Gaol/Gaol: Re-Viewing Silence in Kilmainham Gaol

GAOL/GAOL: RE-VIEWING SILENCE IN KILMAINHAM GAOL KATHLEEN O’BRIEN kilmainham gaol, located west of Dublin, was operated as the “County of Dublin Gaol at Kilmainham” from 1796 to 1924. In recent years, Kilmainham Gaol has become a major archive and heritage center, with extensive displays of historic objects accompanied by text panels and publications that contextualize the objects, the architecture, and the gaol’s conflicted place in Irish history. In September 1998, the bicentenary year of the 1798 Rebellion, Kilmainham Gaol was the site of a sculpture exhibition for which artists were invited to develop visual responses related to the theme “Imprisonment.” My response was a sound installation entitled Gaol/Gaol: Double Talk, constructed in a prison cell on the ground floor of the East Wing (figure 1). In recognition of the sharp decline of the Irish language since the Great Famine, the installation focused on a language shift embedded in the term gaol, which is spelled the same in Irish and English but whose meanings differ in the two languages. De Bhaldraithe’s English-Irish Dictionary defines gaol simply as a prison (príosún or carcair). However, the reverse translation in Ó Dónaill’s Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, itemizes several definitions of gaol, gives many examples of its diverse uses, and lists numerous words that use the term as a root. In all instances, gaol in Irish refers to relationships of extended family members, intimate terms of affection or endearment , or close relationships between things (for example, cognate words). This paper seeks to situate the installation within the historical and architectural terrain of Kilmainham Gaol in order to examine how that site can be experienced as a contemporary text within a shifting discursive landscape. In A History of Kilmainham Gaol, published in 1995, Director Pat Cooke describes Kilmainham as GAOL/GAOL: RE-VIEWING SILENCE IN KILMAINHAM GAOL 173 a political seismograph, recording most of the significant tremors in the often turbulent relations between [Ireland and Great Britain]. . . . At the epicenter of these relations lay the Irish aspirations to political independence , setting off shockwaves of varying force throughout the nineteenth century and reaching a climax in the years 1916–22. There can be few places that more intensely crystallize the forces that shaped Irish nationalism.1 Kilmainham, in its developing role as educational archive and popular heritage site, reconstructs Kilmainham Gaol’s role in Irish history and highlights several renowned patriot-prisoners. However, the site is also a terrain formed by many fragmented, conflicted, and invented narratives; the contemporary solitude of the massive stone structure is an experience veiled in provocative shadows and echoes that resonate with unrecorded events and silenced voices. In juxtaposition with traditional approaches to history, philosopher Michel Foucault prioritizes the term genealogy because it GAOL/GAOL: RE-VIEWING SILENCE IN KILMAINHAM GAOL 174 1 Pat Cooke, A History of Kilmainham Gaol (Dublin: Government of Ireland, 1995), 1. figure 1 Kathleen O’Brien, Gaol/Gaol: Double Talk (sound installation, 1998). Black and silver wire mesh, text on acetate, seven recorded voices, graphite shadow (incidental and fabricated). does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present. . . . Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents , the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to have value for us . . .2 The Gaol/Gaol installation and this discussion of it seek those fragmented, multidirectional, and unfixed points in which the Kilmainham “political seismograph” can also be imagined as a genealogy of deviations, reversals, and “faulty calculations.” The “Imprisonment” exhibition was situated in the environs of the East Wing, the Gaol’s 1861 addition whose vaulted glass roof and airy open concourse contrast markedly with an older, darkly oppressive stone structure. For a few weeks, the exhibition formed yet another...