Derek Mahon: ‘Resident Alien’

Abstract

Reacting against Hewitt’s insistence on the need for the Ulster writer to be ‘a rooted man’ to avoid being merely ‘an airy internationalist, this tledown’, Mahon comments: ‘This is a bit tough on thistledown; and, speaking as a twig in a stream, I feel there’s a certain harshness, a dogmatism, at work there’.¹ In contrast to Hewitt’s regionalist, or Heaney’s atavistic, sense of belonging, Mahon’s poems assert a poetic freedom by complicating all stereotypes of identity, projecting them into extreme metaphysical realms beyond human history and the human self, in the end, subverting the very idea of belonging anywhere. As expatriate outsider, he is as much ‘a tourist in his own country’ as he said MacNeice was. The phrase, Mahon insisted, need not be regarded as derogatory, but ‘might stand, indeed, as an epitaph for modern man’.² Mahon accepts deracination as the essential condition of modern life and, taking MacNeice as his example, sees it as importantly creative.