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Never understood the weird vitriol against Peig. It’s a self-perpetuating myth, a caricature mindlessly regurgitated in many instances by people who never studied her and know feck all about her life really. She is an easy image to evoke: she is literally the Shan Van Vocht 1/5 https://twitter.com/ansiopaleabhar/status/1314665454540066817
I remember people complaining about Jane Austen and Shakespeare in school. And other authors. But somehow that never became a “trauma” that caused them to question their study of English. Why does the “mythical Peig” play this role in the discourse on Irish? 2/5
I think its because Peig is a symbol of another time and another age, an uncomfortable reminder of our past, of a culture that was different to the one which dominates now. We don’t like to/know how to talk about this rationally. 3/5
The mythical Peig also seems to be a shorthand for prejudices about rural poverty, & some deeply internalised narratives connecting the Irish language with that poverty. Narratives which often fail to take the colonial context of 19th & early 20th Cent. Ireland into account. 4/5
But do those of us who talk about her know who she was, really? Have we read her words, engaged with the “real Peig?”. I haven’t, but I think its time I did. Anyone out there got a nice copy? 5/5
