It’s an interesting thing: without even wanting to, I often start by apologising to people when I tell them what my book is about. It starts during the Famine, I say, and then I usually make a face that says, I know. I know no one wants to talk about the Famine, I’m trying to make the face say, I know it’s a heavy subject and we’re post-pandemic now and we’re all looking forwards and it’s very grim to bring up the Famine, I know, I’m sorry.
Because this much I’ve learned, since I started writing my second book: people don’t want to hear about the Famine. In Ireland, where at least you know the person you’re talking to is mentally thinking of the word with a capital F, the Famine is something we’ve long determined to consign to the past. It’s a blood memory for us, a bedrock theme, but that doesn’t mean we want to talk or think about it. In England, where I live, you’ve essentially lost your listener as soon as you say the words Irish famine, or potato famine. Here we go, you can see them thinking. When I started writing the book I asked an English friend, what is it about the Famine that makes it so hard for people to engage with? It’s too grim, he said. And too boring. No action, nothing to distinguish it from other historical tragedies. Nothing to grab the attention.
So when I heard the story of Doolough, I thought: this is it. In telling this very specific story, I can give the reader purchase on the Famine. My book starts during the Famine, I say, and then I say, it starts on March 30th, 1849, in a place called Doolough in the west of Ireland. A group of starving people - 600, by many accounts – came down from the mountains and walked 12 miles through the snow to the landlord’s house that sat by a black lake to beg for food and relief, but they weren’t given food, just counted, like cattle, and on the walk home they fell by the black lake and most of them died on its banks, from weakness, and starvation, and the cold. And this happened, I say then, my book is fiction but it’s based on this thing that actually happened, and what I don’t do on to say is that this friction between life and art is the engine that drives the rest of the book forwards.
Doolough felt like a story I’d always known, and it still seems incredible to me that it is a story that everyone, in Ireland at least, doesn’t know. It was a microcosm of the Famine, of what was happening in Ireland at the time. And yet there was something mythical, almost ahistorical in its simplicity. It was an intensely local story, rooted in a place, and a universal one too; it’s something that took place in the past, but it could be happening today, here, anywhere. It’s both outside of time and place, and absolutely a product of both. When I started writing this book, I wanted to keep it fictional, for it to be only loosely inspired by Doolough. The book, however, had other plans for me. I’d write a section, do some reading, and then find that what I’d written had actually occurred. The people would have fallen on banks of sand by the black lake, I decided, and then I discovered that that was exactly what happened. The more I wrote of the book, the more I felt as if I were tracing over an already written story, that I was bringing to life something that had been waiting, for a long time, to be told. You couldn’t make it up, I would tell myself as I wrote, and I almost didn’t have to.
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But as much as Doolough was a hard story to hear, it was a hard story to tell, not least because to separate the story from the history, the people from what had happened to them, was a very difficult thing. For a long time, I struggled with the idea of giving a voice to those who’d been silenced, of making them into characters in a story of my telling. Their history, their ending, was theirs alone. Would all those people, whose names I didn’t even know, who didn’t survive Doolough, who didn’t get to tell their own story, wanted to have had it recounted by me? My people survived the Famine: I’m here. What gives me the right to take someone else’s story for material? And so in an act of remembrance, of apology, of recognition, in April this year I and my agent from New York, Lisa Gallagher, walked the 12 miles the people did in 1849.
We did the walk in sunshine and with a low wind at our backs, we wore comfortable shoes and clothes and were well fed and most importantly we weren’t walking for our lives, we weren’t carrying babies or supporting old people, we weren’t walking towards death, and it was still a long hard road. There’s something melancholy about the landscape around Doolough: even if you didn’t know its history, it’s an unsettling place with a lonely feel to it. The waters of the lake are black, the hills surrounding it are coloured like bruises, the ground underfoot is wet and rough. And this part of Ireland, I realized, is reminiscent in its expanse of the American West, and that was an unexpected and eerie echo of the second half of my book, which is set in Oregon Territory in the 1850s.
What would a survivor of Doolough have done? I’d asked myself and I had decided that she would have left Ireland and gone to America. She would have traveled west, and she would have met an Indigenous man whose experiences mirrored her own. I looked for historical connections between the Irish and the Indigenous Americans, and I found, again, a whole world of history waiting to be told. In 1847, the Choctaw Nation sent money to help the Irish during the Famine. In 1990, a group of Indigenous American people traveled to Doolough to complete the Famine walk (mayo.ie). In 1992, Irish people walked the Trail of Tears, from Oklahoma to Mississippi, to mark the forced walk the Choctaws had undertaken in the 1830s. In 2020, the Irish donated €2.2 million to the Hopi and Navajo peoples who’d been badly hit by the COVID-MP pandemic. “We are kindred spirits,” said the chief of the Choctaw Nation, in 2020, “with the Irish.” The story of Sing, Wild Bird, Sing was already there. I just had to tell it.
Sing, Wild Bird, Sing by Jacqueline O’Mahony is published by Lake Union
