the coal man’ – ‘sorry mammy passed away in her sleep’– ‘and other
people [who] don’t’.^16
In view of the fracturing apparent in conceptions of the nation, it
is important to examine the movement away from the limitations of
colonial and nationalist formulations of identity in relation to the
poetry. How far can more flexible representations of identity be
identified within the poems with the effect of establishing so-
phisticated ways of thinking about decolonization that take into
account the way in which the nation is fragmented and discontinuous,
rather than unified and uncontradictory?
The Partition and Border Transgression
Situated on the Catholic side of the national question, Seamus Heaney
comments: ‘From the beginning I was very conscious of bound-
aries.’^17 Heaney is all too aware of the divided communities living in
the North and he has referred to the ‘split culture of Ulster’ in much of
his writing.^18 Heaney’s move South in 1972 was a conscious decision
to leave the British colony that was originally his home. What is
interesting is how this move demonstrated that the border could be
transgressed in both real and symbolic terms.
The Southern Irish critic, Ailbhe Smyth, has attacked the
formation of frontiers within Irish culture and political discourse. In
her lecture ‘Borderline Cross Talk’ (1998) which she delivered to the
opening conference of the ‘Women-on-Ireland Network’, Smyth
turned to the liminal spaces of feminist and post-colonial political
theory in order to suggest more malleable modes of identity
16 Rita Ann Higgins, Sunny Side Plucked: New & Selected Poems (Newcastle:
Bloodaxe, 1986, 1996), pp.38, 40, 41, 68ñ9.
17 Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 1986), p.13.
18 Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968ñ1978 (London: Faber,
1980), p.35. Cf. Henry Hart, ëHistory, Myth, and Apocalypse in Heaneyís
Northí, Contemporary Literature, Vol.30, No.3, Fall, 1989, p.397.