(Talk given to the ‘Gender, Fictions, Power’ Conference, University of Strathclyde, 2003)

Good morning, everybody and welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here, and thanks to the organisers for inviting me.

I’ve come straight from the august sonic architecture of BBC Scotland’s Colin MacKay Programme, and so I still may be in fruity-voiced radio mode, so if from time-to-time I slip into invisibility, please just close your eyes and listen. I’ll know you’re not falling asleep!

I would like to dedicate this talk to my friend, the poet, comedy-writer, journalist and kick-boxer, Sameena Jamil, who died last year at Hampden Park Football Ground where she was addressing a Youth Conference.

To give you some idea of ‘where I’m coming from’, and to get you into the mood, I’m going to read a piece which I wrote for a book called ‘Being Scottish’, which was published in August by Edinburgh University Press. The editors, respected historian Tom Devine and community, peace and civil rights worker and ex-priest Paddy Logue, asked a hundred people from various walks of life to write 800 words on what ‘Being Scottish’ meant to them.

Read piece:

Recently, a journalist, writing in the Sunday Herald, slated the book, and in particular, singled out my essay, which he described as a ‘dud’. He called for more pieces by retired armed services generals and admirals and captains of industry, stating that, quote: “If Scotland has any international reputation it is as the land who produced Adam Smith, Joseph Black, James Watt, David Brewster, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin and a swarm of others who tackled the hard and difficult things and shaped human society.” End of Quote. He also called for the inclusion of “senior policemen”, to replace what he termed ‘the vapourings’ of poets and novelists. Presumably, this journalist either does not consider it possible for a woman to be a senior police officer (tell that to retired Assistant Chief Constable Sandra Hood) or that their views are of no consequence. Presumably also, the inclusion in the book of pieces by Susan Rice, CE of Lloyds TSB Scotland, the Duke of Buccleugh, Hugh Pennington, Prof. of Bacteriology, medical scientist Anna Paterson, Fauzia Davidson, science researcher, Tam Dalyell, politician, Sandy Grant Gordon, whisky manufacturer, as well as a host of other chief execs. did not seem to matter. I give this example because it is an illustration of how too many people in positions of power and influence do not really consider the struggle for democracy, equity and representation in this country an important one. If he had, then surely, in his litany of ‘Great Scots’, this journo would have mentioned the likes of Amy Sanderson, Theresa Billington, Helen Fraser, Flora Drummond, Bessie Semple, Rose Witcop and Drs Marion Gilchrist, Elizabeth Chalmers Smith and Nora Wattie. And in case these names sound unfamiliar, it’s no accident, since these were some of Glasgow’s leading early and mid-C20th suffragettes, doctors and other campaigners for the rights of women. Women gaining the vote for themselves, instituting effective family planning and helping to overturn the unbelievably high mortality rates which were normal at the beginning of the C20th seems, in the world-view of such reviewers, of no consequence whatsoever. As Elspeth King enunciates powerfully and accurately in her book, Glasgow’s Women in a process that she calls, ‘The Thenew Factor’ after Glasgow’s original ‘mother saint’ figure, these histories have been ignored, suppressed, and remain largely uncelebrated. And in this context, I welcome ‘Black History Month’, which has just begun. Devine and Logue’s book was not attacked because it included voices such as lawyer Donald Finlay, engineering giant CEO Euan Baird and millionaire entrepreneur businessman Tom Hunter, it was slammed largely on the basis that it also included the voices of those who have been considered less important, either because they belong to gay or black people or to women, or because at some level, they work to try and effect progressive change in human society. If you’re attacked in this manner in the media organs of those who hold power, it’s usually a sign that you have stood up and that your head is now most definitely above the level of the parapet. Gender, Culture, Power; past and present; Gender, Fictions, Identity. This goes to the root of what we’re here to explore this weekend. 

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I’m going to briefly mention Scottish writing in terms of its historical interaction with literatures from some other parts of the world, and then I’ll talk about a community project which I had the honour and privilege to set up and run for eighteen months.

In keeping with the numerologically significant trope running through this conference of everything coming at us in threes, let’s call my talk, ‘Three Triggers, Three Processes: The Route to Infinity’. 

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 bedrock. 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 through Michael Scot, the thirteenth century Scottish scholar, who lived in Toledo and at the Normano-German-Arab court in Sicily of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, where he translated Aristotle, Averroes and Avicenna from the Arabic into Latin. The internationally respected C17th. French humanist Protestant scholar, Claude de Saumaise traces a clear line of transmission for the European novel: it stemmed ultimately from Persia. 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. And from this point, of course, any acknowledgement of such processes becomes abruptly denied, and in the new mythology of ‘Western Christian’ hegemony we are led to believe that the novel was invented by a handful of Englishmen.

 Right: Three triggers to writing: what might they be? Well, there’s really no right or wrong answer here. For me, at various times, the three might be anger, love and fear, or they might be love, death and music. Let’s take the first lot. All three - anger, love and fear – may be pre-requisites for the physical, creative act that is writing. They are only starting-points, of course, triggers. At some level, writing can be therapeutic and in my experience, it must burst, broken and bleeding, from the cold bedrock of our imperfection. Even communal, stylised forms possess an inherent pain as well as an aesthetic beauty; the rigour of the stylisation acts as a kind of pressurised kiln. Amnesia creates false histories; at some level we are reconnecting with the work of the ancient African writers like Apuleius (author of Metamorphoses) and with texts such as the Aithiopika by the Syrian writer, Heliodorus in which the central character is an Ethiopian woman called Charikleia who is a kind of ‘everywoman’ who asserts the power to resist and the power to create change, and with the Persians who inverted the western novel, three thousand years ago, and with the Druidic and Celtic poets who were distinct from the tribal Celtic bards. Cultures have never been impermeable and historically, the most inventive, successful and vibrant cultures have been those which have had the most holes. Someone should tell that to those politicians of little vision who even today, deign to ‘play the race card’ in search of bottom-of-the-barrel votes and also to those tabloid newspapers which act as de facto censors and which are hegemonic, anti-democratic, regressive organs which are antithetical to the heterogeneous Britain which has always existed and which will outlive and transcend them all.

Now I would like to mention a ‘grassroots’ project, the Pollokshields Writers’ Group, which I had the privilege to set up and run with the help of a Millennium Commission Award and subsequently Glasgow City Council funding.

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What were my reasons for setting it up? Well, when I started writing, about 10 years ago, there seemed to be no Black writers in Glasgow; actually, there were a few, but I had no way of knowing that, nor any way of knowing how to go about knowing it. I felt that a similar writer who was beginning to try to write now, ought to be able to leap that hurdle more adroitly than I, and so I set it up, partly as a way of ‘seeding’ a network and also for a sense of solidarity. Why is that important? I grew up in Glasgow in the 1970’s, when racism ran naked and untrammelled through all layers of society. This can lead to a real sense of alienation and a fragmentation of the personality, with all the negative consequences stemming thereof. In the words of the song by The Verve: I can be a million different people from one day to the next… It’s important to combat that process, to centre oneself. There’s no doubt that for me, writing was (and is) a way of doing that. It’s a lot more than that - it has to be, to lift itself, “by the bootlaces” (to quote Archie Hind) from the psychotherapeutic into major art and then beyond that, into the ‘high emptiness’ to which Kenneth White refers or the naked Sufic unity of Rumi. There was a real need for a group like this, and the response was very encouraging.

Funding was obtained from the Lottery-distributing Millennium Commission, via the  Glasgow New Opportunities Millennium Fund (through Community Service Volunteers) to set up and run the group for six months. I mail-shotted about 100 community organisations throughout Glasgow, with posters and postcards and a letter. The Group was sited in Pollokshields because of the relatively high concentration of people of South Asian origin living there, and because the library had a room with a door. Privacy is very important in this context.

Over 30 people wanted to come to the group. Ultimately, there was a pool of around 20 - and about seven to twelve were at every meeting. I did some didactic work and some free writing at the start. But later the writers were bringing in so much material, there was hardly enough time to go over even that! The work ranged from hard or tender social realism to acted-out comedy sketches to material of a more spiritual nature. It spanned the whole range, from hard urban realism to spiritual, lyrical, comedic pieces and from travel journalism to rap to the beginnings of scripts for the theatre. Issues relating to the joys, difficulties and the humour of living within and between several cultures at once were evinced in the writing. The realities of racism and sexism were approached in varying ways, while I detected also a celebration of a new kind of Britishness and of Scottishness, a broad concept of identity which is robust and inclusive and self-defined and which looks forwards as well as back. We are Scottish because we say we are - and that’s enough. All of human life was inherent in the work produced by the PWG. Some of the writers drew on their facilities with other languages - Punjabi, Urdu and Scots Gaelic. It is through slippages, linkages, juxtapositions such as these that major art can emerge.

When I ran the Group, the distribution of ethnicity was probably roughly 50% of South Asian origin and 50% of combined African-Caribbean, Irish, Scots Gaelic, English and Majority Ethnic Scots origin. The age distribution ranged from 17 to 70’s, but most were in their 20’s and 30’s. 85% were women.

I brought in loads of books, mainly fiction and poetry and also ‘How-to’ books, by writers from all over the world and I would lay them out on tables close to the windows so that people could browse through them and also borrow them if they so wished, and they formed a kind of backdrop of vicarious guest-writers. If you feel you’re in friendly company, you’re more likely to do your best creatively.

Actual guest-writers also visited the group, including Valerie Thornton on poetry, ‘High Road’ scriptwriter, playwright and novelist Chris Dolan on film and TV writing, novelist and poet Jackie Kay on the novel, writer-presenter Sanjeev Kohli (who wrote for Chewing the Fat and Goodness Gracious Me!) on Comedy Writing, Creative Writing Tutor Elizabeth Reeder on pushing the envelope of one’s creativity and re-defining the concept of the literary canon, BBC Scotland Radio Drama Development Producer David Neville on writing radio-plays, and visual artist/sculptor Kate Robinson and poet Gerry Loose who together ran a participative workshop with the Group on the theme of concrete (or ‘plastic’) poetry. We also had talks on journalism and storytelling.

I handed out a questionnaire at the start. The writers’ reasons for coming consisted of mostly “to improve my writing skills” and also, “to meet with other writers” and “to know whether or not I can do this”. Most said that they were interested in writing prose fiction, yet much of the material brought in was actually poetry. During the sessions, the issue was raised of creating a space for themes such as racism and feminism to be discussed as pertaining to the work brought in.

Most of the material brought in was written in Standard English, but as time went on, there were a few pieces with some words of Punjabi and Scots Gaelic in them, though during my time with the Group at any rate, there was no interior monologue in languages other than standard English. I am not fluent or literate in any language other than English, but I do understand a certain amount of Urdu, Scots and French and this awareness, I believe (and this is echoed by many, among them the writer and thinker, George Steiner) does give those of us who are at some level multilingual access to other mindscapes since every tongue has a different conception of the universe. So I can come at English from varying angles and can chop up and re-assemble the language in new ways which might communicate thoughts to the reader in a novel and possibly illuminating manner.

A substantial amount of the group’s work was published by Survivors’ Poetry Scotland in an issueof Nomad magazine in 2000, which I co-edited. Publication is a form of validation; it is a conduit for getting inside other people’s heads, for creating a kind of psychic unity, as mind meld.

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I involved a Community Artist, Jane Thakoordin, in the group’s work for three months. I wanted to allow the group to evince the links between text and visual art. Some of the people who had brought in no written work created a lot of visual art during these sessions. The group had an exhibition, Face-to-Face: Different Visions, Common Voices, which was launched in June 2000 at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow and which subsequently was exhibited also at Pollokshields Library.

Because of work and family commitments, and the fact that I desperately needed time for my own writing, after running the Group for 18 months, I left it in the hands of the Group members, in particular, Shameem Akhtar and Sheila Puri. This was one of my original intentions. Subsequently, the Group has continued as the Pollokshields Writers’ Collective, and they meet now in the Pollokshields Community Centre. Some of the writers’ work has been published in various magazines and broadcast on BBC radio and I believe, a self-published book is due out soon featuring the work of the writers. One of the writers has penned a book in Urdu script, and we have worked together, he and I, to produce a creative translation of these poems into English. We will approach a publisher once it’s tidied up. Visual artist, Ranjana Thapalyal whose exhibition and project, ‘Talacchanda’ was launched to great acclaim earlier this week at the Tramway, was also part of the Group for a while, and contributed very positively to its ambience. I’d like to think that in some synaesthetic way, the process was mutually beneficial.

I saw this group as a mechanism for scattering seedlings into the mainstream, into the manifest future of Scottish writing. I also saw it as establishing a network for mutual support, both in artistic terms and in the broader sense. Writing is a very solitary activity, a form of contemplation, and as the women and men who became Egyptian and Celtic Christian hermits discovered, this necessary solitude needs a counter-balance if it is not to become a recipe for paranoia.

I think that in fifty years’ time, when we (or ‘people like us’) will be surveying the development of literature and the arts in Scotland over the course of the early 21st Century, these projects, together with the work of New Writing Scotland, Talacchanda and of ice-breaking authors such as Jackie Kay, Luke Sutherland, Matthew Fitt, Anne Donovan, Janet Paisley, Liz Lochhead, Leila Aboulela, Sheila Puri, Elizabeth Reeder, Christopher Whyte, Tony Davidson and others will be seen as extremely important in the development of new, old voices in Scottish writing. We write, in part, to draw sense from our world, from our communities, and to seek our place within those frameworks. Through fictions, we attempt to define, and re-define, the world, to identify flows of power, knowledge and the nexus of our individual and collective identities. Through the characters which we create and the alternative worlds through which they move, whether or not we realise or admit it, we explore gender, power, knowledge; past, present, future; evolution, revolution; performance, spectacle, nation, voice.

One could construct almost any argument about writing, and one would probably not be wrong. The only argument which, I feel, would be inaccurate would be the one which views Scottish writing as being defined by some boundary or other, rather than by the immensity of the imagination. The more one tries to hem it in, the more one cannot fail to notice connections and micro and macro syntheses. Identity, and the ‘identity’ of writing are intimately tied up with the actual process of writing; neither will be trammelled. 

The use of language in physicality which is writing offers a multiplicity of different perspectives. This dynamic is impossible to repress or suppress and this is something to be welcomed. Kennedy and Gioia (American academics in the field of literature and creative writing) state that “for a writer, the gift of words is ‘the right inheritance’, even if those words are, for an immigrant poet, sometimes in a different language from that of one’s parents; the debate between ethnicity and universality has echoed among American writers of every racial and religious minority. There is, ultimately, no one correct answer to the questions of identity, for individual artists need the freedom to pursue their own imaginative vision. But considering the issues of ethnicity does help a poet think through the artist’s sometimes conflicting responsibilities between group and personal identity. Even in poets who have pursued their individual vision, we often see how unmistakably they write from their racial, social, cultural background. We inherit our bodies as well as our cultures. Our body represents our genetic inheritance that goes back to the beginning of time.” End of quote.
Whether we like it or not, whether we define ourselves as that, or not, every one of us, as writers, as people, arise from shifting, mixed contexts. Our art is both a reflection of this and an extension of it.

The moment something is written down, it has become part of an ordered universe and has the potential to go anywhere and to exist, far into the future. Its contexts will change, and the interaction between Word and context will be infinitely diverse. Let’s not have narrow definitions which shut out half the world; national and temporal boundaries are fluid. Both our literary history and our literary future depends on interchange. History consists of stories of mixture and variety, of boundary-crossing and changing. Such mixing, creativity, exuberance is the antithesis of oppression, war and death. From the waters of the Yangtze and the Indus to the Tigris and Euphrates, even as today they turn blood-red, to those of Forth, Clyde, Amazon, Potomac, it represents, to quote Margaret Anne Doody, “the ultimate despair of Fascismus, it is proof that there is life before death.”

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