Peig Sayers

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Peig Sayers (1873 - 1958) was an Irish author.

[edit] Life

Peig Sayers was born in Dunquin (Dún Chaoin), a small town in County Kerry, Ireland. She moved to the Blasket Islands after marrying Pádraig Ó Gaoithín, a native of the island. Peig was illiterate, but dictated many of her stories to Seosamh Ó Dálaigh of the Irish Folklore Commission. Peig Sayers continued to live on the island until 1953, when the island was abandoned due to declining population. She was moved to a hospital in Dingle, Co. Kerry where she died in 1958. She is buried in the Dunquin Burial Ground, Dingle Peninsula, Ireland.

[edit] Peig

Sayers is most famous for her autobiography, Peig, ISBN 0-8156-0258-8, which she dictated to her son Micheál. Published in 1936, Peig is perhaps the most famous expression of a late Gaelic Revival genre of personal histories by and about inhabitants of the Blasket Islands and other remote Irish locations. Tómas Ó Criomhthain's autobiography An tOileannach ("The Islander", 1929) and Robert J. Flaherty's documentary Man of Aran address similar subjects. The movement swiftly found itself the object of some derision and mockery -- especially among the more cosmopolitan city dwellers of Ireland -- for its seemingly relentless depictions of rural hardship. Parody of the type reached its zenith with Dubliner Flann O'Brien's merciless reinterpretation of An tOileannach' as An Béal Bocht ("The Poor Mouth").

Peig depicts the declining years of a traditional, Irish-speaking way of life characterised by poverty, piety, and folk memory of the Famine and the Penal Laws. The often bleak tone of the book is established from its opening words:

I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge. I have experienced much ease and much hardship from the day I was born until this very day. Had I known in advance half, or even one-third, of what the future had in store for me, my heart wouldn't have been as gay or as courageous it was in the beginning of my days.

The book is well known to anyone who studied the Irish language for the Leaving Certificate examination. Studying Peig in Irish (Gaelic) was mandatory for the vast majority of Irish secondary school students for generations and the book is most closely associated with that experience today, to the point of overshadowing the book's intrinsic importance as a historical and cultural document.