Review - 50 Minute Mermaid

A Mermaid and her Therapeutic Catharsis in a Post-Colonial Ireland

 

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is very much regarded as one of the most gifted Irish poets in a post-revivalist era. She deliberately writes in Irish and regards the dying language not as a revivalist tool but as a means to preserve her Gaelic Heritage while raising awareness for contemporary societal or even biographical issues of a post-colonial Irish identity, mixing old folklore elements with critical or even subversive thoughts on the Irish psyche.

Despite her intercontinental collaboration with the US-American translator Paul Muldoon the beauty of her words will sadly remain a mystery for the average reader. Most are faced with the translator’s take on her poetry. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is part of a whole generation writing in Irish, revolutionizing poetry, thus critical responses to her writing praise her as the skilled wordsmith representing the voice of the contemporary Irish women.

This biography of mermaids invites the reader to travel alongside a female speaking subject into an otherworld of myths and legends, imagination and personal neurosis to question the notion of fixed identities. While the language issue invites a whole host of nationalist connotations into her work, her themes subvert traditional conventions often exposing stereotypes about female sexual identity.

The mythological landscape of mermaids functions as a metaphor for the childhood stories exposing life in modern Ireland as riddled with complex often difficult relationships and experiences of human, translating them into flowing poetry without romanticising them. In a series of poems she very openly she addresses child abuse at the hands of the Catholic clergy and mentally unstable parents, forcing the reader to take a closer look at his own reality and his own subconscious. This volume confronts us with a more global problem of being out of tune with the world, being unable to deal with psychological trauma and repression and the inability of language to represent reality.

The theme of the mermaid, unlike the Disney version, explores the tension between two realities, the realm of the underwater myths and the harsh reality of a fisherman’s wife, of an outsider who needs to forget his former life and home to be accepted as part of the community. When the mermaid comes up for air, she tries to adapt to a Catholic lifestyle with a family of her own. In “An Mhaighdean Mhara” the speaker tries to deal with her imprisonment in a female human body and the pain of being trapped in a situation without hope. She is the stranger in a strange land who is neither here nor there, between past and present. Her language of the sea, the language of the past, fails to catch up with her present experiences. Poetry imitates life, though metaphors and comparisons but falls short as it becomes the expression of a forcefully silenced, painfully disillusioned mere caricature of a culture.

This volume is a remarkable expression of life in modern society with all its tensions between history and present reality, Englishness and Irishness, community and individual, reminding us forcefully, there is no happy ending, no return to a watery Eden. And like the mermaid, the reader has to learn how to cope with the consequences of an almost biblical fall from Grace – 50-minute sessions - with the trauma of the present and regain the repressed memories of her past and the distortions of time. 

Other reviews:

1. Phillips, Adam. 2008. "Like a mermaid out of water". 
2. Bennett, Sarah. 2008. "Sarah Bennett reviews The Fifty Minute Mermaid by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon"