Coercive Confinement and Irish Languages: Ó Cadhain, Behan, Heaney, Okorie

This article explores the consequences that the conditions of incarceration have on the linguistic make-up of literary texts that result from or reflect on them. Due to the island’s colonial history, Ireland has a rich canon of confinement literature, but – largely as a result of this very same history – these literary works have often been studied through a binary cultural lens, reinforcing what Declan Kiberd has termed the ‘quarantine’ of Ireland’s literatures, with English kept on one side of the language fence, Irish on the other. Drawing on Ian O’Donnell and Eoin O’Sullivan’s concept of ‘coercive confinement’ in order to include carceral institutions outside the formal criminal justice system, this article examines four case studies in which Irish writers cross the borders of language quarantine when writing about coercive confinement, focusing on selected works by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Brendan Behan, Seamus Heaney and Melatu Uche Okorie. Just as the conditions of confinement that gave rise to these works differ widely, so too do the literary strategies employed to represent or respond to these situations of incarceration. While Ireland’s literary languages have historically existed in quarantine, we hope to show that this linguistic confinement is often breached by Irish writers responding to actual instances of imprisonment. Keywords: coercive confinement; language; internment; prison; borstal; direct provision; heteroglossia; translation