‘Something adequate’? In memoriam Seamus Heaney,Sister Quinlan,Nirbhaya

Abstract

Seamus Heaney talked of poetry's responsibility to represent the ‘bloody miracle’, the ‘terrible beauty’ of atrocity; to create ‘something adequate’. This article asks, what is adequate to the burning and eating of a nun and the murderous gang rape and evisceration of a medical student? It considers Njabulo Ndebele's answer: the retelling of the story in the service of ‘love and politics’, and that of the South African playwright, Yael Farber, who workshopped and then performed experiences of terrible, disfiguring violence against women. It asks what Humanities disciplinary writing would be ‘something adequate’: something that raises ‘critical consciousness’ in the terms Heaney claimed in his Nobel Lecture ‘Crediting Poetry’, that illuminates and appreciates rather than contributes to an anaesthetising ‘culture of suspicion’, that re-presents adequate – discipline-specific, singular, particular, poetic – truth.