for an authentic sense of Irishness, ëThe Tollund Maní and ëTollundí,
notice how sacrosanct versions of history and nationality, wound and
cut out historical subjects from their present moment in time. Freed
from the historical crypt, ëTollundísí unheimlich ëghostsí have flown
with the future tense anticipated by ëThe Tollund Maní in an attempt
at rebirth into the present tense of ëTollundí: ëOurselves again, free-
willed again, not bad.í
Using Hallís terms, which are post-colonial rather than
traditional nationalist terms, ëTollundí
re-read[s] ëcolonizationí as part of an essentially transnational and transcultural
ëglobalí process ñ and it produces a decentred, diasporic or ëglobalí rewriting of
earlier, nation-centred imperial grand narratives [...] It is about how the lateral
and transverse cross-relations of what Gilroy calls the ëdiasporicí supplement
and simultaneously dis-place the centre-periphery, and the global/local
reciprocally re-organize and re-shape one another.^100Hall argues that hybrid, transcultural movements inscribed in the
history of colonialism in binary terms, have emerged as new and
disrupting forms: ëThey reposition and dis-place, ìdifferenceî with-
out, in the Hegelian sense ìovercomingî it.í^101 In this way, the post-
colonial and Heaneyís poetry thinks the cultural consequences of the
colonizing process in non-originary ways. Heaney/Sweeney has
travelled a long way since North, displacing both colonialism and
nationalism on his way. Questioning standard lines of thought,
Heaney positions himself within the tendency of anti-colonial writing
to transfer attention from what is imagined as ëcentralí to a critique of
representations of centrality.
The overtly political, (or what we take to be political), agenda of
North has been replaced by a less publically motivated anti-colonial
vision that has in many ways been there from the start with the
unrooted figure of Antaeus, ëraised upí ëinto a dream of lossí.^102 On
the one hand, this leads to uncertainty whether ëTollundí imagines that
one must leave Irish territory in order to find freedom and how far this
poem altogether destroys the nationalist issue of repossessing
100 Hall, The Post-Colonial Question, p.247.
101 Ibid., p.251.
102 Heaney, North, pp.46ñ7.