Why the Moon Travels

Skein Press may be small, but they have published two of the most interesting books of recent years in Ireland, in each case introducing voices which have been silent (or even silenced) so far. This Hostel Life by Melatu Uche Okorie was one of my books of 2018, and we brought it into our school Transition Year English course, reading and discussing it last year for the first time (we revisit it next January). Its stories came mainly from a startlingly new angle for Irish literature, the Direct Provision system.

Their latest book, Why the Moon Travels by Oein DeBhairduin (with evocative black and white illustrations by Leanne McDonagh) also amplifies marginalised voices, but in this case from a very different source. This time the stories are from a community which has a long deep history in Ireland, rather than a recent one, but it's one which most of Irish society is largely ignorant about. I certainly am.

The stories in this collection come from the Irish Traveller community, the Mincéirí, the Pavee, an lucht siúil - different but equally valued names for the community recognise as Ireland's indigenous nomadic people and an ethnic minority.

Oein DeBhairduin has shaped the individual stories beautifully. Most are four or five pages long, and they constantly surprise. Folklore by its nature can be necessarily predictable, but here are fresh angles: the origins of spiders in old women who travelled the land weaving constantly, the story of how badgers came to be striped (I read my young daughter these, and she loved them). DeBhairduin's writing can be lyrical, but he never tips into sentimentality: there are harsh moments here, as well as consoling ones.

If I had to pick out one tone which colours the collection, it would be 'tenderness'. DeBhairduin is tender and very careful with the heritage he is putting into print. The stories don't have definitive versions, and as DeBhairduin writes in the Introduction, 'Like all traditional tales they are meant to grow and change with the visions of the teller.'  He has consulted with family and friends 'to ensure that they were rooted in authentic exchanges and sharing.'  I think of Emily Dickinson's lines

To see the Summer Sky / Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— / True Poems flee—

Putting the stories down on the page in this book is a thrilling act of enlightenment, but they will still continue to develop beyond the book. True oral stories can't be pinned down like a butterfly in a show cabinet. As DeBhairduin writes in his words on the final story, 'The Dance of Smoke and Midges' (like several others, a tale of metamorphosis),

Each time I have heard this story, the teller has brought and lost elements. It has stretched and shrunk more times than the tides on the sandy beaches of memory. From an early age, I knew that stories were told with the understanding that they would be retold. 

Later he writes that

For many Travellers, the gift of a story comes with the responsibility to retell it, for untold stories pass into the forgotten.

Above all, tenderness is evident in the constant presence of the natural world, especially in plants: 

Remembering the qualities of every plant not only connects us with our past but honours the sacrifices of many; we only know a plant to be poisonous because someone has suffered to give us that knowledge.

There are many more pleasures in these pages: strange and memorable words from 'Gammon' (subleen = boy, kheiran = a small piece of turf), the author's personal reflections on the stories, especially as he recalls his childhood, the understated loveliness of the book just as an object.  And for those of us who are English teachers, here is a new trove for reading to our pupils.