Introduction

230
Melanie Swiatloch
a counter-question could be: Why does everything have to be defined in strict
orders? Is one not able to speak without perfectly knowing what or who one is? It
will not be implied here that the world would work without any rules. Rules and
definitions are certainly helpful to provide stability and security. Nevertheless,
Bhabha’s considerations of a difference without hierarchy would not remain utopian
if people could accept difference more easily. The point I would like to make
here is that through the act of speaking an identity can be created. The “coherent
identity” Easthope demands can become concrete through speech acts even
though the hybrid is not yet fully aware of it. A good example here would be Saoirse
Pentland. In the second half of the novel she is sixteen years old – a teenager
on its climax – and begins to question her own identity. Above all she is interested
in the disappearance of her mother. She is asking a lot of questions and demands
to be told the truth by her aunt and uncle. The story of initiation thus serves the
novel in a double way as it supports Saoirse’s longing for finding an identity: On
the one hand she needs to know about certain things that happened in the past in
order to come to terms with her current situation – that is, why her mother left
her and where she has gone to – on the other hand all the discoveries she makes
are connected to the context of Northern Irish history and help her to make up
her mind about her Irish identities (I use the plural here because Saoirse is the
daughter of two opposing Northern Irish strands). Saoirse does not yet have a
coherent identity as demanded by Easthope. Still, she does not remain silent. Although
her aunt Bernadette wants to protect her from the truth Saoirse insists on
her right to know everything:
Nobody’s ever straight with me […] There’s all of this scheming, and secrets;
there’s all of these secrets, and going behind people’s backs, and pretending,
and not telling the real reasons for things, and I’m sick of it. It’s
not fair […] I’m not a little girl any more. And because it’s to do with me,
all right, it’s to do with me and I have a right to know (Caldwell 111).
Saoirse’s case therefore runs directly counter to Easthope’s argumentation. While
he claims “a coherent, speaking subject cannot live in the gaps between identities”
(Easthope 347) I would contend that just that – the inbetween identity – leads a
person to question him- or herself, thus the very questioning leads to a speaking
subject and this in turn to an awareness of one’s identity.
For this reason, Bhabha’s reflections on hybridity are especially suitable for the
Northern Irish crisis of identity. In order to find answers to the question about
what has changed in Northern Ireland one can also take a closer look on the protagonists
Madden and McLiam Wilson create. All of them share aspects of the
‘New Irish’ who is a little more cosmopolitan, a little more educated and a little
more non-Irish than the characters of Frank O’Connor and other twentiethcentury
authors were a couple of years ago. To show up the differences it is help-