Paula Meehan

This article traces and examines representations of motherhood and mother-daughter relationships in contemporary Irish women’s poetry in the light of Adrienne Rich’s theories in Of Woman Born. I particularly focus on Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan, whose work poses a direct challenge to the traditional values of motherhood, a metaphor that, in the Irish context, has been intrinsically connected with national identity. In their dealings with topics as diverse as pregnancy, childbirth, infertility, infanticide, miscarriage, abortion and mother-daughter relationships, both writers offer alternative perspectives to the myth of the benevolent and abnegated Mother, a social and cultural ideal recurrently manipulated in Ireland by nationalism and Catholicism.

This article shows how Paula Meehan’s work is driven by the ‘globalist’ impulse of creating an open translocal solidarity among oppressed communities. Her stance could be summarized as what globalization theorist Gilroy calls a “metropolitan planetary consciousness”, an attempt to connect, on a global scale, disparate minorities by seeking resemblances between one another.

Paul Meehan, in his definition of tech-noir, mentions elements of “aliens, monsters, and cybernetic brains,” but refers to them as incidental rather than important to the definition of the genre itself. He also writes that tech-noir is noir functioning within the science-fiction framework, when it may be that there is a symbiotic relationship between SF and noir. Furthermore, he references “tainted technology,” which is a vague but loaded term that does not rightly characterize some of the technology included in tech-noirs such as phones, cameras, etc. His stab at a definition also circumvents the fact that tech-noir is a recent development that owes its advent to preceding films, most notably Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I argue that Meehan’s introduction of tech-noir in these terms is merely a starting point for understanding tech-noir, and there is room for much elucidation of how the genre hybrid came into existence and continues to take form.

In this age of globalization, interracial and cross-cultural encounters have become common aspects of everyday life. This paper aims to examine how Irish writer Paula Meehan engages in this global discourse of interculturality by articulating aspects of cross-cultural and inter-ethnical exchange. I subsequently link to the context of 21st century Ireland Meehan’s openness to cultural diversity and her alertness to the voices of the marginalised. The first section discusses Meehan’s subversive representations of the ‘internal’ Others of Irish society. Her depictions of otherness challenge the often rigid boundaries which define national and ethnic identities and open a liberating place which successfully accommodates diversity. The second section focuses on Meehan’s attempt to move away from the ethos of individual egotism which marks contemporary life. In particular, she advocates a model to confront the experiences of ‘foreigners’ based on the self-exploration of one’s own subconscious. In line with Kristeva’s argument, Meehan implies that discovering the ‘stranger’ hidden in oneself is an essential prerequisite to accept, in an unconditional and genuine way, the presence of external ‘Others’ in Irish society. While this can easily be dismissed as an abstract utopia, Meehan’s ideal becomes ethically and politically relevant in the contemporary context of a multi-cultural society open to large-scale immigration.

This article stresses the importance of the local in Paula Meehan’s work, showing how her perception of Irishness is firmly informed, at its heart, by a specific cultural history: that of her childhood, her (male and female) ancestors and her under-class community. It will try to answer one essential question that inevitably arises when dealing with Meehan’s attempt to recall the past: how to decipher communal identity in the face of the all-homogenizing tendencies of globalization? This article addresses this first question, by highlighting the difficulties Meehan encounters in recalling the past. As we will see, her poetry reflects the often strained relation between globalization and cultural history, and the underestimation or scepticism in today’s world as regards the cultural importance of our ancestors. Meehan celebrates a rich cultural past of ancestral oral traditions, dreams and myths, cultural mediums which have been devalued in a modern, technical and utterly disenchanted world.

Meehan’s work acknowledges a pervading sense of rupture between past and present, ancestral knowledge and rational modernity. An important aspect of her poetry is to draw our attention towards the perils that a global world may present for cultural identities, by emphasizing the fragility of myth and local stories in danger of disappearing or being forgotten in modern times. In recent poems such as “Zealot”, “Scrying” and “Note from the Puzzle Factory” (Painting Rain, 71, 62, 58), Meehan criticizes a world in which materialism and technology are prized more than ancient forms of knowledge. She shows how the myth of progress has gradually erased a rich mythical past. In “Window on the City” (Dharmakaya, 30), Meehan laments the failure of the civilized world to re-establish the connections of memory to mythic consciousness. In such a fast-changing society, one has no time to reflect on one’s own life and surroundings: “If you blink you’d miss it,/ your own life passing/ into memory, frame by frame./// Sometimes you can’t be sure of your own name./ So fast, the changing/ face if the city” (30). The risk of living so quickly in the anonymity of contemporary life, Meehan implies, is the disappearance of personal and communal identity.