'Those pitiable prisoners you brought in?are they the enemy I must fear? Is that what you say? You are the enemy, Colonel!' I can restrain myself no longer. I pound the desk with my fist. 'You are the enemy, you have made the war, and you have given them all the martyrs they need?starting not now but a year ago when you committed your first filthy barbarities here! History will bear me out!'
'Nonsense. There will be no history, the affair is too trivial.' He seems impassive, but I am sure I have shaken him.
'You are an obscene torturer! You deserve to hang!'
'Thus speaks the judge, the One Just Man,' he murmurs.
We stare into each other's eyes.
'Now,' he says, squaring the papers before him: 'I would like a statement on everything that passed between you and the barbarians on your recent and
unauthorized visit to them.'
'I refuse.'
'Very well. Our interview is over.' He turns to his subordinate. 'He is your
responsibility.' He stands up, walks out. I face the warrant officer.
The wound on my cheek, never washed or dressed, is swollen and inflamed. A crust like a fat caterpillar has formed on it. My left eye is a mere slit, my nose a shapeless throbbing lump. I must breathe through my mouth.
I lie in the reek of old vomit obsessed with the thought of water. I have had
nothing to drink for two days.
In my suffering there is nothing ennobling. Little of what I call suffering is even pain. What I am made to undergo is subjection to the most rudimentary needs of my body: to drink, to relieve itself, to find the posture in which it is least sore. When Warrant Officer Mandel and his man first brought me back here and lit the lamp and closed the door, I wondered how much pain a plump comfortable old man would be able to endure in the name of his eccentric notions of how the Empire should conduct itself. But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints
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284 8 / EAVAN BOLAND
of salt water are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself. They did not come to force the story out of me of what I had said to the barbarians and what the barbarians had said to me. So I had no chance to throw the high-sounding words I had ready in their faces. They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal.
1980
EAVAN BOLAND
b. 1944 Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, the youngest daughter of an Irish diplomat and a painter, but as recalled in 'Fond Memory' and other poems, she was displaced as a six-year-old from Ireland to London, where her father was Irish ambassador, and then to New York, where he was his country's representative at the United Nations, before finally returning to Ireland in adolescence. She attended convent schools in these various locations. In Ireland she studied?and then taught?English at Trinity College, Dublin, and since then she has taught at University College, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University.
Boland said in a 1994 lecture, 'I am an Irish poet. A woman poet. In the first category I enter the tradition of the English language at an angle. In the second, I enter my own tradition at an even more steep angle.' The great puzzle of Boland's career has been how to embrace Irish identity while rejecting certain male-centered assumptions that have long dominated Irish literary culture. For Boland as a young woman writer, the frozen, mythical images of the Irish nation as an idealized woman? Mother Ireland, Dark Rosaleen, Cathleen Ni Houlihan?were inhibiting and insufficient. To bring into Irish verse a national narrative, a 'herstory' that interweaves private life and public life, Boland seized on an alternative tradition to that of Irish male poets?namely, the example of American women poets such as Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. Her eye for symbolic detail, her ear for musical structure, her use of form to mirror content have served her well in her effort to recover and vivify Irish women's historical experiences, including domestic labor, motherhood, famine, prostitution, and emigration.
Fond Memory
It was a school where all the children wore darned worsted;0 woolen fabric where they cried?or almost all?when the Reverend Mother announced at lunch-time that the King1 had died
peacefully in his sleep. I dressed in wool as well, ate rationed food, played English games and learned how wise the Magna Carta was, how hard the Hanoverians2
1. King George VI of the United Kingdom died in 2. Family of English monarchs who reigned from 1952. Boland's father was a diplomat, and she 1714 to 1901. 'Magna Carta': charter of English spent much of her childhood in London. liberties granted by King John in 1215.
.
THA T TH E SCIENC E O F CARTOGRAPH Y I S LIMITE D / 284 9 had tried, the measure and complexity of verse, the hum and score of the whole orchestra. At three-o-clock I caught two buses home 10 where sometimes in the late afternoon at a piano pushed into a corner of the playroom my father would sit down and play the slow islilts of Tom Moore3 while I stood there trying not to weep at the cigarette smoke stinging up from between his fingers and?as much as I could think? I thought this is my country, was, will be again, this upward-straining song made to be our safe inventory of pain. And I was wrong. 1987
That the Science of Cartography1 Is Limited
?and not simply by the fact that this shading of forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam, the gloom of cypresses is what I wish to prove.
