Postcolonial Overtures by Obert Julia C.;

Author:Obert, Julia C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2016-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

1. Sound, of course, can also reterritorialize (e.g., national anthems sound the bounds of particular place). However, sound is often unmoored in ways that sight is not, and acoustic space is always potentially boundless: its expansive shape and scope are pregnant with the possibility of “being together” beyond the territory.

2. Mahon has written at least one radio play—his adaptation of The Bacchae: After Euripides aired on Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ)—and the collection of his papers in the Emory archives includes pieces of others. This work suggests his vested interest in Truax’s “shared experience of hearing.”

3. Louis MacNeice, one of Mahon’s major poetic influences, wrote radio plays for precisely this reason. MacNeice (1993, 397) claimed an attraction to the medium because it allowed an author to “take many more liberties with time and place . . . with the help of music and recorded effects”—in other words, because audition can exceed the bounds of visual space. In his essay “MacNeice, ‘the War’ and the BBC,” Mahon (2012, chap. 14) notes the “close relationship between MacNeice’s poetry and radio work”; both forms, he says, leave “intimate whispers . . . echoing somewhere in the ether.” I argue that the same can be said of Mahon’s work.

4. See Dionne Brand’s (2002) descriptions of listening to BBC radio broadcasts as a child in colonial Trinidad. “Through the . . . broadcasts,” Brand says, “[you are] inhabited by British consciousness. . . . [On the other hand,] the ovular sound of the BBC . . . [tells] you that you are living elsewhere. . . . You have heard it described as an island. . . . You have seen on the borders of maps of islands, natives, nubile and fierce. You are living on an island, banished or uninhabited, or so it seems through the voice of the BBC. You are therefore already mythic” (13, 17).

5. The ban was overturned in 1981 while Mahon was in the midst of composing The Hunt by Night (the volume in which “Morning Radio” [now “Radio Days”] was initially collected). Paul Muldoon produced the first Irish-language radio show on BBC Northern Ireland after the injunction was lifted, and he made significant headway with bilingual programming in subsequent years.

6. The prophesy “[t]hat the world we know / is coming to an end” (“Radio Days” lines 14–15), a sense of finality reinforced by Mahon’s strategically end-stopped line, is further amplified by the reverberations of historical tragedy in the poem. The sounds of “furniture / creak[ing] and slid[ing] on the [art-deco liner’s] decks” (lines 17–18) recall the sinking of the Titanic, a ship built in Belfast’s Harland and Wolff shipyard where Mahon’s grandfather contributed to its construction. Mahon (1991, 27) likes to indulge in the rather morbid fantasy that his grandfather’s handiwork brought down the liner.

7. On this point, see Elmer Kennedy-Andrews’ (2008, 174) Writing Home: “Mahon’s final resting-place, as he makes clear in [Harbour Lights] concluding poem, ‘The Seaside Cemetary’ . . . is in the deterritorialized, paradoxically shifting, symbolic space of the poem itself.

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