unrooted. According to Docherty, the continuity provided by ëa
traditioní has fallen apart. To refer back to Arendt, this means that the
linkage between past and future can no longer hold or be justified with
the effect that the poetry writes of a dispossession that provides a
more historical rather than traditional sense of the moment. As things
fall apart there is no legitimate centre or authentic origin that can
provide a suture for the rupture left by colonialism. In view of this
debate, it is important to consider how the condition of colonial
violence is what brings about the symptoms or metaphors of un-
rootedness, rupture, dispossession and deterritorialization in Heaneyís
poetry.
The impulse to return to oneís roots is questioned rather than
endorsed in Heaneyís poem ëThe Tollund Maní (1972), written during
the Troubles. Lloyd explains how in this poem the poet takes on the
role of an archaeologist who digs for missing origins. However, the
poem reinscribes the ideological violence an attention to origins might
impose and alludes to the mythological aspects of such a reinscription.
In this way, continuity between identity and ground is not restored but
disrupted. The speaker oscillates between using the ësad freedomí of
the Tollund man as a symbol of resistance, whilst hinting at the
negative quality of the corpse as a symbol of blood sacrifice. In part
two the speaker recalls the layers of dead residing in a universal bog
which exists from the Tollund man at Aarhus, to the ëscattered,
ambushed/ Flesh of labourersí, ë[t]ell-tale skin and teethí ë[o]f four
young brothersí, dragged along railway sleepers by Protestant
paramilitaries, and part of Heaneyís own local history. In this
worldwide crypt of preserved victims, the setting of Jutland serves as
an analogy for Ireland. The speaker poignantly ends the poem:
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost
Unhappy and at home.^30Ritual killing is ëoldí, part of history, inscribed on the consciousness
of the community and yet not confined to the Irish context alone.
30 Heaney, ëThe Tollund Maní, Selected Poems, pp.78ñ9.