Earth Care and Recovery in Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places (2021)

Abstract

Thin Places (2021) is a piece of work which defies categorization. It is partly a memoir filled with traumatic personal events, partly a reflection on loss in all its manifest forms (physical, familial, linguistic, environmental), and partly an uplifting plea for allowing the exploration of our natural surroundings to function as a meaningful form of care. Kerri ní Dochartaigh uses the materiality of the sentient beings that surround us, and deep care for our ecosystem, as a means of recovery. Earth care as self-care. Ní Dochartaigh is concerned with both the materiality and the immateriality of objects of care and manages to incorporate both through her interest in “the liminal space between things”, to borrow the title of an article by Timothy Morton (2014). The narrator foregrounds her mental health difficulties brought on by a violent and traumatic childhood in Northern Ireland yet also places the focus on the ways in which Ireland’s natural habitat, its material reality and its immaterial Celtic portals, “hold us” (2022: 228) in unsuspected care relationships. In the process, “[a]rt happens […] in the liminal space(s) between things, in conversations between metal and sky, humans and metal, era and era, heaven and earth” (Morton 2014: 270-1). A poignant process of recovery is recounted, highlighting firstly the refusal of care before slowly moving towards co-constituted acts of care: as ní Dochartaigh gradually recovers her lost mother tongue, and pays attention to the beauty of her natural surroundings, as she begins to care for both, she also starts to feel cared for. The sensory experience of loss, gain, and care in Thin Places is predicated upon several ecologies and resonates strongly with Joan Tronto’s definition of care as ultimately “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves (sic.), and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (1993: 103; original emphasis). Kerri ní Dochartaigh celebrates, in the most understated manner, the full complexity of this “life-sustaining web” and this article proposes to unpack all of the above elements to show how her very singular aesthetics places the emphasis on the coloniality of loss and the restorative power of stories.