Introduction

Construction of Identity in Northern Irish Novels 209
should not be left out completely of the postcolonial context is one aspect this
paper aims at showing in reference to contemporary Northern Irish fiction.
Alongside Malta, Gibraltar and Minorca, Ireland takes a special position as it is
one of the few European places of British colonisation and thus was excluded
from the prevailing Eurocentrism described by Edward Said (221). While the great
European imperial powers put on the role of observers that “studied, classified
and verified” (ibid. 221/222) other peoples Ireland belonged to that very group
studied itself. The system “subordinated them by banishing their identities, except
as a lower order of being, from the culture and indeed the very idea of white
Christian Europe” (ibid. 221/222). In the eyes of the British colonisers Ireland
never fitted into this “white Christian Europe”.
British writers such as Edmund Spenser have repeatedly put the Irish on a
lower level. In his essay A View of the Present State of Ireland Spenser describes the
Irish as descendants of the Scythians 16 and that they were once every year turned
into wolves: “Also the Scythians sayd, that they were once every yere turned into
wolves, and soe it is wrighten of the Irish” (R. Morris 634). Tobias Döring also
points to Charles Kingsley who, while on a journey through Ireland, portrayed the
Irish in a letter to his wife as “white chimpanzees”, clearly perturbed by the fact
that the Irish did not look any different from their British occupiers (Döring 98).
The comparison to animals thus subordinated the Irish to their British occupiers
and reminds of the treatment of American natives or Indians as savages. “It is
important to note how Ireland has been specifically positioned over many centuries
as an Other against which a British state formulated itself” (127), Sabina
Sharkey notices. This state of otherness prevailed well into the twentieth century
and still has not vanished completely. Many Northern Irish Protestants still feel
unfamiliar with their Catholic fellow citizens (and the Irish living in the Republic)
although they have been living next to each other for centuries. Asked in an interview
about their notions towards the Irish a Protestant woman from County
Down answered: “I don’t feel anything in common with my Irish counterparts –
they feel like strangers to me” (Mitchell 2006, 65).
Said argues that one way of opposition for a colonised people lies in developing
a nationalism that unites the people by a common history, religion and language
against the occupying power. A problem occurring here is the fact that resistance
was led by the better educated classes who in turn were educated or “produced”
by the oppressor (Said 223). Said also mentions two political moments
that can enable the way to resistance: The first point is the realisation of Western
or European imperialism. Out of this new gained consciousness the oppressed are
now able to claim the end of imperial power. The second moment then occurred
after World War II when “conventional nationalism was revealed to be both insufficient
and crucial.” Out of this a stronger urge for liberation arose that even
16 Scythians: An ancient nomadic people of Iranian descent living in central Asia and later southern
Russia in the 8 th and 7 th centuries BC (Britannica 576).