Clodagh Finn: Hitting a high note for ordinary women

When her husband gave up his pillaging ways, she teamed up with Captain ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham and gained a fearsome reputation as the ‘pirate queen’ of the Caribbean. The myth-makers have had a field day with the story, embroidering much fanciful detail into a real but threadbare story.

There are some solid facts, though. We know for certain that Captain Rackham and his crew — including Anne and British woman Mary Read — were arrested and put on trial for piracy in Jamaica in 1720.

We have this insight from an eyewitness at the trial. Both women were disguised in men’s clothing and they were armed with a pistol and a machete. Anne, as one of the ship’s last defenders, fought till the bitter end. When the women appeared in court, they were “very profligate, cursing and swearing much”.

Bold and brash

All the men were sentenced to death and hanged a few days later, but Anne and Mary avoided the hangman’s noose because they were pregnant.

The unfortunate Mary Read died in jail. There are many versions of what happened to Anne, including a claim that she moved to South Carolina, married (again) and had eight (some maintain ten) children.

Who knows, but Anne Bonny is back in the news. She is the subject of Nuala O’Connor’s new book Seaborne, due out next month, and she provides the inspiration for Fiona Kennedy’s song Gráinne Mhaol (Grace O’Malley), which also recalls the more famous pirate queen from Westport, Co Mayo.

What is particularly striking about Fiona Kennedy’s beautiful song is that it moves beyond the idea that the only women we celebrate in history are the bold and the brash ones.

The song’s second verse is about an elderly woman who is desperately trying to stay in her own home in the face of attempts to move her to a rest home.

“For all of us, and particularly for women, when we reach old age, people can forget about how strong, independent and free we were when we were young. I like to think that a drop of the blood of these female warriors might still run in the veins of Irish women,” she says.

She also makes the overlooked point that those female warriors were women too, with the concerns and issues facing all women.

If there is something of the everyday in the exceptional, the opposite is also true: expect to find something extraordinary in the lives of ordinary women.

Home truths

Take Fiona Kennedy’s own mother, for example. Aileen Kennedy, of St Luke’s in Cork city, was a self-taught gardener so respected that she once featured on Gerry Daly’s gardening show on RTÉ television.

She always wanted to go to university too, but as a mother of five didn’t get the chance until she was in her 60s. Then, she enrolled in University College Cork and qualified with a diploma in sociology. She also learned to drive in her 60s and would take off in her automatic Mini in search of exotic plants.

Her daughter will now sing her mother into public memory, along with all the other ‘ordinary’ women who have inspired her. There’s a special nod to the invaluable work done by her mother’s carers, for instance, who made it possible for Aileen Kennedy to stay in her own home until she died in her nineties.

All of those celebrated in Natural Woman are women who just got on with it without “fuss or furore”, as Fiona puts it.

They include American singer-songwriters Janis Joplin and Carole King, Irish writer Dervla Murphy, the late, great campaigner Vicky Phelan, aid worker Mary Elmes, Cork Penny Dinners coordinator Caitríona Twomey and long-time campaigner against sexual violence, Mary Crilly.

The song about Caitríona Twomey is called Get Through the Day: “For a lot of people just getting through the day is a huge achievement,” says Fiona.

The piece of music commemorating Mary Crilly’s tireless work over four decades is called That’s Not Love: “She shone a light on coercive control and shifted the blame for sexual violence from the victim. If it hurts, it’s not love,” the singer-songwriter explains.

Then she does something that takes my breath away. Fiona Kennedy puts the phone on speaker, grabs her guitar and sings a few verses of We Will Dance. It’s a rousing Spanish-inflected tribute to the Roma troupe that came out of the caves of Almería to dance for Corkwoman Mary Elmes and her fellow volunteers during the Spanish Civil War.

Extraordinary ordinary women

It’s particularly moving as the song is based on a passage I wrote in A Time to Risk All, a biography of Mary Elmes. I remember being very taken by an account of the young women who came during siesta one day to dance for the “English señoritas” at the hospital they had established in Almería in Spain.

Into the chaos of war with its air-raid sirens and the screams of terrified children, six teenage girls, with their black eyes flashing and billowing skirts, swept out of the rock caves to dance with grace and beauty as they kept time with their hand-castanets.

The women they danced for were so charmed that they described the experience in words. In turn, those words have travelled through several decades to be interpreted in song in a show that runs at the Cork Arts Theatre next week.

It’s a powerful illustration of how the lives and the extraordinary actions of ordinary women can resonate through time. Now, those women will be preserved for ever in a song, the ultimate memory capsule and one which can whisk around the world in a beat.

It might be too soon to talk of a world tour, but Fiona Kennedy hopes Natural Woman, with Billy Kennedy (no relation) on guitar, Paul Seymour on keyboard and Ethel Crowley reading narratives, will tour Ireland. Let’s hope it does because this is a brilliant and uplifting way of inscribing the stories of women, in all their glory, into the collective consciousness.

• In the meantime, the show runs at the Cork Arts Theatre on Thursday (sold out) and Saturday, 30 March.