easier to see how appropriate they are to manipulation by the powerful in
society.^23Like time, maps regularize human existence. Referring to European
maps, Harley explains how they supported imperialist beliefs in
ëEuropeís God-given right to territorial appropriationí.^24 Ideological
boundaries exist before the maps are drawn up. Therefore, the image
of the map is a useful metaphor for the contest between discursive
fields of power since ë[l]ike the historian, the map-maker has always
played a rhetorical role in defining the configurations of power in
society as well as recording their manifestation in the visible land-
scape.í^25 In the light of this it is interesting to ask how far ëOn
Ballycastle Beachí can be read as challenging the historian, the
mapmaker and configurations of power in society.
Graham Huggan argues how cartographic representation involves
presenting a particular view of the world which draws up boundaries
that contain identities within specific spaces. Huggan views Bhabhaís
reading of the ambivalence of colonial discourse as he
undermines the claim to coherence of cartographic discourse by revealing that
the exemplary structuralist activity involved in the production of the map (the
demarcation of boundaries, allocation of points and connection of lines within
an enclosed, self sufficient unit) traces back to a ëpoint of presenceí whose
stability cannot be guaranteed [Ö]^26The issue then is ënot whether deconstruction can somehow provide a
ìbetterî map but the problematization of ìany discourse which
proposes itself as an exact map of realityî.í^27 So what kind of map of
reality and space for identity does the poem ëOn Ballycastle Beachí
(1988) provide?
23 J.B. Harley, ëMaps, Knowledge, and Powerí, The Iconography of Landscape:
Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments
(Cambridge: University Press, 1988), p.278.
24 Ibid., p.292.
25 Ibid.
26 Graham Huggan, ëDecolonizing the Map: Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism
and the Cartographic Connectioní, Ariel, Vol.20, No.4, October, 1989, p.129.
27 Ibid., p.113.