How to Silence a Woman Writer #1 "Dirt, spit and poetry"

How to Silence a Woman Writer #1 "Dirt, spit and poetry"

Imagine a woman who wanted to be a writer, but didn't dare write when her husband was around.
Too far-fetched? Not in this day and age? Well, I know one that happened to. Here in Scotland. Not that she got much of a chance to write anyway, with a houseful of kids. So she'd wait till the wee ones were in bed. Then she'd wait till her man was asleep, creep downstairs, quietly shutting all the doors. Holed up in the living room she'd tap out stories on a small portable typewriter. But typewriters are noisy, clattery buggers. Even wee portable ones. So she'd balance it on a pillow on her knee to stifle the clickety-clack of the keys. For a while it worked. She started to get her stories published in magazines. Then he copped on to her infidelity. Burst in one night, caught her red-handed. In a rage he battered the typewriter off the walls. Then he battered her. The typewriter was broken beyond repair. But the writer wasn't. She eventually escaped the husband - not without a lot of difficulty - saved for a new typewriter and now has poetry collections, novels and prizes to her name.

Then there's Salma. Salma had the misfortune of being born a girl in India. Her father wasn't interested in another daughter, so she was given away to be looked after by a cousin in another village. That cousin was five years old. When Salma herself turned five she was sent back to her parents so she could go to school. But at 13 she started to menstruate, and was taken out of education.  Her fate as a woman was simply to be a wife. And until she accepted a husband she would be confined to the family house. She steadfastly refused to be wed. So she was kept locked in. Until her early 20s when her parents tricked her into a forced marriage.

Life as a married woman didn't bring freedom though. In her new home she was once more kept in confinement by her in-laws. But through 25 years of what was essentially house arrest she was allowed to read, and had access to books from the local library. So she read widely. Dostoevsky. Tolstoy. Camus. Her mind travelled and grew, and soon she started to write poetry. Secretly. On any scraps of paper she could find. The backs of old calendars. On discarded newspapers. Sometimes she got her hands on notebooks. And when her husband found the notebooks and scraps she'd squirrelled away, what did he do? He ripped them up. He destroyed them. So Salma started over again. Infuriated, he threatened her. He would beat her, he said. But she continued to write. He'd throw acid in her face while she slept, he said.

Salma is beautiful. A serene, calm presence. Perhaps, like the American poet Audre Lorde she had reached that point Audre reached when she wrote her famous essay, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. In it Audre wrote, "Your silence will not protect you." Six words I find infinitely powerful. (EDITED LATER: I've just discovered the quote should be attributed to Adrienne Rich in 1976.) The poet may as well use her voice, Lorde explains, for the injustices will continue whether or not she speaks out. Salma was not going to be silenced.

Magi with Salma
Glasgow Women's Library 2014

When confronted with the threat of acid, she slept with her baby hugged close to her face, trusting that her husband would not assault her with the child there. It worked. And she kept writing. Her mother smuggled her poems out in the folds of saris being taken to the laundry, and on instructions from Salma, sent them to a literary magazine. The editor recognised her extraordinary voice, the poems were published, and if you'd like to know how Salma's story unfolded, and how she eventually helped change the lives of other Tamil girls and women, listen to this podcast I made after you've finished reading the blog. The recording I made talking about Salma's story for the Dangerous Women project. There is also a documentary about Salma, made by Kim Longinotto.

Both these stories are true.

Both are about living women poets whose voices would have been silenced but for their extraordinary bravery and tenacity.

The first took place a few decades ago in Scotland. The second from not very long ago in India.

In writing groups I've tutored I've often worked with women whose husbands or partners were opposed to, or 'not keen' on, them writing. Of course, writing can be threatening for a partner, regardless of whether it's the man or woman taking it up. There can be fear of unwanted exposure, of revelations about private lives and emotions, fear of betrayals. Fear that the partner might grow and change through writing,  a very real and grounded fear, because they often do.

And Salma did write of the intimacies of her life as a Tamil woman living in an arranged marriage. Sensitively, brutally, beautifully.

A Midnight Tale

These nights
following the children’s birth
you seek, dissatisfied,
within the nakedness you know so well,

my once unblemished beauty.
You are much repelled,
you say,
by a thickened body
and a belly crisscrossed with birthmarks;
my body, though, is unchanging
you say
today, hereafter and forevermore.

My voice, deep-buried
in the valley of silence,
mutters to itself:

True indeed,
your body is not like mine:
it proclaims itself,
it stands manifest.

Before this too,
your children, perhaps, were born
in many places, to many others;
you may be proud
you bear no traces of their birth.

And what must I do?
These birthmarks cannot be
repaired, any more than my own decline—
this body isn’t paper
to cut and paste together, or restore.

Nature has been
more perfidious to me
than even you;
but from you began
the first stage of my downfall.

More bizarre
than the early hours of night
is the hour past midnight
when dreams teem.

It is now, at this midnight hour
the tiger which sat quietly
within the picture on the wall
takes its place at my head
and stares
and stares.

(Translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom)

It is undeniable - and some would say almost inevitable - that power imbalance will exist within a marriage or, indeed, any relationship. It is also undeniable that historically within marriage that imbalance has almost always been in favour of the man. As Friedrich Engels wrote in Origins of Family, Private Property and the State in 1884:

"In an old unpublished manuscript, written by Marx and myself in 1846, I find the words: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children.” And today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male."

So it should not surprise us that a writing woman might be seen as a threat to a marriage, and that her husband, even in the early twenty-first century might try to block her development. Whoever has the upper hand in a power relationship will inevitably favour the status quo. Change presents threat.

And although middle and upper middle class women writers like Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (author of amongst many other feminist tracts, the famous short story, The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892) did meet with adversity as writers in the masculine literary world of their era, I would argue that working class women today often feel most sharply the dark undertow of deep-rooted oppressive attitudes. After all, their voices are not only outside the establishment like the working class voices in the writing of, for example, James Kelman and Tom Leonard, but they're also, in that other sub-class, the one that makes up 50% of the population. Women.

Edinburgh poet Sandie Craigie (1963 - 2005), whose unique voice is sorely missed in the Scottish poetry world, captured this double oppression in this prose poem.

A Good Man by Sandie Craigie
  

Gie him aes due, never laid a finger oan mi, never lifted his hand. When he met me ah wiz shy an blushin an aw that shit, ah wiz sixteen. Ah wizny a fuckin wimp tho, an ah wizny inti marij or that ken, or huvin things, or styin poot – anywhere. Ah sez "ivry man wants ti make yi his fuckin mother" he sez that's what he liked aboot mi, ah wiz difrint. Blusht like a virgin, tawkt like a skeemy, thoat like a fuckin hippy. Twelve years oan am mairryd wi a bairn, nae munny an the three piece suite. An him sayin how he quite fancyz ma best mate, sez mibby we should huv wan ae they open relationships.
            Ah gret fir three dayz. Then wan night ah askt him how the fuck he kent ah wizny awready huvin wan ae they open hings. He sed, YOU, youv no gote the GALL, no gote the NERVE ti stand nakid in front ae any man, what's fir tea. Then he undressed mi. Gie him his due tho, never layed a finger oan mi, never lifted his hand. Never hud ti.

Of course, as individual writers we can choose to get out of oppressive relationships, to stay out of them, or not get into them in the first place. But we are still stuck with the country we live in. And Scotland has got 'previous' on silencing its women.

As much as Scottish women like to think they have a 'guid Scots tongue in thur heids' that can give as good as it gets, as much as we like to think no one would be able to silence us, the reality is that we are carrying the weight of centuries of being silenced, of our voices and opinions, both as women and for many of us, as working class people, of being undervalued and deemed as not worthy of being heard, as we take up our pens and open our mouths. To be both working class and female, is to inherit a double whammy.

Our museums have a fine array of so-called Scold's Bridles, also known as Witch's Bridles, branks and jougs. 'Brank', according to my dictionary, comes from: ‘a pillory or bit for a horse’ and Dutch prang  ‘a fetter’; also with late Middle English barnacle(s), denoting a powerful bit for restraining a horse. 

Brank or witch's bridle. Kelvingrove Museum. Glasgow

Woman - horse - nag. The association is all too clear.

The first reference in writing to a scold's bridle is in 1653 in the Lanark Borough Records. Imagine the disgrace of it! To be shamed in your village as a woman who talks too much. Your chin immobilised. A spike pushing up under your tongue. Your head literally clamped in iron. Unable to eat or drink. Historically, children should be seen and not heard, we all know, and mouthy women should be brutally disgraced.

In my group work with women I hear them constantly self-disciplining, apologising for talking too much. Self-chastising. If this is explored as a theme in creative writing, stories and poems emerge of being reined in as a child, punished at school, given lines, put outside the door.  The chatterbox child. I've tutored mixed groups, all-male groups and all-female groups. I've not done scientific data collecting, but this seems to be a predominantly female experience. I do have a male neighbour, who has OCD, who apologises for talking too much. But in all my years of teaching and tutoring I've come across very few men who are apologetic for talking too much. But women? They apologise constantly. So maybe that's why sixteenth century law-keepers came up with the brand and the bridle? Maybe women are just predisposed to letting those tongues wag wag wag?

Scottish bridles - see the spikes!

Yet evidence abounds that boys speak much more than girls in school, and that this behaviour is the result of early social conditioning. "Boys talk nine times more than girls in the classroom—and are encouraged to do so—according to findings from a new language dynamics study." There are many other studies. Here's another recent study suggesting girls are silenced by 'rowdy' boys in the classroom.

Historically in Scotland, a woman with too much to say not only met with social disapproval in life, but in the Western Isles, could be buried after death face down to halt her tongue as Kathleen Jamie's beautiful and haunting poem describes.

MEADOWSWEET

Tradition suggests that certain of the Gaelic women poets were buried face down.

So they buried her, and turned home,
a drab psalm
hanging about them like haar,

not knowing the liquid
trickling from her lips
would seek its way down,

and that caught in her slowly
unravelling plait of grey hair
were summer seeds:

meadowsweet, bastard balm,
tokens of honesty, already
beginning their crawl

toward light, so showing her,
when the time came,
how to dig herself out —

to surface and greet them,
mouth young, and full again
of dirt, and spit, and poetry.

Not so easy to silence a woman, then.

The American poet, Adrienne Rich, in her essay, Arts of the Possible said, “Every real poem begins in the breaking of a silence, and the first question we may ask of any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?” For women and others who've been historically marginalised; the disempowered, the colonised, Rich points out that “the impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully in a tunnel of silence.”
For some women I've known that's meant creeping downstairs in the middle of the night to type. Or hiding poems in the folds of a sari to have them smuggled out. Or, indeed, coming along with excitement and trepidation to an all-women writing group.

For many women in today's society you may think there's no struggle at all, but it's worth remembering just how recent these gains and breakthroughs are, and just how equally easy it might be to lose them again. It's also worth remembering how important poetry is. It may be romantic, but it's also political, and it can be life-changing and culture-changing. So women's voices in poetry are not only important, they are absolutely necessary.

So we must heed the words of Jamie's poem, and no matter how beaten down we sometimes feel, we must keep our mouths "young, and full again/ of dirt, and spit, and poetry." For without our women's poems, we only hear half the story, only hear half the song. We only dream half the future.

A leg-up for male poets?

A deliberately all male poetry line up in Glasgow? Making a marketing point of being men-only! Hah! We had them aplenty back in the last century. I had thought we’d consigned them to the dustbin of history, the neanderthal swamp…

Ironic that it’s on at the same time as Bard in the Botanics in Glasgow is producing their ‘These Headstrong Women’ season. 

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15357718.Women_centre_stage_in_Botanics_Shakespeare/?ref=fbshr

And when we see politics programmes in Scotland being met with public outcry each time they feature all-male discussion panels.

And as evidence abounds that women’s voices are not being heard equally with men’s in public forums.  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/upshot/speaking-while-female-and-at-a-disadvantage.html

Meanwhile the Scottish poetry world, it seems, can’t quite give up the auld ways that led to Sandy Moffat’s painting the Poets’ Pub.

Now, there are the finest of poets in this painting. But take a gander at how the women are represented. Peripheries, my dear. No centre stage for you. Woman, know thy place! 

 And where else would Scottish poetry crawl back to for its all male line-up - as if by a miserable quirk of regressive genetics - but the home city of the knuckle-draggin wee hard man hissel?

“Glasgow: a city strangely devoid of women poets?” is a question I posed once before in a blog about an anthology of Glasgow poetry:

I’ve just been browsing through a book I’ve had for a while, Noise and Smoky Breath, An Illustrated Anthology of Glasgow Poems 1900 – 1983, published in May 1983 by Third Eye Centre and Glasgow Libraries Publications Board. It’s a beautiful book, but 30 years on from its publication I’m stunned to see how few female poets are featured.

There are 81 poems altogether. Of these 9 are written by women. Four of those by the then emerging poet, Liz Lochhead.

In total, to represent 83 years, 4 female poets; Jean Milton, Catherine Czerkawska, Margaret Hamilton and Liz Lochhead.

In total 43 male poets.

So just to be clear – over 83 years we have

72 poems by men      9 poems by women

43 male poets            4 female poets.

I didn’t study one Scottish woman poet at school. And now I know why. 

If women were not being published in anthologies, if their work was not being included in the canon, how could I, or anyone else, study them? This is how those women who did write, who did get published against the odds, often as not had their voices subsequently erased.

And what's more, when we talk as artists and writers about standing on the shoulders of giants, young women writers were expected to stand on the shoulders, not of the women who preceded them, but of the men. 

Why should that matter, you might ask. Why can't a woman emulate a man. Well, when it comes to poetry we are talking about voice and life experience. And a woman’s voice and life experience can be very different from a man’s. We understand this when it comes to race, class and culture. It holds true for the sex divide too. 

When Sharon Olds, who in 2013 became the first American woman to win the TS Eliot prize for poetry first submitted her work to a magazine in the early 70s, she was rejected. 

"They told me: 'This is a literary magazine. If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies' Home Journal. The true subjects of poetry are ... male subjects...' "

Alice Munro, now a Nobel prize-winner suffered similar put-downs. You will know, of course, about the opposition Sylvia Plath’s poetry encountered. Anne Sexton, another great American poet of the twentieth century had to endure sexist negativity for poems such as Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator and In Celebration of my Uterus. (Okay, Bukowski may have managed the former, but the latter would have been a bit of a push. He might have done better with Olds' Ode to a Douchebag. But I digress...)

A few years after Noise and Smoky Breath and many other anthologies failed to find those elusive Glasgow women poets to include in their pages, women writers in Scotland took matters into their own hands. And this is exactly why ALL-WOMEN anthologies started up. And by extension, all-women line-ups at events to promote them. 

Not as vanity projects. 

Not as a wheeze. 

But as political necessity! 

In Edinburgh in the 1980s the women’s collective Hens in the Hay started producing pamphlets as the small publisher Stramullion. In 1989 they brought out the full-length and ground-breaking Fresh Oceans anthology, bringing together poems by 60 living Scottish women poets established and new. This was one of the first places I was published, and it was the first collection of its kind in Scotland. 

Polygon’s Original Prints series started up in the late 80s, giving a boost to the fledgling careers of many of Scotland’s now established women writers in both poetry and short story. Suddenly we had the possibility of a generation of Scottish women poets on whose shoulders the next generation might well stand. Yes, women were also getting published elsewhere too, but there were huge imbalances. Men outnumbered women greatly. Positive discrimination was needed. Especially for working class women. We were lucky to have female editors Joy Hendry and Tessa Ransford heading up two of our leading poetry magazines, and also some enlightened male editors. In particular I recall Richard Price at Gairfish who produced the special Calemadonnas edition to showcase emerging women writers and poets.

In the 90s and noughties it was not at all unusual for a poet like myself to go to reading after reading and be either in a minority as a woman, or occasionally the lone woman in an all-male line up. It certainly was the norm for the men to headline. At the launch of one magazine I congratulated the organisers on inviting me as ‘the token woman poet’ when I took the mic. They were not well-pleased. But it was a fair political point. They had not tried hard enough.

But, you might be thinking, that’s all ancient history. Ah... if only! 

In 2014 a gig I’d read at more than once here in Glasgow - one that sees itself as radical - accidentally billed a poetry line-up with 11 men and one woman. It was about the Independence Referendum. An important political topic. Were our female poets' voices to be ignored? Unheard? When I contacted them to object they apologised and tried to fix it, rather late in the day. But how could it even have happened? Because of millennia of subtle and not-so-subtle conditioning.

Seamus Deane, the Irish writer and editor is still wondering how he got it so wrong in the now infamous1991 Field Anthology of Irish Literature. Seamus forgot to put almost all the Irish women writers from history in. He was genuinely shocked when it was brought to his attention. GENUINELY SHOCKED. It was meant to be a definitive work.  Irish women were furious. I mean, he just didn’t realize what he was doing. And why? Because blind misogyny was so ingrained in society. This was a handful of miles from where we live. A man who is my contemporary. A nice man. An educated man. 

In 2000 I was sitting on the Scottish Arts Council Grants to Publishers Committee. An application came in for a Scottish anthology of new writing linked to a particular theme – with almost no women included. Three male editors. All intelligent men who’d see themselves as enlightened. I refused to give my backing for funding until they went and actively sought out more women writers. Which they did. Because there were women writers linked to the theme there. They had failed to identify them. And simply hadn’t noticed. Neither had anyone else on the committee until I pointed it out.

More recently you can look at the findings of Edinburgh-based poetry reviewer Dave Coates and see that given that women are just over 50% of the population there’s still some way to go in redressing imbalances in the contemporary poetry world.
https://davepoems.wordpress.com/2017/05/29/the-state-of-poetry-criticism/

And in 2016 the Abbey Theatre in Ireland presented a programme for the centenary of the Easter Uprising with 9 out of 10 plays written by men. And the male director's response when that imbalance was questioned? "Them the breaks." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/13/irish-women-abbey-theatre-centenery-feminist. 

We are never far from sliding right back to significant under-representation of women's voices. And as the response from that male director at the Abbey shows, we are never far from brute misogyny. Anyone who thinks these battles for women are done and dusted is, quite frankly, delusional.

So, my fellow male poets, when asked to take part in an all-male line up, do yourselves a favour, leave the “all-whatever line-ups” to the groups whose voices historically have been unrepresented and under-represented. To those who have been consistently silenced and told their life experience didn't count and their voices were not welcome. When I attended Glasgow University there was an exclusively male Union. Exclusively. It hurt and angered and yes, I would say damaged me as a woman back then. It was a clear signal to me and other women we were not full members of the university. We were second class. To be honest, it was an extension of what had happened all the way through school.

A line-up in Glasgow of all-male poets is NOT just a bit of fun. Could you say that so easily if it was any other group of people who had been consistently sidelined, ignored, treated as second-class and often-as-not silenced for centuries? 

Damned right you couldn’t. It wouldn’t be just a bit of harmless fun. But women? Sure, we can mess about when it comes to women. 

Look again at that Poets' Pub painting. Look at how the women are represented. As Glasgow playwright Ena Lamont Stewart so rightly said, Men Should Weep.

Edited 6th July 2017

The Death of the Pits

A day to both mourn and celebrate.

I grew up in a mining town. My grandfather hated going down the pits so much he swore he'd do anything to save his sons from the same fate. In the end my dad's older brother became a miner, and lost his hearing and his lungs to the job.
My dad went up the way instead, and became a slater. At least he had the skies to look at, even if he often got soaked and frozen.

The following poems are from my third collection, Graffiti in Red Lipstick, and are dedicated to my grandfather, and my great-grandfather who was also a miner. I never met my grandfather. He died the year I was born. Both he and my uncle loved their gardens more than anything.


Miners' Daughters

Our hair is honey blond and styled,

our clothes are well-made, warm,

and on our fingers gold rings shine.

But in the memory of our bones

rickets lurks like an ache

and our lungs still recall

the hacking coughs 

of grandfathers we never met.

At night in the dark pit of our dreams

we are down on our knees

tunneling, chipping

at the hard black face of the future

and even as we sit, well-groomed,

sipping cocktails in this posh hotel

there is a trace of coal dust

beneath our polished fingernails.

black heat - a sequence

pit wheel

slowly turning

black-spoked giant

from the mineshaft of memory

you draw a smiling child

waiting at the pit-head gate

miner

he did not have a garden

just a plot, to grow a functional crop

carrots, leeks, potatoes

but always he kept a corner

where he cultivated flowers

to feed his soul

after a twelve hour shift

of eating into darkness

lousing time

bursting from the cage

black creatures

frightening

until they smiled

white teeth human

the miners’ perk

coal castles dumped

for dirty wee rascals

to be kings on

coal

burning in the grate

wind howling in the lum

we saw castles, dungeons

fire-breathing dragons

our parents saw money

going up in smoke

and worried lest winter

last too long

bings

once they peaked like witches’ hats

brooding, dark, they shadowed us

as we skipped to park and school

but today?

shrunken sugar loaf plateaux

sparkling white with last night’s snow

Scottish Independence - a question of self-respect

When I was asked to write an essay on the question of Scottish independence for the Scott Hames' collection, Un-stated, I was flummoxed. Did I have a particular view? If so, what was it? In the end the writing of the essay became a voyage of discovery. It turned out that I did indeed have a view, and a strong one at that. So here's the essay.


 We all know one.

The woman who stays in a marriage with a husband she doesn't love or respect. In fact, she doesn't even like him. And we all wonder why she doesn't leave. Not least because she moans about him constantly; how he over-rules her, even as he insists that her opinion counts. How he belittles her, but oh-so-affectionately; can't she take a bit of gentle ribbing? How he says they're in a marriage of equals, but as he's the bigger earner it's only natural that he gets a bigger say in how they live, what they spend their money on. (And anyway, why would she want to worry herself with those things when he can take care of them for her?)

We look at this woman. She has all the trappings of someone who's doing well; stylish haircut, fashionable clothes, gold jewellery. She has her own car, a couple of credit cards, two foreign holidays a year. But the outer trappings count for nothing. Underneath she is stunted. Like a plant growing in the wrong conditions.

You go out for drinks with her sometimes. After the third drink she reminisces about what she was like before; bright, intelligent, independent-minded. She had potential. She had dreams. After the fourth drink she becmes animated about what she could have - should have - been.

Everything this woman says and does reveals one thing. One thing that over-rides all her superficial affluence: her spouse's control over how she lives affects her sense of self worth, threatens to subsume her very identity. (Of course, from time to time, he allows her little victories. He likes having a 'kept' wife. It feeds his sense of being a Big Man.)

As time goes on she mythologises her past more and more, and develops a self-indulgent bitterness as she gripes about how everything that goes wrong is HIS fault. You look at her with some sadness. You see what she cannot. No matter how materially comfortable her life is, as long as she stays in this union of unequals, she will never realise her own unique potential.

So why doesn't she leave?

FEAR.

Fear of what? Of failure? Of taking full responsibility for herself? Of being the architect of her own future? Of not having someone else to blame when things go wrong?

To be fair, this fear has not grown and developed totally by chance. It's the result of years and years of being told (mostly by him, and he can be very persuasive) that she's not strong enough to cope on her own. In Harlot Red, a short story I wrote at the time of devolution, the woman tells her partner she's being stifled by their relationship, she needs to leave. As she stands in the doorway with her packed suitcases, he says: "You can't be serious. You'll be back in a fortnight. You'll not be happy on your own. Who's going to look after the bills? Who's going to fix the heating if it breaks down? Who's going to get up in the middle of the night if you hear a strange noise? You're fooling yourself. You need me." Does he really believe she needs him? Or is he psychologically manipulating her so that she is too scared to go it alone?

How many women have had these words said to them over the years?

 In the feminist classic short story, 'The Yellow Wallpaper', written by Charlotte Gilman Perkins more than a century ago, the husband – a physician in this case, presented not as a mysogynistic monster, but as a caring and moral man – diagnoses his wife with mental illness when she wants to grow and develop by writing and painting. He needs her to stay as she is, dependent and weakened, so that his control of her, necessary to his sense of being dominant, is not threatened.

 So what has all this to do with Scotland? It might seem strange to anthropormophise a country so often symbolised by whisky-swilling, pugnacious, football-playing, hairy, head-butting hardmen as a woman – and a weak woman at that. But is that what the once fierce and feisty Scotland is turning into? A scared, wee, moanin-faced woman trapped in an unequal marriage. (What's more, a polygamous marriage. Scotland is just one of England's wee wives.) No wonder the bell-ringer at St Giles Cathedral reputedly played 'Why should I be so sad on my wedding day', and civil unrest broke out in many parts of Scotland when the Act of Union was signed.

 Right from that first wedding night Scotland was never going to be an equal partner. It could even be claimed it was a forced marriage; by all accounts it was not the choice of the people. It was certainly a marriage of financial convenience - if not necessity - and yes, Scotland may well have benefitted in some ways over the past three centuries. But perhaps it's time for Scotland to get off her knees, stop snivelling, and prove that she's got the balls to determine her own future – like the lineage of feisty Scotswomen I hail from, who would have lived on bread and water before they'd compromise their beliefs or kow-tow to anyone.

 For amazingly, even three centuries of grudging subordination and barely disguised colonisation have not eradicated Scotland's sense that she DOES have her own distinct identity.

 As a child I was never in any doubt that I was Scottish. Oh, I was told that I was British too, but that never spoke to my heart. But my Scottishness? That flowed through my veins as strongly as the bagpipe music my father occasionally played on winter nights.

 In our wonderful, wee council house, I was taught to be proud of Scottish education. I attended one of the first comprehensive schools in the country. I learned that to be Scottish meant to be part of a co-operative, caring community; to have a socialist mindset where hard work with either your hands or your brain was honorable and should be rewarded with decent wages; that everyone should have free healthcare and decent living conditions; that tolerance and acceptance of difference was a good thing. I loved the lyrics of the Burns' song, A Man's A Man For A' That, and (despite being a girl) thought it was speaking directly to me and epitomised the best of what being Scottish meant.

 But that is my sense of Scottishness. What is happening to our collective sense of Scottishness now, in the twenty-first century? Like that woman we both know, does today's Scotland spend too much time harking back to an unfulfilled past, rather than planning for a fulfilled future? A Scotland that loves nothing more than greetin into its whisky glass about how it hates the bastard English? Is that the Scotland we have today? A nation happy to package up and sell its sense of self in couthy tartan shortbread tins and tartan tammies and faux-fur sporrans? To peddle a plastic-heather-kitsch-and-keech culture while its young people develop an alarming sense of victimhood, and despite (apparently) better education than ever before, confuse nationalism - with all its negative connotations of nasty and nazi - with national pride? If we want to be treated as a nation inside or oustide the union our sense of who we collectively are has to be more than a snazzy collection of designer kilts; an absentee, mysogynistic film star; and a horde of Saltire-draped, ginger-wigged football fans famous for being good-natured losers.

 Scotland will continue to have a crisis of identity until she stands on her own two feet and faces down the demons – many of them imaginary as demons so often are – stationed between her and her future. A future which could offer so much; not least self-respect; the opportunity to close the ever-widening gap between rich and poor; and a true democracy unfettered by inherited privilege and historically-evolved undemocratic structures.

 But will twenty first century Scotland have the guts? Remember that unfulfilled woman we all know?

One day you get fed up with her constant moaning about her husband, so you challenge her.
'Why don't you leave him?' you ask. 'Strike out on your own. Be who you want to be.'
 She stares into the bottom of her whisky glass as if she might find the answer there.
'It's complicated,' she sighs. 'We've been together a long time. I wouldn't know where to start.'
 'It's not that complicated,' you answer. 'Scientists decoded the human genome. Now that was complicated.'
 'I might end up with less than I've got now,' she mutters.
 'There are different ways of having less,' you say.
 She doesn't answer. Just goes up to the bar and orders more drinks. 'Make mine a double,' she says to the barman.

 Then there was the woman in the story, Harlot Red. She left despite her partner's infantilisation of her and his fear-mongering. She's her own woman now, and a dab-hand at fixing the heating. Her husband, meanwhile, has been set free to forge a new and different sense of self too.

 And the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper? Unable to grow and develop her creativity in a positive way, she descends into madness, her unused energies turning inwards. Soon she loses all sense of who she is and spends her days crawling round the attic room, a pitiful, twisted version of the woman she could have been.

 Of course, Harlot Red is a contemporary story. The Yellow Wallpaper was written over a century ago. Women – and nations, even small ones – have much more ability to be independent these days. If that's what they really want.

In 2007 Ian was awarded the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Part of the award was the chance to stay for a while and write in the beautiful Hotel Chevillon in Grez-sur-Loing in the Forest of Fontainebleau in France. Now an artists' retreat it was formerly a hotel. Stevenson himself spent time there, as did many famous artists and the playwright, Strindberg.

I was lucky enough to be able to join Ian for part of his time there. I wrote the following poem in the Visitors' Book when we were leaving.


Leaving


At the Hotel Chevillon, Manuella, cloth in hand,
cleans the rooms, disturbs the artists’ dreams
rolling lost beneath the beds, swathed by time in softest dust.

On the burnished wooden stairs, fallen thoughts,
delicate as spider webs, float before her sweeping broom
and as she polishes and sprays, the ghosts of those
who once lived here flit restlessly from room to room.

While Manuella does what must be done;
mops up the drops of inspiration, the dregs of desperation
fallen from the artists' pens

wipes from the windowpanes
the breath of those who long to leave

a brushstroke on the sky,
a poem on the petal of a flower,
a pure note echoing in the breeze,
something which says, yes
I was here
I left
I did not leave


Hotel Chevillon, September, 2007

february on flanders moss

in morning sunshine
feathers black as mourning silk
death perches on a leafless tree

behind my back
my shadow stretches
a silent ghost

wraithed in mists, dark firs wait
like forgotten Roman armies
doomed to haunt the edge of time

a scots pine, stunted, stands
its branches gnarled as an ancient’s hands
begging kindness from the rushing clouds

in a flat green field, ditched around with brown, a scarecrow leans,
the next along lies face-down in a muddy shroud
forgotten fallen soldier in a sodden Scottish Somme

a shot rings out, a cloud of herons lift
into a sky of gun-metal grey
forty wings in a flap

late evening sun slants
the moss beneath my feet
emits a human gurgling sound

They shoot poets, don't they? Part two.

As I explained in a previous blog entry, The Herald - who over the years have liked to portray themselves as champions of poetry with their tiny daily poem squeezed in beside the obituaries - were happy to indulge in lax journalism on the appointment of a Makar for Stirling.

Not content with one article spreading malicious misinformation, The Herald has followed up with another piece by Cate Devine stating that the appointment of a Makar is controversial locally as the poet is being paid to promote poetry throughout the area.

Makes you wonder how much work a Herald journalist would do for £500 per year. Who knows, they might even go to the bother of checking their facts.

But more mysterious to me - why all the negative spin from The Herald on the appointment of a Makar? Are they running an anti-poetry agenda?