coloniser and colonised breaks down through irony, imitation and
subversioní.^46
Graham attempts to critique the containment of essentialist and
authentic conceptions of colonial and national identity in favour of
noticing the liminal spaces or passages between identities. Seeking
dis-position or in Muldoonís terms, being double or twice, he is
neither one nor the other but several. This move away from fixed
modes of identity on the part of Muldoon results in poems about
identities that resist closure. Such an open ended struggle char-
acterizes the balancing acts undertaken by the liminal speakers in the
poems discussed in this chapter. In the conclusion of The Location of
Culture (1994), entitled ‘“ Race” , time and the revision of modernity’,
Bhabha notices:
There is no longer an influential separatist emphasis on simply elaborating an
anti-imperialist [Ö] tradition ëin itself.í There is an attempt to interrupt [Ö]
discourses of modernity through these displacing, interrogative [Ö] narratives
and the critical-theoretical perspectives they engender.^47It is precisely this refusal to stay rooted in essentialism, that is
played out in the poems by Muldoon that have been discussed as they
provide the reader with ëdisplacingí and ëinterrogativeí ëperspectivesí.
As Muldoon attempts to avoid the limits of the prescriptive, he
touches on ëpost-modern, post-colonial and post-nationalistí ëcritical-
theoretical perspectivesí that are symptomatic of his dis-position as a
contemporary poet from the divided state of the North of Ireland who
has emigrated to the United States. Muldoonís doubling need not be
understood simply in terms of postmodern theorization but rather in
terms of the post-colonial politics of the North, and in relation to a
colonial inheritance and a divided nation. Muldoonís critical dis-
positions are a symptom of the divided nature of the territory and
culture from which he originated. Yet his poetry seeks to sever his
rootedness and containment within any given culture and mode of
thinking in order to ëthink otherwiseí and be ëelsewhereí. This is
46 Colin Graham, ëìDefining Bordersî: Liminal Spaces, Post-Colonial Theories
and Irish Cultureí, The Irish Review, No.16 (Autumn/Winter 1994), pp.29ñ43,
pp.31ñ3.
47 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p.241.