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Ciara Ni É Bilingual poet Ciara Ni É was recently
called a “cool Irish language poet,” which she says was an impossible sentence just two years ago. Integrated into the Irish language poetry community, Ni É runs REIC, an open mic night dedicated to Irish language poetry, as well as AerachAiteachGaelach, a LGBTQ+ One City, Many Stories Highlighting the diverse array of writers across Dublin, the Ireland Writers Centre is putting out a series of videos entitled One City, Many Stories and in one episode, Island of Nations, the Centre spoke to writers from all over the world. WORDS Kaavya Butaney Suad Aldarra Rooney Award-winning writer Suad Aldarra made headlines last year with her memoir I Don’t Want to Talk About Home, capturing her memories of her home country of Syria and her journey to Ireland. The book, she said, is borne out of her own grief and depression she was having at the time, finding that writing the stories down was the only way forward. “I started writing these stories that were pressuring my memory a lot, that were begging to be written, as they say,” Aldarra said. “And I started there, like the chapters were not following a timeline. They were just randomly picked, but they were picked by how much they were affecting my mental health and how much they were keeping me inside this bubble where I couldn’t move forward. So every story I wrote, every chapter I wrote, freed me a bit from that.” Aldarra said while the book was initially pigeonholed as a refugee story, people are connecting with beyond that now. Her focus was portraying Syria to a Western audience, describing it beyond destruction and politics and more on how she grew up: her grandmother’s cooking, her cats and her love story. She said people have said the book changed 12 their perspective on Syria. “Once I opened it all, and I was much lighter whenever I talk to people and whenever I meet anyone,” Aldarra said. “I don’t have anything to hide. I don’t have my history, my nationality, my background, nothing to hide. I’m a writer. I’m from Syria. Here’s my book. Read about it. It helped me be comfortable in my own skin.” In the last year, Syria’s political circumstances have changed radically with the fall of the Assad regime. For the first time in over a decade, Aldarra went home. “I was reading the prologue, and it’s so different now because whenever I read that before, before the collapse of the regime in December, I would feel sad, and I would choke with the words, because it hit home for me,” Aldarra said. “But I read it for the first time after my visit to Syria, and I was just so happy, and I felt the texts were out of context now that it was completely different, that I’m not that stranger anymore, I can make that trip home. And I keep saying to people, like the title should be now ‘I Want to Talk about Home’, because I can’t stop talking about home.” Irish-language art collective. “I chose the word reic in Irish, which comes from the root recite, because it’s a spoken word event, but also because it sounds like W-R-E-C-K in English,” she said. “And it’s just to give people a space to come and use whatever Irish they have and not be worried about wrecking it. Like I’d say, well, try and wreck it. Like you could try your best, the language has been here for thousands of years, you writing one poem that has some grammar mistakes is not going to kill it.” After learning Irish in school, Ni É was inspired by some of her teachers that taught the language culturally, which helped her connect to her ancestry. She said it tends to make sense to Irish people because the way many Irish people speak English is based on not traditional English grammar but instead, Irish grammar. “It’s only when you actually, like, realize that, no, we’re not speaking English, we’re speaking Irish translated into English,” she said. Ni É writes in both English and Irish, often translating her own poems between the two languages. The risk, she said, is if Englishonly speakers can’t understand the translation out of Irish. Not all her poems are translated, though. Ni É has also written in Irish and English simultaneously. “It really makes you question your own lines,” Ni É said. “You know, if you write something in one language, then you translate it. You translate it. You might change the English. Then that might change what you might change back into the art, so they can be working off each other.” Dublin: One City, Many Stories is a six-part video series celebrating Dublin’s 15th anniversary as a UNESCO City of Literature. Each episode pairs acclaimed and emerging writers in conversation, exploring themes of creativity, community and connection. An Island of Many Nations is available on the Irish Writers Centre’s YouTube channel and at www.irishwriterscentre.ie.