E.G.

I'm listening to Ethel Cain's Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. I am thinking about Ethel Cain's interest, in much of her work, in the uses of Christianity by ordinary people who think of themselves as sinners. And this makes me think about Sinead O'Connor, who is among the artists I appreciate. So, here's my take on Sinead O'Connor.

***

I think she felt that she had been abused by the Catholic Church. Not just by individuals who happened to be Catholics, but by the Church itself. In her autobiography, she writes:

My intention had always been to destroy my mother’s photo of the pope. It represented lies and liars and abuse. The type of people who kept these things were devils like my mother. I never knew when or where or how I would destroy it, but destroy it I would when the right moment came.

Her mother abused her, so it was her mother's photo of the pope that she destroyed in front of everyone in her infamous appearance on Saturday Night Live. But her mother didn't act alone. She acted under the influence and guidance of the Catholic Church. I think Sinead thought the Church abused her through her mother. And this, I think, is why it was a photo of the pope, and not any other possession of her mother's, that she publicly destroyed.

***

And I think her way of responding to the abuse she suffered was not to reject the Church, but to turn it into an artwork of her own making.

She treated the Church like a piece of driftwood you'd put on your mantel. In relocating driftwood from the beach to your mantel, you make it into an artwork: what's called found art. You thereby make it yours, and assert control over it. You can do this to a piece of driftwood without making any alterations to it. My view is that Sinead O'Connor did something like this to the Church itself.

Of course, you can't put a Church on your mantel. So instead she did other things with and to the Church. For example, she made songs out of rearranged lines of scripture:

The way I worked was that I laid down on the floor huge pieces of paper, and I wrote down all of the lines that I loved that were in the Scriptures and decided to put them together and not change them but make them rhyme where I could. And there are some beautiful songs already written by God in the Scriptures.

She says in her autobiography that she wanted to be buried with a copy of that album. I don't know whether she was, though.

And she became a priest. She said: "We're all born priests." 

***

As her life and work evolved, she was drawn to religious traditions beyond Christianity. She became a Rastafarian, and then a Muslim. And she was buried as a Muslim in a Catholic cemetery.

My overall feeling about her is that she exhibits an intensifying pattern of appropriative freedom throughout her life. She admired and respected other people's traditions and experiences, but also regarded them as generally available for her own free use. She kept whatever she wanted and discarded whatever she didn't want.

This comment about Muhammed Ali (from her autobiography) seems illustrative:

I loved him, as I’m sure all child-abuse survivors did, because we had similar self-esteem issues as African-American people had. We got there in a different way, but nevertheless, we were in a form of slavery, with a small s.

Personally, I'd be very hesitant to use the experience of American slavery in order to say anything about myself. Sinead shows no such hesitation.

The case of Sinead O'Connor might present interesting issues related to the transracialism controversy. Sinead claimed a lot of identities for herself that she knew others would perceive as inauthentic, confused, or mistaken—and perhaps in fact were inauthentic, confused, or mistaken. But I for one don't think there was anything wrong with the things she did and said, and I put a high value on what she created. Then again, I've also never been entirely sure why Rachel Dolezal deserved all the trouble she got.