A Woman Leaving Twice to Arrive: The Journey as Quest for a Gendered Diasporic Identity in Anne Devlin’s After Easter

• Main Author: Mária Kurdi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses 2010-03-01
• Series: Estudios Irlandeses
• Subjects: Exile; Gender; Other; Diasporic identity; Journey as quest; Storytelling; Northern Ireland
• Online Access: http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Mária_Kurdi.pdf

Nowadays the joint themes of living at the borderland of cultures and responding to the pressures which emerge during the necessary re-formation of identity are treated in an increasing number of literary works. The subject of the present paper is Anne Devlin’s After Easter, a drama which uses the trope of the journey to fuse the constraints of exilic existence with narratives of gender, race and generational tension. My analysis explores how Greta, questor of a new diasporic identity, manages to reinterpret conflicting images and discourses as she confronts them on revisiting her original home country, Troubles-ridden Northern Ireland. By the end of the journey she is able to invent her own story, intertwining concerns of origin and continuity, love of the mother(land) as well as of the Other, and through that she re-constructs her identity as a self-assured migrant.