“My intention was to write a book of fiction. Short stories to echo my favourite writers, Alice Munro and Elizabeth Strout.” So Rosaleen McDonagh tells us in the introduction to this slender yet powerful volume. Instead, Unsettled is a series of essays about her life and experiences, a life lived in the cracks between identities. McDonagh invites us into her world with traces of hilarity, pride and abjection in equal measure. She shows, coolly and dispassionately, the excruciating cruelties wrought on her by an indifferent and hateful society. She takes us dancing.
McDonagh wears many hats: she is a playwright, a Traveller, a disability activist with cerebral palsy, a member of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, a doctor of disability studies, and member of Aosdána. For the most part, she wears her expertise lightly.
The Traveller halting site of her youth is brought into full view: it is bustling and lively, loud and loving. Mam hides soap from her 20 children so that they won’t waste it. Dad covers the mirrors of his van with fabric so his daughters won’t spend all their time looking at themselves. He becomes anxious around settled people, forced as he is to interact with them because of young Rosaleen’s additional needs.
In a book that heaves with bodies, McDonagh delights in showing off young Traveller men especially. Here is one of my favourite moments on the site: “Young fellas that my sisters and myself fancied were busy with scrap. Some of them were combing their hair, wearing string vests and jeans. That Traveller swagger.”
McDonagh’s sexuality is proudly on display throughout this book, and is one of many acts of radicalism in her extraordinary life. But not everything is as open and clear; there is much that remains veiled, hidden from view or presented obliquely.
McDonagh did not grow up on the halting site. She was loved and accepted by her family, but her disability resulted in her being placed in a series of residential institutions. If the halting site is a key scene in this drama, the homes and facilities are frequently kept off stage, referenced but barely shown. The faint glimpses we get into the horrors are enough to know why.
In Caked On, McDonagh celebrates her love of style and glamour, contrasting it with the disdain for her physical presence that was shown to her in institutions. Elegance is McDonagh’s small act of resistance against the casual cruelty of institutional staff. She describes the home full of children with severe physical impairments: “If the staff didn’t like you they’d make you wait a long time before helping you to the toilet.” Young Rosaleen meets these humiliations with silks and perfumes, a proud appropriation of “the Traveller look”. “I’d go without food just to wear good clothes,” she says.
The essay moves thus between cruelty and glamour, abjection and autonomy, and takes us ultimately to the therapy room, with a strong, determined therapist pushing Rosaleen well beyond her comfort zone. Repressed memories voiced, the reader becomes spectator to a moment of terrible realisation. Rosaleen retrieves the moment when she was seven and soiled herself in the institution.
“There were two care workers. One of them pulled down my knickers and hit me. They made me sit on the toilet. They took off my knickers, held them up to my nose and rubbed it into my face.”
This tiny book contains enough material to fill many novels over
This tiny book is dense with themes, and reading its 128 lucid pages gives a better insight into the language of the contemporary moment than books of theory could, bringing depth and detail to abstract concepts such as intersectionality, empowerment, racism and solidarity. Activism is brought to life through character and relationships. McDonagh presents some of her intense partnerships with fellow activists, relationships that are at once fraught and life-saving. She reminds us that the community of political activism offers belonging to those whose families can never truly understand them.
The density of the book is an occasional weakness. The prose is mostly transparent and fluid, transporting us to places and situations where books rarely take us. But at times it becomes bogged down in explanations and slides into a social sciencey voice, deadening the relationship set up between author and reader. In other places the opposite is true: the writing is oblique to the point of confusion (for me at least). Ink, Blood, Tears, a beautiful essay in which a grieving Rosaleen gets a tattoo, ends with a stirring and evocative scene that evaded my understanding.
Somehow, this tiny book contains enough material to fill many novels over. The settings, the characters, the ideas are rich and stimulating. It’s not a smooth read or an easy one – nor should it be. It is my fervent hope that, having put all of this on the record, McDonagh might go on to write that collection of short stories. What a riot that would be.
