create her individualized sense of a womanís time, she has also to
ëchange the worldí of the nation and move away from a nationalist
conception of History that is rooted in the past.^21 That is, she has to
move from a traditional form of nationalism that tends to re-root to a
nationalism that re-routes or looks forward. If tradition mixed with
progress is the story of nationalism, a more critical kind of nationalism
can refigure modernity on its own terms. This can be achieved by
looking back and forward simultaneously so as to challenge the
historical continuum, the universality of History and, by implication,
the modernist essentialism upon which the nation-state is founded and
by which ëthe peopleí become fixed.
Timothy Foley explains how ë[a]rticulating difference by
bestowing a fixed identity on that subaltern exposes the continuity
between the tactics of imperialism and the tactics of essentialist
nationalism.í^22 This is a further problem with ëThe Achill Womaní. In
the poem, the speaker acknowledges the irony of reading the ëSilver
Poetsí with their ëharmonies of servitudeí whilst at the holiday cottage
where the Achill woman serves her by bringing water each day. As
Meaney notes, there are class differences between the two women and
it is clear that the speaker has been educated within imperialist
traditions. How far then can Boland fill the silences of history with the
words of the marginalized without bestowing a fixed identity on the
Achill woman? What is nagging discussion of writing for ëthe
dispossessedí is the danger that in critiquing historicism or a given
idea of History as homogenous, the marginal becomes the new
authentic way of fixing the temporal rather than creating a critical
herstorical consciousness.
As Colin Graham indicates in his essay ëSubalternity and
Gender: Problems of Post-Colonial Irishnessí (1996): ëEthically-
endowing the position of the subaltern can lead to a revelling in the
insurgency of nationalism or feminism which easily slides into a
continuous and necessary reinstatement of their oppressed position.í^23
Male and female critics, Protestant and Catholic, from the North and
21 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, ëTime and Historyí, Infancy and History: The
Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 1993), p.191.
22 Timothy Foley, ëIntroductioní, Gender and Colonialism, p.10.
23 Colin Graham, ëSubalternity and Gender: problems of post-colonial Irishnessí,
Journal of Gender Studies, Vol.5, No.3, 1996, p.368.