If a colony is a wound what will heal it?
After such injuries
what difference do we feel?No answer in the air,
on the water, in the distance
And yetEmblem of this old,
torn and traded city,
altered by its river, its weather,
I turn to you as if there were ñone flawed head towards another.^53The end of the poem finds ëno answerí that will sweep away the
wounds of colonialism or even patriarchy that mark the speaker; even
the transcendent elements of ëairí and ëwaterí provide no resolution.
There is only misrepresentation or the flawed head of the statue and
the speaker herself who is represented in the poem as the woman with
the scarred face. No authentic or pure solution can be found; there is
only dissolution or the flawed head of the statue dissolving in the
ëIrish rainí. Boland draws on the fluid image of the rain as the poem
suggests little foundational sense of ëIrishnessí beyond the scarred
heads of woman and statue that heal ëjust enough to be a nationí or
what ëI have lostí.^54 As the monument to a woman and nation be-
comes softened by the rain gendered and national identity are
dissolved, and both women are conceived in terms of loss.
In Bolandís ëAnna Liffeyí identity is dissolving rather than
resolving, and in this way, she resists the pull of more traditional
conceptions of Irish womanhood. At the end of ëAnna Liffeyí, the
speaker becomes ëlostí in ëthe oceaní imploring that ëthe spirit of
placeí becomes a ëlost soul againí. As Bhabha notices: ëThe lost
object ñ the national Heim ñ is repeated in the void that at once
prefigures and pre-empts the ìunisonantî which makes it unheimlich;
analogous to the incorporation that becomes the daemonic double of
introjection and identification.í^55 In ëAnna Liffeyí the ëunisonantí
53 Ibid., ëThe Scarí, pp.19ñ20.
54 Ibid., ëA Habitable Griefí, p.29 and ëThe Mother Tongueí, p.31.
55 Bhabha, p.165.