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Victoria Kuttainen
University of Alberta, Canada
'Fertile and Mum: The Post-Colonial Trauma Poetics of Medbh McGuckian'
'Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare' (Edna O'Brien Mother Ireland 26).
In the Catholic/Protestant, Anglo/Irish country where the act of naming has become an inheritance of name-calling and betrayal, it is perhaps not surprising that Medbh McGuckian's poetry is so elusive, so difficult to classify and to penetrate. The history of Northern Ireland itself speaks with a forked tongue; it reads one way from a Unionist perspective and another way for Irish Nationalists. Binary language and binary politics in Northern Ireland translate into real violence - discursive regimes are not merely metaphorical, but an everyday reality that has produced and transformed, as Seamus Heaney terms it, the 'land of the password, wink, and nod.' Despite, and perhaps because of these conditions, the Troubles in Northern Ireland have produced a rich yield of poets. Louis MacNeice, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon have dredged poetic 'open ground' (to use Heaney's phrase) out of the quagmire of politics and violence. But it is well known that the poetic scene that is the inheritance to this day of Yeats' dominant voice has been preponderantly male. Women writers in Northern Ireland have been doubly displaced. The emergence of Medbh McGuckian's writing has been and remains groundbreaking, on the cutting edge of new turf for a whole generation of female voices in Ulster poetry. In McGuckian's quest to open ground from which she can articulate her experience, she is not only a Catholic poet on Protestant ground, but has always been conspicuously female; McGuckian is a gender outlaw as a writer on male literary turf. As such, her writing of place and space becomes paradoxically a double displacement. A book like Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Some Male Perspectives (1999), despite its very laudable and much needed criticism, draws attention to the double partition in Northern Ireland, in which women writing are always first women, and never part of the great tradition.
Always already other to the ever shifting centre, McGuckian's poetry is a double articulation of the desire to escape the otherness of sex, gender, race, and religion at the same time as it is rudely forged by these conditions. Her writing intensifies the conditions of her male progenitors: intensely suspect the violence of language and of naming, it simultaneously overflows with the white milk of words. A desire for proto-linguistic poetics haunts Ulster poetry. Its famous 'foetal' poems - Louis MacNeice's 'Prayer Before Birth' and Derek Mahon's 'Prayer from an Unborn Child' are two of the most prominent poems in this 'fertile' vein - suggest Kristeva's work on unruly borders between mother and child. Articulating a wish indefinitely to postpone birth, and the subsequent baptism into slippery and violent waters of language, they sing the paradox of desire to exist in the 'no-man's land' of subjectivity. But though so many of the poems of Ulster - the predominantly Catholic Nationalist state in the overwhelmingly Protestant Unionist territory of British Northern Ireland - allegorize the problematic relationship with Britain in terms of rape or motherhood, poets in Northern Ireland seem intensely conscious of the problematic nature of allegory. Much critical ink has been shed on the problems of writing back to empire in empire's own allegorical terms, echolalia of the violence of empire's first speech. As a woman writer, allegories of motherland that invoke birth and rape imagery are doubly problematic. Writing back to British colonisation and to male writers who have made poetic fodder out of the female body as allegory becomes a double trap. Despite its problems, the image of Ireland as a mother is a rich one in Ireland's national literature.. Edna O'Brien unconsciously betrays these complications in the passage I have cited: while countries are either mothers or fathers, Ireland has always been an ambiguous mother. Since the Plantation of Ulster, in which Northern Ireland became one of the first settler colonies of England, Ulster has rested 'uncomfortably on the cusp of colonialism' to use Gillian Whitlock's description of the difficulty of placing white settler poetics into the post-colonial arena. Motherland and mother tongue are both intensely cherished concepts in Northern Ireland - the mythopoetic Irish originary and the erstwhile motherland of Britain imply 'mother' allegories that beget politically fraught ideologies. Critics on all sides of the debate have declared the urgency for the establishment of new subject positions in Ireland to articulate the nation out of, and beyond the dialectical chain of reactionary politics. John Wilson Foster notes that '[t]he politics of colonization are less complicated than its cultural expressions and the psychology of those involved. The latter persist after the political apparatus of colonization has been dismantled' (Foster 263). As Clair Wills posits, 'For both sides… the value of art is that it can find a way out of the mis-recognition of reality by forging a heightened self-consciousness' (Wills 28).
The language of these critics bespeaks the possibility of recovery. Their rhetoric eerily matches the rhetoric of trauma theory. But just as post-colonial debates are uncomfortable with articulations of the settler experience, trauma theory is suspect in the post-colonial arena, too. Its rhetoric is that of disorder and recovery, and by bespeaking the terms of normative experience, articulations of trauma are exiled to the realm of the Other from which it is assumed trauma patients must needs wish to recover. Nevertheless, Dori Laub's writing on witnessing, sheds much light on McGuckian's work. My paper will explore the nexus of allegory and trauma that haunt Medbh McGuckian's poetic articulations out of a land of terror. I will explore McGuckian's fertility imagery, her thwarting and dalliance with allegories of motherland, and its trauma poetics. My desire is not to recuperate her poetry into a paradigmatic reading, but instead, to draw attention to how McGuckian's poetry lays bare and intensifies the problems of allegory and trauma theory as tools of interpretation in post-colonial poetics.
Bio: Victoria Kuttainen is currently finishing off work at the University of Alberta, Canada, to take up a doctoral fellowship at UQ working on Australian short fiction, trauma and allegories of motherland. She is very interested in 'outlaw genres' and hence her Other interest in poetry. Victoria Kuttainen's preoccupation is with settler subjectivity in the postcolonial context and is excited by Medbh McGuckian's writing. Recent conference papers include work borders and boundaries in Rohinton Mistry's short story cycle 'Tales from Firosha Baag,' trauma poetics in Paul Muldoon's poem 'The Sightseers,' (forthcoming as conference proceedings), and the post-colonial poetics of Tenzing Norgay's testimonio autobiography Man of Everest. I have written a thesis on the autobiography of madness in Leonora Carrington's Down Below and The Book of Margery Kempe.
<Vkuttainen@hotmail.com>