Boland is in danger of eliding the differences between patriarchal
victimization and colonial exploitation. Yet in doing this, Boland also
brings the female body into a herstorical event in the hope that her
description of the famine will not forge an abstract historicist
narrative. She presents herstory in terms of a material time and space
peopled with the flesh of rotting corpses, and the cannibalism of
ëchildren devoured by their mothersí.
The poem still makes connections between the woman and the
landscape since her scars are imagined as ëan accurate inscriptioní ëof
that agonyí, of ëfailed harvestsí or the famine. There is a sense of
being unable to escape from the historical link forged between woman
and national landscape, and being unable to erase the scars left by
historicist myths which are nationalist as well as imperialist: ëThere is
no other way:// myth is the wound we leave/ in the time we have ñ .í
These lines provide a moment of interruption: rather than describing
the historical event of famine as a narrative from beginning to end, the
poetic voice interrupts this story with the effect of breaking the
narrative. Amongst the fragments of the poem are inserted the
individual experiences of mother and daughter. Myth is presented as
wounding with its abstract versions of unscathed femininity. In
resistance to eternal myth, the poem invokes the individuality of the
motherís scars, her daughter and a particular moment in time that is
subject to change: a ëMarch eveningí where the ëlights have changed
all dayí. At ëthe foothills of the Dublin mountainsí time does not stand
still, with the effect that neither time, space nor the women are
represented as static and unchanging.
Disruptions in the syntax, usually in the form of a hyphen, offer
the sense of a silent space being alluded to in the language of the
poem at moments when it is as if the poet swallows her own tongue.^16
Cora Kaplanís essay ëLanguage and Genderí (1986) notices how
femininity has been connected with silence; using the example of
Emily Dickinson, Kaplan argues that patriarchal representation of
women as mute affects the female poetís handling of written
16 Cf. Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature
Today (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p.143.