I've been talking about including reviews and other such stuff for some time to friends and in my continual dialogue that goes on in my head between me and myself and I - that makes it a trilogue I suppose. Anyway, I'm digressing, the point is I'm finally getting around to doing a review of some poetry I read recently by Maria McCarthy, also known as Medway Maria. She comes with a great poetry pedigree as she studied under both Sarah Wardle and Susan Wicks.
I've known Maria for a few years now and have had the great pleasure of reading some of her short stories. Maria's work tends to be concerned with Irish immigrant family life - much of her work is based upon memoir but also in the grand tradition of Irish writers her work is often playful, truthful, heartbreaking fiction. This time, however, I'm looking at one of her poems, 'Story'.
Story by Maria McCarthy
I know this story.
It’s one of nuns and Christian brothers;
of drawing water from the well; of delivering
a sister when the midwife couldn’t come;
of finding a man in the barn, hanging;
of sailing to England with one suitcase,
bearing two of everything, of sending money home;
of working like a navvy; of cinemas
and dancehalls and clinging to your own;
of meeting my father at a dance
above the Gas Showrooms; of the wedding
in the blue suit, three months gone,
on a day you had the flu, of letting you go
home while he stayed and drank; of his mother
who said he didn’t have to marry you;
of sharing her house till she complained
about a mark made by the baby’s arm
on the bedroom wallpaper; of going homeless,
in a hostel, where the men could only visit;
of how he did nothing to find you somewhere to live;
of travelling to Ireland with my brother;
of the man who would have taken you on,
baby and all, married or not, and of the other man
in England, who you knew before my father,
who took you to a show, Chu Chin Chow on ice,
but was too nice, too old, too caring,
who came walking his dog past your house
every day until he died, the house that the council
gave you once you had five, where my father
led you a hell of a life with the drink and the babies
and the miscarriage when the hospital doctor
accused you of doing it yourself;
of hiding from the rent man; of holding
your head up in the street with us all turned
out nicely, so the neighbours wouldn’t know;
of how you did it for us, stayed with a man
who was home when the pubs were shut,
or when the horses had run the wrong way.
I know this story. It’s yours, not mine.
I’ve stopped listening.
This poem is just like the suitcases that the woman takes with her to England, yet instead of holding ‘two of everything’ it’s stuffed full of her life, her story. That’s what this poem is about – one woman’s story that is rolled out again and again in all its gritty misery only to fall upon the deaf ears of her own daughter who’s heard it all before. We’ve all heard the stories from our own parents or grandparents about how we don’t know we’re born, we didn’t have to walk twenty miles to school like they did in a blizzard without shoes or have a night out on five shillings and sixpence (a night out? That fortune would last us all year!). This poem is for all the daughters and granddaughters who have listened to their mothers and grandmothers trotting out their tales of woe.
It would have been a cheap and easy shot for Maria McCarthy to just poetically roll her eyes and ignore the stories of a hard life. Likewise there are plenty of nasty histories that just become Misery Memoir and set the reader up as the voyeur. She’s avoided this by giving us line after line of clipped story – just what you’d hear at a family party; have you heard about the time when.... We’re transported at first to a world that’s almost Biblical in its simplicity – water drawn from a well, populated by nuns, Christian brothers, missing midwives and hanged men. Already in the first five lines there’s enough plot for a novel.
As the poem unfolds we hear the common tale of a woman trapped in a marriage out of religious duty, living the hard life of an immigrant and it’s this that makes this poem more than just a story of one Irish woman’s life, it’s the story repeated all across the world whether the religion is Roman Catholicism or Islam; arrive with one suitcase, work hard, send money home and cling to your own.
As I was reading ‘Story’ I was reminded of the Galway poet, Rita Ann Higgins and her wonderful poem, ‘Some People’ which deals with similar territory of poverty, Catholicism, motherhood and hiding from a rent man.
The thing that made me come back to this poem again and again though was the bitter last line - 'I've stopped listening' it makes me want to go back to the beginning and pick through all the stories there - what was it that made the daughter turn away from the mother? Was it the promise of a better life with the man who would have taken her on baby and all? Or was it the constant repetition of all the stories, all the stories that are the mother's, not the daughter's - a distancing, a marking out of territory, of independence - you've told your story, you've lived your life, now let me live mine.
And I for one want to keep hearing the stories of these Irish women.
