Alternatively, the encounter may be viewed as an act of
reciprocity between individuals. Although the couple are separated at
the end of the poem, the final image is sexual and one of intermingling
fluids. The speaker wanders along streams which ëhad once flowed
simplyí into one another: ëOne taking the otherís nameí. The title of
the poem suggests plural identity and hybridity, and this reiterates the
dedication of New Weather to Muldoonís ëmothersí and ëfathersí. The
sexual metaphors of mingling fluids surrounding the coupleís
relationship suggests that identity is interactive, unresolved and con-
stantly in process. Moving between the limits of coast and capital,
race and sexuality, Muldoonís poem ëIdentitiesí undermines notions
of identity as centralized and pure, in favour of liminal locations and
hybrid forms of identity where one takes on another name. In this
poem, identity is presented in the plural as an unbalanced site of
struggle which is affected by materialism and social politics, where
the capital and the liminal periphery exist in tension with one another,
and where frontiers are continually crossed.
Using Bhabhaís terms from his essay on ëDissemiNationí, the
couple in ëIdentitiesí can be described as wandering people
who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its
unisonant discourse, but are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that
alienates the frontiers of the modern nation [Ö] They articulate the death-in-life
of the idea of the ëimaginary communityí of the nation; the worn-out metaphors
of the resplendent national life now circulate in another narrative of entry ñ
permits and passports and work-permits that at once preserve and proliferate,
bind and breach the human rights of the nation.^39In ëIdentitiesí identity is represented in terms not of purity but fusion,
and the relationship is presented as a messy human process of
exchange and transgression rather than as a singular, self contained
encounter. ëIdentitiesí subscribes to the representation of identity in
terms of mingling and apartness, hybridity and difference. Im-
portantly, the location and historical period of the poem are not
divulged, nor does the poem identify the race of the couple.
ëIdentitiesí leaves identity indeterminate, somewhere on the periphery,
at the limits of space and time, in a non-specific place and non-
39 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p.164.