national home is unhomely and so the woman at the threshold of a
doorway turns off ë[t]he harsh yellow/ Porch lightí and stands in the
darkness asking: ëWhere is home now?í The heimlich becomes
unheimlich; standing on the threshold, her ëvisioní is set free from the
confines of the ëbrick houseí while the spirit of Anna Liffey is
released. Throughout the ëAnna Liffeyí sequence, the speaker appeals
to the fluidity of ëAn Lifeí with the effect of deterritorializing rather
than reterritorializing identity. In ëThe Floozie in the Jacuzzií (1989),
Smyth asks: ëHow to emigrate from the myths of Motherland?í By the
posthumous end of the ëAnna Liffeyí sequence Boland has already
done so.
Foley notes: ëThe colonial state of deracination and shattered
identity may well be exploited in terms of a fetishistic recuperation of
imaginary origins, but it can also serve to expose the relative in-
efficacy of the kind of singular identity that ideology wishes to
enforce.í^56 Within Bolandís ëAnna Liffeyí sequence this is the case
with the effect that
relations between the constructions of ëgenderí and ëcolonialismí are seen to
throw into crisis the identity-thinking which characterizes the ideologies of
patriarchy, imperialism, and bourgeois nationalism, the apprehension of these
relations may be at least potentially productive of a more fluid and politically
versatile sense of identity, one which can be used more effectively as an agent
of resistance.^57The statue of Anna Livia can be surveyed from another
perspective: as the floozie sits in the jacuzzi she can barely be seen
because of the sheets of water pouring over her. She dissolves into the
water, the fluidity of which makes her less monumental and also less
easy to see. Her identity is therefore less recognizable. Smyth argues
that Anna Livia is frozen in a monumental time and her identity is
unreal or misrepresented, and so representation of Woman does not
equal representation of the Real. To consider ëwomenís timeí, no
matter how differential, as more ërealí is founded on an idea of
authenticity that has created misrepresentation of the female in the
first place. Womenís time can gain critical impetus if it will recognize,
56 Foley, p.10.
57 Ibid., p.11.