I do not want what I haven't got

For Sinead O'Connor and anyone who has wanted to die

There is a timbre of voice

that comes from not being heard

and knowing / you are not being

heard / noticed only

by others / not heard

for the same reason.

Audre Lorde: Echoes 

I'll Tell You What Freedom Is to Me. No Fear.

Nina Simone 

I

If freedom is the absence of fear, then can we know that we are not alone, that we are loved, when we are afraid? Or if we seem fearless, does that mean we are free? If we are free, will others love us? Or will they want us to be fearful so that they don’t have to be afraid of the freedom that they think they cannot have?

II

The term “tend and befriend” was coined in 2000 by Shelley Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of California. The tend and befriend theory says that when faced with a perceived threat, humans in certain situations will tend to their young and rely on others for connection and support. 

If this affiliative ritual can be completed there will be no need to fight, to flee or to freeze. 

Inside this theory, is a detail which has helped me see my mothering inside my mothers mothering, hers inside her mothers and on and on and on. I see these ripples appear as my daughter takes shape inside me, my breath moving between my body and hers. The water of the breath that we exchange is not just made up of our own, but mingles with and is shaped through the world in which our relation is permitted to actualise. 

There is no new breath, it has already been inhaled and exhaled. There is no individual breath - we must inhale and exhale together. 

When I start to understand tend and befriend as a theory I imagine it as love (oxytocin) surging through a body that gives us the courage to reach out to others. When this love is met with care it melts into relaxation and trust which transmutes into the overall psychological stability of the mother or caregiver. If the surge of love can be met, then the mother need never bring up her defences and the performance of mothering can unfold in the simplicity of giving and receiving care: gestures of frequent checking, affectionate touch, singing or speaking to the baby in a certain way, of tending and cleaning, can be completed. 

What happens when this surge of love moves through her body and meets histories of abuse, cultures that shame love and affection and valorise control and domination — what happens then? 

In Shelley Taylor’s theory — the love keeps surging. 

But instead of an attunement to relationship enhancing feelings such as trust, empathy, positive relationship memories, fidelity, positive communication or processing of bonding cues, the body becomes attuned to and on the lookout for the ways that social interaction is ruptured. Judgement, blame, shame, gossip, rumour, spite. I wonder if when tend and befriend fails, we become attuned not to life — the possibilities of holding and care for it — but to survival:  the life that is forced out of us despite the container that holds and receives it. 

What if instead of a surge of love, each act of care that we receive was shaped by fear, driven by survival? Watch how the mothers gaze hardens or cannot settle, watch how her shoulders hunch. Watch words turn to bile in her mouth, watch them being spit out of a mouth that barely opens, watch her scrutinise and judge, watch  her eyes slant slightly. Watch as the lower muscles of her ears activate - primed to listen for yelling and thudding. See her throat constrict, her heart beat fasten, her breath become short. Watch as blood rushes into her limbs, to strike or to grip our hands until ours turn red and hers are white with fear. Not because of individual failures rooted in bad caregiving, but in grand historical inequities. What surges through our collective bodies when so many of us cannot discern, in our acts of caring and being cared for, the difference between love and control? 

I thought about tend and befriend — about mothering, control and collective care this week after the news of Sinéad O’Connor’s death. I watched again and again a video of a young O’Connor on stage at Madison Square Gardens wearing a blue jacket and saying, quietly and gently “thank you” to a crowd that half loved her and half hated her. As the sounds of love and hate clashed in her ear, I imagined she began to take flight. She was supposed to keep her feet on the ground and whisper a song by Bob Dylan, whose music had fed the desire for her own. The song she was going to whisper to the crowd that had gathered was “I believe in you”.

I believe in you when winter turn to summer/ I believe in you when white turn to black /I believe in you even though I be outnumbered /Oh, though the earth may shake me /Oh, though my friends forsake me / Oh, even that couldn't make me go back

In her ear was not the sound of acceptance or the quiet of tender faith or reverence,  so she cannot keep her feet on the ground and she cannot whisper. So she takes flight, the bird in the blue jacket, and she whispers not about love, but shouts out a song about war. She uses her voice loudly but she does not look on herself from above, as she imagined when she had thought about singing about God, but she circles the stage, the bodies around it, the hard structures that shape the (be)longing around them all. She zooms out beyond the lack of care she is receiving and spits out not an individual wish for peace but her understanding — learnt through the most intimate of violence — that there is no peace where there is no justice. Where there is no justice there is no love.

Where there is no love Everywhere is war.

III

Sinéad O’Connor was a bird. She could fly even though her wings had been clipped. She had the ability to soar over her pain and those that caused it, to see them and herself in context. 

I spent my entire childhood being beaten up because of the social conditions under which my mother grew up and under which her mother and her mother grew up. ¹

She knew that what made up her mother was not just her cruelty, but also the role of motherhood that was prescribed to her, and by the institution of motherhood defined by the dominant culture. 

O'Connor understood that for trauma to teach us anything, we need the freedom to move both towards and beyond those that harm us; to see and confront the structures that allow abuse to take root. When she tears the picture of the Pope on TV, people share the image and speak of risk to her career, of symbolism, of performance art. But they don’t often speak about how this picture belonged to her mother, how it was one of the only two items she took from her house after she died, how she had saved it for this moment to show us what she had seen and felt and known about the ways abuse works, the ways that is exists, and the ways that is collectively silenced. 

What she tore was something that organised her mothers love as well as her cruelty, which in turn organised her mothering and that had organised the abuse of other children like her. When she tore that picture she rips through symbolic love turned into institution, she reaches into the wound of love that is raw and messy, as that tear opens up she asks us to come through this messiness, towards what might come after this wound is opened, sutured and healed. 

IV

Mother, may I go out to swim? /Yes, my darling daughter/ Hang your clothes on a hickory limb /And don't go near the water.  Anonymous

Sinéad O Connor often spoke about the abuse that she suffered at the hands of her mother who she loved and she believed loved her. She spoke about how her singing could soothe her mother, could “quieten the beast”. I wonder about her using her voice to quieten the beast of the crowd. I wonder about her ways that love and hate can be folded into sound, I wonder about anger as a demand for love.

Later after she went to live with her father, she acted out all the ways that love had been mingled into hate in her being. She was unruly and impossible to control and she was taken into the ‘care’ of nuns along with other wayward girls who held truths that were bombs in mouths and in their wombs and in their hearts. When these truths spilled out, she would be punished by being made to sleep in the hospice area of the Magdalene laundry that neighboured the ‘home’ she lived in.  This temporary shunning was supposed to teach her that if she carried on trying to exorcise the truth that no one wanted to hear about the things that she had seen and felt in her heart and her body, then she would end up like the women in the hospice: women who were imprisoned, their labour extracted and upon reaching old age were were left in pain, unable to sleep while they called and called for help that never came. Their voices sounded an alarm that no one wanted to hear but that needed to continue to ring and ring so that it could help numb others into silence. 

I wonder when she walked off stage, what she heard in the space between her voice and the crowd’s — did she hear the sound of the beast quieting or did she hear the sound of the women’s screams? 

V

(Shortly before she died, Sinéad O’ Connor writes about/to her son who had committed suicide while under the care of the state less than two years earlier. She writes we were one soul in two halves.

When she hears the news of his death she sends him a song from Bob Marley, on  an album called Survivor. 

Natty keep on comin' through / And no matter what they say / Natty do them every day, yeah! / Natty dread rides again / Through the mystics of tomorrow / Natty dread rides again / Have no fear, have no sorrow, yeah! …. Only the birds have their wings, yeah!

Sinéad O Connor tells her son he is a bird. That he could fly even though his wings had been clipped.)

VI

As she leaves the stage, Kris Kristoffersen whispers don’t let the bastards get you down she replies 

I am not down.

It is true that she is flying above it, but it is true she is also in the ground. 

(Later she said that that night was an attempt to bury her. Later she said they thought they were burying her alive. Later she said “but they didn’t know I was a seed.” )

Before she is buried alive while she is trying to fly, as her first baby grows inside her, Sinéad O Connor writes a song that she calls a testament to another garden in which she was rejected. She writes about screaming and screaming and her mother not coming. She writes about huddling in the long grass outside, trying to keep warm as dusk turns to darkness and the light in the house goes out, leaving her outside the house of her mother’s love. After she has written it she screams it on stage over and over again. Later she says the song, which she called Troy, “Is not safe, I don’t need to dig that up again, it's like trauma therapy. There would have been no point in writing and screaming Troy into microphones if there wasn’t going to come a day that I didn’t need to do that anymore.”

VII

One day, she writes an album named after something her mother told her in a dream. An executive at the record label says This is like reading somebody’s diaries, I’m not putting it out. 

A diary. 

Adrienne Rich,  who was a poet like Sinéad O’ Connor, and who also knew how  under patriarchy female possibility has been literally massacred on the site of motherhood² called the diary  that profoundly female, and feminist, genre. ³

Perhaps Sinéad O Connor’s ability to diarise; to connect part of herself that had been broken apart; to question by making connections and seeking community across space and time — with herself, her mother, her mother’s mother and then from those selves with others — is what gave her wings. 

VIII

In Kathryn Ferguson’s film Nothing Compares, O’Connor reflects on how the world fell in love with her because of one tear that rolled down her cheek as she sang into the abyss of a lens and summoned the memory of her mother. A drop in an ocean of tears that she had spilt over her mother. Later when the tears came faster, stronger, hotter, angrier, where did that love go? (where did I go wrong?)

IX

Who was O’Connor’s flock? Were the people she flew with the ones who had come before, the agitators, the artists like her who struggled with truth? Or did she belong with her mother and her mother’s mother, incarcerated in her body — in an idea of woman permitted only in as much as they might be stifled with awe and respect to give women some say in the life of a people or a clan?⁴ 

When she refused to go to the Grammys in 1991, Sinéad O Connor asked the people she thought she flocked together with, what is the role of our voices in systems of artmaking? 

Is it the quality of the sound we make, how we produce and train it? Or is the clarity of its truth? If the former is rewarded with material success and the latter results in public shaming and rejection, what happens to the surge of love that runs through our bodies when we feel the urgency to make work and share it? What role does that surge have when the spaces that this energy surges into can only receive it if it looks and sounds a certain way, if it is given and received in certain places, and above all only if the body of the person that it surges through seems only to exist in order to give and receive success and does not express the embarrassing unsophisticated, disreputable need to give and receive care?

X

The album that they called a diary is called I do not want what I cannot have. 

In her book Rememberings Sinead O’Connor writes: 

I went to see a medium and my mother came through. My mother asked my sister to forgive her for what she had done to all of us. But my sister would not forgive her. And while I understood this, it made me very, very sad for my mother's soul. I was so young and didn't know any better. That night I had a dream in which my mother came to me for the first time since she had died a year and a half earlier. In the dream, I told my mother I was sorry that Eimear couldn't forgive her. My mother said, 'I do not want what I haven't got.' What my mother meant was that she didn't deserve my sister's forgiveness and that she knew she didn't deserve it so that I shouldn't feel sorry for her.

In the song that Sinéad O'connor writes about this dream she writes about letting go of fear; of stepping into love. In the song she returns from this journey to not being afraid  as a “paler blue bird.” After she died this week, I listen to the song and I saw her on stage at Madison Square Gardens, small, birdlike, dressed in blue; reaching, wanting, shouting for what her mother and her mothers mother were told they could not have. 

I'm walking through the desert

And I am not frightened although it's hot

I have all that I requested

And I do not want what I haven't got

I have learned this from my mother

See how happy she has made me

I will take this road much further

Though I know not where it takes me

I have water for my journey

I have bread and I have wine

No longer will I be hungry

For the bread of life is mine

I saw a navy blue bird

Flying way above the sea

I walked on and I learned later

That this navy blue bird was me

I returned a paler blue bird

And this is the advice they gave me

You must not try to be too pure

You must fly closer to the sea

So I'm walking through the desert

And I am not frightened although it's hot

I have all that I requested

And I do not want what I haven't got

1. Sinéad O’Connor in  Nothing Compares (2022) dir Kathryn Ferguson

2. Rich, Adrienne. 1995. Of woman born : motherhood as experience and institution: Norton.

3. Rich, Adrienne. 1979. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978. Norton.

4.  Rich, Adrienne. 1995. Of woman born : motherhood as experience and institution: Norton.