“To Pick Up the Unsaid, and Perhaps Unknown, Wishes”: Reimagining the “True Stories” of the Past in Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky

Abstract

This chapter approaches Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky as an imaginative retrieval of a silenced and untold episode of the Irish Famine and looks at the novel as a text that not only translates the past into the present (since it bestows visibility on an unspoken historical event) but also perceptively foregrounds connections between translation, mobility and memory. The chapter suggests that Not the Same Sky functions itself as a “memory site” and, thus, becomes an astute reflection on the complexities attached to events and discourses concerned with the cultural reconstruction of knowledge. In this respect, the chapter argues that Conlon’s novel lends itself to be analysed as an inquiry into the concept of translation and the unsolved ethical dilemmas attached to the debate on voice and voicing which often accompany translational acts.

Silence has been considered one of the greatest legacies of the Irish Famine. The idea that the events of the 1840s have been obscured by silence has been prevalent in critical work since Terry Eagleton famously questioned in his book Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (1995): “Where is the famine in the literature of the Revival. Where is it in Joyce?” (13). In this pioneer study, Eagleton highlights the existence of what he refers to as “this wary silence” (12), a “traumatized” form of “muteness” (13) in relation to what “strains at the limits of the articulable” (13). A few years later, in his introductory essay “An Interpretation of Silences” for the 1997 Eire/Ireland special issue on the Famine, Peter Quinn similarly regrets that “at this late date we are still trying to fill in the blanks so that we might grasp the enormity of the event” (8). He significantly invokes the words of anthropologist Joan Vincent in her speech at the May 1997 Great Famine Commemoration at Dublin Castle: “a great deal of my perception of that Great Irish Famine of one hundred and fifty years ago has to be based on the interpretation of silences, on what did not happen, and on what one does not know, but needs to know” (cited in Quinn 8; emphasis mine).

In the same year, in her groundbreaking The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (1997), scholar Margaret Kelleher astutely suggested that although the extent of such a silence runs the risk of being overstated,¹ in the specific context of famine literature, where “references to the impossibility of communication were frequently a rhetorical tool” (4), one encounters “the sense of ‘an unspeakable’ and the ‘unspoken’, that which needs to be spoken, remembered and retold” (7). Thus, Kelleher argues, “famine narratives encourage their readers to imagine what the experience of the famine may have been like, exposing the gaps left by historical record” (5). In a similar vein, in her Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument (2013), a book that provides a nuanced examination of visual representations of the famine across Ireland and the nations of its diaspora, Emily Mark-FitzGerald problematizes the notion of memory and argues that “the horrors and shame associated with the Famine period relegated its representation to the margins of Irish history and remembrance” (1). She identifies a “traumatic” impact on Irish society, in connection with an emphasis on the “Famine’s unspeakability” (3) and significantly remarks that, among the variety of values assigned to famine memory, there is “a shameful incidence of ‘silence’ to be corrected by present generations” (8).

If the issue of silence and repression, the existence of an unspeakable or inexpressible reality, has traditionally been a major concern among famine studies scholars, more recently attention has been paid, specifically, to how women have remained underrepresented in the history and historiography of the Great Hunger. In this respect, in the introduction to their Women and The Great Hunger (2016), editors Christine Kinealy, Jason King and Ciarán Reilly emphasize their commitment to correcting absences in exploring the role of women since, as they claim, “despite some attempts to write women into Irish History, the historiography remains sparse” (9). They remark that, in its emphasis on women’s agency and interpretations which have largely been invisible, the volume aims to recover women’s voices about the Great Hunger in order to shed light on how women experienced and shaped the tragedy. Overall, they explain, the collected essays aspire “to retell history” (13) in particular in the area of famine studies where women have remained largely absent from the narrative.

In its retrieval of women’s voices, Women and The Great Hunger represents a multidisciplinary approach and gathers the work of a large diversity of authors with different theoretical and methodological perspectives who ultimately want to do justice to those most directly affected, the most vulnerable and destitute female victims who did not have a choice, let alone a voice. This is, for example, the case of the chapter by Rebeca Abbot on “The Earl Grey Orphan Scheme, 1848–1850, and the Irish diaspora in Australia”, which explores the story of the more than 4000 orphan young women who took part in the Earl Grey Emigration Scheme to Australia.² Through interviews with their descendants, Abbot explains that she hopes to provide a degree of insight into the lives of some of the Earl Grey Girls who survived the Great Hunger:

Their survival required them to leave the only life they had known in Ireland and to settle in a new and very different land, thousands of miles from home. Within Australia, these women are now honored for their bravery, their fortitude, and for their contributions to shaping the country. Their stories reinforce the diverse experience of famine women, not only in Ireland, but in other parts of the world. (2016, 209)

Telling the untold stories of the Irish Famine Orphan Girls, who were shipped to Australia between 1848 and 1850, through the imaginative retrieval of their suppressed voices becomes precisely the subject of Evelyn Conlon’s 2013 novel Not the Same Sky. Conlon, who has been widely anthologized and translated, has published four collections of short stories, My Head Is Opening (1987), Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour (1993), Telling: New and Selected Short Stories (2000) and Moving About the Place (2021) and three other novels, Stars in the Daytime (1989), A Glassful of Letters (1998) Skin of Dreams (2003), before Not the Same Sky (2013). She has also edited Later On: The Monaghan Bombing Memorial Anthology (2004). Conlon has herself acknowledged the inextricable connection between her writing and her political consciousness: “I don’t think you can be a ‘feminist’ writer, I think you’re a writer. I am a writer who is a feminist. And, my feminist consciousness affects the sort of things I enjoy writing about” (Moloney 2003, 29). Significantly, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing³ Clair Wills introduces her work in connection with the tradition of “subversive writing” represented by authors like Edna O’Brien and other Irish women writers who have long been “challenging customs and prejudice, and telling subversive truths” (2002, 1125).

Whereas most of Conlon’s fiction to date has been characterized by a continuous exploration of how the ordinary lives of ordinary women are affected by the pervasive predominance of patriarchal mythologies and discourses, more recently the writer has turned to history and has dealt with the recovery of female voices which had remained silenced in male-centred versions of the past. This is the case of “Dear You” (2013), a short story based on the life and deeds of Violet Gibson, the Irishwoman who shot Benito Mussolini on April 7, 1926. To save himself from the embarrassment of having to expose publicly the fact that he had almost been killed by a woman, Mussolini managed to keep the attempt on his life out of the media, and Gibson, initially sent to jail for a year and later declared insane, was finally confined to a mental institution in Northampton for the rest of her life. Conlon followed Gibson’s journey through Italy and England and learned that the letters she wrote explaining her reasons to shoot Mussolini were never posted. Thus, with “Dear You” Conlon provides an imaginative recovery of one of Gibson’s letters and transforms a story of invisibility, exclusion and repression into a challenging and self-affirming counter-narrative. Drawing on her own feminist consciousness, and informed by her commitment to breaking silences and demanding that women’s voices be heard, Conlon writes a story that is meant to be an act of restitution. As has been remarked:

It is not by chance that Conlon chose to first publish the story in Italy at the same time as its Italian translation, each English page facing its Italian version. In such a way Violet Gibson re-enters Italian culture and historiography, as well as individual readers’ imaginations and emotions, through translated literature. (Bollettieri Bosinelli and Torresi 2016, 6)

As I have argued elsewhere, the reference to letters as containers of buried stories, secrets kept for a long time, dead revelations awaiting to be brought to life, conform to a recurrent motif in Conlon’s fiction (Caneda-Cabrera 2023). Significantly, in some cases her writing lends itself to be examined as a form of motion and migration or rather a “transmigration” (Cutter 2005), a concept I borrow from translation studies and which, I suggest, can be seen as “a trope for the relocation of pre-existing texts within a new context in which a disenfranchised discourse and a silenced story are not only re-appropriated and foregrounded but made to occupy a hegemonic position” (Caneda-Cabrera 2023, 57). The desire to break the silence and to know the truth about a historical event which has been untalked about becomes obvious in Not the Same Sky (2013). Conlon’s latest novel is fundamentally a book about women, journeys and letters⁴ in which the writer ironically and playfully addresses the intricate relations between history and memory as she reimagines the past and rescues the silenced stories of the forgotten young famine women migrants from the margins of history and from the amnesia of collective public memory. As has been noted:

Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky (2013) addresses a lacuna in narratives of the Great Famine (…) Given the relative paucity of writing about the famine, it represents an unusual intervention in terms of both the underrepresented histories of Irish women migrants and larger cultural anxieties about representing the famine years. (McWilliams 2018, 421)

In this respect, Marguerite Corporaal and Jason King have discussed how, although young women were among the largest group of Irish immigrants to Australia, “the public remembrance of these female migrants was long overshadowed by Irish political exiles and Young Ireland leaders transported during the Famine and after the failed 1848 rebellion” (Corporaal and King 2014, 303). Likewise, these two scholars have remarked that, together with Jaki McCarrick’s play Belfast Girls (2012) and Fiona Quinn’s youth theatre production The Voyage of the Orphans (2009), Not the Same Sky is a work which has enhanced the relevance of the girls “as figures of remembrance in recent years” (Corporaal and King, 304).

Not the Same Sky concerns the voyage of a specific group of girls who left England on October 28, 1849, on the Thomas Arbuthnot under the care of Surgeon Superintendent Charles Strutt. The novel’s first thirty chapters focus mainly on the characters of Honora, Julia, Bridget and Anne (and on Charles Strutt himself) and deliver a rigorously detailed and deeply humanized account of their voyage and of their subsequent arrival in Australia; a short prologue and the final five chapters provide a contemporary frame for the main narrative body of the novel, a present-day story of a sculptor of headstones, Joy Kennedy, who has been commissioned to help carve a memorial to the Irish Orphan Girls in Sydney. Joy’s own dilemmas as she struggles to “scrape out a memorial for their dead” (208) further emphasizes the theme of memory (and representation) as a theme “closely linked in the novel to the concept of the journey –actual, physical journeys and those that take place inside the mind, as well as the relationship between them” (Pelan 2013, 191).

Conlon, who reveals in her acknowledgements that this novel, “which started with a personal ‘hungry grass’⁵ moment in Gundagai in 1973, is based on the true story of the Irish Famine Orphan Girls, who were shipped to Australia between 1848 and 1850” (254, emphasis mine), has herself referred to the silence surrounding the story of the girls in eloquent terms:

So they fascinated me for two reasons: one, the thought of them and their journey, and two, that so few people had examined it. And I began to think to myself, “Did they not examine it because they were girls?” But I now think it’s more than that. I think that when the girls got to a certain point, where they could organize their lives in some way, they had to leave their pasts absolutely behind, because there was no possibility of them ever being able to recollect at ease. How they got to where they were was way too crazy for gentle reminiscing. That is why I got into the whole thing about memory because I feel that they dug a hole and put their memories in it. (Conlon 2017, 213)

In the pages that follow I shall discuss Not the Same Sky, a novel which invokes the silenced voices of the Irish Famine Orphan Girls through an imaginative act of memory on the writer’s part, an exceptional example of the notion of writing as “transmigration” which functions itself as a (contradictory) memory site. As mentioned earlier, the concept of “transmigration” has been used in translation studies as a trope for the relocation of pre-existing texts within a new context to foreground how texts, discourses and ideas are displaced and reinvoiced. Thus, I will argue that Conlon’s novel, on the one hand, is a “retrospective textual creation” (Morash 1995, 6), as a famine narrative concerned with issues of language and representation and, on the other hand, a travel narrative defined by displacement and dislocation in the larger context of transcontinental voyages and colonial mobility, not only enacts the concept of transmigration but also, furthermore, engages with translation issues in extremely significant (political) ways. Carmen Zamorano Llena has aptly contended that Not the Same Sky is not only concerned with “the intertwining of memory, trauma and silence” but places a special emphasis on “transnational, transhistorical interconnections and their relevance to present globalised Ireland” (2020, 182–183). In this respect, alongside these “transnational and transhistorical connections” I propose to draw attention to the relevance of the “translational” in a novel about travel and migration which invites a nuanced reflection on the nature and function of memory and memorialization and, like translation itself, significantly asks questions about the ethics of language and representation.

As Loredana Polezzi (2006) has discussed in depth, over the past two decades, increased attention has been paid to travel writing and translation and significant links have been drawn between the two as textual and cultural practices, under the aegis of mobility and transfer, specifically in the context of postcolonial studies and diaspora studies.⁶ Migration, travel, interactions, exchanges and networks have become key concepts which have encouraged the reflection on transnational flows of ideas, practices and people through the prism of translation.⁷ Speaking about the connected nature of travel and translation, Polezzi reminds us of their shared etymological roots (movement, transportation of goods, people and ideas) and, more importantly, of the historical and phenomenological parallels:

the way in which travelers have always relied on interpreters, as well as acting as intermediaries in its own right; the need experienced by both translators and travelers to relay the new through the known, the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar; the ultimate unreliability of those who travel and those who translate; their potential to deceive, confound and betray, as well as to act as reliable guides, mediators and witnesses. (171)

The reflection on how both travel writing and translation, far from being neutral or transparent, are forms of mediation and representation which raise fundamental questions about voice (who speaks and for whom), becomes extremely relevant for the examination of a novel like Not the Same Sky. As I will discuss, both as a famine narrative which bestows visibility on an event that has remained largely neglected and unspoken and, simultaneously, a travel narrative defined by displacement and dislocation in the larger context of transcontinental voyages and colonial mobility, Conlon’s novel calls for an awareness of the strategic way in which translation may be used in critical discussions of cultural practices and literary texts which involve an overall reflection on issues of, on the one hand, displacement and, on the other, representation and cultural (re)construction of knowledge. Likewise, as will be explained, when explored from within a theoretical framework informed by translation, Conlon’s Not the Same Sky strongly resonates with concerns that are essential in debates over translation and migration.

In this sense, the novel first draws attention to translation issues when the narrative invokes the painful (linguistic) estrangement and alienation which foregrounds the vulnerability of the Irish Orphan Girls, picked up and sent to a British colony as a source of cheap domestic labour:

Honora looked at the crowd of girls at the quay. She knew there was a house and a mother and a father and may be sisters and brothers behind all of them. But in the past only (…) First there were the noises. It was hard to separate them. There was a lot of shouting although Honora couldn’t be sure if it was all in English –it could have been, but shouted in a different accent. Her teacher had explained all that when he had taught them English. He had even told them their language had different accents depending on what part of the country it was spoken. (…)

But, would still be the same language? (…)

So Honora listened, gathered the sounds from the wind hoping to recognize something. But nothing was familiar (…) she was caught here between time and language. (35–36)

Read in the context of the British colonial project, the passage above highlights the complex nature of power relations as it eloquently speaks of silences that are the result of the violent and unilateral assimilation which reduces the (original) subject to an accessible (translated) object of consumption; in other words, a form of hostile translation that ultimately speaks of asymmetries, accomplices and voiceless victims.⁸ Subjected to enforced migration and relocation outside their place of origin for the sake of profit, the Irish Famine Orphan Girls, unable to speak up, become the translated protagonists of a narrative written in the imperial language:

It was impossible for Charles to decide whether it was the disruptions or the issue of language that made them stare at him sometimes, as if they had no idea what he was talking about (…) most of them had more than the rudiments of English –that had been taken into account in their selection (…) Others of them had only the basics of schooling and some had a strange grasp of English. Or was it the other way about? Or was that it at all?” (55, 61, 62)

It is thus, how their journey becomes in itself a border that splits their lives into that which existed before in Ireland and that which is happening after in Australia:

On the first morning of Honora Raftery’s new life she was awoken by strange noises (…) She tried to think of her father and her mother (…) They had not known the smells or the colours out here, or even had to live in a sustained manner in the language that was now making itself heard from the kitchen and the yard. (112)

When Charles Strutt hears “one of the older girls shouting out to the sea (…) hollering so loudly that the words could be heard perfectly” (85), he requests that “this noise” (86) must stop immediately. Unable to identify the meaning of the keening⁹—“It is only a ‘caoineadh,’ (…) A lament. It won’t do you any harm” (86)—Strutt is puzzled by the “gutturals” of what he perceives as “the most ferocious howling” and “a terrible sound” which strikes him as a helpless act that expresses “the erasure of hope” (86). His ignorance of this practice of mourning for the dead makes him feel momentarily displaced, “suddenly aware he was an outsider” (86); threatened by the foreignness and the impropriety of what he is unable to understand—“The tone was eerie, poignant and frightening at the same time” (86)—he warns the girls: “there would be no pudding if this noise did not cease immediately” (86).

By foregrounding precisely the experiences of estrangement, disorientation and loss, pervasively invoked by translation scholars who have reflected on the affective cost of displacement in colonial contexts (Cronin 2000b, 48), Conlon’s novel perceptively articulates a complex narrative which functions as an indictment of a silenced and dark episode of human trafficking in Irish/British history. In this respect, the novel lends itself to be read as a dramatization of what happens when a language and the human group that speaks it come under intense pressures from another language and another human group¹⁰; in these circumstances, translation does not propitiate a hospitable meeting ground or a balanced encounter, but functions instead as an expression of hostility, a clash which brings about the experiences of dislocation, dispossession and displacement as the ones of the Irish Orphan Girls:

After the leaving was done, there was England. The strange smells of the port, all those other girls, some who knew one or two others, but most who knew no one (…) nothing was the same. The language was a little like the English she had learned at home, and a little more like what she had learned on the ship. But so much was not the same. The potatoes all seem flavourless—the ones at home had not been like that, before they died that is. The first part of forgetting was to think of this new place as home. Yass as home. She said it to herself, felt the strangeness of it. But it would have to do. (141)

As I have been intimating, Conlon’s narrative complicates (and politicizes) assumptions regarding the key concept of translation equivalence in a novel that lends itself to be read against the background of imperial/colonial translation. In opposition to forms of translation that allow for the negotiation of sameness within difference, “to produce something that is other than the self, but where the self can be recognized” (Cronin 2000b, 45), Not the Same Sky repeatedly highlights the fact that “so much was not the same” for the girls; not the same stars, not the same birds, not the same potatoes and not the same language. Thus, the text reinforces the painful locational and ontological disrupture attached to their voyage, a disrupture which, ironically, the title of the novel, Not the Same Sky, already announces.

As mentioned, the story is told from the various points of view of the characters of Honora, Julia, Bridget and Anne, and also to a large extent from that of Superintendent Charles Strutt himself, the colonial administrator concerned with the task of “transporting” the girls safely from one side of the world to the other. Ironically, as we discover early in the novel, Strutt has trained as surgeon and is also a translator:

In Charles Strutt’s mind, it was important to manage the girls in such a way that they did not know they were being managed (…) He would not yet try to remember all their names, there were far too many of them, and too many that were similar (…) Charles, with his understanding of translation, was doubly conscious of the minefield of naming. Didn’t he spend hours searching for the correct word? Translation was like a ship really, smooth sailing, through leagues or miles of water at the speed of knots, with the danger to follow the presumption of such calm. (48)

In the context of my previous reflections, Strutt’s concern with “managing” the girls calls attention to the way in which in certain circumstances, like those of the vulnerable and dependent migrant orphans, translation (which always involves speaking for others) may function as a form of support and simultaneously as a means of control. In his role as mediator, both protective and restrictive, the superintendent offers the girls a voice but, at the same time, insists on controlling who does the speaking:

In each group he would decide on one girl to speak for them. Of course the groups would be arbitrary, existing only in his mind to help with the smooth running of things. That core person might have to change, as responsibility turned some into tyrants while others flourished when given it. That was why he would not inform any girl of where he was placing her on the ladder in his mind –he might have to alter the place she held. (48)

Thus, it is tempting to interpret Strutt’s concern with maintaining his authority by exercising his control over the girls’ voices in the larger context of discussions on migration and translation which remind us that “Translation takes place not just when words move on their own, but also, and mostly, when people move into new social and linguistic settings” (Polezzi 2012, 348). As has been remarked, migrants may have the opportunity to shift from objects of translation to agents, however, this shift will not alter the balance of power since, ultimately, as in the case of the orphan girls, the power remains with the one who authorizes and enables that agency,¹¹ i.e. Strutt.

Significantly, the image of the ship that Strutt invokes as an intriguing metaphor for translation, “smooth sailing, through leagues or miles of water at the speed of knots, with the danger to follow the presumption of such calm” (48), features in Paul Gilroy’s influential concept of the Black Atlantic as a powerful motif. As has often been remarked, for Gilroy the ships which crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean bear witness to the history of slavery and oppression, but also symbolize the possibility of creating myriad ways of thinking and circulating ideas and cultural and political practices, thus functioning “as a living micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” (Gilroy 1993, 4). In his role as superintendent acting as a cultural mediator, a guide and an educator for his girls—“Not the, nor those but his” (47)—Strutt puts forward the progressive notion of “school on a boat” (54) and uses the three-month voyage to train them for their future in Australian households and to improve their physical condition.

In the general context of exploitation and objectification underlying the voyage of the Irish orphan girls, Strutt’s mediation—“he would feel their days up as best as he could” (46)—becomes a reminder of the ethical role of translation¹²:

He had read stories of some of their predecessors, hauled into open courts by their employers and handed back to the authorities. Humiliated. (…) He would also feed them up and build them up. They would be grateful for their training, it would make their lives better when they got there. And they would be liked better for that. No employer would bring any of them into court to hand them back. (45–47)

However ambivalente and patronizing his position as an intermediary may be (since he is after all committed to the British colonial project) Strutt foregrounds, through his actions and words, the ethical dimension of the encounters and negotiations that define translation in sensitive contexts like the ones of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. When Strutt reads old newspaper articles about the arrival of ships which had preceded his, he finds it hard to cope with the language used to refer to the girls:

The articles before him were mired in a vitriol of a kind his soul found hard to take. They not only showed a lamentable level of sectarian bitterness but also manifested a barefaced hatred of these helpless orphans. How could one have so much hatred for those with so little power? (…) One editor delighted himself by saying that their domestic expertise might stretch so far as to know the inside from outside a potato. He thundered on, picking up new insults with every dip of the pen. He poured scorn on everything about these newly landed girls: their place of origin, their beliefs, their tongues and even their looks. (45–46)

As I have been suggesting, Not the Same Sky, a novel that foregrounds the connection between translation, travel and migration raises fundamental questions about language and representation in the context of relationships of power which draw a clear line between those who are made to remain silent and those who do have a voice. “This is about us”, says one of the girls in amazement upon their arrival in Australia when she discovers that they are being described as “barefoot, little country beggars” in a local newspaper whereas Strutt thinks, outraged, that such words were “altogether unseemly, insulting and untrue” (107). Conlon’s novel highlights the political nature of language and the relevance of translation in migration scenarios. It has been remarked that migrants often suffer social and cultural isolation due to ethnocentric attitudes from individuals, communities or entire nations with language functioning as an active site “where the contours of exclusion and inclusion become most visible” (Inghilleri, 2). Mediators (witnesses, journalists and translators) may choose to shape truths through falsehoods¹³ and, thus, use their potential to deceive, confound and betray or, like Charles Strutt—who “would never go back to not knowing these girls” (51)—they may choose to act as reliable (ethical) guides and speak for the vulnerable silenced others:

Charles passed the church on his way out of Yass, having begun his journey back to Sydney. He foresaw weddings, christenings, and funerals at the end of what he hoped would be good lives. He wished prosperous and kind times for them (…) The Goulburn Herald had a different story now. Good news of his girls were filtering through. (111)

As announced earlier, in Not the Same Sky the historical famine narrative is framed by the present-day story of Joy Kennedy, a sculptor of headstones who has been commissioned to help carve a memorial to the Irish orphans in Sydney. The book opens in Dublin in 2008 with Joy reading a letter from the “friends of the Memorial Committee in Australia”, who write to her because one of the members suggested “it might be both interesting and appropriate to have a mason from Ireland” (2), and closes with her back home, after her epiphanic journey to Australia feeling that the girls “were inside her now” and “she was a different person” (249). Aware of her role as a mediator, “a go-between” because “there’s not always agreement (…) about what should be said” (208), Joy provides numerous reflections on the nature and function of memory and memorialization and, unsurprisingly, it is through this character that Conlon addresses relevant issues of representation, language and ethics which significantly resonate with the concept of translation as representation and cultural (re)construction of knowledge I introduced at the beginning of this chapter.

When Joy visits the Hyde Park Barracks Museum where, together with the convicts, the girls would have had to stand “like exhibits at a fair while prospective employers looked upon them” (238) and sees a sign that proclaims that “many of these women were refugees of the Great Irish Famine”, she thinks to herself: “No, they weren’t. That suggests that they were taking refuge, shelter. They were virtual prisoners, girl slaves” (237). She is angered by the way the museum uses language that banalizes the cruelty of the girls’ experience and by the sanitized and aestheticized display of objects that makes the room—set up with white hammocks instead of beds to resemble a dormitory—seem more like a “sanctuary” (237) instead of an intimidating place for the young frightened girls. Joy’s reactions to the Hyde Park Barracks Museum are but a reminder of how the meaning of the past is constantly reconstructed by “translational practices” through which the uses and purposes of museums, monuments and memorials are revisited. Like translation, a form of transmission and representation which ensures the afterlife of cultural narratives across time and space, the preservation of national heritage and the commemoration of the historical past, are processes through which objects and memories are selected, salvaged, preserved and re-contextualized for different generations.¹⁴ Just as translations reconstitute a sense of meaning which once inhabited a previous text, the memorial that Joy will help carve will necessarily be reconstituted by her present historical consciousness.

Much has been written about the transferability of memory which, as memory and famine scholars have remarked is “inherently fluid and transportable” and “changes with each actualization, continually and dynamically” (Corporaal 2017, 1). In her Women and the Irish Diaspora (2004), Breda Gray refers to the relevance of commemoration as “an important site for the staging of continuity at a time of rapid social change in Ireland” (33) within her broader reflection on the diaspora as a trope for a more inclusive Irish identity. Gray’s perceptive discussion of how the commemoration of the Famine in many sites and contexts may bear different implications, both as a tribute to continuity and change as it “channels the present through the past” (34), aptly conveys Conlon’s concern with the theme of translating the past in Not the Same Sky.

Specifically in the context of famine memorials, Richard Kearney has eloquently written about the way in which memories are transformed in each act of recall as they are brought into new social and political contexts: “an art of transference and translation which allows us to welcome the story of the other, the stranger, the victim, the forgotten one” (15). In a similar vein, in her incisive study of famine monuments, Mark-FitzGerald reflects on how the trope of silence pervades the narrative against which many “memorial builders measured their own historical moment” (118). She discusses the materiality of the monument, “its concreteness, permanence, physicality” in relation to its being an act of resistance to forgetting—“a legacy and witness to the duty of care assumed by the present generation, projected into the present and presumed future” (118)—and significantly concludes that the transnational commemoration of the Famine “compels a redefinition of Famine memory from a distinct and recoverable ‘thing’ or set of beliefs, towards an understanding of it as an unfolding series of process and positions” (277).

In Conlon’s novel, Joy reflects on her job as a way of helping her customers “deciding what to remember and what to forget” and thinks to herself that “she’d become good at this, her ears picking up the unsaid, and perhaps unknown, wishes” (207) yet, confronted with the idea of the orphan girls memorial in Australia, she finally becomes hesitant and confused—“She was in two minds about the whole thing”(246)—and cannot avoid but wondering about the meaning of it for the present: “I don’t know what memorials are for now. Why pick one thing and not another” (249). Ironically, the task of the Irish stonemason excavating the past in order to carve something for the present echoes Conlon’s own task as an Irish writer “translating” (in the purest etymological sense) this famine narrative, as if she were removing the “relics”¹⁵ of the Irish Famine Orphan Girls from historical neglect and forgetfulness. As announced in the introduction to this chapter, Not the Same Sky functions as a form of “transmigration”, a narrative that relocates and reinvoices the silenced stories of the girls through the writer’s imaginative retrieval. Joy’s conundrum—“Why pick one thing and not another?”—as she struggles to recover the memory of the girls whose stories she is “unable to forget (…) no matter how she tried to see them merely as passengers from one place to another” (213) highlights the difficulties that those who undertake the task of translating the past will encounter.

In a recent essay on Not the Same Sky, Margaret Kelleher claims that “in the opening chapters of her novel, Conlon foregrounds the limitations of any narrative effort –including her own– to represent an historical event of such immensity as the Great Irish Famine” and further explains that “Conlon subtly introduces unsettling historiographical questions: what’s ‘now known’ about the Great Irish Famine; how we know it; what’s not known” (Kelleher 2023, 119). Certainly, as discussed, Not the Same Sky raises questions about the practices and forms of commemoration—“It depends on what memorials are for” (240)—and simultaneously gestures towards the possibility of a transmission that must shift the focus from the past to the future: “someone has to tend to memory, and keep both the dark and light parts nurtured in some way, so they’re there when needed” (224). In the context of his own reflections on the purpose of memorials, Kearney has himself claimed that “the goal of memorials is to try to give a future to the past by remembering it in the right way, ethically and poetically” (16) and has, likewise, argued for the need to “‘translate’ the past in a wise way (…) for only in that way can history be retrieved as a laboratory of still unexplored possibilities rather than a mausoleum of facts” (18).

In Not the Same Sky, Conlon has Joy reflecting on how, although the facts are “easy to find out”, the interpretation of those facts becomes a much more complicated business: “And can we agree on tenor so many years later? Does language not change? (…) Who could interpret the emotions and who owned them” (247). Joy’s questions about how to translate the past ironically echo the task of the translator and powerfully invoke Conlon’s own predicament as a mediator committed to an imaginative and critical retrieval that may “unlock the potencies and expectancies which the subsequent unfolding of history may have forgotten or travestied” (Kearney 16). As a writer reimagining the true stories of the past “in the right way” (Kearney 18), Conlon effectively gives the orphan girls a voice but, as she has herself indicated, “I wanted the novel to leave us with no answers, because how could we round off the notion of these lives?” (Conlon 2017, 216). Ultimately, the reading of Not the Same Sky as an inquiry into the concept of translation and the practices that go with it evokes not only the ethical dilemmas in the debate on voice and voicing. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that Conlon has produced an insightful novel that functions itself as a memory site and as such it exposes gaps and corrects silences but also leaves readers with as many certainties as contradictions:

‘It depends on what memorials are for. Are they to let us know? To make us accept? Or are they to make us weep?’

‘All three, I suppose.’

‘I’m not sure.’ (240)