Your name is a fossil, a petrified tree
Your name means less than nothing.^5The poet claims to be unable to construe the national hero because he
is so dated. However, paradoxically, the poem does construe
Cuchulainn and demonstrates his shadowy presence within contem-
porary Irish culture. For example, his ëname is a fossilí and as
ëpetrifiedí as is his statue in the General Post Office in Dublin. ëAn
obvious Martian in human disguiseí he is from another planet, a
hackneyed alien from a science-fiction serial who is removed from
Ireland and cannot relate to ëEarthlingsí, understand their language or
what they ë[s]peak ofí. Even so, his image is still part of the
iconography of the nation-state and is present none the less in the
mind of the modern poet, and also for Dubliners posting their letters.
Although Cuchulainn at first appears as an anachronism who
does not fit with the backdrop of concrete tower blocks and domestic
violence, and seems disconnected from urban life in Dublin, he still
lives in the subconscious of people as their home is ë[n]amed after an
Irish Patriot/ Who died with your name on his lipsí. His name on the
patriotís lips who provides a name for a modern day tower block,
bears testimony to the way a post-colonial culture looks to a myth-
ologized past before colonialism in order to assert a nationalist future
after colonialism. In the poem, Cuchulainnís ancient presence is held
alongside ëPhoenix Audio-Visual Systemsí and the graffiti in the
ëchildrenís playgroundí. Contemporary life and the presence of myth
are both juxtaposed and held together in the poem.
OíLoughlin connects the violence of colonialism and that of a
patriotic hero with that of the violence inflicted on the modern day
housewife whose eyes are ëbattered and bruisedí. There is no sense of
freedom for the woman, no room for heroes such as Cuchulainn and
no place for the mythological version of Ireland visited by Revivalists.
For the speaker, the meaning of Cuchulainn is translated in terms of a
tranquilizer, ëLibriumí, and the television that has become a new
purveyor of myth, heroes and official versions of national history as
communicated by the media. Brand names are used in the poem as
though modern meaning and identity are dispersed into a process of
5 Michael O’Loughlin, ‘Cuchulainn’, Another Nation (Dublin: New Island,
1996), p.13.