ABSTRACT
Introduction Shakespeare’s Lear and the speaker of Carson’s ‘Belfast Confetti’ voice a shared sense of irritation at the perceived rupture, ‘the discrepancy between a private and a social self ’ (Boesch 2007: 6), which constitutes an identity discontinuity predicated by forces external to the speakers. Confronted with a face-threatening act that questions his habitual right to self-determination, King Lear counters with a dialectic (speech) act of defiance. Demanding an answer to his iconic question ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’, Lear asserts the ‘I’ as a stable entity and, by extension, as a sovereign source of self-knowledge. Yet, his question implies that the construction of a sense of self is necessarily mediated through interaction with meaningful others, and the challenges their (re-)actions pose to the way in which the ‘I’ perceives its essence, its ‘self ’. Similarly, the speaker in ‘Belfast Confetti’ is painfully cognisant of this space of interference between his sense of self and the external world. The continuous interrogations of his cultural identity carried out by the Northern Irish security forces1 have eroded his sense of self to such an extent that they have become the cornerstones of an auto-aggressive form of self-questioning. Not only has he lost his bearings in a Belfast he can no longer ‘read’ because its troubled topography has become ‘A fount of broken type’ (‘Belfast Confetti’ l.2) and has ceased to coincide with his mental map of Belfast. Equally, he can no longer voice his subject position in the idiosyncratic language of the self, which has been overwritten by the register of locally-situated identity politics.
