Mama Says

about…to cut the tongue out of me.

This is followed by a description of her childhood relationship with Mama,

…anything that had wonder was transposed onto her…At mass, when the priest turned the key of the gold crested tabernacle door, I had the profane thought that he was turning a key in her chest…

No one except O’Brien can pierce the exalted with such razor-sharp wit except perhaps Anne Enright, whose protagonist Veronica in The Gathering is reminded of St Veronica wiping the face of Jesus every time she’s handed a hot towel after a Chinese meal.

O’Brien says of Mama,

…we lived for a time in such symbiosis there might never have been a husband or other children except that there were. We all sat at the same fire, ate the same food…

This was a shock. I’d always visualised the narrator as an only child. And yet I recognised this scenario completely. I, too, was passionate about my equally religious, equally yearning mother. Because I was the youngest I did enjoy special time alone with her but this intimacy never lasted beyond the return of the true favourite. They said that the umbilical cord had never been cut between Mammy and this favourite, which reminds me of the tongue cutting in Two Mothers. Mammy said that the tongue was

“…the most dangerous organ in the body.”

If it was dangerous to reveal family secrets, to write about them was beyond the pale. ‘Don’t tell her anything,’ Mammy said about me. ‘She’ll write about it!’

In Two Mothers the ‘breach’ begins with, 

…tiffs over food that I refused to eat…

intensifying as the narrator begins to write and Mama insists that literature is

a precursor to sin and damnation…

The total split comes when the narrator runs off with a man she’d only known six weeks. Mama reaches out with a letter after ten years when the narrator is divorced,

She enjoined me to kneel down on the spot I was standing on, vow to have nothing to do with any man in body or soul so long as I lived.

It would be easy to dismiss these repressed and repressive Irish mothers, turn them into caricatures but O’Brien’s eye is so tender as well as funny. She illuminates these fearful, ashamed beings who knew the punishments which lay in wait for transgressing women and were often sadly in line to cast the first stone.

Clair Wills’ memoir Missing Persons or My Grandmother’s Secrets features another powerful secretive mother, condemning an unborn grandchild to one of the notorious Irish Mother and Baby homes. Wills speaks of “a whole society” who learnt “…not to look too closely, and certainly not to ask too many questions…”

Secrecy was a whole way of life then and not only applied to sex. O’Brien showed us this maniacal secrecy in action. In an early story, My Mother’s Mother, the grandfather is visited by a man called Tim even though his real name is Pat.

Tim it seems, had died and my grandfather was not to know, because… it brought his own death to mind.

When an aunt’s husband is shot by the Black and Tans, this aunt has to conceal the death from her own parents, pretending he has been transferred to the Northern Ireland, inventing letters that she received from him,

…the man who brought these imaginary letters would have been Tim, because he would have been the postman… So there in the porch, in a worn suit, was a man called Pat answering to the name of Tim…

This made me laugh out loud, remembering similar convoluted scenarios from the own childhood. Rereading this story now, I wonder why I’d never been disturbed by this description of one of the farm workers,

…all he would do was tickle my knees and the backs of my knees, because at heart he was shy…not like some of the local men who would want to throw you to the ground…press themselves over you so that you would have to ask God for protection

Can I judge the ‘amnesia’ of the previous generation when I must have been looking away myself?

Joyce intended Ulysses to serve as a blueprint for Dublin should it ever be destroyed but O’Brien created an equally dazzling blueprint of mid-twentieth Irish country life for a nation now puzzled over the painful scandals of the past.She showed it all with such style – funny, charming Ireland with its dark secrets, its strange innocence and above all, its excruciating shame. And although the Catholic church might have lost its power, shame and, in particular, the shaming of women is not over. Anne Enright has described writing as “shame management” and has highlighted the repudiation of shame in novels of Sally Rooney and Eimear McBride.

The current ‘golden age’ for Irish writing owes much to O’Brien’s earlier, lonelier fight and long may it continue to grow, fighting shame in all its shape-shifting forms. Two Mothers ends with Mama’s last letter –

my hand is shaking now as well as myself with what I have to tell you.

But the letter remained unfinished,

which is why I wait for the dream that leads us beyond the ghastly white spittoon… to begin our journey…again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting and free of shame.