Mangas Coloradas and the Challenge of Semantic Repatriation in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon

In this article, I examine Paul Muldoon’s interest in the nineteenth-century Apache leader Mangas Coloradas. The recurrence of this figure in Muldoon’s poetry reflects his well-known fascination with indigenous American history and culture but, I argue, must also be understood in relation to recent debates about cultural appropriation, derogatory place names, and the repatriation of indigenous artifacts and remains. While recognising the sensitive issues at play when Muldoon writes about – and even in the voices of – indigenous American figures, I show how his poems about Mangas Coloradas reveal a complex awareness of the processes by which indigenous names are appropriated by non-indigenous actors, emptied of their content, and turned into commodities of different kinds. These poems also exemplify the poet’s technique of combining the cinematic with what he calls the ‘imharragistic’, or the bleeding of one image into another. Through the dynamic play of images flowing together and cinematic shifts from scene to scene, Muldoon’s Mangas poems ultimately perform a crucial act of self-awareness that invites us to imagine the political and poetic possibilities of ‘semantic repatriation’.