. I picture her inside me, all muscle and feint. Light pierces deep underwater, silvering her limbs. A curse is a shoal of mackerel escaping a predator. It’s a murmuration full of sharpened beaks. It is strength as subterfuge. It’s the wit conferred by years of cunning which found its channels under a blanket of patriarchal authority. It echoes the words uttered by tricksters, pilferers, and wise women throughout history. It lassoes an acre of sky while dragging its feet in the muck. This writing feels like the spilling of the darker part of myself onto the page, the space within me where I’m growing a new skeleton; a life with seeds of teeth and nails held tight inside it. As I write the curse, my daughter turns inside me like a root shifting underground, carving a path through tonnes of soil and rock, cracking the paving stones. I send the curse speeding through the ether to its target. I feel, for the first time in a long time, emptied of hornets.
*
Does the curse work? It’s hard to say. Soon afterwards, a scandal breaks out about the running of the organisation in which I’d worked. It’s not related to any one individual’s behaviour, but it undoubtedly causes the person who made my life very difficult much discomfort, and some sleepless nights. I make no public comment. But something toxic and painful has been excised. What interests me now, five years later and having faced at least one instance of very public adversity and threat in the interim, is that I haven’t felt the need to focus my negativity in the same way again. There was something in the previous situation that felt like a culmination of too many other experiences, both personal and witnessed, a legacy of too much swallowed powerlessness that demanded exorcism.
*
Now, I read the curse poem often at readings, with a fair amount of glee. After one reading, an older women says to me, troubled, ‘You have to be careful with curses…’, but she doesn’t say why. And I wonder if this idea harkens back to the notion that we so often hobble ourselves with in society: that the expression of anger in response to a problem is wrong. That being angry, particularly as a woman, is distasteful—the reaction is worse than the injustice perpetrated. That speaking up creates more trauma than shutting up. I think of the teenage boys I loved who spent all day listening to male-fronted metal bands screaming at intense pitches, but couldn’t stand the sound of a female punk singer. The exhortations to women politicians not to be ‘shrill’. The scrutiny of public testimonials of assault, like those of Christine Blasey Ford, for tone. The caricatures of Kamala Harris’s facial expressions which emerged after the 2020 Vice Presidential debate. The men and women on social media who chime in with their opinions on rape cases, claiming that if teenage girls didn’t wear short skirts, there wouldn’t be a problem. I offer up to them Waters’ collection of curses, gathered together across the centuries:
‘Bad cess on you. Devil take you. May you never prosper. The first drop of water to quench your thirst—may it boil in your bowels. May the flesh rot off your bones, and fall away putrid before your eyes. May your limbs wither and the stench of your rotten carcass be too horrible for hungry dogs. May you fade into nothing, like snow in summer. May you be accursed in the sight of God, and hated by your fellow man. May you die without a priest. May the Almighty’s curse rest on your children. This, I pray.’
Do I mean it?
I do.