The courage of Sinéad O’Connor

With the death of Sinéad O’Connor, I don’t want to do anything today. It feels like the death of a distant friend. I didn’t follow her closely, even though I loved her singing voice and the songs I heard on the radio. Am I allowed to feel this knocked off my feet?

I loved her especially for her image and her actions.

She came into my consciousness with the videos of her first hits. I was twenty-four. Her shaved head and boyish clothes zinged into my mind like a secret message of validation to my inner twelve-year-old. She seemed to say, “Like you, I refuse to work to look feminine, because I’m nobody’s little sex object.” 

Decades went by before I learned that I’d heard the message correctly. “The leaders of [record label] Ensign ‘wanted me to wear high-heel boots and tight jeans and grow my hair,’ Ms. O’Connor told Rolling Stone in 1991. ‘And I decided that they were so pathetic that I shaved my head so there couldn’t be any further discussion.'” (New York Times)

It still makes my heart beat faster to know that.

Later I admired, with awe, her clarity and courage to speak her mind about child abuse, religion, and misogyny. I think her bravery poured out like springwater through gaps in the bedrock of a difficult life. Is that where all (women’s) courage comes from? And the courage of everyone who has been repressed or oppressed? It boils out, between your own struggles. Sometimes it seems reckless. You don’t always have the mental/emotional luxury to be strategic.

After watching Nothing Compares, the intensely moving documentary about O’Connor’s life [my review here], I hoped she would live to be old, when sometimes one’s emotional struggles have calmed. I hoped to hear her reflect with ever-greater perspective on the events of her life. But I do love this from 2021:

“In discussing her memoir with The Times in 2021, Ms. O’Connor focused on her decision to tear up the photo of John Paul II as a signal moment in a life of protest and defiance. …’I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,’ Ms. O’Connor said. ‘But it was very traumatizing,’ she added. ‘It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch. … The media was making me out to be crazy because I wasn’t acting like a pop star was supposed to act,’ she said. ‘It seems to me that being a pop star is almost like being in a type of prison. You have to be a good girl.'” (New York Times)

Crazy bitch vs good girl: judgmental labels like so many others that conceal meaning and prevent understanding. Thank goodness for people who defy them. But the cost is high.

Accolades in the Irish Times 

Obituary in the New York Times