NOMADIC MEMORY AND REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN EAVAN BOLAND’S THE HISTORIANS

This article aims to explore Eavan Boland’s The Historians (2020) through the lens of Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic memory. In this posthumously published poetry collection, Boland brings together the marginalised and mostly forgotten stories of Irish women so as to reject their silenced and monolithic representation in traditional narratives such as history and official documents. While doing so, Boland uses the power of memory and fuses the act of remembering with imaginative recreations. The act of remembering Boland presents in The Historians is in line with nomadic remembering in that it provides mobility and fluidity for female subject positions, and eventually problematises the essentialist representations that are supported in the dominant patriarchal discourse of history. Accordingly, this paper argues that read through Braidotti’s notion of nomadic memory, Boland, in The Historians, uses nomadic memory to develop female nomadic subjects with fluid identities and their own history.