Sinéad O’Connor, ‘Three Babies’ (1990)
In this characteristically excellent essay, Phil Christman discusses his two favourite Sinead O’Connor songs: ‘Mandinka’ and ‘Three Babies’. He’s right that ‘Mandinka’ is ‘basically a pure showpiece for her voice, and every video of her singing it is like watching an Olympic gymnast do six impossible things and stick the landing’, though calling the words ‘very nearly meaningless’ is perhaps a minim de trop, especially since Christman goes on acurately to summarise pretty precisely what those words are conveying, something he does by focusing on their emotional authority rather than on semantic logic (Christman’s summary of the song: ‘I feel a passion for someone or something that is similar to the deep and uneffaceable sense of common ancestry felt by people of Mandinka origin who were enslaved in the United States in Alex Haley’s novel Roots, which I read at an impressionable age, or maybe just watched the TV version of.’ If Christman has a failing as a stylist — and I don’t concede he does — it’s his habit of ending sentences with prepositions). We can call this kind of thing impressionistic, as he does, although I’m not sure I’d use the word myself: impressionism is an aesthetic descriptor rather than an emotional one I think (I’d say it grows less useful as a piece of critical terminology when abstracted from the visual arts). Emotions are rarely impressionistic in the sense of being vague. On the contrary: they may be inchoate, even incomprehensible, but they are almost always vigorous and precise: we may not know why we feel what we feel, and sometimes we may not even intuit the logical content of what we feel, but we always know that we feel. I’d say ‘Mandika’ is both vigorous and precise, emotionally speaking. O’Connor was a confessional poet, her art drawing directly, often bravely and even startlingly and alarmingly, from her personal life. ‘Trust the tale, not the teller’ doesn’t help us with a poet like her, any more than it would with Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton.
Take, for instance, the gorgeous ‘Three Babies’. Christman says ‘I have tried to find out what the story behind “Three Babies” is. I don’t know why; it’s none of my business.’ I respect that, although the story ‘behind’ the song actually isn’t so hard to intuit. As a young woman O’Connor had a miscarriage. A few years later, in the run-up to recording I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, she had a baby, her son Jake (born 16 June 1987). The father was music producer John Reynolds, whom she later married, in 1989. Later that same year, the relationship already failing, she had an abortion (her song ‘Special Child’ is about this). The ‘three babies’ of this 1990 song are not just three distinct children, but three different modes of babyhood: one warm and living, two cold (“I have wrapped their cold bodies around me”) yet still present, still her babies, each of these latter taken from her by different forces, fate or nature on the one hand, and her own wildness or madness on the other.
To me the song evokes Wordsworth’s great poem ‘We Are Seven’ (1798). When I was a student, reading and studying the Romantics for the first time, I much preferred Wordsworth’s grandioser projects: Tintern Abbey, ‘Intimations of Immortality’, the Simplon Pass episode in The Prelude and so on. ‘We Are Seven’ struck me then as a slight piece: of interest but trivial, of a piece with the simplesse of its unpolished form and idiom. The kid doesn’t understand that her sister and brother are dead because she is only a kid. How wrong I was. Now that I’m older, I wonder if this short ballad isn’t Wordsworth’s greatest, as it is certainly one of his most uncanny and haunting, poems. The point of the poem is not that the kid is wrong because actually, read properly, the poem is saying the kid is not wrong. The wrongness is in the adult interrogating her, and by extension in us, taking that adult’s side. We think death marks a clear separation from life. The girl knows better. It is a poem about innocence rather than ignorance, and more to the point about the wisdom of innocence, its insight. ‘Three Babies’ is saying the same thing. ‘How fragile is life,’ we adults say, ‘so easily snuffed out!’ On the contrary, say Wordsworth’s poem, and O’Connor’s song, how fragile is death, in the face of the overwhelming force of love. How little it matters. Life is strength. Death is not a removal, not even a removal to a spiritual afterlife, for that would mean that the loved ones are no longer here. And the girl in ‘We Are Seven’ is absolutely determined that her siblings are still here. ‘But they are dead,’ the poem’s narrator tells her, at the poem’s end, driven to callousness by her stubborn refusal to face facts (which is actually his stubborn refusal to grasp her higher wisdom): ‘those two are dead!/Their spirits are in heaven!”
’Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
Christman, having wisely conceded that O’Connor’s lyrics don’t construct meaning according to tables of logical inference, then slips back into an attempt to make sense of the song on just such terms.
The lyrics of this song are upsettingly specific in their particulars but vague in the overall picture they add up to. They’re like the stories that your friend who is mentally ill tells you about their life when you catch up with them: they start in the upsetting middle (why does she have three children all of a sudden? Why is she like a wild horse?), move off into reverie (I’m a wild horse, I don’t need water and feed), and then an emergency detail surfaces (“I have wrapped their cold bodies around me” — what??? Holy shit! What can I do?! Is it too late for CPR?!), and then suddenly we’re in a place of calm and everything’s resolved (“No longer mad like a horse/I’m still wild but not lost”). The almost New Agey tranquility of the instrumental background makes these declarations all the more stark, as does the alternating tenderness and stridency of her vocals.
He’s right about how the tension between softly-softly lilting music and production and the hardness of the words, something which O’Connor emphasises in the delivery, with her ability to shift in a fraction (as Christman says) between tenderness and stridency, is integral to the way the song functions. But those lyrics are imagistic, not logistical: she is a horse because a horse signifies strength, and this is a song about a strength of love that surpasses life and death (the realms of water and feed) to connect again with life. The distinction she draws between wildness and madness, inflected via lostness, which is to say via foundness, strikes me as eloquent and powerful. It’s a great song.
