Borders Visible and Not: Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places

Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s genre defying book explores our attachments to place in beautiful, poetic detail according to Chris Bateman

There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in

Leonard Cohen

How do we define place? Is it a physical notion, defined by trees, grass, buildings or water perhaps? Or should it be viewed as an emotional concept: home, a memory, where we have loved or were frightened? Or should place be purely geographic: a dropped pin on an online map, an old name for a river in a language that someone doesn’t think you should speak anymore, a border you cannot see?

In Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places, a genre defying book which meets at a crossroads (yet another place) between autobiography, nature writing, history and memory, the question of place and our attachments to it is explored in beautiful, poetic detail. Ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry at the very peak of the Troubles and in a lot of ways, the book is about how she has managed to endure and survive the trauma of her life there, the mental scarring that has happened to her from childhood and throughout her life. To read of the horrifying events of her early years: petrol bombs being thrown through her childhood bedroom window, being forced out of communities for not being the ‘right’ religion and the brutal murder of a teenage friend, the author has survived more horror and atrocity in those precious, early years of her life than most would expect to be inflicted on them in many lifetimes.

Stephen King wrote about how being a writer was partly about being able to point to your scars and tell the story of every single one. In Thin Places, ní Dochartaigh doesn’t just have a story to tell but she has a voice too – an enchanted, poetic and powerful voice which tells us her story, taking us all the way into the depths of her soul and to those very thin places, the liminal spaces between worlds where the veil is pushed back just enough to see beyond.

Being about place and especially about the North of Ireland, Brexit looms large throughout the book. In all the millions of words written about Brexit, there is not enough room given to the personal, to the real impact that the decision has made to people’s lives, especially around that land border between Europe and the UK. Not in an economic sense – that is well documented – but in the real sense of loss, the feeling we are being torn away from something. This is felt hardest in these border lands, where those ‘invisible lines’ that separate Northern Ireland from the Republic are suddenly threatening to manifest themselves in their dire, militarised forms once more as the spectre of a hard border looms again. Ní Dochartaigh, like many, despairs of this, beyond frustrated that all the progress, all the “change… so many of us hoped for” was now at risk of being “lost, along with so many other precious things”. Borders, visible and not, matter here more than anywhere else under London or Dublin’s (or Brussels’ for that matter) bailiwick and, as the writer laments, “we are not ready for this” that’s “enough, already enough.”

One of Thin Places’ great strengths is in the power of its descriptions of nature and how personalised they become. Virgina Woolf’s line that “there is no denying the wild horse in us” always meant something to me about natures, both that of the individual and of the world itself. Ní Dochartaigh channels the wilds of the world, finding solace in these places.  She sees her own suffering “buried under a single rock”, infused with the very land and its myth, “like Lir’s children”, she describes it. Birds feature heavily too, sometimes auspicious, suggesting better things to come, sometimes as the very embodiment of the grief itself, following, haunting and inescapable, they are often there in both “stillness and flight”. It is an appropriate phrase for Thin Places as it is often a tale of the latter pursuing the former.

Besides the power and depth of her journey, the book is studded with references to saints, myths and nature that had this critic longing for bonus content. A collection of monographs, perhaps, where she could share with us more of her knowledge of hagiography, of all the birds and insects in these islands or enigmatic myths of her homeland.

Thin Places is written in a beautiful, free flowing prose that will, when the timing is right, glide off into verse. Powerful imagery is deployed throughout, often leaving a sense of a child’s viewfinder toy. Peer through and push the button: you see poppies growing through the cracks in the concrete, click, we’re thrown into blackness, a coffin ship and the night “darker than soot”, click, the sky is now pink and it is sunset in a meadow. Ní Dochartaigh’s ability to take us all the way around the viewfinder, from darkness back to the light is testament to her writing ability.

As I write this review, Thin Places reminds me that it is St Brigid’s day, a day claimed from the pagan Imbolc. On the very last day of January, we can suddenly see flowers starting to push through the earth, lambing season is almost here and, if you look closely, you will sense the light pushing back at the edges of the day. That for me was, ultimately, one of the messages of Thin Places: the light always returns to us, even from the darkest of days. The earth continues to turn and the sun lets us know the future has come back into view. In parts the language of Thin Places is reminiscent of a well kent voice from her neck of the woods. Where Seamus Heaney implores us to believe in that farther shore and in cures and wishing wells, ní Dochartaigh reminds us that even at the “pinnacle of a darkening” we are still “called to rest, to be still, to heal and to hope” and that is just what Thin Places leaves us with, a call, and a reason, to hope.  

Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh is published by Canongate