Republican News · Thursday 27 February 2002

Examining the language of power

Former political prisoner Marian Coyle is pictured making a presentation to Ella O'Dwyer at the book launch last week

Ella O'Dwyer's astonishing book, "The Rising of the Moon", is all about the language of power, and its origins are in the 14 years that Ella herself spent as a political prisoner in England. At the launch, Seamus Deane attemted to sum up the scope of the work - "It is a book about the language of slavery, victimhood, silence engineered by coercion, the language of emancipation, the language to get out of the cage, which Ella knows all about, that language which is abducted by people in power, dedicated to the very overthrow of those who seek freedom."

Belfast republican Brian Keenan launched the book. "She told me she was writing a romantic novel," he quipped. "It wasn't. But the more I got into it, I saw the import and power of what she was saying. The complexities and flexibility of her intellect made me ponder what I'm about, what republicanism is about."

"They who couldn't penetrate the mind, tried to rape the body," he said, referring to the strip searching Ella endured in Brixton. It is a book which I think should be recommended reading to all republican revolutionaries."

With great ease, informality and warmth, Ella told how the book came to be written. She paid tribute to the many people who had helped push the project forward, from studying English at UCD with Terry Eagleton and Declan Kiberd, to the first days of jail, where after six years herself and Martina Anderson won the battle to have education.

She spoke of how how pleased she was for Brian - "who had the intellect to grasp the book, the spirit to understand, the heart to know the love that is in the book" - to launch the book.

Seamus Deane bridged the literary and political worlds with ease and acumen at the launch. "The Empire has the power to recruit any language of emancipation and use it for its own purpose," he said. "Joyce and Beckett have helped us to see what release might be. We're still looking for it. We still use the language of victimhood, imagining we are thereby free. What Ella has shown us, in this strange and powerful book, is that power of language is the language of power, and how it is controlled.

"Casement, Bobby Sands, Conrad, Joyce, belong to a single culture, a terrifying culture, that once was British and is now American, a culture that brooks no enmity, no real subversion, which always adapts the language of subversion for the sake of reinforcing itself.

"How quickly that language of the revolutions of the '60s, events in the North, how quickly that language was adopted by governments in order to reinforce its position and to crush what that language was seeking."

Seamus Deane referred to Kafka's short story called, in translation, the lepers. A group of priests, in charge of the temple, had perfected and sustained traditional ritual over hundreds of years in the temple they were charged with. Lepers broke in. Repeatedly, the priests strengthened security, and repeatedly the lepers broke in and destroyed the temple. Finally, the priests decided to include the lepers in the ritual.

Ella has shown how that happens.