Us & Them: Women Writers' Discourses on Foreignness

Manuela Palacios Us & Them: Women Writers’ Discourses on Foreignness Copyright This edition has been elaborated under the auspices of the research projects “Us and Them: Discourses on Foreignness by Irish and Galician Women Writers (MICINN FFI2009-08475/FILO), and “The Animal Trope: An Ecofeminist Analysis of Contemporary Culture in Galicia and Ireland” (PGC2018-093545-B-I00, MCIU/AEI/ ERDF, UE) funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union. ISBN Lovers roam around like foreigners Lupe Gómez Arto, Azul e estranxeira For Bahi Takkouche Summary 1 The book Us & Them: Women Writers’ Discourses on Foreignness focuses on literary works from the last four decades to analyse the contingent nature of the constructions of foreignness in Ireland and Galicia. On the basis of various comparable circumstances in both communities —migration flows, increasingly multicultural societies, constant renegotiations of national identity, and the growing visibility of women in the public sphere— this book traces the multiple ways in which gender is intertwined with foreignness and presents contemporary women writers’ new insights into cultural difference. Contents Acknowledgements Summary Discourses on Foreignness by Irish and Galician Women Writers: An Introduction I. The Genres of Foreignness I.1. Us & Them in Contemporary Irish and Galician Poetry I.1.1. Mirror Conversations: Mary O’Donnell’s Massacre of the Birds I.1.2. “Sisters of a trillion parasites”: Alba Cid’s Atlas I.1.3. Correspondences I.2. Us & Them in Contemporary Irish and Galician Short Fiction I.2.1. Englishness in Contemporary Irish Short Fiction 1.2.2. Nomadic Women in Galician Short Fiction I.2.3. Correspondences I.3. Us & Them in the Contemporary Irish and Galician Novel I.3.1. “There is no ‘us’”: Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky I.3.2. Two Foreigners Speaking the Same Language: Eva Moreda’s A Veiga é como un tempo distinto I.3.3. Correspondences I.4. Us & Them in Contemporary Irish and Galician Drama I.4.1. Keeping the Barbarian at Bay: Lorna Shaughnessy’s The Sacrificial Wind I.4.2. “On that difference is life grounded”: Luz Pozo Garza’s Medea en Corinto I.4.3. Correspondences II. Glocal Identities in Translation III. Mixing Memory and Desire: Women Writers’ Emigration and Wanderlust Appendix I (Writers’ profiles) Appendix II (Questionnaire) References Index Acknowledgements The present book has been simmering for some time, gently and slowly, allowing new readings, courses, conferences, and research projects to yield their juices so as to enhance their mutual flavours. Due credit for the funding and special encouragement to further this investigation must be given to the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and the European Regional Development Fund for the consecutive project grants to study contemporary women’s writing in Galicia and Ireland from a comparative perspective (HUM2005-04897/FILO; FFI2009-08475/FILO; FFI2012-35872; FEM2015-66937-P; PGC2018-093545-B-I00). My gratitude goes especially to my colleagues in the research unit “Discourse and Identity” at the University of Santiago de Compostela, sagely led by Laura Lojo, for their unflagging support and collaboration with the activities organized in the frame of the above-mentioned projects. I also wish to thank Burghard Baltrusch, editor of iBroLit, Ibero-Romance Studies in Literature and Translatology, for his encouragement, guidance, and infinite patience in the elaboration and final edition of this book. With the members —every single one of them— of the research projects undertaken I learnt the extremely fulfilling practice of transdisciplinarity, as we aimed to bring together Galician and Irish studies, literary and cultural studies, academic and creative writing, research and social and cultural activism. Coordinating these projects has constituted the most exciting part of my university career and I am most grateful to my research colleagues for their devotion, dependability, and wisdom. Furthermore, working on contemporary literature allowed me to make the acquaintance of many writers from Ireland and Galicia, to understand the challenges they must face, to admire the determination with which they pursue their artistic goals. Our conversations and correspondence produced some of the most exquisite moments of affection and intellectual enjoyment in my personal and professional life. I hope our research and, in particular, this book will do justice to their artistic inquiry. The following two chapters were published in earlier versions, and I want to take this opportunity to thank the publishers and the individual editors of the publications where they appeared for their permission to present revised versions in the present book Us & Them. Chapter I.2.1 “Englishness in Contemporary Irish Short Fiction” is a revised version of: Manuela Palacios (2012c). “One anOther: Englishness in Contemporary Irish Short Fiction”. In Jorge Sacido (ed.). Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Short Story in English. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 207-225, which is reproduced here with the kind permission of Koninklijke BRILL. The single chapter of section II “Glocal Identities in Translation” is a revised version of: Manuela Palacios (2012). “Glocal Identities in Translation”, Word and Text. A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics II: 2 (special issue “The Place of Translation” guest edited by M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera & Rui Carvalho Homem), 62-74. Summary The book Us & Them: Women Writers’ Discourses on Foreignness focuses on literary works from the last four decades to analyse the contingent nature of the constructions of foreignness in Ireland and Galicia. One recurring question addressed in this study is about the reasons why, and with which consequences, discourses on foreignness recirculate through time. The objective is not merely to delve into the representation of the foreigner in literature but to examine the nature of difference: whether the Other is recognized or negated. On the basis of various comparable circumstances in both communities — migration flows, increasingly multicultural societies, constant renegotiations of national identity, and the growing visibility of women in the public sphere— this book traces the multiple ways in which gender is intertwined with foreignness and presents contemporary women writers’ new insights into cultural difference. The concept of foreignness undermines the already problematic notions of Irishness and Galicianness, and invites us to consider gender difference in a new light, thus revealing the everchanging processes of identity formation. Rather than to symmetries between Ireland and Galicia, this book is attentive to crossing lines and discontinuities between both literary fields, although always with the conviction that what Irish women writers have to say is relevant to Galician women writers and vice versa. Irish writers have incorporated in their texts issues of otherness, displacement, foreignness and spatial segregation. Furthermore, they have been attentive to the new configurations of national identity that result from the migratory flows, in addition to notions of hybridity and the tensions between belonging and alienation. Migrant identity is characterized by perceptions of fragmentation and loss, and fosters a critique of traditional notions of the self. Another remarkable feature of the Irish literary field is that a substantial number of writers have chosen to become diasporic subjects themselves. Galician literature, on its part, has the notion of foreignness rooted in its canon, as we can see in Rosalía de Castro’s “Estranxeira na súa patria” [A foreigner in her own homeland] (Follas novas 1880), a figuration of the artist’s internal exile which has been taken up and adapted to modern circumstances by many later writers. Furthermore, Ireland has become an inspiring Other for a number of writers who recuperate the Celtic imaginary that has bound Galicia, Ireland and other Celtic nations. A socially engaged approach to foreignness, however, is that which combines feminist convictions with the condemnation of xenophobia. Moreover, as in the case of Irish writers, new opportunities to travel and work or study abroad have also had an impact on young authors who set their plots in other European and American cities, thus testing their characters’ prejudices about foreign ways. With the above concerns about the notion of foreignnes in mind, the present book engages in the analysis of the following literary works: two poetry collections, The Massacre of the Birds (2020) by Mary O’Donnell and Atlas (2019) by Alba Cid; a selection of Irish short stories by Anne Devlin, Fiona Barr and Mary O’Donnell, as well as Galician short fiction by Rosa Aneiros, Ánxela Gracián and Iria Collado López; two novels, Not the Same Sky (2013) by Evelyn Conlon and A Veiga era un tempo distinto (2011) by Eva Moreda; finally, two dramatic pieces that illustrate the fertile hybridity of poetry and drama: The Sacrificial Wind (2016) by Lorna Shaughnessy and Medea en Corinto (2003) by Luz Pozo Garza. Translation and its negotiations of self and Other constitute the focus of one additional chapter. The book ends with a chapter that discusses Irish and Galician women writers’ accounts of their travels and their reflections upon the encounter with otherness. Discourses on Foreignness by Irish and Galician Women Writers: An Introduction Identity can be understood as a notion that operates dialectically in connection with otherness. In this sense, one may affirm that there is no us without them, that is to say, us is dependent on and construed in terms of them. Furthermore, identity often functions as a criterion for inclusion and exclusion: the inclusion of those who share a number of features, and the exclusion of those who differ or are Others (Bello Reguera 2007: 9).1 However, neither identity nor difference are fixed and everlasting but constantly transformed and renegotiated according to changing circumstances and interests. In this respect, Edward Said has suggested that “each age and society recreates its Others” (1995: 332). For this reason, the present book will focus on literary works from the last four decades to analyse the contingent nature of the constructions of foreignness in Ireland and Galicia. Rather than understanding us and them as a binary opposition of two distinct, pre-existing entities, this book will explore their various relationships —them within us, as in Julia Kristeva’s suggestion that “the foreigner lives within us” (1991: 1), them beside us, as in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s poetics of propinquity (2003)—, as well as the interstitial space of dialogue between us and them, as “[r]esponding ultimately takes place in an in-between-sphere” (emphasis in the original, Leistle 2017: 13). In order to acknowledge the existence of a radical otherness that the self cannot appropriate, the notion of responsivity will be conducive to understanding the Other as the entity that the self responds to, thereby eluding “the grasp of the self which nevertheless is constituted in the act of responding” (Leistle 2017: 12). Although the foreigner is often seen as a manifestation of otherness, a destabilizing force and a menace for national identity, Bonnie Honig maintains that nations actually need the figure of the stranger, especially in times of crisis (2001: 4). Following Honig’s view that foreignness should not be seen negatively as a problem but, alternatively, as a solution that social regimes have had recourse to in situations of conflict, this book will address one of Honig’s central questions: “What problems does foreignness solve for us?” (ibid.: 4). The concern here is not merely with the representation or configuration of the foreigner in literature, but with the nature of difference: whether the Other is recognized or negated. This has important social consequences because, as Gerard Delanty has observed, it entails a choice between diversity and xenophobia (1995: 5). Indeed, in his discussion of Emmanuel Lévinas’ inquiry about the nature of evil, Alain Toumayan urges for a reconsideration of both the subject and the Other in order to confront the moral, intellectual, cultural and structural failures that cause evil (2007: 235-236). Of particular interest for this study is Anna Triandafyllidou’s proposal that we take into consideration those “inspiring Others” with which particular social groups maintain a positive rapport (2002: 34). The cultural connections between Ireland and Galicia illustrate Triandafyllidou’s thesis, since, during part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Galicia saw in Ireland an inspiring Other, 1 For the understanding of Other and otherness, I will follow both the spelling and meanings provided by Bernhard Leistle: “‛Other’ has been capitalized when it is meant in the sense of an abstract noun, designating everything that is non-self, but stands in relation to the self” (viii). As for the term otherness, its “abstract character is expressed in its form, by the suffix ‛-ness,’ and therefore doesn’t have to be highlighted by artificial means” (2017: viii). into contemporary female playwrights’ rewriting of patriarchal myths is bound to expose gender stereotypes and dismantle deep-rooted structures of domination. Part II consists of the single chapter “Glocal Identities in Translation” in which the task of translation is presented as an auspicious activity to tackle misguided anxieties about homogenizing globalization and isolationist nationalism. Attention will be paid to minoritized languages in Europe, as is the case with Irish and Galician, and the role that English can possibly play in the dissemination of their respective cultural productions. The tensions between the local and the foreign, between us and them, will be approached through translational practices such as collaboration, reciprocity, hybridity and the range of viable negotiations between relative differences. Part III consists of the chapter, “Mixing Memory and Desire: Women Writers’ Emigration and Wanderlust” and two appendices that complement it. Irish and Galician women writers live and work in profoundly nomadic societies to the extent that migration is often seen as a natural process, rather than a social phenomenon. Although emigration and exile, due to hostile economic and political conditions, could lead us to think that these writers might have a strained relationship with the experience of travel, a genderaware analysis reveals the liberating potential that travelling may have for women. I have passed, to a selection of women writers, a set of questions regarding their views on the history of migration and exile in their families and on the ways this experience has marked them both on a personal and professional level. I have also asked them about the travel opportunities they have enjoyed, the impact of these journeys on their writing, their collaborations with foreign artists and the institutions which have favoured this approach to other cultures. Through their answers, we can trace the various emigration waves of the twentieth century and the role played by women in these displacements. Although political exile is predominantly gendered as male, these accounts evince the painful ways in which women have negotiated the taboo around it. The unsavoury memories of emigration have not deterred these women writers from travelling or from giving free expression to their wanderlust in search for alternative identities. Appendix I provides brief professional profiles of the participating writers, and Appendix II contains the questionnaire about migration, travel and the encounter with foreignness that was sent to the writers. I. The Genres of Foreignness a stranger in my own history in my own landscape in my own language Chus Pato, Fascinio I.1. Us & Them in Contemporary Irish and Galician Poetry I.1.1. Mirror Conversations: Mary O’Donnell’s Massacre of the Birds Mary O’Donnell (1954) is a poet, fiction and essay writer who has authored, to date, eight poetry books, four novels, three collections of short stories and a good number of collaborative works in all genres, as well as a wide variety of essays the scope of which ranges from theatre and visual arts criticism to reflections on the contemporary state of culture in Ireland and beyond (Jaime de Pablos 2018). Her writing has been concerned with the violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, British colonialism, sexual liberation, Irishness, multiculturalism and environmental degradation among many other issues of paramount importance for Irish and Western societies today. This chapter will examine her rendering of the tensions between us and them in her most recent poetry book Massacre of the Birds (2020), a collection that “successfully charts the full spectrum of female experience” (Wells 2020) and compellingly inquires into travel, forced migration and ecological vulnerability. Although many of these concerns are intertwined, the main focus in this analysis will be on the diverse configurations of foreignness in this book and, in particular, on the experience of travelling, migrating and present-day perceptions of foreign cultures. Glocal Environments Massacre of the Birds ponders global and local —thus the portmanteau word glocal— dangers to our environment and more-than-human life, as the title of the collection and a good number of poems in it clearly evince.4 The global scope of this menace may render insignificant the difference between here and there or between us and them. The poem “Against the Vanishing” illustrates the worldwide worry about the vanishing species of animals in both the Northern and the Southern hemispheres and, although inhabitants of very specific places might be attentive only to local loss of life diversity, the poetic persona of the poem adopts a comprehensive approach by carefully watching and listening to those near her in Ireland but also conjuring up similar concerns in other latitudes. “Against the Vanishing” is divided into four parts of verse written in relatively short lines and stanzas that make the poem’s statement more incisive. From the very beginning of Part 1, the poetic persona deploys the dual approach to here and there, us and them, although this is not meant as an alienating contrast but as an inclusive parallelism, since both places and their people witness the similar phenomenon of life diversity loss: “On the lakeshore / of conscience I stand. / God help me. // Certain that in Argentina, / a woman also stands, / nature-struck” (14).5 The “I” and the “she” in the poem are not simply brought together by adverbs like “also”, “too”, “as much as” or by 4 “Glocal” has been defined as the reciprocal flow of agencies between the global and the local (Ashcroft & Griffiths & Tiffin 2007: 104). 5 All quotations from Mary O’Donnell’s Massacre of the Birds are taken, hereafter, from the Salmon Poetry 2020 edition and only page numbers are provided. specular motifs —“a mirror conversation rumbles on / thoughts replicate like pockmarks”— (15) along with the parallelistic structure that alternates stanzas concerned with each of these two women and each of these two countries and ecosystems, but also by the amiable appellation of the other woman as “My unknown companion” (14), “my unknown woman friend” (15). The gender affinity between the Irish speaker and the Argentinian woman should not go unnoticed, although such sympathy does not make the female observers different from other male witnesses of environmental degradation: “[…] two local men chat / about the swallows. / ‘Not so many th’year,’/ one remarks, then bites into a sandwich” (14-15); their counterpart, the Argentinian woman, also poses her questions about the loss of animal life, while she eats and drinks, very much like the Irishmen do, a behavioural pattern which reinforces the analogy in the daily, puzzled reactions to the endangered local ecosystems: What happened to the chinchilla, the armadillo, giant otter? And who last heard of any jaguars? She bites into an olive, sips her wine, reminds herself to go again tomorrow to the lake. (Emphasis in the original, 15) Male behaviour, however, is mordantly censured in the reference to hunting: “See the white playboys // pose with rifles over zebra, elephant” (16). This practice of hunting is obviously not limited to Ireland and Argentina, as the poem makes explicit: “Argentina as much as Ireland, // Canada as much as France or Italy, / wherever birds are shot and feathers scatter” (16). Other poems in the same collection will emphasize the male-female divide in their denunciation of men’s brutality against women’s bodies, as happens in the poem “It Wasn’t a Woman”, which provides a harrowing catalogue of violent acts against women and children in Ireland and around the world. The difference between us and them, between women/children/animals on the one hand and men on the other, is decidedly buttressed in O’Donnell’s poetry for the identification and indictment of violent hierarchies. For a poetry collection like Massacre of the Birds, which scrutinizes the workings of violence against the environment, women and the many Others of the planet Earth, the intersectionality in the modes of oppression —an important focus of research for ecofeminism, as in Carol J. Adams’ influential book The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990)— is especially relevant. Nevertheless, there are in this collection some significant examples of loving, caring and mutually supportive relations across the gender distinction, particularly between wife and husband or daughter and father in poems such as “On Reading My Mother’s Sorrow Diary” and “New Year’s Eve, 1958”. To the diversity of characters and places in the poem “Against the Vanishing” — I, she, male, female, human and nonhuman animal, Ireland, Argentina, Canada, France, Italy— one must add the reference to a national group, Poles —the largest non-Irish population group in Ireland according to the 2016 census of the CSO—: “Here, Polish families picnic late / with children and a shaggy puppy. / Their voices echo, group to group” (14). Although the poem acknowledges the present-day multiculturalist make-up of Irish society, it does not seem to include these Polish families in the common concern about the environment, since they are presented as simply enjoying an evening by the lakeshore and interacting self-sufficiently among themselves. Furthermore, their presentation is followed by the contrast with “two local men”. This could be an illustration of the paradoxes of multiculturalism, a phenomenon that diversifies society but is not tantamount to integration. Although these Polish families share the same space as the poetic persona, they are not construed as sharing the same environmental concern and even the reference to their national identity seems to set them apart. In this respect, Julia Kristeva says about the foreigner’s apparent aloofness: “[…] his being kept apart corresponds to his remaining aloof, as he pulls back into the painless core of what is called a soul […]” (1991: 7). Asylum Seeking The inflow of migrants in Europe and, in particular, in Ireland, which has resulted from the Irish economic boom during the Celtic Tiger period in the 1990s and, more recently, from the war in Syria and other international conflicts, has considerably changed the population make-up of Ireland. A country that used to be, especially since the famines in the middle of the nineteenth century, the departure point of massive flows of emigration, has, of recent times, considerably diminished the outflow and experienced a significant contrary inflow of people from other European countries and beyond. The collection Massacre of the Birds, attentive as it is to the main on-going social changes in Irish society, also delves into the phenomenon of immigration and its concomitant predicaments, such as the Direct Provision system that has shaken the conscience of many activists, intellectuals and artists in Ireland. RIA (the Reception and Integration Agency of the Irish government) defines Direct Provision as “a means of meeting the basic needs of food and shelter for asylum seekers directly while their claims for refugee status are being processed” (2010). A first-person testimony of life in these shelters has been provided by the writer Melatu-Uche Okorie in her book of short stories This Hostel Life (2018), in which she describes the system as an abusive relationship. Mary O’Donnell also confronts this issue in “Direct Provision and the Old Agricultural College Ghosts”, a poem which consists of three stanzas of formal irregularity in what concerns the number of lines per stanza, syllables per line and the absence of rhyming patterns, as if the subject matter itself resisted all attempts at harmony or proportion. The first stanza refers to an encounter, on the road, between the speaker and the refugee children on the latter’s way to school. Although the poem does not start with the I / them distinction, but with a communal “we” —“We meet on the stretch between two crossroads” (24)—, difference immediately makes itself evident in the reference to bodily features —“dark-haired schoolchildren” (24). This encounter with a different body recalls Julia Kristeva’s remark that “[a]t first, one is struck by his peculiarity —those eyes, those lips, those cheek bones, that skin unlike others, all that distinguishes him and reminds one that there is someone there” (emphasis in the original, 1991: 3). The speaking I hardly draws attention to herself and mainly registers what she sees, hears and remembers about the place. The difficult life conditions of these asylum seekers in Ireland are not deflected: “three miles away, their families bunked up / in the old agricultural college” (24). Every chosen word has its significance for the critique of the Direct Provision system: the long distances to be walked by the children and the crammed and inadequate places that should function as shelters. The second stanza evidences the substantial social changes in Ireland, as a building which was originally designed for animal farming becomes a shelter for refugees —once again the animalization of the Other cannot go unnoticed here— as the speaker conjures past scenes from the agricultural school: “to a clang of feeding buckets, disinfectant smells, / the scrape of shovels / in the dung-lumped byres.” (24). That asylum seekers should be lodged in what used to be byres for cattle not only speaks of a definitely bygone rural Ireland that is now just a ghostly presence —“spirits loiter”, “a ghostly bleating” (24)— but also of a symbolic dehumanization of the refugees. The poem finishes with a third stanza that shows the refugees’ enduring attachments to their former national identities —“the thud of a football as boys play / for homelands: Albania, Moldova, / Nigeria, […]” (24)— as an act of resistance against both their animalization —“to silence a ghostly bleating and lowing at dawn” (24) and their invisibilization: “as they themselves become invisible.” (24). Two poems in Massacre of the Birds tackle the specific predicament of Syrian refugees in Sweden and although the horror of the Syrian war is the ineluctable backdrop of the poems, here at least they have the possibility of starting a new life. The relative optimism of these poems may be justified by the contrast between the war left behind and the peaceful atmosphere of the Swedish towns, but it may also be due to the stranger’s deceptively benign perception of the refugees’ real circumstances in Sweden. The poem “Message from Malmö” is one compact eighteen-line stanza that omits any reference to the poetic persona and focuses exclusively on the refugees: “The women wear sadness in their eyes” (23), “the husbands are cloaked in defiance, / desperation; and the young men, also / defiant, wear invisible undergarments / that sparkle with hope” (23). The attitudes presented along gender and generation lines —women’s sadness, husbands’ defiance, young men’s defiance and hope— may have their explanation in the rigid gender roles of the society of origin, where husbands are expected to struggle so as to provide for their families, but such representations may overlook women’s determined endeavours, a lapse that, according to Breda Gray (2004: 1) and X. Amancio Liñares Giraut (2009: 11), is too common in studies of women’s migrations. Furthermore, the male defiance pointed out in this poem can be understood in the light of Julia Kristeva’s observation about the foreigner’s reaction to perceived hatred: “Experiencing hatred”: that is the way the foreigner often expresses his life […] Constantly feeling the hatred of others, knowing no other environment than that of hatred. […]. Hatred makes him real, authentic so to speak, solid, or simply existing. Even more so, it causes to resound on the outside that other hatred, secret and shameful, apologetic to the point of abating, that the foreigner bears within himself against everyone, against no one, and which, in the case of flooding, would cause a serious depression. (Emphasis in the original, 1991: 13) The absence of the “I” in “Message from Malmö” and the observer’s distance from the actual place, as implied in the word “message” in the title, centre all the attention on the refugees but may also accentuate their otherness through the repeated use of “they”, even if the poem engages with their ordeal and empathetically construes their intent: “preparing to mend the great torn blanket / that was once their family, now / left behind in the dust” (23). The observer’s detachment seems questionable because, as Bernhard Leistle affirms, “the representing self is not in full control of what it produces” (2017: 8) and remaining distant from the Other’s standards, as well as from our own, is an illusion (ibid.: 3). A similar detachment is found in the poem “The Little Waves, like Judgements” about Syrian families being relocated in the town of Visby on the Swedish island of Gotland. It is again a one-stanza poem, this time with twenty lines, and its page faces that of “Message from Malmö” as in a mirror. Besides the same distant, though European, setting, there is a similarly inconspicuous speaker, as the poem focuses on them: the refugees from Syria. The poem exudes confidence and optimism regarding the refugees’ capacity to start a new life in this place, which is presented as welcoming and safe for adults and children alike. In contrast with the inadequate accommodation provided in Ireland, as previously seen in the poem “Direct Provision and the Old Agricultural College Ghosts”, Sweden lodges these refugees in “holiday chalets”, and they can walk the seafront with dignity and do their shopping, while their children, who epitomize the hopes for the future, play untroubled. As opposed to the partner poem about the refugees in Malmö, there are no sad or defiant attitudes here on the part of the immigrants; on the contrary, “they come unmarked” (22) which, although highly implausible, may hint at an observer’s surprise at the migrants’ extraordinary capacity of recovery after the traumatic escape from war. Sweden has certainly been among the most hospitable countries in Europe for Syrian refugees, but according to Kerrie Holloway, Diego Faurès and Amy Leach (2022) such migrant inflow has raised concerns about safety among the native population and has increased negative public narratives on refugees. The reliability of the speaker’s positive perception of the refugees’ integration in O’Donnell’s poem is questionable, but it is precisely the speaker’s absence, or at least the lack of an explicit I in the poem, that makes the scene seem like a factual account. Only at the very end of the poem does the speaker make her presence explicit through a collective “us” and, only then, does a more critical attitude come up: “A whole sea like a judgement on us” (22). The poem ends with this open interrogation about our shared responsibility in the migrants’ predicament, thereby intertwining our accountability with their destiny. In connection with this, Julia Kristeva calls our attention to three unfortunate responses in one’s encounter with the foreigner: “[…] amateur proxeni know it unconsciously as they choose foreign partners on whom to inflict the torture of their own contempt, their condescension, or, more deceitfully, their heavy-handed charity” (emphasis in the original, 1991: 6). Sex Trafficking Another pair of poems, also presented on facing pages, delve into the sexual exploitation of the foreign woman, either in Europe or in her own country. “Remembering Amsterdam” was first published as a response poem to the Galician poet María do Cebreiro’s “O barrio das chinesas” in the anthology Migrant Shores. Irish, Moroccan and Galician Poetry (Palacios 2017a: 123), a collection with a special focus on migrant women’s circumstances. The poem consists of seven stanzas of irregular length in free verse, as is common in O’Donnell’s poetry, and the setting is the red-light district in Amsterdam city centre —a notorious pole of tourist attraction because of the public exhibition of prostitutes in brothel windows. The poetic persona ironically refers to the festive and luminous atmosphere on the canal streets and its contrast with the sordidness back home: “compared to the Dublin canals, where women slope, / lost curs in the dark” (67). The openness of prostitution in Amsterdam also differs ostentatiously from the furtiveness about it in Ireland: “it’s 1987, we have not seen the like” (67). The speaker, clearly identified as female, seems to yield to the sexual and spectacular allure of the place and the prostitutes: “My eyes too, mesmerised by magic, / coveting it. […]” (emphasis in the original, 67). The exhibited women are objectified and animalized for the spectators’ consumption: They recline in gift-boxes within a theatre of light as our eyes travel their flesh, explorers tracking the blood-pinked belly of golden antelope, hooves striking sparks. (67) Presented as objects of gift to be offered to passers-by and exposed through seductive techniques of spectacularization, these women of all races —“Dusky skin, white skin” (67)— are also animalized by means of hunting imagery in the context of the exploration and colonization of far, exotic places. The female bodies are compared to the flesh of the antelope chased by explorers of distant lands following the well-known colonial pattern of discovery of new territories and exploitation of its resources and inhabitants. The link between colonization and the animalization of the colonized was highlighted by Franz Fanon, who identified the taming of unruly nature as one of the objectives of colonization: “A hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious Nature is in fact synonymous in the colonies with the bush, the mosquitoes, the natives, and disease. Colonization has succeeded once this untamed Nature has been brought under control” (2004: 182). Concomitant with the colonizing project was the exhibition of natives and animals from the colonies in European tours that, on removing humans and animals from their original setting, made them appear as less menacing: The key point here, however, is made by Renate Wasserman that, “Indians exhibited at Royal courts or turkeys and parrots in cages” could be seen as “innocent signifiers” of an exotic other, one that could titillate the European public imagination while offering no threat since such exotics were, in her terms, “non-systematic” (1984: 132). Isolated from their own geographical and cultural contexts, they represented whatever was projected onto them by the societies into which they were introduced. Exotics in the metropoles were a significant part of imperial displays of power and the plenitude of empires. (Ashcroft & Griffiths & Tiffin 2007: 88). Apart from its ironic tone and the inculpating use of animal imagery throughout the poem, “Remembering Amsterdam” finishes with the impact of a direct encounter between the observer and the observed though their reciprocal gaze and it is this meeting of eyes that produces an epiphanic moment of identification: “I know then I am no different, / no wife, Weib, or vïf. Since then, / I sometimes climb into a special gift-box, / in solidarity with the woman, / who still meets my gaze” (67). This empathetic identification of the poetic persona with the prostitute though their gaze is one of the most significant encounters between us and them in O’Donnell’s poetry. The poem on the facing page is “Those Prostitutes in Cuba” and consists of five three-line stanzas that contrast in their succinctness with the more detailed “Remembering Amsterdam”. The characters involved in “Those Prostitutes in Cuba” are a female poetic persona, a man who recounts his experience with two prostitutes in Cuba, and the prostitutes themselves. The only characters with a voice are the European characters (female speaker and male client), while the prostitutes themselves are rendered silent. Apart from the Irish / Cuba divide, which entails a glaring economic imbalance between the affluent European tourists and the impoverished Cuban women, especially after the economic depression following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, there is a gender divide that is the main focus of the poem. As the man boasts about his sexual adventure with two young women —their age or ethnicity are not specified— the female speaker expresses —not without some sense of guilt: “I thought ‒against my own sex‒ […]” (66)— her consternation over the impossibility, for a woman her age, to live such a sexual experience with the same freedom and unaccountability. The women are, once again, animalized in the man’s account: “They were like two kittens, he said, / snuggling up to him / they were fun and they liked him” (66). The term “kitten”, which refers to a very young cat, suggests that the prostitutes may be minors, or at least he boasts about their youth, so the age divide between client and prostitutes is implied in his comment and is remarked upon by the female speaker: “[…] admiring / their health, their strong teeth, that / vitality […]” (66). The gender divide is then made evident: “[…] It could never happen // to a woman my age, two tiger men / who would not wound, the three of us / so human in a dusky room […]” (66). We again find the animalization of the male gigolos, but the difference in the imagery is blatant: young females like kittens and adult men like tigers. As readers, we are left pondering these two sexual fantasies and the power relations in which they are inscribed: economically affluent Europe vs. impoverished Cuba; real male sex customer with young, affectionate female prostitutes vs. imagined and unlikely female sex customer with vigorous male gigolos; speaking European sex customers vs. silenced prostitutes. Neither the man nor the woman speaks about payment, since that would remove the titillation. There is no consideration in the poem about the causes and consequences of sexual tourism and no ethical concern with prostitution as a type of modern-day slavery. Actually, the abolitionist approach to prostitution insists on the need to take into account the economic, ethnic and gender asymmetries that make sexual consent a fallacious criterion (Velasco Sesma 2017: 277). What the poem does delve into is the gender and age imbalance in the capacity to perform one’s sexual fantasies, a gender rift in sexual and sentimental education with a long patriarchal history in Ireland and elsewhere. Women’s Double Colonization Massacre of the Birds contains, in the middle of the collection, a number of poems from an overt feminist standpoint in which O’Donnell examines the various discriminations and aggressions, whether physical, psychological or social, against women around the world. “Twenty Inches of Hair”, in particular, is a poem that focuses on the circumstances of women in the Indian subcontinent, where local patriarchal oppression is further complicated with neo-colonialist practices that render Indian women’s bodies in the service of European women’s fashions. Post-colonial analysis has long identified this double colonization of women both by the patriarchal forces of their own community and by Western colonial powers (Holst-Petersen & Rutherford 1985). O’Donnell’s poem exposes the husband’s arguments to sell his wife’s hair for European women’s hair extensions: “This is what a wife does; / for the children, for her keep, besides, / wives are expensive. With such hair, / other men will desire her” (30). Economic necessity, but also male sexual jealousy, add to the subalternity of this Indian woman who, as if illustrating Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985b) remains silenced throughout the poem.6 Only an animal seems to speak for her: “a peacock cries eeeiu, eeeiu” (31) the way the nightingale cries in T.S. Eliot’s rewriting of Ovid’s violently silenced Philomel in The Waste Land (1922). The figurative animalization of the Indian woman, evenly distributed along the five irregular stanzas, reinforces her subjugation: her shaved head ends up looking like “a peacock’s egg” (30), the sacred serpent —her potential source of divine energy— remains lethargic: “But her Kundalini, / curled within its chill of poverty, / […]” (30) and two dead pigeons to be cooked are what she gets in exchange for her hair: Her husband returns, swings two green pigeons from his fingers. Today’s meat, he murmurs, avoiding her eye, places them, curl-clawed, beaks oozing, in the bowl that held her hair. (30) The us-and-them divide in this poem initially entails two oppositions that act as violent hierarchies: the male/female and the European/Indian binaries. However, these counterpart patterns destabilize each other by making Indian men and European women the oppressors of the Indian female protagonist: “for the pleasure of a woman with blue eyes” (30). This shows the importance of problematizing binary oppositions through an intersectional analysis that criss-crosses gender and colonial considerations, apart from including class and economic vulnerability. Religious Otherness The otherness of the foreigner is also a central aspect of the poem “The Blackbird, God Almighty, and Allah”, which includes, after the title, a bracketed dedication with a resolute denunciation: “(Remembering the dead children of Syria, murdered by Bashar al Assad)” (25). The poem is a celebration of nature and an indictment of violence and religious fanaticism. The dedication, however, is puzzling because the Syrian president’s dictatorial regime has never stood for Islamic fundamentalism and, together with international allies, has been fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Could this amalgam of Al Assad / war / Islamic fundamentalism / Qu’ran be a signal of our Western askew perception of the Other? The title has three main motifs, the blackbird —a pervasive symbol in Irish poetry— God and Allah, the difference between the last two in the poem sometimes just hinting at variance in religious persuasions: “You hold forth like God Almighty, / or Allah, […]” (25), “Do not bless me, God or Allah” (25). This contraposition of religiosity and pagan nature recalls the famous poem “The Blackbird of Derrycairn” by the Irish poet Austin Clarke (1974), who based his text on another eighteenth-century Ossianic lay in Gaelic, both poems reproving the asceticism of the Christian religion and celebrating the joys of nature. O’Donnell, therefore, adds Islam to the contrast between religious zeal and the hedonism of nature: 6 The “subaltern” is a term derived from the writings of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and usually refers to non-elite or subordinated social groups. The Subaltern Studies collective of historians in India borrowed this term to refer to the Indian non-elite. In “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice” (1985b), Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak related the exclusion of women from the production of discourse to the marginalization experienced by the colonized subject. Later, in 1996, Spivak refined her definition of the subaltern: “So, ‘the subaltern cannot speak, ‘means that even when the subaltern makes an effort to the death to speak, she is not able to be heard, and speaking and hearing complete the speech act” (in Landry and MacLean 1996: 292). ecosystems and specific economic conditions do not always foster transplantation, so when the instructions on the bag of bulbs recommend adding bone flour to the soil, the poetic persona comes face to face with the real conditions of locality: “pero aquí non temos diso. / como xustificariamos aquí o luxo da carne ausente, / o luxo da terra negra / para unha simple floración” [but we don’t have that here. / how could we justify here the luxury of the absent flesh, / the luxury of black soil / for just one flowering] (14-15). Here and there are also brought together by the history of another plant and its flower: the camellia. The second poem of the European Cycle, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose ou da denominación das especies” [Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose or on the denomination of species] engagingly tells the story of the arrival of camellias in Europe and, unsurprisingly, such a journey is two-way: from Jesuit incursions into the Far East in the seventeenth century, with the accompanying christianization and trade, to progressive importation into Europe, to the extent that this bush has become a staple of Galician winter gardens: “vixiamos despois a súa floración / na profusa constelación de pazos galegos” [we later monitor their flowering / through the profuse constellation of Galician manors] (18). The colonial and aristocratic tenor in the history of this bush cannot pass unnoticed, and yet this plant also features nowadays in public and modest gardens. Cid appealingly interlaces the natural process of oxidation of the flower —a recurrent motif in vanitas iconography— to ancient cultural and social uses, thereby connecting past and present, East and West. The falling flower, however, brings a sobering ending to religious, economic and colonial domination: “pétalos corrompidos pola humidade / cando tocan a terra” [petals defiled by dampness / when they touch the ground] (18). Hybridities There is a fascination in Cid’s poetry for hybridity and the encounter of opposites such as home and abroad, as in the case of the third poem of the European Cycle, “Da envorcadura do mundo” [On the overturn of the world], where sea meets land and overturned boats turn into homes. Now a tourist attraction in Équihen Plage on the northern coast of France, these inverted boat hulls used to be the humble abodes of poor fishermen and their widows. The poverty and the hunger are in the poem “—a fame permítelles ver cousas— ” [Hunger enables them to see things] (20) but the aestheticization and commodification too: “E o seu maior encanto consistía en que era un barco de verdade” [And its greatest charm resided in that it was a true boat] (emphasis added, 21). The fishing people’s hybrid home, with a boat hull as roof, is not just a manifestation of forlorn people’s resourcefulness but also an apt trope for their hybrid existence as much at sea as on land, which allows the poetic persona to project that hybridity on humanity at large: “así a nosa cosmogonía: un universo reflectido en escamas” [such is our cosmogony: a universe reflected on scales] (22). The marine imagery and the hybrid sea-land conception of humanity constitutes a further development of a tradition of marine tropes in Galician poetry of which writers such as Ana Romaní, Estevo Creus, María Lado and Marilar Aleixandre, among many others, form part. Boat and home, sea and land, France and Galicia are brought together through imagery that allows them to recognize each other. The local and the foreign are also encompassed in the following poem of the European Cycle “Instrucións para arrolar o canon do Sil” [Instructions to cradle the Sil Canyon], which, in its geological history of fractured tectonic plates, relates the Galician Sil Canyon to the Yellow Mountains (Huangshan) sung by the Chinese poet Li Bai in the eighth century, and to the Siberian petrified forests —now being uncovered because of permafrost thaw. Deep geological eons are deftly interwoven with more recent ages of human transformation of the landscape through mining in Roman times and longstanding agricultural practices, such as winegrowing on the steep slopes of the canyon. Furthermore, earth geological formations and human transformations of the territory are entwined with personal memories and domestic practices of care and emotional comfort: “desvíanse os dedos que descobren a ferida / para curala. […]” [the fingers move aside and uncover the wound / to cure it] (24). Ecocritical analyses of deep geological time highlight its challenge to anthropocentric historiographies, since it exposes the brevity of human presence on earth and grants as much agency to the planet as to human subjects. The focus on natural history also enhances contemporary post-humanist thinking by recognizing the value of nonhuman ecology (Flannery 2016: 7, 69-70). Somewhat less contrapuntal of here and there or past and present is the following poem “Da pintura en tea de araña” [On cobweb painting], which predominantly focuses on the singular artistic practice of painting on spider webs. The stickiness of the webs allows to form a canvas of successive layers that need to be painstakingly cleaned and framed. Cid’s text traces the first documented productions back to sixteenth-century convents in the Puster Valley of the Austrian Tyrolean Alps. The various stages of cobweb painting are meticulously detailed: the gathering of gossamer webs, their arrangement and cleaning, the painting of religious, aristocratic, popular or natural themes with watercolours. The extreme industriousness and delicacy needed to produce these gossamer paintings become an apt illustration of the laboriousness of art in general. Their transcendence, however, is to be interrogated, related as they are to monastic orders, aristocratic patrons and tourist memorabilia, and considering the scarce remnants to be found today. The ephemerality of art and of human endeavour is adroitly bound in this text to the fragility and unreliability of memory: “así a memoria: / rescatar uns perfís, esvaer outros […]” [such is memory: / to rescue some profiles, to blur others] (28). Moreover, although these precious old paintings are the main object of attention, a sidelong dialogue is established with external and apparently extraneous sources: the planets, the twentieth-century author Gwendolyn Brooks and her celebration of human struggle, the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and his awe before technological advancement, but also the speaker’s presence and her dramatic monologue with an imaginary addressee that encompasses the readers. This alluring interlacing of domesticity and cosmos, pictorial art and superstition, divinity and life’s material struggles, which is characteristic of Cid’s collection and contributes to the blending of divergent temporal and spatial scales, is featured once again in the last poem of the European Cycle, “Tríptico” [Triptych]. Migrations The African Cycle of the book consists of just one poem about a ground-breaking discovery concerning birds’ migrations. An apocryphal letter —three of the poems in the collection have the phrase “apocryphal history” in their title and thereby move along the beguiling borderline between historical fact and imaginative account— tells of the accidental finding of an arrow-stork —Pfeilstorch in German— in the north-east of Germany in 1822. What was actually a white stork was renamed arrow-stork because it carried a central African spear in its neck, which proved the migration of storks to Africa for winter and their return to Europe in summer and started an innovative research line about birds’ migrations around the planet. As amazing as the very late date for the discovery of patterns in birds’ migrations, which did not take place until the early nineteenth century, is the account of earlier beliefs regarding the annual disappearance of birds which range from Aristotle’s theory about the birds’ metamorphosis to other bird species or the assumption that they hibernated underwater to the eighteenth-century hypothesis that birds flew to the moon. Apart from this survey of successive hypotheses about animal behaviour that shows the contingency and limitations of human knowledge of the natural world, the notion of birds’ migrations between Africa and Europe, making of both continents their homes, without privileging one over the other, and defying human territorial, exclusionary boundaries is enlightening for this discussion of us-them conceptualizations. The American Cycle consists of two poems. Human, plant and animal life are, one more time, interwoven in “Historia apócrifa das venus atrapamoscas ou o campo magnético da necesidade” [Apocryphal history of Venus Flytraps or the magnetic field of necessity], about the Venus Flytrap, the most famous carnivorous plant, which grows in the coastal bogs of North and South Carolina. North-America and the speaker’s hometown are also brought together by the motif of the trap: “ao final as trampas non son máis que as bocas / digo, / as bocas dunha enorme atracción inchábel nas festas locais / dos meus doce anos” [in the end traps are nothing more than mouths / I say / the mouths of an enormous inflatable attraction in the local festivities / of my twelve years] (37). The name and notion of “trap” triggers moral issues about deception and evil that concern humans, but not nature, and the poem actually explains the material reason for the plant’s behaviour: “os insectos subministran o nitróxeno que falta no terreo” [insects provide the nitrogen that the soil lacks] (38). Ecocriticism has often put the focus on the materiality of nature with the aim to disentangle nature from anthropocentric moral notions (Flannery 2016: 2-5). Art, on its part, struggles to replicate nature: “diante da única especie que non sabía reproducir en origami” [before the only species I could not reproduce in origami] (37). Additionally, we detect in the poem the ecocritical interest in the human-animal continuum. Human and nonhuman corporeality is explored, as humans turn into figurative animals: “proxectando fugazmente a escena dunha marisma / cos reflexos dos seus cabelos rosa flamengo” [fleetingly projecting the scene of a swamp / with the flamingo pink reflections of their hair] (37). This example recalls that of the tarsier primates alluded to in the poem “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose ou da denominación das especies”, as they are presented as having human-like fingers: “cuns dedos case humanos” (17). The identification of humans with the Venus flytraps serves as a conclusion to the poem: “e que só conseguimos abrazar así // a few times before we die” [and that we only manage to embrace like this…] (38). In this way, the human speakers’ personal emotions are fused with plant life and survival mechanisms, as the swamps of North Carolina are brought close under inspection and the Galician and English language are interwoven to communicate the possibility of shared experience. The second and last poem of the American Cycle, “A inmersión de Safo” [Sappho’s immersion], makes a very unusual synthesis of entomology, literary history and legend as it braids the emergence of periodical cicadas on the Eastern coast of the United States, after seventeen years of underground existence, alongside the writing of the Greek poet Sappho and the legend about her suicide out of love for the ferryman Phaon. Human and animal contiguity, Greece —as the cradle of Western civilization— and the United States’ plentiful natural history, literary biography and legend are radically commingled in such a way that Sappho metamorphoses into a cicada —“Safo dóbrase a si mesma / […] // un exoesqueleto dourado / a punto de eclosionar” [Sappho bends herself / […] // a golden exoskeleton on the point of moulting] (39) — and the fall of her legendary suicide by jumping into the sea is compared to the fall of the cicadas’ hatched eggs to the ground, where they burrow and begin their seventeen-year stretch of life under the ground. Cid’s blending of experiences usually entails more than binaries and, in this poem, the human and nonhuman animal identification also affects the speaker and her partner: “non fixeramos os vinte, e durante dous segundos pensámonos / practicamente irmás / dun billón de parasitos subterráneos” (39) [we weren’t twenty yet, and for two seconds we thought of ourselves / as practically sisters / of a trillion parasites underground]. The Asian Cycle of Cid’s collection consists of four poems, the first of which is untitled and begins like this: “que fermoso pensar que os deuses abondan” [how beautiful to think that gods suffice] (45). This is one of the rare poems which predominantly focuses one-sidedly on the Other, in this case the Chinese sacred Mount Hua that used to be inhabited just by hermits in a number of scattered Daoist temples before it became a tourist pole of attraction. The speaker seems to be describing a magazine illustration — “a escada na folla esquerda” [the steps on the left page] (45)— and attention is paid to the extraordinary geographical location and human achievement in the construction of the trails, as well as to the religious and military uses. The objective description of the place is tinged with subtle personal perceptions, the most obvious of which is the starting line with its ironic commentary on religious faith, while others are indirectly expressed through adverbs of doubt and interjections: “talvez unha opresión no peito, e chás” [maybe an oppression in the chest, and tchas] (45). We therefore perceive in Cid’s poems a broad range of possibilities for the interrelation between us and them that gradually vary between inconspicuous grammatical forms and an active personal involvement on the part of the speaker. Spectacularization and Animal Ethics “Ukai, da pesca con corvos mariños” [Ukai, on cormorant fishing] is the second poem of the Asian Cycle. The locations mentioned are Erhai Lake, in China, and the Nagara river in Japan and the subject matter of the poem is Ukai, the traditional practice of fishing with cormorants which is over one thousand years old. These birds are trained to fish by diving but a snare tied around their throat does not let them swallow the big fish, which is then removed by the fisher. This practice is nowadays a popular attraction within a tourist industry that is partially responsible for water quality degradation and the dramatic reduction of fish in certain areas (Manzi & Coomes 2002). The poem is divided into an introduction and six “movements”, as in a musical composition. The introduction clearly identifies both the speaker, the subject matter and the setting. There is a simultaneous push and pull force between us and them, of alienation —“fóra do noso alcance” [beyond our reach] (47)— and approximation —“pero con estes depósitos de auga doce compartimos os corvos mariños” [but with these fresh water reservoirs we share cormorants] (47). The first “movement” is of utmost importance in that it reveals the source of information about this fishing practice: “porque asistimos ao espectáculo por medio de fotografías alleas” [because we attend the spectacle through somebody else’s photographs] (47). These are, as made explicit in the poem, pictures taken by professional photographers and tourists. This mediation through photography and touristic spectacularization effectively cancels the illusion of direct access to the traditional practice and places the speaker at home, far from the place of events. Tourists are alluded to as making noise and drinking sake, therefore denigrating the tradition and the quiet in which it must be carried out. Fishers and cormorants are equally objectified and spectacularized for the sake of the spectator’s rights, which takes us back to the discussion of the photograph of the book cover and the pernicious effects of massive tourism for both cultural traditions and the environment, although some claim that this fishing practice has survived thanks to tourist demand. The reference to the photographs also calls attention to our role as observers and readers of travel and geography magazines: are these audiences taking part in the overexploitation of the natural resources in the area by demanding this type of photography? The question, once more, could be: who controls and benefits from this business of spectacularization? Present-day photographs, however, are contrasted with engravings from the Edo period (1603-1868) in Japan and Cid’s poem acknowledges the way the old engravings aestheticize this fishing practice: “os artistas recréanse no lume” [artists relish the depiction of fire] (47). The engravings are from a time when this fishing practice was ecologically sustainable and when human survival probably depended on the training of cormorants, although the actual suffering inflicted on the cormorants deserves further comment. Richie Hertzberg (2018) quotes a haiku from seventeenth-century Japan by Matsuo Bashō which seems to problematize this fishing practice by considering its less agreeable aspects: “Delightful, and yet / Presently how saddening / the cormorant boats”. Hertzberg also refers to Lori Gruen, a specialist in animal ethics, and to her criticism of the disregard for animal well-being in this fishing method, because these cormorants are most often raised in captivity and caged, their wings are clipped, they are not fed during the day so that they will fish for the spectacle, they have a snare around their neck so that they will not swallow the fish and, finally, the fish is forced out of their long throat. Overlooking the animals’ feelings and glamourizing the fishing tradition therefore has ethical consequences because, as Angélica Velasco Sesma maintains, animal ethics puts the emphasis on animals being sentient creatures who feel pain and this sentience is an overriding criterion to treat animals ethically (2017: 42). The second “movement” in Cid’s poem illustrates the anthropocentric approach to more-than-human nature in its allusions to Christian iconography —the fishers’ canes with a cormorant on each end resemble St Michael Archangel’s balance to weigh souls— and human-centred notions of justice, while the animal is presented as “disposto ao traballo” [ready for ‒also willing to‒ work] (48). Although the ingenious visual comparison between the fishers and St Michael is a deft attempt at a hybrid convergence of East and West, otherness is here displaced to the animal. While the third “movement” consists of just two disturbing lines about the snare placed around the birds’ throats, the fourth “movement” describes the fisher’s removal of the fish from the throat and delves into the violence of the process: ao cabo, subtraer sempre implica violencia e supoño que se o fío de prata do Eclesiastés que une a alma ao corpo non lles estivese vedado aos animais miúdos, rompería —plín!— antes de caer na cesta do pescado. a ave déixase facer […] (48) [after all, to subtract always entails violence / and I suppose / that if the silver cord of the Ecclesiastes that binds the spirit to the body were not denied to small creatures, it would break ‒snap!‒ before it drops inside the fish basket]. One wonders whose life is at stake here, that of the fish or that of the cormorant, both definitively subaltern, although the poem seems to point to the fish. The fifth movement returns to the comparison of the skinny fisher with the figure of St Michael in their dominion over the others’ destinies and continues to focus on the encroaching night and the removal of the snare from the bird’s throat. The last movement is a good illustration of the ambivalence towards the spectacle: once the baskets are filled with fish, the cormorants can finally eat to their fill: “as estrañas formas do amor e a vasalaxe” [the strange manifestations of love and vassalage] (49). The following poem in the Asian Cycle is “Wing Chun, do amor como arte marcial” [Wing Tsun, on love as a martial art] a poem that brings together the Far East — in its elaboration on the Wing Tsun martial arts from China— and the Middle East — with the illustration of a mastaba, an ancient Egyptian tomb—as well as the customary quotations from writers worldwide, but in particular from the overpowering Western literary canon, that intervene in the dialogues stimulated by Cid’s poems. The predominant subject matter seems to be the encounter of opposites and their tactics in negotiating otherness: “Ng Mui espreita unha serpe pelexar cun grou, direccionalidade fronte a equilibrio […]” [Ng Mui observes a snake fighting with a crane, directionality versus balance […]] (52). The poem also brings about a concurrence of paradoxes, as fighting becomes an art and both become entangled with love. The last poem in the Asian Cycle is “Unha columna Asmat” [An Asmat pole] about a type of wood carving from the Asmat culture in West Papua on the island of New Guinea that is part of a funeral ritual to attract the favour of ancestor spirits. Although West Papua is an Indonesian territory, it is geographically included in the Oceanian region. Its transitional location, however, makes the continental division seem porous. The poem consists of six parts and predominantly focuses on the description and function of these ceremonial carvings. The book furnishes, additionally, an illustration of one Asmat pole. The poem begins with a reference to diaspora: “Intuír o bosque na dispersión das sementes” [to intuit the forest in the dispersion of seeds] (55), because the word “diaspora” comes from the Greek dia-speiro: to sow across. Cid plays with the polysemy of the word “column” to finally focus on the Asmat pole: “unha columna serve, entre os asmat, para conmemorar o que marcha” [a pole serves, among the Asmat, to commemorate the one who passes away] (55). The poem briefly describes the swamplands ecosystem that the Asmat are part of and their customs, and immediately continues to focus on the carving of the pole: the mangrove tree that is cut for each pole and the sophisticated carving that superposes human figures representing the ancestors of the deceased person. Cid also draws attention to inversion of the tree in its carving, since the roots of the tree are used to carve a very ornate protuberance at the top: “aquí, erixir unha homenaxe quere dicir inverter unha árbore” [here, to erect a memorial means to invert a tree] (56). The carving of a canoe to transport the ancestors to the after-world is another significant element in the pole which, when finished, is left to rot in the fields to enrich the soil. Besides the writer’s subtle personal and cultural references throughout the poem, the shift in perspective is ostensibly marked at the end of Cid’s text, where the new focus is “París, maio de 2017” [Paris May 2017] (57), to be followed by a memory of May 2015 in the same city, and an explosion of worldwide references: to Vagator and Anjuna in the Indian state of Goa —with its Portuguese colonial past and nowadays a popular tourist destination— concerning the various well-drilling studies in the region to examine the hydrogeological conditions; an allusion to Walt Whitman’s writing about the wetlands of America; and a further reference to Provence, in France, by which the reader, in an attempt to follow a connecting thread, conjures the wetlands of La Camargue. This final plethora of references to wetlands opens the specificity of the Asmat culture to other lands with similar swamp conditions but diverse cultural practices, thereby avoiding the amalgam of the Other. In their proliferation, these entwined allusions to other marshlands at the very end of the poem resemble the elaborate, ornate protuberance of the Asmat pole. The Oceanian Cycle consists of just one long poem titled “Cartas de navegación polinesias” [Polynesian navigation charts] and contains two illustrations: one of a stick chart from the region and another of Nefertiti’s profile, both featuring surprising similarities —a coincidence that the poem exploits and that highlights the hybridity aimed at by the whole collection. The poem begins with a quotation from John Ashbery’s poetry in free translation and with an adaptation to Galician specificity, as “desert heat” becomes “a calor das Limias” (61) [the Limias’ heat]. Here and there are both intertwined as the navigating skills of Polynesian sailors provide enlightening metaphors for human emotional relationships. The overriding subject matter seems to be that of direction, route and travel, as these become recurrent notions from the beginning to the end of the poem. The sailors’ bodily perception of the sea currents in their communion with the canoe, the making of the navigating charts by means of sticks elaborately tied together to mark currents, sea swells, atolls and islands, the tactile memorizing of the charts through the sense of touch, the secrecy about the information encoded in the charts, all these aspects of Polynesian navigating wisdom reveal important information about our sentimental education: “así a nosa comprensión dos afectos: / a ilexibilidade, a dependencia do tacto, o tecido” [such is our understanding of the affects: / the illegibility, dependence on touch, the pattern] (63). The human body is, then, like a canoe that registers the directions of underwater currents, as lovers assemble their stick charts to orientate themselves through the hazards of their relationship. “Ártico” [Arctic] is the last geographical region featured as a section in Atlas and contains just one poem “Mapas de óso inuit” [Maps of Inuit bone]. If the previously analysed poems about the Polynesian stick charts, the Asmat poles, Chinese martial arts and Ukai fishing transport us to cultural practices already performed long before Western civilization had its impact on these regions, the same happens with this poem about Inuit cartography. The poem is accompanied by an illustration that actually corresponds to two Inuit wooden maps of the coastline of Greenland —see The Decolonial Atlas 2016 for the actual matching of the wooden maps and the coastline they represent. These carved maps were supposed to help Inuit navigators identify islands and fjords simply by feeling with their fingers the edge of the carved wood and its representation of the coast outline. The poem begins with a quotation from John Ashbery’s poetry, translated again with appealing freedom, about food and feeding, a theme that will become especially relevant again at the end of the poem. Although not long, the text is divided into three parts, the first of which introduces some important elements for the poem: the snowed landscape, the decoding of strange alphabets and the process of adaptation to difficult light conditions. Part two focuses on the figure on an Inuit hunter and, as happens more than once in Cid’s collection, there is an explicit acknowledgement of the medium through which the portrayed scene is accessed, in this case a film projected on a screen. This recognition of mediated accessibility is important in that it calls attention to the speaking subject’s and the spectator’s perspective and circumstances —their inferences from the scenes are interspersed throughout the poem— and breaks the illusion of Western unimpeded mobility. However, the focus of attention will not be what is seen but what is imagined: the hunter’s supposed use of a small carved wooden map that can be read by feeling it with one’s fingers. This map serves as orientation in a way similar to the guide provided by the Polynesian stick maps in the previous poem. Both maps are tactile rather than visual but while the stick maps are not carried in the voyage, the Inuit carved tool can be easily kept inside the hand gloves. The third and last part of the poem moves on to another manifestation of Inuit culture: the inukshuk, a figure of piled stones built to communicate with other inhabitants of the Arctic and acting as a hunting and navigation aid, but also providing information about the place where food is stored (Hallendy 2013). Here is where the poem neatly connects with the initial quotation of Ashbery’s poem: “porque a estatua significa: / alguén pasou antes por aquí, atoparás peixe cerca” [because the statues means: somebody passed through here before, you will find fish nearby] (68). Survival in these extreme regions depends on acts of solidarity such as this one. Cid’s poem is not just presenting and delving into the living conditions of what may seem like an alien culture to us, modern-day Eurocentric readers, but is also highlighting the necessity and moral duty to protect the stranger, even if this solidarity actually results from a social pact that safeguards everybody’s interests. Atlas finishes with a section titled “Ensaios ou As flores de okra abriron e pecharon durante a eclipse” [Essays or The okra flowers opened and closed during the eclipse]. The encounter with alterity consists, in this case, in the fascination with vegetable life experienced by two main creators: Karl Blossfeldt, a German photographer who managed to capture the sculptural qualities of plants, and Walter Benjamin, whose commending review of Blossfeldt’s album of plant photography contributed to the artist’s worldwide recognition (Friedlander 2017). Like Blossfeldt’s botanical pictures, categorized as illustrative of the New Objectivity aesthetics, the brief, numbered statements of this concluding section are often rendered through scientific writing conventions: “Vid. ‘News about Flowers’, do ano citado” [See “News about Flowers” of the cited year] (73). A truly heteroglossic text, these “essays” entwine a plural first-person speaker with a third-person narrator that conjures scenes of the photographer’s passion for plants. Furthermore, a series of questions posed to an open addressee invite the reader to this multifaceted exchange between human and more-than-human nature, and between us, the present-day local readers of the Galician-language version of this collection and them, the German artists and scholars of the early twentieth century. Concluding Remarks Alba Cid’s Atlas opens the Galician local reality to a planetary scale, and the present day to deep time before the appearance of humans on Earth, thereby presenting the world in unceasing movement and recomposition where frontiers actually become passages or corridors, as Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau would put it (2007: 17). This is a book intent on migration and transplantation, and elaborates on numerous instances of hybridity between us and them, here and there, now and then. Among the range of reactions to that Other visited or contemplated in the poems, continuous questions are raised about the phenomenon of spectacularization, starting with the photograph of the book cover itself. The tourist gaze —a term that John Urry (1990) has turned into a category of analysis— is also the object of scrutiny to denounce its perverse effects on human and more-than-human life: their objectification, appropriation, commodification and exoticization. Furthermore, the poems often call the reader’s attention to the mediations of photographs, engravings, drawings, films and paintings in our encounter with the Other, thus denying the kind of direct access that the Western spectator feels entitled to. The colonial history of mobility is always in the background, even when the apparent focus may be on the material reality of a delicate flower or a bush imported from Asia. Atlas shows how nature and culture undergo an unrelenting process of crossfertilization and how migration, whether of human or more-than-human nature, expands the notion of home. I.1.3. Correspondences The purpose of the present section is to make a succinct commentary on the similarities and differences found in the configurations of foreignness and the encounter between us and them in these two recent poetry collections: Mary O’Donnell’s Massacre of the Birds (2020) and Alba Cid’s Atlas (2019). This comparative approach is not founded on the existence of what the French tradition of comparative literature used to call rapports de fait, or factual and historical connections (Étiemble 1963: 97). Thus, the argument here will not be based on the mutual influence of these two poets resulting from their literary collaborations. However, as mentioned in the introductory chapter, the social and cultural bonds between Ireland and Galicia through history, especially regarding the predicament of migration and its concomitant encounter with foreignness and becoming foreign oneself, invite the hypothesis that the findings in one literary field will be relevant to the other, and that concerns raised in one national literature may expose blind spots or tantalising omissions in the other. Furthermore, both poets have verifiable awareness of the cultural production of each other’s literary tradition and present developments. Both poetry collections have been published in very recent times and both are by female poets born and raised in their respective Western European countries: Ireland and Galicia. This poetry will, therefore, allow readers to appraise present-day responses to the encounter with foreignness, as perceived by two white, European women with formidable, inquiring minds. However, the books have had a different reception and impact on their spheres of influence, as O’Donnell’s Massacre of the Birds, her eighth collection, has received a number of laudatory reviews but no literary prize to date, while Cid’s Atlas —her first published collection so far— was awarded the Miguel Hernández National Prize for Young Poets in 2020, which will entail a great boost to Cid’s literary career and to the dissemination, translation and impact of her collection. There is, nevertheless, a contrary substantial difference in the expected reach of these two collections, because O’Donnell’s is written in a global language, English, and is published in Ireland —a country that has made of its literary production a potent beacon of cultural sophistication— whereas Cid’s book is written in Galician, a minoritized language that, although much more widely spoken than Irish, painfully struggles to maintain its number of speakers and literary audience. O’Donnell has written elsewhere about her sensitive relationship with the Irish vernacular language (2009: 52-53), and, in Massacre of the Birds, she acknowledges her mother’s bilingual heritage. This kind of recognition of the foreigner within us is of extreme importance for our response to the foreigner outside, as Julia Kristeva maintains: “By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself” (1991: 1). Cid, on her part, does not explicitly engage with the linguistic conflict in Galicia in this book, but is especially concerned with the history and circulation of words to the point of revealing their essential foreignness, as in the example she gives of the etymology and Greek origin of the placename “Anatolia” in Turkey (2019: 13). The generalized impact of post-colonial debates of the last few decades may explain the awareness that both Massacre of the Birds and Atlas evince of colonial and neo-colonial relations, with their power imbalances and exploitative ambitions, in the circulation of goods and people. Likewise, modern tourist practices are featured in both books and raise questions about the spectator’s perceived entitlement to watch, commodify and spectacularize the Other regardless of the latter’s interests or rights. Both was a bomb in Oxford Street yesterday. Some of your countrymen” (Devlin 1985: 60).9 Born in Belfast, her status should be that of a citizen of the United Kingdom, though the security officer speaks of her as if she came from a different country. The tragic irony is that, while in England she is linked with menacing nationalist terrorists, in Belfast she will be the victim of unionist bigotry. Can this chasm between the Irish and the English be bridged? “Two feet between the British and the Irish in the airport lounge”, the protagonist observes, while adding “Two feet and seven hundred years” (60), which evokes not only the process of colonization begun by Scottish Presbyterians and English Anglicans with the Ulster Plantations in the seventeenth century, but also harks back to the Norman settlements in Ireland in the early thirteenth century. At this point, it is apt to remember Elizabeth Bowen’s wish that the Irish would remember history a little less and the English a little more (Ingman 2009: 239). The protagonist’s unstable identity reaches a point of indeterminacy when she thinks that, next time she has to fill in the customs card, she will write “don’t know” under nationality (61). This reaction recalls the story “Walking the Dog” (1996), by Bernard MacLaverty, in which a man who is walking his dog saves his life when, asked about his sectarian affiliation by a group of paramilitaries, he answers: “I suppose I’m nothing” (7). However, it is very difficult to hide one’s allegiances in Northern Ireland, where segregation affects all aspects of the citizens’ lives: education, work, housing location, sport, marriage, accent and even colours. When, early in Devlin’s story, the protagonist informs us that her lover’s father is a shipyard worker, the informed reader already gathers he is a Protestant —since Catholics would find it very difficult to get a job in shipbuilding and engineering at the time. As soon as she mentions that her parents live Andersonstown, readers immediately grasp the nature of the conflict that will unfold in the following pages, as this is a Catholic zone in Belfast which was severely punished during the Troubles. In a like manner, Anne Devlin also sets her play Ourselves Alone (1986) in Andersonstown and deals with the repercussions in this area of the hunger strikes by IRA prisoners in 1981. The female protagonist in Devlin’s “Five Notes after a Visit” desires to transcend segregation and mutual hostility between Catholics and Protestants by means of love. She remembers her six years of solitude in England until Stewart, a Belfast Protestant entered her life. Their happy times in England are presented as a picture of domestic bliss: “our breakfasts at lunchtime in my garden, our evening meals on the raft, my bed” (62). As in Fiona Barr’s story, the domestic sphere and personal affections are the means to overcome division. When the couple tries to recreate their private paradise in Belfast, they are soon reminded this is no place for loyalties other than political ones. They receive a phone call saying: “Send your Fenian girlfriend back where she belongs, or we’ll give her the works and then you” (64). In this context, “Fenian” is a derogatory word for Catholic, and the implication is that she is not allowed to live in a Protestant quarter with a Protestant man. How did they find out her identity? Maybe through her Catholic name (she is nameless in the story), maybe through the football pools, when she chose Liverpool, etc. The story 9 All quotations from Anne Devlin’s “Five Notes after a Visit” are hereafter taken from Ruth Hooley’s 1985 edition of The Female Line and only page numbers are provided. actually exposes the preposterous assumptions on which sectarian affiliation is based. The lovers give up their hypotheses, as they realize that the paramilitaries would have found out sooner or later. Since these threats tend to be executed with diligence, the protagonist has no other option but to leave Belfast and return to England. This is no lovers-of-Verona story: neither does the couple die nor do they remain together. The protagonist’s lover has a clearer sense of belonging than she and he stays in Belfast: “Whatever this place is — it’s my home” (66). Back at Heathrow airport, she is asked for some means of identification and the security officer wants to know the purpose of her visit. Although the story puts the emphasis on the protagonist’s uneasiness during the immigration officer’s interrogation, her comings and goings suggest that she leads a border existence that puzzles authorities. In fact, she has the destabilizing power of a trickster figure. She had already felt she was treated like a visitor in her hometown when the taxi driver signalled to her the Catholic landmarks in Belfast. She seems to have only visitor status wherever she goes. Eventually, England is no safe refuge, either. Her milkman’s son, finding no other job, has joined the Army to go to Northern Ireland. Her supermarket suffers three bomb scares in one week and a bomb kills fourteen people in London. Both English and Irish civilians suffer the consequences of the Northern Irish conflict. Cramped by fear, the protagonist becomes paranoid: “I keep myself awake all night so I am ready when they come” (67). The pessimistic conclusion seems to be that there is no possibility for a healthy identity in this context of generalized and indiscriminate violence. The last story for discussion is “Twentynine Palms” by Mary O’Donnell, published in her 2008 collection Storm over Belfast. In spite of what the title of the book may suggest, this collection is not about the Troubles. In fact there are few traces of them in the stories, as the action is brought to the twenty-first century. Published ten years after the Good Friday Agreement —also known as the Belfast or the Stormont Agreement— in Northern Ireland (1998), these stories leave the impression that they wish to turn a page in Irish history. Nevertheless, Mary O’Donnell is explicit elsewhere about the scar left by the British colonization of Ireland: “The absent parent —the ex-colonial one— left a vast aperture in the social consciousness of Ireland that took decades to begin to seal and heal” (2007: 160). Although Mary O’Donnell is from Monahan —a county of Ulster which, after the partition in 1921, formed part of the then called Southern Ireland and although she has herself endured the conflictive identity feelings of being a Republican in the North (Palacios 2007: 144), her main interests in this short fiction collection are the ways in which Irish women explore the world and forge strong personalities thanks to the experiences they undergo. England or the English are not, for these new women, the object of great curiosity anymore, except in the story “Twentynine Palms”, where they recur as a painful memory that, now and then, needs to be revisited. An Irish baby-sitter in multi-ethnic San Diego, California, Connie has an insatiable curiosity for the exotic, whether this be American religious fundamentalism, drugs, or the lives and beliefs of Native Americans, although her measuring stick is most often her own native Ireland: The God-groupies didn’t freak Connie. She’d never known fundamentalism, even in Ireland. Now, she accepted it as a natural part of the exoticism of exile, part of the self-conscious thrill that came each time she experienced otherness, in whatever form. (O’Donnell 2008: 122)10 In California, Connie tests her prejudices about other ethnic groups and ways of life, but she also comes face to face with the clichés other people have about the Irish. When she corrects Maria, the Mexican domestic servant: “Come on, Maria. You’ve got to improve your English if you want them to take you seriously” (113), Maria retorts: “You not perfect. You Irish” (113), which shows how quickly the subaltern person interiorizes the hierarchy of value imposed by the colonizer. Even if her American employers like the way Connie speaks, they establish a hierarchy of Irish accents. About a previous babysitter from Kerry or Cork —they are not sure— they say: “Anyway, wherever she was from, we never could tell just what she was sayin’. Her voice went up an’ down, all over the place. A real Colleen” (112). This cliché of the Irish girl (in Gaelic cailín) who speaks English with a strong Irish intonation is one of many stereotypes against which the protagonist must construct her own identity. The test of the subaltern’s skill in mimicking the colonizer’s accent introduces an important flashback in the story, as Connie remembers the lost paradise of childhood during a summer holiday with her family in Wexford. This flashback is a narrative manifestation of a ghostly past that continues to make its presence felt. Like all paradises, this one also had its serpent: the English guests, who made her family’s accent seem wrong and, curiously enough, “out of place” (114): At dinner every evening, English voices announced an unfamiliar, yet approved of, standard. In comparison, their softer Irish tones seemed obliquely related to the language they shared. On that holiday they became islanders, hobbling after their betters. (115) One day during this holiday, two young English women ask them to join the volleyball team that will play that afternoon. The invitation seems frank and the question is whether this Irish family is ready to feel on equal terms with their English counterparts. Connie’s parents react awkwardly, class-conscious about their modest beach utensils, eager to please, lost for words, embarrassed, offering excuses, until, upon the English women’s insistence, they relent and say: ‘Well. Sure, we’ll see,’ her mother relented. ‘We’ll see? Splendid!’ she said in a high, victorious voice. ‘I know that’s Gaelic for yes!’ (116) The English women, though full of good intentions, resort to the stereotype about Gaelic ambiguity. Of course, the Irish family will also laugh at the English women’s turns of phrase and accent, but they will only do so after the women are gone. During their holiday, although the family is not really excluded, they are made to feel “alien” (116). Abdul R. JanMohamed maintains that it is impossible for the colonizers to position themselves as equals, as they would have to renounce their own ideology of moral superiority in approaching the Other (1995: 18). After this encounter with the English women, Connie decides she will never feel inferior again on account of the way she speaks: “Some people 10 All quotations from Mary O’Donnell’s “Twentynine Palms” are hereafter taken from the New Island 2008 edition of her collection Storm over Belfast and only page numbers are given. were so stupid that they would always need the reassurance of having their own accents echoed back” (117). However, paradoxically, she soon begins to work at her own accent and to practise new inflections of her voice. While Maria’s Mexican accent remains “defiant” (117), Connie modifies hers to avoid the humiliations and mockery that it provokes. In fact, not only will she interiorize the colonizer’s hierarchy of accents and identify hers as the anomalous one, but, as seen earlier, she will enforce it on Maria, thereby reproducing the control mechanisms of empire. Connie, who was named Constance after the famous Anglo-Irish nationalist Constance Markievicz (1868-1927), continues her process of self-discovery in California and, interestingly enough, it is a Native American, Blue Hawk, who most helps her. After they go beyond the clichés of each other’s culture: “‘Know what, Irishwoman?’ ‘What, Injun?’” (125), they start to share notions of dispossession and colonization: “Back when your Constance was fightin’ along with them revolutionaries. Y’all lived on a kind of reservation too, right?” (126). Eventually, the desert becomes “home” (127) to Connie. As in the stories by Barr and Devlin, the female protagonist can make a home —a literal or figurative, private, intimate space— wherever the encounter with the Other becomes a fulfilling experience that overcomes mutual mistrust and surrounding hostility. Concluding Remarks The two Belfast short stories seen in this chapter show an inspiring Other who either offers “new vistas” —“The Wall Reader”— or makes life without this Other a miserable, solitary experience —“Five Notes after a Visit”. It is as if Barr and Devlin committed themselves to surmounting the abyss between the nationalist and the unionist factions while the conflict was at its peak of cruelty, even if their choices as writers could entail the punishment reserved for those accused of fraternizing with the enemy. However, contrary to what one might expect, Mary O’Donnell’s story, approximately two decades later, revisits the past with a trace of resentment which can be explained by the longstanding implementation, by the British, of a process of inferiorization among the Irish. As Clare Carroll and Patricia King maintain: “The effects of the colonial past are far from over in Ireland and Northern Ireland” (2003: 2). In O’Donnell’s case, the inspiring Other is the Native American, the ethnic subaltern with whom the Irish character shares the experience of being dispossessed and marginalized. Julia Kristeva’s suggestion that foreigner dwells within ourselves can be illustrated in Devlin’s story by the protagonist’s status as a visitor wherever she goes, as well as by O’Donnell’s protagonist, an alien in her own country and a nomadic subject who chooses to make of an American First Nations reservation her home. In the Belfast stories, the intolerant political climate forces the protagonists to leave as exiles, whereas in O’Donnell’s story of this new millennium, the motivating force to travel is curiosity about the world, a sort of wanderlust. However, there is no fantasy about globalization, cosmopolitanism and unrestricted travel, as security border controls and visas constantly remind us that movement is not free. As for the intersection between gender and foreignness, it is interesting to observe the female protagonists’ disaffection with normative or conventional identities, their active role in the approach to the Other and their agency in the transformation of society. The private, domestic space, which is also the realm of emotional life, becomes a site where the genuine encounter with the Other can be achieved, even if this space is besieged by xenophobia. This domestic space is not necessarily the family home any more, but anOther place assembled collaboratively by us and them. I.2.2. Nomadic Women in Galician Short Fiction Mais esa noite El-Rei deu a orde tamén de que se destruíra a estatua. Pero iso, para serche sincera, foi o que menos sentín, pois nunca gustei dela. As estatuas carecen de mobilidade. (Gracián 2020: 220) [But that night the King gave the order to destroy the statue. Although, to be frank, that was what I regretted the least, since I had never liked it. Statues lack mobility]. This chapter on the configuration of foreignness in Galician short fiction, will centre on two short story compilations: Narradoras. 25 autoras galegas (2000) —a womenauthored selection that gathers some of the most prominent Galician female writers— and O libro dos trens (2019) —a recent and balanced selection of stories by male and female writers who focus on the motif of the train and its concomitant notions of mobility. The following discussion aims to scrutinize the various ways in which women authors of short stories engage with notions of women’s mobility, foreignness and the general configuration of otherness. The initial epigraph is taken from Ánxela Gracián’s story in Narradoras titled “As noites en que o vento asubía o teu nome” [The nights when the wind whistles your name], which recounts the life and opinions of the woman minstrel María Pérez, also called “Balteira” in the form of a letter that she writes to her friend Lourenço. María realizes that her life is coming to an end and wants to clean her reputation by defending herself from the slanderous songs written against her figure. Concerning the protagonist’s outspokenness about power relations in the society of her time, her critique of dualistic thinking deserves special mention because it is at the root of the oppression of women and all other subaltern beings. The ecofeminist philosopher Angélica Velasco Sesma draws on numerous feminist references to affirm that Western thought is based on conceptual dualisms that establish a gender hierarchy of masculine superiority and feminine subalternity, such as reason-emotion, human-animal, mind-body, transcendence-immanence, culture-nature, civilized-primitive, productionreproduction, freedom-necessity (2017: 97). Similarly, the writer Ánxela Gracián has her protagonist claim that human societies are governed by absurd binary oppositions that never allow contraries to meet thereby simplifying and falsifying human experience: “Onde queda lugar para o que non é nin un nin outro, senón algo de cada un?” [where is the remaining space for that which is not one or the other, but a bit of each?] (2020: 209).11 This critique, one could argue, also applies to the distinction between us and them, which is also an oversimplified and oppressive pattern for identity formation that establishes artificial ontological boundaries between both groups and does not acknowledge their mutual formation or the degree of foreignness constitutive of the self, as Julia Kristeva reminds us in Strangers to Ourselves (1991: 1). Since women have only been allotted by patriarchy the domestic role of mothers and caregivers, María, the protagonist, rebels against this imposed function and turns 11 All quotations from Narradoras. 25 autoras galegas are hereafter taken from the 2020 edition by Edicións Xerais de Galicia and only page numbers are given. precisely to dualistic thinking to valorize all that patriarchy has despised, thereby upsetting the hierarchy that underlies binary divisions: Sen embargo, neste sistema dual de escollas, a miña foi sempre esa que manifesta o lado irracional e que os nosos poetas chamaron desmesura. Preferín sempre a paixón intensa, máis efémera, á doce estabilidade dos amores máis convenientes ca queridos; o mundo das viaxes e o das descubertas ó mundo apracible dos horizontes coñecidos. Preferín tamén o carromato dos artistas ós sólidos muros do pazo. (209-210) [However, in this dual system of choice, mine has always been that which exposes the irrational side and which our poets have called excess. I have always preferred intense passion, more ephemeral, to the sweet stability of affections that are more convenient than loved; the world of travels and discoveries to the mellow world of known horizons. I have also preferred the artists’ wagon to the solid walls of the manor]. María’s choice is clear when forced to choose within the patriarchal dualistic order: excess, passion, travelling, discoveries and an artist’s itinerant life. When the king, furious about her rebelliousness, orders the demolition of the statue raised in her honour, she does not regret it, as statues cannot move and she is all for mobility and freedom. This section will subsequently delve into the sundry examples, in Narradoras and O libro dos trens, of women’s mobilities, their motivations, objectives, means, practices and consequences. The Nomadic Woman “Lola”, the story by Rosa Aneiros included in Narradoras, is about a successful international female photographer called Lola, who returns to her Galician home-village after her father’s funeral, which she has missed. The narration is bound together by the meta-artistic motif of photography, as if its various sequences were viewed through a camera lens, a device that facilitates the detachment from and defamiliarization of perceptions and events. The one-morning temporal frame —the local festivity day, so old acquaintances can be easily met on the public space— is fragmented and rendered more complex by a series of flashbacks about the protagonist’s experiences during the seventeen years she has been abroad. Here and elsewhere, present and past are therefore intertwined as constitutive parts of the protagonist’s identity. The narration is especially enigmatic about what triggered Lola’s departure in 1985, even though the reasons for female protagonists’ departures are essential elements of any plot and become crucial for the understanding of women’s mobility. The first encounter in the village is that with the protagonist’s godmother, who played an important role in her parting: “Ela sabe ben por qué marchou, de feito foi a velliña quen a empurrou a aquela decisión que lle mudou a vida” [She knows well why she left, in fact it was the old woman who pushed her to make that decision that changed her life] (34). Besides this enigma, there is that of Lola’s relationship with her deceased father, who was the only one to know the protagonist’s whereabouts but who never told the rest of the family. For this reason, Lola could not be contacted for his funeral. There is no indication of any serious confrontation with the father that may have provoked Lola’s departure, although his depression after becoming a widower back in 1970 may have some relation with Lola’s decision to leave: “Dende o de miña nai nunca quixo saber de ninguén e levou a súa mágoa ata o cadaleito” [Since that about my mother, he never wanted to know about anyone else and took his grief with him to the coffin] (35). The elusiveness about the motivation for the departure is complicated towards the end of the story on the occasion of one further encounter between Lola and the man who had been her boyfriend before she went abroad: “Lola, fuches cunha bolsa de fotografía a París por tres meses e diso hai xa dezasete anos” [Lola, you left for Paris with a three-month photography grant, and it’s been seventeen years since then] (47). The protagonist is here revealed as a distressed character who was once torn between love and the deep-felt awareness that she would never return home to stay. Rosi Braidotti has identified three possible figurations of women’s mobility, two of which are explored in her analysis as metaphorical—the exile and the nomad— while the third one is empirical —the migrant (1992). The exile corresponds to women’s disaffection with the nation and is illustrated with a quotation from Virginia Woolf’s essay Three Guineas: “[…] as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world” (Woolf 1992: 313). Neither is Braidotti satisfied with this notion of the “planetary exile” (1992: 8), because she fears it may simply be an evasive tactic not to tackle the unresolved relationship of the woman with her nation, nor does the protagonist of Aneiros’ story seem to fit this category of the exile, because she does not express such disaffection for the nation or for the social, political or economic conditions that the nation provides. Braidotti refers to migrants as mainly those “‘domestic foreigners’ of European industrial metropolises” (ibid.: 9). The philosopher claims that it is with these migrants, and in particular with female immigrants, that feminism needs to establish a dialogue, both in order to stop the increase of xenophobia and “nationalistic neo-fascist ideologies across Europe” (ibid.: 9) in the late twentieth century, and to extend migrants’ rights of citizenship and promote their intellectual potential. Lola’s is not a case of forced emigration, either for economic or political reasons and, in this sense, “migrant” is not the term that best defines her circumstances. The category that probably fits the character of Lola best is that of “nomad”, which Braidotti explains as follows: “The nomad has no home to start off from or to go back to” (ibid.: 8). The philosopher draws on Gilles Deleuze’s work on nomadic thinking, which consists in the continuous crossing of boundaries regardless of the destination and which Braidotti applies to international networking to propagate feminist resistance. The protagonist of Aneiros’ story was still young when she felt impelled to leave home and the option of ever returning home was dismissed from the start. It is not until the end of the story that the destination of her first travel is revealed. We are told that, while abroad, Lola progressed from total deprivation to becoming a successful fashion photographer and then a bold war correspondent, but these accomplishments have not quenched her thirst for further explorations of more remote, solitary and inaccessible regions. The story ends with her determination to cure her internal wounds by working as a photographer of oceanic depths: “Nunha fosa abisal do Pacífico tentarao ata o remate dos tempos” [In a Pacific abyssal trench she will strive for it until the end of time] (50). Lola is not the only character in the story who once wished to leave the village. In the short time of the narration, at least two other characters avow they have considered that option, one of them being precisely Remedios, Lola’s godmother, the woman who pushed her to leave. On meeting Lola, Remedios remembers her youth love for an animal tamer of an itinerant circus. The old woman has been revisiting that memory for seventy years in an attempt to justify her decision to stay: “Qué tería pasado cando a guerra, qué tería pasado no estranxeiro, qué tería pasado no inverno… qué tería acontecido se tivese valor para sabelo” [what would have happened when the war came, what would have happened in foreign lands, what would have happened in winter… what would have happened if only she had had the courage to know it] (38). In this case, as in many others in both short story compilations, failing to leave is configured as a moment of fear and cowardice, as a moment of paralysis similar to that James Joyce makes his protagonist Eveline go through in the eponymous story from Dubliners (1914). Nineteen-year-old Eveline finally gives up leaving for Argentina with her dear sailor —another nomadic occupation— and remains in Dublin with her abusive father. Remedios could be seen as an elderly figuration of Eveline, as she struggles to mask her regret with commonsensical thinking. Joyce’s story ends with young Eveline torn between her family duties and her gratitude to her lover: “Could she still draw back after all he had done for her?” (1992: 33-34) Eveline’s and Remedios’ paralysis could be explained on considering that their respective departures involve sharing their lives with a relatively unknown man. Eveline must choose between a life with an abusive father and one with a secret and unreliable lover who takes her to see The Bohemian Girl and tells her “stories of the terrible Patagonians” (ibid.: 32). Lola, on the contrary, leaves alone and when her childhood friend Laura confesses her desire to also leave the village and asks about her experiences around the world, Lola refuses to either encourage or dissuade her: “Nunca te fíes do que digan os demais. Tes que buscalo soa porque non hai quen faga ese camiño por ti” [Never trust what others say. You must find your own way because nobody will do it for you] (44). Lola actually gives up a significant love relationship so as to live a life of her own, although she also pays a price for her hard-won independence: “As bágoas en tódolos aeroportos porque ninguén está a agardala; as cartas de amor nunca enviadas” [Tears at all the airports because nobody is waiting for her; love letters never sent] (49). To move beyond the familiar and the well-known and to venture into the unknown, the foreign and the strange requires a resolute determination that does not leave anyone unscathed. Of special import for the present analysis is Rosi Braidotti’s conviction that “differences become the stuff communication is made of, instead of acting as major dividers” (1992: 10). Difference is what Lola will undoubtedly find as a war photographer around the world, covering a large variety of conflicts in all continents. The fireworks of the village festivity trigger memories of bomb explosions that suggest a kind of posttraumatic stress disorder that, although of a very different degree, recalls the trauma suffered by Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway —the WWI soldier to whom the daily noises of London provoke a mental breakdown (1992: 98). The third-person narrator in Aneiros’ story intersperses memories of bomb blasts with the noises of the local celebration, thereby revealing a horrendous list of conflicts that Lola has registered with her camera: Non consegue afastar dos miolos o terror dos estoupidos en Iakarta, e as bombas en Bagdad, e as sereas en Xerusalén […] O tiroteo en México D.F., un autobús queimado en Freetown, barricadas no Ulster […] A masacre no colexio de Houston, o regueiro de cadáveres inmolados dunha secta de Francia, as violadas de Kosova, as violadas de Kosova, as violadas de Kosova… elas (41) [She does not manage to keep off her mind the terror of the explosions in Jakarta, and the bombs in Bagdad, and the sirens in Jerusalem […] The shooting in Mexico DF, a burnt bus in Freetown, barricades in Ulster […] The massacre at a school in Houston, the torrent of immolated corpses from a sect in France, the raped women in Kosovo, the raped women in Kosovo, the raped women in Kosovo… those women] Whether of a political, ethnical or a religious nature, these acts of violence leave a deep imprint on Lola’s mind. Literary trauma studies aim to identify the linguistic traces of trauma (Hartman 2003) and one could argue that the above quoted passage features some of these traces: the detailed enumeration of the nature of the attacks and of the place names, the shift from the noises and objects to the victims, and the final insistence on the female victims from Kosovo. The encounter with the victims of such unbridled violence arouses the protagonist’s self-questioning about her role as a photographer and evinces the acknowledgement of her powerlessness: Arrancaría o propio brazo para non ter que ver aqueles olliños de mel insípida pola fame e a indixencia. […] Pero ela é fotógrafa. O seu brazo ten que valer para transmitir unha imaxe ó mundo […] e, seis meses despois de superar atrancos burocráticos, bombardear con catro caixas de papas para milleiros de persoas. Ata entón non ten nada que ofrecerlle. Nin sequera a esperanza da chegada dos avións nese pestilento éxodo cara a ningures (40) [She would tear her own arm so as not to have to see those little honey eyes turned insipid due to hunger and destitution. […] But she is a photographer. Her arm must be used to communicate an image to the world […] and, six months after surmounting bureaucratic barriers, dropping four boxes with potatoes for thousands of people. Even then she has nothing to offer to the child. Not even the hope that the planes will arrive during that pestilential exodus towards nowhere]. This is the dialogue stimulated by the encounter with difference: a dialogue that results from individual face-to-face encounters and one that assesses one’s responsibilities and limitations. Likewise, it is a dialogue that clearly identifies the victims and makes supranational institutions accountable for their failure to bring them succour. Lola admits her relative powerlessness but her photographs and Aneiros’ narration of her life function as constant reminders of real historical conflicts around the world, their perpetrators and their victims. Hybridities Rosa Aneiros’ “Lola” can be interestingly compared with Iria Collado López’s “Meghalaya” from the compilation O libro dos trens (2019). The latter is a story told by a first-person narrator —with the degree of immediacy but also partiality that this usually entails— who starts her account by saying she has been travelling for two years. However, her travel is soon revealed to be of a very peculiar type, as she seems to be escaping from some situation that remains an enigma for a while: “Desfíxenme da maleta e son quen de with conflicts of a colonial tenor between a Spanish or Castilian dominant group and the Galician subaltern population, although there is no scarcity of references to the strategies of inferiorization deployed by dominant Spanish-speaking groups in Galicia which have been rendered in sundry literary genres, but the repertoire of women-authored short fiction about this specific conflict is still limited. Domínguez, Saussy and Villanueva affirm: “By comparing we build sense, for comparison is a cognitive operation, and a connection between at least two elements transforms both elements” (2015: xi). In the particular case of the short fiction discussed in this section, the comparison, besides revealing similarities, exposes gaps and discontinuities that become all the more eloquent precisely because of their unobtrusiveness. Moreover, Jorge Sacido and Laura Lojo have drawn attention to the traditional dismissiveness towards women’s storytelling, often regarded as “old wives’ tales”, that in its intersection of gender and genre has become a formidable obstacle to the creation, publication and reception of women’s short fiction (2018: 1). I.3. Us & Them in the Contemporary Irish and Galician Novel 1.3.1. “There is no ‘us’”: Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky Irish Diasporas Travel, whether forced or voluntary, is one of the most propitious situations for the encounter between us and them and the subsequent interrogation of both categories. In the case of Ireland, emigration has become a constitutive feature of Irish identity and the current descendants of Irish emigrants around the world amount to millions: Irish demographics reveal two startling facts: There are around 70 million people worldwide who claim Irish descent, and Ireland today has barely half the population that it had 160 years ago, a decline unmatched in the modern world. These facts are explained and connected by the undeniable social reality of nineteenth-century Ireland —emigration. (Hackney and Hackney Blackwell 2007: 150) Terms such as “emigration”, “exile” and “diaspora”, each entailing different connotations and circumstances, have, however, often been used interchangeably both by the displaced people and by commentators on Irish migration flows (Delaney 2006: 35-38). Although emigration has been a widely acknowledged fact among Irish people, the government of the Irish Republic seems to have been reluctant to incorporate its diaspora as an integral part of the Irish community, as if doing so were a recognition of the state’s failure in providing for its citizens (Muldowney 2012, Delaney 2006: 38-40). An attempt to redress this glaring omission took place with President Mary Robinson’s speech “Cherishing the Irish Diaspora”, in 1995, when she delved into the relevance of emigration to the notion of Irishness: If we expect that the mirror held up to us by Irish communities abroad will show us a single familiar identity, or a pure strain of Irishness, we will be disappointed. We will overlook the fascinating diversity of culture and choice which looks back at us. Above all we will miss the chance to have that dialogue with our own diversity which this reflection offers us. (par. 8) According to D.A.J. MacPherson and Mary J. Hickman, the substantial advance brought about by this new attention to the Irish diaspora is its redefinition of national identity and belonging, which is now “based on diversity, multiple affiliations and multi-located identifications” (2014: 1). This chapter will analyse the novel Not the Same Sky (2013), by the Irish writer Evelyn Conlon, with the aim to identify the various configurations of identity produced in the process of displacement from Ireland and adaptation to the receiving society in Australia. The title of the novel itself includes the notions of difference and sameness as an avowal that both contribute to each other’s signification. The migrants in this novel, which is based on a true historical event, are a group among the 4,414 orphan girls shipped to Australia by the British government during the years of the Irish Famine in the late 1840s. The most frequent range of these girls’ ages went from sixteen to eighteen years old, and they were especially vulnerable both because they were orphans and because they had suffered severe starvation. The novel often poses the question about the girls’ capacity to choose the courses of their lives in this situation of transportation when, in fact, the alternative of staying in Ireland entailed serious risks to their survival and no adult relative could assume responsibility for them. Conlon also makes one of her characters question the term “refugees from The Great Irish Famine” branded on the girls, when in truth they were “prisoners, girl-slaves” (Conlon 2013: 238) who, upon their arrival in Australia, were assigned to the various masters who needed female workers, a situation in which, once more, the girls had no say.13 Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky is, therefore, a perfect illustration of Ellen McWilliams’ assertion that contemporary Irish fiction is recovering the story of the Irish female emigrant, a story that used to be underrepresented both in historical accounts and in literature on migration (2013: 2). The attention paid to Irish migrants in Australia also contributes to redress the balance in accounts of the Irish diaspora worldwide, as there has been a predominant scrutiny of Irish immigrants in America. The historian Margaret Kelleher, a specialist in Irish women’s predicament through the Great Irish Famine, has described Conlon’s novel as an “affective and effective literary representation of history” (2023: 111). Apart from a very informative discussion of various controversies around famine memorials like the one that articulates the plot of Conlon’s novel, Kelleher turns to Sara Ahmed’s theory of affects to discuss the emotions, such as shame, guilt or anger, that are triggered by the knowledge of past traumatic events. Furthermore, Kelleher pays attention to those narrative devices in the novel which problematize historical knowledge, as happens with the use of time shifts, partial focalization and modal verbs that “foreground the limitations of any narrative effort” (ibid: 119) and avoid the standardization of trauma narratives. The Colonial Conflict In the 1840s, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, as a result of the Act of Union that came into effect in 1801 with the aim to suffocate Irish resistance to British colonial power. Conlon’s novel raises the issue of the colonizer’s responsibility in both the famines and the schemes designed to find a solution to the problem of so many orphans precariously accommodated in workhouses in which disease and death were rampant. The novel therefore starts by presenting a clear opposition between the colonized Irish and the colonizing British with a third-person narrator’s point of view that is clearly sympathetic to the Irish ordeal: The resulting slow chaos grew worse until this hunger could no longer be ignored. In London many people spent time thinking about what to do. This may have included deciding to do nothing, or deciding what not to do, or deciding to put these thoughts to the back of minds, where they could not interfere with London life. (7) The eventual decision is to send the orphan girls to Australia, where a number of penal colonies were run in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and where Irish rebels against the British colonizer were also transported to, thereby eliciting some analogies between the convicts and the girls throughout the novel: although the girls have committed no 13 All quotations from Not the Same Sky are hereafter taken from the Wakefield Press 2013 edition and only page numbers are given. crime, one may say they are “transported” to the colony, given their impossibility to choose any other course of life; the girls are accommodated in the same barracks that had been used for convicts; some of the former convicts will become the masters of these servant girls; one of the girls finally finds her mother, an ex-convict, alive. The colonial situation in Ireland is somehow replicated in Australia as the sons of former landlords become settlers in Australia and perpetuate their exploitation of Irish people. The novel Not the Same Sky is divided into thirty-five chapters, in addition to a prologue set in 2008 that does not provide the author’s statement of intentions or any contextual information, as is most often the case in forewords, but is actually a fictional chapter that introduces the subject-matter of the novel through a letter sent from Australia to Joy Kennedy, a female sculptor of gravestones living in Ireland. The letter informs of the project to build, in Australia, a memorial “to the 4414 Famine Orphan Girls who were shipped here to Australia between 1848 and 1850” (2) and invites Joy to be the stonemason for that memorial. Memory will be a key theme in this novel as descendants of the orphans and the transported protagonists themselves persistently struggle to come to terms with their past and present circumstances. The past is constitutive of their identities and yet little is known about it or about them. In the presidential speech above mentioned, Mary Robinson actually referred to commemoration as a moral act: The weight of the past, the researches of our local interpreters and the start of the remembrance of the famine all, in my view, point us towards a single reality: that commemoration is a moral act, just as our relation in this country to those who have left it is a moral relationship. (par. 15) The President of Ireland is here appealing to what Josefina Cuesta calls “historical memory”, i.e., a nation’s use of the past, and not just an individual use (2014: 31). There is an otherness to the orphan girls’ past that may well be a manifestation of trauma, as all the characters, though haunted by a past that they cannot let go, make use of different strategies to suppress it. To the Memorial Committee, formed by descendants of the transported girls —the total number of their descendants is calculated to be around one million— and to Joy Kennedy, the stonemason, the girls are “they”, figures of a traumatic past. Joy, in particular, avows her ignorance about the girls’ ordeal: “I’ve never heard of them, have you?” (3). The following twenty-nine chapters will tell the story of the girls through the second half of the nineteenth century and the last six chapters will close the novel by returning to Joy Kennedy, in 2008, and her transformative trip to Australia to inquire about the memorial project and the orphan girls’ life stories. Gender Matters The novel uses the term “girls”, although in some cases these orphans were as old as twenty years of age. Although the term might risk infantilizing them all, it is used throughout the novel to refer to these dispatched females who, in some cases, were as young as fourteen. Age and gender are important factors since readers get to know how the girls cope with the changes in their bodies as they grow. Some have their first menstruation while they are on the ship, but nobody has told them why or how this happens: “She’s bleeding to death. Look at her blanket. Rose Larkin’s dying” (91). Even when told by older girls or by the matrons themselves, there is a persistent taboo about this topic: “[the matron] did not want the younger ones to know before they needed to” (92). The barracks where they are exhibited for their hiring have no provision for women’s facilities and the girls have to hide “their sanitary rags under the floorboards” (238). Furthermore, the girls’ starved bodies had not grown properly, and the novel informs us of accidents in their pregnancies because their bones are weaker than the baby in the uterus: “[…] the prevalence of spontaneous symphysiotomies at birth, the babies having grown stronger than the weak pelvises of the girl starved at a crucial bone-making time of her life” (235). Gender is an important factor that has often been neglected in migration studies, but Irish migration flows evince the conspicuous presence of emigrating women, whether single, married or widows, travelling accompanied or, more often than one might expect, alone. According to Breda Gray, “[women] emigrated in greater numbers than men in most decades since the mid-nineteenth century and left mainly as single women rather than as part of a family” (2004: 1). Their role in the economic growth of the social groups that they were part of also needs further study by the social sciences. Conlon’s novel, therefore, contributes, thanks to its literary recreation of the expedition of the orphan girls, to a better understanding of female emigration from Ireland and disseminates factual information about the Irish famines and their effect on migration flows. One decisive issue that is raised now and then in the novel is the degree of consent or choice allowed to the girls in their transportation. Often referred to as “cargo” for the ships to carry and deliver, their human agency and personal autonomy to choose the projects they would wish to pursue is drastically curtailed. Starvation and the cramped conditions of the workhouses that shelter them also restrict their capacity to choose. The matron of the workhouse calls the names of the girls she thinks may be fit to endure the voyage and informs them she will later ask them “if they want to go” (19). A narrator using free indirect discourse speaks the girls’ minds: They wanted to live on a patch of land nearby, to grow potatoes, or turnips even, and other produce to pay the rent. They didn’t want to be talking about places with names like America, where aunts and uncles and cousins had gone, and now Australia, which some said was in the opposite direction, and further away. (20) Certainly, the possibility to eat and survive, as well as that of having a job are the definitive and persuasive arguments for the girls to accept the scheme despite the enormous pain of leaving their siblings, their Irish whereabouts, and their memories of a past, happier childhood before the potato plagues of 1845, 1846 and 1848. Sameness and Difference Apart from the us-them opposition regarding the conflict between the British colonizers that organize this scheme and the Irish colonized that are sent to the penitentiary colony of Australia, the transportation of the girls recurrently raises comparisons and contrasts between the familiarity of Ireland as home and the uncertainty and strangeness of Australia as the destination land. The novel focuses on one voyage, that of the ship Thomas Arbuthnot, which departs from Plymouth on 28 October 1849 under the surveillance of a surgeon-superintendent, the Englishman Charles Edward Strutt, in charge of delivering alive the cargo of around two hundred orphan girls in Sidney three months later. That the girls should reach Australia alive was not a simple mission, since many ships were overcrowded, and the already weak migrants got critically ill or died because of the bad sanitation and inadequate food on the ships. In emulation of the slavery ships that carried African slaves to the New Continent, those that transported the diseased Irish were also called “coffin ships”. The migrants who did not die during the voyage were likely to do so upon arrival, during the quarantine periods, or in the continuation of their journeys to the final destination (Hackney and Hackney Blackwell 2007: 154-155). The narrator’s selective omniscience will give special attention to a few girls in order to present a variety of personalities and coping strategies: Honora Raftery, Anne Sherry, Julia Cuffe and Bridget Joyce. Of the four, Honora Raftery is the character to be explored in more detail in the novel and may be identified as the protagonist. She will also prove to be the one with the strongest attachment to her childhood memories and her homeland. For this reason, the narrator delves into her robust family bonds which, in spite of the humble means, were supportive of all the family members and neighbours and were deeply ingrained in the vernacular language and culture. Honora’s mother used to know the Brehon laws, which constituted the legal system of Celtic Ireland and regulated issues as multifarious as land disputes, theft, or marriage, but also instructed in the care of trees and animals. The children learnt to read and write in Irish but also learnt English at school. With the onset of the potato failures, neighbours and members of the family began to emigrate to America and, finally, Honora’s parents died, which is the reason why the girl ended up in a workhouse. On the ship, Honora becomes a storyteller, like her father. When she reaches her destination in Australia and the surgeon-superintendent asks what she would like to have, she answers: “ ‘I’d like a dictionary […] and a map,’ she added, remembering the shape of her home” (109). Among Honora’s coping strategies to deal with the uncertainty of her future and her fear of the unknown are her resignation and determination to survive. On hearing incomprehensible accents on the harbour of Plymouth, Honora’s resolve is rendered by the narrator through free indirect discourse: “But nothing was familiar. But it didn’t matter. Everything did not have to be familiar, she had learned that since leaving Dublin, thirty-six hours ago, or was it longer?” (36). Little by little, Honora learns to take foreignness in her stride, although she does so at a high personal cost. The comparisons between here, on the ship, and there, back in Ireland, help in the transition, so when Charles Strutt, the superintendent in charge of the girls, talks about starting a school on the ship, Anne Sherry remembers the Irish hedge schools: “Well, my mother went to a hedge school, maybe it will be like that” (54). Hedge schools were allegedly clandestine because of the British Penal Laws of 1695, which banned the schooling of Catholics in Ireland. The most poignant bond between the ship at sea and Ireland is that conceived by Honora about sharing with her remaining siblings in Ireland the same sky no matter where she went: She wanted to believe this was the same sky that was over the home she had just glimpsed on the map, the one she had been taken from and would never see again. That became clear the more days passed. Who could ever come back from so far? If she could believe it was the same sky surely that would help. (58) The shock will come, however, when she is later told that the constellations seen in Australia and in Ireland are not the same because of the change of hemisphere. This distressing realization is deftly summarized in the title of the novel, Not the Same Sky. Similarities between the new surroundings and Ireland sometimes come up in unexpected situations and help to forge new attachments, as when Honora looks at the deserted houses in her destination place and remembers her home back in Ireland, the one the children had to abandon when their parents died: “But Honora could like these houses”, the narrator informs us (114). Likewise, one year after her arrival, Honora finds a man who, she thinks, looks like her father, although “he didn’t smell like her father. He didn’t speak like her father” (148) and will accept him as husband. Nevertheless, it comes as no surprise that the differences in Australia surpass any attempts by the girls to establish comparisons: landscape, plants, animals, people, food, etc. hold the orphan girls in awe: yellow grass, white trees, no hedges, dry rust, shadows falling differently, bats, kangaroos, birds of spectacular plumage, they will all amaze the girls and challenge them to relinquish any analogies. Close to the end of her life, Honora will avow her unfailing marvelling at the splendours of plant and animal life in Australia. Identity-as-parameter and Identity-as-limit Once on the Thomas Arbuthnot, the girls are instructed to share sleeping slots, to take care of one another when seasick, and they are organized in couples so that the most mature girls take responsibility towards the younger ones, as in the groups for classes, where the weaker students are guided by the stronger ones. Together, they also make a quilt to be offered to the surgeon-superintendent at the end of the voyage. The quilt is a common trope of feminine collaborative work, and the narrator explains the continuous negotiations and social skills that go into its making: Girls who had wanted to be dogmatic about the way their mothers had done it had given up. Either they had realised that everyone was entitled to do their square —even if some of them were uneven and perhaps marred the overall look— or else they had decided that their desire for the greatest colours and matches would have to wait until they were doing their own in their new home. (89) These common activities create a sense of community, dependence and mutual support that will form a new collective identity for the orphan girls: that of “us”. The characters will later raise the issue of whether this collective identity really exists or whether they are just a heterogeneous group of very different individuals. Before dying, Honora writes a letter and leaves instructions to one of her sons to give it to the other orphan girls he may manage to gather for her funeral. In this letter she maintains that the orphan girls did form a community in spite of the fact that, upon arrival in Australia, they were scattered and distributed in different towns, homes, and businesses: Teresa says that there is no “us”. She says that to see the 4000 of us as “one”, is nonsense. And yet it was she who told me 4000 —I had not known that number […] I was told in Ryan’s that they had a debate in the London Parliament about “us”. It proves that we are one. And our names are all together in an office. (201) In his book The Ethics of Identity, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah makes the distinction between who we are, our individuality, and what we are, our identity (2005: xiv). Identities are then social forms that experience tensions between the alleged homogeneity of the group and the singular, situated selves (ibid.: xv). Appiah is a firm believer in the fact that the individual can and does live with many loyalties, and not just one to a single social form (ibid.: 214). When Honora vindicates the category “us”, she is struggling against oblivion and denial in an attempt to preserve a community that shared the same trauma and implemented strategies of mutual aid. This could correspond to what Appiah calls “identity as a parameter”, which is the case when “categories designed for subordination can also be used to mobilize and empower people as members of a selfaffirmative identity” (ibid.: 112). On the contrary, Honora’s friend, Teresa Furey, sees the category “orphan girls” as a constraint, an obstacle to leaving trauma behind and moving on in life. Appiah admits that identity-as-parameter and identity-as-limit actually constitute a two-way traffic and may easily coexist (ibid.: 112). On considering the experience of the famines in Ireland, the British settlers in Australia also question the possibility of a collective memory of the Irish famine: “that would presume everyone experienced it in the same way, which is certainly not true” (179). That there should be heterogeneity within the affected groups is understandable but British settlers have a vested interest in division in order to elude responsibility for the British government’s handling of the catastrophe. Settlers themselves encourage divisive practices also in banal situations, as happens with the chalk line drawn on the dancing floor so that masters and servants do not mix up (163). Contrary to these divisive ruses, some cultural artifacts, like Thomas Moore’s nostalgic melodies about Ireland’s glorious past, enthusiastically bring the Irish together (184). The Linguistic Conflict The linguistic conflict deriving from the British colonization of Ireland also plays a role in the novel, although it is not at the forefront of the plot. One of the criteria for the selection of the orphan girls is that they should speak English, which they are expected to have learnt at school. About the most defiant girl in the group, Julia Cuffe, the narrator says: “She was good at English, could already swear in it” (25), which necessarily recalls Caliban’s retort to Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play that also delves into the practices and effects of colonialism: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is that I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (I, ii, 365- 367). On another occasion, Julia Cuffe also talks back to an official who has a difficulty with the spelling of Irish names: “I can spell in my own tongue” (39). Although the language conflict is not prominent in this novel written in English, the vernacular language, Irish Gaelic or Gaeilge —another term for the Irish language— is at times bound to the girls’ Irish identity and to their past lives before the voyage, thereby signifying their conflictive dual identity. In fact, Honora’s letter, which is to be read posthumously, begins with two quotations, the second of which is from a well-known poem by the Irish-language poet Anthony Raftery: “Mise Raifteirí an file, Lán dóchas is grá…” [I am Raftery the poet, full of hope and love] (200). It is not only the coincidence in the last names of the poet and the protagonist that calls the reader’s attention but the dominant mood of their texts, both written at the end of a life’s long journey. In her letter, Honora wants to come to terms with her suppressed past and, the Irish quotation suggests, with her suppressed vernacular language as well. The English language will accentuate the orphan girls’ sense of foreignness, as they associate the language learnt at school, with that learnt on the ship and used in Australia (141), thereby connecting the colonizing language with the traumatic experiences lived. However, even if the Irish language learnt and spoken at home, with family and neighbours, has positive emotional attachments in the novel, the English language is that which facilitates emigration, escaping from the famines and, hence, survival, which evinces the paradoxical workings of colonialism. The loss of Irish, not just among the migrants but also in their homeland because of its speakers’ death or emigration, also takes its emotional toll, as we see in the case of Bridget Joyce, who attributes her miserable state in part to the English language: “And I’m tired of speaking English all the time, there’s no rest from it” (124). Losing their Irish is also associated in the novel with the girls’ loss, or even cancellation, of their past and the concomitant trouble for their self-identity: “They might, too, have lost the language to tell the story” (244). Xenophobia and Racism Charles Strutt, the English surgeon-superintendent in charge of the girls, soon becomes more concerned for their health and well-being than anybody else in the transportation scheme to the extent that he starts to think of them as “his” girls (47). Revealingly enough, his concern for them surges on reading about the xenophobic reactions they awake in Australia: “[one newspaper editor] poured scorn on everything about these newly landed girls: their place of origin, their beliefs, their tongue, even their looks” (46). This vitriolic reaction illustrates the amalgam of different marks of identity —nationality, religion, language and physical appearance— exhibited by xenophobic discourse. Mary Daly similarly highlights the way many accounts of Irish female emigration are “replete with gender, religious and racial discourse” (2014: 19). To the journalist’s alienating “them”, Charles Strutt responds by committing himself to the improvement of “his” girls with naïve enthusiasm: “He would also feed them and build them up. They would be grateful for their training, it would make their lives better when they got there […] At this point in his effusive plans, the girls became his. Not the, nor those, but his” (emphasis in the original, 46-47). Xenos-phobia, or fear of the stranger, can be mixed up with racism — discrimination on the basis of physical, biological features— even among white people, as was the case in Australia. The British Empire, on claiming whiteness for the English only, concomitantly identified a set of “inferior” races, particularly in reference to the Irish, who had been animalized and racialized since the Renaissance and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, were included in an “index of Nigrescence” and identified as sharing Africanoid features (Ashcroft & Griffiths & Tiffin 2007: 184). Therefore, when the girls’ looks are mentioned by Australian journalists, it may be, not just because of their malnutrition or poor clothes, but also because of racialized, exclusionary prejudices. The term “Black Irish” has been used throughout centuries to refer to either immigrant or emigrant groups but was particularly common to characterize those who left Ireland because of the mid-nineteenth-century famines (Irish Central Staff 2022). Contrary to this, and paradoxical though it may seem, Breda Gray informs that in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, Irish women were sought to “breed an indigenous white population” (Gray 2004: 176). Racism, therefore, did operate in both antithetical ways: on the one hand, to exclude Irish immigrants by “darkening” them and, on the other, to appropriate them so as to “whiten” the colony’s population stock. Settlers and Aboriginal Peoples Concerned as it is with the orphan girls’ voyage and lives in Australia, the novel Not the Same Sky pays little attention to the Australian Aboriginal peoples but, although marginal in the narrative, they are occasionally acknowledged as legitimate, although dispossessed, owners of the land and as the most knowledgeable regarding the land and natural risks. The narrator tells, for instance, of a man of the Wiradjuri people who rescued dozens of settlers during the Big Flood of 1852. However, the indigenous population and their land property rights are not respected by the greedy new settlers who have arrived to plunder the land and its riches: “Ah, Charles, we’re discussing native populations, what to do about them. You know, in theory, we do not believe that Aboriginal land can be legally possessed if it is occupied, but practice is another thing. […] It is not always possible to get a definitive agreement on what constitutes terra nullius”. (176- 177) The new settlers maintain that they are entitled to own territory that is inhabited and used by Aboriginal peoples, whose customary property rights are not recognized. Honora Raftery, however, although she is an underprivileged settler, realizes that the little house she has occupied upon marriage is on somebody else’s land. She is aware that she was once dispossessed of her own family home in Ireland and was, after that, displaced. Now, no matter how unwillingly, she is participating in the colonial project that dispossesses and displaces others: There’s a man around here who watches me. He saw me before I saw him. He was here first. I know what he thinks of me. I want to say to him that I do not want to be in a house on his land, I have my own spot, even if I cannot get to it. […] When he saw us coming he stared, then after staring long enough he thought that maybe he could share with us, but then he realised that we didn’t want to share, we wanted to own. (202) Honora’s use of “us” here does not simply refer to her newly formed family unit, but to settlers in general, of whom she has become another member. It is the encounter with the Aboriginal person that relocates her in a different group from that of the Irish orphan girls as “us”. Both senses of identity, the immigrant underdog and the striving settler coexist, and they manifest themselves in the letter she has written through the use of the same pronoun “us”. As Julia Kristeva has remarked, “just because one is a foreigner does not mean one is without one’s foreigner” (1991: 24). Thus, the Aboriginal peoples are the foreigners of the foreigners, i.e. they are doubly estranged. Trauma In her analysis of a selection of twenty-first-century Irish novels confronting traumatic subjects, Kathleen Costello-Sullivan makes a distinction between twentieth-century past, although possibly an idealized future as well, while the diasporic I does what it can, living the time it has been assigned. And how about the possibility that the representation, the performance might be a means to triumph over that discontinuity, to yoke again the bits that have remained scattered in different times and places?] This split subjectivity between the migrating I’s new life and the past life experienced in the homeland before departure is very aptly expressed through a metonymical twist in the title of the novel as space is rendered in temporal terms and vice versa: “A Veiga é como un tempo distinto” [A Veiga is like a different time]. The apparent simile actually conveys the migrant’s discontinuity with regard to the irrecoverable past of the homeland. Narratological instability Apart from the characters’ sense of foreignness in London or A Veiga, and the migrant’s split subjectivity between past and present selves, we must add the instability of place and time construed through blurred spatial boundaries, often stretched and distorted in a highly subjective, even surrealistic, manner: “ […] aquela tarde de Noiteboa, a praia de Brighton, o tímido sol inglés de xullo e agosto non parecía estar a apenas sesenta millas de Notting Hill, senón lonxe, moito máis lonxe cá Veiga, mar, mil mares por medio” [that afternoon of Christmas Eve, the beach of Brighton, the shy English sun of July and August did not seem to be barely sixty miles from Notting Hill, but far away, much further than A Veiga, beyond the sea, a thousand seas] (50). The narrator’s agonizing yearning for Elisa makes him lose the temporal and spatial parameters of the happy moments he shared with her. His despair destabilizes any sense of himself, alienating him from his beloved and making him a stranger to himself. Likewise, in spite of the punctilious naming of specific places such as those in the titles of the chapters that trace Elisa’s whereabouts —Portobello Road, Willesden Green, Oxford Street, Brighton, Hampstead, City, Bethnal Green, Croydon, Miou, Westmister, Holloway— there is a tantalizing avoidance of terms such as Asturias, Asturian, Galicia or Galician in the novel. Instead, the narrator repeatedly uses expressions such as “da terra” [from the land] (15), “do país” [from the country] (12), “bar de noso” [bar of ours] (9), “un dos nosos” [one of our own] (24), etc. One wonders whether this reluctance to name the region when, even in Franco’s time —the time of the story— Galicia and Asturias were two distinct and recognizable regions, may be related to the liminal Galician-Asturian identity of A Veiga. Along a similar line, Danny M. Barreto has argued that the equivocal location of A Veiga is an instance of the flexibility of borders (2018: 204). In her essay “Escenificando Galicia, escenificando a diáspora” (Moreda 2011b) the author —herself born in A Veiga, although she moved to Galicia with her family at a very early age— clearly and repeatedly identifies herself as Galician and claims for further representations of the Galician diasporic identity beyond the stereotypical ones in the media and in political speeches. The lack of an overt regional ascription for the main characters of the novel may be seen as another symptom of the instability of their identity and of the challenge that liminality poses to the act of naming and, eventually, to recognition and identification. The elusiveness of the protagonists’ identity is further complicated by the characters’ changing names. Dolores Vilavedra has already pointed out that double names, indicative of migrants’ split identity, are a recurrent feature in Galician narratives of migration to Europe (2015: 193). On arriving in a new land, it is not uncommon to have one’s name adapted to the new phonetics or changed to a similar name in the host culture. Such is the case recounted, for instance, in Xesús Fraga’s memoir of his grandmother’s emigration to London in the 1960s, Virtudes (e misterios) (2020): “Londres obrara unha transformación: Virtudes convertérase en Betty, dúas mulleres habitaban un mesmo físico” [London had worked a transformation: Virtudes had become Betty, two women inhabited one same body] (16). The notion of “becoming” is revealing in that, rather than opposing two solid identities, the past and the present selves, it refers to a fluid identity that never solidifies. The narrator in A Veiga comments on the behavioural transformations matching the consecutive changes in Elisa’s name —Luísa, Louise, Elizabeth, Liz—: “Cando deixaches caer Elisa e Luísa e Louise e puxeches o Liz, xa te decataras de que te movías como unha inglesa, rías como unha inglesa, pensabas como unha inglesa, mesmo falabas como elas, pero co teu acento” (28) [When you dropped Elisa and Luísa and Louise and took on Liz, you had already realized that you moved like an Englishwoman, laughed like an Englishwoman, thought like an Englishwoman, you even talked like them, although with your accent]. Mimicry is one of the immigrants’ strategies to pass for the more prestigious English locals. Elisa trains body and mind to resemble an Englishwoman and the narrator’s detailed enumeration and repetition of the term “Englishwoman” underlines the coveted identity. However, mimicry generates a flawed impersonation, as the reference to her accent exposes, a fissure in the adopted identity that will eventually become a chasm. Although he seems in general reluctant to changes, Gelo, the narrator, also has his name changed upon his arrival in London, which results in one of the few humorous moments in his rather sombre account: —[…] Só está comentando que lle resulta estraño que un home se chame Ángel, ou Éinllel, como din eles. Non lle parece apropiado chamarche así. —Dille que todos me chaman Gelo. El tamén pode chamarme así. Aquilo non convenceu tampouco a Mister Stobart. Parecíase demasiado a Hello [...]. —Di que prefire chamarche Martin. Martiño, vaia. Polo apelido. Seica tampouco dá pronunciado o Martínez. (21) [—[...] He’s just saying he finds Angel is an odd name for a man, or Einllel, as they pronounce it. He doesn’t find it proper to call you that. //—Tell him everybody calls me Gelo. He can also call me that. //That did not convince Mister Stobart either. It sounded too much like Hello [...]. //—He says he prefers to call you Martin. That is, Martiño. Because of your last name. It seems he cannot pronounce Martínez either.] Names do not travel easily across cultural and linguistic borders. They trigger new associations, not all of them dignified or desirable, and their pronunciation may prove to be a challenge to the phonetics of the receiving country. It is not just the migrant’s name that puzzles the English, strangeness operates the other way around too. English names, of people or of places, can also be deceptive and conjure up mental pictures that are very different from the real thing. Such is the case of Elisa’s first address in London: “como case sempre en Londres, o nome enganaba. Willesden Green non era máis ca unha high street” [as was almost always the case in London, the name was deceptive. Willesden Green was no more than a high street] (17). Another factor in the instability of identities is the narrator’s unreliability, which is not an infrequent characteristic of first-person narrators. Gelo’s psychological predicament —the novel begins with an explicit reference to his unremitting fear since childhood—, his partiality, contradictions, occasional naivety, prejudices, his temporary ignorance of crucial facts, such as Elisa’s whereabouts, and his formal disposition of the information to be delivered: the continuous use of prolepsis and flashbacks, the indeterminacy of dates, some of which are not clarified until the penultimate chapter, the intriguing postponement of information about his affective ties with Elisa, all of these are factors that, although fascinating from a literary point of view, make this witnessnarrator’s personality more elusive. The Heterogeneity of Us The protagonists’ unstable and fluid selves, their strangeness to themselves and to their surroundings, whether in London or in A Veiga, do not favour the constitution of a consistent collective identity —an us— and any attempts to take refuge in a group soon expose the latter’s internal division and the continuous reproduction of further us-them binaries. Edward Said has commented on the exiles’ solitude and their anxious recourse to the exiled community’s support to restore and reassemble an identity that has been made discontinuous by banishment from the homeland. Said warns, however, of the risk of being exiled by the exiles when the accepted group line is not followed (2000: 140- 141). Although the Palestinian intellectual is careful to differentiate between terms such as exile, refugee, expatriate, and émigré, he notices that the experience of solitude and estrangement is common, even if to varied degrees, to all these types of migrants (ibid.: 144). In A Veiga, the main characters meet at the bar on Portobello Road, the bar “de noso” [of our own] (9), most likely in order to reassemble their discontinuous identity. Fun and entertainment could be certainly found in other London bars, but they prefer this particular one attended by their fellow nationals. Olivia Rodríguez-González has called our attention to the fact that this bar is not a hermetically sealed space or community, because external cultural phenomena such as fashion and music manage not just to penetrate its walls but to effect transformations in some of the characters (2016: 67). The collective identity is soon revealed to be illusory, especially in what concerns gender difference and, more specifically, the double standards applied to women and men: —Abofé que con nenas como estas é sempre o mesmo. Chegan aquí sen saber nada da vida máis que as catro parvadas que lles meten na cabeza na Sección Feminina. E aquí ven catro cousas, poñen unha saia máis curta e xa cren ser as máis listas [...] Cando lle dixen que aquelas dúas raparigas eran da Veiga e que a máis alta era amiga miña e lle fixen notar ademais que el xa mudara de moza dúas veces nos apenas dous meses que eu levaba en Londres, Tino respondeume cunha risada sarcástica. —Home, pero iso é distinto. Por que non hei poder divertirme un pouco? (22- 23) [—Really, with girls like these it’s always the same. They arrive here knowing nothing of life other than the four silly ideas that Sección Feminina crams in their heads. Here they see four things, wear a shorter skirt and they already think they are the smartest […]. // When I told him that those two youngsters were from A Veiga, that the taller one was a friend of mine, and reminded him that he had already changed girlfriends twice in hardly two months since my arrival in London, Tino answered me with a big sarcastic laugh. // —Man, but that’s different. Why can’t I have some fun?] The patriarchal point of view aims to control women’s sexuality: either these women are for the exclusive sexual pleasure of the hypermasculine males in the community, or they will be slandered and banished on the ground of their lax morals. The same applies to the male migrants’ perception of Englishwomen’s sexuality: “Non hai inglesa que se me resista!” [no Englishwoman can resist me] (15) exclaims Tino, the narrator’s friend. The hypermasculine complex is also manifest in the men’s ironic comments about the vocalist’s high falsetto voice in the song Sugar Baby Love (10) —the 1974 release date of this song, however, does not fit in the temporal frame of the beginning of the novel. The gender divide seems to be stronger than the national one regarding patriarchal attitudes to sex and sexual orientation, as also happens in the field of domestic tasks: Englishwomen are slurred for being careless housewives, as if the work of cleaning were part and parcel of the female condition (19). A similar carelessness in the male migrants’ homes is, however, seen as natural and acceptable. Homophobia is another divisive prejudice to the extent that it menaces to break not only the internal bonds of the migrant community but also those of female bonding. This is manifest in the comments made by Rita, the narrator’s second wife, who is actually jealous of her husband’s attachment to Elisa and makes derogatory remarks about Elisa’s friendship with Gail, insinuating their censurable lesbianism (82). Neither is Elisa’s feminist activism acceptable in the Portobello Road bar. A former friend of hers like Lidia avows using contraception pills but resents feminist campaigns such as those led by Elisa to spread knowledge about reproductive rights (77). In the trial for Elisa’s involuntary aggression against an English policeman, Lidia, who has accompanied her frail mother to court, feels totally alien to Elisa’s actions: “aquela banda de lunáticas” [that pack of lunatics] (110). Elisa’s firm convictions help her to overcome the hostility of the women whom, in the narrator’s ironic words, she aims to “redeem” (102). A fissure in the possibility of transnational female sorority is made manifest through the intersections of gender with social class and education. Elisa’s struggle to integrate herself in English society clashes with a social structure that assigns cleaning jobs to female migrants, while university education, white-collar professions, and jobs in middle-class venues are reserved for the English: “Esas inglesas non limpaban en pensións glorificadas como o Waycott Hotel. Elas podían aspirar, como mínimo, se non tiñan vocación universitaria nin sabían mecanografar, a despachar nos templos da moda en Oxford Street” [Those Englishwomen did not clean in glorified boarding houses like the Waycott Hotel. They could at least aspire, if they did not have a university vocation or did not know typing, to be retail assistants in the fashion temples of Oxford Street] (28). The category of protagonist is bestowed on Elisa precisely for her endeavour to change the social course that has been fixed for her, as she combines cleaning work with union activism and university training, at least until the very end of the novel, when she unexpectedly envisages returning to A Veiga to fulfil her mother’s dream of opening a haberdashery (116). On the other hand, gender difference is clearly connected with the salary obtained, even among migrants from the same country, as an unqualified male waiter like Gelo makes fifteen pounds a week (15), while a female cleaner of the night shift only makes twelve and a half (84). Gender discrimination is blatant in the workers’ unions too, as Elisa and her female co-workers soon realize: “Os T & G non fan máis que mirarnos por enriba do ombreiro […] Pensan que en realidade non nos fai falta traballar, que todo o que nos pasa témolo ben merecido por teimar en saír da casa” [those in the T&G will continuously look down on us … They think that we do not need to work, and that we deserve everything that happens to us because of our obstinacy in leaving the home] (59- 60). One infers, then, that workers’ unions primarily defend male workers’ interests and would rather send women home. José Babiano and Ana Fernández Asperilla, in their analysis of women’s emigration to Europe in the 1960s, refer to female political exiles’ activism to defend the rights of female economic migrants, as the latter had fewer opportunities to organize themselves (2009: 88). Since economic migrants go to the receiving country to work, it is important to detect, as A Veiga perceptively does, the ways in which gender discrimination is implemented by English employers and unions in what concerns jobs on offer and salaries. Elisa sees through this inequity soon, and becomes highly engaged in the organization of female cleaners of all nationalities working in London, but her own community, including her admiring Gelo, resent her activism and the mobilizations of unions that struggle for workers’ rights: “Marta […] axiña dixo que nin tola a verían manifestándose diante das Casas so Parlamento en Westminster, que ela fora a Londres para traballar” [Marta […] soon said that she would, no way, be seen demonstrating opposite the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, that she had come to London to work] (73). Their economic and juridical vulnerability, together with decades of ideological indoctrination in their homeland, make the immigrant community in this novel especially docile and very little inclined to mobilization. A similar example of resistance to ideas that may be judged politically inconvenient is that referred by the narrator concerning the migrant group’s mockery of Don Adolfo’s republican ideals: “Nós non coñecemos outra nación que aquela das glorias imperiais que nos aprenderon na escola e que moitos senten verdadeiramente, e nada nos din palabras como federalismo ou estatuto” [We know no other nation than that of the imperial glories we were taught at school and that many feel at heart, and words such as federalism or statute mean nothing to us] (79). Social integration in the receiving country requires a minimum command of the receiving country’s native language and, here too, Elisa performs better than Gelo, although her foreign accent betrays her and becomes an obstacle in her social ascent (29, 30). This difference in language fluency becomes a barrier between the couple in their social relations with English people, as the narrator himself avows: “Eu fun pouco a pouco quedando fóra. O inglés non é meu: nunca o será” [Little by little I was left out. English is not mine: it will never be] (37). It is not only the personal relationship between Gelo and Elisa that suffers from their unequal command of the English language, because Elisa’s desire to sound English and look English also provokes mistrust among her fellow migrants —the bar in Portobello Road functions as a metonymy of the migrant community— as if she were trying to swap loyalties: “E iso fixera que algúns en Portobello Road te mirasen con desconfianza , e ti sábelo, como se quixeses cruzar cara a outro lado que non che correspondía, como se o inglés e as saias curtas e o cabelo tinguido fosen pequenos estigmas que te facían estraña para os teus” [And that had made some in Portobello Road look at you with mistrust, and you know it, as if you wanted to cross over to another side that was not for you, as if English and short skirts and dyed hair were little stigmas that made you a stranger to your own] (40). Edward Said refers to exiles’ insistence on their right not to belong to the receiving society, as well as to their, at times, narcissistic masochism and refusal to ameliorate their condition (2000: 145- 146). This handicap also seems to apply to the migrant community in the novel, and one could perhaps explain it by the recourse, once again, to Said’s understanding of exile as a phenomenon of discontinuity on being cut from one’s roots (ibid.: 140). Migrants’ resistance to adopt the receiving country’s culture may be understood as a refusal to accept that discontinuous state, and as a strategy to remain in the fantasized sameness of the homeland. The international community of immigrants in London mentioned in A Veiga is certainly miscellaneous: the nationality most frequently pointed out and with close attachments to the characters of the novel, is that of Italians, but they are perceived as lazy and troublesome (15). On other occasions, they may be inspiring, as in the case of Italian and Greek restaurants in the metropolis (15), which give the idea to Tino and Gelo to open a restaurant “da terra” [from the land] (15). Some neighbourhoods accommodate more immigrants than others, as happens in Willesden Green, Elisa’s address, which bustles with business run by Irish, Pakistani, Indian, Caribbean and Portuguese immigrants (17). Such ethnic diversity actually makes the narrator recall the enduring racist prejudices of Lidia’s father: “Celestino […] fixera parte do servizo militar en África e xamais conseguira superar a súa aversión polos mouros nin polos negros, dos que anos máis tarde nos bares da Veiga aínda falaba con noxo mal agachado” [Celestino had done part of his military service in Africa and had never managed to overcome his loathing for Moors and blacks, of whom years later in the bars of A Veiga he continued to talk with poorly hidden disgust] (17-18). The novel does not present any clear signal of biological racism on the part of the British against Gelo’s and Elisa’s community of migrants, although there are hints of a more subtle cultural discrimination, a phenomenon that Gabriel Bello Reguera, following Pierre-André Taguieff and Michel Wieviorka, calls “implicit racism”, which he relates to the European shift from biological racism to cultural racism after World War II and the Nazi genocide made the former untenable (2007: 2- 3). Celestino’s biological racism corresponds to Spain’s Protectorate in Morocco —as in the omission of the terms “Galicia” and “Asturias” in the novel, “Spain” is never mentioned, and there is no reference to “Spanish” migrants—, a colonial enterprise that, as we can see in the novel, promoted colonialist racism, even among the most subaltern members of the colonialist army. Necessary though migrants’ networks are because they help in finding jobs (15, 20) and accommodation (54-55), as well as giving emotional support, they evince divisive forces that make collective identity very fragile. The heterogeneity that one expects to find inside any national group and that is often overlooked in the diaspora really emerges and reproduces itself in the destination country. Even the smaller family unit is often torn by emigration, as happens in Nela’s and Celestino’s family when their daughter Luísa refuses to emigrate to London and Elisa not only occupies her place as Nela’s sort of foster daughter but also adopts Luísa’s name for a while (19-20). Similarly, Elisa’s family is broken apart by emigration with the grandmother in the home town, the mother in Bilbao and the daughter in London. However, the family may be the first institution to encourage or facilitate emigration among its members because of the experience gained by the first migrating relative, as we can also see in Xesús Fraga’s memoir Virtudes (e misterios) (2020). The novel A Veiga overall shows that, no matter how strongly the notion of us is desired or reaffirmed by migrants, its repressed heterogeneity surfaces before long, as families are reshuffled and migrants’ networks undergo wrenching tensions. Contrapuntal identities Edward Said maintains that the exiled person enjoys a contrapuntal awareness of at least two cultures and that the experiences lived in the new environment occur, contrapuntally, alongside memories of the homeland, thereby giving rise to a series of comparisons, similarities and differences between both (2000: 148). This contrapuntal process is probably the one which most actively bolsters the us-them, now-then, here-there binaries in A Veiga. The most striking comparison is that between Francoist oppression, with surveillance of people and their mores even as late as the 1960s, and the more tolerant and democratic practices in England —the novel always refers to the receiving country as England and to its people and institutions as English, so even very common terms such as Britain or the UK are not used in A Veiga, while the term “British”, very rare in this novel, is collocated with positive qualities as in “británica solemnidade” [British solemnity] (52) or “británica sutileza” [British subtlety] (53). When Tino shares with Gelo his project to open a restaurant “da terra” [of the land] (15), he stresses the difference between the two countries regarding not only bureaucratic formalities but also Francoist control of the population’s actions and ideology: “Alí non che hai esas lerias de certificado de boa conduta, nin hai Garda Civil, nin o alcalde nin o cura teñen nada que dicir nestas cousas” [There you don’t have all the bother about the good conduct certificate, there is no Guardia Civil and neither the mayor nor the priest have any say in these things] (16). A chapter that is especially prolific in pithy contrapuntal examples of us-them, now-then, here-there binaries is “Westminster”, about Elisa’s incident with a policeman during one of the Women’s Lib actions, and her trial at court: “Inglaterra non é a Veiga, repito para min. Mil novecentos setenta e tres, este ano que ata aquel momento está sendo tan plácido, non é o trinta e seis. E un policía, e menos aínda un bobbie, non é un alcalde, nin un cura, nin un sarxento da Garda Civil” [England is not A Veiga, I repeat to myself. Nineteen seventy-three, this year that until that moment was passing so placidly, is not nineteen thirty-six. And a policeman, and even less a bobby, is neither a mayor, nor a priest, nor a sergeant of the Guardia Civil] (109). Apart from the observations on the difference between a military dictatorship and a democracy, with everything that each system entails regarding citizens’ rights, the narrator often comments, in similarly eloquent contrasts, on the difference between women’s lives under Franco’s National Catholicism and women’s mores in London during the “Swinging Sixties”: “Daqueles meses lembro a sensación de que Londres todo o cambiaba. Nin os bailes eran xa bailes, nin os amigos eran o que foran, nin as rapazas que vos criarades ao abeiro de dona Brígida levabades xa o veo os domingos nin saia por debaixo dos xeonllos" [Of those months I remember the impression that London changed everything. Dances were no longer dances, friends were not what they used to be, and you, the young women who had grown under Dona Brígida’s supervision, did no longer wear a veil on Sundays or the skirt below the knees] (25). The Catholic Church used to promote discourses about the moral risks that emigration entailed for women and pressed them to contact their missions on arrival (Babiano & Fernández Asperilla 2009: 81). The young migrant women in London, however, would rather look like Twiggy, the English fashion model who became an icon in the swinging ‘60s in Britain (9). A more disturbing comparison, however, is that of the less attractive Rita, Gelo’s second wife, with the character in the Beatles’ song “Lovely Rita, Meter Maid” (1967), as the narrator’s dispassionate relationship with her shares some resemblance with the opportunistic relationship described in the lyrics of the song. When Gelo and Rita go dancing, with their Italian and Portuguese friends, to the dancing hall of the local Catholic church —in his novel Brooklyn (2009), the Irish writer Colm Tóibín also pays careful attention to role of the Catholic Church in the management of the migration flow from Ireland to the United States and, in particular, to these dancing evenings where new couples are formed to ensure the consolidation of the Catholic community in the destination country— the dancers end up reproducing the habits of the homeland with men and women talking in separate groups, although they vainly attempt to imitate English social gatherings: “coidábamos que os ingleses non eran así, que se mesturaban e falaban con uns e con outros e que entre eles non había asuntos de homes e mulleres” [we thought that the English were not like us, that they mixed up and talked around and that among them there were not men’s topics and women’s topics] (70). The narrator approves the lack of segregation by gender in English social gatherings but, due to his conformist disposition, soon yields to the customary ways of Mediterranean Catholic countries. Although in the contrapuntal comparisons seen above England is presented as more democratic and modern than the homeland, there are some occasional comparisons in which the homeland fares better. The narrator’s unreliability and false consciousness leads him, for instance, to identify problems in London that he thinks are non-existent in his hometown, as in the case of sexual harassment in public places: “en Londres iso pasaba, na Veiga non” [in London that would happen, not in A Veiga] (47). In spite of the severe police control in Francoist times, one expects that sexual harassment did take place, but was rarely denounced because of the common practice of victim shaming in conservative societies. Another disconcerting contrapuntal difference observed by the narrator, considering his personal and economic background, is that about the hardships of life in London: “Non pode haber anos fáciles en Londres como si os había na Veiga” [There cannot be easy years in London like those that really existed in A Veiga] (66). The narrator’s maladjustment to the receiving country may be responsible for his occasional idealization of the homeland. Concluding Remarks The present chapter has focused on the main intersectional conflicts that arise in migrant groups, such as the community portrayed by Eva Moreda in her novel A Veiga é como un tempo distinto (2011), and that destabilize the notion of sameness or homogeneity in said groups. The novel abounds in examples of tensions and division within the migrant community that intersect with the us-them national boundary between the English and immigrants, and end up reshuffling groups and loyalties. To start with, the migrants’ relationship with their homeland is problematized to the extent that the protagonists feel they are strangers in their own country. Similarly, migration provokes a split subjectivity, a discontinuity in Edward Said’s words (2000), between the migrant’s past and present selves which, rather than constitute two clearcut solid selves, gets intertwined in a fluid process of transformation and becoming. There are a number of narratological strategies that emphasize the instability of the migrants’ identity, such as the narrator’s numerous instances of unreliability, his distorted perception of time and space, the tantalizing liminality of the characters’ place of origin and the deceptive nature of names of people and places. Regarding the impact of social conflicts on the migrant group’s collective identity, the gender gap is among the most divisive ones in this novel, as we come across abundant examples of patriarchal domination, with double standards for men and women, homophobia, exaltation of hypermasculinity, hostility to feminist activism, and discrimination of women in education and the job market. Francoist and Catholic indoctrination are among the strongest forces behind the gender gap and are also decisive in the migrants’ resistance to ameliorate their situation. The migrants’ networks, among them that of the family unit, play an important role in facilitating, even encouraging, the experience of migration, and in providing emotional support to reassemble the migrant’s discontinuous identity, but they also reproduce internal us-them divisions that make the collective identity extremely elusive and problematic. I.3.3. Correspondences This section “Us & Them in the Contemporary Irish and Galician Novel” brings together two very different novels that engage with female diaspora at disparate times in history —the second half of the nineteenth century in Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky and the late 1960s and early 1970s in Eva Moreda’s A Veiga é como un tempo distinto— and distant places —Australia and London respectively. It could be argued that, considering the massive flow of Irish emigrants to London in the twentieth century —especially after World War II and, later, in the 1980s— a more fitting comparison would have been between Moreda’s novel and a woman-authored novel about Irish female emigrants in London around the same years. Indeed, Tony Murray’s book London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity (2012) would have been an enlightening source of information for such a comparative analysis, but his own comments on the femaleauthored literary works included in his analysis suggest circumspection, as he concludes that Edna O’Brien’s writing does not foreground migration and the short stories by Sarah Berkeley and Emma Donoghue hardly correspond to “the archetypal London Irish story” (2014). The scarcity of Irish women novelists who deal, in any depth, with the female migrant’s predicament in London around this period is, therefore, noticeable. One question to tackle is whether the disparity in the temporal and spatial settings of the novels by Conlon and Moreda invalidates placing them side by side to highlight relevant comparative aspects. The answer proposed here is that, on the contrary, disparate times and places reveal the persistence of certain situations and discourses that should be the object of analysis by critics of literary and cultural studies. Bonnie Honig’s book Democracy and the Foreigner (2001) is actually haunted by the recirculation of narratives about foreignness and their use, among other purposes, either to renationalize or denationalize a particular community (ibid.: 6, 10). In this respect, even comparisons across genres are pertinent, as in the recourse to the motif and trope of bird migration that is to be found both in Alba Cid’s poetry collection Atlas and in Conlon’s novel. Likewise, Cid’s attention to the memorializing function of the Asmat pole bears compelling resemblance to the memorial monument to the victims of the Great Irish Famine. The individuals’ sense of foreignness within their own community is also a concern common to Moreda’s novel and to the stories by Fiona Barr and Anne Devlin because of the hostile political climate and its concomitant exclusions. Moreover, the migrant’s need to adapt to the receiving society often entails practices of mimicry that are illustrated in Moreda’s novel and in Mary O’Donnell’s story “Twentynine Palms”. One common feature in Conlon’s and Moreda’s novels is their close date of publication —2013 and 2011 respectively— soon after the 2007 international financial crisis that had dramatic effects on the economy of Ireland and Galicia and provoked subsequent migration flows. The contemporary reading public of both novels would necessarily be especially sensitive to past experiences of economic turmoil and emigration. The recirculation of such past events could then be understood as a strategy for coping and learning from history. Regarding the encounter with foreignness which results from the migration experience, both novels engagingly interrogate homogenizing categories of sameness such as those expressed by the use of the pronoun us in opposition to another amalgamated group of them. The heterogeneity of the homeland, that of the receiving country and of the migrant community are thus laid bare in both novels. 2016 while I was writing some of the monologues. It strikes me that whereas throughout the twentieth century Antigone was a theatrical touchstone and political metaphor for resistance to authoritarianism, in the twenty-first century, Iphigenia is emerging as a metaphor for ‘collateral damage’, and the deaths of civilians (many of whom are women and children) in the interests of militarism and political expediency. (Shaughnessy 2016b) One certainly expects every rewriting of a classical play to allude to the playwright’s contemporary social context, but the third paragraph of the above quotation establishes unanticipated and eye-opening comparisons between Euripides’ play about Iphigenia’s ordeal with the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. The innocent victim as collateral damage when civilians are killed in the interest of military and political strategies is a tragic conflict considered in both the Greek play and in Shaughnessy’s version. Shaughnessy also refers, in the above quotation, to the war in Syria, which has been ongoing since 2011, and the subsequent migration flows, an experience of forced displacement caused by a violent conflict that recalls Anne Devlin’s need to leave the violent North during the Troubles, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. In her review of the performance of the play at the O’Donoghue Theatre, the writer Sighle Meehan also comments on the relevance of Euripides’ play to our present times: Of course, nothing happens in the old myths that does not repeat in our own times. Does not every ruler who leads his people to war sacrifice his nation’s children? And are the seas off Europe today not red with the blood of young children, “barely visible in the bigger schemes / dreamed up by gods or men?” (2017: 19) One may initially be surprised to find this recourse to Greek drama from the fifth century BCE to comment on the present world, but it is actually the role played by the strangeness of such a distant past and culture that is of relevance to this chapter, because it defamiliarizes our present-day experience, deactivates our automatic responses and inertia, and forces us to look at it anew, from a different angle. Another far from secondary concern in The Sacrificial Wind is patriarchy and its ruses to use women, young and old, to perpetuate its privileges, a topic that rings a bell apropos the discrimination against women playwrights in a predominantly patriarchal Irish theatre, as seen in the introductory section of this chapter, and that, distressingly, does not limit itself to this cultural manifestation, as seen in Phyl Herbert’s account of the control over motherhood through the collusion of nationalist and Catholic patriarchal interests. The Sacrificial Wind exposes the limited range of action of the female characters, who must serve the gods’, the nation’s and the patriarchal institutions’ designs. Iphigenia’s predicament in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (408-406 BCE) also informs the plot of Marina Carr’s Ariel (2002), while the myth of Medea informs her play By the Bog of Cats (1998) (Roche 2009: 254), but Shaughnessy engages more closely and critically with the Greek play itself. Although the director of the production, Max Hafler, follows the three-actor rule of Athenian drama, by which only three actors play the roles of all the characters, and even though both Euripides’ and Shaughnessy’s texts are in verse, the latter does not contain dialogues or rapid verbal duels among the characters, but a sequence of substantial individual monologues arranged in a way that allows the contrast of different points of view. This disposition, which may at times recall witnesses’ testimonies at a trial, compels the audience to assume their responsibility in the interpretation of the characters’ predicaments and in the judgement of the characters’ various ethical positions. But the audience’s scrutiny is not simply applied to the onstage characters because, as the director Max Hafler reminds us, the public must probe into their own responsibility in the victimization of others: The characters addressed only the audience. This did not mean that the other performers did not support the main actor, but the principal acting partner was always the audience. This kept both a feel of Greek drama and a palpable collusion in the audience regarding their “role” in the sacrifice and other decisions that the characters made. (2016) Furthermore, the monologues present the characters’ internal struggles, an aspect which, according to Marit Meinhold, today’s audiences are accustomed to but was alien to Greek drama: “[…] the exploration of internal motivations and emotions onstage, a notion that was foreign to Greek theatre” (2022: 138). Max Hafler actually compares the monologues with musical arias “changing energy and movement suddenly for two or three minutes before a new character twists the story, often violently, in another direction” (2016). Thus, each monologue requires a different mode of delivery and generates a particular atmosphere. The number of characters also differs from the Greek to the Irish version, as the former has seven, apart from the Chorus —Agamemnon, Achilles, Menelaos, Clytemnestra, Old Man, Messenger and Iphigenia— while Shaughnessy’s has nine, apart from the Chorus: Euripides, Iphigenia, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Footsoldiers (1 and 2), Achilles, Calchas, Chrysothemis, and Electra, five of whom are new onstage with respect to the Greek play. By including the Greek author as a character in her version, Shaughnessy adds metatheatrical considerations about the plot and its ending, as well as about a playwright’s responsibility in the perpetuation of certain ideologies of power and gender. In this respect, the director of the production Max Hafler also interrogates his role and that of artists in general: what have they to offer in the face of these atrocities? (2016). By introducing Chrysothemis and Electra —Iphigenia’s sisters— Shaughnessy reinforces and adds complexity to the female points of view in the play and, apart from the motherdaughter bond, explores sibling ties but also rivalry. By introducing Calchas’ and the footsoldiers’ speeches, Shaughnessy gives them the opportunity to speak their own words, rather than merely have their intentions and motivations interestedly reported by other characters. As Mary-Kay Gamel argues in her analysis of Euripides’ play: Iphigenia at Aulis is full of references to characters who have a strong influence on the behaviour of onstage characters but never appear, among them Helen, Kalkhas, Odysseus, the army, and Artemis. Their nonappearance emphasizes their existence in the characters’ minds as verbal constructs, projections of the needs and fears of those who invoke them. In this play “offstage” is associated with words, the expected, tradition, the past, inevitability, “onstage” with actions, surprise, unpredictability, the present, the possibility of change. (1999: 323) Gamel’s assessment of offstage characters’ roles is applicable to Shaughnessy’s version, not only in what concerns the characters that the Irish version maintains offstage but also regarding the impact of presenting some of them onstage. However, Gamel’s appraisal of onstage action and onstage characters in Euripides’ play is of less pertinence to Shaughnessy’s script since, in the latter, events are often presented in the past tense, so the effects of surprise, unpredictability and possibility of change are considerably reduced. The Irish version seems to acknowledge that a Western audience is familiar with the play and that propelling the intrigue about the sacrifice of Iphigenia may be selfdefeating. The linear presentation of events in chronological order in Euripides’ play, with the concomitant sustained intrigue about the sacrifice of Iphigenia until the very end of the script, is destabilized in Shaughnessy’s arrangement of the script in two implicit broad parts: a first one about the already decided and impending sacrifice and a second one about its aftermath and the characters’ assessment of what has happened. The Irish version, which is not divided in either acts or scenes, reduces the intrigue of the traditional plot but adds more psychological intrigue about Iphigenia and her entourage, their motivations and their plight. Max Hafler refers to the structure of The Sacrificial Wind as “serpentine”, which in his opinion allows more dramatic possibilities than the conventional presentation in consecutive scenes (2016). This alteration of the linear plot recalls Anthony Roche’s observation about the circularity in Irish drama plots, which he connects with the post-colonial condition of Ireland and the lived experience of circumstances that have been “imposed” on the Irish (2009: 4). Similarly, the destiny imposed on Iphigenia very much curtails any forward movement. In her feminist analysis of Euripides’ play, Gamel detects implicit contradictions and inconsistencies in the patriarchal discourse of the Athenian play that Shaughnessy engages with in a more overt way in her version. There are a number of oppositions in the Greek play that Gamel deconstructs to show that these binaries are actually diffuse and intertwined: gods vs humans, family household vs the state, Greeks vs barbarians, free people vs slaves, and male vs female (1999: 312-316). The inconsistency of these oppositions is exposed in Shaughnessy’s script by questioning the various us-them divisions around notions of foreignness, marginalization, and exclusion that the Greek play presents us with. Shaughnessy’s The Sacrificial Wind begins with a speech by Euripides that raises the question about the author’s responsibility in the perpetuation of oppressive ideologies: “Will Iphigenia die yet again at the stroke of my pen? […] Either way she’s a slave to someone else’s will” (ll. 26, 31). However, the character of Euripides the playwright in The Sacrificial Wind is not in a position of power or control over meaning, as he manifests his doubts about the appropriate ending for his play: “no, let’s be honest, I can’t decide / which way I want it to end” (ll. 23-24). Presenting the playwright’s explicit hesitation about his choice of the ending in the Irish version is an aspect that differs substantially from the script of Euripides’ tragedy —although there has been an ongoing debate about the authorship of the ending of Iphigenia at Aulis (Gamel 1999: 327). It is also the aspect that allows for more unpredictability and surprise. To the interrogation of the binary opposition between author and protagonist and the alleged control of the former over the latter, we can add the questioning of the opposition between the free citizen and the slave in Athenian society. Although Iphigenia is a king’s daughter, she has no power to choose her destiny, her range of choice being limited to being sacrificed voluntarily or involuntarily (Gamel 1999: 315). The Greek play ends with Iphigenia accepting to die in her father’s sacrifice ritual, but the goddess Artemis whisks the young woman to her temple and replaces her body at the altar with that of a deer, thereby evincing the similar subjugation by patriarchy of woman and animal. The bearing of Euripides’ speech on the Irish context is expressed in various manners: “[…] the never-ending wars, / battles lost and battles won/ […] / tit for tat, the blame game” (ll. 1-2, 3). The similarity, on the one hand, to the unceasing Irish resistance to British colonization and its never-ending wars can easily come to the public’s mind. On the other hand, distinct expressions such as “tit for tat”, that we also find in Shaughnessy’s poems on the Northern Ireland Troubles in her collection Witness Trees (2011), equally establish connections between the Peloponnesian War that Euripides lived through and the sectarian violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland: “about the killers he sent to jail / and the man they made a killer of / to tit their tat” (32). For this reason, the irony —a device that Shaughnessy’s version especially relishes— in the Greek playwright’s statement is stunning: “[…] So I came north / to this place, in search of peace” (ll. 7-8). Although this may well refer to Euripides’ exile to Macedonia, the audience is likely to understand the reference by the character onstage to “this place” as Ireland. The probability that the audience will consider the North to be an inhospitable place for peace, due to its sectarian violence, makes Euripides sound misguided or misinformed, which adds to his fallibility as a character in the Irish version. Euripides complains that Greece is no country for old men: “I could see there was no space for an old poet” (l. 12) and this again narrows the distance between past and present, Greece and Ireland, as his sentence recalls the first line of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: “That is no country for old men […]” (1928). Yeats’s poem equates Ireland with old age and ephemerality, and Byzantium and Greek craftsmanship with youth and permanence, so the character of Euripides may be right in thinking that his destination place could be more welcoming of old age, considering that he sees his own death approaching: “Death doesn’t look so heroic at my age / when it’s breathing down your neck” (ll. 27-28). This consideration of impending death brings together Iphigenia and the character of the playwright, in spite of the fact that the former stands for innocent youth and the latter for confused and frustrated old age. In his opening speech the character of Euripides very succinctly presents the plot of the Greek tragedy: My mind keeps going back to Aulis, the raw beginnings of the Trojan Wars that Homer didn’t tell, when strongman Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to Artemis in return for wind to fill the sails of his fleet […]. (ll. 15-19) This summary of the plot clearly illustrates Shaughnessy’s expressed concern with the collateral damage and innocent victims of militarism, to which we may add a young woman’s absolute impotence in the face of religious and patriarchal designs. Once again, we are confronted by the fact that the us-them division is often drawn along gender lines within the same community: that of free humans from the same family and the same nation. In another metatheatrical clue, the character of Euripides refers to a myth ending in which Artemis saves Iphigenia from the sacrifice and makes her a priestess at the goddess’s temple, a situation that the real Greek playwright explored in his play Iphigenia among the Taurians in the fifth century BCE and that Lorna Shaughnessy alludes to at the end of her version. Whatever ending the fictional playwright resorts to is unsatisfactory, as he openly denounces the mythical appropriation of the young woman by the collusion of patriarchal and religious designs: “Is there a right ending for a story like this? / Either way she’s a slave to someone else’s will, / a young girl, barely visible in the bigger schemes / dreamed up by gods and men” (ll. 30-33). This complicity of patriarchal and religious institutions against women’s physical integrity and freedom will not pass unnoticed to an Irish audience familiar with the investigation of child abuse first published in 2009, known as The Ryan Report (2021), and the investigation around Mother and Baby Homes which began in 2015 and examined evidence of illegal traffic of unmarried mothers’ babies (Mother and Baby Homes 2021). The Chorus is the element of Greek plays that may seem as the most alien to contemporary drama and which, for this reason, is sometimes removed in modern adaptations (Meinhold 2022: 136). Shaughnessy’s version maintains the Chorus and divides it into 3 different voices who describe the expectant fleet anxious for war, criticize the causes of the war and anticipate the devastating consequences of Iphigenia’s sacrifice in a very apt blending of past, present and future events. Rather than the initially excited Chorus voices, ignorant of the reality of war, who praise the feats of the Greek army against the barbarians in the Greek tragedy (Gamel 1999: 318), The Sacrificial Wind presents a very censorious Chorus that, rather than speak for the Athenian society of the fifth century BCE, sounds like the present-day voice of our conscience: “The vanity of a cuckolded husband / demands the public stage of war / the Greeks will pursue Helen / to persuade the world of Menelaus’ outrage” (ll. 41-44). As the consequence of male sexual jealousy and vanity, and the claim of a man on a woman’s body and mind, Iphigenia will be sacrificed, and the Trojan Wars will ensue. The Chorus in Shaughnessy’s version is aware of and vocal about the fallout of this military campaign for both Greek and Trojan people: “If we thought for an instant her death would save / the life of any young Greek man / or save one Trojan woman from rape and slavery / it would bring some comfort” (ll. 55-58). The opposition between us-Greeks and them-Trojans eventually founders, as the Chorus foresees from the start of the play that both will lose in the bloodshed. The above intervention of the Chorus makes the action move forward very rapidly and, instead of Agamemnon’s and Menelaus’ disputes and the former’s tricks to deceive his wife and daughter as in Euripides’ play, The Sacrificial Wind accelerates the plot and presents Iphigenia expressing, in the third speech of the play already, her fear and astonishment at her father’s decision to sacrifice her. At this stage she is still the child that holds on to family ties and is ignorant of the national alibis wielded to proceed to her sacrifice. Gamel points out the inconsistency in the construction of the protagonist in the Greek play: the fearful daughter that opposes her father’s design vs. the Greek citizen that eventually accepts to die for her country (1999: 309). Such inconsistency corresponds to two incompatible roles and spheres that the protagonist embodies in the Greek play: that of private life, which privileges family bonds and emotions and is usually feminine, vs. that of masculine public life in which Iphigenia ardently gauges and endorses the nation’s interests very much like an Athenian man would be expected to do (Gamel 1999: 316). It is this inconsistency that makes Clytemnestra, in her dramatic monologue of The Sacrificial Wind, ask Iphigenia to explain the reasons for her change, as she urges her daughter to keep on resisting the Greek army’s pressure: “What made you change course from the fight / to survive to this listless resignation” (ll. 157-158). Shaughnessy’s version, then, delves into the protagonist’s development and presents, in the mother’s words, a resigned rather than a willing victim. Already in her first speech in Shaughnessy’s version, though not in Euripides’ play, Iphigenia shows that she has interiorized some values of Athenian society when she proposes to have a slave girl sacrificed in her place. Although her conscience tells her that this segregation between free Greek people and subjugated foreign slaves is morally wrong, she justifies her idea by recourse to her uncontrollable fear: “Am I ashamed? No. / Fear is stronger than shame” (ll. 109-110). Woman, slave, and also the animal that replaces Iphigenia during the sacrifice in the contested ending of Euripides’ play are considered as propitiatory offerings to the gods, so the human vs. animal and the free person vs. slave binaries do not apply to women in Athenian society, since they are unreservedly aligned with slaves and animals. Although Iphigenia would like to think that there is a difference between herself and a slave, she will resignedly accept to die for the society that enacts their sameness. Slaves and barbarians are starkly contrasted with civilized Greeks in the Greek play, but this us-them binary fails again when we see that Athenian civilization requires the murder of an innocent girl, while the barbarian, the slave, is the one who summons the courage to denounce Agamemnon’s plan to his wife Clytemnestra (Gamel 1999: 314). Shaughnessy’s version gives the soldiers the opportunity to present their point of view instead of having others interestedly speaking for them, as in Euripides’ play. Two soldiers take turns in their accusations against Agamemnon and Calchas, and defend themselves from the allegation that, in their desperate yearning for war, they might end up killing the Greeks themselves: “As if we couldn’t tell friend from foe” (l. 212). The alliteration of the initial fricative consonant actually brings together the two notions that the soldiers would like to maintain as opposites. It is tempting to believe the soldiers in their self-defence when they are blamed, but the play in fact disproves the ability to distinguish friend from foe. Achilles, for instance, blames Agamemnon for his scheming and the soldiers for their rapacity. Eventually, however, the alleged friend turns to weakkneed foe and admits his share of blame in Iphigenia’s sacrifice: “That was the first time in my life I’d felt it. Shame” (l. 257). A character without speech in the Greek play is the priest Calchas. Shaughnessy’s version, however, lets him present his point of view. Calchas blames Agamemnon for choosing fame over family, and Odysseus for his duplicitous character, as the latter plotted the most convenient course of events to promote his career as a warrior without taking any responsibility in Iphigenia’s sacrifice. Interestingly, in their respective selfdefence by blaming one another, the Greek characters fall prey to internal division and, for a moment, seem to forget the external and more facile enemy to pinpoint: the barbarian. Calchas does defend the goddess Artemis, as is to be expected from a priest, by saying she gave Agamemnon a choice and discards her responsibility in the Trojan Wars: “The gods are not in the business / of telling men to go to war — / they don’t need any encouragement for that” (ll. 266-268), an observation that is also highly pertinent to our bellicose present times. In about the middle of Shaughnessy’s version, Iphigenia, fearful though resigned, goes to the altar but, once there, she is taken by the goddess and her body is replaced by that of a deer. This moment of the plot corresponds to the end of the Greek play, but The Sacrificial Wind proceeds to present anew other points of view regarding the devastating consequences of the attempted sacrifice. The most compelling characters in this second part, because of their unexpectedness, the poignancy of their situation and the frankness of their expression, are Iphigenia’s sisters: Chrysothemis and Electra. The former candidly expresses, in a present-day colloquial register that approaches her to the modern audience, her jealousy and envy of her sister’s many virtues and their parents’ preference for the latter: “She was so bloody good it got on my nerves” (l. 413). Electra, on her part, focuses on their mother’s traumatized behaviour and anticipates further elaborations of the myth that have Clytemnestra plot with Aegisthus —“… a kinsman, one of us / we thought…” (emphasis added, ll. 470-471) the murder of Agamemnon. Iphigenia’s father is granted the opportunity to explain his actions, and unconvincingly claims that he wanted to save Greece from Trojans, the external enemy: “anything to keep the barbarian at bay” (l. 550). As for Iphigenia, now leading the life of an exile in Tauris, she must oversee sacrificial rites that she abhors in her role of Artemis’s priestess. She misses home, but the ghostly home she conjures is empty of people: “no family, no servants, no friends” (l. 567), in an effort to suppress the harrowing emotions that human ties arouse. Concluding remarks The Sacrificial Wind brings together a distant past and culture, those of Athenian society in the fifth century BCE, and a present-day Irish audience. Through clues that signal the relevance of the former to the latter, Shaughnessy disputes the binary opposition of us vs. them as one constituted by national difference and temporal distance, and conversely highlights the unremitting marginalization and subjugation of women within patriarchal societies of all times. The recourse to classical Greek drama allows Irish theatre to avoid the ethnocentric focus of some of its popular plays and opens national culture to a broader European tradition. The relative strangeness or foreignness of Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis allows the modern audience to defamiliarize the present and consider it from new angles. However, Shaughnessy does not merely adapt a classical play, but incisively revisits the moral dilemmas exposed in Euripides’ script, especially in what concerns patriarchal configurations of gender and nation, and stresses the collateral damage caused by militarist ambitions. As if in an implicit critique of the silencing of women on an Irish stage that continues to suppress women playwrights’ work, Shaughnessy not only gives prominence to women’s speeches —even to female characters that do not feature in the Greek play, thereby extending the number of affected victims— but also creates male characters that acknowledge their sundry complicities in the subjection of women. I.4.2. “On that difference is life grounded”: Luz Pozo Garza’s Medea en Corinto Women Playwrights vis-à-vis Galician Theatre In 2010, Roberto Pascual Rodríguez published an essay on contemporary Galician playwrights the title of which provides an alarming diagnosis of the anomalous state of Galician drama in what concerns gender balance: “On the Lamentable Effect of Criticism on the Irregular Situation of Galician Drama Written by Women”. Apart from expressing the conviction that literary criticism has been highly ineffective in the visibilization of women playwrights (ibid. 181), Pascual Rodríguez’s essay scrutinizes the participation of women in Galician theatre in the period 1981-2010 and reaches some disturbing conclusions. On the one hand, the author affirms that there is a situation of inequality and marginality in what concerns women creators in Galician dramatic literature and theatre (ibid. 181). However, he finds that the same has not been the case in other Iberian cultural systems, such as the Spanish-language one, in which women theatre directors and playwrights have received the attention of academic criticism, their work has been staged, shown in festivals, and has been awarded prizes, while specific competitions promoting women directors’ work have been designed by cultural institutions. One troubling phenomenon singled out by Pascual Rodríguez is that, after an initial stimulus towards the normalization of theatre in Galician in the 1970s, more women than men abandoned dramatic writing (ibid. 182). Feminist theory and criticism, he argues, certainly motivated women to participate in all cultural spheres, and writers such as María Xosé Queizán and Xohana Torres made definite contributions to the genre of drama and, in particular, to the configuration of female protagonists who questioned traditional feminine roles (ibid. 183). Myths had to be rewritten —among them, classical Greek ones— and characters and conflicts had to be refashioned in response to contemporary “political, aesthetic, social and economic circumstances” (ibid. 183). Due recognition is also given to women playwrights such as Ánxeles Cuña, Ana Vallés, and Cristina Domínguez, who managed to stage their work with their own companies. Other women created theatre companies such as Salmántiga, Malbarate, Teatro da lúa, although they had to face the obstacle of staging existing plays in which female characters are often subsidiary to strong male roles that drive the action (ibid. 183). Pascual Rodríguez refers to statistics from the Catálogo de dramaturgos galegos 1973-2004 [Catalogue of Galician Playwrights] showing that only twenty-nine per-cent of playwrights were women at that time, although writing for children’s theatre was more balanced. The technical side of theatre was also predominantly in male hands (ibid. 184- 185). A similar discrimination against women was to be noticed in the Revista Galega de Teatro, which out of sixty texts, featured only eleven by women, three of which were by Galician women playwrights —Dorotea Bárcena, Luísa Villalta and Vanesa Sotelo—and the remaining eight were translations of non-Galician women authors (ibid.: 185). In this respect, the translation of international women playwrights’ work, undertaken by the Francisco Pillado Mayor Library and Archive at the University of A Coruña, is seen by Pascual Rodríguez as “crucial in adding new works marked by gender awareness to the textual corpus of Galician dramaturgy” (ibid. 184). Anthologies of Galician theatre of the time similarly featured few women dramatists: María Xosé Queizán, Luísa Villalta and Inma António Souto among them (ibid. 186). The selection brought together by Manuel Lourenzo and Francisco Pillado Mayor in 1982, for instance, only included three women writers among a total of forty-six playwrights: the sisters Dora and Pura Vázquez Iglesias and Xohana Torres. Luz Pozo Garza’s Medea en Corinto: Revisiting Greek Myth It was in this dismal theatrical context that, in 2002, Luz Pozo Garza had her Medea en Corinto [Medea in Corinth] first published in the collective volume Medeas. Versiones de un mito desde Grecia hasta hoy (López & Pociña 2002: 1177-1227) and the following year, 2003, it appeared as an independent book in a bilingual edition —Galician / Spanish— produced by Andrés Pociña and Aurora López. In their introduction to the 2003 edition, the editors never use the term “play” to refer to Pozo Garza’s piece and present it as a lyrical poem in dialogue form (2003: 9). The close collaboration between the author and the editors suggests that it was Pozo Garza’s will to present her version of the Medea myth as a poem but, I would like to argue, reticence possibly due to her limited experience in a genre that had proved to be so inhospitable to women writers might be among the reasons that led the writer to opt for the category of poetry rather than that of drama as the genre that frames her text. Although it is a long poem —five hundred and seventy-four lines— it may have seemed short for a full-length play, but its dialogue form, the introduction of decisive elements of classical theatre such as the Chorus, and the range of characters including Medea, the nursemaid, Jason and people’s voices, together with the extremely influential antecedent theatrical texts by Euripides and Seneca, all suggest that it can be regarded as a play as well, thereby presenting a challenge to debatable genre boundaries, as was often the case in late twentieth-century Galician literature authored by women (González Fernández 2005: 222). In addition to the dialogue form —although not consistently throughout all the text, the characters, including occasionally the Chorus, use the second-person pronoun to address each other—, the absence of an explicit lyrical I distinct from the characters also suggests that this text can be read as a dramatic poem. Furthermore, the range of characters, together with their imposing stance and classical eloquence, as well as the abundant visual imagery, use of deictics, and references to specific props and locality, encourage readers to conjure a performed rendering of those verses onstage. A reverse statement, by Ariane Mnouchkine and her company Théâtre du Soleil, about the poetic quality of drama is also applicable to Pozo Garza’s Medea en Corinto: “Le théâtre n’est théâtre que s’il est poésie” [theatre is not theatre if it is not poetry] (my translation, 2021: 41). In their enlightening introduction to the 2003 edition of Medea en Corinto, Pociña and López present Luz Pozo Garza’s expressed reservations in the project of writing this work: the anxiety of dealing with the character of a mother who kills her children, to the extent that the writer considered the possibility of a text that would finish before their murder, an “inconclusive” Medea (10). However, the urge to fully understand and explain the character of Medea led the author to tackle the final vengeance “porque ademais de bruxa, ademais de criminal, ademais de matricida, Medea era unha muller trasterrada, enganada, ferida, sobre todo, inmensamente namorada” [because besides being a witch, a murderer, a filicide, Medea was a dislocated woman, deceived, wounded, above all, immensely in love] (Pociña & López 2002: 10). It is Medea’s feeling of dislocation as she delves into her condition of exile and foreigner, together with the temporal, cultural and geographical distance of the Greek myth from Galician culture in the third millennium that make Medea en Corinto especially relevant to the focus of this book on discourses on foreignness. Pociña and López also provide, in their introduction, an account of those other Medeas featuring in Galician literature before the publication of Luz Pozo Garza’s version (2003: 11-13) —curiously the seven of them published after 1980, which is in accordance with the stimulus afforded to Galician culture by the 1981 Estatuto de Autonomía de Galicia [Statute of Autonomy of Galicia]. These previous Galician versions of the myth of Medea were rendered onstage, in short fiction and in poetry, but they were all male-authored. Therefore, the need to have the character of Medea construed by a woman writer was pressing because, as the playwright Ánxeles Cuña Bóveda has argued, female stereotypes had to be deconstructed, commonplaces demystified, and new myths built in order to “alter structures of domination and submission” (2010: 153). Such pending tasks can and must be implemented by male writers too, of course, but the female point of view of women’s experience must not be suppressed. María Xosé Queizán quotes Andrés Pociña’s Medea in Camariñas to stress the need for female renderings of the myth: “Unha muller que contase a miña historia seguro que non diría semellantes cousas de min” [A woman telling my story would certainly not say such things about me] (2003: 55). In their necessarily brief survey of Luz Pozo’s literary career, Pociña and López broadly situate the writer in the context of Galician literary culture and provide information about those essential personal experiences with an impact on the writer’s development. One aspect that will not pass unnoticed to new readers of Luz Pozo Garza’s work is her dual language literary production with a first period of writing in Castilian Spanish —as evidenced in the publication of her poetry collection Ánfora in 1949— and, after the advent of democracy in 1975 with the subsequent restitution of the Galician language’s official status, her writing in Galician. This dual language tradition entails challenges to notions of ethnicity, home and belonging that must be considered in their historical, political and social context, and which destabilize the us-them division and other concomitant exclusions that a rigorous understanding of the philological criterion applied in the definition of Galician literature might encompass (Miguélez-Carballeira 2010: 124). One expects that a rewriting of a classical myth may explore the relevance of that myth to the writer’s contemporary society. Indeed, in present-day uses of a past myth one detects two seemingly contrary forces: one that brings in all the strangeness of a past and distant culture, and another that attempts to establish connections between the source and the target cultures. The strangeness of the past myth will not only put our receptiveness to the test but may also become a helpful tool in the defamiliarization of conflicts that we experience daily but the understanding of which has become hackneyed. Strangeness impels us to consider a particular situation from a new angle and may help us in finding alternative ways of coping with a conflict. This may have been Luz Pozo Garza’s case, when she initially felt alienated from a myth about a mother who kills her own children out of vengeance on their father, the man who betrayed her love. However, the effort to understand the complexity of Medea and to overcome that early rejection allowed the writer to delve into circumstances, such as Medea’s foreignness, her pain on being II. Glocal Identities in Translation In spite of the globalizing tendencies that promote English as a lingua franca, the vernacular languages of various European regions have devised a series of strategies, in order to survive and become visible, which include the strengthening of cultural bonds with other minoritized languages and translation projects among them, with or without the mediation of English. The present chapter analyses a number of translations of Irish and Galician poetry by paying attention to their construction of glocal identities, as the local is transferred to a foreign language and culture. Place will be an important notion, since Ireland and Galicia have often been construed as sharing, among other characteristics, similar geographical and landscape features. Although a good number of the examples to be discussed evince the mutual recognition of place, attention needs to be paid to various signals of resistance to such recognition. The anthology To the Winds Our Sails. Irish Writers Translate Galician Poetry (O’Donnell & Palacios 2010) gathers the poems of ten Galician women writers and their respective translations, into English and Irish, by a number of Irish poets. With these translations, Irish writers wish to reciprocate the longstanding interest that Galicia has had in Ireland as well as to contribute to the visibilization of minoritized vernaculars and women writers’ work. In her translation of María Lado’s poem “tres” / “three” for this anthology (O’Donnell & Palacios 2010: 138-139), the Irish poet Máighréad Medbh chose to leave one word in Galician, without translation, and to explain its meaning in a footnote. Lado’s poem presents the struggles of the inhabitants of a small island that is ferociously pounded by an ocean where ships wreck and lose their cargo. This seascape immediately conjures a notorious stretch of the Galician coast known as Costa da Morte [Coast of Death],17 a name that is commonly associated with the numerous shipwrecks in this area but that may also derive from the fact that the sun sets on the western coast of Galicia. Costa da Morte is also Lado’s home locality in Galicia and the place where she initiated her literary career alongside a group of poets called Batallón Literario da Costa da Morte [Literary Battalion of Costa da Morte]. The word that Máighréad Medbh chose not to translate was “percebes” and her explanation of the term in her footnote was “‛Percebes’ are gooseneck barnacles, a delicacy in Galicia” (ibid. 139). Readers’ attention will most likely be drawn to the robust presence of that non-translated word, which is additionally typed in bold both in the original and in the translated versions: “e é por iso que os percebes enganan con voces de serea” / “and percebes sing them like sirens” (ibid.: 138-139). The translated line gains in terseness both with its omission of the initial clause and its causal phrase —and it is because of this that […]— as well as with the compression of the verb phrase “enganan con voces de serea” —literally: they deceive with siren voices— into Medbh’s recreation “sing them like sirens”, as the allusion to The Odyssey is clear and needs no further particulars. Steven Vertovec has argued that even “translocal understandings” are “anchored in places, with a variety of legal, political and cultural ramifications, not only for practices and meanings, but for the places as well” (2009: 12). This chapter will conceive 17 In this chapter, the translations in square brackets are mine, while those in quotation marks are by each respective poet here discussed. translation as a kind of “translocal understanding” and will examine both the way translations remain anchored to a place and the effects that derive from this rootedness. Lado’s poem, though highly symbolic and metaliterary, abounds also in precise economic and environmental allusions alongside their concomitant social and cultural practices. The name of the island in the poem is “novembro” / “november”, a reference to the month when the oil-tanker Prestige sank off the Galician coast in 2002, contaminated the coast with its oil spillage and severely damaged the fishing-based economy. This environmental catastrophe had political, social and cultural consequences, since Galician writers were often at the head of social mobilizations against the political mismanagement of the crisis which led, in part, to the defeat of the conservative party then in power in the following Spanish (2004) and Galician (2005) parliamentary elections. The oil spillage also became the stimulus for numerous writers to form networks whose activities and projects had artistic and organizational consequences which went beyond the denunciation of the spillage. Another socio-economic feature of the place depicted in the poem is inscribed in the word “percebes”, which alludes both to this seafood, which has become a very expensive delicacy in Spain, and to the dangerous harvesting practice it requires because, as the poem explains, the best gooseneck barnacles hide in deep grottoes beaten by strong waves. It is for this reason that María Lado speaks in her poem of deceitful and tempting barnacles, of the blind greed of men and of the ocean that swallows the fishermen now and then. Lado’s poem clearly illustrates Vertovec’s notion of the sundry social “ramifications” generated by a particular place. This chapter aims to analyse the anchorage of literature in place and the effects of those social “ramifications” on translation. One of the editors’ tasks in putting together the collection To the Winds Our Sails consisted in explaining all these cultural specificities of Galicia to the Irish writers who participated with their translations because, in spite of the common Atlantic Ocean shared by Ireland and Galicia —an ocean that can be envisaged as a “translocality” that has given rise through centuries to important transnational exchanges between both communities — a number of economic and cultural practices remain alien to each other. It is this strangeness that the word “percebes” patently manifests and that Máighréad Medbh, clear-sightedly, maintained in her English version by not translating it. When asked about the reasons that led her to keep the Galician word in her English version, Medbh mentioned her concern for formal aspects such as typography, “all those rounded letters” (2012), and phonetics, “to reproduce as much of the Galician sound as I could” (ibid.), but she was also intent on conveying the social “aspects of heroism and desperation” (ibid.) entailed by the harvesting of barnacles: “Retaining their own given name, the percebes become active personalities with all the strength of their native environment. I've allowed them to stay steady and unchanged on their cliffs, mysterious and powerful” (ibid.). Medbh’s strategy is in line with Lawrence Venuti’s admonition that translation should not enact “a labor of acculturation which domesticates the foreign text” (1992: 5). The Irish poet Michael O’Loughlin, in his back cover commentary on the anthology, highlights the bonds between Galicia and Ireland but repeatedly qualifies these ties by signalling the strangeness that persists in these communities’ reciprocal glance: “Galicia has long been seen as our distant, neglected overseas cousin” (2010), “[her poetry is] strangely familiar” (ibid.). The family trope that binds both communities is counterbalanced by the relative otherness that Galicia still embodies for Ireland. Quite coincidentally, O’Loughlin illustrates, with a reference to María Lado’s poem, his belief in the capacity of translation to negotiate these “clashing tides” between both communities. It is for this reason that this particular example of a translation practice has started this reflection on glocal identities in translation, transnational ties and the tensions between global forces and local claims. “The common language of Europe is translation”, maintains the Italian philosopher Giacomo Marramao (2011), who thus acknowledges the persistence of diversity and difference in the face of the cultural homogenization brought about by globalizing economic and political practices. The European Union recognizes, as official languages of the supranational institution, the state languages of the various member countries — though not other official vernaculars spoken in smaller areas of these same countries, as is the case with Galician. The Union also recommends the learning of two other European languages but does not specify which ones. The fact that there is no official common language for all the member countries of the Union leads, therefore, to the necessity of translation. Since this is seen by many as a problem of inter-communicability, English is, in practice, the most common second language used in Europe and is included as an obligatory subject in the school curriculum of many countries (Bastardas i Boada 2007: 116). There is the risk, however, that some speakers may perceive this major position of English as overbearing, which is the reason why writers of minoritized languages have brought forward a variety of responses to this conflict. The Irish poet Biddy Jenkinson, for instance, has refused to have her Irish-language poetry translated into English, although she accepts to have it translated into other foreign languages such as French. Other Irish-language poets, however, often produce dual-language editions of their writings. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has published bilingual collections in which other English-language writers recreate, in English, her Gaelic poems, while Celia de Fréine usually makes her own translations of her Irish-language poetry into English. Practices such as de Freine’s entail a special interrogation of the common dichotomy original / translation, since both texts are of the same authorship and both appear published simultaneously in the same collection, so it is reasonable to expect that the writer has polished both versions concurrently by switching from one to another. In cases like this one, the question may even arise as to which version was conceived first, whether the Irish or the English one. One of Galicia’s best-known writers, Manuel Rivas, whose work has been translated into numerous international languages, usually has his work published first in Galician and, subsequently, in Castilian Spanish. His poetry collection A desaparición da neve (2009), however, was first published in a multilingual edition which included the original Galician version alongside the Catalan, Basque and Castilian translations. The reasons he adduced for this multilingual format were, in the literary critic and poet Martín Veiga’s words, “an attempt to remove the ongoing social and political emphasis laid on linguistic conflict and to generate a greater recognition of the richness of linguistic plurality as a wealth that should be treasured” (2012: 10). Other writers like to experiment with various possible combinations of major and minoritized languages. The Galician poet María do Cebreiro, for instance, has delved into her occasional use of English, French and Spanish titles for her Galician-language poems: “I believe in an idea of language that is constantly contaminated by other languages, voices, sounds. […] I am very much drawn to the visual force of that clash between a hegemonic language and a language such as Galician, only spoken in that tiny corner in Spain” (2008: 11). The poet thus turns the conflict that results from the power imbalance between languages into a creative strategy of fertile miscegenation. Something similar happens with the poetry by Lois Pereiro, a writer whose familiarity with and fondness for other European languages and literatures has led him to embed numerous foreign expressions and quotations in his Galician-language texts: “Non podo eludir a tentación de convertir a noite en night ou Nacht” [I cannot avoid the temptation of turning noite into night or Nacht] (apud Rivas 1985: 8). There is an incontrovertible interest in putting the extraordinary power of dissemination of an international language such as English at the service of minoritized languages in dual-language editions where the geographically and demographically restricted vernacular language is accompanied by the English translation (Palacios 2012a: 7-8). These editions need to be bilingual so as to avoid the further suppression of the minoritized language by concealing it and thus rendering it irrelevant. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a series of cultural associations in Ireland were concerned about the dramatic loss of Irish-language speakers. A number of intellectuals with very diverse agendas, such as James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson first and, afterwards, Lady Gregory and Patrick Pearse, devotedly engaged in the translation and / or recreation in English of popular oral culture with the objective of saving this cultural patrimony from oblivion (Kinsella 1995: 53, 58, 66, 72). The irony was, however, that much of this folk wisdom could only survive in English and that the linguistic policies implemented did not manage to abate the loss of speakers of Gaelic. Therefore, one needs to be aware of the risk of the bear hug when a world language embraces a minoritized one. Translation should be, in this case, a site where the imbalance in the power relations of languages can be renegotiated in fairer terms. The possibility of bilingual editions is limited, however, by budget restrictions, and some genres seem more hospitable to this dual-language practice than others. It is not uncommon to find bilingual poetry collections, especially when they consist of the conventional one-page poem, but it is less common to find full-fledged novels in this bilingual format. The rapid spread of the English language is a manifestation of present-day globalizing forces, but globalization arouses a deep anxiety in people. In Ireland —“one of the most globalized countries in the world” in Bob Holton’s words (2008)— some writers, such as Paula Meehan, see globalization as a modern version of imperialism that only serves the interests of First-World nations (Morales Ladrón, and Elices Agudo 2011: 6). Deirdre Madden has also avowed her suspicion of globalization, as she does not see that world-wide travel or telecommunications have really made people empathize with one another: “My loyalties would always be with the local”, she affirms (Morales Ladrón 2011: 249). Curiously enough, it is not just disempowered stateless nations that feel menaced by globalization but also strong nation states, as they perceive a growing loss of autonomy —nation states are, however, important agents of globalization, as they liberalize and deregulate the market, privatize public services and bring down borders (Castells 2003: 9-10, 15). The local has also had its share of attacks when associated with derogatory terms like parochial or provincial. Mary O’Donnell has been highly critical of those discourses of inferiorization that dismiss a certain literary product by branding it as local (González Arias 2011: 266). She has also expressed her critique of value-judgements, within the Irish literary system, that fetishize terms such as “international” or “European”, and she has interrogated the frequent capitulation of Irish culture to English criteria of value (2007: 159; 2010a: 201). There is a general penchant to oppose the global to the local as if they were two incompatible notions. However, definitions of the term “globalization” usually bring them together: “Globalization is the process whereby individual lives and local communities are affected by economic and cultural forces that operate world-wide” (Ashcroft & Griffiths & Tiffin 2007: 100). Therefore, the phenomenon of globalization can only be assessed through its effect on the local. It is probably the failure of the term “globalization” to fully convey its relationship with the local that has stimulated the use of the term “glocal”, a word that originated in Japanese entrepreneurship but which soon proliferated in sociology in the 1990s (Bastardas i Boada 2007: 29). It would be interesting to analyse, however, the converse case: the extent to which the local can transform the global either through strategies of resistance or by providing emergent and alternative discourses. Translation practices that renegotiate power relations (globallocal, male-female, North-South, etc.) could produce such alternative discourses. One should all the same take heed of Gayatri Spivak’s warning about “the discourse of cultural specificity and difference, packaged for transnational consumption” (1989: 276). The danger in this case is to provide a light version of foreignness that can travel well and be digestible in an international context. This could lead to a reinforcement of stereotypes or identity signs that may be easily understood by readers worldwide. Editors, publishers and translators of translated literature have a delicate role as they police what is or is not appropriate for foreign consumption. When I edited the anthology Pluriversos. Seis poetas irlandesas de hoxe (Palacios 2003), I was interested in the relevance of contemporary Irish writing to the Galician literary system and society: the emergence of women writers, women’s reappropriation of their bodies, the critique of Catholic and Biblical discourses on femininity, the situation of vernacular languages, the hybridity of identities which results from processes of colonization, etc. Relevance, however, is not sameness, although it entails a sort of family resemblance and the possibility of learning from each other. Dialogue is more likely to thrive in the meeting point of relatively, rather than radically, different actors. In Pluriversos, the strangeness of the Gaelic versions of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems was reinforced by the absence of an English translation that might provide some mediation for Galician readers acquainted with the English language but not with the less familiar Irish one. As I edited the anthology Forked Tongues. Galician, Basque and Catalan Women’s Poetry in Translations by Irish Writers (Palacios 2012b), the Galician poet Lupe Gómez Arto suggested, upon my consultation, I include some texts from her recent book Diálogos Imposíbeis [Impossible Dialogues] (2010). These are texts which abound in references to local places and people unknown to a foreign reader, so I had to weigh which was the proper amount of specificity I should include in my selection. The criteria I followed for my decision were related to the genre of the texts, the overall degree of foreignness of the anthology and the expected reader. The poems from Diálogos Imposíbeis I included in the anthology contain references to one Galician and one Spanish writer, a local university professor, a café in the town where the poet resides, one local folk music instrument, local porcelain, etc. Some of these culturally-specific allusions required clarifying notes, but the genre of poetry is particularly attentive to the formal layout of the lines on the page, and cramming the page with footnotes or numbers for endnotes did not seem to be the right solution. I had to decide which allusions might be totally strange to a foreign reader and then I included an appendix with notes at the end of the anthology. I only used notes for what I deemed were local, not international, references, so I explained, for instance, who Xohana Torres was, but not Wim Wenders. I also considered which of those allusions might only have Galician- or Spanish-language entries on the internet and would be, therefore, little known to the common Englishlanguage reader. I inserted, however, no numbers for those notes on the texts and trusted the reader would notice, on the initial Contents page, that there was a final section with notes. The poems by Gómez Arto that I selected seemed to have fewer local references than other texts in her collection, and I chose them because, overall, the anthology Forked Tongues already had a high degree of strangeness for an English-language reader with its original versions of Galician, Basque and Catalan poetry. The anthology was published by Shearsman, an English publisher, and I therefore had an English-language audience in mind. One source of anxiety concerning globalization is that the world should become “a single place” (Ashcroft & Griffiths & Tiffin 2007: 100). Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson maintain that “a transnational public sphere has certainly rendered any strictly bounded sense of community or locality obsolete” (1992: 9). Indeed, Arjun Appadurai has argued that electronic mediation has produced virtual neighbourhoods which have led to a disjuncture between territory and individual or collective subjectivity (1995: 213). These new circumstances have not gone unnoticed to writers, who relish in the contrast between old and new social networks. Such is the case of the Irish poet Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, who, in her poem “Bare Necessity”, contrasts the isolation of a woman emigrant in the early twentieth century with her descendants’ facilities for travel and communication: “Throwing life-lines of voice / Across oceans” (1993: 113). As we see in the phrase “life-lines of voice”, telecommunications have also had their impact on poetic tropes. Similarly, the Galician poet María do Cebreiro has recharged the metaphorical import of the word “navegar” [navigate / sail] in her response to Xohana Torres’s rewriting of the Penelope myth in The Odyssey. If Torres makes her Penelope exclaim that she also wants to take to sea: “EU TAMÉN NAVEGAR” [I too sail] (2004: 251), María do Cebreiro makes her poetic persona surf the World Wide Web: “EU TAMÉN NAVEGAR / […] / Na rede a miña casa é o alfabeto” [I too sail/surf too … On the web my home is the alphabet] (2005: 104). Although Appadurai believes that new technologies increase “difficulties of relating to, or indeed producing, ‘locality’” (1995: 213), Vertovec maintains that “there have emerged, instead, new ‘translocalities’” (2009: 12). The rapid increase in transnational connections between social groups in recent times is, in Vertovec’s view, “a key manifestation of globalization” (2009, 2). Translocalities and transnational connections, however, are not an exclusive manifestation of modern processes of globalization. As Vertovec reminds us, social and cultural practices derived from particular localities “have always been transferred and regrounded” (2009: 12). A translocality that has traditionally connected Galicia and Ireland is, for instance, the Atlantic Ocean. Galician nationalism has had recourse to this common space to establish mythical, political and cultural ties with Ireland. This proves that nationalism is not necessarily an essentialist and isolationist project, as it produces a series of discourses of kinship with other nations which are perceived as sharing similar social circumstances. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, Galician intellectuals have elaborated on the alleged Celtic brotherhood that bonds Galicia and Ireland by circulating discourses from the medieval manuscript Lebor Gabála Éren [Book of Invasions of Ireland] on the mythical common founders of Ireland and Galicia: the Sons of Mil (Lamas 2012: 109-110, 121-123). Decades later, in the 1920s and 30s, the group of Galician intellectuals called Xeración Nós [Generation Ourselves] continued to forge the ties between both nations on the basis of a common Volksgeist nourished by their common geographical location on the Atlantic (Risco 1921). Of special interest for this article is their translation work, as they rendered the poetry and drama of W.B. Yeats into Galician (Vilar Ponte 1921) and provided a pioneer translation of substantial fragments of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1926 (Otero Pedrayo 1926). The main reasons for their choice of writers were their common interest in Celtic mythology, the struggle for national sovereignty, the deep rootedness of Catholicism in Ireland and Galicia, and the international repute of these two Irish writers. What remains to be analysed, however, is the little attention they paid to Gaelic-language writers since, by the 1920s, Gaelic culture was spreading internationally, although mainly through its English-language practitioners. The apex of modernist literature that W.B. Yeats and James Joyce stood for and that Galician intellectuals desired to engage with was written in English (Caneda Cabrera 2009). In particular, we find an interest in Ireland on the part of certain Galician intellectuals who saw themselves as sharing common concerns such as geographic situation, foundational myths, ethnic background, national awareness in the face of colonization, religious beliefs and linguistic conflict. The translation and recreation of Irish literature by Xeración Nós was, however, a unilateral effort, with no correspondence on the part of Irish writers in the early decades of the twentieth century. Nowadays, we might be tempted to believe that nationalism has no place and no future in a globalized world, but as Will Kymlicka and Christine Straehle have argued, “secession remains a live issue” within Western democracies, precisely because building the nation-state has often entailed “nation-destroying” (1999: 76). Inventing the nationstate has required forgetting local differences, but memory is stubborn and not easily wiped out. Furthermore, the anxieties provoked by globalization about the homogenization of the world reignite nationalist claims and, vice versa, the fear of isolationism fosters transnational practices and institutions. Rather than opposites, globalization and nationalism seem to stimulate each other. At any rate, globalization seems to pose no risk of obliteration of the local at present because, as Tom Inglis maintains: “The more sameness, the greater need for individual, local and national cultural differences to be created and maintained” (2008: 259). Translation has a key role to play at this stage in the dissemination of the local through transnational projects that involve both stateless nations and nation-states. Such translational / transnational initiatives produce emergent discourses which, as Michael Cronin has suggested, help us conceive of place in a more dynamic and politically sophisticated fashion: […] in the investigation of the links between culture, place and language [...] it will be possible to develop a reading of, for example, non-metropolitan experience which is not condemned to a wistful passéisme but is fowardlooking in its restoration of political complexity and cultural dynamism to all areas of territory and memory. (2006: 18) Reciprocity between empowered and disempowered cultures and languages seems to be a good starting ground for translation projects. Also, the transnational imaginary could be relaunched as a potent strategy to disseminate knowledge about the local. As we shall see in the following example of poetry in translation, this may result in interesting images of hybridity and syncretism. When the Galician poet Luz Pozo Garza was asked to choose five of her poems for the anthology To the Winds Our Sails. Irish Writers Translate Galician Poetry (O’Donnell & Palacios 2010) so that the Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill could translate them into English and Irish, Pozo Garza selected poetry she had written about her impressions of Ireland (O’Donnell & Palacios 2010: 30-43). This seems a welcome illustration of reciprocity. The Galician poet wrote about Ireland and the Irish poet, who usually writes her poetry in Gaelic but has her work translated into English by other writers, rendered Pozo Garza’s lines into both English and Gaelic —the lingua franca and the Irish vernacular. The unrequited translation enterprise of Xeración Nós was now, at last, reciprocated. As Mary O’Donnell explains in the introduction to the anthology that gathers these poems, “there was a dearth of information and interest in Ireland regarding Galician poets” (2010b: 15). The poems that Pozo Garza selected for this collection owe much of their inspiration to nationalist discourses from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which revolved around the Celtic brotherhood of the Atlantic nations. However, what may seem today like residual discourse on Celticism is revivified in the Galician poet’s hands, as she invests the traditionally bellicose account of the foreign founders with the affections of the mother-daughter bond. This starts a series of tropes of hybridity, as the Galician mother visits her daughter, who married and Irishman, in Dublin. In “Os palacios de inverno” / “Winter Palaces” (O’Donnell & Palacios 2010: 30-31), the translocality of the Atlantic acts as one of the links between both nations: “a alianza / dunha linaxe celta en dúas ribeiras” / “the alliance of a Celtic lineage / on two shores” (ibid.). This alliance should not involve, however, the erasure of the daughter’s original national identity: “Non esquezas a patria” / “Do not forget your native land” (ibid.). Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill interestingly turns “fatherland” into “native land”, thus avoiding not only the gender dichotomy between fatherland and motherland but also any possible jingoistic connotations. Apart from the common features shared by Ireland and Galicia, Pozo Garza is attentive to singular Irish places and pays homage to Irish cultural specificity and achievements in her poems: the Hill of Howth, Bran’s sea, the dolmens, the Sidhe, Yeats, the round towers, torques and other treasures of the Kingdom of Tara, druids, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the symbols of the harp and the rose, etc. In her translation of “Avalon Avalon” (O’Donnell & Palacios 2010: 40-43), Ní Dhomhnaill actually seems to modify “Avalon” —the Welsh name of the Arthurian legendary island— to bring it to an Irish context, so “Emain Ablach” and “Avalon” are turned into “Eamhain Úllach”, and “País das mazairas” [land of apple-trees] into “Oileán na n-Úll Cumhra” [the Island of Fragrant Apples]. We perceive, then, two simultaneous lines of force in both the original version and its translation: one of assimilation and another one of singularity and difference. There are moments, however, of effective syncretism, as in the final line of “Páxina Atlántica” / “Page of the Atlantic” (O’Donnell & Palacios 2010: 38-39), where the poet refers to the camellia, an omnipresent flower in Galician winter gardens, as the “camelia gaélica do xardín de Bínn Eadair” / “the Gaelic camellia in the garden of Bínn Eadair” (ibid.). Concluding Remarks This chapter has inquired into those translation strategies that maintain the local singularity of literary texts in transnational cultural projects. Attention has been paid to the anxieties provoked by ill-suited notions of globalization and nationalism, and translation has been deemed a very apt tool to overcome such anxieties. The key notions of reciprocity and dialogue across relative difference in translation projects have provided a fair basis to renegotiate bonds between empowered and disempowered groups. Likewise, it has been argued that collaboration and hybridity in translation are not at all incompatible with and need not efface cultural specificity. As the editor of anthologies of poetry in translation, I have delved, with some necessary reservations, into this genre’s specificities for the representation of foreignness and have argued for dual-language editions of poetry in order to grant minoritized vernaculars their due visibility and relevance. Finally, the local has been proposed as a potential site of resistance to homogenizing forces due to its capacity to put forward alternative discourses that take issue with globalizing impositions. III. Mixing Memory and Desire: Women Writers’ Emigration and Wanderlust Do communities that have suffered traumatic experiences of massive emigration, because of calamitous economic or political conditions, have a strained relationship with the experience of travel? Both Ireland and Galicia went through repeated waves of emigration to America and various European countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an experience which left an indelible mark on their literature. In Ireland, emigration was almost constant from the time of the famines in the 1840s until the 1990s. Heather Ingman informs us that forty percent of Irish-born people were living abroad in the 1920s (2009: 122). Likewise, Galicia experienced a massive migratory pattern similar to that of other southern countries in Europe from the 1870s to the 1930s, with an important second wave of emigration in the 1960s (Cagiao Vila 2009: 64).The much-improved economic circumstances in Ireland and Galicia, during the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, allowed many of those emigrants, or their descendants, to return to their family homeland, while those who had remained in their respective native lands began to travel for the sake of broadening their horizons and testing their capacity to face the challenges of the unknown. The 2007 financial crisis changed, once again, the course of migratory flows: emigration was again envisaged as a solution to rising unemployment in Ireland and Galicia; conversely, a significant number of immigrants left both countries and returned to their homelands.18 Women’s traditional constriction to the domestic sphere and tutelage by their male relatives —limitations which, however, have often been disallowed by the experience of forced emigration— render female subjects as likely to view new travel opportunities as a liberating and yearned for experience. This chapter will focus on contemporary Irish and Galician women writers’ perceptions of travel and on the way their wanderlust interacts with those personal and social references which constitute their identity. In order to build a corpus for our group’s research projects on women’s mobility and encounter with foreignness (IrGal.es 2010-2016), I passed, to a selection of women writers of various literary genres in Ireland and Galicia, a set of questions regarding their views on the history of migration and exile in their families and their understanding of how this experience marked them either on a personal or a professional level. The writers were also asked about the travel opportunities they have enjoyed, the impact of these journeys on their writing, their collaborations with foreign artists and the institutions which have favoured this approach to the Other. Both the instructions and the questionnaire were the same for all writers, except for the language used —English or Galician. The selection of participating authors included different generations with the objective to register the changing patterns and attitudes towards travel through a sequence of decades. The method employed did not pursue statistical significance, but simply sought to provide a space for writers to reflect on travel, migration and the encounter with foreignness. The authors who participated by answering this questionnaire were the following: from Ireland, Celia 18 For a popular history of the various immigration waves to Ireland from the island’s first Stone Age settlers to Polish immigrants in the Celtic Tiger period, see Hegarty (2009). In 2021, there were in Galicia 4.21 percent of people born abroad (Punzón 2021). The impact of the economic downturn on Galician population showed that, in 2011, there was a decrease in the arrival of descendants of former Galician emigrants, and increasing number of immigrants who returned to their countries of origin (Punzón 2011). Almost seventy percent of Celia de Fréine’s travels are directly connected with her writing activities, and she finds them beneficial, as they inspire her to look anew at her own country. She needs to be “relaxed and cut-off from all communication” in order to write poetry, conditions that she finds in her Connemara house and in her son's house in Sardinia, but more rarely while she is travelling. One of her poetry collections, imram: odyssey (2010), was inspired during a writing residency in Slovenia —a trip funded by the Literature Across Frontiers programme. Other travels received funding from The Arts Council, Culture Ireland, The Irish Book Publishers’ Association, the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris and a number of host universities —Santiago de Compostela, Oviedo, Toronto. It is mainly for her screenplays that de Fréine collaborates with foreign artists, such as the Indian film-director Biju Viswanath. In the case of Lia Mills, around forty percent of her travels are related to her writing: readings, talks, research… Travels offer her “inspiration, exposure to fresh ideas and impressions; getting out of stale routines, freedom from responsibilities, exposure to new writers and artists, interaction with new audiences”. Mills responds quickly to new settings by taking notes and gathering impressions, but these “take a while to sink and percolate down to something that might re-emerge as literary writing”. One of her novels, Nothing Simple (2005), is set in the US, and she has chosen foreign locations for some of her short stories as well. Mills’s literary travels have received funding from host universities —Oviedo, Toronto—, Culture Ireland, and the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. Mary O’Donnell warns us off the kind of tourist writing produced after trips abroad: “I am naturally suspicious of the poetics and prose of the seasoned conference / seminar participating poet / writer. By this I mean that part of me resists the urge to write about travel-inspired things unless absolutely necessary”. However, she admits that certain discoveries and contacts with other writers and scholars have, more than once, increased her creative pleasure. Travelling is, for O’Donnell, note-taking time and she acknowledges that: “my experiences abroad have indeed bitten into my creative writing”. Her poetry collection Spiderwoman’s Third Avenue Rhapsody (1993), for instance, was largely inspired by a visit to New York. Her travels have received funding from the Irish Arts Council, the Irish Writers’ Union, and the Finnish Writers’ Union, apart from various host universities —among them, several Spanish ones: Almería, Granada, Santiago de Compostela and Alcalá de Henares. Among her collaborative projects with other European writers, one must point out her co-edition of the anthology of Galician poetry translation To the Winds Our Sails (O’Donnell & Palacios 2010). Rita Kelly finds that travelling has been extremely beneficial for her creative writing —which is also attested by titles of her books such as Travelling West (2000). Kelly’s trips have been funded by the Irish and Scottish Arts Councils, and by various Departments of the Irish government —Foreign Affairs, Trade, Education, and Gaeltacht Affairs. Her main collaborations abroad consist in translation projects, inclusion in anthologies, publication opportunities, although, like most writers in Ireland and Galicia she regrets that: “I have often wished for greater collaborations but, in my case, they have never seemed to materialize”. About twenty percent of Mary Hosty’s travels are related to her profession as a writer and she used to have a travelogue section on her personal web page. Travel offers her “escape, stimulation, difference, inspiration, sensation and experience”. While abroad, she likes to take notes and make observations, but she objects that “putting myself under pressure to write doesn’t help; much like constantly taking photos, it can often become a barrier to actually experiencing the place”. Hosty often uses places she has visited as settings and backdrops for her work, but her stays abroad have not resulted in collaborations with other foreign writers or institutions. Lorna Shaughnessy finds that travelling “stimulates the senses and the mind. Break from the routine of home and work also frees the mind. Travelling alone is particularly beneficial: lots of daydreaming time on trains, planes and buses!” Spain and Mexico have featured in her writing, as can be seen in her collection Torching the Brown River (2008) and she has participated in translation projects with Galician (2010a, 2010b, Shaughnessy & Kelly 2010) and Mexican poets (2006a & 2006b). María do Carme Kruckenberg used to say that she returned to the countries she had once visited every time she read the writings they inspired. Her collection Vivir, aventura irrepetible (1998) includes a substantial number of poems about her travels with her parents. In her biography with a similar title, Vivir, unha aventura irrepetíbel, Mercedes Queixas Zas (2011) discusses Kruckenberg’s travels and experiences abroad in more detail. Her main collaborations with foreign writers took place in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and the US. In the case of Luz Pichel, however, her travelling has had limited connection with and influence on her writing, she maintains. Marilar Aleixandre often participates in international book fairs, readings, literary festivals and book launches, where the intense contact with other writers and literary projects usually triggers new reflections on the art of writing —although she is also a bit anxious that such frequent travelling may rob her of the time and concentration she needs for writing. Some of her travel experiences have been poured into her fiction: a good part of her novel O rescate do peneireiro (1990) is set in Ireland, where the writer once stayed as an au-pair; the novel A expedición do Pacífico (1994) contains passages about the Amazonia which were inspired by Aleixandre’s travels to the Tikal forest in Guatemala and her trekking activities in Thailand; the Portuguese dictatorship —1926-1974— is the setting for her novel A compañía clandestina de contrapublicidade (1998) where Aleixandre’s clandestine propaganda activities and those of her acquaintances are aptly fictionalized; her short story “No lombo do río elefante” (2007a) tells us about a flood in Myanmar — not unlike the floods Aleixandre witnessed during her trip to Southeast Asia in 2006— and all the characters’ names are actually names of political prisoners; Aleixandre’s poetry has also drawn inspiration from her travels, as is the case of the poem “As debandadoras de seda” (2007b), which weaves her impressions on visiting a silk workshop along with the topic of child prostitution in Southeast Asia; also, Aleixandre’s poem “1” (2006) is set in the Italian region of Romagna, where she has visited her friend Derno Scaioli. Other writings by Aleixandre also contain references to her travels to Brazil and to Nashville, Tennessee. Chus Pato’s travels are often related to her literary activities and, for this reason, this type of trip is usually short and very busy: “readings, poets, critics, journalists, hotels, meals, bits of cities”. These literary travels have been funded by the Galician government, the Instituto Cervantes and the CCEBA —Spanish Cultural Centre in Buenos Aires. With this hectic rhythm, she can hardly write while she is away. However, there have been two long private travels along the Danube where “everything changed” and she had the concentration to write, “because life and travel went hand in hand”. Her travel to the region of Colchis —modern Black Sea coast of Georgia— features in her poetry collection m-Talá (2000, 2009a), while some of her perceptions of the Carpathians and Tangiers appear in Secesión (2009b). Since Pato was a secondary school teacher, she could not devote, to her writing and travels, all the time they required and laments not having enjoyed the opportunity of being a professional writer. Her collaborations with foreign writers have materialized in numerous joint publications and translations which have allowed her to keep in contact with writers’ projects elsewhere “because poetry, though a fleeting art, travels leisurely”. Most of Teresa Moure’s travels relate to her literary activities, although she tries to reserve some time during these trips for visits on her own or with her family. She finds that travelling is both an intense and exciting experience and one that reveals your vulnerability and uncertainty about other people’s codes. However, Moure has not translated her travels to her fiction and has never travelled looking for settings as, for this, she prefers to do research. For those literary meetings in which Moure represented Galician literature, she received funding from the Galician government and some of her promotion tours have been funded by publishers such as Barcelona-based Lumen and the Italian Urogallo. She has not been involved in collaborative projects with foreign writers but is interested in writing residencies abroad. Though Lupe Gómez Arto says she has travelled little, she sometimes feels she needs “to leave Galicia, because here, in this wee country, I’m drowned by so much darkness and so much green water. I need to stretch myself, to stretch my body and to stretch my poems”. She believes that travelling is highly beneficial for writing: “my mind grows and so do my words” and she would even like to write a book of travels. However, Gómez Arto understands the notion of travel very broadly, as she also travels when she dreams, when she takes the bus for her family visits and when she writes or receives letters. She likes to write about her promenades to the river in Fisteus, her home village: “That place is of crucial importance to me. All my poetry, all my dances originate there. That river means father and mother”. She never went on holidays as a little girl and only began to spend some summers on the beach of Louro after she was twenty. She would then go on promenades with her mother and they would feel “strangers, close to each other and happy. The sea speaks a foreign language to those of us who have grown up inland”. Gómez Arto left her home village to attend secondary school in A Coruña. This large city was also foreign territory for her, partly because the dominant and prestigious language was Castilian Spanish and not the Galician vernacular that she spoke with her parents, and also because: “my life in Fisteus was not at all reflected or gathered in the books I had to study”. For this reason, she published a prose memoir about her childhood in Fisteus (2001). Gómez Arto has assiduously written to other authors with whom she has shared “music, books and poems”: John Berger, José Luís Peixoto, Antonio Gamoneda… She does not feel isolated “because there is a Post Office in my neighbourhood where I go almost every afternoon to send my letters to all corners of the world”. María do Cebreiro likes to take notes during her travels and, once she is back at home, to polish her texts. The experiences lived away from Galicia have nourished many of her poetry collections: A visit to Lisbon in 1998 inspired o estadio do espello (1998); Os hemisferios (2006) was written during a stay in Barcelona; Cuarto de outono (2008a) and Non son de aquí (2008b, 2010) have resulted from her travels to Lisbon and the latter also incorporates a few poems sketched in Wales. Her literary travels to Wales have been funded by the AELG —Association of Galician-language Writers— and by the Centre for Galician Studies in Wales at Bangor University. These stays in Wales have favoured collaborations such as shared poetry readings and round tables with the writers Zoë Scoulding and Menna Elfyn. Most of Yolanda Castaño’s travels are related to her literary activities and have been funded by the Galician government, the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Instituto Cervantes, among other associations and institutions. She finds travelling extremely beneficial for her writing because “one of the most interesting perspectives is that from the outside. I never knew so much about my country as when I left it, so much about my reality as when I transcended it, so much about my intimate self as when I left my family home”. Travelling has for Castaño a liberating effect that makes her writing less circumscribed by parochial, narrow or miserly predicaments. Disconnecting from her domestic and professional ties becomes stimulating and creates a foreign space, a tabula rasa ready for creativity. The anticipated adventure of travel rouses the desire to trace new paths of words and to venture into the intricacies of poetry. Even those dead hours of journeys in the middle of nowhere provide a parenthesis that can be inspiring for my creative work. Her impressions of Venice have accompanied Antón Sobral’s paintings of the City of Canals (Sobral & Castaño 2000); her readings of Marguerite Duras are intertwined with real encounters with people from the Far East in her poem “Yolanda entra en escena…” (2003); a visit to Paris at a time of personal crisis haunts her poem series “(RE)SER(VADO)” (2007); the city of Buenos Aires is rendered in a book of poetry and photographs by Galician and Argentine artists where Castaño is a contributor (Longueira 2009); it is probably her long poem “Mazás do xardín de Tolstoi” (Becerra de Becerra 2008) that most clearly registers her travels, but Castaño also has a wide variety of poems, some published in literary journals and others still unpublished, on places such as New York, Nicaragua, Bosnia, etc. Her collaborations with foreign writers have included projects such as the promotion of Latin-American writers in the international literary blog “absolutepoetry”, the edition of the complete works of Farruco Sesto, a Galician writer exiled in Venezuela, the coordination of the international poetry festival “Poetas Di(n)versos”, the international poetry translation workshop in San Simón, and the running of the 1863 literary residency in A Coruña. Eva Moreda’s journeys are often related to her academic activities, and she tries to accommodate her participation in literary events to those dates in which she can and wants to travel. She is convinced that her long sojourns abroad, especially her stay in London, have been decisive for her creative writing. Moreda rarely writes while she is travelling, as her concentration requires regular times and habits, and she has never journeyed in search for literary inspiration, though she admits that experiences lived in past travels may unexpectedly make their way into new writings. Her novel A Veiga é como un tempo distinto (2011a) tells the story of a young woman who, in the late 1960s leaves for London, where she later joins the feminist movement. Moreda shares some features with her protagonist, but there are also substantial differences between the two: “she lives in another epoch, comes from a different social class and has received a different education. My first contact with feminism was of an academic nature while my protagonist starts at a grassroots level”. Concluding Remarks Irish and Galician women writers live and work in profoundly nomadic societies to the extent that migration is often seen as a natural process, rather than an economic, political or social phenomenon. Depending on the writer’s age, some dig deep in memories of their grandparents’ time while others refer to their contemporaries. Among the Galician writers consulted, there are abundant references to emigration in the first half of the twentieth century, while Irish writers often bring their memories closer to present times. One can easily recognize the Galician emigration waves to Latin America before the 1950s and, from the 1950s until the 1970s, to other European countries. The Irish economic crisis of the 1980s extended the diasporic flow —predominantly to the USA and the UK— until the early 1990s. Women writers’ memories of emigration often focus on women’s lives and role in migratory flows. Of special interest is their reflection on the liberating potential of the experience of travelling and the degree of autonomy and self-esteem that women can achieve through it. Galician writers often refer to their relatives’ political exile after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the subsequent dictatorial regime of General Franco (1939-1975), while none of the Irish writers consulted explicitly mention political exile, but economic constraints as the main reason for their relatives’ departure. Galician writers who had political exiles in their families often recall the social taboo around their departed relatives. Concerning Irish writers, those whose families were divided by the North-South border usually refer to the alienation from their relatives and there is a taboo about those Irish emigrants who joined the British military forces. In these cases, emigrants were submitted to a double process of estrangement on account on their departure and the silence with which it was sealed. Although the political exiles mentioned are predominantly male, these accounts bear witness to the painful ways in which women had to negotiate the taboo around this kind of emigration with political overtones. Both Irish and Galician writers avow that their understanding of their relatives’ ordeal is vague and, sometimes, even mystified, but emigration has, in a few cases, given these writers the material means to write and, for many of them, has become a motivating force behind their writing. Their families’ painful emigration has not deterred the writers here consulted from travelling; on the contrary, many of them have visited their relatives’ destination countries, which have become part of their private, emotional history. The majority —and in this respect Irish and Galician writers mainly resemble one another— give free expression to their wanderlust and see foreign countries and cultures as repositories of alternative lives and identities. Their fascination for certain world regions has often been kindled by their literary readings. In many cases, the beginning of their writing career is related to the experience of displacement and their travels either have inspired or appear mentioned in their writing to different degrees. The institutions which have funded their literary activities abroad are mostly public ones related to their respective governments, departments of culture and writers’ unions. Most authors express the wish to engage in more collaborative projects with foreign artists; however, Galician writers sometimes affirm that they have little information about grants and writing residencies programmes abroad. Mixing Memory and Desire APPENDIX I WRITERS’ PROFILES Aleixandre, Marilar (1947): A poet, fiction writer, university professor and member of the Royal Galician Academy, she is the author of numerous poetry collections, among which: Catálogo de velenos (1999), Desmentindo a primavera (2003), Mudanzas (2007) Desescribindo (2016). Her fiction for adults includes: Tránsito dos Gramáticos (1993), Lobos nas illas (1996), A Compañía Clandestina de Contrapublicidade (1998), Teoría do caos (2001), As malas mulleres (2020, awarded the National Fiction Prize). Castaño, Yolanda (1977): As a poet, her collections include: Elevar as pálpebras (1995), Delicia (1998), Edénica (2000), Vivimos no ciclo das Erofanías (1998), O libro da egoísta (2003), Profundidade de campo (2007), Erofanía (2008), A segunda língua (2014) and Materia (2022). She is the Director of the writers’ residency “1863”, of the international poetry festival “Poetas Di(n)versos”, and of the international workshop for translation of poetry “Illa de San Simón”. De Fréine, Celia (1948): A poet, playwright, librettist and screenwriter in Irish and English, she is the author of numerous poetry collections which include: Blood Debts (2014), cuir amach seo dom: riddle me this (2014), Aibítir Aoise: Alphabet of an Age (2011), imram: odyssey (2010), Scarecrows at Newtownards (2005), Fiacha Fola (2004), Faoi Chabáistí is Ríonacha (2001). Her plays include: Cúirt an Mheán Oíche: The Midnight Court (2012), Desire: Meanmarc (2012), Plight: Cruachás (2012), Anraith Neantóige, Cóirín na dTonn, Tearmnn (the three gathered in Mná Dána, 2009), Nára Turas é in Aistear (2000), and Casadh (2009). She is also the author of several filmpoems in collaboration with the director Biju Viswanath. Gómez (Arto), Lupe (1972): A poet, her poetry collections include, among others: Pornografía (1995), Os teus dedos na miña braga con regra (1999), Poesía fea (2000), Querida Uxía (2004), Levantar as tetas (2004), Luz e Lupe (2005), Azul e estranxeira (2005), O útero dos cabalos (2005), Quero bailar (2006), Diario dun bar (2008), Camuflaxe (2017), Fosforescencias (2019), Sílabas da peste (2021), Salón de té (2023). She is the author of the poetic prose memoir: Fisteus era un mundo (2001). Burghard Baltrusch edited the collection of critical essays on Gómez’s work and translations: Lupe Gómez; libre e estranxeira (2013). Hosty, Mary: A bestselling novelist, her books include: A Perfect Moment (2005), Learning to Fly (2004), The Men in her Life (2003). Kelly, Rita (1953): A poet, playwright and fiction writer in Irish and English, she is the author of the following poetry collections: Further Thoughts in a Garden (2013), Turas go Bun na Spéire (2009), Travelling West (2000), Fare Well / Beir Beannacht (1990), An Bealach Eadóigh (1984), and along with her late husband, the poet Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, she wrote Dialann sa Díseart (1981). She is also the author of The Whispering Arch and Other Stories (1986) and Kelly Reads Bewick (2001) and the play Frau Luther (1984). Kruckenberg, María do Carme (1926-2015): A poet, her collections include: Obra poética case completa. 1953-2000 (2000; this gathers the poetry she published until 2000), Lembranzas da beleza triste (2003), Luz para un novo amencer (2004), As complexas mareas da noite (2006), Os límites do arreguizo (2008), A voz da auga (2010), Jazz espido un e dous (2011). Her short stories have been gathered by Mercedes Queixas in O morto asasinado e outros contos (2018). María do Cebreiro (1976): A poet and professor of literature, she is the author, among others, of the following poetry collections: o estadio do espello (1998), (nós, as inadaptadas) (2001), Non queres que o poema te coñeza (2004), O barrio das chinesas (2005), Os hemisferios (2006), Cuarto de outono (2008), Non son de aquí (2008), Os inocentes (2014), O deserto (2015), A lentitude (2017), Soños. Arquivos. Cartas (2028). As an essayist, she has published the books: As antologías de poesía en Galicia and Cataluña (2004), As terceiras mulleres (2005) and Fogar impronunciable. Poesía e pantasma (2011). Mills, Lia: A writer of novels, short stories and literary non-fiction, her book titles include: Another Alice (1996), Nothing Simple (2005) In Your Face (2007), and Fallen (2014). Moreda, Eva (1981): A poet, fiction writer and musicologist, her novels include: Breogán de Guisamonde, o cabaleiro da gaivota (1997), O demo e o profundo mar azul (2002), Singularis Domitilla (2004), O país das bestas (2009), Organoloxía (2010), A Veiga é como un tempo distinto (2011), Para toda a vida (2020), Rapazas de polar (2021). Moure, Teresa (1969): A fiction writer, playwright, linguist and essayist, her novels include: A xeira das arbores (2004), Herba moura (2005), Benquerida catastrophe (2007), A Casa dos Lucarios (2007), A intervención (2010), Uma mãe tão punk (2018), Ostrácia (2015). Essays published in book form are, among others: Outro idioma é posible (2005), A palabra das fillas de Eva (2005), O natural é político (2008). Her play Unha primavera para Aldara (2008) has been staged to wide public acclaim. O’Donnell, Mary (1954): A poet, fiction writer and essayist, she is the author of numerous poetry collections, among which: Reading the Sunflowers in September (1990), Spiderwoman’s Third Avenue Rhapsody (1993), Unlegendary Heroes (1998), September Elegies (2003), The Place of Miracles: New and Selected Poems (2006), The Ark Builders (2009), Those April Fevers (2015), Massacre of the Birds (2020). She has co-edited the anthology of Galician verse To the Winds Our Sails: Irish Writers Translate Galician Poetry (2010). Her fiction includes volumes of short stories such as: Empire (2018), Strong Pagans (1991) and Storm over Belfast (2008) and the novels: The Light-Makers (1992), Virgin and the Boy (1996), The Elysium Testament (1999), Where They Lie (2014). Pato, Chus (1955): A poet, she is the author of the following collections: Urania (1991), Heloísa (1994), Fascinio (1995), A ponte das poldras (1996), Nínive (1996), m-Talá (2000), Charenton (2004), Hordas de escritura (2008), Secesión (2009), Carne de Leviatán (2013), Un libre favor (2019). Much of her writing has been translated into English by the Canadian poet and translator Erin Moure. Pichel, Luz (1947): A poet, she has published work in Galician and Spanish: El pájaro mudo (1990), La marca de los potros (2004), El pájaro mudo y otros poemas (2004), Casa pechada (2006), Cativa en su lughar (2013), Tra(n)shumancias (2013), CO CO CO U (2017), Din din don y más Hortensias azuis (2021), Alén Alén (2021). Shaughnessy, Lorna (1961): A poet and literary translator, she has published the poetry collections Torching the Brown River (2008), Witness Trees (2011), Anchored (2015), Lark Water (2021). Her translations include two books of Mexican poetry: Mother Tongue. Selected Poems by Pura López Colomé and If We Have Lost Our Oldest Tales by María Baranda, and two books by the Galician poet Manuel Rivas: The Disappearance of Snow (2012) and The Mouth of the Earth (2019). Shaughnessy is the co-editor, together with Keith Payne and Martín Veiga of A Different Eden: Ecopoetry from Ireland and Galicia (2021). Mixing Memory and Desire. APPENDIX II QUESTIONNAIRE Emigration and exile: 1. Have any members of your family (close or distant) emigrated to foreign countries? 1.a. If so, was their emigration forced by hostile circumstances in Ireland / Galicia or was it voluntary? 1.b. Would you say their emigration allowed them to have a more successful life? 1.c. Has their experience marked you in any particular way? (e.g. your relationship with the foreign country they went to, etc.) Wanderlust: 2. How many times a year (on average) do you leave your country? 3. When you travel abroad, which are the countries you visit most often? 4. Which other countries have you visited? 5. Is there a foreign country or a continent (region, etc.) that fascinates you (whether you have visited it or not)? 6. Have you ever lived abroad for a period longer than 3 months? If so, where and for how long? 6.a. If you answered Yes to question 6, was your stay abroad connected with your profession as a writer or was the reason a different one? Travelling abroad as a writer: 7. What percentage of your annual travels abroad is directly connected with your profession as a writer? 8. In what ways do you find travelling abroad beneficial for your creative writing? 9. When you travel abroad, do you primarily draw inspiration from what you see around you and wait till you are back home in order to write about it? 10. To what extent have your experiences abroad inspired the subject-matter of your writing? 11. Is your writing output more intensive while you are abroad? Institutional support: 12. 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