Eating Shame: A Tribute to Cherry Smyth’s Famished
Emer Lyons
School of Psychology, University of Galway
Cite this Article
Lyons, E. (2025). Eating Shame: A Tribute to Cherry Smyth’s Famished. p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e, 8.
Abstract
In Cherry Smyth’s 2019 collection Famished she writes through alternating levels of shame to re-member history by writing to the past from a place of dis/embodiment. Famished encapsulates the crucial convergence of ecopoetics and performance as the body becomes text, the text itself, the language, becomes a lament for years of disembodied and diasporic grief. In this essay, the ethics of re-membering history through poetry and performance is explored through shame and belonging.
Keywords
Irish, poetry, Famine, shame, performance
There seem to be three primary levels on which shame operates with regards to the Irish Famine: survivor’s shame; subaltern shame (the shame attached to having been dehumanised) and the shamefulness of ‘bringing it all up again,’ whereby the speaker about shame becomes shamed and stigmatised, just as a whistle-blower who speaks of what most people know, is often ostracised.[i]
Cherry Smyth was born in Antrim and grew up in Northern Ireland, a country wrought by battles over identity, British or Irish, Protestant or Catholic, and so over belonging. These questions have been complicated further by her lesbian identity and her life lived outside of Ireland in London so that Smyth and her work occupy multiple boundaries of belonging. In 2019, she published Famished[ii] a poetic sequence that explores the Irish Famine and how imperialism helped cause the largest refugee crisis of the 19th century. Smyth developed and toured Famished as a performance with Lauren Kinsella on vocals and score by Ed Bennett.
Three poems[iii] from the sequence are situated around County Antrim and question the way ethics operate in contemporary Irish poetry when writing the past. In this essay, I concentrate more fully on these three poems as I am concerned here with place, with Smyth’s relationship to Antrim, her relationship to ‘home’ as a place and how history has troubled that relationship, and in what ways Famished explores the ethical consequences of creating art from intergenerational trauma. Throughout this essay, I will engage with the discourse around art and memory through the lens of Cherry Smyth’s poetic and performative work, focusing on the Irish Famine, trauma and artistic remembrance. The theoretic analysis will integrate carnal hermeneutics, ecopoetics and queer theory to explore shame as a both a theoretic and poetic concept. I will use the ‘three primary levels on which shame operates’ that Smyth refers to above to section the essay and explore each level in more depth.
1. SURVIVOR’S SHAME
A MORSEL, BALLYMONEY, 1847
‘They flock where there is a morsel to eat’ (8)[iv]
[morsum, a bit, a bite, became morsel in Middle English and morceau
in French, almuerzo in Spanish, from mordere, Latin, to bite]
I knew what was to come
when I saw it in his shadow,
as sharp as scythes cut.
When love still showed flesh on his face,
shadow showed us
growth’s reversal.
‘Come you up here, star of my life.’
I would absorb him back
to where I fed him.
I’ll give myself the night
at the barracks’ gate:
a bit for a bite.
Smyth begins A MORSEL, BALLYMONEY, 1847 with a quote from Elizabeth Forster, a Quaker, from the 21st of May 1847 ‘They flock where there is a morsel to eat’ (8).[v] Under the quote she blends definition, translation and etymology to make ‘a morsel’ active, ‘to bite’. The quote and ethymological translation begin the poem’s traipse through differing definitions of carnal desire, carnal hermeneutics. According to Hwa Yol Jung,
Carnal hermeneutics [. . .] reads the body as social inscription in and of the world. It is not enough to say that the body is the medium of communication: it is communication itself. Carnal hermeneutics is thus a way of conceptualizing multiple performative roles of the body.[vi]
Throughout the poem, Smyth lyrics the body alive, in itself, in its functions and in the world. In the 1st stanza, the shadow of death on ‘his face’ [the subject of the poem] is ‘as sharp as scythes cut’. Smyth uses the image of a scythe, a tool used for cutting crops, to make the face become like a crop, like something to be harvested, cut down. In the 2nd stanza, the speaker desires to absorb the other into the poem, into the speaker, ‘I would absorb [take in / take up] him back’.
To choose the sea, leave our limbs’ work.
Waves measure out the shrinking time,
closing to an answer known,
on wind our ears refuse to hear.
In the 3rd stanza, the speaker will give herself to ‘the night’, she will give ‘a bit’ of herself for ‘a bite’, for a morsel to eat. She offers her body up to the desires ‘at the barrack’s gate’, her body offered up as food for the carnal desires of the other. Her body is used, re-used to feed her own ‘flesh’ and that of her child’s. The child returns to her body, becomes absorbed in the process of carnal desires and returns – ‘to where I fed him’. As John Panteleimon Manoukksakis writes, ‘Hermeneutics can become the reverse of digestion, a process of excretion, spitting out, throwing up’.[vii] The poems in Smyth’s Famished worry the leftovers, the manifestations, of loss and differing levels of shame involved in creating art from intergenerational trauma.
In Paul P. Preciado’s 2013 body-essay TestoJunkie, he coins the term pharmacopornograhic, to refer to the processes of a biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity. This form of biocapitalism makes a commodity of everything, of all organisms and knowledge systems. As Preciado writes:
Pharmacopornograhic biocapitalism does not produce things. It produces mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions, and conditions of the soul. In biotechnology and in pornocommunication there is no object to be produced. The pharmacopornograhic business is the invention of a subject and then its global reproduction (italics in original).[viii]
The biocapitalism used by Britain in Ireland during the Famine did not produce things but subjects. These subjects were commodified to increase the colonial and capitalist ambitions of Britain. We are now living in the age of the Irish post-Famine subject. The subject that has now evolved into a diaspora, a ‘global reproduction,’ of over 80 million people.
Preciado embodies a culture of carnal hermeneutics by calling his not memoir a body essay. He prioritises the experience of his body as central to the text. He uses both poetic and theoretical concepts to lyric his body alive in the text. Just as Smyth does by reiterating the text through performance, she keens back to the oral culture of Ireland. She uses her body to perform the loss of culture, the loss of the Irish language post-Famine which has left the language on the brink of extinction.
The highest number died
in the Gaeltacht
where the native words were spoken
not written not read.[ix]
(In)Carnal hermeneutics decrees eating as declaring one’s dependency on the world. Enforced hunger/starvation in Ireland dehumanised the population to becomes subject’s dependant on British rule. Manoukksakis writes that ‘only an embodied being can be hungry,’ (311). A number of quotes included in Famished read of the Irish people as rooted to the potato. Like potatoes. The Irish become the food that starved them. The Irish become dehumanised through survival. The collection reiterates the starved disembodiment of Ireland.
Lord Clarendon, Westminster
‘The wretched people seem to be human potatoes,
a sort of emanation from “the root” —
they have lived by it and will die by it.’[x]
The temporality of the Irish subject becomes synonymous with that of the blighted potato. Irish people are blamed for their stunted lifespan because of their symbiotic relationship with ‘the root’, with the soil, with the ground.
The poetic text operates beyond the page, without the page, as the performance will disappear, become non-existent, extinct. Like the body performing. The root. In the contemporary poetics of place, poets differ in their relation to the root, stability: Seamus Heaney claims that poets must look to ‘the stable element, the land itself’,[xi] while Jo Shapcott, regards such organic rootedness in local landscapes and idioms as neither possible nor desirable, opting instead ‘to be a different kind of writer, for whom place and language are less certain, and for whom shifting territories are the norm’.[xii] Smyth manages to ebb and flow between stability and instability. The reader knows entering Famished that there will be death and uncertainty because the collection is based on a historical event. While at the same time, every line break embodies the unshakeable connection between body and land, body and sea. The collection is both a historical poetic and an ecopoetic.
2. SUBALTERN SHAME (THE SHAME ATTACHED TO HAVING BEEN DEHUMANISED)
The sea storm served up its booty:
tea chests from which to fashion furniture.
How were we to know that we’d give back
all we salvaged with flesh itself, our bones?
Smyth begins ‘THE CLACHAN, DOAGH,’ a poem about collective life in Ireland, by serving up booty, something gained or won especially through war. The first stanza returns us to the last stanza of the poem before. We move from – ‘a bit for a bite’ – to ‘we’d give back / all we’d salvaged with flesh itself, our bones?’ Smyth highlights dehumanisation as a strategy of survival. The booty gained is salvaged from the bones, the flesh of the dead, taking the stories of the dead into their starving bodies. In the 2nd stanza, the body communicates in the eyes and hands as stories, these stories live in the fields, in the stones. The body becomes the fields and stones.
We keep the eyes’ stories in the fields,
the hands’ stories in the stones,
In relation to Aristotle’s claim that touch is the universal sense, Richard Kearney states that, ‘one cannot live without sensing, one cannot exist as soul without flesh, and every sense requires the ability to be touched—at whatever the distance—by what one senses (through eye, ear, nose, or tongue)’.[xiii] The subjects of Famished are surviving, they are being abandoned towards extinction, they are touched by only hunger so are therefore, not living, not existing, they are subaltern, dehumanised.
Smyth writes collective, we move through the poem together. The boundaries between the reader and poem becomes as inconsequential as the boundaries of land, ‘built to the beat and notes of song’. The land and body are drawn apart by heritage, by ancestry. Boundaries are lyric not economic. And yet the speakers, we, ‘choose the sea,’ ‘an answer known’. The speakers leave behind the land of Ireland. But, as Smyth writes, there was more energy ‘for loss’ and staying in Ireland would be allowing grief to ‘utterly consume’.
There is an energy
required for loss,
for singing loss,
for losing,
that too much grief
does utterly consume.[xiv]
The topographic and specific use of place and time in the titles of the poems reinforces this concern with loss of place, with loss of history. Smyth builds an archive on the contents page beginning with the third poem ‘The Parish Inventory, Gweedore, Pre-Famine, 1837’, to the last poem, ‘The Holloway Road, London, 2017’. The move into contemporary time includes her body into the text, to make herself part of the narrative of the Famine.
Hunger and its satisfaction by eating demarcates the before and after of the body’s time [. . .] a body that becomes hungry is a body affected by time.[xv]
Intergenerational trauma becomes an inherent quality of the collection’s subject/s through recreating the journey of the Famine by writing place across temporal planes. The lines, the bloodlines, carry trauma.
3. THE SHAMEFULNESS OF ‘BRINGING IT ALL UP AGAIN’
Shop mannequins in tilted wigs, black shawls
and outsized polyester shirts play evicted peasants
at the door of a thatched cottage, the poised
battering ram surrounded by tall, blank policemen
in black capes. The guide smiles a socialist smile
as she emphasises the growing gulf between rich
and poor and global corporations’ crooked wealth.
‘Every ten seconds a child dies of hunger.’
In ‘THE INTERPRETATION CENTRE, DOAGH’, we return to Ireland. The Famine villages attempt to embody the suffering/poverty/starvation of the Famine for tourists with mannequins performing intergenerational trauma. By tourists, I mean not only people visiting Ireland but also the generations of Irish people who visit these villages with family or school to see the reality of the past, to try to understand how the Famine looked. Jessica Lieberman states, the ‘traumatic response blocks the integration of the experience and the comfort of placing it, psychically, in the past. Instead, the individual is left to perpetually relive the event as an unresolved present’.[xvi] The Famine exists as both a tragic historical event and the constant present for Irish people.
The interpretation centre commemorates the Famine, after the fact, just like Smyth’s poetry. Images in the poem are juxtaposed – the famine village v a new tearoom – history/tradition v modern consumerist Ireland with the village boosted by ‘the EU grant’. The village also seems to be ingrained in Western populist holidays rather than Celtic celebrations. The use of Halloween rather than the Irish word for the Celtic festival Samhain serves as a signal of the distance between cultural tradition and cultural representation. Also, it is important to note that Smyth was educated under the British educational system in Northern Ireland and therefore, was not taught Irish in school which is where the majority of Irish children access the language. The irony of the last line is potent – ‘catering for coaches, groups and families’ – a tagline that could have been used to refer to the workhouse in Ballymoney in the 1940s. At the height of the famine in 1847, entire families were being admitted to the Ballymoney Workhouse.
The inconsistencies between crime and punishment are re-iterated in Famished to show the yawning gap between those eating and those starving. Economy continued during the Famine; life went on for some. I am ever reminded of Ilya Kaminsky’s poem ‘We Lived Happily During the War:’ What about those who lived happily during the Famine? [xvii] What about the survivor’s shame in searching into your ancestry and finding landowners, stores of food, and a lack of empathy? Before my next-door neighbour died, she told me once that she remembered her grandparents talking about the Famine. It was in her memory, her at that time, living memory.
The Famine remains remembered in the minds of some in Ireland. That makes these memories those of the survivors. What of the trauma of remembering survival? I have not had the guts, literally, to figure out my ancestry. I tried once but I didn’t know any of my grandparent’s surnames and was too ashamed to ask. Smyth writes about the shame connected to this lack of cultural and historical knowledge, as she writes at the beginning of this essay, ‘the shamefulness of “bringing it all up again,” whereby the speaker about shame becomes shamed and stigmatised.’ Smyth shows vulnerability in her willingness to perform the role of the stigmatised. She scapegoats herself and arguably as a lesbian in a heteropatriarchal society, this is a role she has become accustomed to.
Quotes are used throughout and as lyric liturgies to UK’s intense desire to civilise Ireland.
If they weren’t such layabouts,
If they pulled their socks up,
If they watched their ps and qs,
If they had better eating habits,
Help would go further.[xviii]
There is a wildness about Ireland and the Irish as a consequence of the choppy Atlantic destabilising and sweeping the landscape to rough. Irish people are seen as emotionally erratic. Wild like the sea.
Language comes as a remedy to a fundamental experience of a primordial separation, a separation that manifests itself first in the distinction within/without, inside/outside.[xix]
The one million Irish people that emigrated during the Famine would have felt ‘outside’ of a sense of Irishness, because of their dependency on a new country, because of their bodies performing in an elsewhere, because of the change and loss of a native language. How to get inside? Learn to eat your words? Cherry Smyth ingested years of research on the Famine, and then put her body through a tour in the pursuit of public archiving, public remembrance, public intimacy.
I realised when I finished writing Famished that words on a page were not enough. They needed music. I had discovered that the singing, musical and oral cultures in Ireland were greatly impacted by the Famine, through the huge loss of life, emigration and paralysing grief, and so I wanted to speak to that absence through music and song. I was also cognisant of the immense loss of mourning itself through mass burials in unmarked graves and years of exodus with no markers for those who died of fever at sea. The piece needed a live audience to invoke a space for mourning and some kind of collective public lament.[xx]
Exposure plays a role in Famished with Smyth’s expansion of words from the private to public. She queers history to create what Lauren Berlant calls intimate publics, ‘affectively structured as scenes for identification, reflection, and recognition.’[xxi] Smyth creates intimate publics through affectively structured poems that reflect back onto Smyth, onto the land, and the reader. Jennifer Biddle writes that, ‘shame arises from a failure to be recognised’.[xxii] Smyth liberates the page through the collaborative performance, inviting shame to the reading and watching, initiating an active re-membering of history, an act of recognition.
In the vein of Eileen Myles, of Maggie Nelson, of Dodie Bellamy, of Mary Dorcey, of Cherry Smyth I desire the creation of a public rather than institutional archive. A consumable archive. A body of text. A body-essay. A body that hungers, desires. I moved back from New Zealand to Ireland in 2023, back to the Atlantic, back to the choppy shore known to my bones. I spent four months staying with my parents in my childhood bedroom, in my ‘home,’ but it didn’t feel like that. I felt I had become a ‘global reproduction’ of an Irish person, a commodity of shame. I lost something in the process of leaving and returning, something that Smyth’s collection Famished illuminates. That something feels like cultural inheritance, an inherited sense of place that only those who survive can inherit.
In Famished, Smyth explores the changing historical climate in relation to the Irish Famine and ethics of the surviving body performing the ecopoetics of shame. Smyth enlarges the conversation around the Irish Famine and how history inhabits the bodies of Irish people through ethical, poetic and societal reflection. She epically ‘brings it all up again’ for people to engage, to root, anew with representations of trauma and memory through performance and poetry.
How were we to know that we’d give back
all we salvaged with flesh itself, our bones?
Notes
[i] Lyons, Emer, and Cherry Smyth. 2020. “In Conversation: Emer Lyons and Cherry Smyth”. The Cardiff Review. https://www.cardiffreview.com/post/2020/03/30/in-conversationemer-lyons-and-cherry-smyth/.
[ii] Smyth, Cherry. 2019. Famished. Occitanie, France: Pindrop Press.
[iii] ‘A Morsel, Ballymoney, 1847,’ ‘The Clachan, Doagh,’ ‘The Interpretation Centre, Doagh, 2017.’
[iv] Forster, Elizabeth, 21 May, 1847, quoted in Kinealy, King & Reilly (2016) p.61
[v] Forster, Elizabeth. 21 May, 1847, quoted in Kinealy, King & Reilly (2016) p.61
[vi] Jung, Hwa Yol. 2014. Prolegomena to a carnal hermeneutics. p. 179.
[vii] Manoukksakis, John Panteleimon. 2015. “On the Flesh of the World: Incarnational Hermeneutics.” in Carnal Hermeneutics edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor. New York: Fordham University Press. p. 307.
[viii] Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornograhic Era. New York City, New York: The Femininst Press at the City University of New York City. p. 35-6.
[ix] Smyth, Famished, p. 67.
[x] Smyth, Famished, p. 42.
[xi] Heaney, Seamus. 1985. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978, p.149; John Burnside. 2000. ‘Strong Words’, in W.N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis, eds, Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, p.261.
[xii] Shapcott, Jo. 2000. ‘Confounding Geography’, in Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones, eds, Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice, p.42.
[xiii] Kearney, Richard. 2015. “What is Carnal Hermeneutics?” New Literary History 46: p. 106.
[xiv] Smyth, Famished, p. 50.
[xv] Manoukksakis 2015, 312.
[xvi] Jessica Catherine Lieberman, ‘Traumatic Images’, Photographies 1.1 (2008), p.88.
[xvii] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91413/we-lived-happily-during-the-war
[xviii] Smyth, Famished, p. 27.
[xix] Manoukksakis 2015, 313.
[xx] Lyons and Smyth. 2020.
[xxi] Ryberg, Ingrid. 2013. ‘‘Every time we fuck, we win’: The Public Sphere of Queer, Feminist, and Lesbian Porn as a (Safe) Space for Sexual Empowerment’, The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, in Tristen Taormino, Constance Penley, Parreñas Shimizu and Mireille Miller-Young (eds), New York City: The Feminist Press, 2013, pp. 148.
[xxii] Biddle, Jennifer. 1997. “Shame.” Australian Feminist Studies 12, p. 227.
Emer Lyons is a writer, performer and researcher from West Cork living in Galway. She is currently a research assistant on the Active* Consent Programme at the University of Galway. She has a PhD in lesbian poetry from the University of Otago. In 2025, her show PART(S)(W)HOLE was part of the Scene + Heard festival in Dublin, she was the Áras Éanna Artist in Residence on Inisheer and the recipient of a Creative Practitioner Bursary both in association with the Galway City Council. She is an awardee of the 2025 Irish Writers Centre Annaghmakerrig Residency. She is one of four poets in the anthology Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2025) edited by Leeanne Quinn. In 2024, she was a Play it Forward Fellow with Skein Press under the mentorship of Pascal O’Loughlin and was awarded an Agility Award from the Arts Council Ireland.