I came to rural Ireland carrying habits that were formed by heat, by prayer times announced aloud, by a life where religion is woven openly into the hours of the day. Malaysia taught me to listen for cues outside myself: the azan floating from mosques, the hum of morning markets, the certainty of the sun rising strong and early.
I had a strange sort of conversation with my mother one morning in the mid-Sixties. I didn’t realise at the time that reincarnation was what it was about. I was four. Maybe five. I hadn’t yet started school. My three older siblings had gone off to school that morning. I don’t remember where my younger sister, the newest baby, was. My two youngest siblings hadn’t yet been born.
You grew up in the Northwest Donegal Gaeltacht speaking Gaeilge as your first language. Are there words that hold a special resonance for you?
Four years ago, four years today, actually, as I finish putting the last few sentences of this piece, whatever it's fully trying or wanting to be, through their final tuning, my mother died, in the early morning hours of mid-October, the 13th, following a fairly brutal two-year battle with cancer; a relief, I suppose, in the end, though it still doesn't feel so.