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sinead oconnor
Sinéad: The True Believer Goes Home
Real artists are subversive. They come to undermine, not reform, the social and spiritual order of the world.
Jul 31, 2023
She was a tree that dripped blood. The audience sat in her shade and called her a freak, a mutant, a mistake, even as the warm rain refreshed them.
She was a tree whose fruit was grief made flesh. The public mocked the spectacle even as they ate the fruit.
She was the ghost mother of Asian mythology who forever mourns her child, but the forests she haunted were inside her.
She was the ghost child, the frail form looking through the frosted window.
She was the exposed nerve ending that reminds everyone — those people whose nerves are sheathed and whose smiles shine like armor — that electrical storms still burn inside them.
They loved her for it, and they hated her for it.
This was Sinéad O’Connor. So was her voice, pale and yet insistent, singing:
It will not be long, love, til our wedding day …
That’s from “She Moved Through the Fair,” an Irish folk song that deserves our attention. The singer meets her loved one, first at a fair and then at night, possibly in a dream. The beloved moves slowly and softly. “He went his way homeward/with one eye awake,” the song says, “like a swan in the evening moves over the lake.”
Here’s the twist: her lover is a ghost, and everybody who hears the song knows he’s a ghost.But the song never actually says that. We just know. It’s an unspoken consensus, a ripple through the silent communion of listeners.
That song was made for Sinéad.
When she died I thought of Bob Dylan’s line about Lenny Bruce: “He fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurts.”
Did I love her? How could I not? She was friend, lover, and enemy. She was mother and child: the mother fierce and kind and ethical, the child wide-eyed and fragile and instinctual. She was, to borrow another Dylan line, the sister you never had.
I’m not deeply familiar with her music, but I’ve loved much of what I’ve heard. Even when I wasn’t sure about the track itself, I’ve loved every note that issued from her throat. Besides, she sang “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” — an anonymous 17th-century poem set to a traditional folk melody — accompanied only by a drum sample taken from “Funky Drummer” by James Brown. That’s proof of artistry, because synthesis is creation.
Everybody knows about her Saturday Night Live appearance. Enough’s been said about that. Some people were born to break the world open so it can be rebuilt; it’s the dance of creation and destruction. I didn’t know what she was talking about back then, but I knew it was a breaking-open moment. And I saw raw courage.
So few people defended her. Kris Kristofferson did, loudly, and probably got his ticket to heaven punched right then and there. They sang a duet on TV once. She looks up him with such tenderness and vulnerability; he looks down on her with such warmth.
Jason Aldean isn’t fit to shine Kris’ belt buckle.
Later on I found out, of course. About the Magdalene Laundries, about the child abuse by priests and the cover-ups by the Church. Like everyone else, I found out she was right. How many of the people who condemned her ever apologized?
Speaking of '“later on” … white liberal America finally discovered the police killings of innocent Black people in 2020, when it became safe to take the knee or put a black square on their Facebook page. After all, their CEOs were doing it, too. But young white Sinéad had sung about police violence thirty years earlier, taking her cue not from bank executives but from the Black British activists protesting the murders of Colin Roach and other young Black men by UK law enforcement. '
“Black Boys on Mopeds” doesn’t indulge in vague pieties. It calls out Margaret Thatcher by name for her hypocrisy in condemning deaths in China while her own forces kill innocents at home. “England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses,” she sings, “it's the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds.”
But I’m not trying to claim Sinéad for the progressive cause, as some people have done. For one thing, I don’t really know what that word means anymore. For another, she wasn’t progressive. She was subversive. Real artists always are. They come to undermine, not reform, the social and spiritual order of the world.
As Sinéad told the Los Angeles Times:
“I come from a tradition of Irish artists where I am principally concerned with affecting my society. Artists are supposed to act as an emergency fire service when it comes to spiritual conflict — not preaching or telling people what to do but being a little light that tells us that there is a spirit world.”
Hers was a revolution of the spirit. She’s a little like William Blake that way. “The hapless Soldiers sigh,” Blake wrote, “runs in blood down Palace walls.” And, “A dog starvd at his Masters Gate/Predicts the ruin of the State.”
That’s not a call for reform. It’s a declaration: that a people’s inner thoughts and outward actions become spiritual obscenities when they support, through acts of commission or omission, an unjust empire. In a moral universe, even the simple act of putting a wild robin into a change “puts all Heaven in a rage.”
Blake’s calling was Sinéad’s, too. Unfortunately, those who bring light frequently get burned. The Los Angeles Times obituary includes this quote from her:
“I think the most crushing thing is the isolation that comes from being a person who is not seen as an ordinary human being, but someone on whom other people’s expectations are placed.”
That speaks to her artistry, her activism, and her reputation for mental illness. There’s a painful talk show interview on the internet where the host keeps saying things like “You seem so normal,” and, “How are you feeling?” The poor woman is just trying to promote an album and he’s treating her like a psychopath.
Those of us who have wrestled with mental illness at some point in our lives, especially in the late 20th century, know how much courage it took for her to talk about these things back then. She performed a service and made a sacrifice by doing so. As she said,
“When you admit that you are anything that could be mistakenly, or otherwise, perceived as ‘mentally ill,’ you know that you are going to get treated like dirt, so you don’t go tell anybody. That’s why people die.”
That’s why people die. I’m sure somebody wanted to live after learning they weren’t alone.
Whatever the cause of Sinéad’s death, her life wasn’t a failure. It was an extraordinary success. She survived for decades under the most intense pressure imaginable, and accomplished so much as she did. Forget pity: she deserves our undying admiration.
At one place in his diaries William Blake wrote, “Wise men see outlines, and therefore they are wise.” In another he wrote, “Mad men see outlines, and therefore they are mad.”
A gift in one context is a curse in another. It’s a gift to see beyond the world of the mundane. But it becomes a curse when you lose your psychic GPS, your orientation in space and time and emotion and society. People with these Blakean tendencies take a chance every time they dive into their work with their full heart and soul. But I imagine she could do nothing else.
Sinéad lived in the shadow of the Catholic martyrs who preceded her. I don’t know how she practiced her Islam, but perhaps she knew that Sufis sometimes refer to a person’s death date as their ‘Urs, their “wedding day.” I’m sad she didn’t get more time and more joy on this Earth, especially since I know — I don’t think, I know — that even profound depression can be cured.
Oh, Sinéad.
Death is never the answer. It is, as they say, a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But I hope her soul is at peace, and that she has finally achieved union with the God she sought for so long.
“It will not be long, love …”
If you or someone close to you is at risk, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, (English: 1 (800) 273-8255; Spanish: 1 (888) 628-9454. Their website: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org). Please reach out. There is real hope.
I am aware that the artist’s name at the time of her death was Shuhada’ Sadaqat. Since most remembrances from her friends and colleagues used her birth name, and since most people know her by that, I’ve used it here. (Her Arabic name has been imperfectly translated in many stories, by the way. It can mean “martyrs to charity,” as the LA Times and others have reported, but it also means “witness to charity,” which seems to make more sense for her.)
Lastly, I’ve been silent for a few days because of a slight health setback, but I couldn’t keep myself from writing this. I should be fully back on line shortly.
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Sinead O’Connor’s Life and Legacy of Protest
Once an abused child, she stood up against the oppression of others, from children abused by Catholic priests to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
Jul 28, 2023
Tragically, Sinead O’Connor is dead at 56. Many of the obituaries of Irish protest singer have been oddly thin, and have ignored key moments in her life. One was her contretemps with Israeli extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, now the country’s Minister of National Security. She later became fiercely critical of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Another was her conversion to Islam in 2018.
O’Connor maintained to Dr. Phil that she was an abused child, the victim of her mother, Johanna O’Grady: “She ran a torture chamber. My earliest memory, she’s telling me I shouldn’t have been born. She didn’t want me… She was a person who took delight, would smile in hurting you.”
She ran away from home when she was 13. She was later caught shoplifting and had to spend eight months in a home for fallen women, which she remembered as a horrific experience. When she was 18 her mother died in a car accident, leaving Sinead forever unable to work through that difficult relationship, which haunted her.
Dylan inspired her to take up music. She came to prominence with her 1987 punk-rock hit in the UK, “Mandinka.”
She was becoming a pop star, but it wasn’t what she wanted. She said she was a punk, a protest singer.
Her breakout song was a cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares to U” in 1990, a song about the depth of loss, in which she genuinely wept at the end of the video. Tom Eames explains that it stayed at the top of the US charts for four weeks in 1990.
She was becoming a pop star, but it wasn’t what she wanted. She said she was a punk, a protest singer. She insisted on shocking her fans. Issy Ronald explains that as an abused child herself, she was sensitive to the stories in the back pages of the Irish newspapers on victims of priest child abuse, and grew more and more furious about it. When she was invited to perform on Saturday Night Live in 1992, she sang Bob Marley’s “War” a capella, and ended by tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul, whom she blamed for having declined to confront the pedophilia crisis in the Church. She shouted “Fight the real enemy!”
I remember watching that performance and wondering what in the world was going on. I didn’t become aware of the priest pedophilia issue until much later.
Ironically, Ms. O’Connor wrote in her memoir, Rememberings, that she probably became a musician because, as a woman, she was barred from becoming a priest. Her spiritual yearning, visible throughout her life, was not squelched by the patriarchy and abuse of major religious institutions. She continued to seek the transcendent truth, but outside such frameworks.
She battled her own demons, including bipolar disorder, and had difficulty maintaining lasting relationships. She was a deeply lonely person who kept seeking intimacy and failing to find it. She had four failed marriages, one lasting just a week.
As someone who felt oppressed herself, she sympathized with both the Jews and the Palestinians. Daniel Hilton at Middle East Eyeexplains that she agreed to do a concert in Jerusalem in 1997 for a group of Israeli and Palestinian women who were campaigning for Jerusalem to be the shared capital of Israel and Palestine. This was when the Oslo Peace Accords had created an expectation that there would be a Palestinian state, before far right Likud politician Binyamin Netanyahu derailed the agreement.
An Israeli extremist group, the Ideological Front, made death threats against Ms. O’Connor, who cancelled the concert. One of the activists threatening to kill her was Itamar Ben-Gvir, whom Netanyahu made minister of national security this winter. Ben-Gvir boasted, “Due to us she is not arriving.” He added, “We are calling the pressure we put on her… a success,” according to AP at the time. As always, Ben-Gvir and his fellow violent extremists were the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They delivered the death threat to the British embassy. Ms. O’Connor was Irish.
She then wrote an open letter to Ben-Gvir, her would-be murderer. She said, “God does not reward those who bring terror to children of the world, So you have succeeded in nothing but your soul’s failure.”
Ms. O’Connor said, “I cannot put in danger the lives of my two children, my musicians, and my technicians, so I have decided to cancel.”
She then wrote an open letter to Ben-Gvir, her would-be murderer. She said, “God does not reward those who bring terror to children of the world, So you have succeeded in nothing but your soul’s failure.”
Well, God may not reward them, but Netanyahu will put them in his cabinet.
She became increasingly concerned about the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli military rule and in 2014 she declined to play in Israel. She told an Irish music magazine, “Let’s just say that, on a human level, nobody with any sanity, including myself, would have anything but sympathy for the Palestinian plight. There’s not a sane person on earth who in any way sanctions what the f*** the Israeli authorities are doing.”
In 2018 she announced that she had converted to Islam, tweeting, “This is to announce that I am proud to have become a Muslim. This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian‘s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant.”
She also praised the beauty of the Qur’an, saying, “Listen to Qur’an recitation… it goes straight to your soul… I find it powerful to hear. What I love is to listen to the beautiful recitations in Arabic and then hear the spoken English. The Arabic recitation has to be listened to.”
I concur, and remember the warm feelings I got from studying the Qur’an in Arabic in Cairo back in 1975.
Khaled Baydoun noted that few obituaries featured pictures of O’Connor, who privately took the name Shuhada Sadaqat, in hijab:
On the other hand, she was an LGBTQ+ ally, and once wore a rainbow hijab. And to be fair, she didn’t always wear a Muslim veil after her conversion. She wrote in her memoir that it wasn’t really possible for her to perform her music in one.
I hope she wrote more about what Islam meant to her in private diaries and correspondence, which will come to light. As with everything in her life, her take on it will have been brave, original, and full of deep ethical insight.
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