Q&A with Sadhbh Ní Chuinn

We have been gifted this week with a wonderfully rich and revealing interview with Sadhbh Ní Chuinn! Speaking with Lara Tokar, one of our poetry editors, Chuinn dives into the two poems we published, “Fiach” and “Famine Body,” as well as her close, ever present relationship with poetry.

Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote, or the first time poetry really moved you? I would love to hear about what role poetry had in your early life, if it was something you stumbled into or something always around you. 

I don’t remember the first poem I wrote, but poetry has been a constant feature of my life for as long as I can remember.

I think my first poems were spoken. I used to talk to myself as a child. It was my way of processing a world that made little sense to me. Talking to other people didn’t give me the same feeling of safety and meaning and delight that those early conversations with myself did. And maybe that’s because I was never only talking to myself; I was speaking aloud to the world. I would address what we call “nature”; that nonsense English word that draws an imaginary border between humans and the rest of the living world. I always felt “nature” as the rest of me, as an extension of my body. So, a lot of the time I was addressing the land and sea and wind, copying the lilt and laments of the shorebirds, the seagulls and the rooks.

I’ve walked the same stretch of shoreline by my childhood home for my whole life. I would go as often as I could get away, in all weather, and I was often the only person for miles. It was there that these lovely tangles of meaning and magic would just fall out of me, or flow through me, in a way that felt like release and understanding. I felt like the beach and the sea and the birds and the stones were in conversation with me. I still question whether those poems really belonged to me at all or whether they were composed by the living world I was passing through, somehow stored in the land and the water and the other bodies that were a part of it.

My favourite part of those childhood poems was always letting them go, giving them away to the air and then forgetting them completely. That felt like freedom to me. 

Would you say your Irish background is something you consciously draw from in your poetry or is it more an undercurrent that comes through naturally? Do you see your work as part of an Irish poetic tradition or do you prefer to situate it differently?

To be honest, I don’t consider myself a part of any tradition most of the time. I mean, consciously, I know I am a part of the cultural landscape of this island because I have grown out of it. It has woven me, the same way our environments weave all of us into being. 

But I’ve lived most my life with a sense of alienation from Irish culture. And apart from a couple of summer stints in the Gaeltacht as a teenager, I had a very difficult relationship with the language growing up. 

Nowadays, I consider Gaeilge as my mother tongue and English as my first language. But like many Irish people at home and abroad, I don’t speak my own language beyond the cúpla focal. I’ve come to understand that as a wound we carry as a people. Our tongues were cut out before we were even born. The colonialists knew what they were doing. You violently erase the language, particularly in an oral culture who navigated both life and landscape with words and stories, you sever the connection to self, place and community. 

It's a strange position to find yourself in, to be a part of a place and still feel somehow outside of it. Yet I suppose it is a common experience for colonised peoples across the world. An often underestimated wound in the bloody legacy of colonialism. 

I use my cúpla focal whenever I can these days. I sprinkle it through my conversations and my poetry. It started off as a conscious, sometimes mortifying effort, but now it weaves itself freely in the tapestry of my days. Anyway. Who really cares if I get it wrong? Who cares if somebody decides I have the dreaded notions? Ó bhuel, is cuma liom. I am trying. 

It's nothing compared to the joy. I use mo Gaeilge bhriste every single day as an act of defiance and reclamation that makes my bones shake with delight and fills my cells with a chorus of bright laughter (because what other sound would you make with a reclaimed tongue?).

So, all that to say, I probably would situate my poems as a part of the tapestry of Irish poetry, in that it is a continuous response to my own existence as a part of this place, but perhaps not as a part of it in any traditional sense. I think, if I had to, I would situate it somewhere in the cracks in between our two languages, in a space of becoming. 

The language of “Fiach” is very sonic, “drum of flight,” “ragged bolt of mirth,” “crack-bone language.” Can you talk about the importance of sound in your writing process for this poem?

I wanted to explore sound as punctuation, sound as a second poem. The poem within the poem. The sonic shape of the raven’s call as its own evolution story. When you sound it out, even the word “fiach” has a throaty harshness to it that reminds me of that call. And Irish is an ancient language so deeply connected into the ecology of the land, I can’t imagine that is an accident. 

Sound, to me, feels more ancient than sight. It has a deeper resonance in the body. The way music has the power to move our emotions like a tide. How sound can shift the mood of a room or conduct a crowd into a state of frenzy or ecstasy or fear. It can alter our consciousness in a way that sight doesn’t seem to do as readily. It seems to have a parallel in the way certain smells can access memory; how a whiff of some long-forgotten scent has the power to transport us to another time.  

I suppose I wanted to draw on an ancient felt sense of a wilder, truer self through the immediacy of sound; that primal sense of urgency and alertness and instinct that images alone do not so easily conjure.

I’m wondering how you settled on ‘Fiach’ as a title. Placing it at the end makes it carry such weight. What made you decide to hold it back until the very last line, rather than the traditional placement at the very top? 

I don’t really resonate with making decisions as such when I write poetry. I always feel like a poem happens to me. Like maybe I have very little to do with it, except to get out of its way. It feels more like a full body response to whatever experience I am having in that moment. Usually beneath my awareness. 

Like how you scream before your mind has even begun to process that someone has snuck up and grabbed you from behind. The title felt like it punctuated this poem. It didn’t happen to me until the end, so that’s where I left it. But when it did, it felt like the raven itself having the last word. Or dropping a gift like a shiny stone at my feet. 

The Irish word for raven, “fiach”, is also the word for “debt”. This felt like a beautiful synchronicity to me. This poem has a dark weight to it, something wild and unrecognised is waiting to be acknowledged. The debt is overdue. All that is brutal and wise and feral about our own natures, and about the world around us, that we have forgotten and shunned to the margins is still there, waiting for us. 

It can also mean to be hunted, which felt right to leave at the end. To be hunted, you must be followed. I like how this word, like the poem’s shadow, lands at the end. I hope it might feel a little like the raven itself following the reader off the page and into the rest of their life. 

“Famine Body” is such a powerful poem, full of images that stay with you after reading it. I would love to learn what your creative process was like when developing this poem. What was the first image, line or feeling that started the process? Did you write it in a single burst or over time, returning to refine it? 

In a way, I feel like the experiences of my great-grandparents seeded this poem in me. I am only reckoning with their pursuit of survival in the language of my own body. That is to say, how my own practice of starvation as an eating disorder survivor, and the impact it has had on my relationship to hunger, has translated into my capacity for love, desire, and survival.

I was thinking about how the traumatic legacy of colonialism tears holes through generations of bodies. How we are connected through time in the same way we are connected through space - through the body. Bodies growing within other bodies. Bodies reaching for other bodies. Bodies consuming other bodies. Bodies starving for other bodies. 

And all this in pursuit of connection and return. 

In that way, I feel like this poem was fed to me all in one go and over the course of my whole life. 

I love the final line, “we have always been most hungry / for each other.” I’m curious how you think about that hunger, does it feel more connected to love, intimacy, survival or something else entirely? How do you imagine readers holding it when they reach the end? 

I think about hunger as a kind of remembering. Remembering like re-membering, as in putting ourselves back together. Hunger is our body’s memory of each other, of our connection to the earth itself and to everything that exists outside our skin. Food is the result of the relationship between the earth and the sun, the edible offspring of that connection which builds our bodies. We are quite literally made of other bodies. Eating is how we reconnect to that reality. 

To me, hunger is the furious urge to remember who and what we really are. The insatiable need to return to each other, over and over again. I think that’s love too. Love, hunger; what’s the difference? They are both a form of devouring, consuming, returning. 

Hunger is also how we fight for each other when our own bodies are the last piece of sovereign land we have left on which to make a stand. I grew up hearing stories about how my great-grandfather went on hunger strike and was force-fed while interned in British prisons. Over a century later, watching the hunger strikers for Palestine, it is clear to me how their choice to starve is a choice to love. It is not only an act of solidarity; it is an act of revolution against the systems that seek to unmake our collective humanity. That is love in its most tangible form. We don’t understand it with our minds; we understand it with our bodies. 

On re-reading this poem, generations removed from An Gorta Mór, I can’t help but see it through new eyes, eyes that have seen another people, our Palestinian kin in Gaza, whose stories are so intertwined with our own, being forcibly starved in real-time by another settler colonial state. It makes me think of the generational shockwaves this kind of violence has on bodies, so powerful that they ricochet across time, spanning centuries with the force of their grief and pain. 

The undoing of self it causes, the undoing of connection to the land and the reinforcing of it in the broken places, where relationships and community reside. The severing from the rest of the world it creates and what that does to the humanity we are capable of offering ourselves and each other in the midst of our surviving. 

And yet, even with bodies interwoven with all this violence, we remain social beings. I wanted to explore how our survival often prioritises relationship, even over our most basic individual needs.

If a reader remembers one thing about your poetry, what would you hope it is? 

I hope that it might leave the reader feeling a little more themselves. And by that I mean, a little more uncomfortable and a little less certain. 

I think it is in that space of the unknown inside ourselves, that we all know is there but we often fear to touch, that we can find a sense of home, of return. But it requires a forgetting of what we consider to be “normal” and, in doing so, a remembering of our own aliveness… which is usually messy, hungry, more than a little unsettling, and a complete mystery even to ourselves. 

What’s next for you in your writing or creative life? Do you have any upcoming projects or publications we should keep an eye out for?

I am always writing. Mostly just as a mode of survival and as a function of who I am. It’s never really been a conscious choice or a plan. I don’t really have plans; my mind and body don’t seem to work that way. All I can say is that I’ll keep writing, like I'll keep going for walks on the beach and making cups of tea. Whatever happens after that, if anything at all, will be as much a surprise to me as to anyone else.