Invoked Great Mothers and Socionational Rebirth: Comparative Mythopoesis of Heaney and Al-Sayyāb

Abstract

"The distinctive imaginative narratives, characters, and events of ancient myths and legends have furnished many writers with inspiration for their literary treatment of major social, national, and political concerns. Old myths about deities such as Gaia, Ishtar, Isis, and Nerthus, whom the ancients associated with the land and abundant harvest, are myths of archetypal great mothers of the land that have persevered in their cultural power. Many twentieth-century poets responding to social unrest and political oppression in their societies used archetypes and images of the great mother goddess to invoke her reviving qualities. Ireland and Iraq were just two of the many countries that faced social and political instability in the twentieth century as a legacy of colonialism, and Irish and Iraqi poets such as Seamus Heaney and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb were products of colonial violence. Both Heaney and al-Sayyāb lived in exile and observed the social, economic, and political decay of their home countries. Finding in the myth of the great mother a hope to reform their ruined worlds, they used that myth in their poetry in hopes of inspiring social and political rebirth in these societies."