I am the dotted lines on the map.' Thus starts Fleur Adcock's poem 'Paths,' included in Below Loughrigg (1979), a poem that conveys much about her way of negotiating the conflicting allegiances that have been at the centre of much of her work, especially those concerned with the issues of time and space as related to her own sense of identity. Since her return to England in 1963, Adcock's poems have increasingly unveiled her sense of an identity split between New Zealand--her country of birth, and which saw her grow as an adolescent and become a wife and a mother--Ireland--the land of her ancestors--and Britain--also the land of her ancestors, where she spent most of her childhood during the difficult years of the Second World War, and where she decided to move for good in the early 1960s. However, in her latest work, especially since her collection entitled Time-Zones (1991), Adcock has shown a new understanding of her own sense of identity, not as conflicting diversity, but as being defined through the dialogic relationship between differences of nationality, (hi)story and, since the 1980s, of gender. This emphasis on a dialogic sense of identity is also characteristic of recent definitions of ethnicity. These new definitions try to undermine the previous essentialist identification of centre/margin with the white/black binary and argue that 'the idea that only some ethnic groups are 'ethnic' and not others can be seen to be fallacious' (Ashcroft et al., p. 213). In Other Britain, Other British (1995), A. Robert Lee aligns himself with this new concept of ethnicity by including in the definition of British ethnicity not only the voices of writers with black or Asian origins, but also what he refers to as 'other shaping ethnicities, among them Jewish, Irish, Chinese, or New Zealand-Australian' (p. 2). It seems to me that it is only within this new definition of British ethnicity that the writing of Fleur Adcock can be understood as ethnic and contributing to shape the ever-changing map of multicultural Britain.
