Finding my ‘guth’: The Lump vs the Irish Language

One day, the lump started sweating dark red and clotty. I waited apprehensively for the lump to finish its session. Once it dried off, the doctor sent me home from A&E. The lump stared back at me for another week before its second and final workout. Non-stop, intensive. The lump was causing a lot of commotion. Emergency surgery had to escort the lump out at the nearest exit. It was then decided that the lump would be sent back to England for testing… turns out he was called Burkitt’s Lymphoma. I was being punished for the lump’s antics: Attached to a chemotherapy pump for three months to ensure that there would be no further problems. The lump, however, had already caused damage.

At the end of those three months, I left Belfast City Hospital bald, skinny and severely doubting my own body. The doctors said it would be check-ups for five years before I could be formally discharged. I became anxious to plan ahead for fear of the lump’s reappearance. Irritability and anger then followed. In certain moments… panic. The sickening instant when something drops between one’s brain and one’s body. I never did return to my university course but intensely I continued my passion for filmmaking – albeit from a different angle.

I began recording strange sounds and images. Researching certain concepts intensely. Piecing together these ideas to help express myself. My experience of cancer changed everything – especially my creative projects. I must have made over 50 short films in those five years after being hospitalised. Despite this kind of relief and creative satisfaction, fear of my own body persisted. It was as though new borders had been drawn up inside it. The back of my mouth had been annexed, and what was even scarier – the perpetrator was now featureless. Labelled only by those two words… Burkitt’s lymphoma.

In 2021 (four years after the lump), I picked up a book called ‘Irish Masters of Medicine’. Flicking through it. BURKITT. That sharp word pinched me. Although this time the words surrounding it were different. In one brief chapter, author Davis Coakley summarised the remarkable medical career of Dr Denis Burkitt, the surgeon who discovered my type of cancer. I stood there for some time in the second-hand bookshop digesting what I was reading… Dr Burkitt was from Fermanagh? He discovered the disease in Uganda? And then suddenly an interconnection. The way that Dr Burkitt mapped Burkitt’s lymphoma across Africa was inspired by how his father, James Parsons Burkitt, mapped birds across Co. Fermanagh. Fascinating.

I could feel life shaking up again. I began to read more and more about Dr Burkitt. I listened to his interviews. I met his three daughters. I found his films and digitised them. I wrote, narrated and intensely edited. By late 2022, I had a short film ready for NI Screen (a film funding body) exploring the life of Dr Burkitt. It was meant to be a 10-minute documentary… what I sent them was over 40 minutes. There was clearly a lot more to this story. TG4, the National Irish Language Public Service Broadcaster, became intrigued by the possibilities and said they would support a feature length film… but it needed to be partly in Irish for their audiences.

I wasn’t fluent but some of those short films I had been making were inspired by the Irish language. My own comprehension of Irish needed to improve considerably as my now feature length film was going to be part narrated as Gaeilge (in Irish). I also needed to interview several Irish-speaking scientists and subsequently edit in these Irish language recordings. I emailed my friend, Breandán Ó Fiach, about this challenge. He had translated a short documentary I had made about the history of Belfast City Hospital in 2020 and was happy to work with me one-to-one to help improve my Irish. We established a routine for this renovation. Every Tuesday morning, I drove to Breandán’s, and we set up the scaffolding around my teanga (tongue). Slowly but surely, we went about this construction and something unexpected began to happen… when speaking certain Irish words, I was venturing further and further into the Lump’s territory. I was beginning to take back control of the area affected by my cancer and its treatment. It was the Lump vs the Irish language!

I was born Enda Oisín Lonán Kelly-McCann. My connection to Irish began with a keychain I held as a child. It read my first name, Enda, and its Gaeilge origin, Éanna. A little information was written about my name’s origin – Éan (bird) – providing plenty of imagination for a child and a small piece of heritage settled into my mind. I felt lovely and full whenever I would spot a bird… even a lonesome magpie made me smile. I would draw squiggly ms across the corners of my page and believed this world to be a familiar place. When I read of the feather connection between Denis and his father, I remembered that lovely childhood feeling. I wanted to explore the feeling further… and it felt as though this was the pathway out of this five-year cancer shadow. The making of the film came with its own challenges but protecting that feeling is at the heart of my film (or maybe being protected by that feeling?).

Like many other children growing up in the north of Ireland I had infrequent encounters with our native language. It wasn’t spoken at home so my interactions were sporadic; playing GAA, the tops of streets or road signs when heading southwards. I gained greater access to the language when I went to secondary school at St Colman’s College in Newry. I loved learning Irish in first year, though quickly my interest shifted and within a few years I became one of the many teenagers who spat out ignorant sentiments about it. The default being: “When will I ever need it?” Amadán críochnaithe! (Utter fool).

By the end of secondary school that kind of rhetoric met a full stop when I began spending time with a Gaeilgeoir (Irish speaker) who deeply cared for the language. She became involved and helped shape many of my films in the years after hospitalisation as I had started using old Irish traditions & customs as starting points for creative projects. This research inevitability interacted with the Irish language. In February 2018 (six months post-hospital), I was putting together a video installation exhibition at the Crescent Art Gallery in Belfast inspired by Caoineadh (or Keen – lamenting the deceased).

I was struggling with a number of mental health issues around this time and working with the Irish language reminded me of my Irish name… my little keychain. In this frayed state of mind, I decided to start presenting my work under Éanna. This choice wasn’t to do with national identity or any anti-colonial sentiment – I changed my name because I was fed up with being Enda. Enda felt compromised, ill and infected. Perhaps if people could see me as Éanna I could feel a little better? This fresh-start feeling wouldn’t really be fulfilled until I started learning about Dr Denis Burkitt and began re-learning Irish.

Irish can be challenging at times when arriving at it from the English language. It is all too easy to contextualise everything through the anglophonic and as a result, lots of people get frustrated at how Irish reformats sentences (Verb-Subject-Object order compared to the English S-V-O). I’m still grappling with this aspect and with the grammar mutations caused by the urú (eclipse) and the séimhiú (aspiration) – liminal, supple compounds within the Irish language; certain words will automate and slide together.

My múinteoir Breandán has such command of it. Dozens of words would whizz by me on Tuesday mornings, but a few got stuck between my teeth and he was teaching me. Whenever I did encounter a tongue twister, Breandán demonstrated how to find the exact intonation – one requires an oral awareness and body presence in these moments. For the first time probably in my life I was paying acute attention to how words were enunciated. Syllables boomeranged around my mouth and sounds echoed backwards towards the syrinx. These were guttural explorations, and I was licking my wounds with new syntax. This was a kinder treatment than surgery and a caustic summer. It felt like restoration.

Learning a new language has all types of benefits including access to new cultures and cognitive health. It has given me the incredible opportunity to tell the Burkitt story in Irish for our national Irish language broadcaster. What I didn’t expect is that it would also aid my own body’s healing. I wish I could tell a stubborn teenage Enda. I feel indebted to the Irish language for creating an environment for healing. As Pádraig Ó Tuama once wrote, “The body speaks its own language and he has started listening.”