Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places in Troubled Landscapes, from self-medication to naming the shapeshifters

Sometimes I am reminded of my own naivety… by a good travel and … reinforced by a good book written by people from the land I visited.

When people ask me why I am interested in the folklore of other countries, especially at the edges of Europe, or at the edges of the North and Baltic Sea, where the Roman Empire never came, or where Christianisation came late, like Lithuania and Ireland, I answer that I come from Flemish landscapes, which once belonged to Celtic and even elder ancestors, but are so wounded and under so many layers of memories of patriarchal empires that it is difficult to know where to dig and search for traces of stories that show we can have different relationships with the land and our ecological self. By going to such places where I feel there are more traces, I can find hints of where to dig and look in Flanders.

However, this summer, first in Latvia, with its post-Soviet memories in the landscape, and then Ireland, where I visited less touristy neighbourhoods, facilitated and joined deep talks about memories and lived experiences, some linked with the Troubles and British colonisation, I was reminded that these countries are also troubled landscapes, damaged, wounded…

Even more, apparently, I seem to know more about folklore than the people in Ireland, and I can see so many similarities rooted in great ruptures of relationality with the land and its folklore, often expressed (as mushrooms express things deep in the ground, in certain seasons, triggered by signals) through, for instance, violence and addictions that numb the wounds.

I got reminded (again) that I cannot romanticise Ireland too much.

Book places

This week, I visited a few bookshops. In this cosy town in the south, called Kinsdale, I visited the cosy book shop Bookstór. Also, close to the summer accommodation in Trinity College Dublin, I visited another bookshop, Hodges Figgis, where I got some more books. I noticed that there are whole sections dedicated to Irish writers. I do not recall any Belgian bookshop which has a whole section celebrating Belgian authors. It made me a bit sad.

Anyway, this blogpost is about a book, by an Irish writer, called Thin Places, by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, which has been on my TBR list for years. It, too, is about addiction, but also about thin places.

Thin places

One journalist from the Guardian introduced this book well:

“The “thin places” that give this book its title exist in Irish mythology as thresholds or portals to the other side; sites where the veil between this world and the next is most porous. Known to locals through oral stories passed down the generations, they are vestiges of an older, stranger Ireland, their resonance still palpable, Kerri ní Dochartaigh suggests, to those attuned to their otherness. “They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves,” she writes, “as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.”

The journey begins in the windswept northerly reaches of Donegal, where she names the small wild things she sees around her in Irish – leamhan (moth); dreoilín (wren); crotach (curlew). That very act is, as it turns out, a way of grounding herself in history and place, of asserting her sense of belonging to an older culture, not just pre-colonial, but pre-Christian.” (source: Sean O’Hagan, in The Guardian, 2021)

It is interesting that Kerri writes about “places that make us feel something larger than ourselves,” because when we are walking alongside addiction, in one of the known programmes of addiction recovery, like the Twelve Step programme, it is also about acknowledging there is something larger than ourselves, and not about institutional religion. It could also be about understanding there is something like the Force, or supernatural places and forces, that remind you we are all part of a bigger web of life, an ecology of caring , but, unfortunately, also of uncaring, and that is where the violence and addiction seep in and affect the whole web.

It might look like it is the individual who is the victim (or the vampire, or the parasite, or the villain, as I heard or read some people describing addicted people, e.g. in Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the River), but, as with the mushroom metaphor, it expresses what is going on in the deeper underground web.

Self-medication

Kerri lives close to Derry, which I know because of Derry Girls. Brexit brought the risk of a hard border back, the ris of that imaginary border between the UK (Northern Ireland) and Ireland becoming back a fenced border, polarizing again as it used to do during the Troubles.

After traumatic events in her childhood, she has lived in various places, and there is something in her writing about escapism and numbing that feels familiar.

In my teens, and especially my twenties, I have also been drinking (too) much to numb, to forget the pain, the shame about my weirdness, my body, my issues. I was lucky that it did not become an addiction to alcohol, but it could have become an addiction. The threshold to enter and (re)create broken wounded troubled places and bodies is nearer than most people often realise.

Addiction as self-medication also appears in both De witte droom (The white dream) and Tussenland (Between land), where characters carry addictions of their own.

In my almost available English book Writing(with)plants, there is a subchapter on this too, plants, control, but bigger systems at work, no victims, no villains, a move away from that polarity. The Ecofeminist Society, which I am co-building now, breaks with the polar and the binary in the same way; in the Writing(with)plants book I also refer to a triangle that fellow ecofeminist Patrycja Pichnicka-Trivedi uses to look at vampire stories and other gothic tales… and that we should actually depart from.

Alcohol addiction runs through it. Not really surprisingly, addiction was a theme also discussed during my last visit to Ireland. During diverse occasions in Ireland, we talked about addiction as a symptom of deeper wounds. In Kerri’s case, and probably that of many Irish people, the self-medication numbs the deep wounds of the Troubles in her and the landscapes, her (ecological) self, which might root in the big Famine and the other terrible effects of the British colonization.

Water bodies

• “A body of water knows no definite form, no true boundaries, no borders. She is held delicately in the in-between place, carrying us in her strong flow to spaces unknown, unmapped territories.” (Kerri, p. 77)

• “Those of us who grow up with a river, who spend our days – either consciously or subconsciously – mapping the course of its ethereal and surreal liquid element, lulled by its lapping, maddened by its meandering, we are shape-shifters. We are reflected and refracted.” (Kerri, p. 105)

Kerri seems to always connect with the local waters, with the Foyle in Derry, with a canal in Dublin, with the Lee in Cork… and she understands how water is like a mirror for the healing boundedness that she is describing.

It was also in Ireland, during my last visit, back in January 2022, that I started to learn more about hydrofeminism, in connection with folklore and ecomythology (see Myth-ecology, technology and hydrofeminism in Ireland: Púca in The Machine). The Irish folklore is full of shape-shifters, especially in waters, like the Puca.

This fourth visit happened now in the the summer of big droughts, everything is bone-dry, leading to fires, even in wet Ireland (not far from where some of my friends live), or recently in the peatlands and wetlands of Belgium. Other expressions of what is happening underground: the soil needs to be taken care of, and not with blood and alcohol, but with milk, honey, and a lot of water.

Rivers are also goddesses in Irish mythology, like the Boyne, whom I visited last time. We need to call back the goddesses and the priestesses, guardians of wells and water, and honour them, honour the caretakers of the land and communities. They are our medicine, and at the same time our symptoms, our indicators, our alarm clocks, our sensors.

Silence

This work returned often in conversations in and about Ireland this summer. In the context of the Magdalena Laundries. In the context of addiction. Silence is the sibling of Shame. And I was not surprised how often Kerri mentioned silence in her story.

• “Silence, like the moon, is a white circle moving through the seasons, shape-shifting its way across the phases of its own darkness.” (Kerri, p. 135)

Grief

• “How grief is not linear: how it is not even circular. How it grows and mutates, shape-shifts and hides.” (Kerri, p. 151)

Kerri makes also time to mention ecological grief a couple of times, especially more towards the end. In the end, it is all connected, the grief for the loss of humanness, the loss of ecological stories, the landscapes…

The book itself, or many parts of it, read as a lament. Reading laments is not easy. There can be shimmers and glimmers of hope, but there is also a lot of darkness. It is a book that I needed almost a whole month for to process, not only because of the beautiful paragraphs and sentences, and all the wisdom in it, but also because of the emotional rawness and the grief that is flooding out of the pages.

Back to the thin places

The thin places are like the ecotones, always changing in space and time. Perhaps, at the beginning of reading the book, I had expected to have – at the end of reading this book- a list of places in Ireland where I could experience the mystery, the wonder, the magical, the enchanting, the thinness… but it became clear that these moments of (re)enchantment) arrive at the combination of various uncontrollable factors, that we, as e.g. forest bath guides, try to recreate in our short guided experiences.

Interestingly, the seasonality was a recurring theme. Kerri reminded us to e.g. summer solstice being connected with Aine, the goddess of the sun and the land, or to St Brigid’s lore. And this seasonality, also a theme in our ecotone symposium in Latvia last month, seems to be a key to unlock some higher likelihood of experiencing thin places. Living with seasons bring structures, which I think -in my limited knowledge- helps especially people who feel lost in addiction and other symptoms of deeper wounds.

Shape-shifters, genre-shifters

The book shifts genre, moving between Troubles memoir and nature writing, and I think that is perhaps how more books should be written: as a self-healing act, writing as self-medication, an immersion in folklore and a search for thin places. In this period of fake autumns, which are symptoms of bone-dry summers and too many endings of what should not end and thrivings of what should die, I started to promote our next online symposium, on eco+thanatology, and I feel this book would belong there.

Do you know other books in the same (shape-shifting) spirit?