By Anna Hickey-Moody
When I was eight years old I accidentally found a vibrator in St Anne’s park, Dublin while visiting the rose garden with my grandmother, Ma. The poor woman nearly had a heart attack as I emerged from some rose bushes clutching the potentially evil object and asking difficult questions about what was that I had found. Raised in a religion and society that both prohibited masturbation and viewed women’s sexual pleasure as a dangerous thing that needed to be managed (if not institutionalised), Ma could not find the words to explain the situation in which I found myself. “Throw that away! It’s a dirty, dirty thing”. She warned me, but was not able to offer much more explanation. It would be 20 years before I could understand the originating purpose of this white oblong shape with smooth, round ends, attached to a little battery packet by a plastic coated wire. I’m sure Ma would not want me to remember this part of an otherwise very lovely day in the local park named after the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary herself. The rose garden had surely been conceived and designed for purposes other than providing an enjoyable space for masturbation.
I do, however, count myself lucky that I can talk about feeling sexy as a woman’s choice, that I can own as many vibrators as I like, and probably also lucky that Ma is not here to see that happen. She died in Dublin, aged 60, while the aeroplane carrying my father to see her was in a holding pattern. The plane he had taken from Australia in, to say goodbye to her, was diverted from London due to thick fog, left to circle the skies in Manchester, unable to land. I came home from school and Dad had rung from the airport to say he had missed his chance to say goodbye. The emotional geographies of diasporic lives are complex, and are often comprised of differing perspectives on religion, gender and sex as well as a lot of love and longing stretched out in trans-continental imaginaries. Faith Stories explores entanglements of family, faith, identity and belonging from an autobiographical perspective and draws on interviews, focus groups and ethnographic observations with over 500 participants in the United Kingdom and Australia.
The book draws on my own experiences of growing up with languages and value systems from two places: Ireland and Australia. My research participants also inhabit multiple worlds, and the book is made up of resonances between vastly different people’s experiences and their many different worlds. These shared voices, which have come together and been torn apart across countries, places, religions, cultures, have also become part of me as I have been immersed in them.
When writing the book, I was consistently reminded of the fact that I am attached to structures of feeling that are associated with Irish Catholicism in ways that are complex, largely involuntary and marked by conflict. I was born in 1977 to a politically left-wing father from the north of Dublin, of Catholic upbringing, and a mother from London who was raised in the Church of England. My mother was not religious when she married my father, who, in his younger years, fancied himself quite a rebel and devoted his life to performing political protest songs. My parents spent their honeymoon in an Irish Republican Army (IRA) safe house in Derry after marrying in Cambridge, where they lived for the first years of their marriage. They moved to Australia in 1974 and later my mother converted to Catholicism – and, to my father’s fury, I was raised a Catholic. These constellations are just the very beginning of a complex emotional attachment I experience to religious icons; an attachment that has oriented my research methods.
This first encounter with the Virgin Mary occurred at the same age as my first encounter with a vibrator, but unlike the mysterious occurrence in St Anne’s park, my visit to St Gabriel’s’ church was completely intelligible and not at all ‘dirty’, or secret. This experience needs to be understood in the context of wanting to recuperate my father’s social and emotional displacement, which has affectively shaped my life. My father’s displacement was informed by his rageful disavowal of the religion in which he was raised. This disavowal seemed symbolic of trying too hard to move away from Ireland. Or had the Church committed injustices against him, about which I will never know? Such questions will never be answered, but I suspect not, as on his deathbed my father asked for his last rites and to be taken back into the Church.
In Six Days to Shake an Empire (1966) Charles Duff sketches the psyche of the distressed Irishman by saying that there is a particular kind of dark, angry man who is also ferociously divorced from his religion, and that turn of phrase rings true to me when thinking of my father. Regardless, there I was, an eight-year-old girl in my best dress, staring at a plaster of Paris statue in a church and thinking that perhaps it was actually quite magical to be a girl. If I wore a blue-and-white dress with a veil, perhaps people would also light candles at my feet one day and make statues that looked like me? Indeed, as trips to the family farm in Charleville (County Cork) taught me, women wearing the white dress and blue veil are displayed with candles even in totally destitute surroundings, next to sickbeds, in dark corners of shabby rooms, and in unruly, cold gardens. In fact, most places that might need brightening are brought to life by a plaster of Paris woman, a set of tea lights, and some rosary beads.
Faith stories: Sustaining meaning and community in troubling times by Anna Hickey-Moody publishes April 2023, find out more here.
This book will be available Open Access via the manchesteropenhive here.