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CHAPTER 3 Imagining History Our history is a mountain of salt A leaking stain under the evening cliff It will be gone in time Grass will grow there – Not in our time. ‘History’ (MS 11) Ní Chuilleanáin’s interest in history is apparent in all of her work, but hers is a historiography defined in its broadest sense from the political history of Ireland and beyond, to her own personal and family history, and to the history of women, until recently an often unexamined and under-documented field. With Ní Chuilleanáin, however, these all intermingle and cannot be easily separated, and often her explorations into history lead to the conclusion that not only is it difficult to understand the past, because a particular history will not reveal its secrets and its voices, but also that the arbitrary lines we draw between past and present can be illusory. Although this was one of Ní Chuilleanáin’s areas of undergraduate study, history as fact-finding, as evidence for pinning down the ‘true’ nature of the past, of recording events, people and cultures so we understand what and who they were, is not ultimately Ní Chuilleanáin’s primary concern. Working from the belief that our vision is always limited, that we can view history from multiple angles and that facts are both selective and open to different interpretations, Ní Chuilleanáin takes a different approach to looking back. As a poet, she chooses often to imagine events, scenes and figures from the past, to speculate on what is hidden, what lies beyond the surface, what might be, metaphorically, on ‘the other side’. Moreover, as Helen Emmitt explains, Ní Chuilleanáin’s moments of revelation are ironically balanced by another theme in her work, ‘the omission of the history that could explain the situation’.1 As we have 38 noted earlier, often with Ní Chuilleanáin there is the start of a narrative, or a glimpse of a scene, and we are encouraged to draw some meaning from a partial story, realising that we can never fully understand the whole. In this process, Ní Chuilleanáin’s imaginative recreations often interrogate traditional roles assigned to men and women as these are reflected in some historical accounts, and she revises well-known figures and narratives, sometimes using the present, or her own personal experience, as an entrance into the past. Acts and monuments – as the title of an early volume suggests2 – are often a starting point. As Ní Chuilleanáin says, ‘the past is there. It is there in the present. In one sense, it is the only thing that we actually do know.’3 Events and specific places and spaces are extremely important, whether an Italian kitchen, her native city of Cork, the cathedral at Parma or the ruins of Bessboro, a Mother and Baby Home in Cork. A recurring motif in all of these poems is the approach to the edge, to the borders of recovery and understanding, to the threshold of a mystery or secret. There is some information to be gained, glimpses into the past, yet the emphasis often falls on limited access to facts. Ironically then, Ní Chuilleanáin begins a journey of discovery, uncovering bits and pieces, only to let us know that there is something there that we can never fully understand, a mystery at the heart of any history. On the other hand, this opens up opportunities for the poet to imagine and recreate worlds we cannot see. Ní Chuilleanáin has described history as ‘that sort of hologram where now you see it, now you don’t, now you see further into the background and then you don’t’,4 depicted metaphorically in the mists, veils and shadows we see often in her poems. As a poet, Ní Chuilleanáin uses this to advantage, with imaginative scenes of what might have been. An artist and not an historian, she profits from the ambiguity poetry affords, from the complexity and multiplicity of meanings that art and language allow. One can certainly argue that this is not a conventionally reliable way of viewing the past, but, as we will see, her strategies give us not only some understanding of the past but also a sense of what has been selected, left out, or misrepresented in traditional historical visions. All of this is important in terms of representations of women’s lives. As she says, ‘I’m interested in female roles, especially historically.’5 In...

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