Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Daylight becomes both ëblack-/ and-whiteí, there is a blurring of
boundaries, and the lines over-spill and seep into one another with the
effect of troubling the meaning of the verse as it imagines a ëmenial
in-betweení against a larger cosmic light.
As Meaney notices:

HÈlËne Cixous, whom Boland cites in A Kind of Scar, has argued that

ëinbetweení is the space of womenís writing, and Bolandís poems move

towards it. The inbetween is left open allowing differences between women to

remain and to redefine their relationship, allowing the gaps and silences, the

inter-dict, to [Ö] question the terms of the poetís authority.^40

Meaney briefly develops HÈlËne Cixousís notion of the inbetween as
she draws on the post-colonial theorization of Homi Bhabha. She
notices how womenís writing disturbs configurations of power from
the margins: ëfrom the only margin of difference available which is
powerful enough to challenge them.í As Meaney suggests, this is ëthe
discourse of internal exileí operating according to Bhabhaís terms

in the antagonistic inbetween [Ö] It contests genealogies of ëoriginí that lead to

claims for cultural supremacy and historical priority. Minority discourse ack-

nowledges the status of national culture ñ and the people ñ as a contentious,

performative space of the perplexity of the living [Ö]^41

Bhabhaís discussion of the inbetween is useful for readings of
gendered national identity in the Irish context, as he puts in place
more ëambivalentí and contradictory readings of feminist and post-
colonial identity politics. He also draws on Kristevaís ëWomenís
Timeí (1979) to argue for the excess of the people over the construct
of the nation or imagined community. In so doing, Bhabha notices
how for Kristeva, the borders of the nation are ëconstantly faced with
a double temporality: the process of identity constituted by historical
sedimentation (the pedagogical); and the loss of identity in the
signifying process of cultural identification (the performative).í Rather
than seeking redemption, Bhabhaís notion of post-colonial and
feminist temporalities offers the challenge to ërethink the sign of
history from within those languages, political or literary, which

40 Meaney, ëMyth, History and the Politics of Subjectivityí, p.141.
41 Bhabha, p.157.