Christine O'Dowd-Smyth  (Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland)
Comparative postcolonialisms: A comparative literature study of postcolonial Irish literature, written in Engish, and North African francophone literature

The Republic of Ireland tends to perceive itself nowadays almost by definition as a postcolonial society, but is perhaps uncomfortable with any comparisons made between it and other countries that are in the process of emerging from the process of decolonisation, particularly if those countries, like Algeria and Morocco, are situated in the Third World.

However, Edward Said has pointed out that there are many echoes and parallels between the Irish, Algerian, Indian and Palestinian experiences of colonisation, in each case the aftermath of decolonisation has triggered similar postcolonial pathologies such as neo-colonial dependence on the former coloniser, one-party rule, religious extremism, the inferior status or silencing of women and internal strife, particularly in both Ireland and Algeria. Said recommended the application of postcolonial theory as an enabling tool in order to study the effects of colonisation on these countries.

Irish psychologist Marie Murray has recently written in The Irish Times that the 'fractures' wrought by colonialism on a society cannot be healed by Independence, colonisation takes its toll on a society; post-colonial freedom does not begin when the coloniser leaves – there is a post-colonial legacy to be dealt with.

Said concluded that what is necessary for the true emergence of a nation's postcolonial identity, is that its people admit to these problems and resist them. In both Ireland and the Maghreb, English and French respectively were the carriers of a set of colonial values. Now, both languages, paradoxically, have become the vehicle for writers to come to terms with their countries colonial legacy and to examine the process of decolonisation.

Postcolonial writers from both Ireland & the Maghreb could be described as 'écrivains engagés' – or writers who have a sense of writing as mission: in each case depicting a fractured society resolutely turned in on itself, its religion and its tradition, its face set firmly against modernity. The language of the former coloniser is in turn re-appropriated and re-worked as the conduit for the oral & traditional culture at the same time as it asserts the individual's separation from that culture in his or her quest for modernity.

What I propose to do in this paper is to adopt the comparative analysis of cross-colony identification as a transnational methodological tool to establish parallels between postcolonial Irish literature, written in English, and postcolonial Algerian & Moroccan literature, written in French. Through a comparative examination of Amongst Women by John Mc Gahern, Le fleuve détourné by Rachid Mimouni, The Field by John B. Keane and Le soleil des obscurs by Abdelkak Serhane with further references to texts by Patrick Kavanagh and Tahar Ben Jelloun, it will be established that place and displacement are the unifying themes of all these literatures, and that through the act of writing displacement, the lack of voice and the problematic of identity in the language of the former coloniser, writing becomes a process of re-placement or re-imagining of post-nationalist identity.