Daughters of Colony*, and: Daughters of Colony: A Personal Interpretation of the Place of Gender Issues in the Postcolonial Interpretation of Irish Literature

DAUGHTERS OF COLONY* EAVAN BOLAND Daughters of parsons and of army men. Daughters of younger sons of younger sons. Who left for London from Kingstown harbour— never certain which they belonged to. Who took their journals and their steamer trunks. Who took their sketching books. Who wore hats made out of local straw dried in an Irish field beside a river which flowed to a town they had known in childhood, and watched forever from their bedroom windows, framed in the clouds and cloud-shadows, the blotchy cattle and the scattered window lamps of a flat landscape they could not enter. Would never enter. I see the darkness coming. The absurd smallness of the handkerchiefs they are waving as the shore recedes. I put my words between them and the silence the failing light has consigned them to: I also am a daughter of the colony. I share their broken speech, their other-whereness. EAVAN BOLAND’S “DAUGHTERS OF COLONY” 7 No testament or craft of mine can hide our presence on the distaff side of history. See: they pull the brims of their hats down against a gust from the harbour. They cover their faces with what should have been and never quite was: their home. EAVAN BOLAND’S “DAUGHTERS OF COLONY” 8 *from “The Colony” sequence of The Lost Land, a new volume of poems due to be published October 1998 by W.W. Norton DAUGHTERS OF COLONY: A PERSONAL INTERPRETATION OF THE PLACE OF GENDER ISSUES IN THE POSTCOLONIAL INTERPRETATION OF IRISH LITERATURE it is a summer evening, more than thirty years ago. The light has the eerie brightness of the early Irish summer: almost midnight, and still not dark. I am in the back room of a small flat, with books on a table, talking to my mother. She is just about to tell me a story. But before she does, I will freeze-frame the scene. The books, the place, the conversation—they all belong in this. The room, to begin with, is plain and comfortable. It is a student flat. I share it with my sister who is already at college, to which I will go in September. The books belong also. I have taken the GCSE that summer , because I have spent years in London and New York. I have studied British poetry. I have answered questions on Donne and Shakespeare without ever feeling it strange that this should be the test for an Irish girl. And now I have done well in my exams. I have small but real feelings of power, of accomplishment. My mother is only there for the evening. Tomorrow she will go back to New York where she lives. And the story? It is just about to begin. One moment I do not know it. The next I am listening to a surprisingly emotional and harsh series of words, sentences, remembrances from my sophisticated mother. I can just about remember it she says. What is it she remembers? As she tells it, she is standing by a fireside. She was a very small girl. She thinks she might have been seven or eight. A very old woman is speaking. She is crouched, and covered in a shawl and telling a terrible story. My mother is standing there: This small child in a space of complete unknowing, hardly knowing that she is listening. But she is listening. She is paying enough attention to carry this poisoned gift—this awkward talisman—across years and years, only to hand it like a secret to her youngest daughter who now sits in front of her, full of prides and distracting vanities. Who does not want this story. Who has no use for it at all. EAVAN BOLAND’S “DAUGHTERS OF COLONY” 9 My reason for writing this can be put in a few sentences: I had a passion for my country’s literature long before I had a place in it. Many young writers feel that. But in my case the feeling continued long past my rational acceptance of it. When my knowledge caught up with my passion, when I began to understand the tradition I came from, when my work still...