"The Text of It": A Conversation with Eavan Boland

My conversation with Eavan Boland came after Carol Shloss's reading from her biography Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, on June 18, 2004, during the Bloomsday 100 International James Joyce Symposium at the Docklands campus of the National College of Ireland. Boland spoke generously and extensively not only about her coming projects, but also about issues that she has hardly mentioned before. In other interviews Boland has emphasized her own evolution as a poet, her perspective on nationalism and feminism, and her difficulty in making her own way in an Ireland where "womanhood" and "poetry" were almost irreconcilable categories. This interview approaches Boland's work from another perspective. My questions bear in mind current postcolonial criticism that focuses on the "decentered" subject.

In her dealings with Ireland's history and culture, Boland has faced charges, mostly in Ireland, of being opportunistic in her choice of subject matter. This interview contains one of the few instances when Boland defends herself from such criticism, arguing that she has no interest in being "representative" or in perpetuating that nationalist discourse in which the Irish poet must speak for an oppressed community. Such an act runs the risk of being misrepresentative, of undermining difference, and of simplifying women's reality as lamenting voices, mouthpieces, or ornaments. That is why Boland's poetry always presents an Irish female past that remains inaccessible. Becoming a poetic voice limited by an ability to retrieve the past is, for Boland, a subversive strategy. By suggesting that the distance between the past and the present cannot be bridged, Boland dismantles the bardic belief that the Irish poet has been empowered by an inherited authority "to speak of and for something." Boland does not seek her authority as a poet from this historic, privileged stance, but rather from a silenced past of defeat.

Boland's theoretical formulations in this conversation ask us, as readers, to learn the limits of representation and, especially, the fallibility of any act that consigns an identity to a poetic image. Poetry, for Boland, is a very limited form of representation that runs the risk of turning fluid and real images into solid and fixed emblems. Boland attempts, as she notes, to dissolve her poetic images in both time and space so as to move away from simplistic reductions. In this sense, Boland's mature work provides the prospect of a fluid identity, one constantly changing and unstable. Her poetry moves toward the liberating possibility of conceiving identity as a category composed of "fragmentations." For Boland, the possibilities afforded by writing in English—the only language she was left with both historically and personally—offer subversive strategies that allow her to overturn misconceived ideas about "Irishness" based on constructions of "pure" precolonial identity.

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PV: I enjoyed your introduction to Carol Shloss's reading from To Dance in the Wake [2004] when you mentioned that biography is "an ethic" for yourself. I found that reading your poetry is to enter biographies from the past. How is identity constructed in your poetry, by recording these biographies, these silences of the past?

EB: It's an interesting question. I think all human identity is fictional in some way. What you construct from your past is usually a process of selection rather than construction: there's no actual model on which to build a past or a present. Inevitably, you select what serves the construction. In my own case, when I was young one of the real shaping influences was my gradual discovery of the difference between the past and history. In Ireland, there's a wide and instructive distance between those two. I believe history is an official version of events—it is itself a constructed narrative. But the past, at least as I came to see it, is a place of silences and losses and disappearances. That gap, that distance between those two narratives—and my own gradual...