This is a rebel song

Just when history, we were told, had allegedly ended in the 1990s, Sinéad O'Connor, icon and iconoclast, insisted on making it. By singing or swearing, shouting or whispering, this uncompromising force always put herself at stake when the lives of people who couldn’t were. Her putatively prophetic wisdom and her angelic, even otherworldly, beauty ironically made her ripe for canonization in a world in which the public is all too keen to turn celebrities into pay-for-play saints. That she punctured her secular saintliness with acts of hilarious, even bawdy, irreverence made her existence appear even more miraculous in the eyes of many. Outspoken on every political and social controversy — abortion, AIDS, gay and trans rights, Northern Ireland, empire, Palestine and church abuse — the trailblazing singer’s views index “the right side” of any given issue in which people's lives were on the line.

But behind this inescapably global celebrity was a profoundly and particularly Irish story: Sinéad, referred to here by her first name alone because she was outspoken about needing to rid herself of the “paternal name,” was born in Dublin in 1966 to a physically abusive mother and a more-or-less absent father. She was delivered by Dr. Eamon de Valera Jr., the son of his more famous father and namesake, who had served as the nascent republic’s head of state several times over. Sinéad was thereby named after the delivering doctor’s mother and the republic’s First Lady of many years, Sinéad de Valera. Dr. de Valera could not have known that he was bringing into the world a child who would later become one of his country’s most outspoken critics of the toxic marriage between church and state, one that his own father had instituted via the infamous 1937 Constitution, which derived authority from the “Most Holy Trinity,” didn’t recognize divorce, and gave priests “sacerdotal privilege.” It is an even more pronounced irony that infant Sinéad would grow into one of the fiercest critics of the illegal theft of babies born to unwed mothers, a phenomenon in which, it would be revealed years later, Dr. de Valera himself participated.

In the half century that she lived, Sinéad’s story was hard to disentangle from that of Ireland itself — something that she was acutely aware of. In a 1994 track titled Famine, she raps about seeing “the Irish as a race like a child that got itself bashed in the face.” How Sinéad would become the icon that she grew into has therefore everything to do with her tragic yet not atypical upbringing. As emblematic as her story was of a time and place, Sinéad insisted that it was necessary to resist excessive sentimentality and exoticization when narrating it. She warned, “Don’t make it all misery. Just remember, my story’s not Angela’s fucking Ashes.” Her painful 2021 autobiography narrates how, after her parents separated when she was eight, her violent mother would pin her to the ground and strike her, insisting that she repeatedly proclaim, “I am nothing.” Teenage Sinéad was particularly rebellious and was sent to a “rehabilitation center” for delinquent girls after she stole a pair of gold shoes to wear to a rock concert.

At the age of 14, Sinéad was separated from her abusive mother and sent to an institution far more horrifying: the nun-run An Grianán Training Centre in Dublin, which had formerly been a “Magdalene Laundry,” where unwed mothers were incarcerated after being forcibly separated from their babies. Some of those babies were trafficked to the United States with the assistance of prominent political elites like Dr. de Valera, while those who died in infancy were thrown into communal graves and septic tanks.

Then and now, these institutions symbolized the violence and abuse of a corrupt church, something that teenage Sinéad witnessed firsthand. Although the full scale of this violence would only become clear in a 2009 government report estimating that tens of thousands of children were abused in these institutions — a shockingly high figure in a country of just over five million people — everyone knew the truth.

But Sinéad was only one of a handful of people who spoke up about it, with a particular gift for showing the porous line between the personal and the political. It’s quite possible to imagine that she inherited this gift from her father, John, but the reverse is just as likely to be true. In later years, John O'Connor would turn his personal pain into public cause by becoming a founder and chair of the Divorce Action Group, an activist entity committed to overturning the 1937 constitutional ban on divorce. When Sinéad made global headlines in 1992 by tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in protest of child abuse in the church, few people knew that the picture she tore up — a souvenir from the Pope’s much-celebrated 1979 visit to Ireland — had belonged to her late mother. Sinéad would gaze at it as a teenager while being beaten. Years later, as she staged her powerful broadcast protest, Sinéad subtly, if powerfully, showed how violence within families was inseparable from the violence upheld by institutions like the church and state.

Perhaps without realizing how deeply the political institutions she stood against had shaped her private life, or maybe precisely because they did, Sinéad’s critics have always sought to portray her as a petulant, attention-seeking child; Arsenio Hall joked about spanking her and Frank Sinatra threatened to kick her. That many of her critics came from the church hierarchy itself was hardly surprising, nor was it surprising that several of them — Cardinals Bernard Francis Law of Boston and Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles come to mind — were implicated in and disgraced by covering up child and sexual abuse scandals many years later. More shocking, however, were the vicious and vitriolic attacks that came from self-fashioned feminists: Madonna said that Sinéad looked like she’d “had a run-in with a lawnmower” and “was about as sexy as a Venetian blind,” and Camille Paglia said that “in the case of Sinéad O’Connor, child abuse was justified.”

The cruelty directed at her in life seems to have been conveniently forgotten by the panegyrists who’ve rushed to claim her legacy in death. She’s been celebrated again and again as "ahead of her time," as a cassandra or siren. In her final interview before her death, she said, “I have always been interested in prophets,” seeming to confirm that she was an extraordinary oracle who could see many years ago what all around her people couldn’t yet.

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Such characterizations, as well meaning as they are, don’t quite capture the full extent of her courage. It wasn’t a special foresight that marked Sinéad’s contribution as distinct — most everyone knew what she did too — but rather her unwavering certitude in acting on it, at great risk to personal health and public profile alike. As she seemingly reminds listeners whose eyes and hearts have been “cut out” and thereby “refuse to see and hear,” one cannot plead innocence on grounds of ignorance.

In the days since she died, mourners have scrambled to claim and highlight the now-uncontroversial parts of her activism (against child abuse, for abortion, in support of people living with HIV), but not the ones that remain divisive (her anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism and what critics may call “anglophobia”). As early as the 1990s, she expressed sympathy for the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) campaign in Northern Ireland, which she somewhat later retracted on the grounds that she was young when she openly supported them. A few years later, she would participate in a 1993 protest against the IRA when a bomb they detonated in Warrington killed two children. Whereas some people might see in Sinéad’s oscillating political positions further proof of her sensationalism, naivete, or immaturity, that very non-fixity might better be framed as evidence of how she was constantly seeking, spiritually and otherwise, and interrogating the certainties that stood all around her.

In either case, she continued to be committed to the cause of Irish republicanism, evoking the legacy and courage of Bobby Sands, a Northern Irish political activist who died while on hunger strike in protest of the inhuman conditions political prisoners are subjected to in British prisons, right up to the present year. While Irish rock band U2 would withdraw from a St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York held in honor of Sands lest they appear to endorse the Northern Irish struggle against the occupying British army, Sinéad would wear badges bearing his face and would post pictures of the “martyr” alongside moving verses from the Quran. A more direct confrontation with U2 was staged in the title of her 1997 hit This Is a Rebel Song, which she offered as a direct challenge to the former’s insipid Sunday Bloody Sunday, a song that Bono insisted was an endorsement of peace but not of its anti-imperial enemies. Sinéad thus raged against the timorousness of those, like Bono and much of the Irish cultural and political establishment, who evoked “peace” as an endorsement of the status quo’s injustice and as a form of anti-politics.

Even as she withdrew her early endorsement of the IRA, Sinéad remained committed to a thoroughgoing critique of British imperialism, past and present. She sang of the “Englishman whose rage is like a fist to my womb” and of “the vampire” (“from now I’ll call you England”), who “sucks the life of goodness.” She gave a very clear sighted spoken-word account of the famine’s man-made origins and presented a damning indictment of Thatcherism and the hypocrisies it engendered. One thing Sinéad insisted was clear: “England is not the mythical land of Madame George and roses.”

It is all too easy, particularly in today’s Ireland, to dismiss these positions as emerging from a crude, jingoistic nationalism, but it’s undoubtedly the case that Sinéad was above all a committed internationalist. Alongside Sands, whom she lionized up until her death, she also found deep inspiration in anti-imperialist icons like Jamaican activist Marcus Mosiah Garvey and Muhammad Ali Clay, whom she considered a prophet.

Ever seeking and always searching, Sinéad was never afraid to admit when she was wrong or when her views evolved upon further knowledge and investigation. This can be seen in her attitudes toward Palestine and Irish republicanism. In 1997, at the height of her fame, Sinéad’s views on Palestine were consonant with liberal opinion after Oslo. She was due to perform at a peace concert organized by Palestinian and Israeli women’s groups in Jerusalem in support of the two-state solution. But Itamar Ben-Gvir, then a young Kahanist activist and now the Israeli national security minister, organized to have her performance cancelled. Fearing for her personal safety and that of her family, Sinéad cancelled the performance, bravely stating that “God does not reward those who bring terror to the children of the world.” In 2014, she withdrew from a scheduled performance in Caesarea, Israel, after becoming aware of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign in support of Palestine. Time and time again, she remained stridently committed to the cause of anti-imperialist internationalism, even as she was mocked for doing so and even as such a position would be dismissed as crude, incoherent and opportunistic.

Perhaps her late-in-life reversion (the term she preferred to conversion) to Islam and her embracing of the name Shuhada’ Davitt (later Shuhada’ Sadaqat) symbolised this internationalist commitment more than anything. It is striking that of the 20 remembrances penned by musicians and writers on the Irish Times’ website since her death, only one writer acknowledges the name change and “reversion.” While referring to Sinéad O’Connor by her birth (and stage) name isn’t, as has been suggested, comparable to deadnaming — calling a transsexual by the name they were assigned at birth — it most certainly is a choice, and a political one at that.

This is especially the case in Ireland, where there’s a seeming consensus on issues such as child abuse but not anti-imperialism; where there’s seeming consensus on abortion but none on how to narrate the history of the Troubles outside the tired tropes of sectarianism; where there’s seeming consensus on contraception but not on the provision of mental health services (which persistently failed Sinéad and her son, Shane, who died of suicide in 2022).

Writing the story of Sinéad (at the expense of Shuhada’) defangs and consequently domesticates her radical spirit in death. It transforms her into a centrist liberal palatable to the post-Good Friday Agreement consensus. Her anti-imperialism is re-inscribed as sectarianism, and her principled opposition to the inequalities engendered by English rule in Ireland is recast as knee-jerk Anglophobia.

Indeed, writing about her as an embodiment of contradiction is a rhetorical move that allows us to separate Shuhada’ from Sinéad, the Muslim from the feminist, or the Palestine activist from the agitator for abortion. But just as the writer Mark O’Connell observed that Sinéad’s immense vulnerability and courage emerged from the same place, so too is it necessary to see her feminism and her “reversion,” her stances on Palestine and Northern Ireland, her commitment to trans and gay rights and her Muslim piety as all being interconnected (if anyone had any doubts, her rainbow flag hijab should have set them aside). As she constantly remarked, signaling those tensions, “The important thing about ‘brave’ is, it doesn’t mean you’re not terrified.” The putative contradictions of her life are ours, not hers.

Indeed, characterizing her struggles with mental health, addiction, abuse and trauma as a battle with internal demons acquits the world of the responsibility for producing the force and structures of injustice that tormented her. As Sinéad herself would emphatically remind her audiences, such attitudes toward mental health were “medieval.” The demons weren’t internal but external, real and man-made at that. Paraphrasing Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, she repeatedly and emphatically exclaimed, “… I'm very happy that I am not well adjusted to your profoundly sick society.”

In the days since her death, I have repeatedly heard people wonder if, and hope that, she knew just how much she was loved. I don’t doubt that so many people indeed felt they “loved” her. I, for one, had never understood how it was possible for people to be moved to tears by the death of a person, let alone a celebrity, they didn’t personally know until her death was announced. Why the news hit differently this time, I can’t be certain, except that it’s often said that, despite having radically different biographies, despite having never met, an addict always knows another intimately by virtue of their shared struggle.

But perhaps “loving” a figure like Sinéad isn’t as benign as it would at first appear to be. Literary critic Leo Bersani described how many gay men’s “love” for Judy Garland was a manifestation of the very forces of misogyny that could have been said to have undone her. Loving an icon and finding pleasure in the acts of collective punishment they endure (and sometimes survive) seem contradictory but often aren’t. Perhaps we are all Salomés, intent on destroying what we love in order to make it ours. For so many of us, Sinéad was a proxy for the struggles we were too cowardly to fight; this is why we loved her; this might also be how we, collectively, killed her.