self-erasureí: ëshe has adopted as an element of form a silence
surrounding the words on the page or in the air of speech.í^49
Representation of the self is always made in the context of
misrepresentation or erasure. Boland echoes Smythís ëFloozie in the
Jacuzzií as she imagines Irishness and femininity in terms of erasure,
and so in the title poem of The Lost Land, she ends with the line:
ëIreland. Absence. Daughter.í^50
Harper draws attention to the relation between death and time
within Bolandís poetry and, in so doing, she comes to the heart of the
problem with how to understand Bolandís relation to identity and
writing. First, she argues that Bolandís poetry reacts against linguistic
tropes that reduce women to object status, whereby History or the
normative and masculinist way of thinking causes the death of the
subject. Hence: ëThe extent one speaks as a woman subject, resisting
death, is therefore life.í Harper runs into difficulties when she reasons
that ëthe old elimination of women by objectifying them in a trope of
eternal life becomes not a killing but a giving of eternal life.í She
concludes that if a womanís experience is delimited into a space of
objectivity where she risks becoming ëeternalí, then what she needs
after all is death or to be killed off in art in order to be born into the
temporal since she has no life within ëan aesthetic dead endí and the
ëtrope[s] of artistic powerí.
What Harper hits upon is the way in which, for femininity, art is
a place of either death or the eternal, and the two amount to more or
less the same thing. In ëThe Achill Womaní Boland tries to create a
more critical herstorical consciousness. She attempts to do this by
stepping aside one death where the woman is the idealized female
object within a male tradition yet she ends up in another death
whereby the female poet who misrepresents life risks creating more
tropes of female identity. Speaking for marginal voices or the
subaltern carries with it the difficulty of how to make this a malleable
and performative articulation, rather than just another pedagogical
formation of identity and temporality. In order to be herstorical the
female voice within the work of art has to cease as itself and recognize
the way in which it is constantly misrepresented. Bolandís poem ends:
49 Ibid., pp.188ñ9.
50 Boland, ëThe Lost Landí, The Lost Land (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), p.38.