Derek Mahon, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford: memoria e paesologia

Abstract

This essay focuses on A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, the most celebrated poem by Northern Ireland poet Derek Mahon, which appeared in his 1975 collection The Snow Party. The disused shed of the poem, a relic of the vanished golden age of British colonization, is a syncretic place that brings together memories of Peruvian mines, Indian compounds and elements of the Irish landscape. The hotel in the poem has been abandoned "since civil war days", that is, since the conflict that took place in Ireland between June 1922 and May 1923. But the text has as its historical backdrop the late-nineteenth-century troubles: the brutal conflict that between the 1960s and 1998 involved the British army and Irish paramilitary groups, Catholic Republicans and Protestant loyalists. The mushrooms covering what remains of a shed close to the burnt-out hotel are equated with the victims of Treblinka and Pompeii and recall the forgotten victims of other historical catastrophes. The poet rescues these wretched forms of life from oblivion by becoming the "individual who remembers" (Halbawchs) and reconstructing the collective memory of humanity through intertextual and syncretic memory.

Through a close reading of the text and a comparison of the hotel metaphor as it appears in Mahon’s poem and J.G. Farrell's novel Troubles, the essay sheds light on the "regime of historicity" (Hartog) of contemporary Ireland, that is, the way a society treats its past and speaks of it. Mahon acts in the awareness that we must re-familiarize with all the words of memory and suffering that have been captured and are "waiting to be liberated" (Ricoeur).