home becomes unheimlich and overrun with strangers. The effect of
this is that the subjects of such a territory occupy contested ground as
is imagined by Daniel Corkery with his notion of the ëquaking sod.í
The decolonizing politics of Irish nationalism seek to construct a more
authentic sense of the national heim with which to counteract the
inauthenticity and not at homeness which has been created by British
imperialism as it made a country strange or foreign to itself. Exploring
the poets, it has been noticeable how the national heim is presented as
not as homely as it might be. This is especially true for the women
poets who experience a double dispossession from ëThe Lost landí
whose tradition has, in Bolandís terms, ëeditedí them out of the
picture, and is typified by McGuckianís poem ëThe Heiressí (1982)
where the ëbirth/ Of an heiress means the gobbling of landí.^24
As Sumita Chakravarty notices in Identity and Authenticity
(1987): ëit is important to remember that a nation is a dialectical unity,
it is constructed in and against ideas of disunity and difference which
it is the work of ìnationalismî to transcend.í^25 Likewise, Gareth
Griffiths argues in ëThe Myth of Authenticityí (1994):
There are real dangers in recent representations of indigenous peoples [Ö]
which stress claims to an ëauthenticí voice. For these claims may be a form of
overwriting the complex actuality of difference equal but opposite to the more
overt writing out of that voice in earlier oppressive discourses of reportage; in
fact it may well be the same process at work, and the result may be just as
crippling to the efforts of indigenous peoples to evolve an effective strategy of
recuperation and resistance.^26Griffiths is troubled that the ëpossibilities of subaltern speech are
contained by the discourse of the oppressorí and that ëthe sign of
ìauthenticityî is an act of ìliberalî discursive violence, parallel in
many ways to the inscription of the ìnativeî (indigene) under the sign
of the savageí (p.71):
24 Medbh McGuckian, ‘The Heiress’, The Flower Master (Meath: Gallery, 1982,
1993), p.57.
25 Sumita S. Chakravarty, Identity and Authenticity: Nationhood and the Popular
Cinema 1947–1962 (Michegan: UMI, 1987, 1991), p.3.
26 Gareth Griffiths, ‘The Myth of Authenticity: Representation, Discourse and
Social Practice’, De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality, eds.,
Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London: Routledge, 1994), p.70. All further
references are to this edition and are cited in parentheses in the text.