Abstract

This article aims to delve into the gendered nature of Mary O’Malley’s and Marga do Val’s poetry on displacement and migration, so as to assess the female subject’s questioning of notions such as home, belonging, mobility and otherness. In spite of these writers’ different national and cultural backgrounds, the common history of massive emigration from Galicia and Ireland allows us to hypothesize that their poetry and contemporary reflections on displacement are mutually relevant, as former research on Irish and Galician women’s mobility has indicated (Lorenzo-Modia 2016, Acuña 2014). As each writer is analysed, their most significant and germane propositions are identified. This allows us to conclude that there is a will to connect the theme of migration to the writers’ autobiographical experience of mobility and that O’Malley and do Val are thoroughly aware of the relation between past and present flows of emigration and immigration.