Personification, chremamorphism and the island in Gaelic writing of the past century

Homi Bhabha writes about a homogenising attempt to deprive ‘minorities of those marginal, liminal spaces from which they can intervene in the unifying and totalizing myths of the national culture’. While this statement should evidently be taken as (at least partly) figurative, we could also stubbornly read it more literally in the case of Gaelic writing. The Gaels, as an imagined community (to borrow another commentator’s term for a moment) often write about what we could describe as marginal or liminal spaces. I have previously pointed out the line from the Iain Moireach story ‘Am Partaidh’ (‘The Party’), where his main character claims that Gaels are only at home while travelling between places.