By Jessie McCarty
Abstract
In an ode to Sinead O’Connor, Irish-American writer Jessie McCarty looks into legacy ethics, the theory of memorializing, dates, and names.
Let them not weep, for I am glad to go.
Cuimhneacháin a Sinead.
I didn’t grow up with Sinead O’Connor. I found her later, in the heat of young-adult survival. Her music was not on my mother’s radio, C-D collection, or middle school sleepover rotations. I think this was because my family was primarily a Prince family. No one ever needed to choose sides, but my mother had. I had found O’Connor’s discography like everyone else, through Nothing Compares 2 U and then through coincidences, like-mindedness, and our mutual Irish heritage. When I refer to Sinead O’Connor’s music, I will refer her to by birth name. When I refer to her separately from the music, I will use her name after converting to Islam, Shuhada Sadaqat.
Translating to God’s gracious gift, or bronntanas Dé, my mother named me Jessica because it sounded like royalty. In 2018, as a peace offering, I purchased two necklaces with all the names we’ve earned. Janet wears it when she is in Chicago. I wear it when I can remember. It’s almost as if Irishness means an inheritance of mother wounds. My Irish name is my mom’s: Janet, translating to Sinead. My name is my Irish grandmother’s name, Jessie Lou, and her father’s name: Jessie Lee. It ultimately became the name of my dead uncle, Jesse Lee, who died in 1980 from an oil rigging incident off the Gulf of Mexico. But now we are here. And these men’s names are now my name. Ancestrally, I am my mother’s. We are both Sinead: God is gracious. But there are days I can tell I am carrying every ghost of McCarty men. There are days when it shows. God is merciful, and without choice, I am his gift. So it seems.
Two days after Shuhada Sadaqat (1966-2023) was pronounced dead inside her London flat, Orla Egan, the director of Cork Ireland’s LGBT Archives, had shaved her head. I had buzzed mine, too. Although that wasn’t about Sinead, that was about something else. It was about control or grief in some other way. It was a week before her passing, and I asked my barber Vladimir to give me a haircut as if I came from Sinead O’Connor’s 2007 album, Theology. He does. The cover art, bathed in indigo, features the Irish singer sitting – sweater on, guarded, and slouched. When I rise from the barber’s chair, I resemble a deer in headlights. I look like myself. The next day, Brian, my coworker, looks at me from the gravel that is our auction house parking lot: “What would Sinead do? You gotta start asking yourself that.” I am starting to.
I am not the only one finding a way to put grief into memory. Dublin, Ireland, quickly painted a Shuhada Sadaqat mural on South Great George’s Street. NTS Radio’s David Holmes curated a Sinead O’Connor Tribute through God’s Waiting Room. Her name is splayed across her burial site near Bray Head, seen perfectly from any Aer Lingus flight. Annie Lennox, a Scottish singer, wrote in her honor: “Lioness and lamb, Sweet singing bird, Keenly tuned, Trembling…(you were) Tip-toeing along the high wire.” My friend Meghana texted the group chat: “Coworker and I just toasted our Starbucks to Sinead.” See? We are all remembering.
Shuhada Sadaqat, formerly named Sinead O’Connor, was angry. She was poetic. She was desperate. She felt crazy. I, too, grew up desperate. Or, I, too, have felt crazy. Shuhada gave the likeness to a scarf, similar to a ribbon. But I forget ribbons usually come tied to gifts. I think about fame; how it makes martyrs out of performers. I think about mirrors; how it’s a way to perform for ourselves. I know many performers who act because they need to. I know performers who perform because they need mirrors. I know performers who don’t anymore because they were scared. Shuhada Sadaqat wasn’t scared of performing or having mirrors. Shuhada Sadaqat always spoke [out] of a mirror, past herself, towards anyone that would listen. She wanted to reach a level of authenticity fame could not allow. Perhaps it can, but audiences are unbelievers. It’s because audiences think a performer is always performing. Performers then stop looking in the mirror or performing altogether. Audiences ask too much of what isn’t there. They get angry. We do not want what we haven’t got.
I was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, about three hours south of Shreveport. My father, formerly a bull rider, then rodeo clown, now a CDL driver, was one of nine siblings. His immediate family built the bulk of the Beech Creek Baptist Church in Winn Parish, Louisiana. When my father was thirty, he married my mother, Janet Rene Sheppard. Janet was born in Benton, Louisiana, a suburb of Bossier Parish; one of two. Janet became a hairdresser in 1987, marking the year Sinead O’Connor released her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. In 1996, my parents relocated to Bossier City. I was born in 1997, when “This is to Mother You” and “This is a Rebel Song” were first released. In 1998, my brother Colton (translating to Comhaltáin, meaning swarthy) was also born. 1998 was the year Sinead decided not to be heard again. No, not until 1999.
2000: O’Connor released the album Faith and Courage. That same year, Shuhada called herself a dyke, but took it back. She was married four times. 2002 became her sexy-Irish sung album Sean-Nós Nua. Goodnight, Thank You, You’ve Been a Lovely Audience was a 2003 documentary detailing the making of Sean-Nós Nua. In 2016, Shuhada Sadaqat took shelter in Wilmette, Illinois. Around the same time, Dr. Phil offered to send Sadaqat to a psychiatric facility. The director of the facility told her she was only interested in fame. Sometimes people do not understand at all. Anyone listening would have known honest performers do not think about the mirror. Break it for all they care. Sometimes it feels as if no one listens to music for its meaning. Sometimes it feels like people only listen to pop songs as an escape. One day you wake up, and you are a celebrity. Sometimes the audience is the mirror. The ribbon with no gift attached goes unnoticed. Shuhada Sadaqat understood: This song is a protest. This essay is screaming.
In October 2018, O’Connor converted to Islam, calling it a natural, intelligent resting point after a long theological journey. All scripture study leads to Islam, She said in an interview. I think of Haleh Liza Gafor’s 2022 translation of Rumi when she wrote: Intelligence is your crown. Only gems are drawn from the depths of you.”
But Shuhada suffered. She was diagnosed with bipolar, suffered PTSD from familial traumas; spoke up about the Irish famine and sexual abuse within Catholicism. American entertainment published her for it. In 2021, her memoir, Rememberings, Shuhada detailed some of the most intimate moments of her life. In 2022, she lost her youngest son, Shane. Though her legacy will reverberate in pop music forever, her resilience and self shone through everything she ever made. That is what remains.
I’m getting tired of you doing this to me
I’m going to hit you if you say that to me
One more time
I want to see you
And you’re saying you’re busy
I want to stop it
And you said it would be easy
It sure takes time.
(Sinead O Connor, Jerusalem, 1987).
Epilogue
Authenticity is hard to attain. For example, my guard is up when I perform. In front of an audience, I speak in a voice that is not mine. I trick my audience into believing they are laughing with me. We are all in on the joke. Reciting becomes a sedative, a blanket over my problems. Everything becomes funny, and nothing is sad. I put up walls. I become a coward. Shuhada Sadaqat was never that. She spoke in her O’Connor voice. An honest voice. An angry voice. Her Irish voice.
I know Irish is a voice, a language(?) that dies. Irish is a language that is always dying. Lately, I have been wanting to relearn this mother tongue. But how can you teach yourself what is already wilting? The truth is, I come from a family of suppression.
I grew up Southern before anything else, weaning through Baptist and Pentecostal Christianity. As I got older, I saw my Irish heritage tied to my father’s former Pentecostalism. Uttered on my college graduation day, my father says: “We were farmers before we were Irish. We moved to the South; that’s all we knew.” Therefore, I find myself saying I was (or am) of the Irish Pentecost. But I no longer need to perform fundamentalist rituals. I am done with that. I relearn an ancestral language to fight the real enemy.
In 2013, ten years after Sinead O’Connor ripped a photo of the Pope on live television to protest sexual exploitation in the Catholic Church, Jeremy A. Pierce, a member of the Westview Christian Church, was arrested for pedophilia in Shreveport, Louisiana. It was his second known offense. I was in a youth group with the girl he took advantage of. His arrest was swift, quiet, and privately escorted. How convenient. We all left the campgrounds after she approached me and a few other girls. We, teenagers, tried to piece together the news. We rode home in silence. And no one wants to talk about this now because it’s too upsetting. My mother gets quiet, and my brother groans. But I am done with that. You can find this information right on your computer. I’ll show you how. Jeremy A. Pierce is looking for a career, states Jeremy A. Pierce’s Linkedin. And sure, I don’t go to church anymore. It’s because the real enemies show up smiling.
I hope that writing in Sinead’s memory makes mourning easier. A partner had called my writing refreshing. But I’m repeating what other Irish writers say, how I believe something is always missing. I want to think about death and anger as they do or had. I mourn with distraction. I can listen to every album, every interview. I can try to put a narrative on her loss, but it is ultimately unquantifiable. A fan-made memorial deludes us into believing the performer Sinead O’Connor left us happy. She was a mother, and she was a friend. But who is to know if Shuhada Sadaqat left this earth happy? Ironically, Shuhada in Arabic translates to martyr. Shuhada Sadaqat is going to be walking like a goddamned saint.
There are days when we carry ghosts. There will be days when it shows.
In the ribbon of her mantle,
there I did behold
His name and his surname,
in letters of gold
Young William O’Riley,
appeared in my view
He was my chief comrade
back in the famed Waterloo
And as he lay dying, I
heard his last cry
“If you were here, lovely Nancy,
I’d be willing to die.”
Her Mantle So Green (Sinead O’Connor 2002).
Jessie McCarty is a writer, archivist, and bookseller. They are from Louisiana, now in Chicago. In their free time, they like to run, snack, and read about gravesites.
Bibliography
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The Documentarian 