Sadaqat was ahead of her time. And like most women ahead of their time, she was viciously scrutinized. “It was very traumatizing,” she recalled. “It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.” Headlines read: “SINEAD THE SHE DEVIL,” “SHUT UP SINEAD!,” “Shut Up? Me? NO WAY!” Crowds booed her. Joe Pesci and Frank Sinatra threatened to beat her. She was mocked relentlessly by the media. The Washington Times called her “the face of pure hatred.” The Anti-Defamation League condemned her. The National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations had a steamroller crush hundreds of her albums outside the headquarters of her record company. She was in her early 20s.
But Sadaqat was right and she knew it. In 1993, a year after her SNL appearance, the unmarked graves of 155 women were uncovered on the grounds of one of the laundries. Nearly a decade later, the pope publicly acknowledged the longstanding abuse within the church, including the sexual abuse of children by priests. The Irish state followed suit a couple of years later, issuing a formal apology for the laundries and establishing a £50 million compensation program for survivors, to which the responsible religious orders refused to contribute financially.
At the 1989 Grammys, Sadaqat stenciled the Public Enemy logo on her buzzcut in support of the group and other hip-hop artists boycotting the awards show for not taking hip-hop and rap as serious categories worthy of recognition. Today, August 11, we are rightly celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Cindy Campbell and DJ Kool Herc’s “Back to School Jam” in the Bronx—the “official” birth of hip-hop—to great acclaim.
Sadaqat was a product of her many antagonists: her family and their abuse, the Catholic Church, the Irish state, capitalism, sexism, English colonialism, men, the media, the music industry. (Her first record label, Ensign, infamously tried to both coerce her into having an abortion and to brand her as a classic long-haired, short-skirted, make up-clad female act, prompting Sadaqat to shave her head and don her once-signature leather jackets and Doc Martens.) To be both against and of what hurts, what oppresses, was the fraught condition of her being, as it is everyone’s. Her answer to the tension comes most clearly, I think, in an interview with Tony Lindo on the reggae TV show Viddyms, the day after she tore up the photo: “the only thing to do is for people to study their history.” That was what she did, she studied her history and she sang. The same voice that had soothed her mother as a child (“my mother was a beast and I was able to soothe her with my voice. I was able to use my voice to make the devil fall asleep”), the voice that had gotten through the torturous residential center, was the voice that let her channel that history—her own and the world’s.