Introduction

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Melanie Swiatloch
stand the outbreak of violence in its full extend six-year-old Saoirse and four-yearold
Daisy perceive what happens in a rather naïve way. They cannot understand,
for example, why they are forbidden to wave at the British Army when all the
other children in their street are doing so (Caldwell 4ff). Their mother in contrast,
although she has her reasons, becomes an accomplice in the segregated society by
forbidding her children to behave as the other children: “How many times have I
told you youse’re not to be waving and being all friendly to the British Army
vans” (ibid. 4). She also gives a hint as to why she reacts so strongly: “They’ve no
business to be installing themselves in this street” (ibid. 5).
The question of innocence and complicity is also significant in the case of
Helen. As a solicitor specialised in terrorist cases she first and foremost intends to
help innocently accused Catholics. Nevertheless, not in all cases can Helen be sure
if the accused really has done nothing wrong. The Oliver Maguire case thus makes
it quite hard for Helen (Madden 171ff): By defending someone she knows has
killed for sectarian reasons she will always be reminded of the murder of her father.
In turn there must be someone out there defending his murderers. It truly is
a difficult situation. This leads to the assumption that everybody could easily become
an accomplice in the dirty policies of the Troubles even though having the
opposite in mind, namely doing good.
3.3.2. Cultural Hybridization and the New Irish
“Ye shall never be free until the woman from the south
be united to the man from the north.”
Where They Were Missed, Lucy Caldwell (2006,
186)
Homi Bhabha has set new standards in the fields of postcolonial identity. Terms
like ‘hybridity’, ‘third space’ and ‘mimicry’ are strongly connected to his theories.
In the introduction to his essay collection The Location of Culture Bhabha introduces
the reader to one of the central issues of his notions of culture:
It is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of
the beyond […] The ‘beyond’ is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind
of the past […]. Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths
of the middle years; but in the fin de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment
of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of
difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and
exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction,
in the ‘beyond’: an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the
French rendition of the words au-delà – here and there, on all sides, fort /
da, hither and thither, back and forth (Bhabha 1994, 1).