When The Body Of A Woman Makes Art

**There is an audio version of this essay, just scroll down to find it.

I was on a panel at a conference a couple of months ago with two amazing Irish writers, June Caldwell and Emilie Pine. Our panel was called ‘Bodies & Boundaries in Irish Literature’ and we were mainly talking about writing the body in our work and to what extent we consciously felt that we write from a woman’s body?

Each of us have written about the boundaries of our bodies being breached. In her ground-breaking memoir, Notes to Self, published by Tramp Press to massive acclaim in 2018, Pine wrote about her rape as a teenager and, in doing so, helped to beat a path for other Irish women to confront their own histories of unacknowledged violations. So many of us are products of the violent histories. Histories we've pushed down and turned away from because when we are invaded and humiliated in this way, it feels like our only options in the wasteland of the aftermath is to minimise it and to blame ourselves. These are the only things available when you grow up in callous society that told us it was our fault. 

When we try to assert ourselves as blameless, as survivors – we find we must constantly push back against an overwhelming tide of recriminations. And, as in that classic horror trope, so often the call is coming from inside the house: ‘Your rape is not your fault,’ we tell our friends while a cold voice inside whispers, ‘her rape was not her fault, but yours was.’   

This is the unseen work of women, packing away our previous selves. The self who was assaulted or the self who was ridiculed or even the self who was madly in love. I feel we stay tethered to these past selves, the solitary cry of the girl you were, joins with the strangled rage of the young woman you became and so on right up to today when you are standing in the self that, by tomorrow, will be gone, having receded to join the others. 

These hidden selves are what rises when we make art. No matter how much I try to reject the wankier perspectives on creativity, it’s undeniable that something beyond our comprehension takes place when we go into the state of creation.