Peig Sayers | |
|---|---|
 Sayers,c. 1945 | |
| Born | (1873-03-29)29 March 1873 Dún Chaoin, County Kerry,Ireland |
| Died | 8 December 1958(1958-12-08) (aged 85) Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland |
| Occupation | Storyteller, housewife |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Notable works | Peig |
| Spouse | Pádraig Ó Guithín |
Máiréad "Peig" Sayers (/ˌpɛɡˈseɪərz/; 29 March 1873 – 8 December 1958) was an Irish author andseanchaí (pronounced[ˈʃan̪ˠəxiː]or[ʃan̪ˠəˈxiː]) born inDún Chaoin, County Kerry, Ireland.[1]Seán Ó Súilleabháin, the former Chief archivist for theIrish Folklore Commission, described her as "one of the greatest woman storytellers of recent times".[2]
She was born Máiréad Sayers in the townland of Vicarstown,Dunquin,Corca Dhuibhne, County Kerry, the youngest child of the family.[3] She was called Peig after her mother, Margaret "Peig" Brosnan, fromCastleisland. Her father Tomás Sayers was a locally renowned expert on theoral tradition and passed on many of his tales to Peig.
Through her father's influence, Peig also grew up upon a richoral tradition ofIrish folklore,mythology, and local history, including localfolk heroes likePiaras Feiritéar, faction fights at pattern days and market fairs before theGreat Famine, and the lingering memory ofMass rocks andpriest hunters under thePenal Laws. The custom ofbothántaíocht (people visiting neighbours at night to swap news and stories) was strong and Peig’s brother Sean used to bring her along, and Peig heard and remembered a large number of stories about the past.[4] Peig was very sociable and enjoyed the company of older people as well as girls her own age.[4]
At the age of 12, she was taken out of theNational school and went to work as a domestic servant for the Curran family in the nearby town ofDingle.[5] The Currans were members of the growingIrish Catholic middle class produced by the Government-fundedbreakup and sale of theAnglo-Irish landlords' estates after theLand War. Peig later recalled that the Curran family were kind employers and treated her very well. The Curran children, however, were forbidden by their parents, who desired for them to move up in the world, to learn theIrish language and so, at the children's request, Peig taught the localvernacular to them in secret.
After she grew to adulthood, Peig was promised during the "American wake" of her childhood best friend, Cáit Boland, that Peig would soon join her as part of theIrish diaspora in the United States. Cáit later wrote, however, that she had had an accident and could not forward the cost of Peig's passage.
Instead, Peig moved to theGreat Blasket Island after her brother arranged for her to marry Pádraig Ó Guithín,[3] a fisherman and native of the island, nine years her senior,[4] on 13 February 1892.[6] Pádraig and Peig had eleven children, of whom only six survived their mother.[5] Three died in infancy, and an eight year old girl, Siobhán, died from measles.
Norwegianlinguist andCelticistCarl Marstrander stayed on the island while studying the Corca Dhuibhne dialect ofMunster Irish in 1907 and later persuadedRobin Flower of theBritish Museum to similarly visit the Blaskets. In turn this led the great English CelticistsKenneth H. Jackson to visit during the summers of 1932-37, and Peig's storytelling influenced his ideas about oral tradition considerably. Flower and Jackson were keenly appreciative of Peig Sayers' storytelling skills. They recorded her and brought her stories to the attention of the academic world.[7][8]
After theEaster Rising of 1916, Peig hung up a framed picture of the 16 executedIrish Volunteers andIrish Citizen Army leaders in the family's cottage in Great Blasket island. During a search of the island by theBlack and Tans during the subsequentIrish War of Independence, a terrified Pádraig Ó Guithín ordered his wife to take the picture down before she got them all killed. Even though Peig indignantly refused, the search party did not harm anyone in their family.[9]
Pádraig Ó Guithín died in April 1923.[4] The remaining children, like many islanders, emigrated to America.[4] Last to leave was Mícheál, called 'an File’ (The Poet), who sailed in 1929. From then on Peig lived only with her elderly, partially blind brother-in-law, Mícheál.[4]
During the 1930s a Dublin teacher,Máire Ní Chinnéide, who was also a regular visitor to the Blaskets, urged Peig to tell her life story to her son Mícheál. Peig wasilliterate in the Irish language, having received her early schooling only through the medium of English. She dictated her biography to Mícheál, who then sent the manuscript pages to Máire Ní Chinnéide in Dublin. Ní Chinnéide then edited the manuscript for its publication in 1936.
Over several years from 1938 Peig dictated 350 ancient legends,ghost stories,folktales, and religious stories to Seosamh Ó Dálaigh of theIrish Folklore Commission[2] (while another source tallies 432 items collected by Ó Dálaigh from her, some 5,000 pages of material).[10] Peig had a vast repertoire of tales, ranging from theFenian Cycle ofIrish mythology to romantic and supernatural stories.[11]
Final Years
She continued to live on the island until 1942, when she returned to her native place, Dunquin, to live with her son, Mícheál, because there was nobody to look after her in her old age on the island.[12][13]
Peig lost her eyesight in the late 1940s. She travelled to Dublin for the first time in 1952 at the age of 81 years, having required hospital treatment there.[13]
She later moved to a hospital inDingle, County Kerry where she died on 8 December 1958 at the age of 85 years.[14] She is buried in the Dún Chaoin Burial Ground,Corca Dhuibhne, Ireland. All her surviving children except Mícheál emigrated to the United States to live with their descendants inSpringfield, Massachusetts.[15]
 | This sectionneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.(March 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Sayers is most famous for her autobiographyPeig and for the folklore and stories which were recorded inMachnamh Seanmhná (An Old Woman's Reflections. The books were not written down by Peig, but were dictated to others.[14]
Sayers' memoirPeig describes her childhood immersed in traditionalMunster Irish-speaking culture, which was still surviving despiterackrentingAnglo-Irish landlords, the resulting extreme poverty, and the coerciveAnglicisation of the educational system. Another theme was devoutCatholicism and mass emigration to theNew World following a ceremonialceilidh called an "American wake".
Even though Peig Sayers' memoir at first received high praise, Máire Ní Chinnéide has since received very harsh criticism and accusations ofcensorship. Máire Ní Chinnéide did so, however, to make Peig's life story conform to the idealised vision of the Irish peasantry favoured by the rulingFianna Fáil political party, which owed more to 19th centuryRomantic nationalism than to the reality of daily life or the culture of theGaeltachtaí.
One matter of speculation is whether there was delicate material that a female informant such as she would have refrained from recounting to a male collector (Irish Folklore Commission's policy being to hire only male collectors), though there was evidently close rapport established between the two individuals, which perhaps overrode such hypothetical barriers.[16] She was also among the informants not comfortable with being recorded mechanically on theEdiphone, so the material had to be taken down on pen and paper.[17]
In the 1966University of Chicago volumeFolktales of Ireland, three uncensored folktales collected from Peig Sayers, as translated bySeán Ó Súilleabháin, appeared in English for the first time.[18]
Peig is among the most famous expressions of a lateGaelic Revival genre of personal histories by and about inhabitants of the Blasket Islands and other remote Gaeltacht locations.Tomás Ó Criomhthain's similarly censored memoiran tOileánach ("the Islandman", 1929) andMuiris Ó Súilleabháin'sFiche Bliain ag Fás, andRobert J. Flaherty's documentary filmMan of Aran address similar subjects.
The often bleak tone of the book is established from its opening words:
"I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge. I have experienced much ease and much hardship from the day I was born until this very day. Had I known in advance half, or even one-third, of what the future had in store for me, my heart wouldn't have been as gay or as courageous as it was in the beginning of my days."
Ironically, the standard cliches of Peig's memoirs and those censored similarly to hers swiftly found themselves the object of contempt and mockery – especially among the cosmopolitan middle classintelligentsia and the often covertly literaryIrish civil service – for their often extremely depressing accounts of rural poverty, starvation, family tragedies, and bereavements. InModern literature in Irish, mockery of the Gaeltacht memoir genre reached its peak withFlann O'Brien's parody ofAn tOileánach: the novelAn Béal Bocht ("The Poor Mouth").
Despite this fact, Peig's book was widely used as a text for teaching and examining Irish in many secondary schools. As a book with arguably sombre and depressing themes and its latter half cataloguing a string of heartbreaking family tragedies, its presence on the Irish syllabus has often been harshly criticised.
It led, for example, to the following comment fromProgressive Democrat SeanadóirJohn Minihan in theSeanad Éireann in 2006 when discussing improvements to the curriculum:
"No matter what our personal view of the book might be, there is a sense that one has only to mention the name Peig Sayers to a certain age group and one will see a dramatic rolling of the eyes, or worse."
— Seanad Éireann – Volume 183 – 5 April 2006[19]
According to Blasket Islands literary scholar Cole Moreton, however, this was not Peig's fault, but that of her censors: "Some of her stories were very funny, some savage, some wise, some earthy; but very few made it into the pages of her autobiography. The words were dictated to her son, then edited by the wife of a Dublin school inspector, and both collaborators sanitized the text a little in turn so that it was homely and pious, a book fit to be taken up as a set text in Irish schools. The image of Peig's broad face smiling out from beneath a headscarf, hands clasped in her lap, became familiar to generations of schoolchildren who were bored rigid by this holy peasant woman who had been forced upon them. They grew up loathing Peig... without hearing the stories as they were intended."[11]
Peig was eventually replaced byMaidhc Dainín Ó Sé'sA Thig Ná Tit Orm during the mid-1990s.
Brown Bag Films made aPeig animated series forRTÉ in 1994.
The stage play,Peig: The Musical! [ga] (co-written byJulian Gough, Gary MacSweeney and theFlying Pig Comedy Troupe) is a humorous adaptation of Peig's autobiography which culminates in her moving to New York and becoming a star onBroadway. It ran at theTown Hall Theatre, Galway for four sold out performances in 1996.[20] Gough described it as "an act of the most exquisite revenge...and of great therapeutic value to a generation traumatised by her infernal book as children".[21][22]
InPaddywhackery, a television show from 2007 on theIrish language on television channelTG4,Fionnula Flanagan plays the ghost of Peig Sayers, sent to Dublin to restore faith in the Irishlanguage revival.[23]
In 2021,TG4 broadcast a series presented bySinéad Ní Uallacháin which attempted to change people's perceptions of Sayers.[24][25]
