Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

More scouts than strangers, ghosts whoíd walked abroad

Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning

And make a go of it, alive and sinning,

Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.^96

At home beyond the tribe, identity or being ëourselvesí is located in
territory which is not specifically Irish but in landscape like the
ëìTownland of Peaceî, that poem of dream farms/ [o]utside all
contentioní. The burdens of history, myth and local history like that of
the ëfour young brothersí in ëThe Tollund Maní are absent. The
figures in the poem travel far out beyond the barricades creating their
own routes rather than setting down roots. This reading can be
criticized for positing a transnational essence. But it also refuses the
grounding of the ëlocalí, separatist or ëuncontaminatedí understanding
that prioritizes one identity over another. In Deleuzian terms, the
ëfootlooseí couple in ëTollundí are travelling a rhizome, and as they
refuse containment in one place, they avoid reiterating the structures
of their oppression in a utopian move towards a place ë[o]utside all
contentioní.
Stuart Hall describes the post-colonial as re-reading the binary
forms in which the colonial encounter has for too long been
represented: ëIt obliges us to re-read the binaries as forms of
transculturation, of cultural translation, destined to trouble the
here/there cultural binaries for ever.í ëTollundí re-reads and revisits
ëThe Tollund Maní in an act of ëtransculturationí or ëcultural
translationí where Danish and English exist alongside one another
and,

[i]t is precisely this ëdouble inscriptioní, breaking down the clearly demarcated

inside/outside of the colonial system on which the histories of imperialism have

thrived for so long, which the concept of the ëpost-colonialí has done so much

to bring to the fore.^97

Both Denmark and England have dominated other countries such as
Iceland and Ireland. Denmark has been colonized by Sweden and, in
the tenth century, Ireland was colonized by the Danes. Making links

96 Heaney, ëTollundí, The Spirit Level, p.69.
97 Stuart Hall in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons,
eds., Iain Chambers & Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), p.247.