Life Writing as Cultural Narrative: Rosaleen McDonagh’s Unsettled
Rosaleen McDonagh's Unsettled is a revelation in many ways. When in late 2018 1 sent to the publisher the final manuscript of my book on life writing by disabled people in Ireland, I regretfully acknowledged in its preface that, despite years of searching through libraries, book shops, magazine...
Saved in:
| Published in: | Irish university review 2022-11, Vol.52 (2), p.189-192 |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | Rosaleen McDonagh's Unsettled is a revelation in many ways. When in late 2018 1 sent to the publisher the final manuscript of my book on life writing by disabled people in Ireland, I regretfully acknowledged in its preface that, despite years of searching through libraries, book shops, magazines, and web sites, I was unable to uncover memoirs by disabled Irish people who were openly neurodiverse or LGBTQ+, nor could I locate any work by Irish disabled people of colour or Irish Travellers. I wouldn't need to write such a sentence now in 2022, and if Unsettled offered no more than a fresh perspective to the conversation about disability, that would be a great gift. But Rosaleen McDonagh has done so much more. The bildungsroman tradition in Ireland and elsewhere has generally traced the lives of its protagonists hom the country to the city, from deprivation to professional success, from the narrow confines of early life through hardship to bright possibility; the autobiography in English, modelled so frequently on the motif of the Exodus, has followed the same trajectory. But Unsettled does none of this. Written from the viewpoint of a woman who has achieved substantial educational, artistic, and professional goals, the book repudiates nothing in regard to her early years with her family, their way of life, or the values of the Traveller community more generally. She concedes that her path would have been unlikely had she not been considered unmarriageable due to her disability and if cultural customs had not rendered unthinkable the prospect of living with her parents into adulthood. Education offered options when others were unavailable. But she presents her unusual trajectory not as superior to that which would have awaited her had she not been born with cerebral palsy, but simply as different, and with differences that nevertheless incorporate ways of life and ways of looking at the world that have been part of Traveller culture for centuries. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 0021-1427 2047-2153 |