The Last Day of Our Acquaintance

Sinéad in a Malcolm X shirt. Sinéad pregnant and bald and screaming on the cover of The Lion and the Cobra (belly cut off). Sinéad at a pro-abortion rally. Sinéad with the Public Enemy logo painted on the side of her head. Sinéad walking down St. Mark’s Place, her “favorite place in the universe.” Sinéad during the Gulf War refusing to play concerts following any rendition of the National Anthem. Sinéad explaining English colonialism and the Irish Potato Famine. Sinéad with MC Lyte. Sinéad hanging a Palestinian flag on her microphone stand. Sinéad ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live.

It would be easy to begin a piece on Sinéad O’Connor with her suffering and vilification. There was certainly no shortage of it. Sinéad stood for something. She became a symbol. And like many people who become symbols, she was often reviled. On July 26, Sinéad died without ever getting the apologies she was owed. We are seeing, again, how easy it is to love someone when they’re dead and how much harder it is when they’re alive. Even in death, she teaches us. If only she could have felt how much she meant to us while she was still here.

Shuhada’ Sadaqat—the name she took after converting to Islam in 2018, while still performing and recording music under her birth name—was born in Dublin in 1966. She described her childhood as emotionally and physically scarring, and her mother, with whom she lived after her parents separated, as violent and abusive. In an interview for the documentary Nothing Compares (2022), she makes two remarks about her early life that I find particularly striking.

First:

I spent my entire childhood being beaten up because of the social conditions under which my mother grew up, and under which her mother grew up, and under which her mother and her mother grew up.

And second:

My father is the type of man that didn’t want anyone talking about what happened, and that’s what was wrong with me.

It’s a one-two punch. The first blow roots her own trauma in the structure of society—Irish colonization, the Catholic Church, and their historical and interpersonal effects. The second, how this very structure sets the terms for addressing that kind of violence—that is, not at all. Trying to break a cycle by talking about what happened, despite a taboo against doing so, is a recurrent theme throughout Sadaqat’s life.

When she was 15, Sadaqat was caught shoplifting and sent to a residential training center run by Roman Catholic nuns. As punishment, Sadaqat would sometimes be sent to spend the night in the hospice part of the attached Magdalene Laundry (an asylum-type institution for “fallen women”)—“to remind me that if I didn’t behave myself, I was going to end up like these women,” she remembered. Some of the women had been locked away since the 1920s, and there they were, calling out for nurses that never came. They were often sex workers, or had gotten pregnant, or been raped by a doctor or a father or a local priest, and always deemed in need of penitence by society and the courts. The first song Sadaqat wrote, “Take My Hand,” was about her nights in the laundry hospice wing.

In 1992, Sadaqat performed an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War” on Saturday Night Live, famously destroying her mother’s photograph of Pope John Paul II on stage to protest the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse. Staring straight into the camera, she held the haunting note of the song’s final lyric: evil. It was Sadaqat’s methodology encapsulated: the destruction of the picture (“the photo itself had been on my mother’s bedroom wall since the day the fucker was enthroned in 1978”) as cathartic, symbolic reclamation of her own childhood, and socio-political denunciation of something bigger than herself, all at once. Working out our pasts, our traumas, is hard enough in private, but to do it in public, in front of millions of people, and somehow also at the service of others, is almost impossibly brave. As Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna put it, “we were all…like ‘feminist performance art on TV, when does that ever happen?’”