(A lecture given at the ASLS Conference on The Shape of Texts to Come: The Writing of a New Scotland, on 13th May 2000)

Infinite diversity in new Scottish Writing is an infinite subject, so I'm going to make some general points re. identity and writing, and then I'll narrow it down to the subject of specifically Cultural Diversity in Scottish writing and just what 'Scottish writing' might be today and what it might become tomorrow. Some of what I'm going to say might seem very obvious, but I think that one of the writer's roles in society is to point out the obvious; that the sky turns from blue to black, and back again.

Simplistically, I perceive three dynamics:
1) Scottish writers gazing out and drawing on so-called 'other' societies or literary traditions and incorporating something of these into their own writing. What I call, 'looking out'.

2) Writers who hail from other cultures bringing something of their or their ancestors' experiences with them and those experiences exerting themselves, either consciously or otherwise, in fresh contexts in their writing. I call this, 'moving in'.

3) Writers who dig deep into that which they perceive as being their own, indigenous Scottish culture(s) and who, in doing so, are able to hit the bedrock, as it were. This is what I refer to as, 'digging deep'.
By these processes - looking out, moving in, digging deep - writing becomes indigenised. It becomes perceived as mainstream. That which, in literary terms, was seen as being 'outside' or substratum becomes internalised, manifest.

This has been going on for centuries, from the Druids and the Celtic poets to Michael Scot, the thirteenth century Scottish scholar, lived in Toledo and at the Normano-German-Arab Sicilian court of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, where he translated Aristotle, Averroes and Avicenna from the Arabic into Latin. Margaret Anne Doody states that the internationally respected C17th. French humanist Protestant scholar, Claude de Saumaise ('Salmasius') "traces a clear line of transmission for the European novel. It stemmed ultimately from the Persians, came to Asia Minor (and thence to the classical world), then traveled with the Arabs to Spain, and thence spread through the whole of Europe. It is thus a truly Eastern form of literature. To which all Europeans are to some extent latecomers…"

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1 According to Cerulli who in 1949, published a study in the Vatican City, Dante was almost certainly familiar with the Islamic eschatological story, Il Libro Della Scala (The Book of the Scale). The book was translated from Arabic into Castillian by Ibrahim al-Faquim, a Jewish doctor. It was then translated into Latin as Liber Scalae Machometi. Cerulli has noted and recorded not only the general analogies in structure and narrative between this originally Islamic eschatological work and the Divine Comedy; but also analogies in points of detail. The book was known and read in Italy for several centuries, and it was available in three European languages. 2 Likewise, the work of Boccaccio owes much to Arab/Persian fiction; his Decameron draws upon Eastern literature, such as the Fables of Bidpai and Sindbad the Philosopher. Again, Sicily was a pivotal island for all of this to-ing-and-fro-ing between Greek, Islamic and 'northern' cultures. Cervantes, in Don Quijote, explicitly draws "a line of transmission, suggesting that Western fiction has a Moorish and Arab origin, and, like sacred scripture itself, comes to us from the East. In chapter nine, the translating Moor reads, translates and sometimes indeed interprets what is supposedly the book itself, the narrative about 'Don Quijote', which is written in Arabic by the Moor Cide Hamete Benengeli. Literature about, or by Moors was closely related to the development of prose fiction in Spain." 3 The Sufic Illuminism of another Scottish philosopher, Duns Scotus and the Arabo-Persian-influenced writings of Dante, Boccaccio and Cervantes take us to the brink of the Eighteenth Century.

The Age of Enlightenment also marked the onset of a particular kind of blindness, referred to by Doody in her True Story of the Novel, when she attributes the rise of what she calls, 'Prescriptive Realism' partly to "a general repugnance, a 'natural' aversion especially among the insular and provincial - if colonizing - English, to that which is 'Oriental'. The New Novel would define itself as home-grown, Aryan. The Novel is an inheritor of the epic of Homer - that much is admissible, for 'Homer' is naturalized, and already stands among our cultural claims to superiority." But Homer is deemed 'primitive, 'mere' folk-culture, and does not meet the needs of high culture as a support to imperial greatness". Homer is replaced as an icon by Shakespeare. Doody goes on: "Shakespeare is what the novelists must try (usually, they are told, in vain) to emulate… the English performed a wonderful trick in persuading themselves that 'The Rise of the Novel' took place in England in the eighteenth century. They eliminated the predecessors once so fully acknowledged, along with transmissions outlined by Salmasius and Huet. Such historians had made the foreignness of fiction too visible. That foreignness at the root must be cut off. Only realistic novels could be viewed as literature… The Novel becomes fully domestic, shutting out aliens… it is almost a definition of the kind of "Novel" meant in The Rise of the Novel that we must meet no Muslim characters. If there are Muslim characters, this is not a novel. Western fiction from Boccaccio to Scudery had had Muslim characters…" 4

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Burns, Scott and RLS were perhaps only partly aware of the elements in their work which Gibbon (the author of Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights, as well as of A Scots Quair) would have referred to as "the essential foreign-ness" which was present in much Scottish writing. According to Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott's writing exhibits "an identity crisis engendered by the experience of empire… His Scottish identity was inextricably linked to the experience of dispossession". In Scott's novel, Guy Mannering, the gypsies become custodians of the Scottish folk tradition, blurring the distinction between native and settler. In this novel, Scott encapsulates the Othello complex, "an acute sense of the 'otherness of the Self'; the discovery of his own… reflection in the shadow of colonised man." 5

Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scot's Quair deals with the furrow, the seed of north-east central Scotland, yet his lyrical style, his interweaving of romantic love with historico-political events and with deeper, mythic themes renders to his writing a profound universality. He also penned a cycle of short stories called Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights in which he explores ideas relating to the very roots of civilisation. For part of the book, Gibbon uses a polyglot narrator, Sergei Lubow, possibly in an attempt to subvert orientalist cliches in the heterogeneous city that was, and is, Cairo. In the other half, his filter is a medieval Nestorian Christian bishop. The cycle is crammed to the gunnels with local characters. Gibbon, of course, spent a decade in the armed forces in the Middle East between the world wars, a time of flux and incipient apocalypse. The irony of a crofter's son being part of a colonialist occupying army in the cradle of western civilisation cannot have been lost on Gibbon. Some of the stories border on the magic realist, while others are plainly fantastic. Gibbon was captivated by mythology and by the diffusionist theory of civilisation and his fascination with the flow of time and with transcending reality led him also into the field of science fiction.
Thus, what we might think of as 'Indigenous Scottish Writing' (much like indigenous Scottish people) is actually, by its very nature, of heterogeneous origin.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Scotland - and particularly Glasgow - has been a melting-pot; of religions, ethnicities and, of course, class. All of this liminality did stimulate creativity, but it took its time in coming through and in some respects, it never came through, at all. In the 1930's, the writer Edward Scouller observed that there were "so many Glasgows" that to get it all into one book would have been impossible.

Jonathan Raban, in 'Soft City', says: "The arrival of the immigrant propels him into abstractions and the contemplation of his own internal state of mind. It is a source of transformations and distortions of scale." 6 Lennox Kerr, author of 'Glenshiels', in the 1930's, decried the view:

"… that literature is national, and that a nation [is composed of] men and women with a common heritage, a common culture and a common ideology which comes to them all by their common nationality. Therefore, the Duke of Buccleuch and Willie Gallacher, the Communist MP, are brothers under the skin… This, of course, is nonsense." 7

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But Edward Scouller disagreed, saying:
"I would seriously question whether the Scoto-Irish navvy in Glasgow has more in common with the polish stockyard labourer in Chicago than with his parish priest or even with the Duke of Montrose. Perhaps he ought to have, but a realist artist is more concerned with "is" than "ought"… even if the one world-wide classless state should be achieved, those differences will be valid material for the artist." 8

And according to Catherine Carswell:
"One can never write till one stands outside." 9
The debate as to whether or not literature is national has been a fierce one and has lasted many decades and today perhaps it is as topical as ever (though I feel in a more positive way than before), but it's essentially a surface dialectic.

In Archie Hind's 'The Dear Green Place', Mat Craig's "feeling of self-division" and his sense that "Writers are always other people" would seem familiar today to writers from Minority Ethnic backgrounds, as would Moira Burgess's statement that "… however well the working-class author writes about his or her own milieu, the result is going to be read mainly by middle-class people, who, by definition, won't understand." 10

Following Hind's novel, there has been a river of books written from supposedly 'working-class' perspectives but dilemmas of identity, appropriation and exploitation refuse to go away. In 1987, Craig stated that:
"… for all Scottish writers, as for few English writers until recently, the issue of language has an overwhelming significance that sets their writing quite different problems perhaps from those posed to the English writer. Few Scottish writers are not bilingual and few have not experimented in writing in two of the country's languages. The language of literature for every Scottish writer, is a matter of choice, and those choices form an integral part of the act of writing." 11
Perhaps all creativity stems from a fundamental identity crisis, or at least, from a deep-seated sense of paradox. Economic, ethnic and class structures may affect the manifestation of this, but they are not the primary causes of it.

In digging deep and refusing to acknowledge arbitrary boundaries, writers such as Gibbon, MacDermaid, Gunn, White, Gray, Elphinstone, etc. have been able to draw out mythologies and themes which are universal in their fundamentals and yet infinitely diverse in their execution. It's very Jungian, very Sufi - and that's appropriate, because dreams, meditation and creative writing are closely linked to the extent that, in its initial outpouring, at least, creative writing may be said to be a kind of 'dreaming awake'. The focus might vary, but the picture is the same. Scottish writing (and all writing) is universal, no matter from which direction one approaches it. It issues, broken and bleeding, from the same bedrock.

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The interesting things about Scottish writing - and especially so, at this moment on the threshold of the Twenty-first Century - are the grey areas. If there is any salvation in politics, art and science, it'll be through grey areas, regions of slippage. In cultural terms, this process can occur through any of the three dynamics I've just outlined; looking out, moving in, digging deep. The big bust-ups which have occurred in the literary world in the past, derive, in part, from a denial that the liminal in literature can be approached from any direction. That is why the diversity is potentially infinite. Boundary conditions may apply, but they are extremely malleable. When confronted by the infamous blank page, there are an infinite number of possibilities in terms of what one might attempt to write. Whenever we put pen to paper (or pixel to glass screen), we are engaging in a liminal process and no matter what our conscious aims might be, no matter how carefully-planned our literary project, the entirety of our selves must pour into the piece of writing. Writing is a jondo act. Memory is held in the nerves and muscles - maybe even ancestral memories. It's beyond the rational, beyond even thought. The writer's consciousness of that which they create must not exceed their ability to create it. The problems, the arguments, have arisen when an inflexible version of the scientific method has been applied to forms which by their very natures, are non-rational. This includes the concept of 'identity'. The debate about whether or not Scottish writing is 'exciting' is a necessary one (and is necessarily subjective - but that's in the nature of the beast). For every literary trend or movement in this country, there has been a counter-trend, even if the counter-trends have been less well-known, over the years. Certain themes have been dealt with more adroitly during certain periods than in others, but I would submit that elements of it have always been exciting; it's just that the particular interface with truth which literature attempts to delineate, may alter.

The rich seam of writing by Irish and by Scots Irish writers is so important that it cannot be dealt with (and given any justice) in this talk. I believe Argyle Publishing are soon to bring out a book on the subject. There are Scottish writers of Welsh origin (like A.L Kennedy and Sian Preece, for example) and also writers from various other European countries (like Michel Faber, who is described by the Scottish Arts Council as 'Scottish by formation').

Among would-be (or 'could-have-been') writers from Minority Ethnic backgrounds, class and ethnic identities are interwoven, so that many of the attitudes adopted are actually due to economics but are perceived as being specific attributes of the ethnic group. For example, my perception is that many young men of South Asian origin in Glasgow today would not consider working in the Arts; this has nothing to do with religion or 'culture' but everything to do with economics and the classic 'immigrant' path, from inner-city to suburb, from manual worker to small business-person to pillar of the community. Most of the people came from poor villages in Pakistan or India and now their male children are still perceived as the primary breadwinners and so it's understandable that they would seek careers in the relatively well-paid professions or in business. Art functions at the level of paradox; it implies rebellion. It tends to chomp at the bit of the status quo and is therefore perceived as dangerous by the beneficiaries of the state - which is why they try and buy it. By a strange twist, it seems more acceptable for girls from these communities to enter the Arts (or at least, the 'para-arts'). Aside from Urdu poetry which, being deemed essentially safe, seems exempt and which (at least in Glasgow) is largely the preserve of the first generation of Asians, the Arts as a whole are viewed as largely feminine, largely 'White' territory and thus, as somewhat self-exposing and shameful ('White', that is, in its narrowest, racial sense and not in the transfiguring sense which is something quite different). Anecdotally, I think that this mixture of defensive machismo and a nouveaux riche obsession with conformity and sensate materialism is just beginning to erode, thanks to the success of 'cross-over' music and to the visibility (and irony) of entities like Goodness Gracious Me! and East Is East; as well as to grass-roots projects such as the Pollokshields Writers' Group and the Soul Food Theatre Project; activity in one art-form has generally triggered activity in other art-forms and all of these phenomena are indicators of a growing self-confidence among the British South Asian communities. However, it is no accident, I believe, that much of the hitherto published fiction and poetry from Scottish writers of South Asian origin has been by women.

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