Integr. J. Soc Sci., 2014, 1(1), 14-20 . Article . INTEGRATED JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Identity, language and culture in Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern Haris Qadeer a* aGautam Buddha University, Greater Noida, 201312, India Received: 28-Jan-2014 ABSTRACT The present paper attempts to study Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s poetic collection The Haw Lantern (1987) from postcolonial lens. The paper explores Heaney’s negotiations with the hegemony and the compromises and compensations which he makes in the process. It explores Heaney’s quest for reclaiming his original Irish identity which is profoundly imbedded in native culture. The desire and need of a single reliable version of the past and the need to revise past in the light of new historical circumstances are among the strategies employed by Heaney to re-write history and scrutinize the misrepresentations of Irish culture and traditions in hegemonic records. Heaney’s effort of dismantling the hegemony and deconstructing colonialism will also be dealt with. Keywords: Postcolonialism, Irish, Identity, Culture, Language Heaney's early allegories subvert Britain's patriarchal social and political identity is a significant issue which he powers so that the silenced, matriarchal voices of his heritage considers in the collection The Haw Lantern (1987). Helen can speak. In The Haw Lantern, Heaney again summons the Vendler claims that “The Haw Lantern is a book of strict, British power brokers to the debating table, and although the even stiff, second thoughts”.2 Heaney embellishes the talk is perhaps more metaphysical in tone and subject, the collection with parables, allegories and satires on the social, underlying political and linguistic issues are similar to earlier political and religious aspects of Irish life. He deploys these ones.1 strategies to define the marginal status of Northern Ireland as within the colonial divisions created by the rules of the British Postcolonialism attempts to uncover the history of Empire and the Protestant church. To repair the fractured colonized whose identity is branded and on whom an alien identity of Irish people, the poet uses his poetry as a medium history is imposed from outside in colonial version of history to provide compromises and compensations. and literature. The colonized may lack a recorded history they nonetheless possess a remembered one in their memory. The The opening poem ‘Alphabets’ traces the metamorphosis of silence of the historical records of the colonized is audible in Heaney from a small boy “when he goes to school” to a their memories. The silence of the historical records of the proficient professor who “stands in a wooden O” and “alludes colonized is audible in their memories. Postcolonialism to Shakespeare” and “Graves”. It traces the poetic journey of demonstrates the inheritance of colonial traumas and ethical his life from the rural primary school to the top university negotiations of recovery. The postcolonial writers across the where he studied and worked in later in his life. The poem was world have been trying to dismantle and deconstruct the written as the Phi Beta Kappa Poem (An academic honour hegemony of the Empire. The present paper attempts to society of American college and university students showing explore the issue of language, culture and identity in the poetry high academic achievement. It was founded in 1776) at of Seamus Heaney using the parameters of postcolonialism. Harvard in 1984. The poem hints at the educational system of Northern Ireland, in which the child is exposed to the different The Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) uses his scripts diction and intonations of the English, Latin and Irish poetry for the process of decolonization. From the beginning language. As the child grows, the languages broaden his of his poetic career he has opted to be a ‘digger’ who digs comprehension of place and culture and expand his linguistic down the layers of history, mythology and literature to revive and literary process. Heaney penetrates into the psyche of a and rehabilitate the original Irish identity. Heaney’s child and projects all the confusions and curiosities. preoccupation with the role of language in the construction of . There he draws smoke with the chalk the whole first Address: Dr. Haris Qadeer week, Department of English, School of Humanities and Social Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y Sciences, Gautam Buddha University, Greater Noida, India. Email: [email protected] This is writing. A swan’s neck and swan’s back ----------- Make the 2 he can see now as well as say Cite as: Integr. J. Soc. Sci., 2014, 1(1), 14-20. ©IS Publications IJSS ISSN 2348-0874 The two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate Integrated Journal of Social Sciences pubs.iscience.in/ijss Integr. J. Soc. Sci., 2014, 1(1), 14-20 14 Are the letter some call ah, some call ay. where large green farms and fields had once been. Fanon, while explaining the ways in which colonialism operates, There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right stated: Way to hold the pen and a wrong way. When we consider the efforts made to carry out the cultural estrangement so characteristic of the colonial (ll 5-12, Alphabets, HL) epoch, we realize that nothing has been left to chance Grasping “Elementa Latina” in the “stricter school”, the and that the total result looked for by colonial child “learns…other writing” and masters the language when he grows up and functions as a poet and a teacher, delivering domination was indeed to convince the natives that lectures on the legends of literary traditions and researching their primeval, mysterious origins. colonialism came to lighten their darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O. the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves. leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, 6 degradation and bestiality. (ll 41-42, Alphabets, HL) Neil Corcoran is of the view that the “wooden O” refers to a The natives became alien to their own culture. large lecture hall, such as Globe Theater.3 Corcoran, further, Industrialization stripped them not only of their rural suggests that Heaney’s thought-process has undergone inheritance but also of identity. Post colonial theory analyses transformation as a result of his altered position in life.4The representations and identity formation of the colonized in the letters become signifiers of reality. The reference to “the literary and cultural text. It also examines various stages, necromancer / Who would hang from the doomed ceiling of strategies and exploitations employed by the dominant. his house and “The astronaut” who tries to figure out the globe Identity is a product of culture and history and it can be “from his small window” raises the poet’s hopes for a unified divided into three phases: The pre-colonial identities, the global vision. Tobin writes that Heaney “is driven to pursue a colonial identities and the postcolonial identities. The pre- unified vision of the world. The hope of such global vision is colonial identities are created independently. They are free embodied by the two exemplary figures that end the poem.”5 from the impact of the colonizers. The divisions in pre- Heaney has always stood for the universal brotherhood and for colonial identities are based not only on ancestry and visible a free and independent world which is not fragmented by the traits such as skin colour and facial feature. It is also based on evil force of caste, creed, and colour. Through his vision, he linguistic, cultural and regions. The colonial identities are compensates for hatred and lends helping hand in breaking result of colonial divisions. During the Enlightment, the down the wall that divides the world; he thus struggles for ‘races’ were the base of the division. The non-whites races bringing global harmony. were regarded as inferior and thus best fitted for the lives of toil under White supervision. The colonizations of Africa and The poem can also be read as an elegy upon the Indian subcontinents were based on the dialectics of White / diminishing rural life and on the extinction of the Irish Black. One of the significant feature abut the Irish language, thus denying to the Irish people, a concrete, colonization was that both colonizers and the colonized were linguistic and cultural identity. Another concern which the Whites and it was not based on the binary oppositions of poem shows is regarding the role which supervision and colours. The dominant were not colour conscious. The post education play in a child’s life. Heaney earlier took up the colonial identities are formed through negotiations and by theme of ruined childhood in poems such as ‘Blackberry- rejecting the dominance of colonial identity. Picking’ in Death of a Naturalist and ‘The Railway Children’ in Station Island. He claims the lack of supervision and Industrialization was brought at the expense of rural life. education damaged the potential of the children which, The colonizers stripped natives of their lands, belongings, and otherwise, could have been utilized in creative tasks. Unlike freedom. They spoke of “prudent squirrel’s hoard” and those deprived and neglected children, the properly supervised “mammon of iniquity” when the natives were left with just and educated child can utilize his caliber in re-structuring and few “coins”. This reflects their double-standard. The re-shaping the world. It was the concern for the importance of ‘mammon’ and ‘coins’ are the binary oppositions and there is education that made Heaney joins hand with Ted Hughes to a large difference between them as is in between the rich and bring out co-authored works such as The Rattle Bag and The the poor or between the colonizers and the colonized.