A Postcolonial Analysis of Seamus Heaney’s 'North'

Jessica Wren Butler – A Postcolonial Analysis of Seamus Heaney’s North (2008) A Postcolonial Analysis of Seamus Heaney’s North A text can be read in a variety of ways. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of authorship in 1968 and opened the interpretive field to a diaspora of clashing ‘meanings’ as diverse as a text’s readership.1 Over the past forty years schools of thinking, such as Marxist or feminist analysis, have emerged, based on their foregrounding of particular themes, issues and ways of reading. It is possible to read any text from one of these critical perspectives and generate a new interpretation – however, some works identify themselves as overtly ‘feminist’ or ‘Marxist’ texts. This confuses the notion of reader interpretation, as the implication is that a reader’s understanding of such a text could be diminished by their ignorance of feminism or Marxism. A reading could still be offered, but it may miss the ‘point’ or make little sense in the context of the wider issues presented by the text. Just as appreciation of a parody is enhanced by familiarity with the parodied, understanding of a themed text is aided by knowledge of that theme. I intend to demonstrate this through a postcolonial reading of Seamus Heaney’s 1975 poetry collection, North.2 Due to space constraints, I shall focus my analysis mainly on ‘Punishment’, ‘Ocean’s Love to Ireland’ and ‘Act of Union’ as these poems relate most strongly to colonialism. I define postcolonial literature as the body of texts produced by writers from colonised, or previously colonised, cultures. Postcolonial criticism, at its simplest, explores the relationship between literature and colonialism and is ‘preoccupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subordination of nations, races or cultures’.3 This process involves ‘reject[ing] the claims to universalism made on behalf of canonical Western literature’ and ‘examin[ing] the representation of other cultures in literature’.4 Literature has become a method of resistance, but as Homi K. Bhabha notes, ‘the social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going notion’.5 This is hindered by debates around postcolonial texts which often lead to ‘contestation of the legitimacy of seeing certain religious periods, socio-political formations and cultural practices as “genuinely” postcolonial’.6 North, however, is accepted as a postcolonial text, and sets out its intention to ‘contemplate the violence on [Heaney’s] home ground in relation to memories of the Roland Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’ in Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents, ed. by Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.228-232. 2 Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 2001). 3 Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), p.12. 4 Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995), p.199. 5 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 2. 6 Moore-Gilbert, p.11. 1 1 Jessica Wren Butler – A Postcolonial Analysis of Seamus Heaney’s North (2008) Scandinavian and English invasions’.7 The ‘home ground’ is Ireland, which, as Jonathan Tonge states, was ‘colonised by Britain, a subordination codified by the Act of Union in 1800’.8 Heaney, born in 1939 in Northern Ireland, never experienced an Ireland free from imperial rule, but he nonetheless retraces a history for himself and his people in North, to become a ‘repository and purveyor of Irish identity’,9 attempting to ‘represent the almost unrepresentable suffering of the North’. 10 To be a Catholic nationalist amongst Northern Ireland’s Protestant British majority was, according to Tonge, to feel ‘alien and second class’ (p.4). Heaney grew up in precisely this position, and Vendler asserts that this ‘forced [him] […] into becoming a poet of public as well as private life’ (p.1). Michael R. Molino adds that Heaney was driven to ‘find a form of creative dialogue, an emancipating discourse that faces the realities of the ideologically motivated, violent, pragmatic political arena’.11 North, and its extended birth metaphor, foregrounds what Tonge calls the ‘perceived illegitimacy of Northern Ireland, an entity contrived against the expressed wishes of the majority of Irish people’ (p.7). ‘The Grauballe Man’, for example, becomes a symbol of Northern Ireland, ‘bruised like a forceps baby’ (36) unwilling to be born. Northern Ireland’s awkward origins recur in ‘Bog Queen’s ‘slimy birth-cord’ (51), and the sardonic, parenthetical ‘it’s tempting here to rhyme on “labour pangs”/And diagnose a rebirth in our plight’ (‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ 39-40), but it is in ‘Act of Union’ that this reluctant birth is given a full exposition. England, prosopopoeically, becomes the poet, ‘imperially male’ (15), addressing a pregnant Ireland as her waters break in ‘a bog-burst, /a gash breaking open the ferny bed’ (3-4). Heaney’s agenda as a nationalist is most overt in this poem, with the two Shakespearean sonnets creating irony at a structural level, enhanced by a final line of quintessentially English iambic pentameter: ‘that leaves you raw, like opened ground, again’ (24). ‘Conquest is a lie’ (11), says England, defending his position as coloniser with the air of a self-justifying rapist: ‘I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder/That you would neither cajole nor ignore’ (9-10). There is a broad theme of rape through North, explored to its fullest in ‘Ocean’s Love to Ireland’, the title of which is an allusion to Walter Ralegh’s patriotic poem ‘Ocean’s Love to Cynthia’. Heaney’s version opens with the rape of an Irish maid by Ralegh, which in itself refers to an account of Ralegh’s sexual exploits by John Aubrey. Aubrey’s description offers no evidence that that maid is Irish, and the event appears consensual as ‘she cryed in the extasey’,12 but Ralegh was instrumental in depressing the Irish resistance, so Heaney has him back both the maid and Ireland to ‘a tree’ (2-3). North, jacket notes. Jonathan Tonge, Northern Ireland (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), p.13. 9 Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), p.12. 10 Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (London: Harper Collins, 1998), p.2. 11 Michael R. Molino, ‘Flying by the Nets of Language and Nationality: Seamus Heaney, the "English" Language, and Ulster's Troubles’, Modern Philology, 91 (1993), 180-201 (p.181). 12 John Aubrey, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. by Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secter and Warburg, 1975), p.256. 7 8 2 Jessica Wren Butler – A Postcolonial Analysis of Seamus Heaney’s North (2008) If the maid is Ireland, then Ralegh is England – ‘he is water, he is ocean, lifting/Her farthingale like a scarf of weed lifting/In the front of a wave’ (7-9): he has the power of the ocean whilst her resistance is but a ‘weed’, insignificant and easily removed. The Walter/water pun clarifies the ‘Ocean’ of the title, rendering the poem ironic and bitter. ‘In London, his name/Will rise on water’ (14-15) has biblical overtones and highlights the differing attitudes to Ralegh: for England he is a hero, for Ireland a colonialist who slaughtered ‘six hundred papists’ (17). Whilst North generally avoids the standard English iambic metre, Heaney uses it to great effect in isolation, usually to accentuate passages which overtly relate to English colonial powers. ‘Iambic drums/Of English beat the woods’ (22-23) has the sound of that drumming in its metre; this rhythm also occurs in lines 4-5 – ‘And drives inland/Till all her strands are breathless’ – in which Karen M. Moloney rightly notes that ‘the syllables simulate Raleigh’s [sic] thrusting action as he rapes the maid’.13 Language is one of the first cultural traditions to be dissolved by the colonising forces, so the rejection of English poetic convention is as effective as its occasional usage for emphasis. As David Lloyd observes, ‘control of narratives is a crucial function of the state apparatus […] the state determines the forms within which representation can take place’.14 Accent, metre and vocabulary are all aspects of language that Heaney identifies and reclaims. ‘I tried to write about sycamores/And innovated a South Derry rhyme/with hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled’ (25-27), the poet reflects in ‘The Ministry of Fear’, highlighting how ingrained mistaken notions of the ‘universal’ can be. Anglo-Saxon vocabulary appears frequently in North, and in the introduction to his translation of Beowulf, Heaney comments on his discovery that some Anglo-Saxon words have the same etymological roots as his own Ulster lexicon. This ‘illumination by philology’ precipitates heavy usage of kennings, especially in ‘Bone Dreams’.15 This poem is an exploration and excavation of the past, in which language figures strongly; ‘ban hus’, translated as ‘bone-house’, is a ‘skeleton/in the tongue’s/old dungeons’ (18-20), bringing other lexical skeletons with it as it is exhumed – ‘love-den, blood-holt, /dreambower’ (47-48). This archaeology of language becomes an invitation to ‘come back past/philology and kennings, /re-enter memory’ (49-51). The form of ‘Bone Dreams’ accentuates this digging into history with its long, thin, drill-like structure and arrangement of quatrains that appear like strata of rock. Quatrains are the predominant form of North, but they are not used for the purpose of adhering to a strict metrical or rhyming scheme, as the poems rarely have either and stanzas are only occasionally end-stopped. The main function of the quatrain in this context is visual, and draws attention to the traditional English forms when they are used, such as the sonnets in ‘Act of Union’ and ‘Strange Fruit’. Maria Cristina Fumagalli notes that ‘the sonneteering vogue was contemporary with the origins of Karen M. Moloney, ‘Heaney’s Love to Ireland’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 37 (1991), 273-288 (p.277). David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Movement (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), p.6. 15 Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p.xxvi. 13 14 3 Jessica Wren Butler – A Postcolonial Analysis of Seamus Heaney’s North (2008) English imperialism’, and that in using the sonnet it ‘is now turned by Heaney to the advantage of the “colonised”’.16 Heaney appropriates conventions only when he wishes to subvert them. In the so-called ‘Bog Poems’ of North Heaney draws on a distant Scandinavian history and uses this to represent his interpretation of Ireland’s troubled past. After reading P. V. Glob’s The Bog People, the poet reveals that seeing the photographs of the exhumed victims of ritual sacrifice ‘blended in [his] mind with the photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles’.17 Shelley C. Reece asserts that ‘the ritual significance of that early violence in Scandinavian countries helped Heaney to see the events of contemporary Ireland as current instances from a long tradition in a larger northern context’, but the fact remains that he is still appropriating figures from another culture to suit his anti-colonial agenda.18 Heaney’s ‘larger northern context’ is no more universal than the English notion of rhyme; it is an interpretation. In these poems the poet becomes the coloniser of the bog people and their history; their identity is usurped and their bodies used as puppets through which Heaney performs ventriloquism on behalf of the Irish he forces them to symbolise. There is a sense of discomfort with this process in ‘Strange Fruit’, the ‘beheaded girl […] outstaring/What had begun to feel like reverence’ (12-14), and her gaze is defiant, resisting beatification. The ‘little adulteress ’(21) of ‘Punishment’ parallels the Catholic women who were tarred and feathered by the Irish Republican Army for fraternizing with English soldiers: they are her ‘betraying sisters’ (38). The most striking aspect of this poem is the theme of self-implication that comes in the eighth stanza: I almost love you but would have cast, I know, the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur. (29-32) The poet here both refers to the bog woman and the Catholics, acknowledging the hypocritical nature of the observer who ‘would connive in civilised outrage’ (41-42) and yet ‘understand’ the desire for ‘intimate revenge’ (44). Lloyd argues that ‘voyeurism is criticised merely as a pose, never for its function in purveying the intimate knowledge of violence by which it is judged’ (p.32), but this assertion could be challenged. The criticism that Lloyd finds lacking is implicit in the tone of the poem. The, presumably male, voice is neither admirable nor likeable – there are patronising undertones in ‘little adulteress’ and ‘poor scapegoat’ (28), and the speaker has confessed to being one who ‘stood dumb’ whilst punishments were taking place. The reader is not positioned to Maria Cristina Fumagalli, The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), pp.88-89. 17 Seamus Heaney, quoted in Lloyd, p.27. 18 Shelley C. Reece, ‘Seamus Heaney's Search for the True North’, Pacific Coast Philology, 27 (1992), 93-101 (p.95). 16 4 Jessica Wren Butler – A Postcolonial Analysis of Seamus Heaney’s North (2008) sympathise, and therefore must question the poet’s integrity – this is not merely a comment on the nature of passive collusion, but on the complex nature of colonialism: the enemies are within as well as without, and the colonised can become the coloniser. North has been criticised by feminists for the continued symbols of Ireland as female and England as male. This is explicit not only in the use of ‘he’ and ‘she’, but also in the extended metaphor of the land as a body, seen to its greatest effect in ‘Act of Union’. This imagery is necessary in relation to the parallel metaphor of Northern Ireland’s awkward and ungrateful birth, but it is the overtly sexual overtones of the collection that I find more disturbing. There is something necrophiliac in the descriptions of the bog people, such as, ‘they unswaddled the wet fern of her hair’ (‘Strange Fruit’, 3), and sexual imagery is a constant throughout, particularly in reference to the ‘female’ Ireland. Even the vegetation is erotically charged; in ‘Kinship’ (72-75) the Mosses come to a head, heather unseeds, brackens deposit their bronze The theme of rape that Heaney has constructed in North is cogent with the notion of women as colonised subjects, especially in times of war, but the incestuous sexualisation of Ireland as the female is disconcerting, and such a patriarchal representation of power balances serves not to challenge but perpetuate and reflect this dominant Western ideology. Thus Heaney finds himself in a complex position, colonised by the British as an Irishman, but a coloniser in his turn, of the bog people and, more broadly, of women. Reece purports that North ‘shows Heaney fully engaged in seeking identity with his northern origins, whether they are words, archaeological fragments, bog people, or myths’ (p.97), and it must be remembered that this collection is indeed an exploration and interpretation of Heaney’s northern origins. To read this work in depth, and to apply a postcolonial analysis to North is to discover a richer ground for interpretation and to understand to a greater degree Heaney’s skilful use of poetic technique. There is no question that my engagement with, and pleasure derived from, this text has been increased considerably by an improved knowledge of the circumstances it relates to, but I must beware of assuming that my understanding of Ireland’s colonisation is equally as illuminated by my knowledge of Heaney’s collection. North, and Heaney, have been generally well-received and achieved canonical status as ‘one of the crucial poetic interventions of the twentieth century’, but it is vital to remember the very individual point of view represented.19 David Lloyd is of the opinion that Heaney writes ‘in terms of a vision of the poet as diviner of the hypothetical pre-political consciousness of his race’ (p.14), and this may well be his vision, but if postcolonial analysis aims to deconstruct the 19 Vendler, p.3. 5 Jessica Wren Butler – A Postcolonial Analysis of Seamus Heaney’s North (2008) idea of Western universalism, it – and the postcolonial writer – must not forget that the experience of the colonised is no more universal. 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