Within and Without Empire : Scotland Across the (Post)colonial Borderline [1 ed.] 9781443855679, 9781443849227

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Within and Without Empire

Within and Without Empire: Scotland Across the (Post)colonial Borderline

Edited by

Carla Sassi and Theo van Heijnsbergen

Within and Without Empire: Scotland Across the (Post)colonial Borderline Edited by Carla Sassi and Theo van Heijnsbergen This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Carla Sassi, Theo van Heijnsbergen and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4922-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4922-7

CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Carla Sassi and Theo van Heijnsbergen “Injured by Time and Defeated by Violence”: Prospects of Loch Tay .... 14 David Richards Gaelic Perspectives Negotiations of Barbarity, Authenticity and Purity in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Gaelic Literature ................................................ 30 Peter Mackay Gaelic Books as Cultural Icons: The Maintenance of Cultural Links between the Highlands and the West Indies ............................................. 46 Sheila M. Kidd Gaelic Poetry and the British Military Enterprise, 1756-1945 ................. 61 Wilson McLeod The Gaelic Voice and (Post)colonial Discourse: An Alignment Illustrated by Case Studies of Neil Gunn, William Neill and Tormod Caimbeul ...... 77 Silke Stroh Writing Scotland’s (Post)Empire Kailyard Money: Nation, Empire and Speculation in Walter Scott’s Letters from Malachi Malagrowther ............................ 94 Liam Connell An Educational Empire of Print: Thomas Nelson and ‘Localisation’ in the West Indian Readers ............. 108 Gail Low

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Colonialism and Empire as Natural Order in the Early Dollar Magazine ................................................................. 123 Ian Brown The Scottish Jutewallahs: A Study of Transnational Positioning in Personal Narratives ................ 136 Bashabi Fraser The Kilted Dragon: Contemporary Scottish Fiction and the New Imperialism ...................... 150 Graeme Macdonald Scotland’s Others: Relations and Representations “I, Daughter”: Auto/biography, Fractured Histories, and Familial Quest for “Scotch Blood” in Grenada and the Grenadines ............................... 168 Joan Anim-Addo “John is a Good Indian”: Reflections on Native American Culture in Scottish Popular Writing of the Nineteenth Century .......................... 185 Marina Dossena Speaking as Tribal (M)other: The African Writing of Naomi Mitchison .............................................. 200 Jacqueline Ryder “The Plantation Owner is Never Wearing a Kilt”: Historical Memory and True Tales in Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter .... 214 Gioia Angeletti Notes on Contributors............................................................................. 229 References .............................................................................................. 234 Index of Personal Names ........................................................................ 268

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We wish to thank Stewart Sanderson and Catriona Perry for helping us with the bibliography and index, and the department of Scottish Literature of Glasgow University for contributing towards the cost of their compilation. We also wish to express our sincere gratitude to Barbara Strathdee for providing the image for the book cover, and to Paolo Pascolo for providing the cover design.

INTRODUCTION CARLA SASSI AND THEO VAN HEIJNSBERGEN

The year 2011 was marked by the publication of the first three full-length, comprehensive investigations of the relations and intersections between Scottish literature and postcolonialism: a collection of essays, Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives, edited by Michael Gardiner, Graeme Macdonald and Niall O’Gallagher, and two monographs, respectively by Stefanie Lehner – Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature: Tracing Counter-Histories – and by Silke Stroh – Uneasy Subjects: Postcolonialism and Scottish Gaelic Poetry. The three volumes focus on three distinct and equally central strands of research in what is a relatively young field of academic inquiry – a comparative approach that identifies theoretical and empirical assonances between Scottish and postcolonial texts (Gardiner, Macdonald and O’Gallagher 2011), an identification of lines of (trans)national subalternity across Scotland and Ireland as a postcolonial marker (Lehner 2011), and a re-reading of the history of Scottish Gaelic poetry through a postcolonial lens as well as a honing of postcolonial theoretical tools in the light of the specificity of the Scottish Gaelic predicament (Stroh 2011b). Not only do these works mark an important turning point in scholarship, they also constitute – along with previous work in the field – the kind of critical mass of scholarly endeavour needed to make an impact within and across disciplinary borders. The relation between Scotland and postcoloniality has in fact been debated over a long period of time – unevenly, in relative isolation from mainstream postcolonialism, and marginalised within Scottish studies itself – along two discreetly interrelated lines of inquiry: an ‘imaginative’ one, that is, through recurring figurations in modern and contemporary Scottish literary texts, and an academic theoretical one, often articulated as a response to the former by (mainly Scottish) scholars who have engaged either explicitly or obliquely with postcolonial theories as an appropriate or partly appropriate framework for a paradigmatic redefinition of Scottish studies.

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Introduction

With regard to the first line of inquiry, literary figurations of Scotland as a ‘colony’ or a ‘postcolony’ – a stateless nation, culturally and/or politically marginalised within an anglocentric United Kingdom, or indeed a colonised nation, especially in reference to the history of the Gaidhealtachd (Gaeldom) – are relatively common in modern and contemporary Scottish literature. It is arguably fair to identify the writers of the twentieth-century ‘Scottish Renaissance,’ and Hugh MacDiarmid in particular, as the establishers or at least the initiators of such a national master narrative, focused on a re-evaluation of the local, the peripheral and the vernacular as a line of resistance against the metropolitan (and anglocentric) language and culture of Empire – a ‘writing-back-to-thecentre’ avant la lettre. The minoritarian and anti-imperialist discourse developed by some of Scotland’s most influential writers in the course of the twentieth century bears affinities with expressions of (post)colonial resistance across the world. MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon both theorised and practised a radical reappropriation of Scots as a literary language;1 Sorley MacLean’s and Iain Crichton Smith’s literary representations of the Highland Clearances as the perpetration of a historical wrong2 filled a historiographical gap and established themselves as counter-historical narratives; Catherine Carswell and Nan Shepherd articulated postnational and gender-inflected redefinitions of Scottish identity.3 Such efforts at (re)claiming and (re)defining lost territories of cultural identity are continued between the 1980s and the early 1990s by Tom Leonard’s militant resistance to standard English and Alasdair Gray’s and Edwin Morgan’s passionate advocacy of political and cultural 1

MacDiarmid’s poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1926), and Gibbon’s trilogy, A Scots Quair (London: Hutchinson, 1946; the three novels had been published separately between 1932 and 1934), may be identified as the two modernist texts that most contributed towards a postimperial re-invention of Scots as a ‘synthetic’ literary language. 2 MacLean’s poem, “Hallaig” (first published in Gairm in 1954), originally written in Gaelic, and Smith’s novel, Consider the Lilies (London: Gollancz, 1968), are possibly the most iconic and poignant literary representations of the impact of the Clearances on the people and the landscape of the Highlands. Both MacLean and Smith denounced the history of repression and marginalisation of Gaelic culture within the UK in their prose work. See, among others, MacGill-Eain 1985; Smith 1986. 3 Carswell’s controversial The Life of Robert Burns (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930) provided a de-mythicised portrait of Scotland’s national bard, while Shepherd’s novels, especially her memoir, The Living Mountain (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1977), foregrounded bioregionalism as a form of national identity.

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independence.4 Fuelled by the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence, to be held in 2014, such controversial representation of Scotland by some among Scotland’s leading authors as a ‘colony’ of England has featured strongly in public debate in the course of 2012.5 While never defining themselves openly as ‘postcolonial,’ modern and contemporary Scottish writers who have articulated their dissatisfaction with the state of the Union have often pursued agendas which bear evident similarities with postcolonial ones. They have questioned hegemonic relations between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ (defined along ‘national’ or ‘class’ lines), engaged with issues of cultural representation and with cultural politics, investigated strategies of re-appropriation of native cultural expressions, and re-evaluated hybridity as a tool for re-positioning Scottish culture. In this way, they have produced a nationalist discourse largely based upon a concept of ‘resistance’ to the imperial centre (identified either as ‘England’ or the British state) that indeed partakes in

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Leonard has consistently deployed a postcolonial vocabulary to frame the predicament of the Scottish writer (see, for example, Stephen 1998); Gray’s possibly most articulate and ‘visionary’ call for an independent Scotland is represented by his novel 1982, Janine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), while a more explicit advocacy of independence can be found in his pamphlet on Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1992); Morgan contributed widely to the debate on independence, as witnessed by his poem “For the Opening of the Scottish Parliament, 9 October 2004,” http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org. uk/poetry/poems/opening-scottish-parliament-9-october-2004 (accessed March 22, 2013), as well as by his bequest, on his death, to the Scottish National Party of almost £1m, to be used for the party’s independence referendum campaign. 5 Gray has divided English men and women who come to live and work in Scotland, particularly to take up leading positions in cultural institutions, into “colonists” and “settlers” (Gray 2012), depending on their commitment to engage with, and contribute to, Scottish life and culture. James Kelman has noted about such ‘colonists’ that “they just assume – they make the ordinary, imperialist assumption – that the country doesn’t exist until they’ve come in and given it their own culture. Because anything that goes on in the colonised country can only be parochial” (cit. in Johnson, 2012; see also Kelman 2012). Regarding the historically very small number of Scottish authors on the annual shortlists for the Booker prize, well behind that of English authors and those of former colonies, Irvine Welsh – whose bestselling Trainspotting was not shortlisted for the Booker prize, reputedly after two jury members threatened to resign if it was – tweeted: “Maybe they only take FORMER colonies seriously. India, Ireland, Australia, & Canada have decent [sic] record. A lesson for us all?” (cit. in Williamson 2012). Alan Bissett has added: “It should come as no surprise that the Man Booker prize for Commonwealth literature mimics the empire itself” (Bissett 2012).

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issues and experiences resonating across postcolonial literatures, and yet in many ways resists direct engagement with them. As for the second (strictly academic) line of inquiry, it ought to be pointed out that, unlike Ireland, which, following Declan Kiberd’s critical intervention (1995), has obtained a wide and almost unchallenged status as a postcolonial country, Scotland has been prevented from attempting to make the same paradigmatic shift by its more extensive and more visible imperial entanglements. Scotland’s partnership in the building of the British Empire was implemented both at a practical level, with Scots either taking part in the elite of the British imperial apparatus or settling in the colonies as migrants, ranging from professionals and bureaucrats to manual labourers and even indentured labourers, and ideologically, with intellectuals of the calibre of Robert Knox or Thomas Carlyle writing in support of, or providing a rationale for, imperialist practices, not to mention earlier contributions by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers to the conceptualisations of civilisation and race.6 Not only were the profits engendered by the Empire’s economic success shared by Scots, both abroad and at home, as historians have widely documented, but Scots also availed themselves of ample opportunities within the Empire to act as a distinct, self-protecting national group – pursuing national interests and even promoting a national cultural agenda across the globe. In light of the scale and of this specifically national dimension of Scotland’s involvement, collective responsibility for imperial crimes – first and foremost the involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade – is undeniable,7 6

It is worthwhile to remember here David Hume’s notorious claim that he suspected “the negroes, and in general all the other species of men, to be naturally inferior to […] the most rude and barbarous of the whites,” dismissing “talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning” as most likely a comment on someone who “is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.” This comment was first added as a footnote to the 1753 edition of Hume’s essay “Of National Characters” (originally 1748), but he kept tinkering with the exact wording, adding nuance only in order to entrench the core sentiment more irrevocably; the text here quoted is from the version included in Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1758, 125). For a discussion of constructions of race in Scotland, see, among others, Young (1995, 62-87). 7 The concept of ‘national responsibility’ for past historical wrongs is by no means a straightforward one, especially in the case of a stateless nation. Many theorists, however, would today agree in claiming that judgements of national responsibility are more appropriate than judgements of state responsibility as “we may want to hold nations responsible for actions performed by states that no longer exist” (Miller 2007, 111). Unlike state responsibility, national responsibility is a form of collective responsibility and therefore “the people who make up a nation may

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aggravated, if possible, by a long and deep silence from within Scotland regarding the role of (and Scots’ agency within) the British Empire, the latter only too often (especially outside Britain) inappropriately identified as a specifically ‘English’ enterprise. Yet, arguably, there were regions, ethnic groups and/or social classes within Scotland that not only could not be held actively responsible for the imperial enterprise, but that to some degree can be seen as its victims. British working classes and peasants were more on the giving than the receiving end of the Empire’s economic system: in Scotland, there were miners treated as serfs as late as 1799 (see, among others, Duckham 1969, 196), while ethnic and social inequalities often overlapped throughout the Victorian Age, as industries “recruited their labour […] from the unorganised and helpless, and especially from Irish and Highland immigrants” (Hobsbawm 1999, 291). Along similar lines, the process of brutal ‘modernisation’8 undergone by the Celtophone Highlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and implemented through forms of cultural repression and/or denigration, was closely related, both in ideological content and in political practice, to what was happening at the same time in other parts of the British Empire, if only because produced within the same discourse and implemented by the same governing establishment. Irish and Highland migrants became indeed part of a multiethnic “Atlantic working-class” – the transnational and trans-racial “manyheaded hydra” described by Linebaugh and Rediker (2000) – and yet their lives were being shaped by specific national and local histories as much as by global capital flows. National responsibility for imperial crimes cannot be shirked, nor in any way diminished, in light of the identification of such ‘lines of subalternity,’ and yet, a representation of Scotland’s predicament vis-à-vis the postcolonial one that identifies its complexities and specificities is not only ethically necessary, but also essential to honing methodological tools in what are two closely related fields. Like Ireland’s, Scotland’s academic dialogue with postcolonialism developed in the 1990s, moving, however, from the very beginning, in a very different direction. By the 1990s, in fact – when postcolonial studies sometimes properly be held liable for what their nation has done” (Miller 2007, 113). Within this perspective, each individual of that collective becomes “remedially responsible for restoring the damage they have caused” (Miller 2007, 116). 8 The need for modernisation always implies a hegemonic relation between an ‘advanced’ society and a ‘backward’ or ‘traditional’ one. Significantly this term, in (post)colonial contexts, has often worked as a benevolent (in form, if not in substance) reconceptualisation of colonialism. See Slater (2004, 62-63).

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was establishing itself as a mainstream academic discipline following the publication in 1989 of The Empire Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin – Scotland’s role within the Empire had already been widely investigated and exposed by historians.9 The same decade also saw Scottish literature recognised internationally as a distinct academic subject for the first time.10 Scotland’s dialogue with postcolonialism, then, was very much shaped by the interactions between these three fields in the early phases of their respective disciplinary histories, intersecting but also setting boundaries against each other. While in Scotland a traditionally historiographical and nation-centric approach sidelined, instead of integrating (at least for another decade), a theoretically grounded investigation of imperial history as a complex system of cultural interrelations,11 the authors of The Empire Writes Back famously observed that while Ireland, Scotland and Wales arguably “were the first victims of English expansion, their subsequent complicity in the British imperial enterprise makes it difficult for colonized peoples outside Britain to accept their identity as post-colonial” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989, 33). In this way they (un)wittingly encouraged an identification of postcolonialism with a strictly historically defined postcolonial identity. The same paragraph, in fact, also contains a call for “an interpretation of British literary history as a process of hierarchical interchange and external group relationships” based on Max Dorsinville’s dominated-dominating model and focusing on “linguistic and cultural imposition” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989, 33). The latter interpretation has since gained increasing credit among postcolonialists, who have applied it to countless historical, national, geographical, linguistic and disciplinary contexts, thus moving the postcolonial “from being a historical marker to a more globally inflected term applicable to a variety of regions” (Wilson, Sandru and Welsh 2010, 2). Scottish studies 9 T.M. Devine’s first major publication in this field dates back to 1975 (The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and Their Trading Activities, c.1740-90). By the time Michael Fry’s The Scottish Empire (2001) and Devine’s Scotland’s Empire, 1600-1815 (2003) were published, the study of Scottish colonial history was already a solidly established field of study. 10 As witnessed by the inclusion of Scottish studies among the area subjects of the European Society for the Study of English, founded in 1990 and endowed with a Constitution in 1995, and by the establishment, in 1999, of Scottish Literature as a Modern Language Association of America discussion group. 11 Such a notion is today very much at the heart of postcolonial studies. The notion of ‘relation’ as an anti-imperialist project was developed by Édouard Glissant in his Poetics of Relation (1997).

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is only now beginning to engage openly and systematically with such theoretical developments, as we shall see, within a wider attempt to reframe or indeed overcome the national paradigm. It is indeed in the partly conflicting agendas of the 1990s that we can trace the origins of the long-standing reluctance of both Scottish and postcolonial studies to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue with each other and to identify the common theoretical and empirical threads running through them. Arguably, such reluctance has also engendered an awkward rift between the two lines of Scotland’s dialogue with postcolonialism, and contributed to the sidelining, rather than the interrogation, of its literary imagination of (post)colonial affinities and relations. An exhaustive charting of pre-2011 Scottish studies specialists’ engagement with postcolonialism is certainly beyond the scope of the present introduction. What follows is rather an essential timeline aimed at showcasing some of the shared or divergent features of scholarly contributions in this field. The vast majority of these are in the form of essays and articles, published across the last couple of decades, that rarely cross-reference each other even though often moving conceptually in very similar ways; they thus function mostly as an important but heterogeneous and largely discontinuous corpus of thought. Scholars have either partly embraced or openly taken the opportunity to re-read the status of Scotland’s culture within the United Kingdom through a postcolonial theoretical lens. Among these, to mention but a few, Wilson Harris and Alan Riach (1992) explore assonances between Caribbean and Scottish literary strategies; Angus Calder, in “Poetry, Language and Empire” (1996) and in “Imperialism and Scottish Culture” (1999), both included in Scotlands of the Mind (2002, 169-83 and 184-98), fathoms the complexity of the Scottish predicament and maps its conflicting histories, as both imperial power and ‘colonised’ territory; Chris Gittings (1995) investigates Canadian and Scottish writers’ representation of “the empty space of history” (138); Fiona Oliver (1996) discusses “outward anger, private guilt and self-loathing” (114) in contemporary Scottish fiction within postcolonial parameters; Roderick Watson (1998) deploys postcolonial categories, such as hybridity and polyphony, to frame specificity in Scottish literature; Berthold Schoene (1995 and 1998) provides what is the first theoretically sustained overview of Scottish literature and postcolonialism; Marco Fazzini (2000) applies postcolonial concepts to discuss the work of contemporary Scottish poets; Michael Gardiner (2001) inquires into constructions of Scottishness and Britishness, engaging, among others, with Franz Fanon’s theories; EllenRaïssa Jackson and Willy Maley (2002) map out relations between Irish

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and Scottish modernism as having important implications for postcolonial theory; Carla Sassi (2002; 2005, 83-102) defines Scotland’s predicament as an ambiguous and complex case study in relation to postcoloniality; Liam Connell (2004b) questions the application of a postcolonial paradigm to Scottish literature and pinpoints the frictions between the discourse of the Scottish nation and postcolonialism; Grant Farred (2004) identifies the debunking of the Scottish myths of romantic nationalism in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting as a ground for a possible rejection of the postcolonial as applied to a Scottish context; Cairns Craig (2004) appropriates the notion of hybridity to illustrate aspects of Scotland’s national culture and identity; Paul T. Riggs (2005) investigates the autonomy of Scots law and Scotland’s legal nationalism as a powerful line of anti-colonial resistance; Graeme Macdonald (2006) discusses how “historicizing the contribution of Scots to empire […] becomes part of a postcolonial process of resistance to the current British imperium” (119); and finally, Niall O’Gallagher (2007) identifies in Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark a series of narrative strategies that mark a transition from a strictly nationalist to a postcolonial narrative practice. Alongside these, a possibly greater number of publications have used what could be described as a more loosely defined postcolonial perspective, structured around a ‘naturalised’ conflation of nationalist or minoritarian discourse with postcolonialism – examples of these might be Cairns Craig’s seminal essays from the 1980s, now collected in his Out of History (1992), that deploy quintessentially postcolonial concepts like ‘periphery’ and ‘in-betweenness’; Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull’s The Eclipse of Scottish Culture (1989), published in the same year as The Empire Writes Back and articulating what seems indeed a Fanonian vocabulary of anti-colonial resistance; or Robert Crawford’s theorisation of the devolution of ‘English’ literature and questioning of hegemonic constructions of the canon (1992). Finally, a separate but no doubt importantly related area that should be mentioned here is that of archipelagic revisions of the ‘English’ literary canon and of Scottish-Irish comparative studies, developed by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies of the University of Aberdeen (founded in 2001) and through a series of separate studies (Stafford 2000; Norquay and Smyth 2002; Maley 2003). Any scholar approaching this field today for the first time through the works listed above – even though they do pinpoint and sound an extremely important and rich series of issues and theoretical aspects – would probably be disoriented, not so much on account of their differing and at times conflicting perspectives and interpretations (which, after all, would

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characterise any scholarly field), but because of what may be described as the apparent absence of a structured debate and programmatic intentions. Furthermore, one would also be struck by the fact that most of these contributions seem more preoccupied with establishing an up-to-date framework for Scottish studies than with a genuine desire to contribute to the wider postcolonial debate. Such a prevailing ‘centripetal’ perspective, largely articulated as an ‘intra-British’ discourse questioning post-Union Anglo-Scottish relations, is no doubt among the reasons why Scottish studies has not been on the whole much noticed by mainstream postcolonialists so far, even though a number of the above contributions have indeed appeared in leading postcolonial journals. Signals of a changing attitude may, however, be traceable in Ania Loomba’s evaluation of James Kelman’s ‘anti-colonial’ stance as well as of Robert Crawford’s investigation of the marginalisation of Scottish culture and language within the Union (Loomba 1998, 76-77), and, more recently, in Robert Young’s thoughtful Scotsman article on the alignments between Scotland and the postcolonial world (Young 2010), as well as in John Mackenzie’s collaboration with Scottish historian T.M. Devine (Mackenzie and Devine 2011). Starting from 2006, and heralded by Douglas S. Mack’s study on Scottish Fiction and the British Empire (2006) – the first full-length ‘devolved’ overview of Scotland’s imperial literature, further developed by Nigel Leask (2007) and Angela Smith (2011) – a more structured postcolonial and interdisciplinary approach has gradually prevailed, with greater attention being given, for example, to the Gaelic question (see, among others, McNeil 2007; Stroh 2011b); to comparative issues (see Covi, Anim-Addo, Pollard and Sassi 2007; Hart 2010); to further investigations of the intersections with the Irish predicament and archipelagic perspectives (see the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, launched in 2007 under the aegis of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies of the University of Aberdeen; Kerrigan 2008; Lehner 2011). There are reasons to believe that further, meaningful developments are on their way: both Scottish and postcolonial studies have been deeply affected by important ideological shifts since the 1990s (post-nationalist in the former case, and ‘post-global’ – that is, more attentive to local practices and expressions – in the latter), and dialogue is not only possible but has also become potentially fruitful for both interlocutors. In different ways, in fact, Scottish and postcolonial studies are both going through a moment of crisis and transformation – if “the potential exhaustion of postcolonialism as a paradigm” has revealed “the importance of international, interdisciplinary conversations in considering histories of

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colonization and decolonization” (Yaeger 2007, 633), the decline of the conventional national paradigm has similarly affected post-devolutionary Scottish studies and thus opened up the path to comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives (see Hames 2006; Schoene 2007). Having clarified the empirical and theoretical background of the present volume, we now wish to position it in relation to its fields of application and to account for its underlying agenda and motivations. A central aim of our project – originating in the successful experience of a double seminar we convened for the European Society for the Study of English (Turin, 2010)12 – is indeed to articulate a “conversation,” as envisaged by Yaeger (2007), across disciplinary borders and to engage productively with the complexities of both fields, by revealing intersections and synergies that may open pathways to future research. According to this perspective, the ‘Scotland’ of the present volume’s title is suggestive of a critical standpoint from which and within which we can productively question disciplinary borders and epistemological fences. The volume, in fact, goes a long way to question Scotland’s imagined borders – cultural borders, by investigating Scotland’s complex relations with its colonial Others; ideological boundaries, by shedding light simultaneously on its imperial as well as on its ‘subaltern’ implications; and disciplinary faultlines, by addressing Scottish studies specialists’ as much as postcolonialists’ concerns. The image of the border evoked by our title provides, then, a central interpretative key at more than one level, as it is suggestive both of Scotland as a ‘theoretical borderland’ in relation to Empire and postcoloniality, and of the rationale of our critical project, aimed at bringing into dialogue scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds (including Scottish, Celtic and postcolonial studies) and adopting different methodologies and empirical foci. Furthermore, while we wanted essays to address consistently a common core of empirical and theoretical concerns and to showcase representative topics and trends in the field, we have also aimed to articulate effectively and fairly the different ideological emphases and nuances that characterise the field, so as to reconfigure them into a structured debate. In short, we have privileged a ‘polyphonic’ over a ‘monologic’ approach as a fruitful structuring principle. Finally, we have

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The 10th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English, Seminar 31: “Dis/placing the British Empire: theoretical and critical views from Scottish studies,” University of Turin, 24-28 August 2010.

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also aimed to provide a balance between empirical and theoretical approaches, as indeed the task facing postcolonial studies today is not, of course, to abandon the theoretical sophistication that has marked its engagement with Orientalist discourse, Eurocentrism, and the exegetics of representation, but to link such meta-critical speculations with studies of actually existing political, economic, and cultural conditions, past and present. (Parry 2004, 80)

The volume, organised into three sections that pinpoint the three main research areas of the field, pertinently opens with David Richards’ keynote essay, “‘Injured by Time and Defeated by Violence’: Prospects of Loch Tay,” offering both an overview of the territory charted by our volume and a sounding of its theoretical implications by investigating the work of one of Scotland’s most epicentric writers in relation to Empire and constructions of Britishness and Scottishness. Sir Walter Scott is in fact also the object of an equally thought-provoking investigation in the second section. In the first section – “Gaelic Perspectives” – four essays provide a complex and cross-referenced discussion of the many facets that constitute the problematic and pivotal ‘Gaelic question.’ Peter Mackay’s “Negotiations of Barbarity, Authenticity and Purity in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Gaelic Literature” brings to the fore the complex connotations and nuances of three keywords of postcolonialism in the Gaelic context, focusing on issues of “anxious” self-representation in the imperial age; Sheila M. Kidd’s archival research on “Gaelic Books as Cultural Icons: The Maintenance of Cultural Links between the Highlands and the West Indies” investigates Gaelic patterns of migration and new possibilities of cultural self-definition and self-production within the Empire; Wilson McLeod’s “Gaelic Poetry and the British Military Enterprise, 1756-1945” discusses the essentially pro-British and proEmpire stance articulated steadfastly by Gaelic poets across two centuries of imperial history. Focusing on a modern and contemporary context, Silke Stroh – in “The Gaelic Voice and (Post)colonial Discourse: An Alignment Illustrated by Case Studies of Neil Gunn, William Neill and Tormod Caimbeul” – undertakes a comparative investigation and traces a series of significant convergences between Gaelic literary expression and postcolonialism. The second section, “Writing Scotland’s (Post-)Empire,” maps the specificities of a Scottish perspective on Empire as well as Scotland’s implications in cultural imperialism and colonial contact zones. Liam Connell’s “Kailyard Money: Nation, Empire and Speculation in Walter

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Scott’s Letters from Malachi Malagrowther” firmly questions and deconstructs Scott’s ante-litteram ‘postcolonialism,’ pitting it against his explicit and militant support of imperialism and a nation-centric capitalism, while Gail Low’s archival research in “An Educational Empire of Print: Thomas Nelson and ‘Localisation’ in the West Indian Readers” positions Scotland’s publishing industry at the very heart of the British Empire, in terms of global distribution as much as of ideological content. Along similar lines, Ian Brown, in “Colonialism and Empire as Natural Order in the Early Dollar Magazine,” reconstructs the crucial role played in the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences by a magazine directed at a specific adolescent community and the diaspora, often imperial, formed by former pupils. Bashabi Fraser’s “The Scottish Jutewallahs: A Study of Transnational Positioning in Personal Narratives,” bringing micro- and macro-historical perspectives together, explores patterns of migration and re-homing of Scots within one of the most lucrative enterprises of the British Empire. Graeme Macdonald’s “The Kilted Dragon: Contemporary Scottish Fiction and the New Imperialism” aptly closes this section by clarifying and illuminating the tensions and conflicts between political practice (Scotland, as part of the United Kingdom, is still an agent of Negri and Hardt’s ‘Empire’) and contemporary literary representations, inherent in the nation’s repression and recovery of historical consciousness. Finally, the third section, “Scotland’s Others: Relations and Representations,” engages with the colonial contact zone as a site of domination and oppression, but also of communication and native selfexpression. This section, in line with the previous two, also opens with a keynote essay, unravelling and pinpointing the crucial issues and problems at stake in this particular area: Joan Anim-Addo’s “‘I, daughter’: Auto/biography, Fractured Histories, and Familial Quest for ‘Scotch Blood’ in Grenada and the Grenadines” provides a poignant illustration of how imperial history is always ‘entangled history’,13 and how, in the case of disempowered and silenced communities, the task of the historian must, by necessity, move beyond traditional research methodology. Marina Dossena’s archival research brings to light another important contact zone: in “‘John is a Good Indian’: Reflections on Native American Culture in Scottish Popular Writing of the Nineteenth Century” she charts strategies of the representation of natives as revealing of racist attitudes but also as 13

‘Entangled history’ is a term and a concept that was introduced by Sidney W. Mintz (Sweetness and Power, 1985). Originally applied to the Caribbean context, it is now used more generally to describe transfer, interconnection, and mutual influences beyond the limits of national history.

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engaging with transperipheral comparisons and postcolonial alignments. Jacqueline Ryder’s “Speaking as Tribal (M)other: The African Writing of Naomi Mitchison” focuses on a canonical twentieth-century ‘Scottish Renaissance’ writer’s identification with the Other, charting the tensions in her work between a colonial attitude and her role of ‘respectful visitor.’ The closing essay brings us to the present day: Gioia Angeletti’s “‘The Plantation Owner is Never Wearing a Kilt’: Historical Memory and True Tales in Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter” analyses a most powerful and theoretically driven representation of Scotland’s involvement in Atlantic slavery. Like Anim-Addo in the opening essay of this section, Kay advocates a ‘creative’ historiographical approach in the face of (post)colonial erasure and silencing. Within and Without Empire, by mapping out pathways and patterns of interdisciplinary conversation, intends to further and widen the debate opened in 2010 in Turin at the ESSE “(Dis)placing the British Empire” seminar, and to encourage more theoretical and theoretically driven empirical research across Scottish and postcolonial studies. Furthermore, by moving beyond the theoretical impasse of a ‘pure’ (post)colonial identity, it also aims, possibly more ambitiously, to foster a re-thinking of discipline-bound ‘truths’ and a shaping of new paradigms for a deeper understanding of a world in dramatic flux and of ever-growing global interdependence.

“INJURED BY TIME AND DEFEATED BY VIOLENCE”: PROSPECTS OF LOCH TAY DAVID RICHARDS

In The Chronicles of the Canongate, Chrystal Croftangry, the last of Scott’s narrative personas, questions Mrs Bethune Baliol, the source of his narratives, about the Highlands: “The Highlands,” I suggested, “should furnish you with ample subjects of recollection. You have witnessed the complete change of that primeval country, and have seen a race not far removed from the earliest period of society, melted down into the great mass of civilization; and that could not happen without incidents striking in themselves, and curious as chapters in the history of the human race.” (Scott 1881a, 407-8)

Since the publication of Waverley, Scott has been both credited with, and blamed for, creating the fundamental cultural division which has defined Scottish identity: the radical reconfiguration and division of Scottish space between a victorious Lowlands of Enlightenment rationality, military efficiency, mercantile economy, and bureaucratic modernity, and a defeated Highlands of original, charismatic, feudal, and heroic Scots conquered by war and removed by clearances. Scott’s historic role has been to narrativise and sweeten with romance the inexorable coming of modernity to Highland Scotland, or, as Michael Gardiner has it, “[i]f the highland clearances allowed for a tabula rasa of bleakness famously beloved of Queen Victoria, unionist Scottish writers like Walter Scott were also on hand to people this stage with highly visible caricatures” (Gardiner 2004, 272). Scott’s version of Scottish identity resides in a vision of a profound topographical and cultural divide, which also has temporal and even racial connotations; his Highlanders are “other men in another time” (Fabian 1983, 143). Scott’s creation of a distinctive difference in time and space is the mark of a process of ‘othering,’ so the argument goes, characteristic of an essentially colonialist, if not outright imperialist, discourse in which English colonial incursions aided by Lowland ‘clients’ create a form of indirect rule through puppet

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governments and institutions. A prevailing postcolonial reading of Waverley seems to follow naturally: a reading that also agrees in all key points with a current nationalist political agenda. But the problem with the postcolonial reading of Waverley is that the argument contains both a logical flaw and a sleight of hand. As Liam Connell contends, the presumption lying behind the postcolonial turn in the national argument is that of “Lowland Anglo-Scots colonizing the Highlands at England’s behest” until the assertion of “English cultural hegemony” emerges as an “uncontested fact” and the representation of “Scotland as an English colony is axiomatic” (Connell 2004b, 253). For Connell, such a reading of the Scottish national imaginary is profoundly problematic since it assumes a “systemic” and incremental strategy of colonisation (indirect and absentee) which is not borne out by the rather more “ad hoc and heterogeneous” history of relations between the Highlands, the Lowlands and England (Connell 2004b, 253). Further, it extrapolates the history of the post-Union nation in its entirety from the suppression of Gaelic culture specifically, and, by an act of wilful amnesia, it thus conflates the experiences of both victims and perpetrators into a single experience of national victimisation. For a postcolonial reading of Scottish history to be possible, on these terms at least, it would require “a generalisation of certain exceptional instances of Highland oppression as the normal experience of Scotland as a whole” and an assertion that “the modernisation of Scotland was the exogamous act of an irreducibly distinct English other” (Connell 2004b, 260). In this configuration, multiple, shifting colonial borderlines are drawn across the map of Scotland: along the Highland line, or across parts of the Lowlands, or finally, at the border of the two nations. This postcolonial/nationalist construction of the nation also has the makings of a further theoretical distortion, or rather, a distortion in theory, which is familiar to anthropologists as the synecdochic representation or evocation of a social whole through the representation of a part (Webster 1986, 41). In the fixed concentration on the Highlands and the compulsion to equate the suppression of the Gaels with the colonial oppression of Scottish culture in its totality, the Highlands become a synecdoche for a national consciousness which wishes for a unifying alliance of Gaels and other Scots in order to oppose the influence of English colonisation on Scottish life. In this, Scott emerges as having an ambiguous role, as both the celebrated creator of the evocative synecdoche and the cursed apologist for its destruction. In seeing only the Highland synecdoche, Scott becomes, post hoc, the nostalgic romancer beloved of Victorians, rather than a novelist of the Scottish Enlightenment deeply engaged in the

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“Injured by Time and Defeated by Violence”: Prospects of Loch Tay

complexities and nuances of contemporary debates on state formation and evolution, and national sympathies and identities. In its identification of a process of ‘othering’ in Waverley as a discourse of colonial difference, and for a concomitant reading of the text as a unionist apologia for colonial hegemony, the postcolonial/nationalist discourse exhibits a strong tendency to polarise antagonists into culturally distinct and internally coherent opponents. Yet, it is axiomatic in postcolonial/nationalist representations of Scottish national identity that Scotland has been riven, divided, and rendered incohesive as a result of English colonisation (see Connell 2004b; Gardiner 2004; Hechter 1975; Makdisi 1998). But, by a perverse logic, it is precisely its divided, colonised character that makes Scotland different from the colonising English; Scotland’s indistinct and inchoate state as a nation (the Other to England’s distinctive coherence) is taken as evidence of its uniquely different national identity. In a move that seems to define Scotland’s identity by its very lack of a national identity, Scott’s vision of a tragically fractured nation is thereby turned back on itself and made to prove the opposite: Scotland is a nation unlike its colonial Other in every respect, particularly in its appearance as a nation. Is a different postcolonial reading of the Scottish national imaginary possible? More to the point, is a different postcolonial reading of Scott’s foundational text of the Scottish imaginary possible? Such a reading should begin, perhaps, with Waverley’s journey to the Highlands and across the map of Scotland’s disputed (post)colonial borderline (Scott 1972, chapters 8-38). From his regimental base in Dundee, Edward passes quickly, in only ten lines of text, north-westwards beyond Perth, towards the “huge gigantic masses” of the Perthshire Highlands where, at the “bottom of this stupendous barrier” lies Baron Bradwardine’s ancient house at Tully-Veolan, “still in the Lowland country” but at a location which cannot be determined exactly (Scott 1972, 73). After a stay of six weeks in this liminal space, Edward is guided by Evan Dhu into the Highlands through the pass of Bally-Brough. They cross a dangerous and very Miltonic bog, “Serbonian” in its epic malevolence, to an unknown lake from where they are ferried in a curragh to Uaimh an Ri, a cave by a loch to the north and west of Loch Tay, where Edward meets the Highland cateran, Donald Lean Bean. From here, Evan and Waverley walk a further five miles (Waverley thinks it ten) to Fergus MacIvor’s clan stronghold of Glennaquoich, where he remains for three weeks. A hunting accident deeper in the Highlands compels him to stay a further six days at Tomanrait before returning to Glennaquoich, where the news he receives forces him to leave the Highlands in the company of

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Callum Beg, and to travel back to the Lowlands with the intention of clearing his name from the charge of being a deserter. After barely a month at Glennaquoich, Edward will never return. He must avoid TullyVeolan where a party of soldiers lies in wait for him and they travel to the Lowlands where they part company and Edward continues his journey with the publican Cruickshanks to the village of Cairnvreckan, where he is arrested and given to the tender mercies of ‘Gifted’ Gilfillan for transportation under arrest to Stirling Castle. He is again injured in a rescue by Highlanders who, on his recovery, eventually deposit him at Doune Castle, which is held by the Jacobites under the command of Colonel Stuart. Postcolonialism’s often-evoked metaphor of the map is useful in charting this journey. It is a fundamental tenet of postcolonialism that colonialism and map making (understood promiscuously both in the wider metaphorical sense of imaginative constructions of the space of Others and cartographic visual mapping) are intimately entwined historically. In Orientalism and in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said described an “‘imaginative geography’ or geographies that provide the intellectual schema for commercial and colonial designs on territories and societies,” in which “geography was essentially the material underpinning for knowledge about the other” (Said 1978; Said 1993, 216). Subsequently, geographers have elaborated on “the hidden discourse of maps” as being “primarily a form of political discourse concerned with the acquisition and maintenance of power” or which “reoriented social and physical landscapes into more metropolitan friendly places of settlement and sovereignty” (Harley 1988, 57; Howard 2010, 141). It has become routine that, as “a discourse of object-ness that reduces the world to a series of objects in a visual plane,” and a technological solution to the “constant colonial struggle to fill voids,” cartography was “the graphic arm of colonial enterprise” (Gregory 2004, 54, 118; Piper 2002, 6; Howard 2010, 148). Saree Makdisi, for example, uses the metaphor of the map more than fifty times in his postcolonial reading of Romanticism in Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity, and specifically in relation to Waverley, where he sees Scott’s Highlands, with some justification, as being “necessarily anti-modern”: The novel’s imaginary map of the Highlands is not, strictly speaking, a map of the past, but rather a map of a possible past, an imaginary past that is forever spatially (and temporally) different and distinct. (Makdisi 1998, 171)

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“Injured by Time and Defeated by Violence”: Prospects of Loch Tay

In this light, Scott’s “imaginary map of the Highlands,” as the signifier of otherness, difference, and distinction, would indeed appear to be a profoundly colonial construction, as Makdisi sees it. Edward sets out in mapped (Lowland) space, but the map loses exactitude the deeper into terra incognita he goes, until he enters a fantastical Highland space, not on any map, but now brought into “imaginative geography,” reduced to “object-ness” and subjected to a colonising sovereignty beyond its borders. But while this reading of Waverley has much to recommend itself, there are some significant caveats. In his Outline of a Theory of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu remarks on the significant dangers of describing any culture as a map, both for those practitioners (he is referring here to his fellow anthropologists) who do so and for those who construct readings, critiques, and epistemologies (such as postcolonialism) based on this analogy. According to Bourdieu, cultural mapping and imaginative geographies occur “to an outsider who has to find his way around in a foreign landscape” and has to “compensate for his lack of practical mastery.” There is, as a consequence, a “gulf between this potential, abstract space” of the map and the “privileged centre,” which is the possession and prerogative of the “native.” Whereas maps are “continuous” (by which he means that the geometric space of a map configures cultural topography as a single, logically coherent entity), the native’s “practical mastery” of cultural space is profoundly “discontinuous” (by which he means that the lived experience is ‘broken’ by informal tracks and significant landmarks which are incoherent to and unrepresentable in a cultural map). This gulf between “continuous” cultural mapping and “discontinuous” practical mastery is enlarged upon by Bourdieu as containing a theoretical distortion: […] in as much as his situation as an observer, excluded from the real play of social activities by the fact that he has no place (except by choice or by way of a game) in the system observed, inclines him to a hermeneutic representation of practices, leading him to reduce all social relations to communicative relations and, more precisely, to decoding operations. (Bourdieu 1977, 1)

In the anthropological domain, the anthropologist’s pursuit of “objectivity,” which mapping appears to secure, is in fact transmuted into “an epistemological choice,” that of “an impartial spectator, as Husserl puts it, condemned to see all practice as spectacle” (Bourdieu 1977, 2). From this, Bourdieu would appear to offer strong support to postcolonialism’s reading of Scott’s representation of the Highlands and the consequent mapping of the national imaginary that descends from it:

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the real play of social activities is passed over and reduced (transmuted) into a hegemonic representation of the spectacle of culture. Clearly, so the argument goes, Scott does not have the “practical mastery” of the environment or a native’s inwardness with Highland culture, and so his spectacle of culture is nothing short of a “hermeneutic representation of practices” and therefore a map of difference, distance and distinction. Although a postcolonial reading, on these terms, would seem to have a great deal going for it, I would wish to argue that postcolonialism is itself a “hermeneutic representation of practices” (and often knows itself to be so) and is equally as culpable of reductive cultural mapping and of seeing “all practice as spectacle.” The real target of Bourdieu’s complex and subtle argument are the “epistemological choices” involved in anthropological representations, which, through the device of cultural maps, give the appearance of neutrality and objectivity, but which are shaped and determined by their own hermeneutical procedures; anything (“the real play of social activities,” for example) which lies beyond those same reductive decoding operations is invisible to it. Similarly, postcolonialism’s discourse of otherness upon which its imaginative geography is founded will see the spectacle of otherness, and only the spectacle of otherness, no matter where it looks: “forever spatially (and temporally) different and distinct.” The postcolonial reading of Scott tends toward the theoretical distortion Bourdieu alludes to in anthropological representation: to see practice as spectacle and to interpret spectacle/representation epistemologically, as fundamentally hegemonic and colonising. Scott’s cultural map of Scotland in 1745, for a map it certainly is, is not the rather simple colonial appropriation of space that the available postcolonial readings would tend to suggest. It is not only that the postcolonial map is drawn to the wrong scale, in that it concentrates only on the Highland synecdoche, it is the wrong kind of map entirely. My point is twofold. Contrary to the assumptions of postcolonial readings of the “imaginary map” in Waverley, mapping Highland Scotland, cognitively or cartographically, was by no means a new enterprise signalling the arrival of a post-Culloden, post-Act of Union, Lowland/English modernity in the guise of “the graphic arm of colonial enterprise.” Highland topography was already the subject of extensive analysis and detailed representation well before the writing of Scott’s Waverley.1 Specifically, Perthshire and the environs of Loch Tay that 1

A list and reproductions of maps of the Highlands, in chronological order from 1572 to 1807 can be viewed on the National Library of Scotland website at http://maps.nls.uk/index.html.

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“Injured by Time and Defeated by Violence”: Prospects of Loch Tay

Waverley traversed, were very far from being terra incognita, but came in for special and extensive attention.2 From the sixteenth century to the Jacobite Rebellion, the Highlands had been extensively mapped, and with extraordinary frequency: a cartographic endeavour whereby a new map of the Highlands was produced on average every six years, at least. This rate of production was stepped up even further in the second half of the eighteenth century, with a new map published on average every two years between 1745 and the publication of Waverley. Undoubtedly this increase in what was already a phenomenal rate of production answered the needs of the military for accurate maps, such as Roy’s Military Survey of Scotland, but very many served no military purpose at all, such as John McArthur’s Plans of The Farms On The South Side of Loch Tay (1769), or Whittle and Laurie’s New map of Scotland for ladies needlework (1797). This space is not the imaginary pre-colonial vacancy: the Highlands are neither Conrad’s Congo, nor Buchan’s South Africa. Secondly, not all maps are the same in this history of abundant map making. Charles Withers, the historical geographer, makes an important Ptolemaic distinction between different kinds of map making: geography, the aim of which is to produce mathematically accurate representations of “the unity and continuity of the known world in its true nature and location”; and chorography which is concerned to convey “the quality of places” rather than “their quantity or scale, aware that it should use all means to sketch the true form or likeness of places and not so much their correspondence, measure or disposition amongst themselves or with the heavens or with the whole of the world” (Withers 2001, 140-41): Chorography emphasised the local and did so historically and geographically: with reference, for example, to the genealogies of families of note, and to the remarkable features in a place. This attention to place had political significance in that matters of a local nature – notable families, distinctive natural features, historical antiquities and such like – were made to appear part of that place, fixed over time as well as in space. Because of this, chorography – with geography one of […] the “eyes of 2

Timothy Pont’s Loch Tay (ca 1583); Blaeu’s Atlas of Scotland (1654); an anonymous map of central Scotland showing clans that rebelled in 1715; H. Moll’s North Part of Perth Shire containing Athol and Broadalbin; Willdey’s A Map of the Kings Roads, Made by his Excellency General Wade in the Highlands of Scotland (1756); Cameron’s An Exact Map of Breadalbane (1770); Taylor and Skinner’s Survey and Maps of the Roads of North Britain or Scotland (Stirling to Fort Augustus) (1776); James Stobie’s The Counties of Perth and Clackmannan (1783). All can be viewed on the National Library of Scotland website at http://maps.nls.uk/index.html.

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history” – was closely associated with chronology (the other “eye”), with antiquarianism and with emerging ideas of public utility and of national identity. (Withers 2011)

It is my contention that postcolonial critiques tend to see Scott’s cultural mapmaking rather too simplistically as a form of colonially inflected geography, whereas his textual representation is much closer to a form of chorography. To trace Edward Waverley’s fateful journey to and from the Highlands is to traverse an imaginary topography of many conflicted borderlands, fault lines, fractures and discontinuities: zones of complex deformation which mark out the cultural and political spaces of the Scottish nation in 1745 from the perspective of 1814. Scott’s prospect of the nation, revealed in Waverley’s journey to the Highlands on the eve of the Jacobite rebellion, is much larger than the Highland synecdoche, as it involves disaffected gentry, merchants, militias, antique aristocracies, reclusive gentry, hypocritical Presbyterians, Cameronian fanatics, rebel generals as well as clan chieftains, and is concerned to sketch chorographically “their correspondence, measure or disposition amongst themselves.” Nor are the ‘colonising’ Lowlands one homogenous domain of Enlightenment rationality and bureaucratic modernity to place against an equally homogenous Highlands of Weberian charismatic authority, since they too contain warring ‘tribes.’ Each location, encountered episodically, has a distinctive landscape presided over by its spirits of place, and Scott’s vision of the nation revealed in this journey is expansive, complex and fractured: chorographical, local, fictional ‘terrains’ and textual contours are laid unevenly next to and around each other like broken moraine. Bourdieu (and postcolonialism to a degree) can conceive of only one alternative to the “abstract space” of the colonial map of continuous representation: the native’s “practical mastery” of “discontinuous” cultural space. Scott’s chorographical landscape is an intermediate alternative between the geographic and the native since it lays no claim to practical mastery or colonial calculation, but his rough ground is “discontinuous” in Bourdieu’s sense of the word: crossed by informal tracks and significant landmarks, distinctive natural features and antiquarian observations, local histories and factional conflicts. Far from being a fiction of internal colonialism, in which the “unifying of Britain as union has driven a wider colonial standardization of cultural authority” (Hechter 1975, cited in Gardiner 2004, 265), Scott’s chorographic narrative emphasises the multiplicity of the Scottish national scene which resists such containment within a single standard vision of the nation. Most importantly, a chorographic view of Edward Waverley’s episodic encounters with the

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“Injured by Time and Defeated by Violence”: Prospects of Loch Tay

various local spirits of place enables – requires – an intricate reading of “correspondence, measure and disposition” along multiple axes: competing political fanaticisms and religious allegiances; models of femininity and masculinity; the practice of the law and hereditary jurisdiction; contrasting allegorical landscapes. The ancient images of otherness – the body, the law, and the wild – are, of course, all brought into Scott’s chorography, but the correspondences construct visualizable representations of cultural phenomena, what Clifford Geertz would describe as “anthropological transparencies” which create a “see-able society” (Geertz 1988, 64-5). This monde commenté is not the single Manichean divide of Highlands and Lowlands, but the self-consciously composed, artificial chorography of romance. Scott's novels repeat familiar images and historical subjects composed within narrative formulae and romance conventions: narrative devices link novels together in chains of increasing complexity predicated upon a view of the nation where recurring fragmentation leads to the fitful birth of the ‘modern.’ Repeated patterns of history engage with the structures of romance, directing the reader to the apprehension of the historical narrative, while his annotations chorographically frame and expand the fictional dimensions of the text. Collectively, the novels seem to claim that history can be entered through romance, a narrative strategy of penetration of temporal ‘surfaces,’ and that the reverse is also the case: history can be ‘turned’ to reveal the moral and aesthetic meanings of romance. Romance and history thus conspire to produce symbolic and emblematic systems and signs which purport to represent the nation. The proper reading of these signs should, therefore, lead to a fuller comprehension of the twists and turn of history by reducing them to formulaic national romance. Yet, having made a kind of ‘narrative machine’ for the processing of history into narrative, Scott seems unwilling to make actuality fit the aesthetic and moral structures of romance. Instead, the novels collectively depict the multiple births of versions of the modern, in every century from the thirteenth to the eighteenth, out of the catastrophe of the nation. Instead of this desired state of enunciation, and instead of certainty in the emblematic structures of the nation, he describes the collapse of cultures made of emblems and signs. This uneasy relationship between history and romance, as if the narration is struggling with its own narrative, denies full validation to the historical processes it seems to describe. In The Fair Maid of Perth, Scott returns to Loch Tay and the space through which Waverley journeyed in 1745, but here the date is 1396. Whereas in the earlier novel the landscape is largely seen as if with Waverley’s eyes, for whom all is new and strange, here the landscape is

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deeply layered in history. Simon Glover, having fled Perth, is left to his own devices while the Highlanders with whom he is seeking sanctuary attend the funeral of their chief, the Captain of Clan Quhele (Scott 1881b, chapter 28). He climbs a hill and stretched beneath him is the Highland world in a microcosmic landscape. After a brief description of the loch, attention is focussed on the ruins of the lake-island abbey. It is a picturesque and antiquated spot which contains the remains of Sibilla, illegitimate daughter of Henry I of England and consort of Alexander I of Scotland, who died on the island in 1122. A paragraph later Scott recounts the approach of the funeral flotilla from out of the remote glen where the rivers Dochart and Lochy enter Loch Tay, “a wild and inaccessible spot, where the Campbells at a subsequent period founded their strong fortress of Finlayriggs” (Scott 1881b, 339). The narrative is set in the fourteenth century, but we ‘see’ the burial place of a twelfth century queen and, in the same sentence, the future seventeenth-century castle of Finlarig, viewed from Scott’s nineteenth-century viewpoint. Vision is subjected to prismatic deflections and varying perspectives; we see Simon looking, he is part of what we see, we see through his eyes, but above all, we see what Scott sees. What ‘we’ collectively (Simon, reader, Scott) ‘see’ is equally plural: twelfth, fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth century landscapes. As Scott places himself on the hillside with Simon, time and the land – time in the land – are subjected to an at least double vision. It is the dynamic tensions between these multiple temporalities and perspectives – the ‘now’ of Scott’s writing and the multiple possible ‘thens’ of the landscape – which play on the difference between an apprehension of history and another, more self-reflexive perspective, which reveals the author in the act or process of assembling his chorography of time in space. Here, and repeatedly, Scott transforms time into space in an attempt (to borrow a phrase from Susan Sontag’s commentary on Walter Benjamin) to see “its premonitory structures” and to understand how historical change works by “spatializing the world.” “To understand something is to understand its topography” (Sontag 1979, 13). The landscape is “read as a language,” to quote Susan Buck-Morss writing in a different context, “in which historically transient truth (and the truth of historical transciency) is expressed concretely” and the nation’s formation “becomes legible within perceived experience” (Buck-Morss 1989, 27). The land thus becomes a mnemotechnic space: a means to realise remembrance and make it material through the spatialisation of time. But what is realised, and, more importantly, what sentiment lies beneath? What these various ‘eyes’ see is an ancient landscape of death and ruin: the seven-hundred-year old priory built over the grave of dead

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“Injured by Time and Defeated by Violence”: Prospects of Loch Tay

Sibilla, where the dead clan chief will be interred, is, by 1828, obliterated by time; Finlarig, too, has fallen into decay, surrounded by the clan MacNab burial ground and a ruined Campbell mausoleum. As the ruins testify to history’s presence, Loch Tay passes beyond the merely picturesque to become an allegorical field of ruins and graves. The layers of vision and of time reveal a melancholic combination of nature and history: the chorographic romance dimension discloses an image of catastrophe that cannot be normalised by an appeal to the picturesque illusion, but which insists, instead, on preserving the memory of the ruins and refusing to subject them to the process of forgetting. Scott recapitulates in his own textual identity the crisis which he observes in the repeated history of the nation: this landscape is a chorography of militant melancholia whose allegorical emblem is the death’s head. In the summer of 1915, Sir James Frazer, the renowned anthropologist, took his French wife Lilly to visit his native Scotland. Lilly was in poor shape; she had been ill and needed to convalesce. Frazer had been keeping to an exceptionally heavy work schedule, even by his prodigious rate of production, and he, too, was exhausted and in low spirits. In the previous years he had published the twelve volumes of the third edition of The Golden Bough and had set about compiling an additional index volume, he had written a collection of essays in the style of Addison, continued working on the second volume of The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, and begun his hardly less monumental work in three volumes on Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, which he described to his publisher as being a “comparatively small book” (Ackerman 1987, 262), which, by his standards, it probably was. His personal and domestic life had also added to his fatigue; he had been knighted in the previous June, which had brought him unfamiliar and unwelcome celebrity, he had also moved house from Cambridge to London, and his younger brother Samuel had died, probably of alcoholism (Ackerman 1987, 260-62). In letters from the second-half of 1914 he wrote of his “despondency” and “ill humour” about “the prospect of European war.” (Frazer, unpublished letter, September 15, 1914); “The men [the Emperors of Germany and Austria] who are responsible for it should be shot.” (Frazer, unpublished letter, July 30, 1914); “If things go on as they have begun, there may not be much of the British Empire left at the end of it” (Frazer, unpublished letter, August 25, 1914).3 3

All references to ‘unpublished letters’ here are to: Frazer-Roscoe Correspondence. Unpublished notebooks and correspondence. The Frazer Archives, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.

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The Frazers decided a Highland holiday was needed and by July they were staying in Perthshire, from where Frazer wrote to a friend of long standing: This is a very beautiful place at the lower end of Loch Tay, where the river flows out of it. The hills are high and some of them are well wooded. In the distance we see big Ben Lawers towering above the lake. The steamers are now running, and we hope to make expeditions in them. (Frazer, unpublished letter, July 18, 1915)

Frazer had been praised for his ability to capture the spirit of place in his writings even amongst a readership with little interest in Classics and less in comparative anthropology; Walter Raleigh, the first professor of English Literature at Oxford, wrote that “Frazer is (a beautiful writer, but) essentially a hard-bitten rationalist […] I love him, and I don’t believe a word of it” (quoted in Ackerman 1987, 259). In particular, he had gained considerable fame for his writings retracing Pausanias’s travels in ancient Greece and Italy, a spin-off from Frazer’s celebrated translations, which attempted to recall archaic Italian and Greek landscapes: lands which he described in melancholy tones as depopulated by “civil brawls and wars,” “injured by time and defeated by violence” (Frazer 1900, 3). The highlight had been his visit to a lake in Aricia: the “dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi, ‘Diana’s Mirror,’ as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it” (Frazer 1890, 1). In antiquity, in the sacred grove of Diana Nemorensis and its sanctuary by the lake, lurked “a strange figure,” the Rex Nemorensis, a slave who was both “priest and murderer,” who had succeeded in breaking off a golden bough from the sacred tree of Diana and defeating his predecessor in combat. He then ruled in his stead until it was his turn to die at the hands of the next runaway slave. Unravelling the mystery of the events in the sacred grove at Nemi, which “stands out in striking isolation from the polished Italian society of the day, like a primeval rock rising from a smooth-shaven lawn” (Frazer 1890, 3), took eighteen large volumes of The Golden Bough and thirty years of Frazer’s life to complete.4 Frazer had a very great deal to say about the lake at Nemi, but hardly anything about Loch Tay, which being similarly injured, defeated, and depopulated it closely resembled. Indeed, Scotland as a whole holds little 4

To Frazer, however, The Golden Bough was not complete with the publication of the third edition, nor, to his mind, could it ever be completed, and he had his publishers prepare a special binding of the text interleaved with blank pages, which he continued to fill with new ‘facts’ until his death in 1941.

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“Injured by Time and Defeated by Violence”: Prospects of Loch Tay

of any real interest for Frazer despite the extensive corpus revealed by previous generations of Scottish antiquarians, like Scott, for in the thousands of references in his oeuvre to folk-loric practices, primitive beliefs, and cultural survivals from hundreds of cultures and locations, Scotland hardly features at all. The beliefs of English ploughmen are given much more expansive treatment than the corpus of Highland myths and legends that underpinned Scott’s historical novels. Scott was very much a part of Frazer’s early reading, as he was for every literate Scot, but the description of Loch Tay bears not a trace of that inheritance. It is hard not to avoid the impression that, unlike Nemi, there is nothing here that excites his professional interest, nothing to engage his anthropological curiosity. This landscape (unlike Scott’s or the lake in Aricia) is emptied of content; this is the “tabula rasa of bleakness” after the clearances, neither “wild” nor “inaccessible,” emptied of danger, and its chorography forgotten. It is, of course, mere chance that Frazer should find himself in the same place as the fictional Simon Glover, and very close to the route of Edward Waverley’s journey, and, after all, this is a letter to a friend, and neither a historical novel nor a work of evolutionary anthropology. But this coincidence of place on the shores of Loch Tay offers an opportunity to ask some important questions about what is different in this landscape and its meanings, because it is difficult not to feel in reading Frazer’s description that much has changed and many things have been forgotten. This vignette opens on to a much wider vista as the letter goes on to evoke another lake, neither Lake Nemi nor Loch Tay, that does engage his most avid interest. The letter is the latest in a long series of exchanges with Frazer’s friend and protégé John Roscoe, a CMS missionary to the Uganda Protectorate who had supplied Frazer with valuable ethnographic information about the kingdom of Buganda, which lay on the northern and western shores of Lake Victoria-Nyanza. Roscoe had entered Buganda relatively early in that kingdom’s encounter with British colonisation following the death of the pioneer missionary Alexander Mackay in 1890: a time of intense internal clan rivalries and terrible civil wars.5 Roscoe had acquired a copy of Frazer’s pamphlet The Questions on the Manners, Customs, Religion, Superstitions, etc. of Uncivilized or Semi-Civilized Peoples (1887), which Frazer had given to any colonial authority that would take and distribute it. The questionnaires and the replies he received constituted, in essence, Frazer’s ‘fieldwork’: a significant body of data which underpinned his work at a time before anthropology developed the 5 For a fuller account of Frazer and Roscoe, see my Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (1994).

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practice of ethnography, participant observation, and the microsociological survey. Frazer’s questionnaire radically shaped the nature of the enquiries to be conducted by his observers and created structures of representation which reflected Frazer’s own presuppositions of the nature of ‘savage’ existence, and although the peoples represented in the questionnaires were invariably in the traumatic throes of imperial conquest and colonisation, very few respondents refer to this, nor were they encouraged to do so. In desiring to see ‘primitive’ people, Frazer failed to see colonised people (Goddard, 1969, 79). Roscoe responded to Frazer directly and began an extraordinary correspondence and a close friendship that would endure for thirty years. Roscoe’s first hand field experience had proved crucial to Frazer in providing him with an extensive account of the elaborate Bugandan clan system, which was based, or so Frazer claimed, on the ubiquitous “savage” belief in “totemism.” Without Roscoe’s detailed knowledge of the complex relationships between the more than forty Bugandan totemic clans, the key second volume of Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy: A Treatise on Certain Early Forms of Superstition and Society (1910) would have been impossible (as would Freud’s Totem and Taboo, as that, too, was derived almost entirely from Frazer’s/Roscoe’s text). In that volume Frazer argued that belief in “totemism” and “taboo,” both as social regulatory apparatus and as religion, was the key marker of the “uncivilised” phase of cultural evolution, and its elaboration by Frazer further established him as a significant theorist of the “savage mind” for colonial anthropology. Frazer’s letter to Roscoe moves on from his prospect of Loch Tay to information about the ongoing W.H.R. Rivers expedition to the New Hebrides,6 before turning to Roscoe’s own planned expedition to Uganda (and without any sense of absurdity, Frazer uses the same term to describe the Uganda and New Hebrides expeditions and his own “expedition”: a trip on a Loch Tay steamer). 7 The letter ends with a veritable shopping list of information Frazer required from Roscoe to enable him to continue his work on totemism. 6

The New Hebrides expedition was led by W.H.R. Rivers and included Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, whose functionalism and structural functionalism would radically transform and put an end to Frazer’s evolutionary anthropology. 7 Yet ironically, when Grant and Speke first mapped the Bugandan shores of Lake Victoria, they added imaginary steamers to their watercolour sketches. In less than forty years, in 1900, the first of many Imperial British East Africa Company ‘knock down’ steamers, the SS William Mackinnon, was launched at Kisumu; she had been built by Bow, McLachlan and Co. of Paisley in Scotland.

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“Injured by Time and Defeated by Violence”: Prospects of Loch Tay

The collection of this data is urgent, Frazer and Roscoe repeatedly remind each other, before “all that was so interesting is […] swept away at one stroke […] in the name of civilization” (Roscoe, unpublished letter to Frazer, April 27, 1900), much as Croftangry had also had a melancholic sense of cultures indeed being “melted down into the great mass of civilization” (see quotation at the beginning of this paper). But making history, particularly the kind of history that Scott practised, is all but eradicated from this place, and the colonial borderline has shifted from Loch Tay to Lake Victoria. Frazer sees none of Glover’s sights, nor can he read the landscape chorographically. Instead, he shows a relentless and irresistible progression: as Aricia was, Uganda is; as Loch Tay is, Lake Victoria shall be; the warring Bugandan clans will be subdued, like the Highland clans; civil wars will end and civilisation will commence; “totemic” practices and other such primitive beliefs will be “swept away,” as they were in Scotland. Like his tripartite scheme for the cultural evolution of human thought – from magic, to religion, to science – the past, present and future are glimpsed in transformed and transforming landscapes showing the undeniable and inevitable coming of civilisation to the “wild and inaccessible places” of the world. At Loch Tay, Scott and Frazer stand at either ends of a historical process in which antiquarianism was converted into anthropology, just as Enlightenment stadial theory became Darwinian cultural evolution; these transformations in the narratives of difference, from historical romance to anthropology, signalled a conceptual shift that was tectonic in its repercussions. Intentionally or not, Frazer devised a new kind of master narrative to replace Scott’s historical romance: the “mythical method,” as T.S. Eliot described it; Wittgenstein’s “perspicuous presentation” where “we see the connections”: juxtaposition, montage, collage. These are the very bases, not only of modernism, but also of modernity. It is also a historical process in which the question of Scottish “national specificity,” to borrow Michael Gardiner’s phrase (Gardiner 2004, 274), is repeatedly posed as an Enlightenment, Romantic, colonial, and nationalist question. Insofar as it is also a question about the nature and meaning of national specificity per se, it is indeed a postcolonial question too, but Scotland lies across many borderlines.

GAELIC PERSPECTIVES

NEGOTIATIONS OF BARBARITY, AUTHENTICITY AND PURITY IN EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURY GAELIC LITERATURE PETER MACKAY

Discussions of barbarity, (in)authenticity and (im)purity have an ancient and anxious lineage. The extension of the Ancient Greek ȕȐȡȕĮȡȠȢ from a description of any non-Greek speaker into a social or ethnic type, in an act of “pan-hellenic and anti-Persian propaganda” (Kamtekar 2002, 3; see also Hall 1989), was not even wholly accepted within Greek discourse. Plato’s contradictory discussions of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy include a dismissal of it as “unscientific superstition” (Taylor [1926] 2001, 44), which served “no intellectual purpose other than dividing people up into ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Kamtekar 2002, 4); this did not, however, stop the distinction becoming a powerful ideological tool in Western European empire and imperialism.1 Similarly, in recent decades, despite some attempts to claim it as an anti-colonial weapon, ‘authenticity’ as commodity and cultural signifier has been – especially when opposed to ‘hybridity’ – variously condemned as “the scourge of the immigrant,”2 “not merely an ontological contradiction, but a political trap” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1995, 214) and “the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism” (Rushdie 1991, 67); and over the course of the last century ‘cultural purity’ has been undermined by the prioritisation of hybridity or heterogeneity, as was ‘racial purity’ by the debunking of racist science. This chapter focuses on a period in which the ‘problems’ of authenticity, purity and barbarity manifested themselves as an interweaving set of concerns in a cross-cultural (and politically fraught) framework. The emergence of Scottish Gaelic secular publishing in the 1

For a discussion of ‘barbarity’ as formulated in the Roman Empire, see Webster 1996. 2 Attributed to Trinh T. Minh-ha (Newman 1995, 161).

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second half of the eighteenth century coincided with the prohibition of various aspects of Gaelic culture in the wake of the failed Jacobite uprising of 1745-46, the accelerated disintegration of the traditional, clannish structuring of Highland society, and a debate – conducted within the terms of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy – on the civilisation/barbarity of Highland culture.3 As a result of this context, these texts are riven with anxiety about the relationship of a past that is presented as alternately barbaric and ‘authentic’ to a present that is alternately civilised and fallen.

“Cuideachd de bhorb-bhrothach bhodach”/ “A Company of Mad Mangy Serfs”: What it Means to Be a Barbarian “Blàr na h-Òlaind” [The Battle of Holland] – a first-hand account of the Battle of Egmond-aan-Zee on 2 October 1799 (see Black 2001, 521-22) by the Morar poet Alasdair MacFhionghain (Alexander MacKinnon) – describes how the Gordon Highlanders fight through intensive fire and break the French lines: Gum b’i sin an tuairmeas smiorail, Chinnteach, amaiseach, gun dearmad, Thug na leóghainn bhorba, nimheil, Bu cholgail sealladh fo’n armaibh Ri sgiùrsadh naimhdean mar fhalaisg ’S driùchdan fallais air gach calg dhuibh. ’S bha na Frangaich brùchdadh fala ’S an cùl ri talamh anns a’ ghainmhich. (lines 81-8) It was a brave onset, Certain, well-aimed, not neglectful, That those wild, deadly lions made, Looking fierce behind their arms As they scourged the foe like heather-fire With drops of sweat on all their bristles. And the French were belching blood 3

There is much critical discussion of how Highland culture, and the Gaelic language in particular, was identified with barbarity from outwith for centuries. This falls outside the scope of the current chapter, which is interested in how notions of barbarity manifested in Gaelic texts or meta-texts; however, for arguments that hostility towards the “barbaric” Gael peaked in the first half of the eighteenth century, see Clyde 1995; MacKillop 2000.

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Negotiations of Barbarity, Authenticity and Purity in Gaelic Literature As they lay on their backs in the sand. (Black 2001, 358-59)

An unashamedly pro-British and pro-Imperial song, “Blàr na h-Òlaind” is – as Wilson McLeod argues in his chapter in this volume – in keeping with the tenor of much Gaelic military verse post-1756. As cultural encounters or negotiations go, this is of the most basic and brutal kind. The French exist as a faceless multitudinous enemy, whose individual characteristics are solely military, and whose sole reason for existence is to be fought against and beaten: “Tha na Frangaich math air teine / Gus an teannar goirid uapa” [The French are good marksmen / Till you get up close to them] (Black 2001, 358-59, lines 73-74; Black’s translation). However, this encounter is more complicated than it might first appear. On the one hand, it manipulates and draws on centuries of established rhetorical conventions: to describe the Gordon Highlanders as leóghainn [lions] is to associate them with countless clan-chiefs and warriors described in a similar fashion in clan panegyrics from the medieval period onwards.4 On the other, by using the adjective borb, i.e. “wild, fierce” (line 83), the verse places itself very much in the context of late eighteenth-century Gaelic literary theory, and of the particular problem of the (self-)representation of Highland soldiers. In MacFhiongain’s verse the term borb is always positive,5 echoing its usage in medieval panegyric verse, where buirbe – the noun form, here with the sense of vehemence or fierceness – was a valued attribute for warriors and leaders.6 This usage carried over into other eighteenth-century verse as well; the anonymous elegy to Rob Roy MacGregor neatly encapsulates how buirbe was a virtue, in a military context at least:

4

See MacInnes (2006b, 265-319) for the seminal discussion of the panegyric in Gaelic poetry, “The Panegyric Code in Gaelic Poetry and its Historical Background.” 5 See “Oran air don Bhàrd a dhol air Tìr san Eiphit” [A Song by the Poet after Going ashore in Egypt] (Meek 2003, 302) and “Oran air Blar na h-Eiphit” [A Song on the Battle of Egypt] (Mackenzie 2001, 343). 6 The anonymous songs “Maith an Chairt Ceannas na nGaoidheal” [The Headship of the Gaels is Good Charter] and “Clann Ghille Eóin na mBratach Badhbha” [Clann Ghill’Eathain of the Raven-blazoned Banners] offer examples of this tradition, as do Mac Mhuireadhaigh’s “Alba gan Díon a nDiadh Ailín” [Scotland is Defenceless after Ailean] and the contentiously dated “Brostughadh-Catha Chlann Domhnaill, Là Chatha Gharbhaich” [Harlaw Brosnachadh] attributed to Lachlann Mòr MacMhuirich. These examples can be found in McLeod and Bateman (2007, 146, 162, 206, 232).

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Bha thu borb ann an strì Bha thu ciùin ann an sìth – Bu cheannard roimh mhìle chlaidhe thu. (lines 34-36) You were fierce in a fight, You were tranquil in peace – You were backed by a thousand swords. (Black 2001, 146-47)

However, borb covers a semantic range from “fierce” through “barbaric” or “barbarous” to “cruel,” and elsewhere generally tends to be used negatively. The full range of meanings for “borb” is suggested in the Galick and English Vocabulary published in 1741 by Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (Alasdair MacDhonuill/Alexander MacDonald); there, however, even the equation of “buirbe” with “fierceness” is negatively framed, since it comes in a section headed “Do Thaobh Dhubhailcain, no Dhobhertaimh. Of Vices” (MacDhonuill 1741, 36).7 Also, when the term appears in the Bible, it is always negative, most commonly directly equivalent to “barbarous.”8 In some eighteenth-century verse the virtuous, fierce buirbe risks sliding into the vicious, barbarous buirbe. Thus, in the somewhat fraught Jacobite poem “An Taisbean” [The Vision] by Eachann MacLeòid (Hector MacLeod),9 the MacDonalds of Clanranald are described towards the end of the poem in unequivocally positive terms as lions, and as being “De shliochd nan Collaidh bu bhorb colg” [Of the Collas’ race of fierce rage] (Black 2001, 198, 464). Shortly afterwards, however, in the crosanachd, a distinctly less aristocratic group is described using the term borb:

7

Other relevant mentions are MacDhonuill (1741, 132, 141): barbira (barbarous) and borb (cruel). 8 See, for example, 1. Corinth XIV: 11, 2 Tim. III: 3, Isaiah XIX: 4, Isaiah XXV: 3, Isaiah XXXIII: 19, Gniomhara (Acts) XXVIII: 4. Gnath-Fhocail (Proverbs) XIV: 16 has a different, yet also negative connotation: “Bithidh eagal air an dhuine ghlic, agus tréigidh e ’n t-olc; ach tha’n t-amadam borb agus dana”: The wise man will be scared, and avoid evil; but the fool is wild and bold (borb is annotated feargach or fierce/angry). The text I have used is near-contemporary to Alasdair MacFhionghain’s work, the 1804 T-Seann Tiomnaidh agus an Tiomnaidh Nuadh [Old and New Testaments] (London: British and Foreign Bible Society [1807 reprint]). 9 For a discussion of the poet, see Black (2001, 460-63).

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Negotiations of Barbarity, Authenticity and Purity in Gaelic Literature Agus thagh iad cuideachd de bhorb-bhrothach bhodach dha’m b’ airm chosanta spaidean agus sluasaidean gu tìodhlacadh nam marbh agus gu glanadh na h-àraich. And they chose a company of mad mangy serfs whose defensive weapons were spades and shovels to bury the dead and to cleanse the battlefield. (Black 2001, 200)

The lion and the mangy10 serf: the oscillation between the two extreme variations of buirbe hints at a crisis in self-representation and selfperception in the eighteenth century, born partly out of the conflict between Christian and medieval Gaelic notions of virtue and vice, but also – I will argue – out of a change in Gaelic literary self-theorising, which took place between the 1750s and early 1800s.

“A Long Succession of Barbarous Generations”: Antiquity as Guarantor of Authenticity? Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s Ais-eiridh na sean chànoin Albannaich [“Resurrection of the old Scottish language,” MacDhonuill 1751] was not only the first secular printed volume of verse in Gaelic, but also – in the author’s preface and the first poem of the collection – made the first definitive argument for the place and merit of Gaelic literature. It is an avowedly multilingual and outward-facing book, with Gaelic poetry situated in the context of other literatures in multiple ways: the Gaelic text of the poems is framed by an English-language preface and an epigrammatic Latin poem by Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair himself. The reason behind the publication is – according to the preface – entertainment for Gaelic speakers, but also a desire to convince non-Gaelic speakers that their literature may possibly contain in its bosom the charms of poetry and rhetoric, those two great sources of pleasure and persuasion, to which all other languages have owed their gradual advancement, and, in these improving times, their last polish and refinement. (MacDhonuill 1751, v)

A discussion of the comparative merit of Gaelic – framed here as its “polish and refinement” – is only one form of intercultural commerce presented in Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s book. Others suggested or enacted are translation, borrowing and adoption, patriotism – including what John MacInnes termed an “integrating principle” whereby Gaelic is explicitly claimed to be integral to Scottish life – competition and being 10

Brothach, as Black suggests, can mean “mangy” as well as “angry.”

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(in)offensive.11 These last two are perhaps the most interesting. Given Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s politics – as well as the ribald content of some of his satires – it is no surprise that he fears being offensive: As [the poems] are published in the GALIC [sic] language, only those that understand that tongue, are competent judges of them; and he submits them to their censure and indulgence; all his ambition being, to approve himself a lover of his country, and an inoffensive man. (MacDhonuill 1751, viii)

Despite his pleading, however, being offensive is at least part of his aim. The arguments made for the superiority of Gaelic to both Greek and Latin in “Moladh an úghdair do ’n t-sean chánoin Ghailic” [The author’s praise for the old Gaelic language] are certainly developed in offensive terms: Tha Laidiunn coimhliont’, Torrthach, teann na ’s leoir; Ach sgalog thráilleil I do ’n Ghailic choir. Sa ’n Athen mhoir, Bha Ghréigis córr na tím, Ach b’ ion d’i h-ordag Chuir fa h-ór chrios grinn. (lines 65-72) Latin is perfect Fruitful, firm and sufficient But she’s a slavish flunkey To kind Gaelic. In great Athens Greek was good in its time But she’s not fit to put her thumb Under her [i.e. Gaelic’s] fine gold belt. (MacDhonuill 1751, 4; my translation)

This comparison between Gaelic and Latin/Greek is central to Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s positioning of Gaelic literature (a placing which serves to aggrandise his own poetic achievement as much as the rich history of the language). It is also a response to questions which implicitly underlie Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s preface and the manifesto poem “Moladh an úghdair”: what is its place among the literatures and languages of the world; and what is its worth? For Mac Mhaighstir 11

See MacInnes (2006b, 43). For more on Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s translations of English language poems, and his assimilation of English language literary theory, see Thomson (1996, 7-12); Black (2009b, 48-54); and Mackay 2012a.

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Negotiations of Barbarity, Authenticity and Purity in Gaelic Literature

Alasdair, the answer to both is connected to its antiquity, and its previous wealth: the CELTIC nation, of which [Gaelic speakers] are a small, but precious remain, once diffused itself over a great part of the globe. From its bosom have issued the conquerors of Rome, the planters of Gaul, Britain, Ireland; still found subsisting in this last, in Wales, in some parts of Spain, and along the coast of France; once great and flourishing in Asia; and peculiarly distinguished, in having one of the holy epistles of the great Apostle of the Gentiles addressed to them. A people so extensive and numerous, could not fail of having made considerable improvements amongst them, though many of their monuments are lost, and the greatest monument of all, the language, entirely neglected. (MacDhonuill 1751, vi-vii)

Nine years later, however, with the recovery of some of these “lost monuments” – the fragments of ancient poetry published by James Macpherson and attributed to ‘Ossian’ – the questions that Gaelic literature asked of itself (and so the way it was presented to the world) were quite different. Whether dealing with Ossianic material or not, the central concern of Gaelic poetry – and Gaelic literary criticism – becomes: “Are these poems authentic?”12 The only question of ‘authenticity’ in Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s preface relates to how accurately the poetry reflects the priorities and way of life of previous Celtic generations;13 for Macpherson, however, authenticity is dependent on antiquity, and to the continued presence of “ancient poetry” in the contemporary oral tradition, 12

Chapman (1978, 42-43) argues that the Ossianic controversy was used to play out – and occlude – broader concerns of the ‘authenticity’ of Romanticism, and of art’s relationship to reality, and that the authenticity of the Gaelic texts was to some extent beside the point. Within the context of Gaelic literature, however, the authenticity of the representation of Gaelic texts (and society) in English and for an English-speaking audience is the key issue. For fuller discussions of the contemporary response to the antiquity and authenticity of the Ossianic material, see Stafford (1988, 163-80). 13 Cf. MacDhonuill (1751, vii-viii): “We cannot however but testify our surprise, that in an age in which the study of antiquity is so much in fashion, and so successfully applied to so many valuable purposes, whether religious or civil, this language alone, which is the depository of the manners, customs, and notions of the earliest inhabitants of this island, and consequently seems to promise, on an accurate review of it, the most authentic accounts of many things useful for us to know, should remain in a state, not only of total abandon, but, which is more astonishing, in an age so happily distinguished from all others, for freedom of thought, love of knowledge, and moderation, this people and this language should be alone persecuted and intolerated.”

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as well as – less frequently – in manuscripts. Thus, in the first sentence of his preface to Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Macpherson promises “The public may depend on the following fragments as genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry” (Macpherson 1760, ii). In Macpherson’s publications, ‘authenticity’ – as guaranteed by antiquity – becomes a saleable commodity, and the value of the poems now depends entirely on their authenticity, rather than in a comparison with other literatures; indeed, Macpherson explicitly refuses to examine their comparative aesthetic value: “Of the poetical merit of these fragments nothing shall here be said. Let the public judge, and pronounce” (Macpherson 1760, vii). Macpherson’s concern with authenticity gives rise in Fingal to a related question: how could such masterful works come out of a culture that was so attenuated in the recent (medieval) past and is so obviously in decline in the present? The strongest objection to the authenticity of the poems now given to the public under the name of Ossian, is the improbability of their being handed down by tradition through so many centuries. Ages of barbarism some will say, could not produce poems abounding with the disinterested and generous sentiments so conspicuous in the compositions of Ossian; and could these ages produce them, it is impossible but they must be lost, or altogether corrupted in a long succession of barbarous generations. (Macpherson 1762, x)

The quest for authenticity here turns into the fear of barbarism. And where Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair turned to antiquity to explain the merit of his poems, antiquity is for Macpherson a problem: since authenticity requires antiquity, the ‘authentic’ risks descending into the barbarous ancient – the mask of contemporary civilisation could crack to reveal the “mad mangy serfs” of the previous “barbarous generations.” Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s and Macpherson’s attitudes to antiquity reflect, to some extent, different approaches to primitivism in the eighteenth century: to see earlier society as simple, free and spontaneous; or to view history as a process of humanity civilising itself, and improving, from generation to generation (see Chapman 1978, 32). Macpherson’s response is nuanced. He denies that previous generations were barbarous, arguing that a bardic caste exerted enough pressure on their “princes” to emulate previous heroes of poetry until [t]his emulation continuing, formed at last the general character of the nation, happily compounded of what is noble in barbarity, and virtuous and generous in a polished people.

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Negotiations of Barbarity, Authenticity and Purity in Gaelic Literature When virtue in peace, and bravery in war, are the characteristics of a nation, their actions become interesting, and their fame worthy of immortality. (Macpherson 1762, xi)

By repeating what is “noble in barbarity” often enough, that is, a virtuous cycle is constructed which not only leads to, but also constitutes in and of itself, civilisation. This is, in effect, the ‘noble savage’ argument: the desire to use the term ‘barbarism’ – and so to differentiate between a civilised present and rude past – but to denude it of its negative connotations and power. Hugh Blair’s anonymously published Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763) continues the same argument, discussing barbarism in the vocabulary of the Scottish Enlightenment (see Price 1991). Comparing an epicedium (or funeral ode) composed by Regner Lodbrog, and published in Olaus Wormius’s Literatura Runica, to Macpherson’s poems, he writes: [Lodbrog’s] is such poetry as we might expect from a barbarous nation. It breathes a most ferocious spirit. It is wild, harsh and irregular; but at the same time animated and strong; the style, in the original, full of inversions, and, as we learn from some of Olaus’s notes, highly metaphorical and figured. But when we open the works of Ossian, a very different scene presents itself. There we find the fire and the enthusiasm of the most early times, combined with an amazing degree of regularity and art. We find tenderness, and even delicacy of sentiment, greatly predominant over fierceness and barbarity. Our hearts are melted with the softest feelings, and at the same time elevated with the highest ideas of magnanimity, generosity, and true heroism. When we turn from the poetry of Lodbrog to that of Ossian, it is like passing from a savage desart [sic.], into a fertile and cultivated country. How is this to be accounted for? Or by what means to be reconciled with the remote antiquity attributed to these poems? (Blair 1763, 11)

And later: Barbarity, I must observe, is a very equivocal term; it admits of many different forms and degrees; and though, in all of them, it excludes polished manners, it is, however, not inconsistent with generous sentiments and tender affections. (Blair 1763, 13-4)

The question here is how can the barbarous appear so civilised – and still remain barbarous? Or, is the barbarous, when it appears so civilised, still authentic? In justification, Blair turns – as Macpherson had – to the notion of a bardic caste, emotionally sophisticated, presenting a nobler and more polished version of Gaelic civilisation back to itself, with the effect of

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‘improving’ Gaelic civilisation. The clash between “barbarity” and “true heroism” also leads Blair back to Homer. The comparison between Ossian and Homer (which had been made from the first publication of Macpherson’s collections) allows for antiquity and a form of civilisation – “Both wrote in an early period of society; both are originals; both as distinguished by simplicity, sublimity, and fire” – if a different form to that of Virgil: “The correct elegance of Virgil, his artful imitation of Homer, the Roman stateliness which he every where maintains, admit no parallel with the abrupt boldness, and enthusiastick warmth of the Celtic bard” (Blair 1763, 62).14 Blair does not acknowledge that what might be happening in the poetry is that eighteenth-century mores are working on ancient songs to give a civilised patina to “barbarous” material. This is because that would raise once more the spectre of inauthenticity: the “simplicity” of the Ossianic poems has to be maintained at all turns, otherwise the argument that these poems were over 1500 years old would fall. What Macpherson and Blair present, then, and indeed have to present, given the terms of the debate that they are involved in, are a range of strategies to try and overcome the question of “authentic barbarism,” how this can be authentic and not barbarous: the claim that it is more delicate and tender than “barbarous” poetry; that this is because there existed a bardic caste that created and perpetuated the noble in the barbarous; and that Ossian, like Homer, created an original, simple, but not “uncivilised” worldview.

“Is it Possible not to Admire the Music that Can Give Pleasure to the King of Prussia?”: Aristocracy as Civilisation The emphasis on authenticity is understandable in terms of the Ossianic material, since the poems faced claims of inauthenticity from their very first publication; however, the issue of authenticity – and the complicated relationship between contemporary Gaelic literature and barbarism – spread from beyond Ossianic poems to become one of the defining contexts of how Gaelic literature presented itself to itself, and to the world. The collection published by Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s son Raonull 14

See Meek 2004. The linking of Ossian and Homer reached its height in the work of Ewan MacLachlan, who prepared a report for the Highland Society of Scotland into the Gaelic manuscripts that lay behind Macpherson’s translations, oversaw publication of the Odyssey and the Iliad with Latin translation, and composed his own partial translations of the Iliad into Gaelic. See MacDonald 1987.

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Negotiations of Barbarity, Authenticity and Purity in Gaelic Literature

MacDhomhnuill (Ronald MacDonald), the 1776 Comh-chruinneachidh òrannaigh Gàidhealach [Collection of Highland Songs] or “Eigg collection” as it is commonly known, contained poetry that was largely composed in the previous two hundred years.15 This was, however, the first collection to be published following the Ossianic controversy (see Cheape 2010), and the arguments MacDhomhnuill makes repeat Macpherson’s concern with authenticity. The preface, in effect, brings together Macpherson’s and Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s differing versions of what it means to be ‘authentic.’ It combines a defence of the Ossianic poems and a withering attack on those who questioned their authenticity: Independent of the beauty of their composition, they served to exhibit a picture of human manners so exalted and refined, that some persons, judging from their own depravity, could not believe the existence of the state it described. The general voice, however, declared in favour of the authenticity of the Poems; and the general voice has been supported by the opinions of men of genius and extensive learning. (MacDhomhnuill 1776, v)

Arrayed here, in a complicated reversal of expectation, are refinement, exaltation, genius, learning and Ossian on the one side and depravity (with Samuel Johnson – the chief detractor from the authenticity of the poems – lurking as an unnamed target) on the other. But MacDhomhnuill also desires to proclaim the ‘purity’ of the Gaelic in the poems he presents (MacDhomhnuill 1776: iv) – a concept closer to his father’s “most authentic accounts of many things useful for us to know” (MacDhonuill 1751, vii-viii; cf. n. 4 above). MacDhomhnuill does seem aware, however, that authenticity and purity are, by themselves, dubious ideological bulwarks for his argument. 15 See MacDhomhnuill (1776, iv-v): “Most of the pieces in this volume have been composed within the last two hundred years; and hence some English words have been adopted in the Gaelic compositions: Since the commencement of this period, the intercourse between the Highlands and the low country has been considerable. The progress of society has given rise to new ideas, and occasioned the introduction of many arts, to which the Highlanders, in their state of ancient simplicity, were entire strangers, and for which, therefore, they could have no language. In this situation, it was but natural to expect, that the Gaelic poets of latter days, in alluding to those ideas and arts, should be reduced to the necessity of adopting, upon such occasions, the English idiom and the English terms of expression. Excepting words introduced in this manner, and which could not be altered without doing violence to the meaning of the author, no expression has been admitted into the present Collection but what is pure Gaelic, and no pieces have been received but those of approved merit.”

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Like his father he was a politically intelligent promoter of the Gaelic language and its virtues, and strategically places Gaelic among the high culture of both ancient and – crucially – contemporary Europe, highlighting one of Gaelic literature’s aristocratic supporters: The music is not of the light kind that can only tickle the ear; it has power to interest the passions and touch the heart. It has commanded the attention of a Sovereign, who is no less celebrated as a judge of the fine arts, than for his abilities in the cabinet, and his conduct in the field. This illustrious personage has procured, from a gentleman of North Britain, a collection of Highland tunes, and he esteems them extremely valuable. Is it possible not to admire the music that can give pleasure to the King of Prussia? (MacDhomhnuill 1776, vi-vii)

Aristocratic favour is here – not unusually – claimed as aesthetic measure. In the context of a tension between barbarism and civilisation this is particularly important, because the ideals of medieval Gaelic poetry are here in effect those of contemporary (eighteenth-century) aristocracy: artistic refinement and political skill off the battlefield; military nous, bravery and “fierceness” on it. MacDhomhnuill’s technique is not simply to plead for the unexpected “civilisation” of ancient Gaelic society – like Macpherson and Blair – but implicitly to draw parallels between Gaelic society and the rest of Europe (and in effect to claim patronage in the process). MacDhomhnuill, in effect, adds purity and aristocracy to the complex range of issues within which Gaelic secular literature had been discussed in the second half of the eighteenth century, by his father and by Macpherson and Blair; and the various methods for negotiating Gaelic culture and contemporary European culture that they use between them inform many subsequent publications.16 The preface to the Cork-published 1798 Nuadh Òrain Ghàilach [New Highland Songs] – by Donnchadh Caimbeul (Duncan Campbell) – repeats almost verbatim some of the arguments that Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair had made in 1751 in support of his book. The purpose, he claims, is twofold: to amuse those who know Gaelic and would like to see it revived; and, hopefully, as a “means to 16 As Hugh Cheape comments, the content of Raonull MacDhomhnuill’s collection also “set the tone for a flow of similar publications at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the volumes by John Gillies of Perth, Alexander and Donald Stewart and Patrick Turner being the most notable and popular at the time. The tone was encomiastic and rhetorical which reflected the work of the professional poets of earlier generations but gives only a partial view of Gaelic literature” (Cheape 2010).

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bring Persons who are not expert in reading the Gaelic Language to the perfect knowledge of it” (Caimbeul 1798, ix). And – as with Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair – he both delimits who can be a fair judge of the poems, and pleads his own inoffensiveness: As for what concerns the following Poems, and their Author, as they are published in the Gaelic Language, only those that understand that Tongue are competent judges of them, and he submits them to their censure and indulgence, all his ambition being to prove himself a lover of his Country, and an inoffensive man. (Caimbeul 1798, x)

The desire to be “inoffensive” had become generic to some extent; but both Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair and Campbell were also publishing in turbulent times. There is no surprise that the famous Jacobite MacDonald felt the need to plead for his patriotism and “inoffensiveness”; similarly, it may well be that an author publishing in Cork in 1798, the year of the United Irish uprising, felt impelled to proclaim his patriotism – in favour of Scotland and Britain, one imagines – clearly. John MacGregor’s 1801 collection, meanwhile, shares Raonull MacDhomhnuill’s concern with “purity,” and the acknowledgement that purity is no longer possible (the assertion in both is that it had once been): “Particular attention has been paid to the purity of the style; but the Saxon has encroached so much upon the Celtic, within the last two hundred years, that some Anglicisms may still be discovered by a discerning eye” (MacGregor 1801, viii). And it is within the context of this matrix of concerns – authenticity, (lost) purity, barbarism/civilisation, aristocracy, and the place and worth of Gaelic – that much of the poetry composed in this period has to be considered.

Presenting the Civilised Barbarian The influence of Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair was writ large in much of this poetry,17 and manifested itself, among many other ways, in sub-genres such as poems to the seasons, personifications of the poet as a mavis, and poems about the Gaelic language.18 This last, in particular, was a means of 17 Maciver (2009, 62), for example, sees Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s influence in the lines from Alasdair MacFhionghain quoted at the beginning of this chapter. 18 As John MacInnes notes, although Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair did not begin this genre, he certainly is responsible for its popularity. See MacInnes (2006b, 43): “In some manner Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s poem on Gaelic only repeats what the Rev. John Maclean had already said in his poem of 1705 in celebration of Edward Lhuyd. But Alasdair’s poem enjoyed a circulation that Maclean’s did not;

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situating Gaelic literature in terms of other literatures, contemporary politics and (somewhat dubious) versions of history. Coinneach MacCoinnich (Kenneth Mackenzie) opens his 1792 Orain Ghaidhealach [Highland Songs] with three poems in this genre – “Moladh na Gailic” [Praise of Gaelic], “Tuirie na Gàilic” [Lament for Gaelic] and “Athleasachadh na Gàilic” [Reform of Gaelic] – which make claims, respectively, for the historical wealth of Gaelic, mourn the difficulties it has faced since the ’45, and celebrate the support it is receiving in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. The first of these is in the manner of Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s “Moladh an úghdair do ’n t-sean chánoin Ghailic,” mingling hyperbolic praise for Gaelic with derision for other languages. In a reverse chronology, Gaelic is identified as the language of “Brènus” (the conqueror of Rome), Ossian and the Feinne, Noah, Abel (Cain, unsurprisingly, is not mentioned), Eve and Adam. Other languages are not so fortunate:19 Spainish, Fraingeis, ’s Eideilt chàinnt a thriall, O ’n Laideinn dh’fàs iad, ’s gheibh iad bás gun bhiadh, Ach stoc na Gàilic mathair chàich gu leir, Cha toir i táing do chàinnt tha fo’ na ghrein. Spanish, French and Italian are a slave’s speech, They grew from Latin, and will die without food, But the stock of Gaelic is mother to them all She won’t give thanks to any speech under the sun. (MacCoinnich 1792, 3; my translation)

In the context of the genre, this might simply appear playful. However, in the context of MacCoinnich’s work it comes across as more sinister. This is one of two main ways in which MacCoinnich develops a relationship between Gaelic and other cultures and languages; the other is a celebration indeed it is true to say that in the context of Gaelic culture in Scotland, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair dominates the eighteenth century.” 19 That a less offensive route of praise for Gaelic was actually possible is shown by Donnchadh Caimbeul’s “Rann Moladh air a Ghaelic” [Verse in Praise of Gaelic], the first poem in his 1798 Nuadh Òrain Ghàilach [New Highland Songs], which simply celebrates Gaelic’s antiquity – back to Adam – and the efforts to maintain the language, without discrediting other languages; cf. Caimbeul (1798, 14-16). That poems in praise of Gaelic were needed can be seen from the continued denigration of the language, even by Gaelic speakers themselves, such as the leading Enlightenment figure Adam Ferguson; see Mackenzie (1805, 65) and Newton (2009, 72).

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of the masculinity, martial ability and military successes of the Gaels. This is exemplified by the song which immediately follows the triad of Gaelic praise poems, “Oran do’ n Chath-Bhuithinn Rioghail Ghai’leach air dhoibh teachd dhachaidh a America 42nd Regt. Royal Highlanders” [Song to the Royal Highland Regiment on their return from America 42nd Regt. Royal Highlanders], which celebrates the regiment’s travels abroad, and their victories in “Tiganderoga,” “Gadalup,” “Havannadh” and America (MacCoinnich 1792, 10-14). MacCoinnich describes how “Na Gaidheil rioghail Albannach” [the royal Scottish Gaels] stood dìl as ainmeineach, Gu sgairteil, sgaiteach, feara-bhuilleach, Cuir as doibh pailt gun leanabaidheachd, Le lanna glasa ceanna-bheartach, ’S bha cuirp gun uchdach seanachais! Le garbh neart a mhàrbh na seoid. loyal and proud bold, sharp and manly destroying many without childishness, with grey swords, heraldic, bodies without heraldic breastplates! With fierce power killing the heroes. (MacCoinnich 1792, 11; my translation)

Elsewhere I argue that the phrase “dìl as ainmeineach” is ambiguous, and that ainmeineach can mean not only “proud” but also “froward” or “contrary”: the Highland soldiers are at one and the same time both “loyal and proud” and “loyal and contrary” (see Mackay 2012b, 129). And certainly, there was some conflict between the self-identification of Highland soldiers and the demands made on those soldiers within the British Army: John Prebble’s colourful Mutiny claims that Highland soldiers repeatedly mutinied if promises made to them were broken, or (and this often amounted to the same thing) their commanding officers did not treat them with the respect that their self-imaging as Highland soldiers demanded.20 However, although not coextensive with British military 20 See Prebble (1975, 272-88) for a romanticised account of the various pressures which led the Highland Fencibles to mutiny in 1793: the combining of clans with no sensitivity to ancient loyalties; mingling Protestant and Catholic soldiers; and – first and foremost – the breach of a promise that they would not be made to sail abroad. MacKillop (2000, 9) suggests that the marked difference between imperial military campaigns and “traditional” Highland clan conflicts lay behind such pressures; certainly, the continued importance of clan loyalties and the strength of

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endeavour, Highland soldiers’ self-identification was, in this period, closely – and consistently – aligned with it. What is not ambiguous in MacCoinnich’s poem, however, is the emphasis on masculine power and martial spirit, explicitly connected both to victory abroad and notions of “royalty.” The purpose of MacCoinnich’s poem like that of MacFhionghain shortly afterwards is clear: to celebrate the soldiers’ victories and, by extension, British military endeavours. And the imagery in the poems of both is also very similar, with the Highland soldiers fierce, royal “wild lions.” As I have argued, this imagery is based on a fluid, unstable – perhaps even mutinous – set of anxieties and questions about Gaelic literature. The self-identification of the Gael, and particularly the Highland soldier, might not have “reached an apogee of absurdity” in terms of self-parody as the uniforms of the Fencibles had (Prebble 1975, 273): it was, however, contradictory and fraught. Royal or barbarous; inauthentic or authentic; pure or impure; offensive or inoffensive; speaking the mother of all languages or a barbarous vestige; the equals of the Greeks and Romans and the victors at Egmond-aan-Zee or mad mangy serfs and seditious Jacobites: Highland self-identification, as developed in Gaelic poetry, oscillated between these various poles in the fifty years following Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s Ais-Eirigh. However, despite this uncertain basis, and despite the many possible means of commerce between Gaelic and other cultures, when placed in the context of military campaigns as in the work of MacFhionghain and MacCoinnich, Gaelic verse limited itself to the simplistic, traditional and propagandistic, with the inauthentic barbarous – and the mad mangy serf – cloaked by the banner of royalty.

the bond (both political and emotional) that could still exist between the enlisted soldiers and the officer who raised their regiment can be seen from a letter written by Lt. Col. Norman MacLeod of the Black Watch in India in 1786 on the news that his men were to be dispersed into non-Highland regiments: “My own Company are all of my own name and Clan, and, if I return to Europe without them I shall be effectively banished from my own home, after having seduced them into a situation from which they thought themselves spared when they enlisted into the service” (Clyde 1995, 160, quoting Adam 1934, 307-8).

GAELIC BOOKS AS CULTURAL ICONS: THE MAINTENANCE OF CULTURAL LINKS BETWEEN THE HIGHLANDS  AND THE WEST INDIES SHEILA M. KIDD

The study of emigré Highlanders, their language and their culture, this far, has been largely focused on the thousands of emigrants who settled in North America, particularly Canada, from the later decades of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, and to a lesser degree on those who emigrated to Australia in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.1 The emigration of Gaelic-speakers, whether temporary or permanent, to other destinations, such as the West Indies, has however been almost entirely overlooked, in part due to the relative paucity of Gaelic sources relating to them, but also due to the relatively small number of emigrants involved as compared with mass emigrations to the aforementioned countries.2 This article draws on some of the limited evidence available which is specific to Gaels and the West Indies in the period c.1750-1830, examining both perceptions of the islands in Gaelic literature and the way in which subscribing to Gaelic books published in Scotland offered Gaels in the West Indies a tangible opportunity to retain links with their native culture. It will be argued that the Gaelic books enabled this culturally distinct group of emigrants to re-affirm their



I am most grateful to the following individuals for their assistance while researching this chapter: Jim Murray, Librarian, Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland; Ronald Black; Dr Michel Byrne; Professor Thomas Owen Clancy, Dr Aonghas MacCoinnich; Dr Karina Williamson. 1 Studies relating to Highlanders in North America include Meyer 1961; Hunter 1994; Dunn 1991; MacDonell 1982; Bennett 1998; Newton 2001; Dunbar 2008. Research relating to Australia includes Cardell and Cumming 1999, 2003, 2009. 2 Newton has commented briefly on Gaelic song relating to the West Indies (Newton 2001, 82, 96-100).

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identity as Gaels while simultaneously making an important financial contribution to Gaelic publishing.3 In recent years a number of scholars including Alan L. Karras, Allan Macinnes, Douglas Hamilton and Iain Whyte have contributed greatly to our understanding of the links between Scotland and the Caribbean. This has included examining Scottish and Highland networks in the islands and demonstrating how profits made there were used to fund the purchase of land in the Highlands in the early decades of the nineteenth century (Karras 1992, 210-34). As did Scots generally, Gaelic-speakers experienced the West Indies in many guises, as prisoners of war, indentured labourers, soldiers, clerks, planters, and colonial officials. Gaels had been in the West Indies as early as the middle of the seventeenth century with a number among the prisoners of war sent there as indentured labourers after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Although most did not return, it seems that one, an Angus MacQueen, returned to Skye after spending seven years in servitude in Barbados, doubtless bringing with him an account of islands somewhat different to his native one (Macinnes 1996). Similarly, after the Battle of Culloden, hundreds of Jacobites were sent to a number of West Indian islands. The 84 clansmen from Urquhart and Glenmoriston who turned themselves in to their chief, Ludovick Grant, expecting a royal pardon, were instead handed over to Cumberland, and subsequently transported to Barbados, many of them dying en route and many in Barbados itself. William Mackay, in his late nineteenthcentury history of Urquhart and Glenmoriston, tells that only seven or eight of these men were to return to Scotland, his great-grandfather, Donald MacKay, being one of them. Having escaped from Barbados to Jamaica he was helped by a fellow-Gael who offered him employment, and as a result he was able to save money and buy land and slaves of his own. When he eventually returned to Glenurquhart, he was referred to as Dòmhnall an Òir (Donald of the Gold), as he had returned with a large chest which, according to local tradition, was full of gold (Mackay 1893, 289; MacKay 1971, 40-42). In common with other Britons and Scots, however, it was the pursuit of economic opportunity which took most Highlanders to the West Indies. As Macinnes has demonstrated, it was not only the “new landlords,” but also clan chiefs who expanded their economic horizons with Cameron of Locheil, MacNeill of Taynish and some of the leading Argyll Campbells such as Sir James Campbell of Auchinbreck, acquiring plantations (Macinnes 1996, 172, 230). The “Argyll Colony” which had been 3

This chapter builds on aspects of a longer article in Gaelic (Kidd 2010).

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Gaelic Books as Cultural Icons: The Maintenance of Cultural Links

established in the west of Jamaica in the early decades of the eighteenth century included not only the MacNeills and Campbells, but also the Malcolms of Poltalloch who were particularly successful. The money from their Jamaican plantations was used to expand their Highland landholding as well as to build substantial houses and rebuild castles, and it was not only money which came back to Argyll from the West Indies, but also new approaches to estate management (Macinnes 2007). The existence of this network of Argyll Gaels and their tendency to employ other Gaels is fictionalised in the anonymous English novel of 1828, Marly; or, A Planter’s Life in Jamaica. The eponymous Marly has travelled to Jamaica to find what has become of his family’s estate there and, on arrival, looks for work. Marly’s friend, a Campbell from Argyll, is immediately employed by another Argyll man, but he has no vacancy for Marly. Later Marly is told that “to my certain knowledge, he has two or three vacancies; but it is not his practice to employ any person whatever, unless they are from the Highlands and can talk Gaelic” (Williamson 2001, 9).4 Military service in the post-Culloden period was another means by which Highlanders were to experience the West Indies, and serves as a reminder that, despite geographical remoteness within Britain, many Highlanders were far from insular in terms of life experience. Thomas Sinton, writing in 1910, observed that “the names of the West Indian islands were familiar household words in the homes on both sides of the upper waters of Spey – Antigua, St Christopher, Barbadoes [sic], Dominica, Berbice, and others,” a familiarity due in part at least to military service (Sinton 1910, 161). Among these soldiers was Colonel (later Major-General) David Stewart of Garth, in Highland Perthshire, whose Sketches of the Character, Manners and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland ([1822] 1977) contains an account of the two years he spent in the West Indies with the Black Watch in 1795-97. It was in fact a soldier who composed the only extant Gaelic songs known to have been composed in the West Indies. Dugald MacNicol was a native of Argyll who served with the 1st Royals, and who composed songs in Barbados and St Lucia between 1810 and 1816. As a teenager, Dugald MacNicol kept a diary in Gaelic and in it he tells how, at the age of 19, he received the army commission he had been waiting for and left Greenock bound for the West Indies in March 1810, arriving in Barbados some six 4

This raises the question as to whether slaves in the West Indies would have learned Gaelic, given that both Dunn (1991, 138) and Sinclair (1872, 97) refer to slaves in North Carolina having acquired Gaelic. See also Newton 2010.

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weeks later. His diary says nothing about the life of a soldier there, but tells of the lighter side of life in the islands, visiting acquaintances. He tells that when visiting one family: bho am braiceis gu am dinnearach bhiodhmaid a marcachd air neo a’ cluicheadh air chleasan aig an taigh, ag icheadh cuilc an t-siucair no reisg feadh ’n taighe gu h-oidhche agus fad na h-oidhche bhiodhmaid a’ dannsa ’s ag gabhail òran. (Henderson 1908-11, 354) from breakfast to dinner time we would be riding or playing games at the house or eating sugar cane or tearing about the house until night-time and all night we would be dancing and singing.

In MacNicol’s songs the fun and hilarity which pervade the diary are replaced by the sadness and home-sickness which is characteristic of much verse of the Highland diaspora, reflecting the use of song and poetry as a means of channelling and addressing these emotions. Were it not for the song titles, such as “Oran a rinneadh ann am Barbadoes” [A Song Composed in Barbados], it would be hard to establish where the verse was composed. In the first of his songs, which runs to 84 lines, the poet, as is typical of much emigrant Gaelic poetry, remembers his home and his friends in the Highlands and it is only at the very end we catch a glimpse of Barbados itself and in negative terms: Is mithich dhomh bhi tearnadh gu deireadh mo sgeòil ’S mi ’n so ann an eilean gun cheileir gun cheòl. Far nach cluinn mi ’ghuileag ach druma ’chinn mhóir ’S far nach faic mi duine nì furan ri m’ ghlòir. Dh’fhalbh mo neart ’s mo spiorad, tha ’mhisneach air chall Dh’fhalbh na h-uile cridhealas a bh’ ann am cheann. […] ’S mì-chàirdeil am fearann g’ an ’tainig mi féin Far nach faic mi cairid a dh’fharraid’ mo m’ dhéigh. (Henderson 1908-11, 362-63) It is time to be coming to the end of my tale / And me in this island without melody or music. Where I hear no singing except for the regimental drum / And where I see no one who welcomes my tongue. My strength and spirit have failed me, my courage is lost / All the cheerfulness which is in my mind has gone.

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Gaelic Books as Cultural Icons: The Maintenance of Cultural Links […] Unfriendly is this land to which I have come / Where I see no friend who asks after me.

This is a very different West Indian experience from that portrayed in his diary, revealing the poet’s more sombre reflections on his situation and on his feelings of cultural dislocation. The sentiments expressed in the other poems follow this model; in another song with the same title (“Oran a rinneadh ann am Barbadoes”), the poet’s location is flagged in the first line and he makes clear that, unlike many, it was not financial gain which brought him to the Caribbean: Tha mi ’n dràsd anns na h-Innsean ’S cha b’ e ’n t-àite bu mhiann leam ’S mór a b’ fhearr a bhi ’n Tìr nam Beann mór. Tha mi ’n dràsd’ etc. ’S e mì-fhorstan a stiùir mi Dhol a dh’fhàgail mo dhùthcha ’S cha b’ e rachd air son cùinneadh na òir. ’S e mì-fhorstan etc. (Henderson 1908-11, 364) I am in the Indies now / And it’s not the place I would wish to be / I would much rather be in the land of the high mountains. It’s misfortune which led me / to leave my country / And it wasn’t a contract for money or gold.

References to the West Indies in Gaelic verse composed in Scotland are few and far between and those which exist are, for the most part, to be found in collections of poetry from the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before the songs of emigrants to North America came to dominate verse of the Highland diaspora. Some of these references are in poetry celebrating the valour of Gaels in the British military machine in the later decades of the eighteenth century. In Kenneth Mackenzie’s “Oran do’n Chath-Bhuithinn Rioghail Ghai’leach air dhoibh teachd dhachaidh a America” [Song to the Royal Highland Regiment upon their return from America], which celebrates the heroism of the soldiers of the 42nd Regiment, the Royal Highlanders, Guadeloupe is mentioned (MacCoinnich 1792, 12). It is likely that it was from military service that the man referred to in a song by Perthshire poetess Mairead Cameron acquired his nick-name, Iamaica [Jamaica] (Cam’ron 1805, 40).5 5

See also Newton (1999, 230-32).

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There are occasional references to Jamaica in the songs of women, generally referring to relatives or sweethearts who have headed for the West Indies. The 1786 poetry collection commonly referred to as “The Gillies Collection,” after its publisher, contains a song attributed to “Oigmhnaoi a chaidh mhealladh” [A young woman who was deceived] in which the pregnant woman laments the fact that she is pregnant and has been abandoned by her lover, a MacLachlan judging by the evidence of the poem, whose attentions are focused elsewhere. Her predicament is made all the worse by the fact that “Tha mo bhràithre ’n Jamaica, / Truaighe léir ’s fhada uam iad // Ach nan d’thigeadh iad dachaidh / Bhiodh Clann-Lachluin glé bhuailte” (Anon. 1786, 45-7)6 [My brothers are in Jamaica / Alas that they are far from me // But if they were to come home / Clan Lachlan would be stricken]. In contrast, the woman who composed “’S gur e mo rùn an t-àrmann,” [My beloved is the hero] is delighted because her sweetheart is not going to the West Indies: “DiDòmhnaich sa’ chlachan / Fhuair mi sgeul a b’ aite leam, / Gun tàinig thusa dhachaigh / ’S nach deach thu do Shiameuca” (Thomson 1991, 21314) [On Sunday in the village / I got news which pleased me, / That you had come home / And that you hadn’t gone to Jamaica]. In the version of the well-known song “Ged tha mi gun chrodh gun aighean” [Although I am without cattle, without heifers], which appears in Archibald Sinclair’s An t-Oranaiche (1879, 168), the last verse reads, “Chaidh mo leannan gu Jamaica” [My sweetheart went to Jamaica], although some versions have Dùn Èideann [Edinburgh]. While it is Jamaica which is referred to most frequently, it should be borne in mind, as Douglas Hamilton has pointed out, that this was often used as a generic term of reference for the West Indies (Hamilton 2005, 205). The poet who makes most frequent reference to the West Indies is the eighteenth-century Sutherland poet, Robert MacKay, known as Rob Donn, with references to Jamaica appearing in six of his poems, reflecting the links between the Sutherland MacKays and the Caribbean, some serving as soldiers, others owning plantations. Some of these are little more than fleeting references, but in others it is possible to gain a sense of how these distant islands featured in the poet’s frame of reference. In one, an unnamed man is mentioned as returning from Jamaica, laden with wealth: “Tha ’m fear a tha ’n Seumeuca / A’ tigh ’nn gu cladach, / S bheir e leis a’ dh’ òr, / Uiread ’s a lìonas flagan” (Mackay 1829, 23) [The man who is in Jamaica / is coming to shore / And he will 6

Songs dealing with pregnant girls being abandoned are not uncommon in the Scottish Gaelic tradition; see, for instance, the section on “tàmailt” [shame] in Ross (1957, 109) and “Fear a’ Bhàta” [The Boatman] Gillies (2005, 65-67).

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bring gold with him / As much as will fill a flagon]. Some of these are poems occasioned by individuals departing for Jamaica, as is the case in his song in praise of Rupert MacKay whom he wishes well in Jamaica (Mackay 1829, 160-62). In one pair of songs the poet puts words in the mouths of two sweethearts, Colonel Hugh MacKay, who was in Jamaica, and Kirsty Brodie, who remained in Sutherland. In the second of these poems, “Oran an ainm Churstaidh Brodaidh do Choirneal Mac-Aoidh” [A Song in the name of Kirsty Brodie to Colonel MacKay], we hear about the various threats that Kirsty perceives the West Indies to hold: Tha mi ’g athchuing ort bhi tigh’nn, Mu ’n dean a’ ghrian milleadh ort, Mu ’m faigh thu biadh ni tinneas duit, ’S mu ’m faic thu òigh ni mire riut. (Mackay 1829, 216) I beg you to come home / Before the sun harms you / Before you get food which makes you ill / And before you see a maiden who flirts with you.

As Ian Grimble has explained, Kirsty’s anxiety was not unfounded, as Hugh married another woman, Frances de la Rue, in Jamaica (Grimble 1999, 58-62). Doctors were much in demand in the West Indies, with both the British and their slaves susceptible to diseases such as malaria and yellow fever (Sheridan 1985). A poetic eulogy to a Highland doctor departing for Jamaica was published in pamphlet form in Glasgow in 1819 by Iain MacLachlan, a poet from the Isle of Seil in Argyll. The title appears on the cover of the pamphlet as Oran molaidh do Dhoctair Donnal Mac Lachainn, air dha a dhuthaich fhagail; a dhol don na Innsian, anns a bhliadhna 1818 [A Song of Praise to Doctor Donald MacLachlan upon him leaving his country to go to the Indies in 1818]. This must have been Donald MacLachlan from the Argyll parish of Melfort, who appears in Glasgow University’s matriculation album in 1811 (Addison 1913, 258). As with Rob Donn before him, the poet is aware of the risks to the doctor’s health: ’S gum a slan bhios an gaidheal, Chaidh air saile bhuain thairis, Dhol a shealtain na’n Insain, Guidheam fhein thu thighin Fallain; ’S gu robh leatsa buaidh larach ’S do shlainte bhi agad, Gu leigheas nan creuchda

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’S gach eucail bhios aca. (MacLachlainn 1818, 2) Health to the Gael / who went from us overseas / To see the Indies, / I wish that you may arrive fit and well; / And may you triumph / And keep your health / To heal the wounds / And every disease they have.

David Campbell, or An Dotair Mòr [the Big Doctor] as he was known in Gaelic, was the second son of John Campbell, 7th Laird of Glenlyon in Highland Perthshire. He went to Jamaica shortly before the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and returned to Glenlyon around 1784, becoming the 9th Laird on the death of his brother. In The Lairds of Glenlyon, Duncan Campbell, a fellow native of Glenlyon, tells of the support which An Dotair Mòr gave to his fellow Gaels in Jamaica, particularly those from his native parish: Young men in search of their fortunes from his father’s estate and native parish began to follow him to Jamaica soon after he established himself there. He became, in course of time, a sort of Gaelic chief surrounded by a following of his own in that island. He gave his help and advice to many more who emigrated to the West Indies after his return; and in truth, a connection of rather a close kind between Jamaica and Fortingall continued fifty years after his death, and has scarcely terminated yet. (D. Campbell [1886] 1984, 299-300)

We are told that his brother, Duncan, followed him to Jamaica, but his story is a different one. In the words of the author of the Lairds of Glenlyon, Duncan “flourished for a while, took then to irregular ways, and next engaged in the slave trade, if, indeed, he did not go the length of piracy” (D. Campbell [1886] 1984, 271). Interestingly, we learn that David Campbell returned from Jamaica a better Gaelic scholar than when he had left, every Gaelic book published being sent to him along with all new medical books (D. Campbell [1886] 1984, 296). Although the number of Gaelic books to have been published by this time was not huge, the second half of the eighteenth century was to prove a significant period for Gaelic publishing. While the first Gaelic book to appear in print was John Carswell’s 1567 Foirm na nUrrnuidheadh, a translation of the Book of Common Order, by the time that Campbell departed for Jamaica in the middle of the eighteenth century only a further 37 texts in, or including, Gaelic had appeared in print; the majority of these were religious texts reflecting the Church’s domination over early Gaelic publishing (Black 2009a). The mid-eighteenth century however, marks a turning point with the publication in 1751 of the first

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book of secular verse, Ais-Eiridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich by Alexander MacDonald (or Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair as he is known in Gaelic), and thereafter a gradual increase in the number of books appearing in print. No less than 100 texts in Gaelic, or containing Gaelic, were published during Campbell’s time in Jamaica. These included not only the landmark publication of the New Testament (1767), but also the first edition of verse by the celebrated poet Duncan Bàn Macintyre (1768), Ronald MacDonald’s notable poetry anthology known by scholars as the “Eigg Collection” (1776) and John Gillies’s The History of the Feuds and Conflicts among the Clans (1780). This burgeoning Gaelic book trade was, particularly on the secular side, to a very great extent dependent on subscription-collecting by authors in order to ensure the financial viability of books. Lists of subscribers, where available, provide important insights into both the dynamics of subscription-collecting and into the profile of literate, book-buying Gaels, an aspect of publishing which has only recently been brought into focus (Black 2007; Byrne and Kidd 2010; Gunderloch, forthcoming). David Campbell was not alone in using the emergent Gaelic book trade as a means of maintaining links with his native culture while in the West Indies. In William Shaw’s An Analysis of the Gaelic Language (1778) two individuals from the West Indies appear among the 182 subscribers named at the end of the book, although their names would suggest they may well not have been Gaelic speakers – “W. Grey Esq. of Jamaica” and “Michael Keene, Esq.; Counsellor at Law, St Vincent.” Among the 1.480 subscribers’ names which appear at the end of the second edition of Duncan Bàn Macintyre’s Orain Ghaidhealach in 1790 is “Mr Patrick Macgibbon, Windsor, Jamaica” along with “Mr William Macqueen, late of Carolina” and “James Rivers Maxwell, Esq. of South Carolina,” reflecting the emigration from the Highlands to the Carolinas which had taken place in the course of the eighteenth century (Macantsaoir 1790, 230).7 Included in the list in Patrick Turner’s poetry collection of 1813 are “Don. Crawford, esq. Jamaica” and “Allan McDonald, esq. Jamaica” (Mac-anTuairneir 1813, 387, 391). Neither volume of poetry features any other subscribers from abroad and there seems little doubt that they would all have been Gaelic speakers, given that both volumes were entirely in Gaelic. We cannot be quite so sure about the Gaelic credentials of the single subscribers from North Carolina or from Barbados or indeed the five Jamaican subscribers who appear among those subscribing to An 7

“David Campbell Esq. of Glenlyon” is among the subscribers to this publication (Macantsaoir 1790, 214).

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Original Collection of the Poems of Ossian (McCallum and McCallum 1816) which was published in English and Gaelic. The same applies to “D. G. MacColl, Esq., Tobago,” who is listed in Evan MacColl’s 1836 The Mountain Minstrel or Clàrsach nam Beann, a volume which contains both Gaelic and English verse (McCallum and McCallum 1816, 54; MacColl 1836, 232). Collecting subscriptions from emigré Gaels would not have been without its challenges, although it may be that this was conducted through family members back in Scotland, as seems to have happened with David Campbell. Undoubtedly the regular trade links, particularly between Glasgow and the West Indies and also with the Carolinas in the later decades of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century facilitated this with no less than 27 ships recorded as sailing from Glasgow, and three from Edinburgh, to Jamaica in 1797 alone (Karras 1992, 34). Edinburgh and Glasgow, it should be noted, were the two main centres of Gaelic publishing throughout the period under discussion and beyond. The absence of such well-established and regular transport arrangements between North America and Scotland at this stage would undoubtedly have hindered subscription-collecting there. It was not simply a matter of transport networks, however. Of equal, and arguably greater, relevance is the different nature of emigration to the West Indies compared with other emigration from the Highlands. Emigration to the Carolinas in the eighteenth century and to Canada in the later eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century was generally permanent in nature, whereas emigration to the West Indies was commonly seen as a temporary relocation, more akin to the contemporary migration of many Highlanders to the Scottish Lowlands with money being sent to family at home and with the long-term intention of returning to the Highlands.8 Under such circumstances the retention of links with Gaels’ homeland would have been of greater importance than it would to those with little or no intention of returning to Scotland and who focused their attentions on community building where they had settled.9 These different emigration patterns are reflected in Gaelic publishing with books beginning to be published where settlement was of a more permanent nature, and where there were concentrations of Gaelic-speakers. In North Carolina the Rev. Dougal Crawford’s sermons, preached to his Gaelic congregation in the Raft Swamp district, were published in Fayetteville in 1791. Gaelic books 8

On Highland migration to the Scottish Lowlands, see Withers 1998. See McLean 1991 and Dunbar 2008 for discussion of Highland emigrants’ community building. 9

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began to be published in Canada from the 1830s and in Australia from the 1850s (Meek 2002, 97-98; Nilsen 2002). There is, however, no evidence to suggest that any Gaelic books were published in the West Indies. The most remarkable contribution of Gaels based in the West Indies to Gaelic publishing was to the Highland Society of Scotland’s Dictionary, a project which was first mooted by the Society in 1806 and which appeared in print in 1828 as Dictionarium Scoto-Celticum: A Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (Black 1986). The 1817 prospectus for the Dictionary appealed for support to subscribers at home and abroad, “especially those interested in the preservation of the Language of their Ancestors,” and details the price to subscribers as “Five Guineas per copy, – Seven Guineas on a fine paper,” expensive by the standards of other contemporary Gaelic books being published by subscription, but also far more ambitious than any other Gaelic publication, the final work running to two volumes and almost 2,000 pages (Ingliston Papers, A.v.2.(3)). Although a complete list of subscribers does not exist, the records of the Society show the breakdown of their locations as follows: “Home 76; Bombay 19; Nova Scotia 18; Demerara, no particulars; Berbice 16; Jamaica 243; Calcutta 20” (Ingliston Papers, A.i.21.22). That just over 60% of the subscribers were based in Jamaica serves to underline the conscious attempts made by these emigré Gaels not simply to maintain links with their native language and culture, but also to contribute to it. The fact that the Dictionary was a long-term project and that subscriptioncollecting was to run over a number of years made it easier for subscriptions to be gathered abroad. The high proportion of subscribers to the dictionary in Jamaica was due almost entirely to the zeal of one Jamaica-based Gael, William MacGillivray, who was galvanised by the Highland Society’s appeal for funds. MacGillivray, a native speaker of Gaelic, was born in the parish of Duthil in Speyside in 1780 and by 1816 was employed in Jamaica as a clerk on Hillside Estate, Vere, by one Donald MacLean.10 As MacGillivray himself explains, his native parish was part of the estate of Sir James Grant of Monymusk and it may be that it was through him and his network of Grants in Jamaica that MacGillivray obtained his position. His employer, Donald MacLean, was clearly an individual of some wealth, being listed in The Jamaica Almanack for 1822 as the proprietor of five estates in the Parish of Clarendon, owning a total of 890 slaves and some 861 stock (Jamaica Almanack, 26-27). It was MacLean who had passed the Highland Society’s appeal on to MacGillivray to deal with, although 10

Old Parish Registers. Births 096/B00 0010 0005, Duthil and Rothiemurchas.

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MacLean himself clearly continued to take an active interest in the matter. MacGillivray’s surviving communications with Lewis Gordon, DeputySecretary of the Highland Society and his nephew and successor, Charles Gordon, run to some 31 letters. These were all penned during his subscription collecting between 1816 and 1822, and are often accompanied by lists of subscribers. MacGillivray’s letters also reveal his personal enthusiasm for the Dictionary project observing that “an undertaking of such magnitude certainly calls for every aid, literary or pecuniary, that its friends can render” (Ingliston Papers, A.i.7.3). Previous studies have stressed the importance of networks in the Caribbean context, and this is evident here, too. In MacGillivray’s subscription-collecting he used his connections throughout Jamaica to drum up support for the dictionary. His second letter explains: I have written on the subject to gentlemen in different parts of the island by last post and their answer I expect by next Sunday […] One of the gentlemen to whom I have written on this subject is residing in Saint Thomas in the East, and if his zeal in our cause be equal to his respectability and influence in that quarter he will collect a very handsome subscription, a great number of Highlanders being resident in that parish. (Ingliston Papers, A.i.7.1)

For the most part, MacGillivray’s optimism about the willingness of his network of connections to contribute was not misplaced. The list of those in Jamaica from whom subscriptions had been collected in less than a month, between the end of March 1816 and the middle of April, contains fifty-two names, including his own against which is the sum of five guineas which he guarantees to pay annually until the project is completed (Ingliston Papers, A.i.7.2). It cannot be ascertained with certainty how many of these subscribers were in fact Gaelic speakers as opposed to ex-patriot Britons whose interest in the Gaelic language and its literature owed more to antiquarian or romantic interests, with the rehabilitation of the Gael from rebel to warrior-hero thanks largely to James Macpherson’s Ossian poems of the 1760s. That the book in question was a dictionary meant it was accessible to those with no knowledge of the Gaelic language. Or indeed some subscribers may have been philanthropic individuals willing to contribute to any worthy endeavours, even those with which they had no connection. This is underlined in one of MacGillivray’s letters in which he quotes from a letter he had received from an unnamed correspondent. The unnamed correspondent writes: “I have got some subscribers to your Earch Diktionary, but it is a work that the people of this quarter know little about, the Laungage not being spoken among them.” MacGillivray

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observes that “this shews what zeal some gentry profess” (Ingliston Papers, A.i.7.5). As a very crude measurement – the only one available in the absence of MacGillivray’s subscribers’ list with birthplaces of subscribers – we can estimate that those with what were at that time still distinctively Highland names were likely to be Gaelic-speakers and that, of the 52 who subscribed in the spring of 1816, at least 22 seem likely to have been Gaels, with names such as McLean, McLeod, McKenzie, Fraser, Campbell, Chisholm, Macintosh and McQueen. Names such as Cottell, Roust, Webb, Koehler and Padmore, on the other hand, seem unlikely to have been Gaelic speakers (Ingliston Papers, A.i.7.2). In 1817 MacGillivray’s endeavours on behalf of the Dictionary project were recognised when he was elected a member of the Highland Society of Scotland. There was one other Jamaica-based member listed among the Society’s membership at that point, Alexander Grant, and another who had been resident there, Colin McLarty “late of Chestervale, Jamaica, now of Campbelton.”11 Daniel Macdowall, esq., of the Island of St Vincent was also elected a member in 1817, as was Donald MacLean, MacGillivray’s employer in 1821 (Transactions 1824, 646-48, 653-54, 661). Membership lists for the Glasgow Highland Society reveal a higher number of members located in the West Indies, primarily Jamaica, with no less than fifteen listed as “in Jamaica” or “late of Jamaica” in the period between 1740 and 1840 (Glasgow Highland Society, 1861). This is attributable to the strong trading links between Glasgow and the West Indies and the relatively large number of Gaels settling in Glasgow. Further underlining the fact that distance was no barrier to retaining links with one’s native language and culture, MacGillivray’s letters reveal that it was thanks to the expanding Gaelic book trade that he was able to keep this connection alive. Having heard via the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle of plans for a new Gaelic edition of the Scriptures, he declared himself in 1816 “anxious to promote that or any other publication of merit in my native language” and asked for Lewis Gordon’s assistance in putting his name down as a subscriber (Ingliston Papers, A.i.7.4). In August 1820 he expresses interest in becoming a member of a Celtic Society that, he has read, has been established in Edinburgh, presumably the Celtic Society established in Edinburgh that year by David Stewart of Garth, William Mackenzie of Gruinard and Sir Walter Scott (Ingliston Papers, A.i.7.19).12 He also refers to having received a copy of Stewart of Garth’s Sketches of 11

Letters from Colin McLarty, a doctor in Jamaica, to members of his family in Scotland are held by the National Library of Scotland: John Cunningham Letters, NLS MS Acc. 7285. 12 For a brief account of the Celtic Society, see Robertson (1998, 136-40).

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the character, manners, and present state of the Highlanders of Scotland ([1822] 1977) and therefore asks Charles Gordon if he will inform its Edinburgh publisher that he no longer requires a copy (Ingliston Papers, A.i.7.24). Whether or not MacGillivray would have been such a zealous missionary on behalf of the Highland Society’s Dictionary had he been based in Scotland can only be surmised, but what is clear is that he consciously sought out opportunities to maintain links with Scotland and the Highlands. Interestingly, the Highland Society’s was not the only Gaelic dictionary to receive considerable funding from the West Indies. Robert Armstrong’s Gaelic Dictionary, published in London in 1825, also received a significant number of subscriptions from the islands, this time from Grenada and St Vincent. Of 170 subscribers listed in the dictionary 34% were listed as being in these two islands, 24 in Grenada and 34 in St Vincent (Armstrong 1825, xiii-xvi). Armstrong, from northern Perthshire, explains why there are so many subscribers in the West Indies when he expresses his gratitude to “Mr Robert Kennedy of Grenada […] for his most active support, to which I owe a great proportion of my West India subscribers” and to “the late Dr Charles Kennedy of St Vincent, my school fellow and college companion” (Armstrong 1825, xi). Clearly a network of subscription-gathering, similar to that in Jamaica, swung into action in Grenada and St Vincent, again driven by key individuals through whom financial support for the dictionary was channelled. A similar example of West Indian networks supporting publishing in Scotland, albeit a Scots rather than Gaelic example, is Andrew Shirrefs’ Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, published in Edinburgh in 1790. Of 863 copies sold through subscription, 148 were destined for the West Indies. The bulk of these, one hundred copies, were bought by two relatives of the author in Jamaica, while eighteen of the subscribers were in Grenada (Shirrefs 1790, xi-xxiv). Other instances of money from the West Indies being used to support causes in the Highlands or related to Highlanders included: the building of a Gaelic church in Edinburgh in the 1760s (Minutes, CH 2/766/1, f.32); the establishment of Inverness Academy with £1,301 of the £6,277 raised between 1787 and 1792 coming from Jamaica (Hamilton 2005, 204-5); money was sent from no less than eight West Indian islands towards the building of Inverness’s Northern Infirmary at the end of the eighteenth century (Macinnes, Harper and Fryer 2002, 259-60). The Rev. Dr Norman MacLeod, who was much involved in collecting money for famine relief when the potato crop failed in the Highlands in 1836-37, mentions having written to Gaels in the West Indies, amongst other places, when appealing

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for help for his fellow countrymen (House of Commons 1841, 66). Even in the later decades of the nineteenth century these links remained alive. Among those listed in the late 1870s as contributing towards the establishment of the Chair of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh are “John Macphail, Esq., of Tulloch, Jamaica” and “Dugald Campbell, Esq., Jamaica” (Anon. 1875, 376). Studies of the Highland diaspora to date have demonstrated the literary productivity of emigré Gaelic speakers as they built new lives in various parts of the British Empire, specifically, Canada, America and Australia. In contrast, Gaelic-speaking colonisers in the West Indies provide us with little evidence in Gaelic of their experiences there; instead, one distinctive response to their colonial experience was to actively seek ways of contributing financially to, and thereby retaining links with, their native culture and language. While more permanent Gaelic emigrant communities would focus their attentions on community building, the later stages of which would include publishing, for Gaels in the West Indies, the expansion of Gaelic publishing at home in Scotland offered them a particularly tangible means of re-engaging with their native language and culture and thereby re-affirming their identity as Scottish Gaels both in their homeland and in their new colonial home.

GAELIC POETRY AND THE BRITISH MILITARY ENTERPRISE, 1756-1945 WILSON MCLEOD

Although military activity is a prominent topic in different strands of earlier Gaelic poetry (see, for example, McLeod 2007; Gillies 1991), the participation of Scottish Gaels in the British military from the time of the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) to the end of the Second World War in 1945 can be said to form a distinct political and, in turn, literary chapter. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, the Highland regiments played a vital role in the expansion of the British Empire, and their achievements and experiences are reflected in a large and diverse corpus of Gaelic verse relating, directly or indirectly, to military campaigns in Europe,1 America, Africa and beyond. Some of this work was composed by soldier-poets who were thickly involved in conflict, more by a range of poets (overwhelmingly male) who remained at home. The great bulk of this poetry celebrates military triumphs and the broader military ethos; at its best, verse in this vein can be vigorous, powerful and dramatically expressive, communicating all the furious intensity of warfare. Overall, there is very little questioning of the British imperial enterprise in general or the role of the Gael within it. Participation in the imperial military played a central role in the assimilation and ‘Briticisation’ of Scottish Gaeldom from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards (see Withers 1988). Thus, although it is certainly not impossible to excavate and emphasise dissonant notes within the literary corpus, there is a risk that doing so may distort or misrepresent what is actually a very largely unvariegated body of work in terms of its basic ideological outlook and assumptions. With almost no exceptions, Gaelic poets accept without challenge the right of the British state to invade foreign lands or dispossess

1

Scottish Gaelic poetry celebrating Highland participation in British military campaigns even extended to the suppression of the 1798 rising in Ireland (see, for example, Caimbeul 1798; Flahive 2008; MacLeod 1952, 382-85), notwithstanding earlier and later expressions of ‘pan-Gaelic’ solidarity. See McLeod 2004, 2008a.

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and rule native populations, and do not even question any of the tactics used to achieve these ends. A key conceptual leap that underpinned the development of imperial(ist) verse was the transfer of the royalist ideology and rhetoric developed in support of the Stuarts from the 1640s onwards (Ní Suaird 1999; McCaughey 1989) to the Hanoverian monarchs and their successors. Interestingly, the development of this royalist ideology and verse had required an earlier leap, as relations between the Highland clans and the Scottish kings were often far from harmonious in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as manifested by the notorious Statutes of Iona (1608) (MacGregor 2006). The cornerstone of royalist ideology was, of course, the principle of unquestioning loyalty to the monarch, a loyalty that could be most powerfully expressed by enthusiastic military service in the royal cause. The first imperial conflict to produce a significant amount of Gaelic poetry was the Seven Years’ War of 1756-63, particularly its North American theatre, which culminated, with the capture of Québec in 1759, in British acquisition of the former French territories in what is now Canada. The defeat of the French was enthusiastically celebrated, as in an anonymous song composed in Badenoch for the returning soldiers of the Fraser Highlanders: Siud b’ èideadh nan diùnlach, fèileadh-beag ’s breacan guaille, Air an criosadh gu dumhail bonaid dubh-ghorm ’s cocàd; Bhur musgaidean croma ’cur faileas len loinnir ’S bu bhòidheach an sealladh nuair dh’èight’ am paràd. ’S iad na fleasgaich bu diùlan’, chuir nàimhdean ar dùthcha Air ruaig feadh nan cùiltean nuair rùisgteadh an lann; ’S gur iad na fir ghleusta, an reisimeid glè mhath Air oitir Rubha Bhreatainn thug gèilleadh air càch. This is the uniform of heroes: the kilt and the shoulder-plaid, Folded thickly, a dark blue bonnet and a cockade; Your angular muskets reflect light in their shininess When the parade was assembled the sight was marvellous. They are the most manly of youths, who have routed our country’s enemies, Through the back woods when their weapons were readied, They are the expert men, the excellent regiment, They forced the others to surrender on the headland of Cape Breton. (Newton 2001, 139)

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From this point onwards, all the major wars fought by the British Empire involved the participation of Highland regiments and with it the composition of Gaelic verse in praise of their exploits. For example, a diverse range of material survives from the American War of Independence (1776-81), almost all of it Loyalist in perspective, bitterly opposed to the rebels seeking to break away from Britain. This material differs strikingly from the corpus of Irish Gaelic verse concerning the same war, which is characterised by nationalist hostility to the British state and in which all British reverses are vigorously celebrated (see Morley 2002, 2005). A particularly striking Loyalist text is “’S e cogadh dubh deurach na h-èirigh a-mach” (“The sad, ill-fated war of the revolution”) by the Argyll poet Donnchadh Ceanadach (Duncan Kennedy), a lengthy and passionate denunciation of the American rebels composed c.1781. For Ceanadach the rebels are “dream fhuilteach nan creuchd / A chlaoidh ’s a shàraich am pàrantan fhèin” (“violent, blood-stained people / Who ravaged and oppressed their own parents”), guilty of “na h-uilteachan cuinnsear bu phuinnseant’ bha riamh / An aghaidh Mòr-Bhreatainn” (“the most poisonous, daggered deeds that ever were done / Against Great Britain”) (Newton 2001, 149-62; especially 158, 159). Two outstanding examples of Gaelic military verse of a ‘celebratory narrative’ kind emerged from the early stages of the Napoleonic wars (1798-1815): “Blàr na h-Òlaind” (“The Battle of Holland”), describing the British victory at Egmond aan Zee in 1799, and “Òran air don Bhàrd a Dhol air Tìr san Èiphit” (“A Song by the Poet After Going Ashore in Egypt”), describing the successful landing of British troops near Alexandria in 1801 (Black 2001, 354-61; Meek 2003, 298-303). Both were composed by the Morar poet Alasdair MacFhionghain (Alexander MacKinnon) (1770-1814), who fought in these battles as a member of the Gordon Highlanders. Detailed and spirited as these poems are, it could not be said that they give any attention to any of the political issues that brought about these conflicts or challenge the policies of imperial authorities in any way. The Crimean War of 1853-6 also engendered a significant amount of ‘celebratory narrative’ verse, due in particular to the prominent role of the Scottish general Sir Colin Campbell (1792-1863), commander of the Highland Brigade, who was connected on his mother’s side to a prominent Islay family (see, e.g., Meek 2003, 304-15; Sinclair [1879] 2004, 216-18). “Cogadh a’ Chrimea” (“The Crimean War”) by the Tiree poet Alastair MacDhòmhnaill (Alexander MacDonald) is a forceful example: Cha dèan mi fhàgail air dìochuimhn’ ursann-catha dh’fhàg Ìle am dhuan,

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Gaelic Poetry and the British Military Enterprise, 1756-1945 An Caimbeulach smearail nach strìochdadh Air muir no tìr leis an fhuachd […] Gun robh e mar sheabhag san speur Feadh ealtainn gan sgapadh bho chèil’, Gearradh nan ceann dhiubh gu smearail, Le spionnadh a ghàirdeannan treun. Bhuannaich e onoir do Alba, Nuair a chaidh e thar fairge le dhaoin’ Na cheannard nan saighdearan Gàidhealach, ’S e dìleas don Bhàn-righinn maraon […] I shall not leave forgotten The battle-post that Islay has put in my verse; That capable Campbell who was unyielding On sea or on land despite cold […] He was like a hawk in the sky Causing the bird-flock to scatter, In manly style lopping their heads off By the strength of his mighty shoulders. He gained honour for Scotland When he went overseas with his men, As the commander of the Highland soldiers, And loyal to the Queen as well […] (Meek 2003, 304-7)

The focus on individual commanders such as Campbell is typical of the Gaelic poetry relating to the imperial military enterprise, as many of the tropes of earlier Gaelic verse, most immediately those of the panegyric clan poetry of the seventeenth century, provided a pre-existing literary framework that could be readily adapted to this new context, with the imperial general now taking the place of the clan chief, lavished with praise for his vigour, valour, leadership and courage (Maciver 2009; see MacInnes 2006a, 281-82). Although it cannot be construed as a challenge to the principle of Empire itself, one prominent argument in nineteenth-century Gaelic verse, especially in poems relating to the Highland Clearances, is that the Gaels deserve better treatment from the landlords and authorities given their military service to the Empire, or, alternatively, that evicting them will remove a valuable source of manpower, a loss the authorities will come to regret. An early example of the latter kind of claim is found in “Òran do na

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Cìobairean Gallda” (“Song to the Lowland Shepherds”) by Ailein Dall Dùghallach (Blind Allan MacDougall), composed c.1800, where the incoming Lowland shepherds who have benefited from the process of clearance are said to have exposed themselves to invasion and conquest: Gach aon fhear fhuair làmh-an-uachdair, dh’fhògair iad uapa gach neach a rachadh ri aghaidh cruadail, nan tigeadh an ruaig le neart; nan èireadh cogadh san rìoghachd, bhiodh na cìobairean ’nan àirc […] All those ones who got the upper hand have cleared out every person who would advance to face the strife if the foray should come in force; if a war should break out in the kingdom, the shepherds would be in distress […] (Meek 1995, 48, 187)

The poet also expresses a wish that the French should come to the Gàidhealtachd and cut the Lowland incomers’ heads off (“B’ fheàrr leinn gun tigeadh na Frangaich / A thoirt nan ceann de na Gallaibh”). Fanciful as this sentiment may appear, it should by no means be understood as seditious; Ailein Dall’s other works include a celebration of the Black Watch’s exploits in Egypt and the Low Countries (Dughalach 1829, 8996). An atypically incisive example of rhetoric in this vein can be found in the powerful “Spiorad a’ Charthannais” (“The Spirit of Kindliness”) by the Lewis poet Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn (John Smith) (1848-81), composed in 1874, at the beginning of the Land Agitation: A bheil neach beò san linn seo leis an cuimhn’ an latha garbh ’s na chuireadh an cath uamhann – Waterloo nan cluaintean dearg? Bu tapaidh buaidh nan Gàidheal ann, nuair dh’èirich iad fo’n airm; ri aghaidh colg nan treun-fheara gun ghèill ar nàimhdean garg. Dè ’n sòlas a fhuair athraichean nan gaisgeach thug a’ bhuaidh? Chaidh taighean blàth a’ charthannais ’nam baidealaich mu’n cluais;

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Gaelic Poetry and the British Military Enterprise, 1756-1945 bha ’m macaibh anns an àraich ’s iad a’ teàrnadh tìr gun truas; bu chianail staid am màthraichean, ’s am fàrdaichean ’nan gual […] . A Bhreatainn, tha e nàireach dhut, ma dh’àirmhear ann do sgeul, gun bhuin thu cho mì-nàdarrach ri t’fhìor-shliochd àlainn fhèin; an tìr bha aig na gaisgich ud a theasairg thu ’nad fheum, a thionndadh gu blàr-spòrsa do na stròdhailich gun bheus. Is anyone presently alive who recollects that awful day, on which was fought the fearful fight – Waterloo of the bloody plains? A fine victory was won by Gaels when they rose in battle-arms; faced with the blade of bravest men, our fierce foes yielded fast. What joy came to the fathers of those who won the fray? The warm homes of kindliness towered round their ears in flames. Their sons were on the battlefield to save a heartless land; their mothers were in the saddest plight, and their homes reduced to ash[…] . O Britain, it is a disgrace, should we recount your tale, relating how hard you dealt with your own and truest race. The land that those heroes had, who saved you in your straits, has now become a field of sports for those wasters without morals. (Meek 2003, 362-65)

Mac a’ Ghobhainn’s argument presaged the later unfulfilled promise to build “homes fit for heroes” after the First World War (Leneman 1989). Even so, the charge of hypocrisy or betrayal does not go so far as to challenge the fundamental legitimacy of the imperial military enterprise.

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On the whole, however, it would be fair to say that there is relatively little sense of a specifically Gaelic perspective on Empire in the poetic corpus – a reflection of the largely assimilationist political identity of Scottish Gaeldom in the modern period. The main source of Gaelic distinctiveness lay in the special contribution of the Highland regiments to the imperial cause and the supposedly martial nature of the Gael, not in a competing political vision or ideology. As such, Gaelic poets often expressed pride in the civilising mission of the Empire in terms that would be entirely normal to an Englishman of the period writing in English. Consider the enthusiastic “Victoria Òirdhearc” (“Victoria Maxima”), composed at the end of the nineteenth century by the Lewis-born poet Iain MacGriogair (1848-1932), who served as a surgeon-colonel in India, Afghanistan and Burma: Gu ’n sgaoladh ar n-Impiorach[d] fada, Fo bhuadhan ro mhaiseach do laimh, ’S chaidh traillean a shaoradh bho ghlasan, ’S an robh iad ro fhada ’n an tamh ; Ar longan ri seoladh nan cuaintean, A null thar na stuadhan is cein, Cho luath ris a’ ghaoth ri cuir cuairtean, Feadh iomall gach cuan tha fo ’n ghrein. Our Empire has widely extended, Beneath thy determining hand, And slaves have been freed and befriended With justice declared in their land ; Our argosies [ships] plough the blue ocean, Throughout the remotest of seas, With speed that out-rivals the motion Of even the foam-swelling breeze. (MacGregor 1897, 15, 187; see McLeod 2008b)

An even more fulsome celebration is found in “Smuaintean air Mòrachd Ìmpireachd Bhreatainn” (“Thoughts on the Greatness of the British Empire”) by the Ullapool-born Aonghas Moireasdan (Angus Morrison), published in 1929, by which time the sun was already beginning to set on the British Empire: An t-eilean beag a’ boillsgeadh anns a’ chuan Mar sheud ro phrìseil sgapas foidhneal uaith’, Mar lòchran deàlrach tilgeil solas-iùil Do mhuilleanan air seachran cuan an t-saoghail; Do mhuirichinn sgaoileadh iad air raon is bheann

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Gaelic Poetry and the British Military Enterprise, 1756-1945 Mun iadh a’ ghrian an sliochd gum faighear ann Is aitreabh thogadh leo is bailtean mòr’ Le laghan ceart gun fiaradh clì on chòir, Le grìd is spìd air taille dìchill chruaidh; Ge cruaidh an gleac, gu diongmhalt’ ràinig buaidh, Gun chosnaich daoine borba ’s coille ’s fonn, An colann slàn ’s an inntinn làn de chonn – Ged fhuair iad freumh is sìol an dùthaich ùir, Air am màthair Breatainn cha do thionndaidh cùl. The little island sparkling in the sea Like a priceless jewel that sparkles far and wide, Like a shining lantern casting guiding light On millions scattered across the oceans of the world; Your offspring have been spread on hill and plain Until where sun encompasses their progeny is found And homesteads built by them and cities too With proper laws unbending from the right With excellence and energy resulting from sound diligence; Though hard the struggle, triumph was firmly reached, They conquered savages and wood and land, Their bodies healthy and their minds replete with sense – Yet for all their roots and seed in pastures new, On their mother Britain they’ve not turned their back. (Black 1999, 36-37)

If there was no specifically Gaelic vision of Empire in terms of political ideology, the cultural expression of imperial participation could sometimes have a specifically Gaelic inflection. A particularly striking example here is “Cumaibh Suas a’ Ghàidhlig” (“Keep Up the Gaelic”) by the Lewis poet Dòmhnall MacAoidh (1854-1932), which combines praise for the Gaelic language (see McLeod 2003), the Gaelic psalms and the kilt with a racist celebration of the crushing of the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857: ’S e sailm le fonn sa Ghàidhlig Seinn cliù do Rìgh nan Sluagh, Na ur clachain latha Sàbaid Ceòl as binne le mo chluais. Sin cumaibh suas a’ Ghàidhlig ’S i chainnt bha aig ar sluagh, Sheas dhuibh cliù na rìoghachd ’S thog ìmpireachd thar chuain. ’S e treibhdhireas nan Gàidheal Nuair a dh’èirich cogadh cruaidh,

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Rinn daoine borb an t-saoghail Nan daoine sìobhalta, suairc. Nuair thòisich anns na h-Innsean Na Sepoys fhiadhaich gharg, Ri murt ’s a’ marbhadh chàich ann Gun iochd, gun tròcair annt’, ’S e Gàidheil chalm an fhèilidh bhig ’S gach àit’ thog orra buaidh, ’S a rinn gach treubh ’s na h-Innsean Nan daoine ciùine suairc. Psalms sung in Gaelic Praising the Lord of Hosts In your villages on the Sabbath day Are the sweetest music for my ears. So keep up the Gaelic, It’s the language of our people, Who defended the kingdom’s reputation And built an empire overseas. It’s the loyalty of the Gaels, When hard warfare broke out, That made the barbarous peoples of the world Into civilised, peaceable folk. When in the Indies The wild brutal Sepoys Began to kill and murder everyone, With no pity or mercy, It’s the brave kilted Gaels Who defeated them everywhere And made all the tribes in the Indies Into calm peaceable people. ([Nic a’ Ghobhainn] 2011, 19)

The First World War gave rise to a large corpus of Gaelic verse, but there is little obviously ‘anti-war’ rhetoric of the kind so familiar in the English canon, whether in the form of poems that emphasise the pointlessness or disproportionate cost of particular actions (such as the First Battle of the Somme in 1916) or works that challenge the very concept of war itself. Some works are enthusiastic or brutally triumphalist, including the well-

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known2 “Eilean Beag Donn a’ Chuain” (“Little Brown Island in the Sea”) by Dòmhnall Moireasdan (Donald Morrison): A Dhia, bi maille ri muinntir a’ bhròin, ’S na fir a tha leòinte, tinn, Bho ìnean guineach na h-iolair’ a bhòc Air fuil agus feòil do chloinn; Tha gaoth an fhir-mhillidh na [h-]itean, ’s a chròg A’ druideadh mu sgòrnan teann, Tha ’n leòmhann a’ fàsgadh Uilleam a Dhà Is spiollaidh i chnàmhan lom. O Lord, be with the people in sorrow And the men who are wounded and ill From the sharp claws of the [German] eagle who has swelled On the blood and flesh of your children; The wind of the conqueror [lit. destroyer] is in its feathers, And his hand is closing around its neck, The [British] lion is squeezing [Kaiser] William II And it will pick his bones bare. (Comunn Gàidhealach Leòdhais 1982, 44-45)

The finest Gaelic poetry of the First World War was that of the Lewisborn Iain Rothach (John Munro) (1889-1918), one of the most remarkable Gaelic poets of the twentieth century. In his “Ar Gaisgich a Thuit sna Blàir” (“Our Heroes Who Fell in Battle”), Munro speaks of death and sacrifice and foreboding, but with a note of contemplative serenity rather than anger: ’S iomadh fear àlainn òg sgairteil, ait-fhaoilt air chinn a bhlàth-chrìdh, tric le ceum daingeann làidir, ceum aotrom, glan, sàil-ghlan, dhìrich bràigh nam beann mòra, chaidh a choinneamh a’ bhàis tric ga fhaireach’ roimh-làimh – a chaidh suas chum a’ bhlàir; ’s tha feur glas an-diugh ’fàs

2

“Eilean Beag Donn a’ Chuain” was recently voted the fourth most popular Gaelic song of all time, with another song from the First World War, “An Eala Bhàn” (“The White Swan”) by Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna (Donald MacDonald), topping the list. See www.bbc.co.uk/alba/oran/bhot/. Note, however, that the more militaristic verses of “Eilean Beag Donn a’ Chuain” are rarely sung today.

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air na dh’fhàg innleachdan nàmh, innleachdan dhubh-sgrios an nàmh a chòrr dheth. Many a handsome young man full of energy Openly welcoming from the warmth of his heart, So often with step firm and strong, Step light, fresh and clean-heeled, Who climbed the slope of high mountains, Who went to face death – Often sensing it beforehand – Who went up to the battlefield; And green grass grows today On what enemy devices left On what enemy devices of total destruction left over. (Black 1999, 215-16; see Mackay 2008)

Taken as a whole, the large corpus of Gaelic poetry from the Second World War is not fundamentally different from the range of works that emerged from the earlier wars of colonial aggrandisement,3 even if the nature of the British cause, which could be characterised as a desperate defensive struggle against relentless fascist expansionism, had changed significantly. Two of the most important Gaelic poets of the twentieth century, Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean) and Deòrsa Caimbeul Hay (George Campbell Hay), each composed a number of major poems arising out of their experiences fighting with the British Army in North Africa. Of these, MacGill-Eain’s celebrated “Glac a’ Bhàis” (“Death Valley”) certainly challenges the value of war in general and the way in which the powerful use it for their ends. Following a graphic description of a young German soldier’s corpse rotting in the desert sun, surrounded by flies, MacGill-Eain asks: An robh an gille air an dream a mhàb na h-Iùdhaich ’s na Comannaich, no air an dream bu mhotha, dhiùbh-san a threòraicheadh bho thoiseach àl gun deòin gu buaireadh agus bruaillean cuthaich gach blàir air sgàth uachdaran? 3

An exception in structural terms is Neil Ross’s Armageddon (1950), which is more than 70 pages long; the author died in 1943, before its completion, and the text was published as a mere ‘fragment’ of the intended epic. In its political perspective, however, Armageddon is conventionally imperial.

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Gaelic Poetry and the British Military Enterprise, 1756-1945 Ge b’ e a dheòin-san no a chàs, a neoichiontas no mhìorun, cha do nochd e toileachadh ’na bhàs fo Dhruim Ruidhìseit. Was the boy of the band who abused the Jews and Communists, or of the greater band of those led, from the beginning of generations, unwillingly to the trial and mad delirium of every war for the sake of rulers? Whatever his desire or mishap, his innocence or malignity, he showed no pleasure in his death below the Ruweisat Ridge. (MacGill-Eain 2011, 206-7)

Hay’s best-known war poems are classics such as “Bisearta,” which emphasise the destructive intensity of warfare rather than political issues or ideologies. Initially, however, Hay had resisted taking part in the war, in common with some other Scottish nationalists, and only enlisted after several months on the run in the hills of Argyll in 1940-41 and a subsequent eight-month incarceration (Byrne [2000] 2003, 469-73). Some of Hay’s poems composed during the early stage of the war are harshly anti-English, sometimes including charges concerning the abuse of other countries in addition to Scotland. “Teisteas Mhic Iain Deòrsa” (“Mac Iain Deòrsa Testifies”) (1940) is particularly striking: Gu dè as cleachdadh do Shasainn? Siuthad, farraid an Èirinn: no thig freagairt an fhuathais à iomadh uaigh an tìr chèin ort; greas is feòraich sna h-Innsean feuch an innis iad sgeul duit; och, is farsaing an eachdraidh, ’s truagh mar a chreach iad an Èiphit. Rachadh an talamh air udal nan robh guth aig na cnàmhan, ’s iad ag èigheach ’s a’ tagairt na rinn Sasainn de chràdh orr’:

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guth Uallais chaidh shracadh, guth Ghilleasbaig, guth Màiri, gàir nan leòint’ air Cùil Fhodair. glòir na gòrt’ ann an Dàrien. What are the customary ways of England? Go enquire in Ireland: or spectres can answer you from many a grave overseas; hurry and ask in India, see what story they tell you: oh, their history spreads far, how shamefully they stripped Egypt! The ground would start rocking if bones had a voice, were they to shout and claim redress for all the torments England brought on them; the voice of Wallace torn limb from limb, the voice of Archibald [earl of Argyll, killed at Flodden in 1513], the voice of [Queen] Mary, the wails of the wounded on Culloden, the moan of famine in Darien. (Byrne [2000] 2003, 75, lines 17-32)

The most bitterly anti-imperial poetry arising from the Second World War, however, is that of the South Uist writer Domhnall Ian MacDhòmhnaill (Donald John MacDonald) (1919-86). MacDhòmhnaill was captured by the Germans at St Valéry in 1940 and spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner in eastern Germany, as described in his memoir Fo Sgàil a’ Swastika (Under the Shadow of the Swastika) (MacDhòmhnaill [1974] 2000). Although he composed several poems during the war itself, none of them particularly ‘anti-imperial’ in tone, his perspective hardened very significantly later in his life, as expressed most passionately in “Flanders”: Vimy Ridge agus Ypres, Altair ìobairt ar bràithrean – O, càit an robh buannachd Ach an duais dhaibh sna h-àrdaibh, Flùr cùbhraidh na h-òige Feadh na h-Eòrp’ air a smàladh? Tart cumhachd gus dìreadh Air na h-ìompairean gràineil, Riaghladh Shasainn a’ cìosnadh

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Gaelic Poetry and the British Military Enterprise, 1756-1945 Bhochdan, ìslean is ànraich: Shnàmh suas i gu ìre Tro fhuil phrìseil a bhràithrean. Dè ’n taing thug an rìoghachd Do na thill as an fhùirneis? O, a Shasainn, mo nàire – D’ eachdraidh ghràineil ga rùsgadh: Dh’òl eileanan Alba Cupan searbh do chuid mùiseig. Ach thuit gach ìompaireachd ainmeil Mar a sheargas na ròsan; Chaidh an cliù dhuinn a dhearbhadh – Murt is marbhadh is leònadh: Càrnadh ionmhais do dh’uaislean Cumail shluaghan fo spògan. Vimy Ridge and Ypres, Sacrificial altar for our brothers – Oh, where was the victory Save their reward on high, Sweet flower of youth, Crushed throughout Europe? Ambitious thirst for power Of hateful empires, Government of England oppressing The poor, lowly and needy: Floating up to success Through precious blood of its brothers. What thanks did their country give To those that returned from the furnace? O England, shame on you – Your loathsome record exposed: The islands of Scotland drank The bitter cup of your oppression. But every famous empire has fallen As the roses wither: Their reputation shown to us – Murder, killing and wounding: Creating wealth for the rich Keeping peoples underfoot. (MacDhòmhnaill 1998, 306-7)

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A final poet of significance who became a perceptive critic of Empire is the Mull-born Donnchadh MacDhunlèibhe (Duncan Livingstone) (18771964). Although he fought in the Boer War (1899-1902) as a youth, his principal literary contribution is the poetry he composed many decades later, in the last years of his life, dealing with decolonisation and the bitter legacy of apartheid in South Africa, where he spent all his adulthood from 1903 onwards, after a very brief return to Britain following his injury in the war. His best-known poem is the ventriloquistic “Bean Dubh a’ Caoidh a Fir a Chaidh a Mharbhadh leis a’ Phoileas” (“A Black Woman Mourns her Husband Killed by the Police”), composed following the notorious Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. In his “Feasgar an Duine Ghil” (“The Evening of the White Man”), MacDhunlèibhe wrote: Tha an saoghal gu iomallan nis fo dhaorsa an duine ghil – ach èist an fhuaim: Na fir dhathte ’n geall air saorsa, is sgìth de dhaorsairean thar chuain. Tha Breatann mhòr an èis a cutadh; earball an pheucaig is e spìont […] A dhuine ghil, is e do dheasgainn a chuir atmhoireachd san taois; Dh’fhalbh do latha, chiar ort feasgar; an oidhche dùnadh nis air t’ aois. The world to its fringes is now enslaved by the white man – but listen to the sound: Coloured men are seeking freedom and tired of masters overseas. Great Britain’s gutted like a fish; the peacock’s tail’s been plucked […] O white man, it’s your yeast that put swelling in the dough; Your day has gone, dusk has fallen on you; night’s now closing on your era. (Black 1999, 72-75)

In their stinging critiques of the imperial enterprise, MacDhòmhnaill and MacDhunlèibhe must be considered isolated voices. The great majority of Gaelic verse, from the eighteenth century onwards, was steadfastly proBritish and pro-Empire, with several poets, including Aonghas Moireasdan and Dòmhnall MacAoidh, enthusiastically asserting the conventional justificatory rationale for imperial expansion, that it was essentially a civilising mission rather than a process of conquest and expropriation. Conversely, there is no significant evidence that the Gaelic poets saw a connection between their own difficult history and the experience of colonised peoples in other parts of the world. Some modern commentators have perceived an ‘irony’ in the failure of the Gaels to express ‘transperipheral solidarity’ with other peoples who experienced political and cultural subjugation at the hands of the British state (Stroh 2011b; see Newton 2009, 75). Such critiques may be open to charges of anachronism or lack of political realism; indeed, even to posit such a hypothesis

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arguably involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the political and social history of Scottish Gaeldom in recent centuries, for affinity with the British state and the British Empire lay at the very centre of Gaelic identity and experience. Scottish Gaelic identity was fundamentally transformed by assimilation into Britain and its Empire, and military activity in particular allowed the Gaels to make and earn recognition for a distinct contribution to the imperial enterprise.

THE GAELIC VOICE AND (POST)COLONIAL DISCOURSE: AN ALIGNMENT ILLUSTRATED BY CASE STUDIES OF NEIL GUNN, WILLIAM NEILL AND TORMOD CAIMBEUL SILKE STROH

This essay charts connections between Celticity, Scottish Gaeldom and international colonial and postcolonial discourse. First, this will be done in general terms, through an overview of transhistorical and theoretical issues that are central to any consideration of Scottish and ‘Celtic fringe’ postcolonialism. The latter’s comparative outlook is reflected in the concept of ‘transperipherality,’ which is of particular importance in the context of this essay. Secondly, these general reflections will be followed by a few case studies of how international colonial and postcolonial themes, and transperipheral parallels, are reflected in Scottish writing. Particular emphasis will be placed on Neil Gunn’s novel Butcher’s Broom (1934), the poetry of William Neill (1922-2010), and the poems, short stories and novels of Tormod Caimbeul (b. 1942).

Celticity, Gaelicness and Transperipherality: General Reflections In the growing field(s) of postcolonial Irish, Welsh and Scottish studies, it is of crucial importance that Ireland, Scotland and Wales possess longestablished and substantial non-anglophone (‘Celtic’) cultural and linguistic traditions which predate the spread of anglophone culture there, and which have long been marginalised by anglo-normativity. These realities are a central touchstone in political and academic discourses which compare the internal fringes of the British Isles to Britain’s former overseas colonies. Celtic languages – and the cultures of their speakers – have long played a prominent role in establishing the distinctness of

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Scotland, Ireland and Wales from the hegemonic English Other. Celticity has often been celebrated as ‘authentic indigeneity,’ e.g. in the reception of Ossianic literature (Susan Manning 1982, 44-45, 51), in the widespread adoption of Highland bagpipes and tartans as pan-Scottish national symbols, or in assertions that Gaelic culture is “the spark that makes us definitely Scottish” (Sìol nan Gaidheal [2013]). Elsewhere, Celticity has been denigrated as ‘backward,’ ‘barbarian’ and in need of ‘civilising’ (anglicising) missions (see e.g. Donaldson [1970] 1974, 178; Clyde 1995, 7-11, 22-23; Knox [1850] 1862, 74-75, 265-66, 322-24, 375). Critics of such ‘civilising’ or ‘colonising’ missions have used Celticity as a key reference point in anti- or postcolonial nationalist discourses of resistance – perhaps most famously by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish nationalists embracing Gaelic language revivalism, traditional Gaelic literary themes and figures as well as Gaelic sports, but also by Scottish nationalists (see e.g. MacDiarmid 1984, 241-42, from a speech delivered at a symposium of the 1320 Club, Glasgow University, April 6, 1968; Pittock 1999, 83-84). While such different ways of denigrating and affirming indigenous culture are noted in postcolonial Irish, Scottish and Welsh studies, and inspire overseas comparisons, the international mainstream of postcolonial studies is still reluctant to participate in this dialogue: ‘Celtic fringe postcolonialism’1 is regarded as an overly ambivalent, marginal anomaly in a field whose ‘proper’ concerns are deemed to lie elsewhere, i.e. in Britain’s former overseas colonies and their diasporas. Even in ‘Celtic fringe postcolonialism,’ where Celticity often features as a reference point, surprisingly little attention is paid to discourses articulated in the Celtic languages themselves (e.g. see the relatively marginal position of Gaelic literature in Kiberd’s otherwise excellent Inventing Ireland, 1995; and even more so in Gardiner, Macdonald and O’Gallagher 2011) – a phenomenon which might be regarded as yet another instance of internal colonial exploitation of the Celtic-speaking world, this time by anglophone literary critics or anglophone anti-Union nationalists. By contrast, the present essay argues that Celticity is a highly central, archetypal construct in (post)colonial discourses, both ancient and modern. A second aim is to show that the role of Celticity as a link between classical and modern 1

The concept of the ‘Celtic fringe’ is of course highly problematic, especially if the entirety of these nations (e.g. including anglophone Scotland) is subsumed under it. In this essay it is merely cited as a convenient shorthand, despite awareness of its considerable limitations which, for reasons of space, cannot be discussed in more detail here. For a more extended discussion, see Stroh (2009a, 710).

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colonialism is also reflected in Scottish literature. Thirdly, this essay attempts to set an example of multilingual postcolonial practice by drawing not only on anglophone, but also on Gaelic literature. The first recorded appearances of the concept ‘Celtic’ can be found in Classical Greek and Roman texts, where terms like keltoi, Celtae and their cognates denote a range of different ‘barbarian’ peoples who were often described in ways which anticipate strategies of othering and cultural hierarchisation associated with modern colonial discourses. In the British Isles, speakers of Celtic languages experienced another wave of marginalisation and hegemonic othering from the Middle Ages onwards. Again, Celtic-speaking people were portrayed as primitive barbarians. Now, the hegemonic forces which produced these colonial-style discourses were the mainstreams of the Scottish and English states, which were increasingly dominated by the political, economic and cultural power of English speakers. Wales and Ireland were subjugated to English political authority. Later, the textualisation and the cultural impact of the Unions between England and Scotland likewise reflected anglocentric hegemonies. The tendency to portray Celtic-speaking populations as internal barbarian Others to the anglophone hegemonic centres of the British Isles increased in the modern period. The (predominantly continental) ethnic groups of European Antiquity to whom the label ‘Celtic’ had originally applied were now regarded as ancestors or cousins of the modern Celtic-speaking populations of Brittany, Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man. The Celtic language family is often seen as uniting these peoples, but Classical texts also applied the label ‘Celtic’ to non-Celtic-speaking populations. Thus, an at least equally (and arguably even more) important feature uniting the peoples grouped under the ‘Celtic’ umbrella is their peripherality and otherness in relation to some hegemonic centre (Greek, Roman, English or French). Being a ‘colonised’ margin or an object of colonial discourse is a defining characteristic of Celticity (see e.g. Chapman 1992; Simon James 1999; Pittock 1999; Collis 2003). Well-known Greek and Roman texts provided models which helped modern elites to make sense of their encounter with modern ‘barbarian’ peripheries on the ‘Celtic fringes’ of their own states and in Britain’s overseas colonies. The internal homogenisation of the capitalist nation state and the assimilation of ‘Celtic fringes’ to the political, economic and cultural norms of the anglocentric mainstream(s) were compared to external colonial expansion overseas. Both endeavours were conceptualised as civilising missions in terms of a universalist teleology of progress. Further connections appear in later anti- and postcolonial

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discourses: a sense of shared oppression among ‘Celtic’ and overseas colonised peoples prompted declarations of solidarity, mutual inspiration and tactical alliances – despite the crucial ambiguity that many people from the ‘Celtic fringes’ had been complicit in the oppression of the nonwhite indigenous populations to whom they were so often compared. Two theoretical concepts help to make sense of such alignments. One of these is ‘minority discourse,’ which highlights the importance of theoretical and practical connections between different minority cultures and movements that are faced with similar problems (e.g. JanMohamed and Lloyd 1987). Another useful, though so far less established, concept is ‘transperipherality,’ which was first introduced into the study of the ‘Celtic fringes’ and their overseas imperial diasporas by Katie Trumpener (1997, e.g. viii, 289). Like ‘minority discourse,’ ‘transperipherality’ highlights connections between various marginalised cultures, regions and nations – bridging the gap between traditional (or international mainstream) postcolonial studies on the one hand, and explorations of marginality or counter-hegemonic discourses in contexts which are not traditionally considered as typically colonial (or postcolonial) on the other. Literature from and about Scotland frequently shows transperipheral connections to colonial and postcolonial discourses in other times and places – including those of Classical Antiquity and modern Britain’s former overseas colonies. Sometimes, these connections take the form of merely implicit parallels; at other times, they are noted explicitly. Both kinds of connections, however, show how strongly Scotland and Celticity are implicated in the discursive matrix of colonialism and postcolonialism.2 The following sections illustrate these general points through case studies of how colonial and postcolonial themes are treated in Scottish writing.

Ancient Rome, the Scottish Gaidhealtachd and the British Empire: Neil Gunn and William Neill The Roman connection, Roman colonial discourses about Scotland’s early inhabitants (usually assumed to have been Celtic speakers of some kind or other), and later Scottish ‘native’ critical responses to these colonial discourses, are reflected in various texts. Often, these can be related to the (almost stereotypically) well known postcolonial paradigm of ‘writing 2

For a more detailed discussion of these and other historical and theoretical issues, and of numerous additional primary texts, see Stroh 2007; 2009a-c; 2011b.

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back’ (e.g. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989, 6-7, 34, 78-115, 189-93). Roman discourse traditions drawing a mainly negative image of the Scottish colonised are appropriated and reinterpreted by modern ‘anticolonial’ voices to give a more positive picture of native society and culture as a source of resilience and resistance. This happens, for instance, in two Gaelic poems from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s “Fuigheall” (“A Fragment,” e.g. in J.L. Campbell [1933] 1984, 116-21) and Iain MacIlleathain’s “Òran nam Prìosanach” (“Song about the Prisoners,” e.g. in Meek 1995, 158-59, 26061), which compare Roman colonialism in northern Britain to the modern relationship between Scottish Gaeldom and Britain’s anglophone mainstream.3 One of the most important colonial texts which have undergone postcolonial rewriting in Scotland is Tacitus’s Agricola. Although Tacitus himself does not speak of British people as ‘Celts,’ his work has often been read as part of the discourse on Celticity and ‘Celtic fringes.’ Agricola essentially voices the coloniser’s perspective, but it also contains a passage where the colonising author attempts to represent the perspective of the colonised, namely the anti-Roman speech put into the mouth of the Caledonian leader Calgacus. While Agricola was often cited in later works that depicted Scotland or its Gaels from anglocentric, colonising viewpoints, it has also been subjected to anti-colonial re-readings which appropriate Calgacus’s speech as a model for native resistance. Such appropriations have been made both by Scottish (cultural or political) nationalists and by more particularly Highland or Gaelic discourses of resistance. An example from nineteenth-century Gaelic poetry is Donnchadh Blàrachs’s “Aiseirigh na Gaidhealtachd” (“The resurrection of the Gaidhealtachd,”4 e.g. in Sinclair 1904, 102-5), which expresses hope that the much lamented Highland Clearances will eventually be reversed through a combination of Gladstonian politics and Gaelic solidarity in struggle. Calgacus and his Caledonian army are invoked as a historical precedent which has the power to inspire modern Gaelic resistance. A prominent twentieth-century appropriation of the Calgacus figure can be found in Neil Gunn’s Butcher’s Broom, a historical novel about the impact of the Napoleonic Wars and the Highland Clearances on a small Sutherland community. Gunn had only a limited knowledge of the Gaelic language, wrote all his works in English, and often expresses a 3

For a more detailed discussion of both poems, see Stroh (2011b, 105-6, 218-19, 224-26). 4 The title is my translation.

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sympathetic outsider’s perspective on Gaelic culture rather than a genuine ‘inside’ viewpoint. In fact, he uses some stereotypes which resemble colonial discourses of the ‘noble savage’ variety. Nonetheless, there are also elements in his work which can be seen as anti- or postcolonial. Butcher’s Broom, for instance, attempts to express the (imaginatively reconstructed) perspective of the Gaelic ‘colonised’ and criticises colonial ventures past and present, at home and abroad. Gunn’s anti-colonial appropriation of Tacitus’s Calgacus is achieved through the speeches of one character, Tomas the Drover. Tomas likens the Roman invasion of Caledonia to the danger of a Napoleonic invasion of Britain, and the real ‘invasion’ of Lowland and English sheep farmers moving into the Gaidhealtachd (Gunn [1934] 1977, 106-9, 152-53, 155, 158-59, 306, 41819). He repeatedly quotes (and partly rewrites) Calgacus to boost the selfconfidence of Gaels in his own time and to provide a precedent for native resistance (106-8, 158-59, 306). Gunn’s novel likens the Clearances not only to earlier, Roman colonial conquests of Celtic territory, but also to the modern overseas colonial activities in which Britain was involved. The exploitative practices of modern capitalist elites in the Highlands are likened to the African slave trade and the colonial subjugation of Native Americans (311-12, 417, 419). Despite these parallels, there is also a clear awareness of the Gaels’ own complicity in overseas colonising ventures (108-9, 217, 311-12). Moreover, there is an implied plea to resist imperial ‘divide and rule’ policies through mutual solidarity against the AngloBritish oppressor. Although this plea is primarily made with regard to Scottish–Irish solidarity (308-9), the references to other colonies elsewhere in the novel arguably extend this solidarity to the colonised populations overseas. Gunn’s view of history also implicitly highlights transperipheral connections for his own time: not only is his novel part of a wider trend of growing nationalism in Scottish literature and politics, but these also resonate against the growth of anticolonial nationalism in Britain’s overseas colonies during the same period. Later, Calgacus was also appropriated as an emblem of Scottish national and Highland regional resistance by the 1970s journal Calgacus; by Paul Henderson Scott in Scotland: An Unwon Cause (1997, viii-xi); and by James Hunter in his Highland history Last of the Free ([1999] 2000b). Similar to Gunn, Hunter also compares the Highlands to British overseas (ex-)colonies.5

5

Hunter (1994, 28, 96, 177, 189, 235-37, 243); (1996, e.g. 34, 52-53, 59, 66-67, 73, 118, 123-24); ([1976] 2000a, 7-10, 28); ([1999] 2000b, 204, 242, 258, 303, 382-83). For a more detailed discussion of all these texts, including Gunn’s novel, see Stroh (2009a, 32, 36, 538-46).

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A Scottish (post)colonial consciousness which extends from the Roman to the British Empire and suggests solidarity between the marginalised in Scotland and Britain’s former overseas colonies is also evident in the poetry of William Neill, who wrote in Scots, Gaelic and English. “A Celtic History” admires the “determination” of “the auncient Celts” (without regional specification) in resisting the Roman Empire (Neill, Hay, MacGregor and MacLean 1970, 45; also in Neill 1994, 5). Specific references to Scotland in relation to the Roman empire occur in Neill’s “Home Thoughts in the Piazza” and “Marching the Wall” (1994, 198; 2001, 20). His “Sawnie’s Complaint” compares the imperialism reflected in Tacitus’s Agricola (which it quotes) to English imperialism within Union Britain which marginalises Scotland politically, economically and culturally (2001, 112-18). Whereas “Unkipling the Raj” notes Scottish participation in overseas imperialism (2001, 41), “St Andrew’s Day, 1966” (1970, 4) compares Scottish with overseas anticolonial nationalism, expresses solidarity with the latter, and laments that Scotland has so far been denied the political autonomy which overseas excolonies have now gained. Scotland is thus presented as one of the last colonies, and incited to make a more determined effort at emancipation similar to overseas models. While these poems suggest that the entirety of Scotland is colonised, a specifically Highland perspective is added in a passage in “The Jolly Trimmers” where non-Gaelic incomers purchasing estates are accused of “attitudes colonial” (2001, 131-43, at 136). In Neill’s work, the postcolonial vision encompasses both Gaelic revivalism and (pan-)Scottish nationalism.

Transperipherality and (Post)colonial Intersections in Tormod Caimbeul’s Writings A Highland focus, and anxiety about non-Gaelic incomers, also feature prominently in Tormod Caimbeul’s work. Unlike Gunn and Neill, Caimbeul does not show any explicit awareness of Roman colonial precedents. There is a single, very brief reference to the Roman conquest of Britain in his novel An Druim bho Thuath (‘The north ridge’ 2011, 51; all English translations of titles and quotations from Caimbeul’s Gaelic works cited in this article are my own), and this passage might even be read as an allusion to Roman colonial literature in its reference to Caesar (whose Gallic War also contains remarks about southern England) and Agricola (protagonist of Tacitus’s aforementioned colonial text). However, this is at best a very oblique reference – Caesar and Agricola are not explicitly referred to as authors and subjects of literature, but only as

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historical personages. Moreover, this passage does not go into any historical detail; one character’s interest in Roman history is immediately ridiculed by another character who calls its local Hebridean relevance into question; and there are no explicit links to more recent colonising ventures either in Scotland or abroad. However, Caimbeul’s work does reflect an awareness that more recent historical experiences in the Highlands do amount to a ‘colonial’ situation. There is a strong sense of cultural opposition between Gaels and nonGaels, and of the Gaelic community being threatened and victimised (even to the point of imminent extinction) by culturally alien hegemonic forces from outside. In several of his works, the response to this quasi-colonial predicament takes the form of a nostalgic invocation of the past, a focus on memory, and a sense of fatalism about the near future. There is also a strong sense of outrage about the increasing linguistic, cultural and demographic hybridisation of the traditional Gaelic heartlands by depopulation, by English or Lowland Scottish incomers (whom other critics often refer to as “white settlers”), and even by self-hybridising and sometimes cultural-cringe-ridden local Gaels. This can be seen in Caimbeul’s novels Deireadh an Fhoghair (‘The end of autumn,’ 1979) and An Druim bho Thuath, his poems “Soisgeulaich” (“Evangelists,” 1994, 58-59), “Neo-shubhach air an t-Samhradh Seo” (‘Unhappy this summer,’ 1994, 69-70), and “Mòinteach Dhail” (‘Dail moor,’ 1994, 1011); as well as his short stories “Am Branch Manager agus Sourbutt” (‘The Branch Manager and Sourbutt,’ 1994, 60-68; also see Stroh 2011a) and “An Naidheachd bhon Taigh” (‘The news from home,’ 1994, 1-7). The latter also suggests a sense of pan-Celtic ‘anti-colonial’ solidarity between the Scottish Gaidhealtachd and Wales, as the problem of anglophone ‘white settlers’ is shown to be common to both. The colonial dimension of Gaelic marginality is sometimes also reflected quite explicitly. In “Am Branch Manager agus Sourbutt” an English ‘white settler’ exploits and despises his rural Gaelic neighbours and notes with relief that at least one of them has adapted far enough to hegemonic (anglocentric and Tory) norms to deserve the label “civilised” (1994, 62). This term evokes ideas of cultural hierarchy more famously associated with overseas colonialism. International connections become even more explicit in Caimbeul’s short story “Cricket” (1992, 87-91), where the protagonist aligns the Gaidhealtachd with the West Indies (see below). Colonial dimensions in Caimbeul’s work have also been briefly noted by previous critics: discussing a Gaelic character who suffers from cultural cringe, MacLeòid diagnoses a “slave mentality” (MacLeòid 1994-95, 94),

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and Watson identifies a “colonial malaise” in “An Naidheachd bhon Taigh” (Watson 2011, 122). Often, Caimbeul’s brand of anti- or postcolonialism suggests clear binarisms between colonising and colonised culture, a strong sense of antagonism, a ‘nativist’ bias in favour of an idealised rural Gaelic traditionalism, and a rather negative image of hybridity. Such notions also exist in international anti- and postcolonialism, for instance in négritude (e.g. Senghor [1966] 1994) or in Gandhian espousals of traditional images of Indian culture (e.g. see the discussion in Young 2001, 318-20, 326, 328, 346, which also charts interesting transperipheral connections to nativist ‘Celtic fringe’ nationalism; as well as highlighting elements of hybridity that complicate Gandhi’s nativist pose). Many other postcolonialists have warned against such tendencies (e.g. Mphahlele 1962; Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989, 21, 36-37, 180), arguing that they can unintentionally reify colonial thought patterns by preserving concepts of racial or cultural binarisms, and by assuming that dynamism and ‘progress’ only come naturally to the coloniser whereas the colonised cultures are seen as intrinsically static. The colonised are thus denied the right or ability to evolve their own forms of change and modernity.6 While such critiques of nativism might also apply to some of Caimbeul’s writings, they do not tell the whole story: elsewhere, he displays a different form of anti- or postcolonialism which is more positive towards change and hybridisation. For instance, like many postcolonial writers elsewhere, he uses the ‘alien’ form of the novel (originally from the anglophone coloniser’s culture) and adapts it for his own indigenous, anti-hegemonic purposes. His novels fuse elements of English and international literary modernism and postmodernism with elements of traditional oral Gaelic storytelling. In Shrapnel (2006), he takes hybridisation one step further, moving away from rural Gaidhealtachd settings to Edinburgh’s urban underbelly. The subversive, decolonising potential of hybridity, and a more complex image of modern Gaelic culture, are also embraced in “Cricket.” Here, Caimbeul satirises ultra-traditionalist concepts of Gaelicness (i.e. what people think is characteristic of the Gaels or of Gaelic culture and identity) and acknowledges the ultimate inevitability of change and hybridisation. The topic of change is already introduced in the first few lines of the story, when the (apparently middle-aged) protagonist and narrator is reading the newspaper, exclaiming: “‘A shaoghail, a shaoghail, gur caochlaideach thu’ – an tuireadh a bhiodh aig mo sheanmhair a h-uile 6 Also see Parry 1994 for a more nuanced discussion of nativism, anti-nativism, and the interstices between them.

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latha, agus a-nis agamsa” (“‘O world, o world, how fickle you are’ – the same lamentation which my grandmother used to make every day, and which I now made myself,” Caimbeul 1992, 85). Already at this point, the story satirises the frequent tendency of middle-aged and elderly people to nostalgically construct the past as an idealised, stable world which is supposedly vastly superior to a present that continually changes for the worse. The satiric effect is achieved through the parallel between the narrator and his grandmother: while the narrator himself tends to assume that the days of his own youth were more stable than the present, he also implies an awareness that such notions are fallacious, since those very days which retrospectively appear so stable to himself are shown to have appeared very dynamic to his grandmother, who in turn idealised the supposed stability of the days of her own youth. Thus, any idealisation of an allegedly stable past is exposed as a nostalgic fallacy, as change is shown to have always existed. This notion of perpetual change is complemented by an implied continuity: the parallel between the narrator and his grandmother suggests that certain habits, such as the nostalgia of the middle-aged and the elderly, may never change. The combination of these assertions – of perpetual change on the one hand and continuity on the other – relativises the sense of tragic loss which individual nostalgics might feel. While in those first lines the narrator’s reflections about the fickleness of the world are triggered by his reading of the newspaper, they are soon directed to an instance of change which is much closer to home: looking out of the window, he sees his sons playing the ‘imported’ non-Gaelic game of cricket. Initially this surprises and incenses the narrator, since he tries his best to “make Gaelic Gaidhealtachd Gaels of them” (the original is: “’s mi a’ feuchainn ri Gàidheil Ghàidhealach Ghàidhlig a dhèanamh dhiubh,” 85). The threefold repetition of these signifiers of Gaelicness constitutes a hyperbole which has a parodic effect, suggesting that the narrator’s educational aims and his standards of cultural purity are overly strict. A similar hyperbolic and parodic effect is achieved in the next halfsentence, this time through highly emphatic semantic choices and alliterations: continuing to describe his educational efforts, the narrator states that he is “striving ceaselessly against the afflictions that are hitting us from all sides” (the original is: “a’ strì gun abhsadh an aghaidh nan àmhghairean a tha a’ bualadh oirnn o gach taobh,” 85). Repetition, alliteration and internal vowel harmony are also used for emphatic or hyperbolic purposes in the following exclamations: Agus mise gach là gus m’ adha a chur a-mach a’ sparradh orra cànan agus cleachdaidhean mo shinnsir. An cultar. (85)

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And here’s me every day working my arse off to enforce on them my ancestors’ language and customs. The culture. Dia romham, às mo dhèidh agus leam, ’s gun gleidheadh e sinn bho Jason, Jeremy agus Jocelyn, Fanny agus Fay. (85) God be with me, before me and behind me, may he save us from Jason, Jeremy and Jocelyn, Fanny and Fay.7

The choice of the verb “a’ sparradh” (“enforce”) conveys a sense of compulsion, suggesting that the narrator’s strictness could be criticised as ‘cultural imperialism in reverse.’ Exaggerated strictness might also be suggested by his threefold reference to God, which can be read as an allusion to the frequent association of Gaelic tradition with radical Calvinism.8 As an example of his struggle for the maintenance of Gaelic tradition against anglicising influences, Caimbeul’s narrator expounds on his sons’ fondness for television programmes which offend their father’s Scottish Gaelic ears with “harsh screeching out of London caverns” (the original is: “sgread chruaidh à uamhan Lunnainn,” 85). The common Scottish complaint about the harshness of English accents is here further enhanced by the reference to “caves” or “caverns” (“uamhan” in the Gaelic original) which stands civilisational hierarchy on its head: cave-dwelling is often associated with ‘savagery,’ i.e. a supposedly lower stage of civilisation. While metropolitan London has traditionally seen itself as a navel of high civilisation, assigning the lower ranks on the civilisational ladder to the Gaels and other marginalised peoples, in this story it is a Gael who associates London with civilisational inferiority through the use of a cavedwelling metaphor. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England considered itself as embattled by the surrounding forces of barbarism (for example during the Jacobite invasion of 1745, or when Victorian colonisers overseas expressed anxiety about the danger of ‘going native’), here it is a Gaelic narrator who feels embattled by the onslaught of English barbarism. This sense of embattlement is highlighted further by the fact that the TV ‘attacks’ already happen early in the morning, when people are still tired and thus caught unawares (Caimbeul 1992, 85). The narrator’s attempts to curb his sons’ excursions into the brave new world of English 7 These English names probably stand for figures from anglophone popular culture, thus functioning as metonymies for anglicisation in general. 8 This association is often reflected (and criticised) in the work of Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn [Iain Crichton Smith]. See, for example, his short story “The Black and the Red” (1973).

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television seem to have little effect in the long run. Moreover, despite his traditionalist stance, the narrator soon admits that he is not uninfluenced by cultural change himself, and that he, too, finds it difficult to relate to certain aspects of Gaelic tradition: Chan e gu bheil mi glè chinnteach mu chultar mo shinnsir fhìn: sgeulachdan breugach gu leòr […] agus rabhdan nach gabh mi orm innse […] agus […] òraidean fada […] a tha a’ toirt fa-near […] caoraich agus maorach […] agus facail mhòra […] nach tuigeadh tusa. Not that I’m all too sure about the culture of my ancestors myself: stories full enough of lies, and rantings which I’m not going to repeat, and long lectures mentioning sheep and shellfish and big words which one wouldn’t understand. (Caimbeul 1992, 85).

Firstly, this implies that traditional Gaelic stories do not cater for the narrator’s thematic interests. Secondly, the reference to ‘unintelligible big words’ might suggest that language decline has left the narrator’s Gaelic vocabulary so impoverished that he is unable to understand all the terms which occur in older texts. However, even these admissions do not immediately prompt him to accept cultural change as given, and to understand innovations within a Gaelic cultural framework as a potential key to the language’s survival. Instead, he immediately reasserts his hostility to change, ending his reflections about his own ignorance and dislike of certain aspects of Gaelic tradition with the exclamation: “Ach gar bith dè a tha no bhà anns a’ chultar, is nì fìor e nach robh cricket ann!” (“But whatever the culture is or was, it’s an established fact that cricket was not part of it!” Caimbeul 1992, 86). Accordingly, he imagines hearing the voices of his ancestors inciting him to stop his sons’ game (Caimbeul 1992, 86-87). However, he does not obey. Instead, he goes on watching them (Caimbeul 1992, 87-88, 91) and recounts episodes from his own memories, including a cricket match played by him and his mates during his boyhood (Caimbeul 1992, 86-91). Like the parallel at the beginning of the story between the narrator’s and his grandmother’s nostalgia, the parallels between the cricket games played by two different generations establish a continuity of cultural change, suggesting that even during the narrator’s youth Gaelic culture was not a stable, self-contained entity, but was already permeated by innovations and adaptations of outside influences. When the narrator resurfaces from the realm of memory into the present, he seems to accept his sons’ choice of game. One factor which contributes to this new acceptance is his recollection of having played cricket himself – his sons’ interest in the sport no longer seems a breach of tradition, but an instance of continuity. A second factor which seems to

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contribute to the narrator’s growing acceptance of the game is his awareness of the history of cricket in the overseas (post-)colonial world, which contains many other non-English cultures long embattled by forces of anglicisation – cultures to whom cricket had originally been as alien as it was to the Gaels. Eventually, however, these overseas colonised peoples appropriated the coloniser’s game and got their own back by attaining global pre-eminence in this sport, playing it even better than its English ‘inventors’: “bha mo smuaintean air ‘cricket’ agus cho math ’s a bha na West Indies agus àiteachan eile a fhuair an riasladh feadh linntean” (“My thoughts were on cricket, and how good the West Indies and other places were at it, places who had been trodden on for centuries”: Caimbeul 1992, 91). This remark metonymically alludes to a voluminous body of overseas discourses which discuss cricket in terms of anti- and postcolonial politics, both in the Caribbean and beyond. These international discourses often read cricket as a sport which was initially imported by the coloniser as a signifier of Englishness, as a tool to instil the colonised with British and pro-colonial values, and as a symbol of imperial unity. Eventually, however, it became a much more complex cultural signifier. Perhaps especially in the early years, the appropriation of cricket by the colonised could be a strategy of imitation and self-assimilation to hegemonic British norms in order to facilitate social climbing, and as such might be criticised from an anti-colonial perspective as a phenomenon which espoused and maintained the colonial order. On the other hand, even such early strategic appropriation could be regarded as a subversive act of colonial mimicry (see e.g. Bhabha 1994a). Moreover, appropriation by the non-English also transformed the sport itself, changing it from a ‘purely English’ pastime (or an icon of ‘pure Englishness’) into a global phenomenon which also signifies other cultural and national contexts – such as West Indian ones, after certain Caribbean teams and players had accumulated legendary successes. This re-signification of cricket can happen in both national and international perceptions. Caimbeul’s Scottish narrator is an example of the latter: for him, cricket signifies both Englishness and Caribbeanness. A re-signification on the national level happened, for instance, when marginalised racial and social groups in (post-)colonial societies challenged the traditional domination of cricket by (e.g. white, lighterskinned mixed-race, and/or higher-class) elites (whose hegemony is often rooted in colonial history), thus edging their way into domains from which they were previously excluded, and broadening the game into a more truly nation-wide phenomenon which cuts across race and class divisions. Another re-signification on the national level has occurred where anti- and

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post-colonial nationalists have read the successes of their local or national cricket teams against English or other foreign teams as symbolic of more general cultural and political self-assertion against colonial inferiorisation and ‘cultural cringes,’ or against the ex-coloniser and other foreign imperialist powers. Thus, the successes of the West Indian team (e.g. against England on June 29, 1950; and later in general international terms between approximately the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s) also instilled confidence and optimism concerning a better post-colonial future (or compensation for political and economic disappointments), and could to some extent9 act as a unifying force for anti- and post-colonial national or pan-regional sentiment across internal social boundaries. Moreover, the resignification of cricket could also go beyond merely positing an alternative (anti- or post-colonial), oppositional essentialism to traditional and colonial notions of Englishness and white supremacy, and challenge cultural and national essentialisms altogether, by highlighting the ability of sports and other cultural pursuits to become hybrid, transcultural, and panhuman spheres of activity and interest.10 The way in which the international (post)colonial role of cricket is evoked in Caimbeul’s short story implies transperipheral parallels between the colonial history of the West Indies and the ‘internally’ colonised position of Gaeldom within the British Isles. It also implies that hybridity can be accepted in the Gaidhealtachd as well, as it is possible to integrate cricket and other elements of the coloniser’s culture into the Gaelic world for the Gaels’ own ends, and perhaps eventually turn the tables on the colonisers by beating them at their own game.

9

Despite contrary tendencies towards preserving long-standing racial and social divisions in many other respects, that is – but this ambiguity between a sense of ideological national unity or shared cultural patriotism on the one hand, and continuing socio-economic divisions (including those of class and race) on the other, also occurs in many other societies. 10 On all these issues, see C.L.R. James 1963, [1963] 1989b, [1963] 1989c; Frank Manning (1981, 617-18); Sandiford and Stoddart 1987; Stoddart 1987, 1988; Cashman 1988; Diawara (1990, 835-43); Appadurai (1996, 89-113); Guha 1998; M. and T. Phillips (1998, 100-2); Bandopadhyay and Majumdar 2004; Bateman (2009, 64, 88, 121-22, 124-31, 134-42, 178-81, 185, 193-200); Hector and Wagg (2005, 161-64, 167-68, 170); Crabbe and Wagg (2005, 204), but also see pp. 17176 and 214 of the latter two essays, where recent developments foster more pessimistic views on West Indian cricket and society.

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Conclusion As these examples have shown, postcolonial approaches can enhance our understanding of Gaelic (and other ‘Celtic-fringe’) issues. These comparative endeavours can also be a source of theoretical enrichment for both Scottish and postcolonial studies. Gaelic issues are often closely intertwined with questions of pan-Scottish national identity (cultural and political); the latter have likewise been discussed through a postcolonial lens. In a post-colonial age when Empire is widely discredited, Scottish nationalists, Highland regionalists and Gaelic revivalists increasingly claim colonial victim status to legitimise their endeavours. Sometimes this entails a problematic attempt to downplay the other side of their historical legacy, namely the role of overseas coloniser. However, other Scottish postcolonialists like William Neill or James Hunter do face up to this ambivalence, arriving at a more nuanced vision that becomes a productive source of socio-cultural critique, international comparison and dialogue. Being both coloniser and colonised is not necessarily a disqualifying factor, as similar ambivalences occur in overseas colonial contexts. Postcolonialism has long recognised the need to transcend simplistic binarisms between coloniser and colonised: Scottish and ‘Celtic’ ambivalences tie in with these wider developments. It is thus important to overcome the still widespread neglect of Gaelic issues in postcolonial Scottish studies, and of Scottish and ‘Celtic’ issues in general within the postcolonial mainstream. A comparative and interdisciplinary approach offers significant benefits: the ‘Celtic dimension’ helps to extend the historical perspective of postcolonial studies into pre-modern periods, offering alternative insights into the relation between colonial discourse and modernity. Numerous key concerns of postcolonial studies are also central in Scottish and Celtic studies today – shared themes include changing constructions of national identity, interrelations between social and cultural power imbalances, multilingualism and multiculturalism, and the representation of these issues in literature. Postcolonialism has developed many useful tools for the study of these matters. The comparative application of these can also benefit the study of Scottish and ‘Celtic’ cultures – and make further contributions to setting these cultures in a global context. Postcolonial comparisons can also benefit the contemporary redefinition of national identity in a multicultural age: they connect an embrace of traditional, indigenous Scottish culture(s) to a pluralist image of modern Scotland that also grants space to the cultures of recent immigrant cultures, many of which are rooted in former overseas colonies.

WRITING SCOTLAND’S (POST)EMPIRE

KAILYARD MONEY: NATION, EMPIRE AND SPECULATION IN WALTER SCOTT’S LETTERS FROM MALACHI MALAGROWTHER LIAM CONNELL

The focus of this essay is on the three letters that Walter Scott wrote as Malachi Malagrowther to the Edinburgh Weekly Journal in 1826 (Scott 1878). The Letters deal with moves by the British Government to curtail the issue of low-denomination banknotes by the provincial banks, including the banks in Scotland, and to produce a de facto monopoly for the Bank of England. I follow the best of recent criticism on these Letters by offering a historicised reading that tries to think about Scott’s imaginative constitution of the British Union as a response to his immediate context. However, in keeping with the theme of the present volume, I try to expand our sense of this context by pointing to the relationship between the immediate debate about banknotes and wider colonial enterprises that lie beneath it. My contention is that this broader context requires a reappraisal of Scott’s Letters which have tended to be read primarily through Scott’s own proto-nationalist framing of his arguments. Scott gives little attention to the economic crisis of 1825 which motivated the Government’s actions and, consequently, the speculative financing by a particular class of Scots is wholly obscured in the Letters. Though the economic arguments in Scott’s letters are highly contentious, the complaint about the precipitous nature of the Government’s policy and its lack of regard for the Scottish situation meets with general consensus. Taking a lead from this, a good deal of the contemporary interpretation of the Letters reads them largely in Scottish-national terms. A prominent example of this is the re-evaluation of the letters by P.H. Scott in 1978 which declares the Letters “a coherent statement of the philosophy of Scottish nationalism,” of which he himself is an adherent, and the “the first manifesto of modern Scottish Nationalism” (Scott 1991, 174). The inclusion of this essay in the 1981 edition of the Letters has inevitably

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shaped their subsequent reception. However, as well as articulating Scottish national interests, the Letters are properly understood as texts that articulate the class interests of Scottish finance capital. It is my contention that Scott, and those critics who have followed his steer, have contributed to a form of political amnesia whereby these latter interests are subsumed in the defence of Scottish entitlements.

The Historical Context The immediate context for the Letters was the Country Bankers Act (1826) which, only a few years after the repeal of the 1797 Restriction Act, loosened the control of joint-stock banks in England but began the process of securing the Bank of England’s monopoly as a printer of money by giving it sole rights to publish banknotes below £5. As a consequence of the demand that the Napoleonic Wars put upon the Bank’s reserves of bullion, the Restriction Act removed the need for the Bank of England to redeem their notes with gold. As many commentators have noted, the debate surrounding the Restriction Act was highly relevant to the debate that the Letters present about the nature of paper (fiat) money, or gold and silver coins (specie) as markers of value. However, the relation of this debate to the Country Bankers Act is slightly different from that of the Restriction Act, and it arose from a new demand for bullion due to speculative losses incurred by the provincial banks during the economic crisis of 1825. This new demand for gold was not born of a national emergency springing from an act of war. Rather, the failure of speculative investments represented a considerably more sectional emergency which imperilled specific class interests. For the purposes of my argument it is particularly relevant that this crisis was international in origin and intricately related to an emerging imperial policy following the defeat of the French in the Napoleonic War and the fatal weakening of the Spanish Empire that this war had brought about. The roots of the 1825 crisis were investments in the newly independent South-American states which had recently seceded from the Spanish Empire. The imperial nature of such investments was encapsulated by George Canning in 1824, a former President of the Board of Control, who argued that “Spanish America is free and if we do not mis-manage our affairs sadly she is English” (quoted in Gallagher and Robinson 1970, 15253).1 Canning’s use of “English” here raises certain questions of 1

The Board of Control was established by the Pitt government in 1785. It comprised six Commissioners in London to “superintend, direct and controul [sic]”

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definition: on the one hand it might be taken at face value and indicate the English, rather than British, character of imperial aspirations at this time; on the other, it may indicate a conflation of English and British that subsumes the other nations of Britain into a single regional designation. The latter use is still commonplace and provides a frequent complaint for Scottish commentators on English superiority. By contrast, the former sense provides a model of Scottish innocence which absolves Scots of their part in imperialism: this has been a significant strand of contemporary Scottish criticism and is one that is relevant to the reception of Scott’s Letters. Arguably, these two senses are mutually incompatible: if Scots are subordinated by English rhetoric can they simultaneously be innocent of British imperial aspirations? Canning’s sense of English affairs, then, most probably incorporated Scottish investments, a view which is endorsed by some of Lord Melville’s criticism of Scott’s Letters, which pointed out the degree to which Scottish trade was a British affair during this period (Phillipson 1969, 182). Moreover, accounts of the composition of British settlers in South America during the 1820s make it clear that Scots were quite prominent during this period. While the Scots and the Irish have consistently provided a disproportionally high number of British emigrés, Matthew Brown suggests that “[h]istories of Scottish overseas activities tend to neglect South America” (Matthew Brown 2006, 37). This omission comes in spite of the fact that “about half the earlier nineteenth-century emigrants to Argentina originated in the Celtic nations of the United Kingdom” and that “Scottish families founded one of the first European farming settlements near Buenos Aires” in the mid-1820s (Rock 2010, 19). With some likely exaggeration, the frequently cited Thomas George Love, editor of The British Packet and Argentine News, claimed that the “majority of British merchants” in Argentina were “natives of Scotland” (Love 1825, 34). Scottish involvement in the South American bubble was not limited to colonial exploits alone. Two kinds of speculative activity arose from the British attempt to exploit the new South American markets. The first of these was speculation on bonds, with considerable sums of money loaned to these newly independent states partly on the anticipation of returns backed by a fantasy of colonial silver and gold (Neal 1990, 172). The investment in these markets may, therefore, owe something to an enduring colonial imaginary dating back to 1492, which urgently desired the

the East India Company (Keay 1991, 390-91). George Canning served as a Commissioner on the Board from March 1799 to March 1801 and as its president from March 1816 to December 1820.

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Americas to be a repository of precious metals. Given the historical context, however, there is also something highly suggestive about the speculative pursuit of silver at a time when paper money was being asked to stand as a substitute for specie. The apparent willingness of European markets to extend money to South American countries encouraged a spate of weaker governments to issue bonds including the entirely fictional principality of Poyais which existed only in the aggressive marketing of its self-appointed “Prince Gregor” (Neal 1998, 63; Hasbrouck 1927; Matthew Brown 2006). Further speculation took place in the form of attendant “bubble companies,” which Andrew Kerr described as “rampant,” leading to excessive “gambling in their shares” (Kerr 1918, 194; Neal 1990, 172). The failure of the South American bonds to provide the expected returns also led to the collapse in value of these companies and resulted in a shortage of capital in the British financial system. This required the Bank of England to underwrite the private banks with bullion, a move that directly led to the Government’s decision to restrict the issuing of low denomination banknotes as a curb on easy credit (Gayer, Rostow and Schwartz 1953). There is great debate between opposing economic views as to whether it is possible for private banks to over-issue and whether this results in an over-supply of debt. Nevertheless, the Government of Lord Liverpool clearly believed that it could and acted accordingly, in a fairly straightforward attempt to restrict the money supply. A central claim in Scott’s Letters is that the Scottish banks had not been susceptible to the speculating spirit which had overcome many regional English banks. This view is, however, widely contested by subsequent economic history. Kerr, for instance, queries Malachi Malagrowther’s account of the health of Scottish banking, suggesting that he was too enthusiastic about its apparent successes (Kerr 1918, 188, 202). More recently, Murray Rothbard cites Sydney Checkland’s “definitive history of Scottish banking” to show that “Scottish banks expanded and contracted credit in a lengthy series of boom-bust cycles,” including 1825-26, proving that they shared “the destabilizing, cycle-generating behavior of their English cousins” (Rothbard 1988, 230). Similarly, following Checkland, Matthew Rowlinson suggests that the note-issuing regional Scottish banks were “the real boom and bust sector of Scots banking” (Rowlinson 2010, 47). Scott also overstates the security of Scottish banking by comparing the absolute number of bank failures in England and Scotland without acknowledging the relatively small total of Scottish banks when compared with England: as a proportion of total banks, the number of failures in each nation is roughly the same.

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This brief history suggests that Scots and Scottish capital were deeply involved in the speculative bubble that precipitated the curb on banknotes. As such, it is instructive that much of the literary criticism on Scott’s Letters has sought to refute or obscure this fact. For instance in an essay on the Letters which explicitly seeks to paint Scott as a “colonized subject,” Caroline McCracken-Flesher boldly states that the Scottish banks “were not implicated in the [1825] crash” (McCracken-Flesher 1996, 7677). It is difficult to discern from her essay what she relies upon as evidence to make this claim. The only source that she cites in relation to this context is N.T. Phillipson’s history, “Nationalism and Ideology” (Phillipson 1969), in which he tries to explain and critique Scottish antagonism to the Bill. However, while sympathetic to the general arguments of Scott’s Letters, that Scotland was substantially dependent on paper currency and that the desire for “uniformity” showed little regard for Scottish particularities, Phillipson is sceptical about Scott’s claims regarding the health of Scottish banking. Indeed, rather than concluding that the Scottish banks were free from responsibility for the crash, Phillipson explicitly cites Kerr’s History of Scottish Banking to implicate Scottish financiers in the speculative frenzy which precipitated the Bill. In these terms, McCracken-Flesher’s use of Phillipson seems somewhat selective, and she is certainly oblique about precisely what use she makes of his account. To a lesser degree, something cognate is evident in Silvana Colella’s suggestive reading of the Letters alongside The Antiquary (Colella 2003). Colella has much to say about Scott’s notion of speculation in her essay, suggesting that The Antiquary stages a contrast between speculation in bullion, which is too “closely related to gambling or to speculative dreams,” and speculation in antiquities which exploits the “ability to trade in imaginary values” (Colella 2003, 64-65). This view is qualified by Rowlinson’s reading of the novel which sees Scott’s presentation of Oldbuck’s antiquarian economics as less sympathetic. Rowlinson notes that Oldbuck’s speculations run the risk that he will end up “a dupe” (Rowlinson 2010, 71) and he sees much more equivalence between Oldbuck’s form of speculation and Sir Arthur’s “quixotic pursuit of gold and silver” as, he notes, both “exchange money for money” (Rowlinson 2010, 73). A key example for him is the case of the bodle, an obsolete Scottish coin which, nonetheless, circulates as local currency. While Oldbuck buys the century-old coin as a form of speculation about its potential value, the beggar Ochiltree recognises that it still represents circulating currency rather than antiquarian possibility (Rowlinson 2010, 67-68). I find Rowlinson’s reading more persuasive for a number of

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reasons. First, what seems more revealing about Colella’s interpretation is her intent to relate the distinction between different forms of speculation to Scott’s defence of Scottish “free banking” in the Letters. This includes no explicit recognition that the 1825 crisis was the product of speculative investments that very much resembled gambling but which combined a dream of bullion with a “trade in [the] imaginary values” of companies whose value was wholly realised in future profits. The separation that she identifies between different kinds of speculation simply was not in evidence in the economic dealings of the South American bubble. Moreover, her claim that Scotland escaped the consequence of the 1825 crisis relies heavily on Lawrence White’s Free Banking in Britain, which leads her to conflate several issues to do with the Country Bankers Act. As an advocate of Hayekian economics, White’s history makes great claims for the freedom of Scottish banks during this period and for the benefits of such a system in comparison with the English banks that were underpinned by the Bank of England as a central bank. However, as the brief account supplied above indicates, White’s claims are highly partisan and do not fully bear scrutiny (Rothbard 1988).2 Finally, the context that Colella continually returns to is the Restriction Act of 1797, which is certainly relevant to The Antiquary, published in 1816 while the Act was in effect, but is less immediately relevant to the situation in 1826. Though the attempt to curtail provincial banknotes and the issue of convertibility are clearly related, they actually pull in slightly different directions. The basis of the Restriction Act was that holders of banknotes (creditors) could not demand that these notes be converted into gold. One aim of this was to limit the ability of the provincial banks to issue credit and therefore to check the cyclical crises that dogged the economy (Poovey 2008, 176-77): to that end it shared a common aim with the Country Bankers Act. However, perhaps more importantly, the Restriction Act marked a clear tipping-point in the material and symbolic nature of money in Britain because it asked the holder of banknotes to accept their value without immediately imagining that they had a convertible equivalent in an actual quantity of precious metal (Rowlinson 2010, 50-54; Poovey 2008, 17596). No comparable claim could be made for the Country Bankers Act which, as Scott complained, appeared to necessitate a greater use of gold and silver coins and which merely sought to limit the production of paper money by restricting its supply to the Bank of England.

2 Selgin and White’s reply to Rothbard (Selgin and White 1996) does not provide evidence of Scottish banks’ relative stability during this period.

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In terms of Scottish relations to British imperialism I think there are two main consequences to suppressing the Scottish involvement in the 1825 crisis in the way that McCracken-Flesher and Colella appear to do. First, it supports a limited notion of imperialism as an organised programme of colonisation rather than a more ad hoc jumble of informal economic relations which served to internationalise British capital. Second, it subordinates Scottish financial capitalism and its interconnections with a range of speculative ventures overseas to an alternative narrative about England’s colonisation of Scotland. To that end, it seems noteworthy that neither critic has much to say about explicit references to colonialism and imperialism in Scott’s Letters, despite the fact that these references could be construed as similarly structuring Scotland’s relation to imperialism as a subordinate nation in spite of the real material relations of the day. Colella, for instance, merely glosses over Scott’s colonial references, noting only his “rhetorical concessions to British imperial pride” without elaboration (Colella 2003, 56). More troublingly, she implies that domestic Scottish prosperity went hand in hand with a retreat from colonial adventure as a direct consequence of the failure of the Darien scheme (Colella 2003, 69, n.28). On its own, this seems to ignore the complex and substantial involvement of Scots in imperialism within the Union. Moreover, if Scottish banking is the institution which has apparently secured this prosperity we might note the intimate relations between the failures of the Darien Company and emergence of Scottish banking. In particular, the Royal Bank of Scotland has its origins in the Equivalent Society, which was set up to manage the compensation to the Company’s shareholders as a sweetener for the Act of Union in 1707 (Lanchester 2009).

Scotland as Colony In responding to the silence of other critics regarding Scott’s colonial allusions, I want to draw attention to the quite remarkable series of metaphoric and analogous references to colonialism which sees Scott repeatedly align Scotland with Britain’s colonies. The first notable example of this appears early in the first letter, when Scott complains that English esteem for its own legal system results in the English piling opprobrium onto its Scottish counterpart, regarding the Scottish attachment to its own system as “ignorant and dotard superstition.” Scott concludes by comparing English attitudes to those which governed Spanish imperial conduct:

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Now, this is not fair construction in our friends […] who certainly are scarcely entitled […] to treat us as the Spaniards treated the Indians, whom they massacred for worshipping the image of the sun, while they themselves bowed down to that of the Virgin Mary. (Scott 1878, 727)

This metaphor is rather complex and its expression is somewhat ambivalent. The complaint that the English are not “entitled” to treat the Scots as the Spaniards treated the Amerindians seems an example of Scott’s legalistic references to entitlements as a component of the Act of Union. Persistently, especially in the Second Letter, Scott insists upon those things which he and Scotland are entitled to expect. The censure of Spanish conduct is realised by a description of their hypocrisy in persecuting the Amerindians for superstitious beliefs while simultaneously holding to a Catholic worship of the Madonna. By nineteenth-century British and, especially, Scottish standards this practice would have been regarded as just as arbitrary or idolatrous as worshipping the sun. Indeed, Scott was an outspoken critic of Catholicism, describing it in his journal as “a mean and depriving superstition” (quoted in Schiefelbein 2001, 15-16). The recurrence of the word “superstition” in the Letters perhaps serves to underscore the metaphoric equation of English practices with the Spanish Conquistadors. The other side of this metaphor is the equation of Scotland with colonised Amerindians in ways that conceptually defines the Union as the colonisation of Scotland by its English partner. This metaphor needs to be read within Scott’s work as a whole, which arguably employs a regular comparison of Highland Scots with a Romanticised notion of indigenous Americans. In Waverley for instance, Edward’s escort Duncan Duroch is twice compared with an “Indian” in his methods of evading the Hanoverian army (Scott 1972, 280-81) while in The Pirate the Shetland fishermen arrange temporary shelters that Scott compares to “an Indian town” (Scott 1929, 231). According to Tim Fulford, Scott fully subscribed to the late eighteenthcentury view that saw a correspondence between Native Americans and historic Highland culture (Fulford 2006, 7-11). Similar arguments have been made about other iconic nineteenth-century Scots such as David Livingstone in respect of African culture (MacKenzie 1993, 735) and R.L. Stevenson in respect of Pacific Islanders (Edmond 1997, 163-64). Such accounts represent a strong tradition in the description of Scots as the innocents of Empire even when, like Livingstone, they are visibly performing archetypal imperial roles. It seems only right to point out certain intellectual difficulties with a critical position which accepts an easy equivalence between Scottish and colonised cultures. For instance, while Stevenson certainly did solicit stories from his Samoan interlocutors

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by offering up stories from Scottish culture, he makes it clear both that his intent was to obtain “detail of savage custom, or of superstitious belief,” and that his method, was to “cast back in the story of my fathers, […] for […] some trait of equal barbarism” (Stevenson [1896] 1998, 13). As I have argued elsewhere, not only does Stevenson presuppose savagery and superstition on behalf of the Samoans, but he also explicitly identifies this with a Scottish past, effectively rendering present-day Samoan culture as equivalent to an antiquarian Scottish history (Connell 2004a). Fulford’s reading of Scott is not dissimilar, to the extent that he sees Scott equate indigenous American culture with the culture of the Scottish Highlands prior to the 1745 rebellion (Fulford 2006, 8). In his account this association operated around a feeling of sympathy and recognition, albeit one which is paternalist and fully in keeping with a belief in a progressive theory of history. In the Waverley novels Scott’s use of the Native American as a figure for his Scottish characters produces an ambivalent set of images which may complicate Fulford’s reading of the similarities that Scott appears to have found between Amerindian and Scottish cultures. In Guy Mannering, for instance, gypsy “tribes” are described as “living like wild Indians among European settlers” and presented as both commanding “awe” for their “indomitable pride” but also being “a vindictive race” prone to “desperate vengeance” (Scott 1906, 57). If this image presents the Scots in the guise of, comparatively civilised, American colonists the sustained use of the image of the American “Indian” in Heart of Midlothian, troubles the easy hierarchies that this presumes. Several characters are identified through similes linking them to Native Americans. The appearance of Madge Wildfire is described as “like an Indian going to battle” (Scott 1908, 156) while her mother Meg is described as possessing “the vengeful dexterity of a wild Indian” when pulling a knife on Frank Levitt (Scott 1908, 308). These examples characterise a certain use of this kind of imagery by Scott, associating peripheral and uncivilised Highland characters with colonial populations. However, there are other occurrences in the text which complicate this view. Charlotte Sussman reads The Heart of Midlothian as a narrative about the nature of productive and unproductive bodies, linking Effie Deans’ expatriated infant, “The Whistler,” to a history of depopulation of the Scottish Highlands and, therefore, as emblematic of the transformation of the Highlands from an uncivilised hinterland to a modern productive environment (Sussman 2002). Significantly, in the fulfilment of this narrative we see the “savage youth,” brought up by the Highland bandit Donacha dhu na Dunaigh and sold into servitude in the Americas by a ship’s captain. In the Americas he

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eventually leads a “conspiracy” to murder “his inhuman master” before fleeing “to the next tribe of wild Indians” (Scott 1908, 538-39). The contrast between Indian wildness and his master’s inhumanity reveals just how ambivalent this imagery is in Scott’s writing. This master was, after all, one of the “European settlers” that provide a contrast with the “wild Indians” in Guy Mannering. Sussman reads the Whistler’s “seemingly inevitable trajectory towards the “savage people” of America” as naturalising “the depopulation of the Highlands through emigration, coerced or otherwise” (Sussman 2002, 105). In her reading, the repeated association of Highlanders with indigenous Americans emphasises the obsolescence and uncivilised character of the pre-1745 social formations. However, this reading is complicated by the fact that the same simile is also applied to officers of the law in the novel. When the procurator-fiscal, Sharpitlaw, leads his men in search of George Robertson, Ratcliffe describes him moving “with the stealthy pace of an Indian savage, who leads his band to surprise an unsuspecting party of some hostile tribe” (Scott 1908, 193). As his name implies, Sharpitlaw is a rough martinet, interested in his own advancement rather than in any ideal of justice (Scott 1908, 178). Moreover his pursuit of Robertson is also the pursuit of a law which the novel’s characters, including the judge, condemn as barbaric and outdated (Sussman 2002, 109). If the presumption that indigenous Americans lack civility is routinely underscored by words such as “savage” or “wild,” this presumption may be weakened by the application of the simile to representatives of Scottish civil society as well as to rough Highlanders. The effect of this double use of the image is to emphasise the extent to which the association is with a historical form of Scottish culture, characterising an unruly but bygone period of Scottish history. To that end, it may well play into the overarching narrative of the novel which asserts the “sovereign legitimacy” of the British Union via Jeanie Deans’ appeal to Queen Caroline (Gottlieb 2011, 33). This conclusion raises interesting questions about the use of a cognate image in the Letters. If Scott often associates Scots and Amerindians metaphorically, his use of this technique in the Letters appears to differ because of the topically political nature of the text. The consequence of applying this metaphor to a newly perceived breach of the Articles of Union is to allow the image to define the nature of the ongoing political relations between Scotland and England. Removed from its historical context, the symbolic casting of the Scots as “Indians” does not reflect upon a Romanticised, “wild” Scottish past. Instead, it structures the relationship between Scotland and an English-dominated Parliament as one of conquest and colonisation, heedless of Scottish sentiment. In

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contrast to the use of the image in Guy Mannering, it is now the English who must occupy the role of “European settlers” but, by consequence, the logic of this colonisation is now deeply troubled. To that end, this image may more closely resemble Scott’s presentation of imperial India in The Surgeon’s Daughter, which, J.M. Rignall suggests, involves an “ironic exposure of greed, brutality, and racial prejudice.” For Rignall, this presentation “reveals” the “dubious […] motives” that underpin British conquest. Importantly, he argues that “the symbolic patterning of the story” leads “the frontier of empire” to resemble the Scottish borders as “the domain of the disinherited and dispossessed” (Rignall 1991, 19). If, as Evan Gottlieb has argued, The Heart of Midlothian involves a narrative of “sympathetic Anglo-Scottish relations” (Gottlieb 2004, 193), the Letters root sympathy in an “aboriginal connection to the land” (Gottlieb 2004, 206). While Gottlieb acknowledges that this shift depends upon Scott’s construction of himself as “Other,” we need to go further than Gottlieb in recognising how far this depends upon a metaphoric construction of Scotland as colonised. This logic is not isolated to a single example, and it is picked up again towards the end of the Second Letter when Scott counters the argument that “the grievances I have complained of are mere trifles” by asserting that The omitting to discharge a gun or two in a salute, the raising or striking of a banner or sail, have been the source of bloody wars. England lost America about a few miserable chests of tea – she endangered India for the clipping of a mustache. (Scott 1878, 749)

Given the date of the Letters, we need to ask whether Scott’s use of “England” is, like Canning’s, a substitute for Britain. Though this usage was not uncommon in Scotland, given the context of the Letters, in which Scott loudly argues for English, Irish, and Scottish distinctiveness, this seems unlikely. It may also be noted that compared to later, post-Union, colonial exploits the American Colonies were a more thoroughly English affair (Colley 1992, 144). As such, Scott appears to be suggesting that British colonialism was a largely English affair, projecting a notion of Scottish innocence that has been picked up by contemporary criticism. Moreover, by relating past failures in an English colonial administration to present-day Scottish grievances, Scott is able to present Scotland as a further English colony by implication. The trivialisation of real American and Indian grievances against British rule might suggest that the legislation on banknotes represents exactly the kind of colonial mismanagement which resulted in American secession and Indian unrest.

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A Scottish Republic If Scott constructs a narrative of Scotland as a colony to offset the real involvement of Scottish capital in the international speculative markets, this is further strengthened by his presentation of the Scottish banks as a model of the nation. In Scott’s account, the security of Scottish banks derives in large part from the social integration of Scottish society, which rhetorically employs the language of nationalism as its register. Again, Gottlieb offers a helpful gloss of this manoeuvre which he sees as resolving the “seeming binary opposition between the gemeinschaft of the Scottish sympathetic economy, and the gesellschaft of the British commercial economy” (Gottlieb 2004, 207). This is prominent in Scott’s comparison of English and Scottish banks which asserts that Scottish institutions are more trustworthy and more transparent than their English counterparts. Crucial for Scott is the transparency of the Scottish Banking Companies which consist of a considerable number of persons, many of them men of landed property, whose landed estates, with the burdens legally affecting them, may be learned from the records, for the expense of a few shillings; so that all the world knows, or may know, the general basis on which their credit rests, and the extent of real property, which, independent of their personal means, is responsible for their commercial engagements. (Scott 1878, 730)

This view neatly conforms to Scott’s Tory sensibilities by rooting value solidly in the “landed estate,” and, consciously or not, extends Adam Smith’s use of the estate as a metaphor for the nation when explaining the function of paper money (Smith 1970, 382-383). In the present context, it is also tantalising to suggest that the phrase “all the world” smuggles in a reference to foreign speculation even as Scott appears to be rooting Scotland’s financial strength in its own natural resources. Scott’s rhetorical language cannot resist gesturing towards the widening circulation of capital that credit enables, even while his polemical intent is to fix capital within the presumed organic-unity of the nation. For Scott’s purposes, it is significant that the English banks lack a similar transparency so that “no one can learn, without incalculable trouble, the real value of that land” and “the English banker cannot make his solvency manifest to the public” and “cannot expect, or receive, the same unlimited trust” (Scott 1878, 730). Here again, the notion of speculation may be implicit in the phrase “incalculable trouble” and, while only land has “real value,” in order to profitably exploit this value it is necessary to be able to measure and anticipate its realisation. Through this

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narrative of transparency Scott proposes that the Scottish banks form a secure and reliable system as a result of their collective supervision. In this account he claims that “the whole Banks and Banking Companies in Scotland may be said to form a republic” (Scott 1878, 740). The language of statehood which Scott confers on the banks directly confronts the immediate context, where the Bank of England is being posed as a unifiying Central Bank. The choice of the word “republic” may imply an alternative model of national organisation which is democratic rather than centripetally authoritarian. This is consistent with the broad argument of the Letters against uniformity and in favour of national difference. While the idea that Scotland’s banks afford it a national coherence may be quixotic, it is broadly in keeping with the widespread nationalist claim that Scotland’s unique civic institutions such as the Kirk, legal and educational systems were the root of its continuing national identification. Moreover, it is implicit in Scott’s defence of paper money as a necessary mechanism for the integrity of the Scottish population. One of the few occasions when Scott directly, as opposed to metaphorically, introduces the idea of the British colonies is when he expresses an anxiety that a reversion to specie will force Highland fishers or kelp-manufacturers to emigrate (Scott 1878, 751, 753). A comparison with Sussman’s reading of The Heart of Midlothian is inevitable here, since the Letters seem to suppress Scott’s attention to the body as a component of the colonial economy by presenting certain kinds of money as a check on depopulation. However, this narrow view of the colonial economy completely ignores other kinds of expatriation, in particular the flight of capital. In contrast to Scott, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations takes a different view of banknotes as an economic instrument for increasing the circulation of capital. In the present context it is noteworthy that Smith regarded the introduction of paper money as freeing gold and silver from circulating in the national economy precisely so that it could flow out into the wider world where paper is not recognised. For Smith this is an entirely beneficial activity and he, too, employs the metaphoric language of colonialism describing excess specie being “sent abroad,” like labouring colonists “to seek that profitable employment which it cannot find at home” (Smith 1970, 390). The ability of banknotes to facilitate the outward flow of capital is crucial to Smith’s understanding of their value in “rendering a greater part of [the nation’s] capital active and productive” (Smith 1970, 419). Since Scott was well aware of Smith’s work (Sutherland 1987) it is possible that he was well aware of this conjecture. Yet the need to deny the speculative nature of capital means that his own account must invert Smith’s metaphor of colonialism by focussing on the

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ability of paper money to allow Scottish labourers to remain within the nation. In doing so, it becomes clear how far Scott’s narrative of nationhood and of Scotland’s status as a colony contrives to mask questions of class and capital by suppressing an awareness of the involvement of Scottish capital in an imperial economy. Scott’s nationalism is not coincidental: it is precisely necessary to achieve this amnesia.

AN EDUCATIONAL EMPIRE OF PRINT: THOMAS NELSON AND ‘LOCALISATION’  IN THE WEST INDIAN READERS GAIL LOW

In Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid’s Bildungsroman set in Antigua, a small schoolroom encounter plays a significant role in establishing the young girl’s rebellion against a colonial education that seeks to annex Caribbean history to the story of European expansion. Annie comes across the figure of Columbus in chains in a West Indian school textbook; her pleasure at seeing the explorer incarcerated and chained inspires her irreverent inscription on the school textbook, “The Great Man Can No Longer Just Get Up and Go.” Written in “Old English lettering,” her carefully inked caption under the book’s colour-plated illustration ventriloquises her mother and performs a calculated retort for all the stories of Columbus’s heroism and voyages of discovery that she is made to read; but for such an exhibition of gleeful insolence and textual “blasphemy,” Annie is punished by having to copy out whole sections of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Kincaid 1997, 78). While A History of the West Indies is named as the text that Annie defaces, stories of Columbus’s voyages (and his imprisonment) appear in the proliferation of reading material directed at the young from the turn of the century to decolonisation and after. They appear, for example, in the Children’s Heroes series edited by John Lang and published in London between 1905 and 1910 and the New York-based American Book Company’s Famous Men of Modern Times (1909). But significantly, Columbus’s maritime adventures are also found in school textbooks such as the widely used five-volume series, West Indian Readers, edited by Captain J.O. Cutteridge and published from 1926 onwards by the 

The archival research for this project was undertaken with the financial support of the Carnegie Trust; I am also grateful to the Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh for permission to quote from the Thomas Nelson Papers.

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Edinburgh-based publishing house, Thomas Nelson and Sons. A picture of “Columbus in Chains” occupies a prominent spot in Book 4, and stories of his serial voyages in search for mineral wealth are narrative threads woven through the series’ representation of Caribbean history from Book 2 through to Book 5. That that story of imperial rivalry, discovery and conquest functions as a synecdoche of Caribbean history is what irks the young Annie John demonstrably. Print technologies, and specifically the circulation of printed material, have clearly contributed to the acceleration of formal education and book learning which has, in turn, fed into the processes of modernity. Annie John is, of course, not the only novel that is keenly aware of the confluence of waters – culture, modernity, literary and imaginative pleasures – and how, especially for a certain generation of colonial and postcolonial writers, these desires and ideals had been seeded by printed matter. Furthermore, Kincaid’s novel is not the only book that is acutely conscious of how profoundly problematic this enculturation is for the young subjects of empire; Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964) and A Man of the People (1966), Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions (1988), Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988) and V.S. Naipaul’s Mystic Masseur (1957) and A House for Mr Biswas ([1961] 1969) are but some of the novels that explore this terrain. Two recent studies have fruitfully focused on the material and symbolic importance of books and school textbooks as heralds of modernity, education, literacy and social transformation, however awkward such associations can be: Neil ten Kortenaar’s analysis of the representation of literacy, reading and writing in some canonical African and West Indian novels and Fraser’s short essay on the impact of the West Indian Readers on the early work of writers such as Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon. In Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy, ten Kortenaar explores “how literacy has been imagined by the literary imagination” in Africa and the West Indies, and the “meanings attributed to written texts and to the acts of writing” in order to chart what ambivalent legacies they leave behind in the histories of a postcolonial modernity (ten Kortenaar 2011, 21). Fraser’s essay on school Readers and the “creation of postcolonial taste” offers us languages, ideas and scenes in postcolonial Caribbean writing that might have had their magic seeding, to appropriate Naipaul’s phrase, from reading about Robinson Crusoe, Raleigh’s search for El-Dorado, Homer’s Odyssey, or an excursion to London – all topics found in the West Indian Readers. West Indian Readers were favoured by the school boards and educational authorities in the anglophone Caribbean from the 1920s until

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well after independence. Fraser has observed that the fact that West Indian writing is “peppered with acknowledgements to these modest books” and contains detailed citations of and from the Readers is testament to the “avidity with which they were absorbed” (Fraser 2008a, 91). He dismisses the anger that greeted the publication of these Readers as “parochial petit bourgeois elitism,” arguing that these volumes not only “supplied images and references” but also “metaphors of the colonial condition” that figure in the early work of the postwar nationalist writers. Research into colonial print cultures has been gaining pace with educational house histories such as Cambridge University Press (McKitterick 2004), Oxford University Press (Chatterjee 2006), Longmans (Briggs 2008) being written; as I have mentioned earlier, critics such as Fraser and ten Kortenaar have also examined how postcolonial writers have imagined literacy, education and colonial modernities in their work (Fraser 2008a; 2008b). Yet there is still a gap to be filled between general house histories and their institutional frameworks, and the legacies of those interventions in the work of writers who may have read these metropolitan-produced educational textbooks. Reconstructed from the surviving archival papers,1 the present case study on the West Indian Readers is offered in the spirit of attempting to bridge macro and micro histories of educational publishing in two ways: addressing the programme of localisation undertaken by the Scots firm of Thomas Nelson and Sons in their textbook production, and exploring the emergence of the West Indian Readers (hereafter abbreviated to Readers) as textbooks for the anglophone Caribbean market. I revisit the story of the Readers also to take issue with some of Fraser’s observations concerning their use-value. I also assess the Readers’ management and representation of Caribbean history and culture, and the region’s relationship with the outside world. Lastly, and drawing from Carl C. Campbell’s accounts of the reception of the Readers, the paper asks, if these textbooks are harbingers of a colonial modernity, just whose (and what kinds of) modernities are represented to these young readers of Empire. Thomas Nelson and Sons was a publishing house with roots in bookselling, the publishing of religious books and popular reprints of 1

There are significant gaps in the run of correspondence in the Thomas Nelson papers that have survived. These are located at the Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh Library. All further references are to these papers; reference numbers indicate shelf and file; for example, Thomas Nelson (Shelf) 37/ (File) 471.

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classics such as The Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe for a mass market (McCleery 2001, xv). In 1846, the building of print works at the Meadows in Edinburgh led to the expansion of its print arm and Nelson broadened its publishing output to include travel books, adventure stories for the young, Sunday school prize or reward books for children and also school textbooks. After the passing of Forster’s Education Act of 1870, which legislated for the provision of elementary education for all children between the ages of 2 and 12 years of age, Nelson brought out the first of their Royal Readers and the Royal School series directed specifically at elementary school pupils. Both were to sell very well throughout the British Empire. When the company relocated to Parkside in Edinburgh after a fire in 1878, Nelson included more general publishing in its output, adding popular series such as the New Century Library, the Shilling Library, the Sixpenny (reprint) Classics, foreign language texts (particularly in French) and new issues of novels at 2s. But school books still represented the firm’s bread and butter, and Nelson sold their school textbooks throughout the British Empire; armed with new printing technologies, the wave of new school Readers looked modern and contained specially reproduced coloured illustrations.2 At Nelson, publishing was intimately connected to printing. Iain Stevenson has observed that, owing to their origins in stationery manufacture, a “distinctive feature” of Scottish publishing was its ownership of print works. This allowed them to “develop new lines quickly and cost-effectively,” and undertake the kind of larger print runs in cheap popular formats that would later be associated with Allen Lane’s Penguin Books in England in the 1930s (Stevenson 2007, 58). However, in the later part of the nineteenth century Nelson had already forged a solid reputation as an educational press with a modern business-like approach to publishing; it invested in new presses and print technologies, linked selling to production and pioneered the use of commercial travellers who called on booksellers for orders. John Buchan, as one of the firm’s directors, wrote confidently that, with Nelson’s cheap books, “people are made to read who did not read before, and to buy who before only read,” and that books are sold “as any ordinary article of commerce is sold” (Buchan 2

This short account of Thomas Nelson and Sons is taken from ‘Nelsons’ of Edinburgh: A Short History of the Firm (Anon., 1907), John A.H. Dempster, “Thomas Nelson and Sons in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Study in Motivation. Part 1” (Dempster 1983) and Alistair McCleery’s introduction to Thomas Nelson and Sons: Memories of an Edinburgh Publishing House (McCleery 2001).

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1940b, 241). The press’s strength lay in an explicit and early professionalisation, the transformation of books into commodities that lay behind its philosophy of the cheap and popular reprint, and its attention to sales; all of these qualities would not be general characteristics of trade publishers until much later in the twentieth century. The firm represented itself as a very modern business with a global outlook; as Buchan observed: “We were a progressive concern, and in our standardised Edinburgh factories we began the publication of cheap books in many tongues. On the eve of the War we must have been one of the largest businesses of the kind in the world, issuing cheap editions of every kind of literature, not only in English, but in French, German, Magyar and Spanish, and being about to start in Russian” (Buchan 1940a, 140). In the nineteenth and earlier twentieth century Scotland’s publishing and printing trades expanded with the growth of new markets in the colonies, leading many publishers to open branches overseas. Nelson opened a New York office in 1854, and by 1915 it had branches in Dublin, Paris, Leipzig, Toronto and Bombay; half a century later there were also offices in Sydney, Cape Town, Lagos and Nairobi (Finkelstein and McCleery 2007, 6). Alistair McCleery observes that, between 1878 and 1881, educational texts represented a quarter of all Nelson’s list and 88% of company profits, and of these Nelson’s lucrative Royal Readers series, comprising six books, made up 44.9% of the publishing house’s profits (Dempster 1983, 67). Nelson lay at the centre of a vast colonial web of educational book production which had a Scottish provenance. A general perusal of the letters ledgers from the 1920s kept at the Nelson archives shows correspondence from India, Australia, South Africa, Canada and the Caribbean islands regarding orders or queries for Nelson’s book lists, as well as suggestions for new commissions and collaborations. Despite the success of the Royal Readers, further growth was to come from the less uniform and more regionally specific textbooks which were already in evidence from 1882 with the issue of the Special Canadian Series, produced in collaboration with the Toronto-based firm of James Campbell and Sons (Fraser 2008a, 91). Canada proved a particularly useful experiment, overseeing the movement away from the uniform Crown Readers or Royal Readers, which were still at that time educational bestsellers across the British Empire. After the First World War, Sir Henry Newbolt joined the firm as an adviser and together with Buchan created the “School Classics” series and the very successful “Teaching of English series” (McCleery 2001, xviii, xx-xxi). Newbolt’s report on his tour of Canada in 1923 was to confirm what was already long suspected – that the

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growing tide of nationalism was to impact on the school curriculum and lead to the clamour for more local material. In agreement with the Canadian branch manager, S.B. Watson, Newbolt suggested that calls for “Canada for Canadians” and the demands for more Canadian content could be to the firm’s advantage in textbooks that would combine the “mental outlook of the Old country” with the “visible outlook of the new”; in this way, “the writer may [thus] be Canadian born, and yet essentially true to the best British tradition” (Sir Henry Newbolt, “Report on Canada” 1923; 37/471). Nelson’s successes in the educational marketplace owes something to its carefully cultivated contact with school boards both in Britain and abroad, its strong marketing, its awareness of rival textbooks and its willingness to tailor products for localised and regional markets (Dempster 1983, 65). For example, correspondence in the Nelson archives between the Edinburgh Head office and Nelson’s Canadian Branch in Toronto shows that the content and pricing for Canadian Readers in the 1920s (including its regional textbooks) were undertaken as a result of negotiations between Nelson and existing Canadian educational and school committees. Watson’s communiqué to Nelson’s head office in 1922 was by no means unique: I by no means subscribe to all the views and criticisms of the Committee, but our attitude […] has been that the books are theirs and we’re willing to make them as directed within reasonable limits. The result has been a much more cordial feeling on their part and notwithstanding the numerous changes. (S.B. Watson to Mr Graham, March 31, 1922; 37/471)

Such processes of localisation fed directly into the company’s profits and ensured that educational publishing would remain at the economic heart of Nelson’s list and, in the postwar period, actually dominate the firm’s output. The West Indian Readers provide a case study of a spectacularly lucrative localisation. But its gestation was by no means unproblematic, with Canada showing much more dogged determination for the project than Edinburgh. Nelson’s commercial interest in the Caribbean may have started with a project to make paper from bamboo that resulted in the acquisition of land and a mill in Trinidad, but the islands were not seen to be a potential market until the advent of the preferential trading agreement which aided the traffic of goods between Canada and the West Indies (Fraser 2008a, 92). Between 1897 and 1925, preferred rates and tariffs were extended by Canada to the United Kingdom, the West Indies,

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Australia and India; the 1912 and 1925 Canada-West Indies Trade agreements formalised these existing trading partnerships. In December 1922, the director of the Edinburgh head office, George Graham, wrote to Watson to agree to his request for a salesman and traveller in the West Indies (Watson to Graham, December 4, 1922; 37/471). Watson’s letters show an entrepreneurial acumen and he pressed the Edinburgh office repeatedly for a West Indian agent who could capitalise on the new trade agreements (see Watson to Graham, October 13, 1922, December 7, 1922 as well as December 21, 1922; 37/471). A Mr S.P. Jones was finally engaged and tasked with reporting on the “conditions and prospects in the educational field” of each colony he visited (Watson to Graham, December 21, 1922; 37/471); kept on the payroll of the Canadian branch, he would be supervised by them. Approximately six months later Watson wrote that the Caribbean territory was “much more promising” than initially thought, and that “owing to the large predominance of coloured people,” the elementary level in education was “the most important.” Compulsory education was soon to be implemented throughout the region and Nelson could seize the initiative by establishing an office there, capitalising on the steamers that run directly from the Halifax. Watson wrote that Royal Readers were used in some but not all of the islands and that a regionally specific Reader might sell well; Mr Jones had made a “definite suggestion” that a West Indian Reader or set of Readers should be produced (Watson to Graham, July 31, 1923; 37/471). The Edinburgh office was more sceptical, arguing that education there was in a “very backward state” and that Watson should wait for further developments (Graham to Watson, August 23, 1923; 18/148). But Watson kept up the pressure to publish “special area” readers by submitting an outline of a proposed West Indian Reader. This again elicited a distinctly cautious response from head office requesting more specific information about differences between the islands and, also, book distribution in the region. Before such a substantive capital outlay could be undertaken, Nelson was keen to know if the respective Education departments on the individual islands were likely to recommend or prescribe these Readers (Graham to Watson, December 6, 1923; 19/155). Captain J.O. Cutteridge was appointed in 1921 to the post of Principal of a government teacher training college in Trinidad; he already had twenty years’ teaching experience in a variety of schools (C.C. Campbell 1984, 36). In 1923, he was given the post of Senior Inspector of Schools and Assistant Director of Education. He was seen as a moderniser who sought, following developments in English educational practice, to move

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away from rote-learning, testing and competitive exams towards a more pupil-centred approach that sought a “closer relationship between school work and the environment.” Local text books were an integral part of this plan (C.C. Campbell 1984, 36-43). While I cannot trace a meeting or any correspondence between Watson and Cutteridge in the Nelson archives, a letter was sent by the Edinburgh head office to Cutteridge as a Senior Inspector to test the waters and also to sound him out as to whether he would sanction such a project in an official capacity.3 Graham’s cautious approach is clear; in a letter written to Mr H. Scheurmier, a senior colleague at Nelson’s London office, Graham claimed that Watson was “inclined to push things ahead too quickly.” Given Nelson’s new and ongoing projects, a proposal for a new West Indian Reader was thought to be highly risky and might over-stretch company finances without any assurance of success (Graham to Scheurmier, June 20, 1924; 18/153).4 A meeting with Scheurmier was arranged in June of 1924 when Cutteridge was to be in London. The proposed meeting gained more urgency when it was known that rival educational publishers, notably Evans, had already approached Cutteridge; there was some concern at Nelson’s that other firms might steal a march on them (Scheurmier to Graham, June 19, 1924; 18/153). In the event, Cutteridge had two “long interviews;” these resulted in the recommendation of Cutteridge as editor. Watson himself was absent from these exchanges even though the Canadian office was still forwarding educational reports, reviews and accounts from the West Indies to Edinburgh. Graham wrote to Cutteridge advising on the kind of material that might be included, sending a sample set of textbooks from West Africa, India, Singapore, Egypt as well as Highroads of Literature, Royal Prince and Royal Crown Readers to help him with the task. Watson’s outline proposal for a single Reader was also sent. This included notes on a history of the West Indies of a distinctly European hue: Columbus’s voyages, histories of the major European colonial settlements, the “Negro-European” wars, buccaneers and the Navy, Nelson’s marriage and visits, the French Revolution, extracts from English literary texts that feature the West Indies, an account of the commercial development of the islands (Graham to Cutteridge, January 27, 1925; 19/169). What was regionally specific or 3

Fraser writes that such a meeting took place in the winter of 1924 (Fraser, 2008a, 92) but I cannot find documentation about such a meeting in my own archival investigations. 4 See also Graham to Cutteridge, September 24, 1924; 19/162.

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local seemed to be restricted to physical and human geography, where there was some anxiety about producing authentic illustrations of animals, flora and fauna. Cutteridge was told that there was no immediate timetable for completion (Graham to Cutteridge, May 1, 1925; 19/163) but he, nevertheless, seemed to be in a hurry, for he wrote to Graham late in 1925 informing him that the manuscript of Book 3 of the series was well under way. To “ensure a market throughout the West Indies,” Cutteridge had also alerted local booksellers to the imminent issue of the first volumes of the new Readers; he wrote to other school inspectors about the project and advised them not to restock old textbooks (see Graham to Cutteridge, December 4, 1925; 20/175, and November 4, 1926; 20/187 respectively). The first three books in the series were published simultaneously in 1926; the primer, Book 4 and Book 5 appeared between 1927 and 1929. Both firm and editor were united and unshakeable in their belief that their school Readers reflected what was modern and progressive in educational method and psychology. With regard to Nelson’s primer for very young readers, Graham had argued against the popular phonic method of breaking words into component sounds. Wanting Cutteridge instead to follow the teaching method of learning whole words that was favoured by American and Canadian schools, he dismissed local methods as primitive and outmoded, writing that the “Educational Authorities” were “still in phonetic bondage” if they held out against the move towards familiar “pictures and names being presented together” and “phonic drills” based on similar sounding words and spellings (Graham to Cutteridge, January 29, 1926; 20/188). Cutteridge himself wrote in the preface to Book 1 of local relevance and appeal, arguing against traditional methods of teaching that relied heavily on rote and mechanistic learning, and for the use of “local names” and everyday objects familiar to most students. The importance of the exercises in the Readers, he argued with some pride, “lies in the process of obtaining the answer, not in the answer itself”; these and other supplementary tasks were to “encourage wider reading on the part of the pupil” (Book 1: iv-v). But exactly what kind of material was put into the Readers by these modernisers in education? Before addressing this question, it is vital to bear in mind how these books were used. Campbell points out that Readers were the bedrock of the school reading material, designed to be used not only in reading lessons but also in writing, hygiene, science, geography and history teaching, observing that they were “pivotal to at least two-thirds of the schools’ curriculum,” often constituting the students’ only book as well as serving as reading material for some adults (C.C. Campbell 1984, 45).

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West Indian Readers were offered as a replacement for the still popular Nelson’s Royal Readers or the Mcdougall Readers, which, despite including little that was local, sold very well throughout the British Empire. West Indian Readers included objects, images, words, narratives and stories that were part and parcel of the students’ environment. Cutteridge wrote lessons on indigenous flora and fauna, as well as on plants that were introduced for agricultural cash export. As a result, lessons on tobacco and sugar cane sit alongside others on tropical insects, “fishes in our waters,” “useful forest trees,” the Sargasso Sea, mammals and reptiles. The Readers contained material about cultures from other parts of the world (albeit briefly). Unsurprisingly, they also incorporated much explicit Anglo-European material, for example, excerpts and abridged extracts from the great English and European Literary “masterpieces,” including William Shakespeare, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and Homer, and “picture lessons” or studies of paintings “by great artists” from the “great Art Galleries of Europe” (Book 4, 18). “Picture work,” which comprised commentary on the composition of famous paintings, was a speciality; these “help[ed] the pupils to study pictures with an appreciation similar to that which is aroused by the proper study of literature” (Book 4, v). Folk tales in the form of Aesop’s Fables, West African and Creole folk tales were a feature of the lower level Readers. As a series, the Readers contained overlapping lessons so that content in one volume builds on and is alluded to in other volumes; for example, geography lessons might also be used for lessons on botany, and might reinforce what was learnt in history or hygiene classes. In addition, chapters in earlier books were sometimes expanded and given greater substance in later books: travel to London which appears in Book 2 is developed as a sustained narrative about London as a metropolitan capital in Book 4; accounts of the buccaneers appear in Book 4 and Book 5; Columbus’s voyages appear serially from Book 2 to Book 5 and in different chapters within the same book. As a motif, Columbus’s story is particularly noticeable. For example, in Lesson 6 of Book 4, in which Columbus appears as “the great Genoese navigator” to “whom all West Indian islands of importance, except Barbados, owe their discovery” (Book 4, 29), teachers are reminded to revise Lesson 19 of Book 2, or the story of one brave man “who first steered his ship across the ocean leaving all signs of land behind him!” (Book 2, 78). Furthermore, as the prelude to the history of the “British West Indies” in Book 5, Columbus’s story reappears in capsule form: “With the exception of Barbados, all the West Indian

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islands of consequence owe their discovery to the great Genoese navigator, Christopher Columbus, who, between the years 1492 and 1504, took possession of these new lands in the name of Spain” (Book 5, 278). As in the Columbus example, phrases and sentences are also repeated across the different books so as to reinforce the lesson to be learnt. Campbell has written extensively on the hostile local reception of these readers and the context of their objections which find their particular focus in the pages of the local Garveyite Trinidadian newspaper Labour Leader. Most centred on the ease with which Cutteridge imposed his reforms without much consultation or feeling for the communities that he was writing for (C.C. Campbell 1984, 1996). I will not rehearse his arguments here, except to mention that the Readers were said to de-emphasise grammar, to incorporate too many folk tales or “nancy” stories, to be expensive (students could simply use one reader but needed different volumes as they moved levels), and to be racially motivated. The latter related particularly to illustrations from the first edition of Book 1 depicting the African-descended community with pronounced elongated heads so that they looked like “gorillas”; these were replaced in the 1928 edition (C.C. Campbell 1984, 45). These negative reactions seem to result from, Campbell argues, Cutteridge’s treatment of the black population as essentially pre-modern and rural communities with little learning, ambition or aspirations and, consequently, with little investment in educational processes. Many of Cutteridge’s readers came from poorer backgrounds and the parents of these children saw education not as “cultural enrichment but as the indispensable vehicle of upward social mobility”; movement away from the rigours of mathematics, grammar, and language was felt to be a hindrance to social advancement (Campbell 1996, 103). Such expectations are evident in Naipaul’s A House of Mr Biswas, where a young child reading from the Reader is lavished with praise precisely because his literacy and education might lead to social mobility for his family; in the rented two rooms that constitute his house, the child’s father observes: “This education is a helluva thing[…] Any little child could pick up. And yet the blasted thing does turn out so damn important later on” (Naipaul [1961] 1969, 311). Later, Mr Biswas’s son Anand enters competitive school exams and becomes the staging ground of his family’s dreams. Yet to my mind, the Readers also exhibited other glaring failures and did not live up to their stated mission of localisation. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Cutteridge’s books were so imbued with colonial ideologies that Caribbean history was cast as the history of European imperial rivalries

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and the stories of heroic “discoveries” and conquests by Europeans such as Columbus, Walter Raleigh, John Hawkins, Francis Drake or John Benbow. Also, chapters on cash crops such as cotton, tobacco and sugar cane appear with very little said of how they had come to be introduced to the islands or of the histories of slavery or indentured labour associated with them. The Readers are almost totally silent on slavery. In Book 4 lesson 32, slave labour, is presented as akin to any other kind of labour and offered as one index of the economic success of English rule in Jamaica after Spanish “mismanagement.” The prosperity of the islands is represented as one of organic development: [the] land was rich; there was useful work to be done if there were the right men to do it. Things began to mend after the importation of African slaves, so that out of evil came much good […] Gradually the fertile soil was laid out into plantations, and towns began to arise. (Book 4, 178, 180)

In Book 5, in a lesson titled “The Story of the British West Indies,” the islands under Spanish rule are said to require more labourers and John Hawkins is named as the “Devonshire seaman” who made voyages to West Africa freighting “his ship with Africans,” thus “beginning the English trade in African slaves” (Book 5, 277). The devastation and longevity of slave trafficking and exploitation is occluded in these abstract accounts of economic development. Instead, the books present slavery (and its abolition) as a developmental and organic process, the result of a practice that happened sometime in the distant past. In this manner, British culpability in centuries of trauma, suffering and struggle is dismissed in four short sentences that describe Spanish and Portuguese involvement, all the while noting that when public opinion took against slavery, “all slaves in British colonies became free.” It is no wonder that George Lamming was to write in In the Castle of My Skin of pupils’ scepticism that slavery ever occurred on the islands: [Slavery] […] was too far back for anyone to worry about teaching it as history. That’s really why it wasn’t taught. It was too far back. History has to begin somewhere, but not so far back. And nobody knew where this slavery business took place. The teacher had simply said, not here, somewhere else. Probably it never happened at all […]. It came up like a ghost and soon faded again. (Lamming 1987, 50)

The Readers’ presentation of culture and ethnicities took the form of a traditional diorama of cultural types, wheeled on to parade their specific

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manners and customs as cultural traits of their communities; for example, in Book 1 “the people of India” also “called Hindu[s]” are “brown in colour” and might wear a “dhoti” or “sari,” eat a “great deal of “dhal” and “cook the vegetables in mustard-oil, cotton-seed oil, or ghee and masala” (Book 1, 34-36); in Book 3, Hindu wedding rituals are described in some detail as specific markers and properties of East Indian communities (Book 3, 78-81). Cultures also appear as anthropological curiosities. In “Homes in other lands” in Book 2, the narrator self-consciously asks the pupil reader to accompany him on a guided tour of the “homes of boys and girls in other countries.” When he alights in the land of snow and encounters “round lumps like basins turned upside down,” the narrator declares that these “are the houses in which Eskimo children live,” and invites the reader to “touch the walls” and feel that they are cold. Desert homes of the Arabs, the wigwams of “Red Indian [hunters] of North America as well as the ‘pygmies’ huts in the forests” are all introduced in turn, and even though cultural difference is framed by environmental adaptation in an aside, these are deemed “funny houses because they are not like ours” (Book 2, 34-35). However, what is perhaps most damning is the Readers’ failure to grapple in any way with the lives of those of African ancestry. While other cultures make a quick appearance, including the Caribs and the IndoCaribbeans (“East Indians in the West Indies”), there is literally no attempt to address the cultures and customs of the African-descended populations that would form the majority of Cutteridge’s pupil readers despite his avowed desire to enhance learning by providing familiar histories, locations and environments. Instead, in the most advanced book in the series, an abridgement of Charles Kingsley’s portrait of the Port of Spain, written in 1869, makes an appearance. This portrait of black peoples by “a master of description” is redolent of the images of the lazy native or the truculent slave that have fed into apologists for slavery in a different age. In Kingsley’s account, pupils are asked to misrecognise themselves as exotic and colourful, as “dawdlers in mid-street” gnawing sugar cane or as gaudily dressed. The black population are described as doing very little but standing “idle in the market-place not because they have not been hired, but because they do not want to be hired […]” (Book 5, 129). In Kingsley’s travel narrative, ethnic groupings are racialised by the text’s explicit attentiveness to appearance and visage. Finally, Cutteridge’s supplementary written exercises ask pupils to compose, “as a stranger might write,” their own version of their environment using Kingsley as a

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model. In the racial mirror offered for self-reflection, such an exercise must have been profoundly estranging. Campbell’s assessment of the hostility that greeted the Readers notes the rural biases embedded in the series as a whole. He also observes that Cutteridge’s companion textbook, Arithmetics, asked students to calculate items “reminiscent of slavery or of aspects of working class culture of which they could hardly be proud” (Campbell 1996, 100). In the Readers, there are chapters on iron and steel production, chocolate manufacture, with accompanying pictures of workers at the Bournville factory in Britain or London’s urban scenes. These, together with the inclusion of English canonical texts and special coloured reproductions of masterpieces from metropolitan museums, seem to indicate that modernity is essentially metropolitan, or, as satirised in A House for Mr Biswas, all West Indian children have goats to milk and tend. Yet despite local hostilities, Cutteridge’s position meant that as fast as the books appeared in print, they were introduced to schools (Campbell 1996, 99). The Readers represented a lucrative and captive market for Nelson, and they were used well into the early sixties (Fraser 2008a, 99). Nelson’s modernisation was predicated on its production of school texts and popular classics for a world market; a Nelson printer recalls: “you felt top of the world ’cause you were part of a book that was being printed and going out all over the world in that time” (Reid 2001, 93). This was not to last; many of the early innovations had ceased to be innovative in the postwar period but, as McCleery suggests, Nelson’s educational links with British colonies and the new Commonwealth did help to buy the company extra time in an increasingly competitive publishing environment (McCleery 2001, xxi). Miles Ogborn has argued in his case study on the spread of printing in the making of the East India Company that “writing was not simply a commentary upon what happened” but an integral part of “reconfiguring of the relationship between Europe and Asia through trade and empire” (Ogborn 2007, 26). More research needs to be done on colonial print cultures and their interface with educational processes, and more should be done on the impact of educational imprints and material on local literary cultures in the globalised print-inflected modernity. But what of print culture or print modernity in the Caribbean? Roderick Cave (1987) and Peter A. Roberts (1997) as print historian and linguist respectively unearthed a rich early Atlantic print cultural history from the early seventeen hundreds. More recently, Rhonda Cobham-Sander (1981), Selwyn Cudjoe (2003) and Leah Rosenberg (2007) have painted a lively and modern local scene based on cultures of print particularly in the

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nineteenth and twentieth centuries, albeit more or less restricted to elite and middle-class communities: newspapers; little magazines; pamphlet publications; reading groups; literary clubs and societies; subscription, parish and, later, free libraries. At the same time as Cutteridge was putting together his Readers, Thomas McDermot’s nationalist local publishing venture, the All Jamaica Library (1904-9), was still in recent memory, and his experiment is repeated in changed political circumstances and in a more commercial vein by Herbert de Lisser, whose novels were serialised in the Daily Gleaner and then published locally or abroad in book form in the 1920s and 1930s. There was already a lively interest in the documentation of folk cultures and folklore encouraged by Walter Jekyll, which in the 1930s and 1940s was to lead to the representation of ordinary people as the cultural basis of the nation in little magazines such as the Beacon and Trinidad. This is not to say that there were no conservative responses supporting the imperial project or no objections to the use of Creole folktales in the Readers by local parents who wanted their children to assimilate more canonical material. However, as this briefest indication of Caribbean print history shows, modernity did not reside in the metropolitan capitals of Europe despite what the Readers imply. This much is evident in The Mighty Sparrow’s wonderful calypso, “Dan is the Man,” satirising the Readers’ absurd “poems and lessons they write and send from England,” “Brer Rabbit and Rumpelstiltskin,” “Agouti lose his tale and Alligator trying to get monkey liver soup,” and “Peter Peter was a pumpkin eater” in equal measure. Cutteridge’s (and Nelson’s) modernity, “plenty times more advanced than them scientist,” was at the expense of his readers who if they learnt their lessons well “woulda be a damn fool.” For Cutteridge and Nelson, the West Indian Readers was, of course, “the Goose that lay the golden egg” (Donnell and Welsh 1996, 162).

COLONIALISM AND EMPIRE AS NATURAL ORDER IN THE EARLY DOLLAR MAGAZINE IAN BROWN

Dollar Academy is located in Scotland’s smallest ancient county, Clackmannanshire, north of the Forth and just over 37 miles from both Edinburgh and Glasgow. The school was founded in 1818 following a legacy left by Captain John McNabb, a Dollar-born ship-owner and merchant: the school badge still features a sailing ship. He made his fortune, at least in part, through the slave trade. The Academy for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries educated primary and secondary school children of both sexes, including boarders whose parents were already serving abroad, who might go on to become empire-makers. They would serve in the armed forces, the colonial civil services or police, or become business people, doctors or missionaries in the developing British Empire and colonies. Nineteenth-century pupils sat either Cambridge Examinations or, in an explicit imperial connection, Indian Civil Service Examinations. Colonial and imperial links were not exclusive – many went on to careers in business, education, industry or farming in and beyond Scotland. Dollar Academy, unlike some other nineteenth-century school foundations in Scotland, like Edinburgh’s Loretto School (1827) or Fettes College (1870) or Perthshire’s Glenalmond College (1847), was not modelled on the English public [private] boarding school system. Where Glenalmond was actually first set up to educate young men for the clergy of the Anglican church, the model for Dollar was native to Scotland, that of a charitable foundation by a local person made good, offering an education as part of local school provision, although with some potential for boarders, like Edinburgh’s George Heriot’s School (1628) and Glasgow’s Hutchesons’ Grammar School (1648). It was as a result of changes in educational policy in the 1970s that such Scottish schools became what they now are, fully independent of public provision or grantaid. In 1902 Dr John Strachan founded The Dollar Magazine, co-editing it with Richard Malcolm until 1926, assisted by a large committee, whose

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members were initially financial guarantors. A doctor practising in Dollar, Strachan was a former pupil and originated the Dollar Academy Club for former pupils. Malcolm, Provost of Dollar during 1896-99, taught English at the school from 1866 to 1910 and was later a Governor and Chairman of Governors.1 The Magazine appealed to the small town of Dollar as well as to the school, and to those abroad with Dollar connections: many contributions and letters came from abroad. The Magazine appeared four times a year and was at times assisted by the Dollar Academy Club and some endowments.2 Described as “The Official Organ of the Dollar Academy Clubs,” that subtitle implies it targeted former, rather than current, pupils, but it carried material about the school and its community as well as the material from former pupils on which this chapter focuses. In this it differs from the writing for children discussed by Kathryn Castle, with its tales of the “Dark Continent,” full of slaves and noble savages (Castle 1996). Such writing represents imperialism, as Daphne M. Kutzer notes, “as natural and good to children” (Kutzer 2000, xvi) and, as we will see, so did Magazine contributors, but the latter included former pupils and local community members, writing largely for Dollar-related peers, not primarily children. Worldwide distribution of the Magazine helped consolidate a sense of a worldwide ‘Dollar community.’ In this it is not comparable even to a contemporary school magazine produced for current students and sent to parents and interested others. It served a distinctive function for the Academy’s pupils and ex-pupils. Rather than simply survey the publication’s many volumes, this chapter considers in detail five typical non-school contributions in its first twenty years from a selection edited by Robin Cumming (2009). The articles considered represent a typical range of contributors, including a soldier, a colonial manager, a businessman, a minister and a local landowner. As will be clear, the articles show common sets of values and 1 I am grateful to Janet Carolan, Dollar Academy archivist, for this biographical information and the information that, while the school was early called Dollar Academy, it was also in its first hundred years called Dollar Institution and John McNabb’s School, its name being standardised only on its centenary in 1918. 2 Janet Carolan notes: “By 1968 there were only two issues a year and the Magazine contained mainly school and former pupil material. The last issue to be called The Dollar Magazine was in 2001. By this time there was only one issue a year and it had become entirely a school publication. In 2002 Fortunas replaced the Magazine – at first it came out three times a year. It is given to pupils, staff and governors and sent free all over the world to Former Pupils and former staff. Fortunas now comes out twice a year with a circulation of around 7000.” Email message to author (January 11, 2012).

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often vocabulary, both of which may be seen as instilling a code of behaviour and beliefs that would predispose the reader to accept colonialism and imperialism as natural states of affairs. Julia Bush observes: “The core ingredients of the late Victorian and Edwardian imperialist message were patriotism, belief in racial hierarchy, respect for the monarchy, Christianity and the armed services, and admiration for the past and present British ‘heroes’ who exemplified these values” (Bush 2000, 126). While all these ingredients will be found in the articles discussed, it is striking that they show little evidence of a sense of patriotic Scottish identity. Other contributors provide local memoirs and photographs, but the prevailing tone in such overseas contributions as those under discussion is of an imperial British destiny where former pupils inhabit the hierarchy’s higher reaches, in both social standing and imperial status. If, as Tony Ballantyne suggests, Empire can be read “not simply as a set of economic and political structures of dominance but as a cultural project” (Ballantyne 2008, 177), then the early Dollar Magazine sustains that project, whose ideology was, however, more often implicit than explicit. As Stephen Howe observes: [One need not doubt] most British statesmen at least between the 1870s and the 1930s […] had a sincere and profound belief in the greatness and goodness of the British Empire. Whether this amounted to their holding and seeking to spread a coherent or systematic imperial ideology is far harder to say. (Howe 2008, 173)

Within such an unsystematic ideological framework, the magazine’s values are represented as derived from the school. This is unquestioningly considered to have a role in instilling obligations of duty and service to the imperial state. As Bush notes: No clear line could be drawn between education as propaganda, promoting essential levels of interest and support, and the more systematic, sustained imperialist education designed to provide a deeper understanding of the Empire. […] an enthusiasm for Empire was being widely inculcated in British society during the 1900s. […] education and socialization […] increasingly equated citizenship and self-worth with love of nation and Empire. (Bush 2000, 126)

The school’s role is made most explicit, perhaps, in a report of the inauguration of the war memorial that stands before Dollar Academy’s neoclassical Playfair-designed main building. In 1921 General Davies

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unveiled this statue. The Dollar Magazine report of his speech includes the following: They were met to do what honour they could to those men, to that woman, who had passed their childhood there, and who had given their lives in order that they who remained might live and be free. […] He always thought that of all war memorials, perhaps the one that touched one’s heart most of all was a school memorial, because one knew that these men had spent their childhood there, learned their lessons there, and played their games, and the whole place seemed haunted with their memory. (Anon. 1921, 72)

Sport is in a conventional, uninterrogated way presented as characterforming, a metaphor for life. (At Dollar sport might even occasionally include traditional field sports; as late as the early 1960s the present author recalls anglers being released from one afternoon of classes annually for a fishing competition on the nearby River Devon). Childhood, lessons, school, games and related adventurous activities shaped pupils’ futures: the school’s motto, Juventutis veho fortunas, translates as “I carry the fortunes of youth.” The conception that school shaped lives includes the idea that pupils learned their special nature and duties not only in the classroom. Davies later observes: It was, perhaps, most of all, what they learned outside the class-room [that mattered]. It was the spirit of understanding that all men are not made alike; the spirit of give and take. It was at school that they learned that essential first lesson – to obey. (Anon. 1921, 73)

Having learned obedience, the former pupil must raise the school’s reputation, presumably by serving society’s received values. After leaving school he (or, in Dollar’s case, he or she) would strive not to bring disgrace to the school, “and if he did well, the honour and glory of his school was thereby enriched.” Davies concluded, to “applause”: The knowledge of what the memorial stood for would give [every pupil coming to the school] more than ever reason to take care that in after life they never did anything which would bring discredit to that great and noble Academy. (Anon. 1921, 73)

And “that great and noble Academy” can be seen to imbue its pupils with “great and noble” values of Empire, not least through contributions to The Dollar Magazine which promulgate a value system embedding colonialism and imperial development. Articles by both former pupils and

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the school’s friends shape and nurture a world in which school, community and empire are artfully conjoined into a continuum of influential experience. In articles here considered, former pupils shape and report the imperial world’s events – both small and large – in South Africa, India and China. These familiarise readers with a view of colonialism and empire as commonplace, a natural order with racial and gender hierarchies they will inherit and sustain. Very early in the magazine’s run, its fifth issue, a colonial war report demonstrates the process of imperialist values later articles would carry forward. Embedded ingredients in these include Bush’s “patriotism, belief in racial hierarchy, respect for the monarchy, Christianity and the armed services, and admiration for the past and present British ‘heroes’” (Bush 2000, 126). They also include gender and social hierarchies and the adventurous necessity of hunting and fishing. Triumph over difficulties endured and overcome and certainty of imperial destiny blend together these ingredients. Keppel Harvey reports in March 1903, for example, on a Boer War action beginning on 18 February 1902, led by Colonel Urmston of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Dollar’s local regiment. The action’s adventurous tension is highlighted, as is factual, but exotic, detail: During that three hours’ march not a word was spoken above a whisper, and strict orders were issued against the lighting of matches. By this time the moon was well up in the sky, and many thanks are due to it for saving men from falling into antbear holes and over ant hills. (Harvey 1903, 33)

We are in an alternative world to that of the Scottish school, yet one where duty, the obedience whose necessity Davies emphasised, is essential for safety – literally a matter of life and death – while the moonlit landscape is alien, beyond school pupils’ experience and, yet, somehow alluring. The imperialist military action Harvey describes represents adventure, but also the picturesque: Far in the distance like so many dots the scouts were carefully picking their way, ever on the alert for hidden Boer snipers, who at this time infested the country. The long silent snake-like column moving over the veldt lent a peculiar and almost weird finish to the scene. (Harvey 1903, 34)

The description is both glamorously dangerous, with “hidden Boer snipers,” and filmic in its attention-grabbing focus shifting. The soldier’s column becomes almost a living creature, snaking along, seeking to rid the land of an “infestation” of non-British, though pre-British, colonisers. Its brave individual members, though, show strength of mind and pluck. Harvey continues, “[By 4 a.m.] some poor fellows were sore and weary,

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and scarcely able to drag one foot after the other” (Harvey 1903, 34), but those “poor fellows” endured; the quarry was spotted. The whole scene is framed as exciting, with the apparently inevitable and ‘natural’ drive we now recognise in an action movie’s emotionally engaging impetus. Harvey’s tale of colonial conquest continues with imperialism triumphant. The Boers, encircled, surrender, though the “fight while it lasted was fierce” (Harvey 1903, 35). With an almost schoolboyish jocular tone we will see elsewhere, but one tinged by cynical and worldly-wise caution, he reports: The handkerchief of questionable colour, known as the white flag, was probably the most welcome sight witnessed since the march commenced. As the Boers were in force, and cases of the misuse of this emblem of peace had occurred before, the Colonel took all necessary precautions, and satisfied himself that this was no ruse on the part of his wily foes to induce his men to forsake their cover. (Harvey 1903, 35)

Sixteen of 189 captured Boers are wounded; nine dead must be buried. The episode is represented as adventurous, perilous and thrilling, but we are reminded of the human cost. By the time the report was published, the war was over, the Boers defeated, peace being established and Boer states being assimilated into Britain’s Empire. In Harvey’s article, therefore, the treatment of Boer deaths can be employed to betoken a new British-Boer relationship, or at least the wishful representation of one: “That plain funeral service, where Briton and Boer stood together with uncovered heads, drew any ill-feeling from the heart and showed the logic of that seemingly paradoxical expression, “My friend the enemy” (Harvey 1903, 35). The funeral comes to symbolise reconciliation – perhaps particularly important by the time the article appeared – where Boer and British enemies “stood together” as, formally speaking, they did imperially in 1903. Enemies and friends become one: the Boers, without “ill-feeling,” at least nominally, assimilate into Britain’s imperial adventure. Harvey’s report closes by noting the distance covered in the march was twenty-six and a half miles – by significant coincidence just over a quarter of a mile longer than a marathon’s regularised length (sporting competition, here linked to classical battle, is an underlying trope). Its conclusion observes that within fifteen minutes of forming camp the men “enjoy[ed] a well-earned rest” and notes that Lord Kitchener “telegraphed his congratulations to the column” (Harvey 1903, 36). British organisational skills ensure a satisfactory outcome and with surprising speed in a pre-electronic age imperial authority confers praise down the command chain to those who successfully gave orders and those who

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obeyed. The hunt – something of field sports imbues descriptions of soldiers’ and scouts’ seeking their quarry – concludes; to the victor, laurels. Colonial roles were often represented directly as adventurous, with thrilling, exoticised detail, though perhaps with an ostensibly socially beneficial purpose. In June 1907, A.W. (Arthur) Strachan wrote from Sylhet in Assam: I am sending you a photo of one of the tigers that has been killing such a lot of cows round here lately. I had been watching the brute’s tracks for weeks, and finding out his regular beats we then decided to try and tempt him with a goat. The moon was nearly full and we got a ‘mâchan’ made in a tree at one end of the coolies’ rice fields […]. (Strachan 1907, 3)

As in the last example, moonlight underscores the exotic. Exoticism is here also emphasised by the Bengali word, “mâchan” (a makeshift scaffold-like structure of bamboo on stilts, like a treehouse, used as a hide by hunters, also by farmers to watch over crops).3 This is, however, no longer metaphorical, but real hunting. One also notes here casual racism in Strachan’s language: he calls the indigenous Assamese “coolies,” a term used at the time for Asian manual labourers or slaves. He establishes a tense atmosphere for the hunt: [At night] you see things and hear sounds that you would seldom see or hear in the daytime. Perhaps you can understand that when you are sitting up for a tiger every little sound is exaggerated and you can imagine a pair of gleaming eyes looking at you out of every dark patch in the jungle. (Strachan 1907, 3-4)

He at once deflates the tension he has created, noting: “the ‘gleaming eyes’ are nothing more formidable than fire-flies, and the rustling of leaves is generally made by a lizard or a rat.” But the tension’s reduction reinforces the exotic sense: fire-flies are uncommon in Scotland. What Strachan achieves through bathetic effect is emphasis on how used he is to what would still be beyond pupils’ general experience (although some boarders might have lived in tropical climes). Again, readers are offered imperial experiences to aspire to. Strachan and his colleagues shoot the tiger that has attacked domestic animals, but the kill is not clean; the wounded beast escapes. Strachan notes “It would have been absolute folly to have followed it up then as it 3 I am grateful to Professor Bashabi Fraser of Edinburgh Napier University for enlightening me as to this word’s significance.

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was pitch dark under the trees, so we went back to R.’s bungalow to wait for daylight, sleep being out of the question” (Strachan 1907, 4). They then follow bloody tracks until “[a]ll of a sudden an unwounded [original emphasis] tiger seemed to rise out of the ground about ten yards from me.” This tiger “bounded into the jungle and disappeared” before Strachan could shoot it, the danger and tension are emphasised, and the hunters continue after the wounded beast. Strachan gets “within three yards of it before I knew. Luckily its back was turned to me and I gave it a shot in the back of the head. Even then it had strength enough left to give a very intimidating roar, but it was its last” (Strachan 1907, 5). Shot in the back of the head, the animal’s end is hardly glamorous or noble, even if Strachan might underline his own courage by reporting its “intimidating roar.” The alien exotic may be seducing the reader, but details are recorded without glorification. On examining the animal, Strachan emphasises the hunt’s practical utility: the tiger is very old with a broken canine tooth, factors no doubt turning it to killing cattle. The community’s danger had been more than economic loss: Strachan points out such an animal would “take to man-eating.” The whole episode foregrounds the coloniser’s ‘necessity’ and the ‘ineffectiveness’ of the indigenous Assamese, slightingly called here “coolies,” who need the imperial adventurer’s protection. The propaganda is understated, but clear ideological points are implicit. In 1909 The Dollar Magazine published W.J. Drysdale’s “Notes from the Burmah Oilfields.” A Burma Oil Company manager, Drysdale employed Indian “coolies” – again racist language is casually used. He reports hearing a “bit of a row” in the village between Burmese and Indians. He acts as colonial leader by breaking up this disturbance: Needless to say, I did not wait to see who was at fault, but fixed on the first coolie I met. I managed to get the fight stopped, but not before one Indian was laid out with a club. I worked at him for an hour or so, but could not get him back to consciousness, so he died. He had got a smash on the back of the head. I don’t think it takes much to kill a coolie. (Drysdale 1909, 1)

Here ideology is direct: the Scot is imperial master of the situation and, where indigenous peoples squabble, and one is killed, he brings order. One suspects the sneer in the last sentence quoted, “I don’t think it takes much to kill a coolie,” is intended as jocular, even though it refers in racist language to the death of a human being. While Drysdale clearly tried to help the man, he seems both to disclaim any responsibility and suggest that somehow it would take more to kill someone not a coolie, perhaps like him, a coolie’s colonialist boss. Once inscribed in the category “coolie,”

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the man becomes less-than-human – i.e. unworthy of pity or respect – and readers are invited to be complicit in this racist, imperialist perspective. Drysdale’s brief article continues by discussing the process of drilling for oil. He describes the environment in which he works: “Derricks 70 to 80 feet high everywhere, steam-engines and boilers galore” (Drysdale 1909, 1). Clearly industrial pollution is involved, but this aspect of his business attracts no attention from Drysdale. He is matter-of-fact about his colonial industrial world, rather emphasising the technological advancement of the coloniser. The latter can bore wells to a depth of “about 2,300 feet,” when “The Native wells are holes four feet square, dug by hand to a depth of 200 or 300 feet.” In this article, unlike the two previous ones discussed, we are not being engaged by the adventurous, exotic or sporting. Rather, we are invited to admire business-like thrusting and exploitation of natural resources, exploitation in no way questioned environmentally and enforced by the coloniser’s superior power over the “coolies.” Colonialism is celebrated without self-doubt as commonplace, the natural order. We have noted how field sports can provide a metaphor for imperialist war, adventurism and the coloniser as ‘protector’ of the colonised. We have also seen how an apparently simple factual report can imply the inevitability of business exploitation and imperial rule. Another article, from the thirtieth issue (March 1911) of The Dollar Magazine, illustrates how an apparently straightforward report of a field sports trip can embody and convey a variety of imperialist, racist, adventurist and sexist attitudes. The Reverend J.L. Findlay (“Chaplain to the Forces”) describes a fishing trip to South Africa’s Drakenberg Mountains. He begins: “We were a party of four. One was a lady, and one a parson. Can any sporting trip be successful without one or the other? Here we had both – best of auguries for a pleasant trip: and it was one of the pleasantest!” (Findlay 1911, 14). The jolly, bantering tone is one we have seen in passing before. Whatever the topic, the death of a coolie or a fishing trip in South Africa, there is a general sense that all is manageable, all fun, that the Dollar former pupil can – superior, though not over-mighty – cope. And, as with Drysdale’s report from Burma, we find racist attitudes enshrined and treated as commonplace, matter for jocular comment: It is not a usual thing to see white men carrying loads in Natal – that is black man’s work – however coolies or natives take some waking, and all that means time, so it is by necessity and not by choice that each of us could be seen humping his weary load at 5.30 towards the waggon [sic], which, because of the cattle fever has to keep a mile away from the town. (Findlay 1911, 15)

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The colonialist takes sport so seriously that he (or she) will even carry a load, contravening – and in so doing emphasising – the racial distribution of work roles. Further by a touch of reportage Findlay inserts an exotic sense: in South Africa cattle fever keeps the wagon out of town so that they have to carry their “weary” loads, transgressing the decorum of racial typing, for over a mile. That decorum is nonetheless unchallenged as a proper norm: everyone has a place; the alien coloniser is superior to the indigenous colonised. The objective of the trip is sport recognisable to Dollar pupils, and the report enshrines not only the racist attitudes already discussed, but sexist ones. The river the party aims for offers such good fishing that even a woman can succeed despite her technical deficiencies: I have found more than once that the lady of our party, blundering up with no such high hopes [of getting a three- or five-pound trout], has hooked and landed from the self-same pools three-pounders, and, as often as not, she has had the sun behind her. (Findlay 1911, 21)

Despite such transgressive achievements, by the end of his report Findlay highlights and reinforces the primary importance of the “lady’s” nurturing and domestic role. Such stereotyping, of course, was not restricted to imperial contexts; nevertheless, it is emphasised abroad as at home. As Bush notes, “[t]he language of Empire was moulded first and foremost by its male exponents. But their choice of familial, and especially maternal, metaphor offered important meanings to women who wished to share in the self-congratulatory adventure” (Bush 2000, 2). Findlay, having blundered on one trip into a long detour, on return seeks warm food. He finds the fire out because of a flood in the camp kitchen and decides he needs some “Irish neat.” At this point, the lady’s “cheery voice” offers him a mug of cocoa. She has set him on the strait way, helping him resist alcoholic temptation, for he responds that cocoa is “the very thing I have set my heart on. No, no I won’t have any whisky, thank you; this cocoa is the best of drinks at present; but, I say, how did you boil the water?” (Findlay 1911, 21). The nameless She (we are introduced to her as Mrs---), having angelically saved him from strong drink’s temptation, reveals the secret of her role as domestic goddess: a small spirit stove. On this revelation of woman’s constantly caring and domestically accommodating nature, Findlay continues: Yes! And what is more she had other things of which we were ignorant. That night, though it never ceased pouring, we had a fine supper all the same; there was camp pie, there was tongue, there was pickled trout and

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coffee afterwards, and all that we owed to the forethought of the one lady in our party. (Findlay 1911, 21-2)

What it was to be a colonial woman. She must embody secret and powerful knowledge, which, however, is focused on providing comfort for menfolk. As Bush says, “during the late Victorian and Edwardian years practicality seems to have been regarded as an unmitigated and peculiarly feminine virtue” (Bush 2000, 74). The “lady in our party” has no name or voice, but Findlay seems to assign her a role Bush describes: “Female imperialists were sometimes congratulated by male platform speakers on their success in carrying out womanly work for the Empire, and they apparently relished this type of gendered compliment” (Bush 2000, 73). Supported by womanly forethought, practicality and nurturing – and their own valiant efforts – Findlay and his companions enjoy good fishing in a bountiful river, where, as in Burma’s oilfields, the coloniser finds plentiful riches. The stream’s name has, however, a history. It is “Bushman’s River,” and we learn almost casually why. Nine miles from their destination, they call in on two storekeepers “who have been there for many years [and] know the Zulu language as well as white men can know it.” Findlay says: They will tell you in detail about the extraordinary exploits of the Bushman in the early days – how they used to come down from the mountains, hiding themselves in bushes during the day, and, only travelling by night, raid the horses and cattle of both the white and black man alike – how the Zulu and white combined forces in the late sixties and pursued them right up the Berg, driving them into the innermost caves of the very topmost ridges – how two whites were killed, and many blacks – how the Zulus returned with the women and children as war prisoners, and how, suddenly, one night many months afterwards, every Bushman prisoner, woman or child, suddenly vanished, and no one to this day knows how or where – how the feuds went on and on till at last the breechloader banished for ever every trace of the Bushman with his little bow and poisoned arrow, his implements of stone and wood. How, even to-day scientists come for guides to help and search the caves to try and find some real live Bushman, and can only find skeletons and broken water-pots. (Findlay 1911, 17-18)

Findlay, colonial and military cleric, perceives the Bushman’s nature as ambivalent: he both infantilises him (having a “little bow”) and portrays him as threatening (with a “poisoned arrow”). That women and children can be war prisoners is insouciantly accepted, as is the fact that all the Bushmen, after whom imperialist appropriators named the river, have been exterminated – become “skeletons” – or driven away, disinherited and

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shattered, leaving only “broken water-pots.” Findlay presents as a piquantly interesting but matter-of-fact anecdote a substantial act of genocide, ostensibly driven by the coloniser’s economic priorities and pastoral values set against the colonised’s nomadic hunting traditions. Values of racial superiority and hierarchy are established, the Bushman esteemed below the Zulu, who may ally with the “white man” against him but will remain subordinate to that ally. In The Dollar Magazine, the reverend, not just by choice an angler, but by vocation “a fisher among men,” presents his peers and young readers with an aspirational sporting example. His colonial experience is represented as a dashing, often amusing, adventure that embeds assumptions about racial and gender status and values. Imperialism – and genocide, so long as it can be camouflaged as a regrettable-but-inevitable side effect of ‘progress’ – is acceptable, indeed accepted as commonplace and natural outcomes of the admirable arrival of colonising ‘civilisation,’ Not only former pupils contributed. A neighbouring landowner, and presumed friend of the school, an inveterate traveller, Isabella Christie of Cowden Castle to the east of Dollar, on several occasions contributed colourful pieces on her journeys in China, Korea and even such ‘exotic’ destinations as Majorca. Bush observes that female imperialists engaged in both education as propaganda and systematic imperialist education (Bush 2000, 126), and Christie has indeed an acute eye and ear, noting the way, for example, in which in Shanghai the French settlement includes “Chinese speaking excellent French,” while the British expatriate community teaches its Chinese contacts, and keeps up, a pidgin language (Christie 1907, 40). The traveller observes imperial powers’ differing attitudes to the colonised’s use of their languages. It is typical of Christie’s approach, though, that she does not interrogate the different ideologies behind French and British attitudes to hierarchies of authority, differing colonial methods and the inculcation of colonising languages. Rather, she reports what she sees and hears, curious about surface detail, incurious about what underlies it. Colonialism and empire simply are, that is the way the world is, and so she conveys her impressions to the readers of The Dollar Magazine. In framing her exotic countries, in which it is natural she should travel and imperial nations establish colonies, Christie includes such observations as: There are large cotton mills on the river-bank, though curiously enough the material of the blue cotton garments worn by the natives both at Shanghai and up country is made in Lancashire and dyed by the Chinese themselves. Something like twelve millions is said to be annually imported of this commodity. (Christie 1907, 41)

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She implies, as observation of curious fact, that colonialism’s economics are just how things are. Given that she uses the phrase “curiously enough,” it is ironic that she reveals a lack of curiosity, transmitted to her readers, about what economic, political or imperial factors might lead to cotton mills in China working material actually made up in the North of England. Imperialism, colonialism and their consequences remain unexamined: they are vaguely quaint, amusing and ironic facts of life. In this, her contributions chime with those of the other contributors this chapter considers. All the authors of the articles discussed embed implicit assumptions about the absolute right of the British to rule their colonies and run an empire in which they impose ‘order.’ The lessons General Davies, unveiling the school war memorial, said that those who had died in the Great War learned at Dollar Academy, where they also “played their games,” were also learned by those who survived. Through the articles of former pupils and friends of the school, The Dollar Magazine fed back the living memories of empire-builders and colonisers into later pupils’ consciousness. So, they may be seen to shape, by their implicit assumptions, the developing attitudes of the next generation of colonisers. Their reports, often quasi-jocularly, sometimes sneeringly, propagandise a worldview of British superiority and right to empire. In doing so, they create an atmosphere around the events they describe of allure, thrills, dangers overcome, economic exploitation, casual and institutional sexism, potentially genocidal racism, and the glamorous exotic. When Arthur Strachan returned to Dollar, Cumming notes he had lost an arm and a leg in a tiger attack. Ever resourceful, he ran a boarding house for Academy pupils, future possible colonials, and wrote Mauled by a Tiger, subtitled Encounters in the Indian Jungles (Strachan 1933). Strachan embodied in a very particular way empire’s adventure and danger. His new role represented, like that of the early Dollar Magazine, the early twentiethcentury everyday reality of continuation from generation to generation, whatever the individual may suffer, of imperial and colonialist beliefs and values as part of the way things are, part of the natural order.

THE SCOTTISH JUTEWALLAHS: A STUDY OF TRANSNATIONAL POSITIONING  IN PERSONAL NARRATIVES BASHABI FRASER

The story of jute is the tale of two cities – of Dundee and Calcutta (Kolkata), with their fortunes inextricably interwoven, where the “global Scot”1 played a crucial role. The crop grew in the deltaic region of Bengal and, like cotton, at the beginning of its imperial story was transported to be processed in Britain as raw material. Jute was sent to Scotland, where it was first “introduced to Dundee in 1823” (Turner 1966, 40). However, as the Crimean War (1855-57) created an urgent need for jute sandbags, Dundee found it difficult to cope with the demand, and it became cheaper to have the production factories where the crop thrived, in and around Calcutta. Dundonians thus opened a mill at Serampore (Srirampur), on the south bank of the Hoogly2 river, in 1855 “and the first spinning and weaving works in 1859” (Turner 1966, 40). When the First World War broke out, Calcutta had 38 mills and 184,000 workers, including 1,000 Scots (Fry 2001, 324). So jute, like tea, was processed where it grew, in India. As Christopher Whatley states, “The highest number of employees recorded in the jute and linen trades in Dundee was 37,000. By 1928 Calcutta had ten times as many, 339,000, which wasn’t far short of twice the entire population of Dundee” (Whatley 2005, 4). Both tea and jute were dominated by Scots who were engineers, managers, assistant managers, accountants, salesmen, factory and plantation owners. But while tea was owned and managed in India, Calcutta jute mills were tied to Scottish firms, with their owners operating from Scotland. As T.M. Devine notes, “Already, by the 1890s, Bengal had overtaken its Scottish I wish to thank the Dundee University Archives for allowing me to view and to quote from unpublished material in their collections. 1 MacAskill and McLeish (2005) refer to the Scottish diasporic community operating through social networks in a global economy (“Introduction,” 13-19). 2 Colonial spelling, “Hoogly,” is used here; current preferred spelling is “Hugli.”

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parent to become the world’s dominant manufacturing centre for the jute sacks and hessian cloth which carried the world’s foodstuffs” (Devine 2011, 266). The story of Calcutta’s jute in its hinterland is the story of Scottish Jutewallahs, as indeed Jute offers a rare example of a great industry which emerged in the Empire and trounced its rival back home, standing on its head the theory of imperial exploitation […] transforming Calcutta from a trading and financial into a manufacturing centre. (Fry 2001, 324)

Furthermore, “[b]y the 1880s, Calcutta had broken the forty-year monopoly of Dundee in the principal markets for jute hessians in North and South America, Australia and even continental Europe” (Stewart 1998, 3). Dundee also faced intense competition from Calcutta, the Oriental second city of the British Empire, which swiftly became the premier producer and processor of jute. Whatley notes that [B]y 1921 jute accounted for more than a quarter of India’s exports, Calcutta had become by far and away the world’s leading jute producer. Dundonians didn’t like to admit it, but by this time they were a long way behind and could never catch up. (Whatley 2005, 4)

The history of Calcutta overtaking Dundee is closely linked to the significant role that Indian businessmen played in the jute industry from the 1920s and 1930s onwards; so as Stewart says “the narrative [of jute] begins and ends in Calcutta” (Stewart 1998, 7). The story of the Scottish Jutewallahs in India disrupts Eurocentric narrative framings and teleologies, which had so far largely dominated colonial perspectives, challenging the centre-periphery dichotomy of imperial constructs. It is problematised by the unique position the Dundonian Jutewallahs held in Calcutta, which was more lucrative than that of their counterpart in the Scottish jute capital. In an interview, William Norrie, who was in India between 1949 and 1955 as an assistant in charge of the mechanics at Barnagore3 Jute Mill, says that his brother went out to India before him “and it was the money that attracted” him “to India” (Interview 7).4 In another interview, David Miln, who spent his 3 The colonial spellings, “Barnagore,” “Samnuggur” and “Tutughur,” are here retained. 4 Bengal Project Archives, Dundee University Archives, MS 298/1/2. This is a rich collection of recorded and transcribed interviews. Henceforth, referred to as “Interview,” followed by the number of the interview in brackets.

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early years in India from 1933 until 1944, notes that his parents “had originally gone out for the money but had always planned to come home to Scotland” (Interview 9). The position and positioning of the Scottish diaspora in this context complicates imperial notions of hierarchy. The colonial and (post)colonial encounter in the Calcutta jute story does not offer the reciprocity and symmetry that postcolonial critics would anticipate in relation to cultural productions. In fact, the twin fortunes of Dundee and Calcutta were, by the very nature of the changing world markets and market economy, asymmetrical. The cultural exchanges and interactions were complex and indeed, as Stewart suggests, “[i]mperialism must be ‘deterritorialised’ in order to uncover and understand the unique position Scots occupied in the ‘established’ schema of the colonizer and the colonized” (Stewart 1998, 194) in Bengal. Furthermore, if we follow Eric Gellner in claiming that a nation is “a contingency, not a universal necessity” (Gellner 1983, 6) (insofar that it is when two men “share the same culture,” i.e. “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating,” that they “recognize each other as belonging to the same nation” Gellner 1983, 6-7), we can indeed identify the Scottish Jutewallah in India as a transnational economic migrant operating in a social sphere and establishing a network with his “fellows” (Gellner 1983, 7), within a contingency aimed at ensuring his economic status and stability. The regional affinities of Dundonian Jutewallahs were a bonding factor as their Scottish ethnic identity accounted for their solidarity in India, which helped them to create a robust united front and to establish the supremacy of the jute industry in Bengal. Their produce was marketed across the world, from America to Australia, as they utilised the imperial network of banking, insurance, transportation by river and railways and shipping, being thus able to manipulate and flourish in the world trade. As Steven Vertovec states, “Network ties also function by way of channelling the flow of material and non-material resources” (Vertovec 2009, 33), which meant that the Scottish Jutewallahs could play a leading role in the internationalisation of the Calcutta product by liaising with diasporic Scots across the world, against Dundee’s claims to a similar global market recognition through a social and economic network. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins note that “the jute mills of Calcutta were connected to Leadenhall Street in the City, country houses in Devon and grouse moors in Scotland, as well as the harbours of Montevideo, New York, Hamburg and San Francisco” (Stewart 1998, 3-4). Dundee did try to manufacture the finer jute fibre to hold on to one section of the jute trade, but it never recovered

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its earlier position, defeated by the Scottish diasporic association of Jutewallahs in Bengal. As Devine affirms: Not surprisingly, in the depressed market conditions of the 1930s, Dundee jute interests pleaded on numerous occasions for tariffs to be imposed on the cheap imports from Calcutta. But their pleas were in vain. Now it was Dundee which looked more like the colony, and Bengal the metropole. (Devine 2011, 266-67)

The Scottish Jutewallahs operated in India in that inbetween ‘Third Space,’ described by Bhabha as “[…] the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture” (Bhabha 1994b, 56). The Scottish Jutewallahs did not fit neatly into the polarised dichotomy of the coloniser against the colonised. As part of the business community, comprising of technically trained personnel, their lives were circumscribed by the jute factory compound. Yet, on visits to Calcutta, they inhabited spaces where other Europeans gathered, at Firpo’s Restaurant, the New Empire Cinema and New Market, alongside wealthy Indians. Furthermore, there was a difference between the jute business houses in Calcutta and jute compounds, as “[t]he managers and assistants who actually worked in the mills were regarded as a rough lot by the burra sahibs of Clive Street [in Calcutta]” (Stewart 1998, 169). The hierarchy that marked the positioning of colonial administrators or the upper echelons of the military therefore did not recognise the profiteering Jutewallah as equals: Ordinary jute men found themselves on the edges of Calcutta ‘society’ […] Arabinda Ray, […] in 1950, studied these Calcutta social patterns […] “There was a distinct stigma associated with being a jute wallah,”5 he noticed, “One couldn’t be a member of the Bengal Club if one worked in a jute mill.” (Stewart 1998, 176)

The Scottish cultural identity was maintained through Burns suppers and St Andrews dinners organised by Scots in India. The first St Andrews dinner was held in Calcutta in 1881, and three years after this, the Indian Jute Mills Association (IJMA) was established. A.J. Fraser was the first President of the Caledonian Society in 1929 (Stewart 1998, 163). These were the institutions through which the regional affinities and ties were reaffirmed in Calcutta. As Whatley notes, “[e]lements of Scottish cultural life were exported […]: apparently one of the public rituals of Calcutta were the annual St Andrew’s Day dinners” (Whatley 2005, 4). The 5

“Jutewallah” and “jute wallah” are both acceptable spellings.

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Scottish Jutewallah in India benefitted from his technological training in Scotland which enabled him to obtain a position of managerial responsibility within the imperial power structure. “Mill managers and foremen from Dundee and educated at the town’s Technical College were in particular demand – and indeed few mills on the Hoogly were without a Dundee overseer, manager or mechanic” (Whatley 2005, 3). William Norrie, referred to earlier, served a five-year apprenticeship at the Dundee Technical College (Interview 7), as did David Miln’s father (Interview 9, whose exact years of apprenticeship are not recorded in the interview). However, as will emerge in the following discussion, the Scot’s positioning was more complex as he remained an outsider to the upper echelons of administrative and military personnel, while enjoying the privileges of being of the ruling power in India. The Verdant Works Museum in Dundee records the story of a young man in Dundee, who took the City and Guilds course in Jute Spinning and Weaving at Dundee Technical College (an apprentice at a jute mill in Dundee). When he asked his teacher where he could earn more money, he was told an interview could be arranged for him if he would like to go to work in India, as the pay was better in Calcutta than in Dundee. Three weeks later he was on a boat bound for Calcutta. The Scottish Jutewallahs disassociated themselves from groups like missionaries and educationists, taking pride in their own work as skilled and trained engineers and mechanics. Stewart quotes from a speech by A.R. Murray, Chairman of the IJMA in 1913, who claimed that “The Calcutta mills had now had “a record to be proud of,” as they had built factories, recruited and trained thousands of workers, and enriched the ryots6 of Bengal “while earning a fair return on our capital” (Stewart 1998, 165). Stewart goes on to illustrate how “The Calcutta jute wallah developed a positive self image […]. They portrayed themselves as recovering the commercial and industrial capacity of India and they convinced themselves that all this was somehow a happy reflection of the imperial traditions associated with the Scots in India” (Stewart 1998, 168). The management and upper positions remained with Scots even after Indian Independence in August 1947, but the jute mills saw the changes in having Indian foremen. This epochal change is documented by the Jutewallahs themselves, in many a personal narrative, as for example in Mr and Mrs Brown’s interview (Interview 10) or in Mr and Mrs Soutar’s testimony, which identifies the take over of McLeod’s in the mid-1950s as the watershed from which time Indians – after a short transition period 6

“Ryot” or “raiyat” (peasant, agricultural worker).

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during which they were Liaison officers, though seldom reached management level – replaced European managers after the latter retired (Interview 26). The Scottish jute firms slowly faced competition from Indian jute merchants such as the Birla group from the 1920s, and they learnt to trade with and alongside them.7 Whatley lucidly explains the changing dynamics of the jute industry in and around Calcutta by pointing out that “the Marwaris and other Indian manufacturers were perfectly capable of making the best grades of jute yarn and cloth, on high spinning frames operated by an efficiently managed workforce” (Whatley 2005, 4). Stewart too records that “from the 1880s onwards,” there was an influx of Indian jute businessmen such as “the Birla brothers, Adamjee Hajee Dawood, Tilokchand Hukumchand and Sheokissen Bhatter” (Stewart 1998, 147). Again, the Jutewallahs’ personal narratives shed light on this historical period: Mr and Mrs John and Anne Morris observe that “Indians before independence were babus, clerks. First senior appointment was an Anglo-Indian, an engineer, then after that Indians were applied” (Interview, Cassette MS298/2/11), while Mr Brown “saw a gradual increase in industrialisation in India, increased numbers of Bengalis travelled to Dundee Technical College to study” (Interview 10). Scots continued to be recruited beyond 15 August 1947 (India’s Independence Day), and many stayed until the 1960s, though they were not assimilated into Indian society and retained their ‘Scottishness’ until they left. Mr and Mrs Brown, for example, lived in Calcutta between 1946 and 1963, where Mr Brown worked for Andrew Yule & Co. at Barnagore, while Mrs Brown worked as a Secretary in Calcutta (Interview 10). As temporary economic migrants in India, Scots were held together by that skein of being Dundonian/Scottish, in their ‘home’ in and around Calcutta – indeed, as R.L. Stevenson reminds us, “[s]uch an unequal intimacy has never been uncommon in Scotland, where the clan spirit survives” (Stevenson [1896] 1907, 236). As recent scholarship has highlighted, diasporas are signified by “a collective memory and myth about the movement, and a desire of eventual homecoming” (Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton 2009, 2), which typically characterises the enforced movements of ethnic groups/communities who are left with no choice but to leave their home, as much as those who undertake a voluntary journey, like the Scottish Jutewallahs. Within European diasporas in settler colonies, the Scots form a substantial group: like their European migrant counterparts, most of them were able to exercise the choice which led to their dislocation and relocation. The Scots 7

See references to G.D. Birla Company, Stewart (1998, 116-17, 168).

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in India did not travel with intentions to settle, and theirs was not an enforced migration, but it was influenced by economic considerations, making them temporary economic migrants. Their collective memory was largely articulated as regional affinity, and ‘home’ was not a place dreamed of with intense nostalgic longing, unlike what often happens with migrant communities, as Jutewallahs went home regularly on leave, paid for by their company, according to their position. The sense of victimhood was absent in this dispersed community, in what was considered a better career in the east. In relation to diasporic communities, Brubaker suggests three core elements as constitutive of the phenomenon: the first is dispersal in space; the second, orientation to a ‘homeland’; and the third, boundary maintenance (Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton 2009, 3). Scots conglomerated along the banks of the Hoogly in jute mill compounds and in Calcutta, so they were dispersed in demarcated spaces where they associated with fellow Jutewallahs. They retained their regional identity as they mixed and associated with fellow Scots who had followed a familiar trail from the same region, i.e. Dundee, Arbroath and Forfar, making the journey for the same reason. Stewart speaks of the “whisky-filled celebrations of Burns’s birthday, which was faithfully marked every January in Calcutta” (Stewart 1998, 148) and mentions how D.R. Wallace, author of The Romance of Jute, “was fond of Scottish verse” like his other compatriots in Calcutta (Stewart 1998, 148). Scots maintained links with ‘home’ in journeys back on leave, as mentioned earlier, and through letters home, and they were sustained by the idea of retiring to Scotland. Pat Arthur and Elizabeth Grant, for example, daughters of Peter Gownmill from Dundee, who was in an Indian jute mill from the 1940s until 1958, wrote regularly to their relatives back in Scotland. They saw new releases of films in Calcutta cinemas before their relatives saw them in Scotland, so their letters home contained “news of the latest blockbusters” (Interview 1). The boundary maintenance was more complex, as Scots benefited from the imperial set up, working closely with their Indian associates, and yet retaining their Scottishness in the St Andrews Dinners they attended or in the Jutewallahs’ clubs they frequented. The boundary of the jute compound was real. It was the place of residence and of work, of association with fellow Scots, as wives visited each other’s houses and children played within these walls. The Gownmill sisters recall how they played with other children in their jute compound, mixing freely with Indian children, but were not allowed by guards at the compound gates to go outside, since it was considered “far too dangerous” (Interview 1).

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William Norrie was assistant-in-charge of the mechanics at Barnagar jute mill owned by George Henderson & Co., from 1949 to 1955. He recalls how he enjoyed life in India, but felt that “the confinement to the compound was hard to bear although” he “realized that it was necessary because in the villages outside there was danger and slaughter” (Interview 7). So there was this clear line separating the safe haven of the Jutewallah’s world in the compound from life outside the walls. However, within the walls, there was no simple blanket policy of Scottish camaraderie. A strict hierarchy was in place according to the position of the men, the senior salesman ranking highest, followed by the manager, the kerani (clerk), the assistant manager, the engineer, right down to the mechanic or even the assistant to the mechanic. The wives mixed with the wives of those near their husband in rank and only visited their superiors’ houses when invited for drinks on special occasions. Charles Lorimer (with Bird & Co., in India, 1951-1962) speaks of the “caste system among the Scots,” which “was very strong, especially for some of the women. The salesman who worked in the office was the top man, and was above the mill manager – he had the best house on the compound, air conditioning, a chauffeur driven car for his wife to use […]. The salesman was often snobbish and moved in different social circles to managers” (Interview 15). However, the bond between the Scots remained strong. Eugenie Fraser’s recalls the busy social life she led (from 1937 until 1963), in which her associates were mainly fellow Scots (Robert Campbell, George Stevenson, George Adams and her cousin Mae), some English (“Gwen was English”) and European; even her gynaecologist was “a forthright Scotsman from Dundee,” Col. Gow (Fraser 1989, 32, 36). William Norrie confirms an experience similar to that of Eugenie Fraser as he recalls that he “was always with other Scots, most came from Dundee and a few were from Forfar and Arbroath.” David Miln, who was born in Dr Gow’s Elgin Nursing Home in Calcutta in 1933 and studied at St Paul’s School in Darjeeling, remembers his “idyllic childhood in India.” He witnessed the “great feeling of brotherhood among the Dundee workers, every adult in the compound was known to him as Auntie or Uncle, and Christmas was great fun, had the Scottish touch to it” (Interview 9). Fraser, too, notes the magic of Christmas, the buzz in New Market, though Christmas Day was a working day and not a holiday at the mill (Fraser 1989, 25-26). Apart from the social life, there was not much to do for the Scottish Jutewallahs’ wives. Some of them did tasks for the War effort or did charity work. Women did not work. David Miln recalls that his mother “never worked in India” (Interview 9), though she had been a foreman at

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Baxter’s office before she married. However, Mrs Brown, whose husband worked for Andrew Yule & Co at Barnagore, was one of the few who did work, as she was a secretary in Calcutta. On the whole, the mill compound life did not provide working opportunities for women and the social position did not allow it, and the few jute mill wives who worked, did so in Calcutta, which offered job opportunities. While most Scots maintained a distance from Indian employees and their families, Mrs Jean Scott, wife of the general manager of Thomas Duff and Co., who lived in Calcutta from 1930, and continued living in Calcutta after her husband’s death in 1950, remembers “getting on well with the Indians” (Interview 2). Eugenie Fraser echoes the story of many Scots who spent the war period in India and stayed on after decolonisation into the early 1960s. The changing times were apparent in the widening of the circle of Scots as most British left after 1947 and Indians entered posts as they trained to take over industries like jute and tea, which had been dominated by Scots, who, once again, were able to move between nation boundaries in post-independent India, associating with Indian colleagues, while still bonding with Scottish colleagues in and outside their own jute compounds. This associational ease becomes evident in Fraser’s memoir8 and in the interviews with Scots who had lived along the Hoogly, recorded after their return to Scotland. Mrs Brown also recalls how boring life in the mill compound in Barnagore was “because there was little to do […]. [T]here (were) only 7 other European women there” with her “and the Indian women did not mix at all.” However, she does say she and her husband “mixed a fair bit with the Indians, played tennis with them.” But when they went to an Indian household Mrs Brown “would be asked to go with the Indian women while men would talk in private” (Interview 10). As times changed, Mrs Brown recounts enjoying Bengali food at Hindu weddings. Like the Browns, through colonial times, Scots crossed the boundaries of nation, moving easily between their ethnic associations and that of their British associates and Europeans, brought together by the complex fabric of empire, thus adding a new dimension to their transnationalism – an ability to identify with their imperial or regional affinities as the moment demanded. Mr and Mrs Brown, who were in India between 1946 and 1963, noticed how after Indian independence regulations changed in the dress code, as they became more relaxed: “There was a different way of life […] 8

Fraser mentions the widening of the Jutewallahs’ circle with Anglo-Indians after Indian Independence (Fraser 1989, 179-80).

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and the gate that separated the office and the mill staff’s accommodation blocks was dismantled, before one had to be invited to the compound” (Interview 10). Whereas earlier, most Jutewallahs from Scotland had been trained in Dundee Technical College, now, as Mr Brown noted, “increased numbers of Bengalis travelled to Dundee Technical College to study” (Interview 10), the same College where most Scottish Jutewallahs had been trained earlier. Yet the Scots who stayed on after 1947, through to the early 1960s, were comfortable in their position, associating with Indian colleagues, still retaining their clubhouse culture as the insider-outsiders in a new nation. The Scots’ perception of their own position put them within a regional affinity. The Jutewallahs were never considered as empire builders, on a par with the civil servants or army personnel. They continued to enjoy an insider-outsider status. The Jutewallahs in Calcutta “sat at their committee meetings in the boardroom of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, […] drinking gin and tonics at Firpo’s restaurant on Chowringhee or as they reverentially attended the annual St Andrew’s Day dinners in Calcutta to listen to speeches about empire and Scotland’s role in building the raj,” which provided “a textured account of the jute wallahs’ perspectives on the economics and cultures of empire” (Stewart 1998, 7) as they enjoyed their status in the imperial fabric. They could not be members of the Bengal Club or Tollygunge Club, but were able to enjoy the Saturday and Swimming Clubs, which were open only to Europeans. Stewart notes that “[t]he expatriate jute community played an apparently minor, and sometimes despised role in the empire” (Stewart 1998, 195). However, they met in their jute clubhouses, where Indians were not invited, and where the Scots enjoyed tennis, swimming and bowling, very much like their imperial counterparts in their exclusive clubs. John Morris remembers “the compound as an ‘oasis,’ beautifully maintained, with bowling green, tennis courts, etc […]. Leisure facilities were excellent: tennis courts and a swimming club, library, dances, snooker, films were shown on the compound, two golf courses, Gleneagles and Angus, for Thomas Duff employees” (Interview 22). Fraser (1989: 23) recalls Saturday evenings in Calcutta (just as William Norrie does in his interview), visiting Firpo’s Restaurant for sandwiches, the cinemas and the races. In fact, the Race Course, Firpo’s and Trinca’s restaurant and Flury’s the confectioners on Park Street, the latter well-known for its Edwardian décor, the New Empire Cinema and New Market in Calcutta were all spaces which were products of the empire, where the Scots met fellow countrymen and were at ease amongst their British confederates and European businessmen, served by Indians, retaining their identity while

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enjoying the exclusive spaces of westerners. Their distinctive ethnicity was reinforced on special occasions when they met at St Andrew’s Day dinners, organised by the Caledonian Society in the New Empire Theatre, the very name reminiscent of the Raj. As David McCrone observes, “Scots even in the heyday of empire never ceased to recognise and assert their national (Scottish) identity even when remaining proud of being British, [which was] their state identity” (McCrone 2001, 159). Scots as economic migrants in India can be seen as part of “transnational social movements, transnational business networks” (Vertovec 2009, 30). However, transnationalism took on wider connotations as Scots travelled across continents, going where better job opportunities beckoned. Thus Bill Soutar, who had worked as a clerk in a jute mill, did clerical work in Africa and “when the opportunity to go to India arose” he “jumped at it.” He arrived in India on Independence Day (15 August 1947) and his wife, Dot, joined him in Calcutta a few months later. Bill was a salesman for Alliance and their son was in a convent school across the river. They returned to Scotland in 1968. John Norrie travelled to Kenya during the War. He wanted to travel and knew that Indian jobs offered better money and his teacher at the Technical College in Dundee helped him to get a good position there. He was in India from April 1951 until November 1963, but as India closed her economy in the 1960s, the pattern of business changed, so Scots companies like Finlay & Co. transferred their focus to Africa, once it was clear that India was keen to nationalise what were once companies managed by Scots. Patrick Brady was in India until 1958, after which he worked in Bangladesh and then in Brazil (Interview 5). The transnationalism of Jutewallahs is evident in many personal histories. Mrs Margaret Ferguson married her husband in St Andrew’s Kirk in Calcutta in 1931. Mr Ferguson was a jute buyer for Sinclair and Murray & Co. When her husband died in 1949 in India, as he had never recovered from Blackwater fever which he had contracted during the War in Burma, Mrs Ferguson continued to stay in Calcutta, running a private hotel, the Killany Lodge in Wood Street. She stayed on for four years before returning the Scotland, but then moved to America (Interview 8). Jim Balfour, who was in India dealing with plant equipment between 1950 and 1965 and was sales manager with McLeod & Co, moved to Dhaka in East Pakistan in 1963 with his wife when taxes were increased in India (Interview 17). Douglas Nicolson worked his way up from mechanic to superintending engineer and then a temporary manager at Budge Budge. He was in the jute industry in India from 1947 until 1969, when he returned ‘home’ to Scotland. However, he could not find a pensionable job

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and left to work in East Pakistan and, after that, in Thailand for nine years (Interview 18). Though India has not figured greatly in studies of diasporic Scots, they established a fraternity there, largely through relatives who inspired an interest in their Indian destination and life through letters home and stories brought back on visits, as well as in their retired lives in Scotland. Fraser, for example, notes: Calcutta, that great metropolis of the East, was not altogether alien to me […] I used to hear many tales about the mysterious land of India from my mother, whose brother, Uncle Henry, had left Scotland for India about the same time as she embarked with my Russian father for Archangel. Being close to each other, mother and Uncle Henry (a broker) kept up a steady correspondence, mostly postcards, showing in turn many aspects of life in India and Russia. (Fraser 1989, 11)

Once again, it can be observed how these transnational Scots corresponded across national boundaries, while retaining fraternal/familial links. Mrs Pollard’s grandfather, Alex Wighton from Dundee, went to India in 1892, and was general manager for Sumnuggar, Titaghur and Victoria mills until 1906. His son, too, travelled to India before the First World War and worked as a jute broker in Calcutta for Thomas Duff and Co. He remembered the Delhi Durbar where he saw George V and Queen Mary (Interview 4). Mrs Jean Scott’s father was works manager for Bird & Co. and, though she spent her young life in Glasgow, she (with her sister) went to live in India when she was fifteen and later married a Scot who was the general manager of Thomas Duff & Co. She lived in their Barrakpore compound from 1930. She remembers getting on well with the Indians but found the Americans being racist towards Indians (Interview 2). In both cases, we are dealing with two consecutive generations of Jutewallahs. Mrs Audrey Bennett, whose father went to India in 1899, had several family members who had lived and worked in India from the late nineteenth century. Her aunt married a clerk in the Indian Civil Service. Her father started to work in India with Andrew Yule & Co. in Budge Budge and later moved to Howrah (the industrial twin city of Calcutta, on the other side of the Hoogly) with Bird & Co., after a disagreement, before becoming magistrate in 1919 (Interview 20). Long after the romance of jute had faded, Charles Lorimer, remembers, “how persuasive the managing agents were in talking Dundee men into going to India. Made it sound very simple, paid for flight out,” as they were “desperate to send Scots over there […] but people were, by 1950s [sic.] not so keen to go” (Interview 15). In the 1920s and 1930s, Dundonians had worked with a sense of the land of the Hoogly being their

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‘place’ of lived lives, their ‘home,’ as Fraser’s book title endorses, while Scotland remained the ‘homeland’ they wished to return to after retirement. The ‘here’ and ‘there’ took on different connotations in the 1950s and 1960s, for Calcutta was no longer the ‘here’ anymore. Mrs Diane Reid’s father was one of the last remaining Jutewallahs in Calcutta, working for Andrew Yule & Co. until 1970. In Reid’s interview, we see how conscious she was of her Scottish roots, noting there were no Scottish children in the compound, but “there were a few Scots children” in her Calcutta school. She “would sneak out of the compound to play with her Indian friends” (Interview 19). The film Brian Cox’s Jute Journey features a series of interviews of Scots who worked beside the Hoogly, 9 and who express regret at the lack of open communion with their Indian employees, a lack they were keen to rectify on subsequent visits to former friends and colleagues, decades after all the Scottish Jutewallahs had left their ‘home’ on the Hoogly behind. Today, the names of compounds of the companies on the banks of the Hoogly still tell the story of the Scottish links in the evolution of Calcutta’s slowly revived jute industry. This history of the two cities can be traced today in the names of houses in the city in Dundee, which are reminiscent of life in Calcutta and along the Hoogly. Daphne Barbieri, an amateur film maker from Dundee, has traced the Dundee-Calcutta jute route in The Three J’s, a film she has directed which includes the story of jute alongside the making of jam and the significance of journalism in Dundee. Jute continues to weave a skein of associations between the two cities amongst Dundonian families who have had members working and living in India in the heyday of Calcutta’s jute production days.10 Today the Jutewallahs and their descendents are back ‘home,’11 and thus Calcutta has reverted to the ‘there,’ evoked as a place where the working Scots enjoyed a good salary12 and had the luxury of leisure time, pursuing sports

9

Brian Cox’s Jute Journey is a Hopscotch Films production for BBC Scotland, first broadcast in 2009 and released as a DVD in 2011. For a close analysis of changing markets affecting government protection policies regarding jute and cotton industry in Scotland and employers responses to global trade dynamics, see Tomlinson 2011. 10 For The Three J’s (2007), see the Scottish Screen Archive, at http://ssa.nls.uk/film.cfm?fid=7578. 11 David Miln says they “had originally gone out for the money but had always planned to come home to Scotland” (Interview 9). 12 In 1928, Mr Webster could earn £2, 10 shillings as a mechanic at Cox’s in Dundee. In India he earned £10 (Interview 16).

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and a social life in clubs,13 which many recall as a good life, while Dundee, where the story of the Jutewallahs’ journey to Calcutta and life on the Hoogly once began, is again the ‘here.’

13

Mrs Diane Reid misses “India a lot, especially the ‘club’ existence and lavish lifestyle” (Interview 19).

THE KILTED DRAGON: CONTEMPORARY SCOTTISH FICTION AND THE NEW IMPERIALISM GRAEME MACDONALD “It’s like a re-run. A re-run of the first time.” Nicholas Garrigan, The Last King of Scotland.

Among the distinguished works of anti-colonialism in world literature is Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun (1969).1 Set in the strategically crucial southern Iranian city of Shiraz, during the Second World War Allied occupation of Persia, the novel begins with the wedding of a town governor’s daughter. Notable wedding guests include three kilted Scottish officers – part of the British Army’s Persia and Iraq Command, established in the Imperial State of Iran and in Iraq in 1941-42. They are not the most welcome invitees: the description of their role and behaviour at the celebration is replete with metaphors and symbols of colonisation and disruption. For Zari, the novel’s main character, the troops’ presence is unreal, “like watching a film. Especially with the foreign army in full regalia: Scottish officers in Kilts, Indian officers in turbans” (Daneshvar 2002, 7). As Savushun’s narrative progresses, a stark reality supersedes such decorative display. The officers’ participation proves a deceitful cosmopolitanism, a “soft power” military-political strategy to limit native disquiet and encourage a comprador culture. By the close of the first chapter it is clear that Daneshvar’s novel sees the military presence as a continuance of a long-established British imperialism in the region, rather than the purported establishment of an 1

The novel has sold more than half a million copies. It is translated in English as A Persian Requiem. It is unusual as a resistance novel in that its heroes are a feudal landlord, Yusuf, and his wife, Zari. Yusuf refuses to hand over his harvest to feed the occupying forces, in order to sustain his peasants. Riots erupt and are put down by the occupying forces, the latter including Scottish troops.

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Allied protectorate. A Scottish officer from “Supreme Command” is prominently positioned as a map of Persia, pockmarked with the multicoloured markers of territorial demarcation, and spread out on a guest table. The banquet these Scottish soldiers patronise symbolises the imperial feast they enable. Their kilts are synonymous not with Highland pride and courage, but with perfidious British colonial force seeking control of the strategically crucial Middle-Eastern oil-spigot, to facilitate the Western powers’ resource seizure to come. From the international viewpoint of novels like Savushun, tartan signifies imperialism, a hegemonic international power in which Scotland, and Scottishness, figures as a principal protector and enforcer of Allied state-territorial and capital interests. What this chapter underlines, however, is the way in which contemporary Scottish texts have sought to not only add to the general historical revision of Scots and Scotland’s role in (and after) the formal period of Empire (a revision that has taken place in the last thirty years or so) but also to demonstrate how these texts are preoccupied with the role of Scotland – and also the role of other states and nations alongside Scotland – in the crises of what Derek Gregory (2004) calls “the colonial present”: a continuation and recalibration of recognizably violent imperial structures of colonialising control, exaction, rendition and suppression, on certain dominated territories – such as Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan – within a contemporary world system characterised by the ‘war on terror.’ This is supplemented by an incorrigible neo-orientalism informing cultural and political consciousness in the Global North, where domestic populations experience a form of cognitive disconnection to capitalist modernity’s structural connections to the Global South, a situation where, despite the advances made by postcolonialism, “so many of us […] continue to think and to act in ways that are dyed in the colors of colonial power” (Gregory 2004, xiv). These crises, while neither post-national nor post-British, have a wider terrain. They provide a forum to consider Scotland’s (and Scottish literature’s) role in the contemporary world imperium, embedded as it is – albeit less securely, in the devolutionary age – within British imperial and neoimperial dynamics. They are also very much the machinations of a world system of capitalist modernity, driven by the perpetual imposition of new market and financial conditionings globally, and involving the retention of core-periphery power circuits between North and South. This context is crucial to the present essay’s reading of contemporary Scottish texts’ international and British positioning of Scotland and Scottish characters, operating as they do within and without national, state, and capitalist networks across the globe.

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A text like Savushun might be seen to disrupt any comparative association between Scottish and ‘postcolonial’ literatures with an antiimperialist bent, illustrating why Scottish literature’s relationship to Scotland’s position within and without both Britain and Empire needs more comparative elaboration. Contemporary Scottish texts register but refuse to settle for the now rather careworn description of this relationship as “ambiguous” or “ambivalent” – terms of description that can limit the terrain of discussion, fetishise uncertainty and vaporise conflict rather than compel material explication. There is nothing ambiguous in Scottish literature’s registration of the deleterious effects of Scottish colonial acts on local populations worldwide. Confronted by nightmarish revenants – such as Idi Amin, who, long after his exile from Uganda, continues to haunt Holyrood at the end of Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland (1998) – this literature appeals for a frank exorcism of the inveterate spectre of Scottish participation within British Empire. Contextualised by momentous events surrounding the devolutionary period of the 1990s and further galvanised by the prosecution of the post9/11 wars, historical novels such as Foden’s, and others such as Jonathan Falla’s Blue Poppies (2001) and Glenfarron (2008), James Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003), Andrew Greig’s In Another Light (2004) and Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006), have developed searching questions about the long reach and wide dimensions of Scottish colonial history. This millennial propensity for novels that revisit Scots in Empire affords an opportunity to consider the purposes of interpreting – and indeed remembering – such a history in the contemporary moment of Scotland’s British/international situation in an era of late-Britishness and irresistible currents of uneven globalisation. A devolutionary shibboleth argues that increased autonomy brings greater responsibility for self-reflection. There can be little doubt that Scottish literature’s autonomous growth has taken place in conjunction with a more developed historical awareness of Scottish “complicity” with Empire, but there is a significant correlation to contemporary events that influences the terms of this revision. It is warranted by the fact that the last fifteen years or so have witnessed a resurgent British military interventionism abroad: in Eastern Europe, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East. As military and foreign policy decisions remain sovereign reserved agenda decisions for the UK Parliament, Scotland and Scottish troops have been part of these campaigns. The irony of this needs underlined: as Scotland has devolved, it has remained firmly involved in bloody British foreign endeavours. Some things, it appears, never change, but as I shall point out below, contemporary Scottish literary texts register and critique the

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problem of a devolved Scotland’s contribution to what Tom Nairn (2004) has scathingly described as “USUK” imperialism. The Scottish/British participation in Iraq/Afghanistan – wars described by Kanishka Goonewardena and Stefan Kipfer as proof of “the contemporaneity of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism” in the contemporary world system (2006, 23) – has figured strongly, in various ways, in prominent work: in drama such as Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007), David Greig’s The American Pilot (2005) and Dunsinane (2010), and also in novels such as James Kelman’s Translated Accounts (2001), You Have To Be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004), James Meek’s We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008), A.L. Kennedy’s Day (2008), Iain Banks’s Transition (2009) and Rodge Glass and Dave Turbitt’s graphic novel Dougie’s War (2010). This identifiable body of “war work” has forged explicit connections to the on-going Scottish involvement in what Nairn (2011) has called the “zombie empire” – a recalcitrant militarism abroad wedded to a residual Empire-nostalgia at home, that has done much to contribute to the UK’s adventures in late imperialism. Nairn has argued that the Scottish contribution to “Blair’s Wars” demonstrates a doubled condition of weak statehood (2004, 29-30). This for Nairn signals a failure of devolution, indicating Scotland’s subordination within a neoliberalised UK state, itself subordinate to US “Washington Consensus” interests. In such a context, the extent to which a cultural internationalism can exist relatively autonomously from the problem of Scotland’s complex politico-economic internationalism, within and subordinate to neoliberal globalisation, remains debatable. It does not necessarily follow that a Nairnite vision of a Scotland without (British) Empire would lead to a nation uninterested in domestically profiting from an unequal global system of corporate capitalism, or forging similar alliances with future neo-imperial coalitions.2 The extending compass of contemporary Scottish literature, however, has already shown a willingness to confront this problematic – albeit tentatively – in moving beyond a purely national purview into a world-systemic one. This has involved an increasingly global – and anti-globalising – perspective, in criticism, production, and subject matter. Such an expansion merits an inevitable growth in comparative analyses with what might be deemed ‘extra-Scottish’ literature – work like Savushun that represents Scotland from without. That such work fosters new alignments between Scotland 2

Witness, for example, the Danish military contribution to the US led-coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan. A country of comparable population to Scotland has sent more troops per capita than any other member of that coalition.

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and world literature is clear, but it is also crucial to realise that such comparisons can equally confirm Scotland’s historical and ongoing role in the colonisation and capitalisation of foreign territories. In Savushun, for example, as the demands of Allied occupation threaten the local populace with starvation, Zari has turbulent nightmares. One is particularly revealing: One night Zari dreamt that a two-headed dragon swallowed her husband whole, as he was galloping along on her mare. When she looked closely, she realized that the two-headed dragon looked like Captain Singer, dressed in a Scottish tartan kilt with embroidery all around the edge. (217)

Scotland’s identification as part of a British occupying force in a renowned text of world literature should not be unexpected among those familiar with the two-headed dragon that is the Scottish relationship to Empire. Compared to the texts examined below, however, a novel such as Savushun allows a glimpse of a Scottish agency semi-detachable from Britishness – but only by seeing it firmly entrenched within UK and US foreign policy as it seeks ways and means of enhancing profitability for British (and increasingly transnational) capital development around the globe. The kilted dragon’s name is apposite. A former sewing machine salesman who dons a uniform when war comes, Singer signifies the close relations between the aims and reach of US corporate commerce and Western military might, an alliance that will go on to control the international dynamics of the post-war century. Throughout Savushun his role is to threaten local markets and control capital flows for the Allied powers. Clear literary, geopolitical, and historical connections can be established over this sixty-year period from decolonisation to devolution, between the petrocapitalist rationale for resource grab that Singer represents, and those given by the officer in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, who describes the recent Iraq debacle as a war for “porn and petrol” (2007, 36). The connection between these texts, separated by 40 years, indexes the emergence of what David Harvey (2003), Lindsey German (2007) and others have described as the “new imperialism” from the ashes of the old. This also replants the roots of the significant world context within which this new Scottish writing emerges: the post Cold War struggle for domination of globalised capital and natural resources, a struggle already in evidence prior to 9/11 but intensified thereafter, through a time of what has been called (RETORT 2006) the “permanent war”: the long collusion between hegemonic military, state, and economic imperialisms in which Scotland has figured both centrally and peripherally.

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The appearance of Scottish professionals – soldiers, doctors, educators, civil servants, missionaries – as active drivers and willing and oppressive administrators of British imperial interests is not uncommon in the general and diffuse world literature of decolonisation and anti-imperialism. Although they are sometimes on the fringes of narratives it is perfectly clear that many Scots are not, as Zavi’s dream imagines, “embroidered all around the edge” of Empire. They are in at the centre, exploiting, profiting, killing, maiming and enslaving natives, all for the standard purposes of imperialism: resource plunder, capital accumulation, market prising, and the insertion of a territory and its populace into the uneven world system. There is a tendency to counterbalance this ugliness by insisting on the benefits that Scots provided in Empire. A notable perspective, for example, advocates the refurbishment of a notion of a specifically Scottish Empire that, as Michael Fry’s (2001) book of that name insists, must be differentiated from Anglo-British methods and experiences. In this liberalising narrative, Scottish imperialism is recast as a more “benevolent” process than its Anglo-British counterpart. The occasional violence perpetrated is largely thought eclipsed by the benefits bestowed on peripheral societies by the gift of development: usually parsed via entry into the international free-market. Such a line of thought, wrought from a recently resurgent neoconservative “civilisational” school of late imperial history has met with forceful opposition. Tom Devine’s (2003, 2011) most recent books, for example, have offered convincing evidence to scotch any remaining myths surrounding the severity of the depredations inflicted upon colonised populations by Scots, revealing their emphatic role in slaving and the extent to which the nation’s rapid industrialisation was dependent on the capital inflows of that system. The manner in which the horrors of the Jamaican plantation are conveniently “hidden,” wilfully forgotten or erased (as a slave is from a family portrait) by the returning Scottish plantocrats in James Robertson’s Joseph Knight, indicates a general willingness in recent Scottish literature to confront the terms of this moral, geographical and historical evasion, what Fredric Jameson has called the “systematic occultation of the colony from the metropolis, the systematic occultation of the colonial labor on which imperial prosperity is based […] in which the truth of metropolitan experience is not visible in the daily life of the metropolis itself” (Jameson 2003, 700). The idea that Scottish Empire was more enriching and enlightening begins to pale in such a light. Scots’ skill and propensity for military ferocity in pursuit and defence of a fundamental system of international exploitation that the Black Atlantic and British Empire did much to enable has also been challenged

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as something that has been overly “celebrated.” One of the most successful tourist attractions in Scotland, for example, is Edinburgh’s annual Military Tattoo. Viewed in the shadow of contemporary war literature, and historical work like Devine’s,3 it becomes a grim evocation of military pomp and imperial pageantry, masking the violent and bloody consequences of military campaigns globally. After September 2001 and the financial crash of 2008, it is a particularly unattractive irony, as Gregory Burke (2007, viii) notes in his preface to Black Watch, that “soldiering, like banking, is arguably the only significant indigenous industry to have lasted into the twenty-first century.” This “indigenous” Scottish industry has been “successfully” exported internationally: military accomplishment in the service of Empire and capital. Its grotesque “surrogate” legacy is perversely apparent in a luminous scene from Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland. The central character, the Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan, witnesses a bewildering military parade in the Ugandan provincial countryside, where he is posted in the 1970s: There, in the foothills of the Ruwenzoris, we heard, of all the sounds in the world, bagpipes. As if from nowhere a detachment of soldiers in full Scottish paraphernalia – kilts, sporrans, white-and-red-chequered gaiters, drums and pipes – appeared over a hill, marching into the dirt track just as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the sound of their wonderful lungs of leather skirling out over the bush. They must have been a border patrol. But what a border patrol. Around their tunics of khaki drill were navy blue cummerbunds, and on each head sat a tall red fez with a black tassel. The strangest thing of all is that they ignored us totally, as if we ourselves were part of the whole bizarre parade. Not observers but participants. We sat there, stunned, as they tramped off, and we might well have thought they were nothing but ghosts coming down out of the mist on the Ruwenzoris. Except that the music kept on for miles later. Dumbstruck, we watched them march down the tracks to town, their outlandish figures getting smaller and smaller. (Foden 1998, 109-10)

The emphasis here on the “outlandish” and wholly unexpected appearance of “Scots” military “paraphernalia,” on an army serving a dictatorship enacting dreadful acts on a vulnerable population, is presented within a 3

Renewed emphasis on the connection between Scotland’s military history and its ongoing contribution to national perceptions of Union and Empire has been made in a number of recent texts. See, for example, Ascherson 2011; Davidson 2000; Devine 2003; Devine 2004; Devine 2011; MacKenzie and Devine 2011; Spiers 2006.

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recognisable rubric informing Foden’s and other novels. The scene forces Garrigan to consider his position, not as a passive observer but as an active participant in the “bizarre parade” of Scottish military exhibitionism. The symbols of Scottishness are welded to “native” African garb – a permanent reminder of colonial connection and subjugation, ironically exacerbated by the intended theatrical effect. The serious challenge here, however, is to perceive Scottish militarism as a baleful export. Garrigan may appear a bystander, but he is progressively disavowed of the privilege of ambivalence throughout Foden’s novel: to stand by and do nothing is not an option in Amin’s Uganda. As the violence in the country erupts, symbolic military posturing gives way to the reality of war and bloodshed.4 When the horrific events of the present unfold, Garrigan realises the extent to which he and his countrymen are culpable for the reproduction of an identifiably Scottish legacy in Uganda, “seconded” (Foden 1998, 21) from, but firmly attached to, British imperial state interests. His initial question on the Ugandan crisis, “where I was in it, spectator or actor, I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell” (Foden 1998, 73), is answered. Scots are involved from Speke’s formation of the nation to the post-decolonised pitch for corporate deals by vulturous multinational corporations courting Amin’s favour. They are led in part by a British foreign agency where Scots play influential roles. In the progressive divestment of Garrigan’s “Boy’s Own” African delusions, the novel disrupts settled and comfortable notions of Scottish domestic morality and civility. The question that reverberates from Garrigan’s surprise at the parade is why he should be so shocked by the Scottish element in Uganda’s army. The analeptic structure allows for a sequential plotting encouraging the reader to work out levels of complicity and responsibility for a “tyrannical history” (Foden 1998, 18). “How could I have been so thick headed, I wonder now, so impervious” (Foden 1998, 96), Garrigan retrospectively wonders, revealing the extent of his ignorance concerning the history and impress of Scots’ colonial military prosecutions.5 He realises he has to change the terms of his involvement and somehow publicise it by “writing back” his experiences to a Scottish 4

Gregory (2004) argues that the performative manipulation of military glory and tradition – always crucial to the maintenance of imperial rule – has been crucial in legitimising the use of military power in the neocolonial present. 5 As Amin boasts, it is in Scotland, with Scottish regiments that he learns his military trade – later to fight alongside them against the Mau Mau rebels. Amin’s embarrassing swooning preoccupation with Scottishness is restated throughout the novel, especially his romanticisation of Scottish ‘freedom fighting.’ He signs an arms deal and a colonial agreement at Holyrood.

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public. His “genuine eyewitness account” is “committed to preserving for posterity a fair judgment on a history of blood, misery and foolishness” (Foden 1998, 19). Neal Ascherson argues that work like Devine’s “targets myth – aspects of the past either flamboyantly invented or dropped down the memory hole,” and, in confronting the distortions of Scottish historical memory, lays bare the extent to which Scots are culpable of running and facilitating an injurious system all over the globe (Ascherson 2011, 8). If this imperial memory-loss permeates Scottish civil life, however, it is quite the opposite in Scottish cultural production. Amnesia, as Cairns Craig (2006) has argued, has been an operating principle in the most prominent writing from and about Scotland since 1981. Craig discerns a recurrent condition of memory loss, repression and (crucially) recovery across a range of prominent Scottish literary protagonists, and reads it as a constituent feature of the loss of national historical co-ordinates as modern Scotland is subsumed into Britishness. This trope continues in the contemporary fiction under scrutiny in this chapter, but the national perspective has been expanded and reconditioned to explore the repressed features of the Scottish international experience, with characters again confronting Scottish historical insensibilities and connecting these to geographic limitations. Protagonists experiencing “foreign” wars attempt to report back their experiences to enlighten domestic Scottish audiences. Reports take various forms: a radio wire from Tibet to Rosyth (Blue Poppies); a satellite phonecall from an Afghan battlefield (Descent); desert-base emails to loved ones (Black Watch); a public or classroom talk on imperial and foreign conflict (Glenfarron). Linking periphery to metropole, these communiqués seek to correct misapprehensions or misperceptions that Scots at home may have about these wars – and the involvement of Scots and Scotland in them. Adam Kellas, for example, the war reporter in James Meek’s We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, considers from his Afghan War zone that “he had been sent to this other world to carry out tasks, report back. There were duties and some were his” (Meek 2008, 45). The fragility of this transnational communication is, however, important to emphasise: these scenes do not always proffer the entire truth about the real situation of events on the ground. In one critical scene, Kellas calls his mother from Afghanistan as a nearby tank fires indiscriminately on a distant convoy. She is left hanging on the line asking what is happening, left in the dark as to the degree of Kellas’s own safety – but also, as the reader is made aware, his own degree of culpability (the tank commander is eager to impress a foreign media representative). The novel expresses general

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anxiety concerning the mediatisation and commodification of global war culture, sanitised in the West by a refusal or inability to engage with the conflict’s full meaning and the extent of its horror. Meek’s novel concerns a foreign correspondent’s personal crisis, but this in itself is caused by a general crisis in foreign correspondence. That the reader is made conscious of this irony signals a determination here and in other literature to consider the full spectrum of the “subsumed” Scottish imperial experience. It is not solely a matter of accurate reporting, nor of recovering memory, spatialising consciousness and correcting history. It is equally a response to a condition of contemporary political avoidance – and in places support – of the neoliberal war process as it has rolled over the globe, driven by components of the US/UK/NATO war machine. This writing does not solely tackle amnesia; it ponders physical distancing, political equivocation and cognitive displacement, playing on the difficulty of trying to blot out the deeper reasons for or, evade culpability, in violent acts of war taking place “elsewhere.” It makes apparent connections between past, present and even future wars. It is impossible, for example, not to read a post-9/11 novel such as A.L. Kennedy’s Day (2007), concerning the repressed, traumatic memories and guilty conscience of a Second World War Lancaster Bomber tail-gunner, without connecting its moral, ethical, and techno-political concerns about indiscriminate mass aerial bombardment to the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Iraq by coalition forces, three years prior to the novel’s publication. Similarly, we cannot read Kelman’s US Airport dystopia, You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free, outwith what Naomi Klein calls the “nascent homeland security complex after September 11th,” part of the “recipe for endless, worldwide war” already in evidence prior to that event (Klein 2007, 161). Likewise, in Iain Banks’s sci-fi novel Transition, set in the present, a shadowy and globally powerful organisation of agents with extraordinary powers flit across space and time, aiming to assert their vision of a parallel world order. It is hard to not consider this outwith postGuantanamo geopolitics of torture and rendition. The repression and recovery of historical consciousness and its relation to present crisis is a crucial feature in the contemporary Scottish novel of Empire. Jonathan Falla’s Glenfarron (2008) is framed by the narration of Charlie Dulce, a Scottish Highland doctor (with Polish ancestry), who presents three historical narratives of events in the small Highland village of the novel’s title, from the Second World War to the present. His narration provides regular reminders of Empire’s present-day temporal frame. As in Day, the notion of “working-through” historical trauma in order to negotiate traumatic present events is key, presented via Charlie’s

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musing on the difficult necessity of recalling his wartime memories among foreign injured and displaced. This is related to the wider Scottish historical and ethical consciousness – and its blindspots. Charlie emphasises “constant reconnection” (Falla 2008, 28), by empathising with those involved in the wider grip of international violence, from the Warsaw ghetto to Africa’s wars to the villages of the Highlands. Frustrated by casual domestic racism and parochial indifference to foreign bloodshed, he becomes aware that private memory can only go so far as public history will allow. Charlie “learns the history” nonetheless, propelling the narrative into a wary but rigorous retrospection that progressively widens its objective historical and geographical scope. The final part of Glenfarron, “Mungo’s Park,” develops its invocation of public awareness of the imperial past and establishes its contemporary salience. Mungo Robertson, returned from a long period in Africa, joins forces with a local primary schoolteacher to teach her pupils about his experiences. They call the project “Native Culture and Colonial Oppression” (“Life in Africa, tell them what it’s really like,” requests the teacher, Falla 2008, 204). The most controversial experiences concern Mungo’s proximity to a genocidal war between warring ethnic factions. He is a “distant relative” of the (in)famous Scottish explorer, whose portrait gazes down at him on the wall of his house. The wry tone to Falla’s narrative is deliberately undermined by its engagement with the locals’ willingness to accept Mungo’s points about colonial oppression and its relevance to them. Even Mungo’s liberal enlightened stance on colonial legacy is revealed as misguided. His inability to accept the full horror and culpability of Scots’ practices in Africa, demonstrates the powerful allure of the “benevolence” narrative of positive missionary work. This is publicly disavowed by the arrival of an African delegation that corrects Robertson’s overly heroic accounts of Park. They remind everyone (especially, of course, a new generation of Scots in the primary classroom, “re-enacting” Park’s “adventures”) of the involvement of the famous explorer in the rather less savoury aspects of British imperialism, involving violent land grabs and peasant expropriation. An African ambassadress accuses Robertson of “bowdlerising,” and tells the story of Mungo Park’s second expedition. “This time,” she informs the schoolchildren, “it was not peace and friendship, this time he came with orders from the king of England, who wanted the gold, the ivory, the land and all the glory […] and down the river they go, shooting, shooting, and Africans shooting back” (Falla 2008, 243). “Welcome to our history class” (Falla 2008, 243), she remarks, the pronoun asserting the other perspective on Scots imperial activity, one remarkably close to a text like Savushun.

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Robertson’s insistence that he has made the issue a “matter for public debate” (Falla 2008, 241) from which Glenfarron can only but benefit is left deliberately undeveloped. The terms of that debate go beyond both identitarian celebration of notable Scots’ work in colonial Africa and shame in recognising the violence and dispossession perpetrated by Scots in Empire. They extend into present unequal developmental relations between Scotland/Britain/Africa within the capitalist dynamics of the contemporary world system. It is revealed in the novel that British government sensitivity to the African delegation is not solely for reasons of postcolonial reparation, but for political and economic advantage. Good relations guarantee success for British capital projects in the delegation’s region. Similar concerns are foregrounded in novels like Foden’s and Meek’s, and are a significant component of other novels concerned with the relations between Scottish/North Atlantic capital interests in former colonial territories with “weak” state-structures, such as Iain Banks’s The Business (1999) and Falla’s Poor Mercy (2005). “Never mind the massacres, think of the shareholders,” Robertson acidly remarks (Falla 2008, 220). Glenfarron explicitly critiques the selective manner of foreign interventions made by the UK and others, and in doing so connects with recent controversies surrounding the aims and ethics of the contemporary Iraq/Afghanistan/Libyan campaigns. “Each case on its engineering contracts,” the British Council representative remarks, adding, “Africa’s domestic squabbles are not our affair. You’d not want us to interfere” (Falla 2008, 222). Robertson’s frank reply, “you are bloody interfering!” (Falla 2008, 222) resonates with all the concerns made by the contemporary Scottish novel’s elaboration of the shady networks of capitalism running the new imperialism: the murky collusions between state and corporate power violently expediting the opening and control of foreign markets and prices via the cover of the liberal and moral mission of “the war on terror.” Gregory Burke’s globally successful Black Watch displays most of these features in its particular satire of the blood, kilts and courage heritage. A subtle undermining of the “honourable” legacy of Scottish military forces in imperial history figures strongly in the play’s charting of the historical geography of the Scottish regiment in the world imperium. It does so from the vantage point of a Black Watch unit’s involvement within the 2003 Iraq War theatre. The seductive regimental narrative of the “Golden Thread” is spun in a celebrated scene redolent with physically dynamic theatricality. A soldier is literally spun from his desert camouflage into a kilt in the regimental uniform of the eighteenth century. As elsewhere, the fetish of “Highlandism” is demystified, via the soldier’s

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narration of the concept of the “Golden Thread”: “what connects the past, the present, the future” (Burke 2007, 25). A connecting yarn is spun into a glorious (and commodifiable) imperial history that operates as an effective recruitment tool – a “force multiplier” – over the centuries, attracting members of the provincial working classes who have sparse employment options.6 Lord Elgin appears as a character in this scene, establishing a link between past and present Empire administrators and military propagandists.7 He plays up to a Scots penchant for quasi-nationalist historical romance and engages the seductive appeal of romanticised figures in the present. His supplication to William Wallace cannot be seen as anything other than ironic, given the play’s engagement with the Scots soldier as British enforcer in the contemporary Iraq occupation: “[Wallace] led his men in a fight for freedom from the tyranny of a foreign power and the need then, as now, for Scotsmen to serve their country in its hour of need is as great” (Burke 2007, 26). Recognisably, Churchillian rhetoric is Bravehearted, and made disingenuous, undermining the official rationale for the prosecution of this and many other wars in which Scottish interests have been aggressively militarised. The satire is pointed, forcing questions about the political connection and the economic rationale: exactly what “country” are Scotsmen serving? Scotland or the United Kingdom? Or Scotland and the United Kingdom? Why is “Scotland” in its “hour of need”? Who are the tyrants? The evident duplicity extends to the valences of the word “freedom,” its liberal use and abuse becoming apparent in a progression of lines exhorting past Scottish battles. “Freedom” in Black Watch is a deflating and questionable term, more in line with the historical distortions of Mel Gibson’s commercially populist movie Braveheart and Scotland’s contribution to the Blair government’s imperial collusions with the Bush presidency’s neo-conservatism, than with a Scottish history of anti-British anti-colonialism. “Freedom,” in the context of the texts interpreted in this chapter, can be perceived as something that Scottish contribution to Empire has either quashed (in terms of indigenous liberties) or presented as an avatar for the free-market manoeuvres of capitalist imperialism. The “freedom” in “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is contested and cheapened in this context, flanked by the elusive “Beat,” with its suggestion of oppression, violence and defeat: 6

Potential recruits don’t ask “what for?” but “how much?” Burke (2007, 26). An informed audience might be aware of the Elgin family’s role in capitalising British India and expropriating funds from it. 7

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Bannockburn Beat Freedom Beat Robert the Bruce and that? (Burke 2007, 26)

It is instructive that the stage directions for this scene inform us that the soldiers “resemble a squad assembling and disassembling a military cannon” (Burke 2007, 30), containing a homonym that crystallises the metaphoric aim of Black Watch. The play, like other texts examined here, offers a stringent and critical analysis of the problems, not only of the popular narrative glorification of the Scottish contribution to military neoliberalism, but also of its uncritical and commonplace support in everyday life.8 As the recruitment scene continues, the beat moves on, through past scenes of atrocity and violence against those who resist British imperialism, into the present: We got sent tay Africa tay crush the Mau Mau rebels […] Tobruk […] el Alamein […] Palestine tay take Jerusalem […] Syria […] in Mesopotamia […] Mesopotamia? Beat Where the fuck have I heard that before? Beat Here we are Beat Again (Burke 2007, 33)

8 One of the most memorable lines is near heretical in Scottish historical contexts: “fuck all that Culloden shite” (30).

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The repetition is no accident. The resounding weight of “Again” suggests an interrogation into why history seems to repeat itself, not as farce but as on-going tragedy. The wars for conquest, capital accumulation and global power do not seem to end, and Scotland remains involved in some capacity. Black Watch insists on establishing the nightmarish reality fostered by the power of the “Golden Thread” fairy-tale. Shifting temporalities offer a means for characters not only to engage meaningfully with the past but also, as Richard Lane (2006, 53) has argued, to forge an active sense of historical consciousness and thus of contemporary political awareness. In this sense, the concern with the literary exigencies of private and public memory (and with faulty memorialising) in contemporary texts confirms a general attention to historical accuracy, where new modes of confession about the Scottish role in Empire seem oriented to inspire a more conscientious internationalism, by broadcasting to relatively unenlightened or broadly supportive domestic audiences the real consequences of Scotland’s continuing involvement in delivering “Shock and Awe” on foreign sites and bodies. Despite an insistence in both Scottish intellectualism and some political commentary on the long history of Scottish alignment and empathy with colonial others, it remains questionable how far this extends into Scottish institutions and the general populace, beyond a cursory and abstract nod to those in “worse” positions elsewhere in the world.9 At its basest this can generate a kind of bad faith cheaper than the neoconservative celebrations of Empire’s “liberal” munificence. The drumbeat of “freedom,” as these texts show, can mean enforcing new forms and structures of immiseration, dependency, and domination. Without full and frank admissions and explorations into Scotland’s role in creating and maintaining a system ensuring that the wretched of the earth remain wretched, then declarations of Scotland’s position within both the UK and Empire that stop at “ambiguous,” however well-intended, can appear elusive and duplicitous. The extent to which Scots were (and remain) privately and publicly involved in imperialism in a negative capacity, weighed against the extent to which Scots have sought (often via private means) to critique and resist imperialism, awaits further developments in research. The texts investigated in the present essay suggest that there is no equal balance between such stances. In the Scottish 9

Carla Sassi has written persuasively on this in her book Why Scottish Literature Matters. See especially Chapter 5, “Rule Caledonia: the ambiguous relation with Empire” (2005, 83-102).

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context the line between resistance to cultural imperialism and actually existing imperialism within the world system is challenged by literary examples that forcefully reiterate and resituate the terms of a connection, hitherto either weakly conceived or riven by the kinds of contradiction pointed out by scholars theorising Scotland’s – and Scottish culture’s – relationship with Empire. Contemporary texts provide opportunity to study the terms and expressions of this contradiction, but they do so from a position that reveals the sizeable degree to which Scotland has been, and remains, deeply imperial.

SCOTLAND’S OTHERS: RELATIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS

“I, DAUGHTER”: AUTO/BIOGRAPHY, FRACTURED HISTORIES, AND FAMILIAL QUEST FOR “SCOTCH BLOOD” IN GRENADA AND THE GRENADINES JOAN ANIM-ADDO “In 1863 he had left the braes and lochs of Scotland to find his fortune in the British West Indies […]. He was my grandfather.” Hugh Mulzac, A Star to Steer By.

Rethinking what empire meant, as Kathleen Wilson frames the process (see Wilson 2006, 212), sometimes leads to questions of family history1, though rarely to black women concubines and Scottish identity, specifically in terms of fatherhood in the post-slavery, nineteenth-century Caribbean. Nonetheless, my initial research, which sought to explore oral family history indicating Caribbean-Scottish connections as familial, led to the discovery of a problematic Scottish-Caribbean patriarchy pivotal to “A Brief History of Juliana ‘Lily’ Mulzac of Grenada and the Grenadines” (Anim-Addo 2007a, hereafter referenced as “Brief History”). In this respect, and borrowing from Wilson, “Brief History” may be said to be “an intervention into the very nature of disciplinary protocols and paradigms,” seeking to counter the effacement of “certain sorts of people, practices and stories from the archive” (Wilson 2006, 212). Taking as my starting point an approach to recuperating Caribbean women’s history by interlinking archival search with “autobiographics” (Gilmore 1994) and oral history, as in “Brief History,” the present chapter addresses questions of methodology and advances a concern with the absence of Caribbean-Scottish familial history and creole family patterns, 1

Arguably, much recent critical imperial/ new imperial work is about networked, prominent and therefore white families as, for example, Hall (2002) illustrates. Yet, questions concerning what constitutes the archive, who gains access, and by what means, mask larger questions of knowledge, power and inclusion.

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particularly the invisibility of Creole women.2 “Brief History” highlighted a model of imperial fatherhood problematising Scottish identity in the Caribbean. Revisiting this, I engage Patricia Mohammed’s direction that “to engender history itself, the discipline must be challenged from both theoretical and methodological perspectives” (Mohammed 1995, 20). I also examine the auto/biographical as an apparatus of truth telling (Ashley, Gilmore and Peters 1994) and the historical within the borderlands of African-Caribbean women’s history. Concerned with the recuperative project, specifically in relation to an erased, and traumatic Caribbean family history, I contextualise my enquiry within a tradition articulating racial injustice (Lorde 1982, Hooks 1990), a critical revisiting (Hutcheon 1988) of the history of the present and deployment of the domestic space as “an enduring site of historical evidence” (Burton 2003). I probe the boundaries of historical methodology concerning the retrieval and articulating of historical evidence, and I raise questions principally about the absence of Caribbean family history “in relation” (Glissant 1997) to Scottish imperial networks, especially in Grenada and the Grenadines. Giovanna Covi prefaces her Introduction to Caribbean-Scottish Relations with an epigraph from Glissant’s “Cross-Cultural Poetics” (Covi 2007a, 7): What is the Caribbean in fact? A multiple series of relationships. We all feel it, we express it in all kinds of hidden or twisted ways, or we fiercely deny it. (Glissant 1989, 139, my emphasis)

At the same time, Covi stresses “interconnections,” (Covi 2007b, 13) which runs as a central theme throughout this edited collection. The present chapter develops the focus on interconnections by further pursuing the “hidden or twisted” that is emblematic of the “antiromance” of Caribbean history.3

2 At the same time, as the case of the high-profile Mrs Seacole illustrates, it is not that visibility necessarily attracts historical enquiry into the familial. Often, the absence of focus on the familial tells more about the archive available. Yet, it remains intriguing that so little appears to have been found about this highly visible nineteenth-century Creole who described herself as “only a little yellow” even as she affirmed her Scottish familial connections; see Seacole ([1857] 1984). 3 Baucom rightly identifies within Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) the crucial “antiromance narrative” signifying Caribbean genealogy for those who can only inherit the “noise” of the Atlantic, in contrast to those who can find a clear genealogical line to their ancestors (Baucom 2001, 2).

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Contextualising Caribbean-Scottish Relations: Questioning Scottish Identities Juliana’s “Brief History” is re-presented here as one of contradictions that remain messy, in part because my research in this field is work in progress. Additionally, as research drawing substantially on oral methods, it should arguably resist the traditional historian’s inclination to make the narrative, as history, appear seamless. Importantly also, it is reliant upon a piecing together of fragments discarded or disregarded by academic historians. This precarious history is about someone who, given the name Juliana Mulzac, became known as “Lily.” A reading of “Brief History” readily yields the information that Lily was my grandmother. In flagging concerns regarding knowledge and subjectivity, I am indicating an interest in methodology, discussed, below, to take particular account of the subjective. Lily’s birth certificate was never found. In 1862, less than two decades before her birth, The Blue Book for St. Vincent (and the Grenadines where Lily would be born) noted “no registration of births and deaths” (“Brief History,” 57). With no information discovered about Lily’s mother, and no birth certificate, attention turns to the man who fathered Lily. Indeed, “Brief History” represents the “familial quest” as one with the primary goal of verifying Lily’s Scottish connection through paternity. The quest, based on a fading memory of Lily’s insistence that she had Scottish connections, led shockingly to the discovery in Christ Church, Carriacou, where she was married, that Lily was the illegitimate and illiterate daughter of Charles Mulzac. Furthermore, Lily would prove to be one of many “outside” daughters fathered by the influential Scottish entrepreneur, wealthy enough in or about 1863 to “lease” Union Island, an approximately 2000 acre sugar and cotton estate. Charles Mulzac’s grandson, Captain Hugh Mulzac, would write in his memoir, A Star to Steer By (1963), of the people of his grandfather’s Union Island: All 5,000, save one, were of African origin, the descendants of slaves captured, bound and carried across the ocean in the centuries-long slave trade between the West Coast of Africa, the West Indies, and the eastern shores of the United States. Their forefathers’ lives had been a hell on earth, and they, “emancipated,” had achieved a kind of purgatory. (Mulzac 1963, 7, my emphasis)

Notoriously, Robert Wedderburn, Jamaican son of James Wedderburn of Inveresk and his enslaved concubine, Rosannah, had given similarly damning testimony of Scottish slave-holding paternity (Wedderburn

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[1824] 1991). Who were the Scots in the Caribbean whose children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren might so strongly indicate their role as perpetrating “purgatory” in the region even after the abolition of slavery? How does history account for the silenced, and how might historians reconfigure the many lives, like Lily’s, that are effaced? While Lily’s father’s surname, Mulzac, appears to hold its own story of earlier European family migration, nonetheless, preoccupied with the difficulties of piecing together Lily’s Caribbean story, her father’s genealogy awaits further research. Unmistakably, though, Lily’s father is celebrated in Union Island’s history as a patriarch and Scotsman, information that he must have shared.4 At the same time, Union Island historian Jacques Daudin, emphasises that the “abolition of slavery did not bring about any freedom to previous slaves” [on the island] and that “patriarchal paternalistic exploitation close to the one of slavery continued” (Daudin 2000, 75). On Union Island, several memorials survive to honour Charles Mulzac’s part in the region’s history. Little is known about his wife, who was not Lily’s mother, and less is known of his practice of forms of “patriarchal paternalistic exploitation” such as concubinage, which waged war on African-Caribbean women and family life to produce disenfranchised offspring such as Lily, one of many extra-marital or outside daughters, in Caribbean terminology, of the wealthy Scot. In addition to his second wife, described by Captain Mulzac as “a native,” Mulzac took as many black women concubines as he desired. While his grandson’s memoir does not mention the name of his grandmother (Charles’s wife), it references her four children: two boys and two girls. However, although neither of the Captain’s legitimate aunts surfaced in my research, a network of Charles Mulzac’s outside daughters, including half-sisters of Lily, Louisa, Sounoon, Theresa and May would emerge. Notwithstanding my attempts to render coherent Lily’s extended family, the scale of Charles Mulzac’s extra-marital fathering challenged the research to its core. Louisa proved pivotal to the network of the Scot’s many outside daughters by his black concubines. She had remained most strongly attached to Lily, attended her wedding, signed the marriage register, and her grandchildren would be “taken in” by Lily in time of need. Louisa’s eldest granddaughters, Glenora Myrtle and Theodora, would strongly preserve family links with Union Island including attendance and 4 Mulzac Square in Clifton, Union Island proudly commemorates the patriarch’s part in the island’s history, see “Brief History,” 86.

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networking at family reunions. Another outside daughter remembered at reunions was Sounoon, who survives in Lily’s storytelling because Llewellyn, Lily’s firstborn,5 on meeting Sounoon for the first time and unable to comprehend that she was his aunt, refused to kiss her, since to the young child the visiting aunt appeared to be a white person in whom he could see no traces of relation. Sounoon’s granddaughter would later confirm that the group of sisters were all “red” and that Sounoon was a pet name for her grandmother, Elizabeth. There was also Princess, whose journey would take her to Trinidad where she would live and die. There was Theresa, who lived much of her life on the island, and there was Luvinia, whose studies would be mysteriously frustrated. While the outside Mulzac girls would, in time, travel and settle mostly outside the Caribbean region, the islands’ telephone directories continue to testify to the legacy of Scottish familial connection through names such as Campbell, Macdonald and Grant – surnames now as Caribbean as they were once Scottish. Furthermore, it appears that the smaller islands, particularly in the Eastern Caribbean, might yet yield clearer traces of Caribbean-Scottish family history. That Lily’s Union Island, one of the smaller islands (less than fourteen square miles) in the chain known as the Grenadines, would host a series of family reunions for the Mulzacs, Stewarts and Wilsons, among others, meant that a mix of generations would be back here to probe and retell family stories, renew connections and reconfirm the oral as a medium of family history. Lily’s migratory pattern, though, would take a northward trajectory through the chain of islands from Union to Carriacou, where she would spend her later childhood before marrying and moving to Grenada.

Rethinking Empire Recent scholarship has focused on the role of Scottish imperial networks particularly in the eastern Caribbean, where, as Douglas J. Hamilton underscores, Scots “could scarcely be considered anything but central to the white population of the Windward Islands” (Hamilton 2005, 221). At the same time, networked approaches have afforded “new imperial” scholars invaluable insight into imperial lives (Lambert and Lester 2006) and into the history of Scots in the Caribbean (Lambert 2008). Yet, the question of history “in relation,” as poet and philosopher Glissant underscores, remains narrowly addressed. Wilson notes that critical imperial studies function “less to replace conventional narratives […] than 5

The name of Lily’s first-born son is incorrectly given in “Brief History,” 81.

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to reconfigure them” (Wilson 2006, 212). The task becomes, then, one of “conceptually rethinking what the empire meant from the point of view of their different partisans and opponents” (Wilson 2006, 212). In beginning to reconfigure Scottish imperial networks in the island of Grenada, my intention is to ask, not only who the “different partisans” and their real and potential “opponents” were, but also how they operated “in relation” to each other. Specifically, I am interested in the absent “Other” of these networks, in particular, women and African heritage peoples. Researching for the Caribbean-Scottish Relations project, I came across The St Andrew’s Journal, 1828, in the archive of Grenada’s public library.6 This important find, marking both Grenadian-Scottish history and a Grenadian literary tradition, proved invaluable not the least in its Scotcentricity. In the first number, referred to as “our provincial miscellany,” a report described a “festival annually held by the Grenada Agricultural Society”: Among the haut ton were: the amiable misses Rowley; the equally amiable Misses Mc Ewan, and Misses Creft, the Hons. J. H. Bent, G.G. Munro, John Berkley and Owsley Rowley, Mr, Mrs, and Miss Longchamps, Mr and Mrs Edgar from St Vincent, with Francis Yelvington Checkley, Esq and his fascinating lady. The Revd. Mr Checkley, Major-General Sir James Campbell, K.C.B, present Governor […] (The St Andrew’s Journal 1828, 5)

Voyeuristic peep at high society, or comedy of planters’ manners at a private event, the writing presents imperial networkers, among them several Scots, at play. While the brief glimpse of planters in family groupings underscores the reality that women functioned in relation to imperial “careerists,” it also opens up questions, discussed further below, of the continued absence of black Creole women from the new imperial histories.7 Another extract, “A Record of Fashion,” offers a clue to black absence: A small but select party was invited to meet His Excellency Sir James Campbell, yesterday at Belle Air House. The dinner, which was served at seven o’clock, and was a very superior one, consisted of almost every

6

The St Andrew’s Journal and La-Baye Miscellany 1 (1828). I have drawn on material presented in the paper, “Writing and Resistance: Tracing a Grenadian Tradition” at the “The Islands in Between,” 14th Annual Eastern Caribbean Islands Cultures Conference, St Georges, Grenada, 3-5 November 2011. 7 “Creole” is used in this instance to denote all those for whom the region is home by birth.

174 “I, Daughter”: Auto/biography, Fractured Histories, and Familial Quest delicacy the season affords: among which were wild ducks and other game; the wines too were of first rate quality. (The St Andrew’s Journal 1828, 22)

Disregarding the “select party,” who prepared the “very superior” dinner? Such a menial task would hardly have fallen to “the misses Rowley,” or McEwan or the matrons of the “haut ton.” What comes sharply into evidence at this juncture is the exclusivity of the imperial networks in representing humanity as that of the planters. Yet, the sumptuous dinner speaks to an unarticulated connectivity between the absent banquet makers in their diverse menial roles and the imperial network favoured by the Scottish governor. If The St Andrew’s Journal confirms the publication as Grenadian as it is Scottish, it is also assuredly not of the people but of the haut ton, the imperial elite, the dominant, most powerful group. In this respect it is useful to consider relatedness that is powerfully read in absence, a clue to which is unmistakably the date, 1828, indicative of an era of Atlantic slavery, a time when it was convenient for much of the European world, especially as colonisers, to assume a more or less exclusive humanity, as I have argued elsewhere, particularly in Anim-Addo (2008). In Grenada, as in much of the Atlantic world, the term “slave” was used to indicate someone held to be less than human, who could be bought and sold as cattle, even when imperial networkers and their potential “opponents” knew the “slave” to be both human and desirable. In such light, Grenadian historian Edward L. Cox’s claim that “a sizable proportion” of the island’s approximately nine per cent of “coloured” slaves were “the offspring of black slave mothers and white fathers who later freed some of their children” (Cox 1984, 26) signals a complication about absence as familial, and liberty as the gift of the patriarch. So, when Governor Campbell, in the same year of the journal’s publication, 1828, responded to a statistical query from the Colonial Office emphasising that there was no need for the law “to make any distinction between free black and free coloured persons” (Cox 1984, 25), he was also obscuring the “coloured” as in familial relation to imperial networks.8 Concerning the Campbell clan in Grenada, already by 1763 Alexander Campbell owned 1,863 acres in St Andrews.9 Similarly, G.G. Munro, listed in the journal, owned three plantations totaling 1,106 acres in the 8

Cited in Cox (1984, 25). See also Campbell to Bathurst, May 31, 1826, National Archives (London) CO 101/66. 9 Douglas Hamilton, quoted above, offers more details about the planter, Alexander Campbell, see, for example, Hamilton (2005, 152-53).

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parish of St Andrews. It seems no coincidence that St Andrew’s (parish) was commemorated in the journal’s name. Not only did it evoke the homeland for many Scots, it also celebrated their success in terms of plantation acreage and slave holding. Importantly, it is in this early writing of people “in relation” despite absence, wilful, or not, that we further probe “conditions and practices” informing Caribbean modernities, for The St Andrew’s Journal also marks the beginning of a written literary tradition on the island of Grenada. Subsequent generations of the excluded or absent Grenadians would find themselves writing within and against that tradition.10

Including Women: Lady Nugent’s Gaze and Beyond Although the American Lady Nugent’s early nineteenth-century observations referred to Jamaica, the sweep of her gaze from public to domestic regarding Scots in the Caribbean allows a valuable shift of focus in this discussion. Lady Nugent, wife of Jamaica’s Governor General George Nugent, was an attentive observer – her comment that “almost all the agents, attornies, merchants and shopkeepers, are of that country [Scotland], and really do deserve to thrive in this, they are so industrious,” resonates with present interest in Scottish imperial careerists (Nugent [1839] 2002, 29).11 Nugent, while not concerned to flatter, showed keen interest in one overseer whom she refers to as “a civil, vulgar, Scotch officer, on half-pay.” Neither the overseer’s appearance, “a dingy, sallowbrown complexion” with “two yellow discoloured tusks, by way of teeth,” nor the management of his rum distillery, seemed of particular interest to Nugent. Rather, taking as pretext the “intolerable” smell of the rum, Nugent chose to visit the overseer’s house where she could investigate his domestic arrangements. It is worth emphasising that Nugent’s was an account meant as her private record. As such, it offers a view of the domestic among imperial networkers that remains obscured. Regarding the Scots, she observes their behaviour at the level of public function (“they say he is a good overseer”), and she notes a certain clannishness (“so at least his brother Scotchman told me.”) Yet, by entering the overseer’s house while her 10 The idea of writing against a tradition of absence has perhaps been most strongly articulated in African-Caribbean women’s writing as breaking silence. See AnimAddo 2007b, particularly chapter 4. 11 All references are to Nugent ([1839] 2002, 29). See also Pollard 2007 concerning Scots in Jamaica.

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party undertakes the official visit, Nugent also lifts the veil on a differentiated domestic arrangement of significance to imperial networkers, and begins to address the question: where are the women? Located mostly at intersecting domestic “nodes” within the networks, women are seldom visible. The domestic, however, even through Nugent’s lens, offers a bifurcated view. On the one hand, Grenada’s St Andrew’s Journal, for example, affords a public view of “imperial officials” among whom “Scots were noted for both their visibility and aggressiveness” (Landsman 1999, 472). Thus the “amiable misses Rowley” in such context might reasonably be expected to be so disposed since Owsley Rowley, presumably their father, was a person of considerable wealth on the island. In the parish of St John, Rowley owned four estates totalling 843 acres, the greater part of which produced sugar cane, which in turn meant owning the requisite numbers of slaves for sugar production. Yet, from the 1763 survey, St Andrew’s parish topped the island’s parishes with some 5,100 slaves on its sugar estates (Paterson 1780). Women, including Scots, were slaveholders, a role placing slaveholding women at the intersection of the domestic and imperial careering. Yet, they were rarely identified as such. One, Mrs Kearton, is mentioned in the Royal St Vincent Gazette and Weekly Advertiser (27 May 1820) only because her slave, Tom, had run away. That the luckless slave was caught, probably thanks to the reward of four dollars offered in the notice, came to light only the following month, when Mrs Kearton’s slaves were sold at public auction (17 June 1820). Historian Hilary Beckles confirms that “elite white women represented less than 10 per cent of all white women in the slave societies of the Caribbean” (Beckles 2003, 146). Moreover, having fewer slaves, unlike their male counterparts, they owned mainly or exclusively female slaves. Entering the overseer’s house, as Nugent recalls on 1 October, she claims that she “talked to the black women.” Her particular informant, described as “a tall black woman, well made, with a very flat nose,” and “thick lips,” appears to show Nugent crucial signifiers of her domestic life with the Scottish overseer, namely “her three yellow children.” Nugent’s interest seems to lie in the woman’s status as “the favourite Sultana of this vulgar, ugly, Scotch Sultan.” Yet, if Nugent distorts and orientalises the Scot, she similarly misrepresents the black woman in classifying her as “the overseer’s chere amie.”12 This is because Nugent fails to take into account that the woman, whose babies are the real objects of curiosity, 12

The term is worth noting especially for its French signifiers, more applicable to Grenada, a former French colony, than Jamaica.

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could in all probability be merely a slave, functioning in the many ways that a slavewoman was required to do in Atlantic slavery. Beckles explains: “[i]n real terms, slavery led to the legal recognition of sex with the enslaved as an intrinsic and discrete social and economic product” (Beckles 2003, 147, my italics). The widespread nature of “sex with the enslaved,” and of the enslaved as concubines, with its meanings to black women necessarily negotiating the sexual realities of slavery, were of little concern to Nugent as representative of the white elite. Yet, as Beckles underscores, for the enslaved woman “sex was demanded as a physical act in much the same way that labour was expected” (Beckles 2003, 147-8). At the same time, Nugent’s meanings in the statement that “no man here is without one” are important to the discussion, particularly in the heightening of the familial as imperial, intimate and everyday “contact zone” (Pratt 1992, 4). The fractured and disparate lives of many black people with Scottish familial connection, from Dido Elizabeth Lindsay to Robert Wedderburn to Lily Mulzac, attest to this.13 In Grenada, where Lily settled after marriage and raised her family, the activity of Scottish imperial networks had been pronounced. How the Scots contributed to the island’s substantial “coloured” population is not known, especially since in slavery it became important to deny paternity in order to minimise claims against white planters’ estates.14 Nonetheless, one way to understand these concerns is to consider the Caribbean family formed within such a context as not just the underbelly of imperial networks, revealing of patriarchy, race, and gender, but as networks in their own right. In this light, there can be identified through Lily’s history another set of networks, largely invisible, that interlink with the official colonial and imperial networks on Union Island and St Vincent. Thus, crucial though erased, the outside children of the black women born in post-emancipation conditions of near enslavement comprised a distinctive network of kinship. That network, marked by a “redness” of skin to which Sounoon’s granddaughter and many of the islanders attest, would also mask the reality that, even as Charles Mulzac entered the phase of grandfatherhood to his legitimate grandchildren, he himself was

13 I have written elsewhere about Dido Elizabeth Belle. Interestingly for this discussion, it is with Lord Mansfield, who presides over Campbell’s case, that the young black woman comes to reside when she is brought from the Caribbean by Sir John Lindsay. See Anim-Addo 2007b, chapter 1; Adams 1984. 14 See Beckles 2003; Cox 1999.

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“breeding” young black women on his plantation.15 At this stage, Lily, his outside daughter was born, seven years before his grandson, Hugh. While her mother’s name does not survive, ironically, Lily carried the patriarch’s surname, Mulzac. Whether Lily’s mother died giving birth to her daughter is not known. Family stories state only that she died “young,” implying that she was likely to have been a young mother. The motherless Lily would in due course live with godparents, marry a sailor, and travel with him to the island of his birth, Carriacou, where more familiar Scottish names such as Mc Intosh, Mc Donald, Maclaren, Cruikshank and Ross are commonplace. From Carriacou, and as a married woman, Lily would travel further south to Grenada, of importance to Scottish history for its famed imperial networks.16 Although Juliana is unlikely to have heard of McQueen, she would settle and raise a family less than five minutes’ walk away from the Westerhall plantation which he managed.17 That the focus on so-called “Scottish imperial networks” renders the families of those Scottish networkers invisible, and particularly the women within them, is important. Concerning black women at varying nodes of the networks, more accurately than many commentators of the time, Frederic William Naylor Bayley noted in his Four Years’ Residence in the West Indies (1830) that “with her white protector […] she lives as concubine (not companion), cannot mingle with the guests, her children illegitimate” (Bayley 1830, 498). It needs hardly be stated that black women concubines would bear generations of Caribbean children to carry the fragile memory and burden of Caribbean-Scottish family connections through concubinage.

15

The term “breeding,” widely used in the Caribbean, retains an understanding of sexual meanings of chattel slavery and its aftermath in the region.

16

Historiographical work on such networks involves a particular focus on James MacQueen, who occupied key roles within sugar plantations in Grenada (Lambert 2008). After Emancipation, McQueen’s entrepreneurial zeal turned to the postal service within which he used to advantage his pro-slavery knowledge of black people (Anyaa Anim-Addo, 2011). 17

Given the prevalence of family and clan in relation to Scots abroad, it is probably no coincidence that “M’Queen” is mentioned in the St Andrew’s Journal (1828, 33).

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Memory and Historical Truth when the Body is the Archive Lily’s “Brief History” attempts to articulate a differentiated “dwelling in the archive” from that described in Burton (2003), in order to highlight the archive as often corporeal, signified in markers of skin tone, and subject to the fragility of memory. Thus, the “yellow” bodies of the unnamed black concubine’s offspring in Nugent’s diary entry, above, like Lily’s body, carry a history that touches the past, documented or not. For Lily, perhaps because she had been left motherless, family became especially important and served to shape her later life as matriarch. 18 Key to her “Brief History,” however, is that Lily’s body served as an archive that required skills of listening. How much the body as “redness” or hair texture functioned as a reminder of her story cannot be gauged, though in terms of the pigmentocracy left in the wake of racialised slavery, these physical features mattered.19 What remains important is that within Lily’s body resided both knowledge and signifier of Scottish connection on Union Island. That she insisted upon passing on the specificity of that connection as Scottish by word of mouth would make listening crucial to the process of attempting a genealogy, even taking into account Derek Walcott’s reminder of the “elemental noise” of Atlantic history that obfuscates, and Baucom’s more explicit references to Foucauldian thought on “faults” and “fissures” that “threaten the fragile inheritor” (Baucom 2001, 3).20 Part of the “noise” of Lily’s story rests in the need for oral communication since, being illiterate, she had no other means to record, retrieve or disseminate such knowledge. The oral, though demanding of critical listening skills on the part of the researcher, is constitutive of Lily’s agency. “I, Daughter” in the title of this chapter is taken from the poem, “Rude Fruit,” in my collection, Haunted by History (1998), published almost two decades before Lily’s “Brief History.”21 Such musings as methodology signal an approach to recuperating a missing African- Caribbean women’s 18 This is discussed in more detail in the focus of Lily as matriarch in “Brief History.” 19 See, for example, Covi’s reading of the representation of such markers in published literature of the region (Covi 2007b). 20 It is notable that Lily’s oral methods contrast sharply with Mary Seacole’s written history as “adventure,” a distinction which underscores also meanings of public rather than private lives. 21 “Rude Fruit” comments on the tradition of writing, signified in Shakespeare’s King Lear, which engages the bastard son, Edmund. In the poem, I question the invisibility of the “bastard” (so-called) daughter.

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history by interlinking archival search with “autobiographics,” oral and written (Gilmore 1994). Specifically, this takes account of the fragmented nature of much extant historical evidence concerning African-Caribbean lives. In this context, “I, Daughter” juxtaposed against the term auto/biography, itself complicated by notions of relationality, offers an indication of tensions within the methodological task of recuperation. To this end, Gilmore importantly underscores not “the self derived from Augustine” but “where self-invention, self-discovery, and selfrepresentation emerge within the technologies of autobiography” (Gilmore 1994, 42). While Gilmore is concerned with both the practice of selfrepresentation and the reading of it, my interest is defined by a specific concern with self/Other simultaneous representation which takes into account an important cultural orality. Autobiographics and familial oral history, then, become, as in Lily’s history, methodological tools for textualising and representing missing women’s histories, and allow a particular engagement with subjectivity.22 At the same time, “Brief History” signifies how and why Caribbean discourse is littered with terms such as “fragmentation,” “fractures,” “fissures” and “discontinuities,” since Lily’s post-slavery narrative begins with a meagre remnant of oral family history, key to which were the references to Union Island and the surname, Mulzac. In this respect, a crucial element of Lily’s story lies with questions of identity. Moreover, since Lily could neither read nor write, a critical question concerned how to position this illiterate, domestic, Caribbean woman as subject. If, as Gilmore argues, “an exploration of a text’s autobiographics allows us to recognize that the I is multiply coded in a range of discourses” (Gilmore 1994, 42), then it becomes evident that a primary discourse that must be considered for its significance to cultures like Lily’s is that of orality. In order to retextualise subjects such as Lily, the oral must be privileged as crucial to a representation of the oral subject’s agency. So, far from avoiding questions of genre, auto/biography, as I consider it, challenges and resists boundaries of genre, including academic history. With Lily long deceased, yet central to the story, and her children in their eighties only able to tell partial or conflicting stories, it seemed important to discover how one might proceed with substantiating or verifying family myth which might materialise into 22

The likelihood is that a commitment like that demanded of family history would be required to retextualise and bring to light lives such as Lily’s and their connection with official histories.

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family history. I needed also to come to terms with the meanings to be found in Lily’s story and to consider how they pertain to the task of assuming auto/biographical agency, particularly within the larger field of women’s or family history. I refer to auto/biography because the signifying “I” in this history underscores the necessarily subjective ramifications of the history. I needed, too, to consider the question: Why does it matter? Reflecting on why Lily’s “Brief History” matters, it should be emphasised that the black family suffered incalculable trauma within Atlantic slavery and its aftermath in ways that still remain insufficiently understood. This is because the reliance on an unrelenting attack upon African family life was central to Atlantic slavery. Black women bore the brunt of this unspeakable history in that their children were not legally their own, though traditionally they carried them bound to their bodies when they could, even as they came to understand that their children could and would be removed from them at will.23 Those children, according to slave laws, belonged to their masters. Surprisingly in relation to Lily’s story, so much of the pattern would hold true well into the latter half of the nineteenth century. Regarding this socio-legal practice, Beckles argues: “Chattel slavery, therefore, an institution built upon private property rights in persons, was thoroughly gendered in design and functions” (Beckles 2004, 230).24 The discontinuities of paternity established in the region by imperial and colonial fathers would persist well after the end of slavery, leaving silence and, with it, a fractured family history. Pivotal to Lily’s history would be the familiar Atlantic slavery question concerning her unknown father, especially given the archive of skin and story that her body carried. To counteract familial silence and retextualise the oral, Lily’s “Brief History” required an inventiveness that I undertook in part as a poetic one.25 While a poetic strategy is not a necessity, it was a skill at my disposal which should not obscure the need in researching family history, for inventiveness in terms of the range of strategies deployed, since the 23

A more detailed discussion is to be found in Anim-Addo 2007b. While space does not permit engagement with Beckles’ larger argument concerning the marginalizing of black paternity, this certainly links with patterns of colonial paternity established regionally. 25 One of my recent poems had distilled oral familial information to construct Lily (Juliana) as sister to the more famous male, Captain Hugh Mulzac. My preoccupation, then was: who was Juliana’s mother? No one was certain, and documented records were not found. Piecing together fragments included mention of an Annie Robertson who might have been Juliana’s mother. 24

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interview readily reveals its limitations in such a context.26 Thus, one stage in the process of attempting to verify Lily’s familial position crystallised in the following, which became both a reflexive tool and aide-mémoir to further probing or informal interviews: Juliana, born in Union Island, 1889, was daughter of Annie Robertson, mother of boys: Hugh, John and Lammie, the story goes, and Juliana’s three sisters: Princess, Louisa and Sue-noon. But who was brother and sister? And who was half? These things not marked.

That my version of history, in verse, seemed distinctly at odds with Captain Mulzac’s narrative proved troubling enough to demand further verification. Yet, the value of the strategy lies in its rendering apparent tensions within the methodology that must account for the oral. Furthermore, the means by which I constructed Lily’s “Brief History” underscores questions of knowing and personal knowledge with reference to a lived Caribbean cultural context heavily reliant upon the oral word signifying “real experience.” Such concern interrupts silencing and a historical lack of knowing. By this means, a domesticating of Glissant’s “Relation” within the familial, and a synthesising of the oral word as historical knowledge, comes the effort implied in Brathwaite’s call for “interdisciplinary” cultural historians prepared “to listen” in order to construct “a story that becomes […] part of the blood and the dream” (Brathwaite 1977, 6).27

Attending the “Forge of Memory”: A Conclusion Locating Mulzac Square in Union Island, with its information board memorialising Mulzac, the Scot, gave important material clues to Lily’s history. Finding her father’s name on her marriage certificate confirmed a difficult familial history, specifically that of African-Caribbean women’s history of concubinage. Yet, attempting to recuperate Juliana’s history is part of the important task undertaken through a feminist process that 26 At the same time, attempting to make sense of history has led to my writing in a range of genres, including poetry and drama. 27 The process might also be compared to Audre Lorde’s autobiographical writing of Zami (1982), which engenders a “multiply marked subject position of poet and essayist,” as Gilmore suggests, to represent the histories of communities of women” (Gilmore 1994, 43-44) and to disrupt the predictable singleness of the autobiographical narrative.

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strategically positions the self in order to re-present significant Others hitherto rendered invisible through historical discourse. Lily, deligitimised as both the “bastard” and daughter, the much stereotyped “tragic” mulatto already known in Atlantic writing, is more than textually linked to the “Inarrator” of the poem, both of whom speak out of the archive of their skin, “yellow” as Nugent identifies it, or “red” as the islanders continue to name such visible racial mixing.28 Writing of the time, even such as Bayley’s, for example, though sympathetic and clear regarding Scottish connections, understood little of familial meanings: In describing them [“coloured people”] it may be well to give the ladies the precedence, and I may perhaps gain some favor among them by enumerating the personal charms which have captivated, in their day, the hearts of English, Irish and Scotch, but more especially of the latter. (Bayley 1830, 493)

In addition to the scant material evidence that survives, then, attention to Walcott’s metaphorical “forge of memory” (Walcott 1990) is strongly indicated in histories such as Lily’s, despite the methodological risk-taking involved. As a direct consequence of plantation history, family history that includes black women is woefully absent from historical works of the region.29 At the same time, in seeking to synthesise the oral word as historical knowledge while interrogating how such knowledge might contribute to the debate concerning Caribbean historiography and women’s textual representation or, concerns with subjectivity, the oral as interlinked methodology, and black women’s absence even in networked histories, arise. If, though, as Michele Praeger argues, the poetics of Relation “implies a dialectical relation between writing and orality” (Praeger 1992, 47), ample evidence of this may be found in Lily’s “Brief History,” which necessarily attempts to “unveil the past” through oral, inventive, as well as archival sources. As Glissant observes: such “passionate determination to unveil the past which has been deformed or obliterated by others may sometimes give us a better sense of the meaning 28

Lily’s story belies the persistent stereotype of the “tragic mulatto” whose life typifies a lack understood in the light of a denied heritage. Although she passed on her story, Lily lived a rich cultural life effectively fashioning herself as culture bearer of African-Caribbean traditions, such as that of claiming a “nation” and with it showing a clear talent for the dancing of Shango, Afrocentric concerns far removed from Scotland. 29 Much has been written about the Jamaican Mrs Seacole and her “good Scotch blood.” See, for example, Pouchet Paquet 1992.

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of the present” (1961, 7-8)30. In Lily’s case, an uncovering of family networks intersecting with Scottish imperial networks pushes the boundaries of what is known and methods to discover new information. To this end, I argue for methodological tools inclusive of archival search, oral accounts, and inventive spaces allowing recognition of an anxiety of discovery. The reality of Atlantic discourse encoded in Walcott’s metaphorical “noise” and its meanings in relation to the “wound of history” (Walcott 1990) demand a concern with complexity of approach and a reconsidering of the archive. For these reasons, “Brief History” presents Lily’s story from a positionality that refuses the historian’s neutrality, even as it speaks to an imperial legacy “in relation” to Scots in the Caribbean.

30 Translated by Beverley Ormerod in “Beyond ‘Négritude’: Some Aspects of the Work of Édouard Glissant.” Contemporary Literature 15, No. 3 (1974): 363.

“JOHN IS A GOOD INDIAN”: REFLECTIONS ON NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURE IN SCOTTISH POPULAR WRITING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY MARINA DOSSENA

Introduction The discovery of New Worlds always brings about a tidal wave of cultural opportunities. In 1555 England had started its very first relations with Russia, thus encountering a milieu that was to strike the Elizabethan imagination, not excluding such a fertile mind as Shakespeare’s. As for America, the first permanent English settlement would not be established until 1607, but narratives were already circulating thanks to the collections of journals and travelogues published by Richard Hakluyt (Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America, of 1582, and The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, 1598-1600). These would then be followed by the works of Samuel Purchas (Purchas, his Pilgrimage, of 1613; Purchas, his Pilgrim, of 1619; and Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, of 1625). In the same years Scotland established its first documented settlement in Nova Scotia (1621), and others would follow until the Darien scheme of the 1690s, the disastrous failure of which would speed up the process leading to the Union of Parliaments in 1707. Both north and south of the border the territories across the Atlantic, with their untapped riches and the presence of other cultures, elicited both considerable interest in the former and a certain degree of exotic fascination with the latter. Literary texts also dealt with the New World: most famously, John Dryden’s The Indian Emperor (1665) and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). Throughout the eighteenth century Native American people visited Britain and actually contributed to the Seven Years’ War (on Britain’s side) and, later (still on Britain’s side), to the

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War of American Independence (Bickham 2005). The reading public was thus not uninformed about ‘Indians,’ mainly thanks to the reports published in journals. Moving closer to our times, the nineteenth century appears to be a particularly interesting focal point for a study of the linguistic means expressing social attitudes towards distant cultures. This is because it is at this point in time that considerable changes appear to occur in the perception (both in Britain and across the Atlantic) of what is distant, potentially dangerous yet alluring. After the romanticisation of the Highlands of Scotland begun with Macpherson’s Ossian and emphasised by Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg long after the Jacobites’ final defeat,1 a similar process of idealisation may be seen to be at work in relation to the American West, a constantly advancing ‘frontier’ in which the creation of myths was supported by countless ‘dime novels,’ emigration guides, promotional publications and even shows, such as – most famously – ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody’s.2 In literature, Fulford (2006) stresses the role played by the encounter with Native American people in the creation of British Romanticism; however, factual writing should not be neglected either. Especially as the century progresses, informative texts (rather than persuasive ones aiming to advertise the characteristics of a certain territory, encourage migration, or contribute to propagandistic views) become valuable sources for the study of what data was provided, and to assess their greater or lesser impartiality. Among these, my study aims to discuss some of the comments recorded in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants’ letters and diaries on the historical, political and cultural contexts in which the encoders found themselves once they had left their homeland. While in an earlier study (Dossena 2008a) I focused on more general issues, here I intend to concentrate on representations of Native Americans, their life style and their language, in order to study the attitudes that emerged from these accounts. The general objective is to contribute to the description of evaluative language in Late Modern English. The findings offered here, though of course preliminary and certainly very tentative, allow us to see that, at this point, evaluative language concerning these issues was basically judgemental, though not without those aspects of affective stance

1

On the progression from “Scotophobia” to “Celtomania,” see Sorensen 2000. In fact, the concept of an actual ‘frontier’ has been challenged by more recent historical investigations: see, for instance, Cartosio 2008. Concerning the mythopoiesis of the West, especially in relation to art and popular culture, see Cartosio 1999; 2010a; 2010b. 2

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which were beginning to shift the perspective on the subjects under investigation. From the methodological point of view, a distinction has to be made between texts meant for a restricted, private readership, and texts aimed at a much wider audience, collected to be printed and read outside the family circle. The adjective ‘popular,’ employed in the title of this paper, is thus to be understood in its two main meanings: one referring to the scope of the communication, which attempted to reach and was enjoyed by a large reading group, and the other referring to the level of education of the encoders, which may not have afforded them a very sophisticated linguistic competence. The examination of texts is expected to shed light on what topics were most frequently discussed, in what terms, and how the interpretations of readers were guided by means of linguistic choices on the part of encoders. While the sample of texts under investigation is still inadequate to yield reliable quantitative findings, earlier studies (Dossena 2007; 2008b; 2012) have shown that qualitative analyses may in fact provide valuable insights into the mechanisms of discourse organisation and pragmatic moves. These studies will therefore provide the framework within which the current investigation is carried out. As for sources and materials, this study relies on the letters included in the Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence (henceforth abbreviated as 19CSC), currently in preparation at the University of Bergamo (see Dossena 2004; Dury 2006).3 These are supplemented with the diaries and memoirs of four Scottish visitors to America in the last quarter of the century (Macaulay 1872;4 Carnegie 1875; Campbell 1876;

3

At the moment (February 2013) the corpus comprises ca. 450 letters (equally distributed between familiar and business letters), for a total of ca. 120,000 orthographic units. For the purposes of this essay, I have chosen to concentrate on a subcorpus of 60 letters (ca. 30,000 orthographic units), sent by men and women of varying education levels from overseas to friends and relatives in Scotland. Permission to quote from manuscripts held in the National Library of Scotland is gratefully acknowledged; such permission does not extend to third parties, so the quotations presented in this contribution should not be used elsewhere. In the quotations themselves names are normally omitted for reasons of privacy, while line and page breaks are omitted for reasons of space. Grammar and spelling are maintained as in the original. 4 This is based on papers that had previously been published in The Leisure Hour, of which Macaulay was an editor.

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Simpson 1903), two essays by Robert Louis Stevenson, and early magazine reports.5 A study of the details presented in these materials (transcribed from authentic manuscripts or early editions), and of the linguistic devices conveying description and evaluation, will allow us to comment on the main patterns characterising the language of stance and attitude to vast cultural differences in Late Modern times. I will first present the comments provided in familiar letters, in diaries and in early journals; I will then discuss the kind of cultural perceptions and constructions that emerge from evaluative lexis as witnessed in the documents themselves.

Native Americans in Scottish Factual Writing Familiar Letters In the sample of letters collected so far for 19CSC, references to Native Americans are very few and rather generic. Two of them occur in the letters sent by a male encoder to his brother at Airdens, Bonar Bridge, Sutherland. In one of them, sent on 8 March 1890, the encoder simply mentions the place where the letter is written as “Liddle, By Lehigh, Indian Territory.” No further information is given as to the characteristics of the place and its native inhabitants. Simply, we are told that it is “a very unhealthy country.” A few weeks later, the same encoder sent another letter, this time from Gallup, New Mexico. The move had been announced in the previous letter: a relative was said to be “doing well out in Montana,” and the encoder stated that “A fellow has a better show out west any way it is a new country and there is more enterprise in business.” Even so, the encoder supposes that his correspondents will be surprised by his new location; the main reason why he decided to move was that he wanted to avoid being involved in a strike (see Dossena 2011). The next section of the letter then stresses the relationship existing between the characteristics of the land, the jobs it offers (or does not offer) and the decisions the emigrant may make about his next moves. In fact, the uncertainties given by a country that is “full of ups and downs” make it very difficult for our encoder to describe it (see Dossena 2008b), especially concerning the “many different people” he encounters: 5

So far research has been conducted on the materials currently available in the Internet Library of Early Journals, http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/ (accessed February 11, 2013).

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now out here it is mostly Mexicans and a good sprinkling of Indians and the Indians that is out here are quite a different class of Indians from those in the Indian Territory. those that are out here are not civilised you can not trust them. (Gallup, March 28, 1890)

The encoder seems unable to provide more detailed information about the differences between the New Mexico Indians and those in the Indian territory, though he hints the latter are more ‘civilised,’ and stresses that one cannot trust the former – though on account of what experiences he said so, we may never know. Nor would his readers probably know the differences between the various ethnic groups, were he to mention Navajos, or Hopis, or Zunis more specifically. The main point is the relationship that the encoder is establishing with the territory, the people in it, and how this is going to affect his life; for the moment, further details would be irrelevant for both him and his recipients. As it turns out, a month later our encoder is still in Gallup, where he has now been working for a week, though he is still uncertain about his future. No further references are made to Native Americans or Mexicans, while the ineffability of the place is stressed. Like in the previous case, emphasis is placed on the healthy quality of the air, which is supposed to be of great interest for his recipients, and is expected to reassure them about the environment in which the encoder finds himself. Given the negative connotation of the previous statements about “uncivilised” Indians one “cannot trust,” to go back to them would have meant to stress a point that might needlessly worry the recipients. Native Americans had also been mentioned by another encoder in a letter from California, dated October 27, 1879. The letter is on headed paper of “The Risdon Iron and Locomotive Works,” and it mainly discusses the young man’s progress at work, together with other more general considerations regarding the family business; in particular, the encoder refers to his visits to the mining districts of Nevada and California, concluding with a comment on the inconveniences of such journeys: before I return here again I will have traveled nearly as far as from here to Glasgow and through a much worse country, and in a harder way, sometimes on mules and sometimes in stages, the climate is hot and dry, Indians and rattlesnakes in any quantities. (San Francisco, October 27, 1879).

Uncomfortable means of transport, unpleasant climate, snakes and the presence of native inhabitants are mentioned in one and the same sentence without the least indication of human interest in these subjects. This

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interest, however, was occasionally perceived in texts addressed to the general public, as they aimed to provide a more complete (and complex) picture.

Diaries and Memoirs In this section I intend to focus on four books based on letters or personal diaries, in which the private dimension is overcome, to address a much more general audience, while maintaining those traits of authenticity which characterise personal narration, and make it all the more reliable. The evocation of familiar writing is indeed made explicit in the subtitle and first few pages of Campbell’s text: in his very first letter, sent from Liverpool on July 7, 1874, Campbell invites his mother to keep his letters, as “they will make a series for a journal, and save me trouble” (1876, 7). In addition, Campbell supplements his text with drawings and sketches of the native people he meets while travelling west from Missouri to Oregon. Carnegie (1875) also narrates various incidents involving Native Americans, but his scope is restricted to the territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and only pictures of objects are presented: an Assiniboine pipe and stem, a knife sheath and a fire-bag; a letter from the Mountain Assiniboines; and Cree syllabic characters. The earlier text by Macaulay (1872) had not provided specific information on Native Americans, except for a passing reference on the amicability of the first relations with English settlers: At Philadelphia, as at Boston, I was upon old classical and historical ground. […] The first English settlement here was not, as elsewhere, achieved by violence and treachery, but by amicable arrangement with the Indian possessors of the soil, and a blessing seems to have descended upon the successors of the early peaceful settlers. (Macaulay 1872, 302)

Elsewhere Macaulay punctuates his text with remarks on the American political system, often stressing how unsuitably extended the suffrage is, but also pointing out the supposed similarities between the two terminals of the “ocean ferry”: [T]hough the broad Atlantic separates the two countries, the nations are near. […] in language we are as near to them as Somersetshire is to Yorkshire; nearer in modes of thought and habits of life than Midlothian to Middlesex. (Macaulay 1872, 1)

It may be particularly striking to observe that greater linguistic distance is said to exist between Midlothian and Middlesex than between England and

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America in general. Nor are literary references neglected, which are aimed at a specifically Scottish audience; commenting on lack of ‘uniformity’ in clothing, even for judges and ministers, Macaulay cites Robert Burns’s famous lines: The carelessness as to dress is only part of the national spirit of independence. I often heard the words used proverbially, “It isn’t the clothes, but the man in the clothes.” It is with dress as with rank, it is “but the guinea’s stamp, / A man’s a man for a’ that.” (Macaulay 1872, 56)

Appreciated similarities with the Scottish system of education are also highlighted: In Chicago, as in Scotland, the rich and poor “are received and taught on terms of perfect equality;” they are not only treated alike, they are educated alike. […] In short, that system which has for centuries contributed so wonderfully to the success of Scotchmen, by throwing the avenues to knowledge freely open to all classes, has been adopted in Chicago, […]. It was, it will be admitted, a noble ambition on the part of these bustling citizens of the far West thus to provide a system by which the poorest child might have the way open to the university. (Macaulay 1872, 232-33)

The links with Scottish literature and myth are equally taken up by a later text, published in New York in 1903, but written by an author, Alexander Simpson, who is very careful to outline his social background and his Scottish education: Born of humble parents, my father being a coal miner and my mother the daughter of a gardener, I first saw the light in a small thatched cottage, called “The Howlet’s Nest,” about two miles from the town of Airdrie, Lanarkshire, Scotland. My mother and father were always industrious and anxious to better their worldly circumstances, and the family, of which I was the second in age, received during the week only the usual attention the poor can afford and after the morning ablutions and breakfast we were left very much to shift for ourselves. When Sunday came round, however, the day was devoted to church and moral training at home. (Simpson 1903, 7)

Concerning Native Americans, Simpson basically restricts his notes to a rather generic description of life on a reservation in the White Rolling Bluffs of Missouri, where he is accommodated in a tepee, as the government agent is absent when his party arrives (Simpson 1903, 169). Detailed information is however provided in relation to the economy of the reservation:

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“John is a Good Indian”: Reflections on Native American Culture The land recovered for the tribe is some thirty miles by four and five miles broad, has 100,000 acres of very rich land and every encouragement is given the Indians to cultivate it. The head of the family is allowed eighty acres, and is supplied free with plows [sic], reaping machines, etc. Those who prefer working for a daily wage are allowed $1.50 per day and rations. They get a general allowance of $20 yearly, paid quarterly. Every Saturday provisions and meat are distributed free, and it is a common thing for the Indians to kindle a fire, roast the meat partially and eat the whole of it before leaving the spot. (Simpson 1903, 169)

The description continues with reference to the chiefs administrating justice in the tribe, the meeting with a deposed chief, and a visit to the local school, where a supposedly amusing list of exotic names is provided, before informing readers that the children also have ‘modern’ names: When the school had assembled the first thing done was to call the roll: a list of names such as Maneater, Young Snake, Little Hawk, Good Chief, Sawn Egg, White Breast, Big Bear, Tabow, Armbroke, Sportman, Snowball, Rainbow, White Wolf, etc. The children were given modern names such as Washington, Victor Hugo, Daniel Webster, Oliver Goldsmith, Napoleon Bonaparte, etc. (Simpson 1903, 170)

The patronising, and indeed sneering, attitude conveyed by the gallery of very famous (white) names imposed on the children also emerges when the teacher complains of his classes’ poor results, and the visitor decides to amuse the children by letting them show off their ability with their bows and arrows: He could teach them to read and write but it only amounted to imitation. They had no mind and the meaning of what they read or wrote could not be driven into them. I amused the boys by giving small coins to those who struck the mark with the arrow, with which they are very expert. (Simpson 1903, 171)

The following pages summarise the customs relating to weddings and funerals, and notes on the latter conclude with a reference to Longfellow’s Hiawatha (Simpson 1903, 173), in the presupposition that all his readers will be able to recollect it or refer to it. Despite this literary reference to an idealised world, however, Simpson’s attitude is generally quite critical, and this is observed also when Scotland is mentioned in relation to legends on the origins of the Cherokees: Their language is much the same as the Dakotas. The earliest known migration of the Dakotas was from the East. Shall we therefore trace both

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the Dakotas and Cherokees to Auld Scotland and make the route of their emigration by way of Iceland and the coast of Labrador? Perhaps the strongest argument against this assumption is that had Scottish blood run through their veins they would have kept a better grip on their possessions. (Simpson 1903, 178)

To modern readers, the concluding remark sounds grimly ironic when the Highland Clearances are remembered, with the enforced emigration that they entailed, not dissimilar from that of Native Americans, by then inevitably pushed to the west of the continent – see Calloway (2008). Indeed, Simpson’s attitude, like Macaulay’s, is conservative, and it is all the more ironic that both authors should refer to Burns’s “A Man’s a Man for A’ That,” with Simpson actually quoting it to advocate a Darwinian approach to labour disputes: No workman ever did himself or family good through striking. As water finds its own level, so will wages, […]. […] we must wait patiently for the time when this selection of the fittest on both sides will bring about the era when “Man to man the world o’er / Shall brothers be: and a’ that” […]. (Simpson 1903, 189-190)

Campbell does not manipulate literature in the same way. In fact, he finds the Indians he sees “exceedingly unlike the Indians of my reading” (1876, 42). While Simpson offers generalisations, except for supposedly amusing details, Campbell gives much greater attention to portraits of individuals and group scenes. His descriptions focus on general aspect, with illuminating details concerning colour or small gestures which accompany the images in the text and somehow bring them to life; nonetheless, everything (and everybody) is seen as “picturesque objects,” observed from a stance of superiority. A few examples are given below: At the Missouri I fell in with my first Indians. I stalked, and tried to trap an old Pawnee woman. As soon as she twigged what I was about she covered up her towsy black hair and skedaddled. […] She was very wild and picturesque, and far too quick to be caught flying with a pencil unawares. She came from the reservations to the North. A still more picturesque boy, in red tights, with a bow and blunt arrows, wanted to shoot coins, and so far as I know continues to want. Neither understood English. (Campbell 1876, 40-41) At tea time, at Grand Island, many Indians came about. […] One got talking to a knot of passengers, […]. He looked like a noble Roman senator, with his black scalp locks, and red blanket draped about exceedingly well-made legs, and a light active body, carried by neat feet, with high insteps. His bow and arrows were in a bag of deerskin, with

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“John is a Good Indian”: Reflections on Native American Culture numerous hanging tags and ends. The general colour was warm yellow. Blanket red, shirt blue, hair black and coarse, skin very dark olive, sepia and vandyke brown, not red. Leggings, deerskin with tags below, like the tails of two fashionable gowns trailing. Deerskin mocassins fitted his neat feet like a stocking. […] He […] stuck his thumb on his portrait, gazed hard, grasped hard, looked amused and amazed. Then he exclaimed and laughed, and bore himself in a very frivolous manner, exceedingly unlike the Indians of my reading. (Campbell 1876, 42) Friday, 14. – […]. An Indian of the Shoshones, in tights and a red shirt, leaning on a fence-pole, with a dead wild goose in his hand, was the most picturesque object visible, so I sketched him. (Campbell 1876, 63-64) I went away and watched an Indian woman walking up the street with a small child strapped upright under a sunshade, in a kind of ark, slung on her back. The imp looked contented, and wagged his arms like pendulums. (Campbell 1876, 67)

Campbell’s notes also provide fascinating touches of authenticity when spoken language is introduced into the narration, so that readers may hear these virtual voices and participate in the author’s experience, albeit vicariously. One such case is given when numerals are listed – probably not the most useful piece of information for ‘civilised’ British readers, but certainly a curiosity that might well be turned into an ‘amusing’ conversation piece at home: At Fremont more Indians came about the train with papers, begging: “John is a good Indian; give him a dime.” As none of them would let me draw them, I got old John, and wrote the numerals. Here they are, as near as I can spell by ear. (Campbell 1876, 41)

Various other publications had included comments on Native American languages: see, for instance, McIntosh (1843) and Schoolcraft (1857). Indeed, these languages had elicited the very early interest of missionaries, whose need to communicate effectively had led them to draw up grammars and dictionaries (see Stevens 1956 and Swiggers 2009). In some cases religious education seemed to go hand in hand with cross-cultural interactions, according to Carnegie’s account (1875, 247-50): it is after religion has been discussed that Carnegie includes a copy of the letter the mountain Assiniboines sent to him, thanking him for his sympathetic attitude towards them.6 6

A very sympathetic attitude is also expressed by Robert Louis Stevenson in his essays “Across the Plains” (1883) and “The Old Pacific Capital” (1880), both

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In Campbell’s text, instead, quoted language as an authenticating device7 is found when episodes introduce the author’s comments on a more general situation: A wild, picturesque woman, knitting and nursing a baby in a basket, sat on a log by a cheery wood fire. Two small children, about nine and six, paddled about, and a hen and chickens clucked and cheeped under a basket. Fishing-gear and pots and pans, and layers for sleeping, made a very pretty picture on the clean gravel beach […]. Wishing to be civil and make friends, I took out a cigar-case and offered the lady a cigar. Why I know not, but thereupon she pointed down the shore with her chin, and said, “Saiwash” (Indian). Then with a face of infinite terror, she sprang up and made tracks along the beach with the baby, followed by the elder bairns. The eldest little girl stopped, stooped, picked up a big pebble, and with a face of rage, terror, and wild fury, she lifted her little arm to shy at me. I stood stock-still with my hands in my pockets. The wild-cat look faded, the stone dropped, and the child turned and toddled off after the squah. […] This small incident tells ill for the white bearded men of this region. They must be ill neighbours to these wild critturs8 of the Puyallop River at the end of Puget Sound and the beginning of civilization. (Campbell 1876, 111-12) .

The use of Indian words (saiwash, squah) contrasts with the use of Scots ones (bairns), which function instead as an ‘affiliating’ device, reaffirming the existence of a code (and a worldview) that the narrator shares with his readers. Campbell then describes another scene in much less complimentary tones: An old woman, clicking as men click when they talk in the Caucasus and at the Cape of Good Hope, with strange grunts and gutturals for language, chattered. The men grinned. They were the ugliest set of mortals that ever I saw. (Campbell 1876, 112)

Similarly, elsewhere he says: “They are curious creatures, and I was sorry not to get their ugly mugs drawn” (Campbell 1876, 79). However, several remarks suggest that his general attitude is one of regret at what may be on the verge of inevitable loss. In this sense, his comment on the Yosemite Valley is emblematic:

published in Across the Plains (1892). The latter, in particular, highlights the role of religion in the establishment of new cultural habits. 7 On this point, see also Dossena 2001. 8 Note also the disparaging use of dialect spelling (Oxford English Dictionary, critter, s.v.).

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“John is a Good Indian”: Reflections on Native American Culture My log is full of stuff about the Yosemite Valley and the big trees, but these are now cockney places. Digger Indians had the whole place to themselves; now they fish there and pound acorns, but all the world and his wife go there. (Campbell 1876, 73)

The interweaving of European fashions and native identity is also presented in terms that seem to suggest that change, albeit inevitable, will not be for the better; his comments from Portland, on 20.09.1874, and then from Slate Creek, a week later, are very eloquent in this respect: I landed in Washington territory at Kalama, […]. Indians with fish on their shoulders were sloping about the streets, and buying thread in shops, and loafing. Their dress was seedy European, and their faces were American. (Campbell 1876, 108) Fishing Indians, riding on mustangs, prowl about the whole country. They are tame and talk English, and wear boots and ragged clothes and hats. (Campbell 1876, 142)

The observation of “ragged clothes” and “seedy European dress” sounds tragic. However, unlike Simpson’s narration, which is often condescending, Campbell’s text, despite its frequently negative terms, is sometimes amused, and – above all – most interested in what is picturesque. His evocation of orality to enhance reliability, together with his sketches,9 provides the reader with a much richer text, in which contents are presented in what might be described as a kind of documentary form. The awareness that this world is inevitably passing is always in the background, but such transition is not clearly welcomed, nor is it wished to occur faster than necessary.

9

In a different kind of study, it might be interesting to compare Campbell’s sketches with those by other artists: see for instance Ewers 1971; Elsasser 1977; MacLaren 1989, in addition to Cartosio 1999. Even as late as in summer 2011 the title of an exhibition of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American landscape paintings and photographs at the Seattle Art Museum was “Beauty and Bounty: American Art in an Age of Exploration.” Quite clearly, this title highlights the relationship between the beauty of a supposedly primitive and untouched landscape, its natural richness and the explorations of subjects who were obviously non-native, and approached this territory for the first time.

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Songs, Ballads and Early Journals Interestingly, none of the broadsheets and ballads available on the website of the National Library of Scotland10 refer to America in any other way than in relation to emigration and crime. A quick look at periodicals, however, suggests fascinating research paths. For instance, in Notes and Queries and in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine references to American Indians appear to concentrate between 1850 and 1869 in the former, and between 1843 and 1863 in the latter. While Notes and Queries, by its very nature, only discusses anecdotal remarks, for instance the fact that Indians are said to eat rattle-snake (Jarltzberg 1852), Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine included more extensive texts, to the point that, over six months, between June and November 1848, it was the first to publish George F. Ruxton’s Life in the Far West.11 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (or Maga, as it was nicknamed and as it is going to be abbreviated in the following quotations) also published Ruxton’s obituary in November 1848, which gives an indication of the interest that its readership may have had in this author and his work. It is in this text that we come across another interesting remark on the inevitable dispatch of the Native American way of life, depicted in terms of lamentable loss: It is a matter of regret no philanthropist has sprung up in the United States to do battle for the rights of the Red Man, and call attention to the wrongs they endure at the hands of their supplanters in the land of their fathers. Robbed of their homes and hunting grounds, […], the Indians, day by day, are gradually decreasing before the accumulating evils, of body and soul, which their civilised persecutors entail upon them. With every man’s hand against them, they drag on to their final destiny; and the day is not far distant when the American Indian will exist only in the traditions of his pale-faced conquerors. (Maga 64, no. 394, August 1848: 141)12

10

See National Library of Scotland. “Word on the Street.” http://digital.nls.uk/ broadsides/index.html (accessed February 11, 2013). 11 These narratives also helped the diffusion of myths that, while based on historical fact, would be greatly emphasized in popular writing. This is the case, for instance, of the several references to Kit Carson’s heroic deeds in Ruxton’s story, which promoted the popularity of this figure with British readers, see Ruxton 1848 (September, 64, no. 395: 310; October, 64, no. 396: 442; November 64, no. 397: 574). 12 The reference to natives who “will exist only in the traditions” of the conquerors appears to evoke that “invention of tradition” with which contemporary scholars are so familiar, see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983.

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Later texts, however, would be much less sympathetic. In an anonymous article dated 1855, “Notes on Canada and the North-West States of America,” Indian villages are described in very negative terms, and the demise of ‘barbarity’ is actually looked forward to: [The Dakotahs] are still amongst the most savage and warlike […]. Retaining their barbarous customs, they only hasten, by their aversion to civilisation, the period of their extinction. (Maga 78, no. 478, August 1855: 167)

British readers would also be very likely to be horrified by the suggestion, reported in an article of 1863, that “The worship of the American Indian is tainted more than any other we read of with the rite of human sacrifice” (Maga 93, no. 571, May 1863: 530). Attitudes could thus be ambivalent, but the general evaluative framework was undoubtedly judgemental, and often very negatively so.

Trends and Patterns in Evaluation If we now try and interpret the linguistic data offered by these texts,13 we see that all our authors express both judgements and a certain degree of ‘affective’ involvement. In the former category we may place adjectives like ugly, barbarous, and uncivilised, while the latter is conveyed by adjectives like wild and picturesque, which do not express opinions as to the degree of acceptability of what is described, but suggest the emotional impact such representations may have. At the same time, judgements are not necessarily negative. In one of Campbell’s descriptions, an Indian is said to look “like a noble Roman senator,” a simile the positive connotation of which is supposed to evoke a picture of dignity, possibly of pride and elegance. Other positive qualifiers relating to the same subject refer to his “well-made legs, […] light active body,” and “neat feet, with high insteps” (Campbell 1876, 40). A disapproving view returns when a pow-wow is described, with reference to the “shrieks and yells and whoops and howls of drunken, wild men” which “made the beautiful night hideous” (Campbell 1876, 103). The negative connotation of the lexical items accumulated in the list of unpleasant sounds made by people who are qualified by equally negative adjectives indicates the extent to which the picture is presented as potentially disturbing for European readers. Indeed, here “wild” is used in 13 For the theoretical framework underpinning these notes, see Martin and White 2005.

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its negative sense, unlike elsewhere: in other contexts it may indicate a state of naturalness, the loss of which is to be lamented. It may not be an accident that, as we saw above, European clothes on Indian bodies are described as “seedy,” or “ragged,” almost visualising the unsuitability of such clothes, emblems of an attitude prepared to give natives only what is discarded by the new settlers. It is Stevenson again who presents a very vivid picture of what could actually be a metaphor of what had been going on across the Continent: I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but now and again at way-stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness. (Stevenson 1892, 66-67)

Concluding Remarks Merely qualitative by necessity, this study has taken into consideration a range of documents belonging to different text types, in order to study evaluative language relating to the representation of Native Americans, a world of which European readers renewed their discovery as migrants moved west. This research question was originated by the awareness that an idealised picture of the Native American (for better or worse: either cruel savage or doomed exile) had played a considerable part in the construction of a new “American” national identity, but this same image had perhaps been under-researched in a transatlantic perspective. The decision to focus on Scottish documents was dictated by the interest that such an image might have in Scotland, where – as pointed out by Calloway (2008) – similar processes of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ had developed in relation to the Highlands. While most commentators stressed the abysmal distance between the ‘civilised’ world of European emigrants (or pioneers, depending on the point of view) and the ‘wild’ west, familiar letters hardly discussed such topics, probably in order not to raise apprehensions in their recipients. In texts addressed to a wider readership, instead, descriptions became much more extensive, comments were more explicit, and attitude was conveyed quite transparently to the audience, for whom a window was opened onto a completely different New World.

SPEAKING AS TRIBAL (M)OTHER: THE AFRICAN WRITING OF NAOMI MITCHISON JACQUELINE RYDER

Naomi Mitchison’s legacy as a writer of over seventy texts published between 1923 and the early 1990s stands in equal measure to her diverse and long life (she lived until the age of 101). Certainly one of the most intriguing aspects of her life was her role as adopted mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana, which began when she was in her sixty-sixth year, a role that was bestowed upon her in 1963 by Chief Linchwe II at his installation ceremony. They had met a few years earlier, when Linchwe was a student attending a British Council tea-party at Mitchison’s Carradale home. Later on, Mitchison reflected that she had known little about him then – his future path for Chieftainship or even where his community was – although he had visited and stayed with her “several times” (Mitchison 1966a, 25).1 The position, then, came as a surprise to Mitchison, but she accepted the invitation and formed a commitment and lasting relationship with Linchwe and his community. The experience of living among the tribe inspired several texts published between 1965 and 1991; these included fiction, short stories, children’s literature, non-fiction, poetry and journal articles. Mitchison’s writing was created during a significant period in African history, which included the transition from Bechuanaland Protectorate to what is now Botswana, and, furthermore, it was positioned in the decades which saw the postcolonial movement develop and gain influence. Chinua Achebe’s well-documented diatribe on Joseph Conrad has been a source of debate for readers and admirers of both authors’ works.2 In an 1

“He came to parties in London from time to time; I was always quite pleased to see him but there was a limit to what one had to say. He no doubt felt the same. The common experience was not there yet, still less a common cause” (Mitchison 1966a, 25). 2 Achebe argues that while “Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation” he “was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth” (Achebe 1988, 13).

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interview with Achebe in 2003, Caryl Phillips attempted to resolve his own conflicting views regarding this issue, hoping that interviewing Achebe would help to “resolve this conundrum” (Phillips 2003). When prompted by Phillips as to whether there were any European writers who had successfully depicted Africa and its peoples, Achebe pointed out that there were not many, with possibly the single exception of Graham Greene: […] because he knew his limitations. He didn’t want to explain Africans to the world. He made limited claims and wasn’t attempting to be too profound. After all, we can’t be too profound about somebody whose history and language and culture is beyond our own. (Phillips 2003)

Challenged by Phillips as to whether outsiders are entitled at all to write about other cultures, however, he observed that the “identification with the other is what a great writer brings to the art of story-making”: We should welcome the rendering of our stories by others, because a visitor can sometimes see what the owner of the house has ignored. But they must visit with respect and not be concerned with the colour of skin, or the shape of nose, or the condition of the technology in the house. (Phillips 2003)

Phyllis Lassner echoes this debate in her book, Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire (2004), in which she, citing Micere Githae-Mugo, states “that the only ‘portrayal of fellow-Kenyans’ that has ‘depth […] is likely only to come from a native son.’” Hence, while Achebe delineates criteria for depicting other peoples and cultures in literature, inevitably the latter is by no means prescriptive and the anxiety remains, “lead[ing] us back to a question that has not been put to rest: who is authorised to represent people unlike themselves?” (Lassner 2004, 119, quoting Githae-Mugo 1978, 132). Within a postcolonial context in particular, the need for literature to re-claim and re-place agency means that, while texts by others may be “well intentioned,” ultimately it can be argued that they detract from the subjects being able to speak for themselves.3 Such arguments are particularly pertinent when evaluating Naomi Mitchison’s “African” writing. Consequently, locating some of 3

“At university I read some appalling novels about Africa (including Joyce Cary’s much praised Mister Johnson) and decided that the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anyone else no matter how gifted or well intentioned” (Achebe 1988, 25).

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Mitchison’s work from this period within postcolonial debates seems a particularly fruitful avenue for exploration, particularly in terms of who has the right to speak for others, and to consider the extent to which Mitchison, in her writing, achieves the balance of being, as Achebe puts it, a respectful “visitor.” The notion of the “visitor” being able to “see what the owner of the house has ignored” was a sentiment which Mitchison herself conveyed in her book, Other People’s Worlds (1958). The book had developed from her work as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian and depicted her experiences of Nigeria as well as Ghana and the independence ceremonies taking place there. The text adopts the style of a travel narrative and, in its division of chapters headed with the prefixed “Other People’s” followed by language, morals, religion and music, to name a few, is reflective of an anthropological study. Here Mitchison explains that This is a book written after only six weeks of observation and thought in the place itself. Why do I write it? I went to West Africa, one of the problem areas and growing points of the world, in later winter, 1957. I came from another problem area, the West Highlands; but it is not a growing point. I wish it was. I grope uncertainly at the kind of conditions which make it so, but see little chance of getting them. If someone came to my area, even for a few weeks, it is possible that if they were clear-sighted they might write a book which I would welcome, which would help me see our own problems and how they could perhaps be solved, and which would do something to explain my country to theirs. One excuse for writing this book is that it might be able to help in that sort of way. (Mitchison 1958, 9)

This statement encapsulates much of Mitchison’s life and career. She was an active participant in political and social issues, and commentator on these concerns. It is reasonable to state that the underlying motivation for Mitchison as a writer was to try and explore conflicts and to “speak for ‘the people who have not spoken yet,’” and to disseminate this to as wide an audience as possible (Calder 1997a, ix). Her ability to speak out on these issues was, in her view, bound to her responsibilities as a writer, and her role allowed her the freedom to do so. As she put it, “all writers are shape-changers […] so strung that they can play tunes in all modes” (Mitchison 1968, 7). The above statement from Other People’s Worlds is indicative also of the need to feel valued and to be involved in a “growing point of the world,” that is, a place of political and social change, and this was ignited in Botswana where she became “alarmingly and joyfully committed” (Mitchison 1966a, 69). In Return to the Fairy Hill (1966) – an account of how she became tribal mother for the Bakgatla – she recorded her inner conflict:

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I knew this was all wrong. I knew quite well that I felt myself at one time committed to Scotland, to the dream of Alba. The reality of working for Scotland had got rid of most of that, though occasionally I still got a breath of it. Possibly the same thing would happen here. Reality of Africans might kill the dream of Africa. […] But I became more and more afraid that it [the dream of Africa] was blotting out other necessary sympathies; I began to judge people by their attitude to my touchstone and that was all wrong. (Mitchison 1966a, 69)

It was Doris Lessing who in a letter reassured Mitchison about her role, stating that “there’s something that cries out in you to be fed […] and that’s why you are now Linchwe’s mother and mother of the tribe” (Lessing 1964). Botswana, then, had a deeply formative effect on Mitchison and the writing she produced. She had continually been drawn to political and social issues, to speak out against injustice and for those who had been marginalised. But it was also a new opportunity in which her endeavours and writing might be recognised. Botswana was a unique and new experience beyond the confines of British and Scottish politics which had disappointed Mitchison at times, and an opportunity to once again reinvent herself. As Mitchison’s biographer, Jenni Calder, observes: Whatever uncertainties Naomi had about her personal standing with individuals in Botswana, she never seemed to have thought that she could not ‘become’ African, just as she became Spartan, or Athenian, or Marobian, or Scottish. It was a matter of culture and mind-set rather than national identity, and the result of her acute eye for the pivots of social and cultural intercourse. It was also the result of a generosity of emotion and her innate theatrical talents. (Calder 1997a, 251)

Mitchison had been lauded particularly for her historical fiction set in ancient worlds, which had often depicted the colonial relationship and the ambivalence, complicity and damaging legacy it encapsulated. Jenni Calder suggests that “she had often described the clash between a colonising power and native resistance. She had often contrasted, with sympathy, value systems that failed to mesh. If the territory was geographically and specifically new [in Botswana], psychologically she knew exactly where she was” (Calder 1997b, 452). However, some of her writing reveals that at times she struggled with her role as tribal mother. It brought into focus her own whiteness, and confronted her limitations as a writer. While she declared that love and solidarity would be enough, in an issue of Transition in 1966 she problematically questioned postcolonial critiques of imperialist white supremacy:

204 Speaking as Tribal (M)other: The African Writing of Naomi Mitchison We whites with our feelings of deep, romantic guilt, may lap up both Fanon’s and Sartre’s preface to punish ourselves with. But it is not quite real. One day some of us will get bored of saying it is all our fault, please cut our throats. Some of us have no feelings but disgust for our “kith and kin” in Rhodesia – disgust and the political action that goes with it. (Mitchison 1966b, 5)

While this piece was a brief “letter to the editor,” the disgruntled sentiment was one which Mitchison was to echo over a decade later in a longer journal article entitled “Botswana Contradictions.” In it, she contemplates the problems inherent in Botswana’s political predicament and questions whether it would be better if “we [outsiders] could all be thrown out, so that the people of the invaded country could go ahead with making their own mistakes.” But she admits that in doing so “they would lose not only those who are in Botswana for their own profit […] but also those who are doing a job for which, so far, there is no replacement.” She goes on to claim that the growing and possibly inevitable “anti-white feeling in Botswana […] comes with the influx of refugees from Soweto and Rhodesia”: Because we are white, we are mixed up in people’s minds with the brutalities of the white police and blind stupidities of the Governments in Pretoria and Salisbury. Just now the UK is blamed all the time for the failures on agreement in Geneva; one gets tired and angry hearing this. (Mitchison 1978, 231-32)

These feelings of being at once the Mother of the tribe and Other within the African community are mirrored in the ambivalence in her role. The sense of guilt articulated in Return to the Fairy Hill, was not as apparent in her first book and novel engaging with the African experience, When We Become Men (1965). Penned after her first visit to Botswana, Mitchison wrote quickly and finished it within a matter of months.4 Although Mitchison asserts that the characters are fictional, they are closely mirrored on her experiences with Linchwe and the tribe. The novel has two narrative strands: that of the protagonist Isaac, and that of Letlotse, the tribe’s Chief. Isaac is the dominant character and is a political refugee from South Africa who reluctantly seeks refuge in a tribe after escaping from being imprisoned: He felt dead scared of these tribal people who didn’t know that, in the end, he was fighting for them. For their rights, for freedom and democracy, 4 “I started writing […] on April 8th and finished on June 15th” (Mitchison 1966a, 67).

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against the old witch doctors and chiefs! They’d know by his voice, by the remains of his clothes, even, that he was a stranger, and so someone to be got rid of. They didn’t know the meaning of the word freedom: his word. How could they know, tied down the way they were, tied down by their own wish, worse than being bossed over by whites! He felt himself inside hating them. (Mitchison 1965, 12-13)

The novel shows Isaac’s development from this resentment and frustration with the tribe to becoming initiated within it and married to one of its members. However, in the end he leaves his family behind and returns to fight in the Republic. Letlotse does not feature until later in the text when he returns from his studies in Britain to take up his Chieftainship, which had passed to his tyrannical cousin in his absence. The novel mirrors some of Mitchison’s earlier works in the sense that it deals with the theme of conflicting loyalties against the backdrop of colonialism and imperialism (see Murray 1990, 243-56). Placing Isaac as the central character allows the reader (presumably an outsider to the tribe) the perspective of an outsider looking in on the unfamiliar culture of the tribe, and to witness the gradual trajectory which leads to developing a respect for, and understanding of, that culture. At the end of the novel Isaac and Letlotse meet and discuss their individual concerns, Letlotse having to sacrifice completing his education in Europe to fulfil his role as Chief, and Isaac having to leave his new family in the tribe to return to fight for his causes in South Africa. Here, Letlotse addresses Isaac and asks him whether he wants to be called by a different name. “It is for you to say […] I am yours” (Mitchison 1965, 222) is Isaac’s reply. The ensuing dialogue provides a problematic representation of post-imperial native politics: “Nonsense,” said Letlotse, “you must not say such things, Isaac – it – it shocks me. I shall call you Isaac again because that name has nothing to do with me, and really I want your help.” Isaac looked round and he was seeing Letlotse suddenly, not as the chief, the leader of the Matsosa, the man who had taken him in his two hands out of the pit of death, but as someone younger than himself and troubled, the kind of young man who comes into politics perhaps out of a mission school with all his old assumptions and values cracking under him and the new ones not yet found. “Is it difficult, then,” said Isaac, “becoming Chief of the Bamatsieng?” “Yes,” said Letlotse, “very difficult. And I have had to give up much. I wanted to finish my education, Isaac. I – I liked being educated, though I was lazy sometimes. I would have liked to get a degree, very much indeed. Now I have had to go back in time. They made this happen when I raised the Magwasa; you too, you went back in time. I have to go back to all this

206 Speaking as Tribal (M)other: The African Writing of Naomi Mitchison at my Installation, to the leopard skin and the assegai, but I can only do it with half of me. The other half wants to be civilised.” “It is possible to be a chief and civilised. I think, for instance, of Khama. He was of his time, but he had great ideas. But for him, perhaps our country would have been given away, given to Rhodes and the adventurers. If that happened, we of the Batswana would have been a bit of Rhodesia, perhaps even a bit of the Republic. But Khama stopped it.” “I am not that sort of person. I am not, so to say, a heavyweight. All the same, I would like to do good. But I also want a little freedom, not to be always tied by the old men, by precedents, by this thick smothering blanket of past!” (Mitchison 1965, 222-23)

Jenni Calder argues that Linchwe is “barely disguised, as Letlotse,” and that Mitchison seems barely veiled as Isaac in this section (Calder 1997a, 245). Although Letlotse was brought up in the tribe and educated in Europe, it is Isaac who is placed in the position to tell Letlotse of the country’s past, despite only having been part of the tribe for a matter of months, and he is the only person to see his troubles. Letlotse is a weak and marginal figure, who fails to have the depth the outsider Isaac has in the novel: the above quotation implies he does not have the acumen to apply lessons learned from his education, Western or otherwise, and instead requires an outsider to provide the subjectivity needed to explain how the tribe could progress. While Mitchison had boasted in a letter to Henry Treece in 1964 about her success in writing the novel (Calder 1997a, 258), her next book – Return to the Fairy Hill (1966), a non-fictional account documenting her development and journey within the tribe since 1963 – depicted some of her insecurities concerning the representation of past civilisations in her historical novels, for which she used “a combination of research and imaginative sympathy towards the characters and their historical situations” (Mitchison 1966a, 76). While “there was never a Gaul or Spartan to ask if one had got it right,” the Batswana depicted in When We Become Men had a chance to recognise themselves, and thus to justify her “working method” (Mitchison 1966a, 76) – as Mitchison put it to Treece, “It is like having got hold of a real Spartan or inhabitant of Marob to tell one if one was right” (Calder 1997a, 258). But the confident tone depicted in the correspondence with Treece shifts in Return to the Fairy Hill, published two years later, in which she asserts that “I had begun to feel less and less certain of my reconstructions – the more praise I got the more I felt guilty, in case I’d got it wrong and misled the seekers for knowledge” (Mitchison 1966a, 76). Return to the Fairy Hill also features one of the most revealing passages about Mitchison, her writing, and her complex relation to the tribe and her ambivalent role within it:

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And now again I began to wonder whether I was repeating myself, whether the helots in The Corn King and the Spring Queen, Tragon and Neareta and Phoebis, were Africans: whether I take sides, not for reason but because of something in myself, something in childhood, perhaps a revenge on my mother. […] It is at least quite reasonable to suppose that we whites have been unforgivably bloody to the Africans in various situations: but that in certain circumstances which we must create, we shall be forgiven: that all may yet work together but that accidentally I am one of the people who must create the new circumstances. What was much harder to take was that so far apparently what I had to do was not hard or hurting; it was instead delightful. That was perhaps why I had the death wish as well. It didn’t seem fair that I should be doing something which should be a kind of atonement, a kind of crucifixion, and that instead I found myself back in the Garden of Eden. (Mitchison 1966a, 79)

Botswana was a pivotal moment in Mitchison’s life, leading her not only to question her role there, but to examine the motivation behind her life’s work. Mitchison’s mother symbolised the staunch pro-imperialist Conservatism which throughout her life and works she had attempted to resist.5 Significantly, Africa is bound to this resistance and viewed as both a punishment and a means to erase the guilt she felt; to prove her “love for the tribe, for Africa: of undoing some of the harm which whites have done: of maximising goodwill” (Mitchison 1966a, 76). Her time there and the writing she produced, then, was a product of her underlying guilt and her attempt to alleviate this. While her first novel of the ones engaging with African experience was passionate and impulsive and allowed Mitchison to marvel in her ability as a writer, this text demonstrates the insecurities she felt. Although she intended it to be about “the people of Bechuanaland and especially the Bakgatla” (Mitchison 1966a, 1), it is more to do with Mitchison’s right to depict the culture and to prove her solidarity to them, arguing that it is a study of commitment. This would be my own commitment to the Bakgatla, my own tribe, and through them to Bechuanaland; it would also 5

Mitchison’s upbringing could indeed “have made her one of those complacent imperialists” (Wallace 2005, 45). Kathleen Haldane was a “Tory and imperialist” who “immersed herself in the Victoria League, an organisation devoted to promotion of the British Empire” (Benton 1990, 3). Mitchison’s mother confessed that she had contemplated not marrying her husband J.S. Haldane, because of her passion for politics: “I could not and would not alter my political faith. For the moment, Home Rule was the burning question. Other things might follow into the limelight, but allegiance to the United Kingdom was a fundamental tenet with which there could be no tampering” (Haldane [1961] 2009, 152).

208 Speaking as Tribal (M)other: The African Writing of Naomi Mitchison be their commitment to me. A clinical study of commitment by a highly conscious writer is doubtless of some value in itself. But the reaction of those to whom the commitment was made is much more important. If I could show the mechanics of a completely non-racial relationship, of mutual love between a Scots intellectual and an African tribe, I might help to solve a world problem. (Mitchison 1966a, 1)

Mitchison seems somewhat naïve to assume that she might “solve” the problems which existed in Africa, especially since she had only recently become acquainted with them. While the text is not strictly an anthropological study, it is interesting to assess Mitchison’s motivation for wanting to adopt this genre. Firstly, the text functioned to cement Mitchison’s learning about the tribe and to understand their culture. Further, the genre also functioned to demonstrate her understanding, to prove that she knew them. The agency therefore shifts from the tribe onto Mitchison, and the community remains a silent Other. Although Return to the Fairy Hill is located among the Bakgatla, it reveals more about Mitchison attempting to negotiate for herself a space within their community. Ironically, in her examination in what is meant to be a text about the Bakgatla, Mitchison produces a text which is in many ways reflective of a colonial diary, in which the European psyche is explored against a foreign backdrop. The ability to demonstrate her knowledge of the tribe and her right to speak as one of them is reiterated in Mitchison’s writing through the use of prefaces. In her early career Mitchison asserted: “reading prefaces is a thing I never do myself if I can help it, so I can only suppose that a very few of the people who want to read the stories in this book are going to start here” (Mitchison 1930, 7). However, in some of her works the inclusion of a preface is as much to do with providing an informative preamble as it is to do with Mitchison justifying to herself her ability to speak on behalf of the tribe. The preface to African Heroes (1968) provides an effective illustration of this: […] during the last five years I have become deeply involved with Africa. I have dear friends there, whom I love and trust […]; I know when I go back that past and future will join up happily, African fashion, into the present. I pay tax in Mochudi, the capital of my tribe; I am irrevocably a Mokgatla – that is one of the Kgatla people – and because of that I count myself de facto, if not de jure, a Motswana.6 This means I have obligations and 6

Mitchison explains in her foreword to Return to the Fairy Hill that “A Motswana is a single citizen of Bechuanaland. All of them are the Batswana […] When I write the Kgatleng, I mean the country of the Bakgatla. Se is the language prefix;

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loyalties to my little, struggling country of Botswana […] which may sometimes, in some ways, conflict with my loyalties as a British citizen. But it also means, I think, that I have learnt to slip into an African skin, to think and feel as an African, to have it said to me lovingly: “I cannot think of you as white.” […] Slipping into an African mentality led me to realise that here were people whose heroes had been taken from them, and led me further to think what the white invaders had done over six centuries or so of African history, not only to the bodies of Africans, but to their minds. (Mitchison 1968, 7-8)

Interestingly, Mitchison focuses here exclusively on herself, a European in African skin, as the privileged viewpoint from which the various figures in African culture will be authoritatively presented in the book. The Africans (1970), a history book, like African Heroes works towards reclaiming histories which had been pushed aside in favour of European narratives: here, Mitchison states her decision to do this because “far too many [Africans] think that it all began with the coming of the whites and that nobody else matters. […] that, on the whole, is how they would feel after reading the version of history which is presented to them” (Mitchison 1970, 13). Both books’ success – as much as that of some of her children’s literature based on her experiences among the tribe – lies in the fact that Mitchison firstly collaborated with people in the tribe and published the stories they told one another.7 Publishing these stories meant that they reclaimed narratives which were perhaps only transmitted orally and thereby helped to ensure that these stories might be integrated into schooling. Furthermore, as these books are mainly aimed at children, Mitchison’s politics or polemics are less intrusive and instead the stories speak for themselves, helping to instil the “confidence” she felt was lacking. And while she cannot claim to be the person to have “found” these “lost” stories, publishing them was a significant contribution in her role as mother to the tribe.8 Setswana is the Tswana language, Sekgatla is the Kgatla dialect” (Mitchison 1966a, 3). 7 “Some of these stories have borrowings, both from stories I heard or half heard in the Kgatleng, or from friends of the Bushmen. Some are based on actual happenings or imagined happenings of today, in Botswana, Zambia and the west coast. Some have passed the test of reading aloud and being told that, yes, you have got it right, or even Yes, how did you know? I hope they will help towards a mutual understanding which is deeply needed” (Mitchison 1988, iii). 8 “The thing that worried me, in a way, most, was that they had so little African confidence, so little on which to build an African future, or a Tswana state. I became more and more determined to make a go of my very difficult History of Africa […] I stuck for days before I could write the chapters about the slave trade,

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Another endeavour in which Mitchison used her experiences of the tribe to depict their culture was her collaboration with the tribe’s historian to collate African proverbs. She explains that “All over southern Africa part of education is to learn to speak in proverbs and riddles. A young or uneducated person can be spoken of rather scornfully as someone who does not know the use of proverbs” (Pilane and Mitchison 1974, 29). More importantly, she asserts that All these together make a picture of life, as it was in Botswana a generation or two ago. But new riddles are certainly being made out of new things. Some of these riddles are specifically Kgatla, though many, if not most, are in some form common to the Setswana-speaking people. All have been collected in the Kgatleng. These riddles are in danger of being forgotten. Mr. Amos Kgamanyane Pilane who collected them and wrote them down, feels keenly the danger of their disappearance. He is the historian of the Kgatla people and knows well that a culture is made up of all sorts of small things, like these riddles. (Pilane and Mitchison 1974, 35)9

This was successful with an African readership in that she collaborated with the tribe’s historian, and that she was not the only person working to promote and preserve the tribe’s culture. Publishing these proverbs was seen as an important task in maintaining an aspect of the tribe’s traditions. Arguably, by researching and writing non-fictional and anthropological texts based on her experiences, Mitchison justified her ability to speak on behalf of the Batswana; arguably, anthropology is a safer genre than fiction, in the sense that it situates its speaking for others as a necessary project rather than an invasion or artificially constructed depiction of a culture. But in “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Linda Alcoff notes that in anthropology, too, the notion that one can adequately or justifiably speak for others is questioned, citing Trinh T. Minh-ha’s characterisation of anthropology as “mainly a conversation of ‘us’ with ‘us’ about ‘them,’ of the white man with the white man about the primitive-nature man […] in which ‘them’ is silenced. […] ‘them’ is only admitted among ‘us,’ the discussing subjects, when accompanied or introduced by an ‘us.’” (Alcoff 1991-92, 6, quoting Minh-ha 1989, 65, 67)

simply because I was so filled with horror and guilt at the thought of what might have been done to my people here, by my people there” (Mitchison 1966a, 11112). 9 See also Mitchison and Pilane 1967.

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Ultimately, it is the difficulty in achieving the balance of showing her solidarity and her membership in the tribe as Mother in contrast to her whiteness which results in the ambivalence and complexity in her writing. Jenni Calder’s assertion that Return to the Fairy Hill is “a book about Naomi at a turning point in her life, rather than a book about Botswana” in many ways encapsulates the problematic nature of her writing which at times removes agency from the tribe to focus on her own feelings and insecurities, and as a means to assuage her own guilt (Calder 1997a, 260). Mitchison stated that her ability to speak as a member of the tribe was rooted in her Scottish heritage: There is a special reason why I can do it. I come of a great Scottish family, the Haldanes, who have known, encouraged and accepted great changes. Even in my own lifetime there has been change from a society based strictly on class in which my family were near the top, to something approaching classlessness. But also I have considerable experience of the Highlands and of fairly recent Highland history, including the destruction of the clan system. There are many analogies between Highland and African people and history; I think these may be helpful and illuminating so they will be found in several places in this book. (Mitchison 1970, 13-14)

But of course this was contrasted with Mitchison’s realisation of the role Scotland had played in colonial expansion and oppression, which sometimes resulted in guilt and at other times in anger that these misdemeanours of the past could not easily be forgiven and forgotten or atoned. There is no doubt that Mitchison was wholly committed to the tribe; she showed an unyielding commitment to them and a wider African society, which included speaking out against apartheid, the result of which made her a prohibited immigrant in South Africa. Yet, Mitchison was intent to prove her solidarity, and in doing so verged on, as Achebe puts it, “trying to explain Africans to the world.” She had a desire to affect change, and endeavoured to expose and explore the problems of colonisation. She set about trying to “solve” some of the problems suffered by the African people, yet her ability to do so was flawed. One of the reasons for this was that her role as a tribal mother seemed mainly a means to assuage her own guilt, and that often her own whiteness pervaded the text. The problem of speaking for people, particularly in a postcolonial context, is one which has also been addressed by Margery Fee in her article, “Who Can Write as Other?” In it she examines C.K. Stead’s ‘reservations’ over Keri Hulme being granted an award “intended for a

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Maori” and reiterates the difficult question posed by Lassner at the start of the present essay: How do we determine minority group membership? […] Can majority group members speak as minority members […] ? If so, how do we distinguish biased and oppressive tracts, exploitative popularizations, stereotyping romanticizations, sympathetic identifications and resistant, transformative visions? (Fee [1989] 1995, 242)

Fee goes on to cite Hulme’s own definition of Maori: “‘actual’ Maoriness, like an ‘actual’ family has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with solidarity of feeling” (Fee [1989] 1995, 244). Solidarity in this context becomes a dangerous tool in which boundaries and fixity are blurred and the limitations of who can represent whom are dismissed. As Fee concludes, “Perhaps [Hulme’s] definition [of Maori] is too liberal, because if we simply conclude that if one feels Maori one is, we fall into a new set of problems. I may feel Maori, I may think I am writing as one, and be completely deluded” (Fee [1989] 1995, 244). This issue of the complexity of colonial voices in Mitchison’s African writing should not be entirely dismissed on the grounds of Mitchison’s status of ‘outsider.’ Indeed, this is a fascinating corpus of work, written by a Scottish author with a unique role in, and relationship with, Botswana at a pivotal time in this country’s history. What is evident, however, is that, while the question about who has the right to speak for others cannot be easily prescribed or reduced to a set of criteria, it seems that Achebe’s figuration of “respectful visitor” allows us to re-evaluate at least in part Mitchison’s attempt to speak on behalf of the tribe: when she chooses to remove herself from the texts, she arguably strikes the delicate balance called for by Achebe. For instance, when Mitchison ends her final chapter of the history text, The Africans (1970) with an epilogue from Burns’s “For A’ That and A’ That,” she sets out her wider ambitions for the tribe, Botswana and Africa, and looks beyond her individual role. She highlights the flaws in the Commonwealth and the strings of neo-colonialism which were still resonant. But she also asserts her confidence in the African people to make their own judgements and decisions arguing that, it is hard not to foresee a time when Great Britain is by no means the most important member of the Commonwealth and will have to do quite a lot of adjusting. A grandmother who can’t do this will find she is no longer loved or visited and that is sad for everyone (Mitchison 1970, 215)

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This metaphor, not only for Britain, but Mitchison herself, demonstrates the need for detachment, trust and respect for the tribe, and in Linchwe’s ability to make decisions and choices best for their own culture. In Africa, her decision to publish a book on Bram Fischer, to quote Mandela in African Heroes, and to deliberately break apartheid laws, all contributed to her solidarity against the problems in Botswana and neighbouring South Africa.10 Her strength in passionately committing herself to causes, however, could also be her weakness, and at times the impulsiveness to prove her worth, her loyalty, her “right” to speak as a “real” Mokgatla could be overbearing. But in her stand against what she called “cultural neo-colonialism […] because it destroys people’s own history in their own minds” (Mitchison 1970, 216) she published and disseminated histories and narratives which otherwise may only have been transmitted orally and certainly not to a wider readership. She recognised that “People who look to a future must do so from knowledge of the past” and that “Africans are finding inspiration from their own great figures.” Nelson Mandela is one of those figures whom she cites to support the necessity to protect against the erasure of these stories; he himself claimed the stories of his ancestors’ past inspired him to make a “contribution to their freedom struggle.” She ends by stating that “You must judge for yourselves what kind of people the tellers and hearers of these stories are. You must judge for yourselves” (Mitchison 1968, 189-90). This is contrasted with Mitchison’s anxiety that she may have “got it wrong – and misled the seekers of knowledge” and is bound to a feeling of responsibility that she needed to “explain Africans to the world.” However, in her relentless desire to instil change for Africa as a whole through her writing, she was naïve, and perhaps did not give credit to her readers or allow them the silence and space to “judge for themselves.” In this regard Mitchison’s own voice and insecurities which seep into her writing, at times, can seem “too profound.” Nevertheless this should not overshadow the fact that her writing made a valuable contribution towards the awareness of the tribe, and southern African culture at this time.

10 Mitchison 1973. Notably, she also refers to Bram Fischer in African Heroes and states he is “at least one white man who is also an African hero” (1968, 8).

“THE PLANTATION OWNER IS NEVER WEARING A KILT”: HISTORICAL MEMORY AND TRUE TALES IN JACKIE KAY’S THE LAMPLIGHTER GIOIA ANGELETTI

“The discourses on slavery, both in attack and in defence, are a matter of living debate as well as the object of historical analysis.” This is Isobel Armstrong’s foreword to The Discourse of Slavery. Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison (1994, xi), and one of the assumptions behind Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter (2008), a hybrid work interweaving various genres that she wrote under commission to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. Indeed Kay’s work may be regarded as an important contribution to a whole series of initiatives that marked the anniversary in Scotland, as well as elsewhere in Britain.1 On that occasion, the Jamaican scholar Geoff Palmer was invited to give lectures on BritishCaribbean relations in various institutions in Scotland and England. In an essay written a year later he summed up the results of his research and concluded: “The negative consequences of British slavery in the Caribbean are still with us today. To say the past has no effect on the way human beings live today is untrue.”2 The implied argument here is that the 1 Various websites are dedicated to the anniversary, inter alias: 1807 Commemorated. The Abolition of the Slave Trade. http://www.history.ac.uk/ 1807commemorated/index.html; Education Scotland. “Abolition of the Slave Trade.” http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/abolition/index.asp; BBC Scotland. “The British Slave Trade and its Abolition: 1770-1807” http://www.bbc.co.uk/ scotland/education/hist/abolition (accessed February 11, 2013). For a list of commemorative events and other initiatives in Scotland see also Sassi 2011, 120122. Kay’s play was broadcast by BBC3 on 25 March 2007, the day in 1807 when Parliament passed the legal act abolishing the slave trade. 2 Scotland. The Official Gateway to Scotland. “The Forgotten Diaspora.” http://www.scotland.org/features/item/the-forgotten-diaspora/ (accessed February 11, 2013).

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memory of the past must necessarily be kept alive in order to understand who we are today as both individuals and members of a national/historical community. This memory, based on testimonies and acts that eschew official records and historical representation, may be fragmentary and limited, “open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting,” to borrow Pierre Nora’s words, since it is “a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present” (Nora 1989, 8). At the same time, though, there are “lieux de mémoire” – symbolic “objects” and “sites” in a community’s memorial heritage – that, in Nora’s words, “block the work of forgetting” and allow a continuous rethinking and revision of the historical process and representation (Nora 1989, 8). In The Lamplighter, Kay transforms the chapter of Scottish history concerning colonialism and slavery into one of such “sites of memory,” or into a moment “of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned” (Nora 1989, 12). In other words, she shows us how literature can become a privileged means of perpetuating a living memory, allowing us to (re)visit and (re)consider past actions and experiences that may have been consciously or unconsciously overlooked. Kay’s contribution to the 2007 commemorative acts is original in the way she challenges the conventional anglocentric representation of slaves as inert victims by according them independent voices and decision-making behaviors even in the most tragic situations (see de Michelis 2009, 83). The horror she evokes is not aimed at disturbing the passive audience-member but at pushing the reader/spectator to assume specific political and ethical stances on issues of human rights and responsibilities that must necessarily inhabit the living memory of both each individual and society as a whole. As a radio and stage play, The Lamplighter consists of sixteen scenes, six of which, as suggested by the title (“Shipping News”), provide us dispassionately with factual information about the slave trade, the “Middle Passage” and deaths at sea, while each of the other scenes reads like a single page torn from the history of slavery describing its effects on the lives of both victims and victimisers, the capturing and imprisonment of African people, their exploitation for the benefit of the Western world, their resistance and final emancipation. The Lamplighter is also a polyphonic epic poem, in which five different voices, one male and four female, deliver from their own points of view the story of the slave fort, the transportation across the Atlantic, the plantations and the impact of slavery on the economy and culture of Britain. In other words, as an aficionado of jazz, Kay introduces a core “melody,” or storyline, that is gradually unravelled and enriched by multiple contributions, so that the central historical narrative intermingles with individual stories of violent

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parting, capture, marginalisation, loss, infanticide, sexual abuse, rebellion and survival. Some of these themes are crucial leitmotifs in postcolonial writing, and certainly pervade Kay’s opera omnia, but this time she provides them with the specific historical context of the eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century slave trade, and embeds them within the complicated discourse of British identity formation and Scotland’s controversial role within it. This essay aims to read The Lamplighter as a key text in Scottish contemporary literature dealing with the aforesaid complex issues crucially informed by the politics of memory. What this means is that by assuming in original ways the points of view and voices of the victims, Kay is able both to convey the tragic sense of their experiences, without lapsing into sentimentalism, and to recognise the culpability of the victimisers without simply demonising them. “We never know where the truth ends and the story starts,” writes Kay in her recent autobiography (Kay 2010, 43). Hence the recurring motif of the journey in her works, translating her constant need to explore the past (personal and collective) even when there seems to be nothing left to be rescued from oblivion. This is what The Lamplighter, among other things, achieves, as this essay will attempt to demonstrate. It obliges the reader to delve into his/her memory, sharing the author’s imperative that understanding one’s present requires the knowledge of one’s past, as this is always “blazingly alive” (Kay 2010, 87), and must be recreated in order to “try and fill in the missing pieces” (Kay 2010, 141). In Britain the slave trade was abolished in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, but in The Lamplighter Kay shows how important it is to keep the slavery debate alive. Past and present, Kay suggests in her work, are not discrete but a continuum, and to discuss slavery issues now implies a reflection on concepts and categories contributing to the definition and development of civilisation since the Enlightenment which can be recalled and interrogated at any time. Scotland in the eighteenth century was a centre of intellectual and cultural developments; Edinburgh was referred to as the Athens of the North. However, as Kay clearly shows in the play, the country was not exempt from one of the worst crimes of humanity.3 It is not by chance that 1707 is the first date mentioned by Kay’s character Macbean (the only male voice, acting as the Zeitgeist) when he describes the slave ships leaving the British ports: in the forging of their transatlantic empire, the Scots and the English put aside old conflicts and pursued 3

On Scotland’s controversial involvement and active participation in British colonialism and the implementation of slavery in North-America as well as in the Caribbean see, among others, Smout, Landsman and Devine 1994, Colley 1992, Armitage 1995, Wilson 1995, and Hamilton 2005.

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common economic interests, even though these involved the brutal exploitation of the natives and the implementation of chattel slavery. Until the 1990s, however, most Scottish people seemed to be affected by a kind of (un)conscious historical amnesia preventing them from confronting the truth of Scotland’s involvement in transatlantic slavery. That collective amnesia has since been challenged by various historians and literary figures, as well as by a whole series of events and initiatives promoted by the Scottish media and museums.4 In particular, the 1999 restoration of the Scottish parliament seems to have coincided with an increasing interest in national and local history from a more global perspective, including a reconsideration of the political and economic interactions between Scotland and other parts of the world, and, how they impacted on the construction, or revision, of Scottish identity. Kay herself admitted being in the dark about the Scots’ participation in the atrocity of the slave trade, because at school she was taught “about James Watt’s steam engine” but not “that money from a slave trader financed his invention” (Kay 2007b). Indeed at first she believed she could not contribute anything new to what was already known about it. Here is how she justifies her initial scepticism over accepting the invitation to write a work commemorating the Slave Trade Act: When the producer Pam Fraser Solomon first asked me to write something to mark the 200th anniversary of abolition, I replied that I thought enough had been written about slavery, and that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a black writer. Black writers are often expected to write about slavery and race. (Kay 2007b)

As Kay repeatedly shows in her writing, her ideological convictions as well as her imaginative world are grounded on a perpetual refusal of classrace or gender-based labelling, while they gravitate around an idea of identity that is mutable, many-faceted and independent of fixed geographical or national roots. This position is particularly significant for a woman born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, but adopted and brought up by a white couple in Glasgow. Deracination, physical and psychological dislocation and a wide range of identity issues are, almost inevitably, at the core of most of her plays, 4

Among the historical studies see Karras 1992; MacKenzie 1993; MacKenzie 1998; Fry 2001; Devine 2003; Hamilton 2005; Whyte 2006; Dobson 2009; and Murdoch 2010a, 93-105. For a list of cultural and media events occurring before 2007 see Sassi 2011, 120. On the figurations of the colonial experience in the Caribbean in post-Union Scottish literature see Sassi 2007. More generally on Scottish literature and the British Empire see Sassi 2005, 83-101, and Mack 2006.

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poems and short stories, as they are in her only novel to date, Trumpet (1998). The second reason she gave for hesitating initially to accept the invitation on offer is apparently less relevant: “enough [has] been written about slavery,” so wouldn’t her contribution be redundant? Ironically, however, Kay’s second thoughts on the opportunity she was offered resulted from a revision of both those original deterrents, as her full immersion in records, documents and research concerning slavery increasingly convinced her that being African and Scottish were reasons enough to investigate a field that still presented many unexplored areas – especially Scotland’s unacknowledged involvement in the historical reality of slavery and its impact on a people traditionally considered enlightened and liberal. As she observes in the same Guardian article, Most British people think of slavery as something that happened in America and perhaps the Caribbean. […] Being African and Scottish, I’d taken comfort in the notion that Scotland was not nearly as implicated in the horrors of the slave trade as England. Scotland’s self image is one of a hard-done-to wee nation, yet bonny and blithe. I once heard a Scottish woman proudly say: “We don’t have racism up here, that’s an English thing, that’s down south.” Scotland is a canny nation when it comes to remembering and forgetting. The plantation owner is never wearing a kilt. (Kay 2007b) [my italics]

“Remembering and forgetting”: “These are the things I cannot stop remembering; / these are the things I cannot stop forgetting,” says the eponymous character of The Lamplighter; “I tell my story to remember” says the character called Mary, to whom Black Harriot, another central figure, replies “I tell my story to forget” (Kay 2008, 35). The main voices speaking in this “epic play” – Black Harriot, Constance, Mary and the Lamplighter (Anniwaa as an adolescent) – belong to four women African slaves who achieved emancipation after long suffering and failed runaway attempts. Their style mixes folklore, storytelling, balladry, and the rhythm of blues and spirituals. Indeed music, especially the choral recitals, is as important here as in Trumpet, in which Joss, the protagonist, says to his son: Music was the one way of keeping the past alive […] Black people and music. Where would the world be without black people and music. Slave songs, work songs, gospel, blues, ragtime, jazz […] You can’t understand the history of slavery without knowing about the slave songs. (Kay 1998, 191-92)

The link between music and one’s cultural roots is of course an autobiographical aspect that Kay often refers to in her writing, as when, in

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Red Dust Road (2010) she admits: “I would feel happy, gloriously happy, surrounded by people who had their songs with them. All of my happiest memories are about people singing to me” (Kay 2010, 31). Musical and verbal language thus allows these four women to emerge out of that desert of silence and amnesia to which one of the most dolorous chapters of Scottish (and generally British) history has been relegated. Challenging Gayatri Spivak’s rhetorical question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 1988), Kay rescues their voices from that forced dumbness, and, by combining knowledge gathered from shocking original testimonies5 with her lively and sensory imagination, she addresses that silent world and confronts that embarrassing chapter, as a handful of other Scottish writers have recently attempted to do: the novelists Robbie Kydd in The Quiet Stranger (1991), James Robertson in Joseph Knight (2003), and Andrew O. Lindsay in Illustrious Exile (2006) (see Sassi 2007, 187-97). Kay’s work, like theirs, testifies to the crucial intertwining of history, historiography and literature in giving narrative and imaginative life to the reality of slavery. Unlike them, though, she daringly puts the slaves’ voices centre stage and, assuming a form of Brechtian distanciation, tries to imagine their individual and collective tragedy from their own points of view.6 Accordingly, The Lamplighter can be regarded as Kay’s response to the symbolic removal of the black servant figure from Archibald McLauchlin’s 1767 portrait of the Glassford family, exhibited in the Glasgow People’s Palace, as a testimony both to Scots’ participation in the tobacco trade, and to their attempt at erasing, or repressing, aspects of that trade that had become a source of shame.7 Composing The Lamplighter 5

See bibliography at the end of The Lamplighter. In Kydd’s novel the main point of view is that of Richard Mason, Bertha Mason’s brother and “quiet stranger” in Jane Eyre, the hypotext, together with Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, behind the novel. The “illustrious exile” of Lindsay’s novel refers to Robert Burns and his intention of moving to a sugar estate in Jamaica to work as a book-keeper, a plan he was able to put aside thanks to the success of Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. The reader is presented with the poet’s journal and, essentially, his first-person narrative. Robertson’s novel is a complex heteroglossic text in which the case of the black slave Joseph Knight, who ran away from his master John Wedderburn in Scotland and started legal proceedings to secure his freedom, is seen from the different perspectives of the advocates involved. Yet, the author deliberately omits Knight’s own point of view and allows his thoughts to appear only in the very final pages – suggesting the difficulty of breaking the silence, and recovering the voice, of the victim of slavery. 7 The black boy, originally portrayed on the left behind his master, was covered by paint when in 1778 it became illegal to own slaves in Scotland, after the Court of 6

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was for Kay an ethical imperative, like “writing a love letter to [her] ancestors” (Kay 2007b),8 a tribute to their memory and a form of personal and collective therapy, as is suggested by the apparently oxymoronic purpose of “remembering and forgetting” expressed by the dramatis personae. The Lamplighter takes us on a journey between past and present, through the heart of darkness of Britain and the British West Indies colonies, which must be evoked in order to “forget,” or learn how to assimilate the pain and guilt involved, as a precondition for avoiding the same mistakes in the future, and moving on – “I tell the story so the story will stop,” says Mary (Kay 2008, 36). This aim is also achieved through the strategic use of reiterated verses functioning as refrains, specific words producing a repetitive or an incantatory rhythm,9 as well as significant lists of personal and city names, including that of Glasgow, to which Kay feels she belongs, despite the darkness lying beneath the urban bustle: I belong to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town, but, alas, there is something the matter with Glasgow that’s going round and round. Glasgow does not readily admit its history in the way that other cities in the United Kingdom have done – Bristol, Liverpool, London. (Kay 2007b)

The incipit here adapts some verses from a popular music-hall song by Aberdonian Will Fyffe, which Kay ironically quotes in The Lamplighter as well: “I belong to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town. / There’s nothing the matter with Glasgow / For it’s going round and round” (Kay 2008, 74). “Bristol, London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh” are the British cities that Constance (Kay 2008, 17) identifies as deriving the greatest economic benefits from slave labour in the colonies, and Black Harriot, scrambling the order of names in that list, says “London, Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow belongs to me!” (Kay 2008, 80), suggesting that, when it comes to imperial history and transatlantic trade, Scotland and England were partners rather than rivals, and that all these British cities owed their affluence to the exploitation of slaves in colonial fields. Kay’s emphasis on “Britishness,” British government and British capitalism suggests that all Britons profited from a system that they then abandoned for different reasons: the rise of Session in Edinburgh found in favour of the black servant Joseph Knight against his master John Wedderburn – the legal case that provided Robertson with the donnée for his 2003 novel. 8 The Lamplighter recites: “This is a letter from me to my ancestors” (Kay 2008, 84). 9 Some examples are: “This is Herself talking”; “Nobody told my story”; and “This is the story of Herself.”

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abolitionism driven by Evangelical Christian fervour, the slaves’ own emancipationist struggles, and the realisation on the part of industrial capitalists that wage labour would eventually be more productive and profitable.10 Kay encourages us to see how enslaved Africans provided the consumables and luxuries that changed British lifestyle and city activities. James Walvin has shown how the essential source of the slave trade can be located in British coffeehouses and tea rooms,11 and Kay translates this historical information into her characters’ lines. “We were sold for sugar in the coffee. / Sugar in the tea” (Kay 2008, 17), recites Black Harriot, while the whole of Scene 8 is a bitterly ironic commentary on the various usages of sugar in the Western world, where “la dolce vita” (Kay 2008, 46) contrasts with the slaves’ suffering that grants Britons those palatable privileges. The author helps us see the networks that existed not merely as bilateral links for the exchange of goods from Scotland to the colonies, but also as a series of complex interconnections that produced a transatlantic world in which England, Scotland and the Caribbean influenced one another’s modes of living and thinking. Kay seems to appropriate and rewrite in literary terms Paul Gilroy’s critique of ethnic absolutism and racial essentialism, inviting us to redesign the geo-cultural maps of Africa, Europe and the Caribbean, where national singularity has been challenged by centuries of crisscrossings and interplays (Gilroy 1993). The slave trade financed the industrial revolution, and helped many British cities to prosper through their commerce in tropical staples. This is the meaning of the Lamplighter’s lines “My story is the story of the city” (Kay 2008, 70) and “My story is the story of Great Britain / The United Kingdom, The British Empire” (Kay 2008, 81), and of Constance’s background singing “Glasgow belongs to me!,” “Bristol Belongs to Me” (Kay 2008, 74-75), later echoed by Black Harriot – “I belong to Glasgow and Glasgow belongs to me!” (Kay 2008, 79). Britain’s, and more specifically Scotland’s, responsibility for supporting the slave system is clearly denounced in Scene 13, entitled “British Cities,” in which the characters’ single voices are woven together to form a counterpointed and interactive chorus. “Any single story is a multiple one,” reads an earlier stage direction, which, in Scene 4, Constance anticipates by making use of the solecism “They is” to suggest that the painful experiences they shared

10

See Williams 1944, Drescher 1986, Blackburn 1988, and Christopher Leslie Brown 2006. 11 This aspect is particularly stressed in Walvin 1992, Walvin 2000, 13-42, and Mintz 1985.

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turned them into one choral identity: “I am. She is. You are. They. They is. They are, they are, they are” (Kay 2008, 15). Mary: There is not a brick in this city Lamplighter: But what is cemented with the blood of a slave Constance (sings): Bristol belongs to me. (Kay 2008, 79)

As specified by another stage direction, the image of the British cities prospering thanks to slaves’ labour is “being built, brick by brick, in words” (Kay 2008, 70), by each character’s listing the financial and industrial enterprises made possible by the West-Indian plantation economy. Scotland’s part in this profitable market is explicated in various ways. Mary, for example, maps Glasgow’s street names to show how colonial history is inscribed in urban geography. In the eighteenth century, Glasgow, alongside Bristol and Liverpool, did become one of Great Britain’s major ports and transatlantic trading centres. So, through Mary’s voice, Kay asks the reader to reflect upon the original source of, or the historical palimpsests concealed behind, such Glaswegian topographical names as the Cunningham Mansion (now the Gallery of Modern Art) named after the tobacco lord William Cunningham, or Jamaica Street, Tobago Street, and the Kingston Bridge. Macbean mentions John Glassford, possibly the most powerful eighteenth-century tobacco lord, and reports what Bishop Pococke said when he visited Glasgow in 1760: “this city has above all others felt the advantages of the union in the West Indian trade which is very great especially in tobacco, indigoes and sugar” (Kay 2008, 74). The Lamplighter refers to the historical episode of the slave ship Neptune arriving in Carlisle Bay, Barbados, on May 22 1731, after leaving Port Glasgow months earlier, carrying 144 enslaved Africans, “Who had been shackled for nearly a year / With leg irons” (Kay 2008, 79). The strong presence of Scottish people in the West Indies in the eighteenth century is particularly emphasised by Macbean who tells us that “In 1770 on the slave island of Jamaica / There were one hundred Black people / Called MacDonald,” that “A quarter of the island’s people / Were Scottish,” and finally that “There was a network of Argyle Campbells at least 100 strong in Jamaica,” all concentrated in the west with nostalgic place names such as Campbell Town, Argyle, Glen Islay (Kay 2008, 81). As a matter of fact, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the number of estates on Jamaica owned and often managed by Scots rose from less than 20 to nearly 30 per cent of the total (Hamilton 2005, 145 and Pollard 2007, 93-130). “My daughters have Scottish blood / Scotland has my blood,” says Black Harriot (Kay 2008, 81).

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On the other hand, as Duncan Rice suggests, eighteenth-century Scotland is “an extraordinary case of a small society that developed a heavy economic commitment to slavery at the very time when its intelligentsia were vehemently criticizing it” (Rice 1981, 19). Various members of the Scottish intelligentsia contributed to the anti-slavery movement and even pushed for the ultimate abolition of slavery. Recent studies have recognised the crucial role of, among others, William Robertson, Hugh Blair, James Ramsay, Zachary Macaulay, Henry Brougham, and James Stephen in drafting the 1807 Emancipation Bill. The Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, moreover, played an important part in abolitionist debates. In particular, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, James Beattie, John Millar, Adam Smith, and David Hume wrote essays on slavery that, if they are not unequivocally abolitionist, both recognise its ignominy and prove its unprofitability when compared to the free and competitive nature of labour.12 In fact, in The Lamplighter, Kay’s politics of memory is not exclusively aimed at bringing to light shame-provoking experiences but also – albeit to a lesser degree – at recalling to mind happier episodes: hence she has the same Macbean describe a Glasgow in which, as early as 1792, 13,000 residents put their name to a petition to abolish slavery (Kay 2008, 84). Indeed Glasgow was where some abolitionists set up an Emancipation Society in 1833 with the aim of abolishing slavery all over the world (Whyte 2006, 226). Here the city acts as a kind of synecdoche for the whole late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scottish nation, its rapidly growing economy, its distinguished intellectual heritage, yet also its unresolved tension between the commercial advantages of a slave economy that offered career opportunities for Scottish entrepreneurs and lads o’ pairts, and the horror of its practices. Almost suggesting that Scotland’s people and institutions should be compelled to confront this paradox and achieve a fuller understanding of all its implications, Kay, in the already quoted Guardian article, admits that at school she learned “about clans and clan names and kilts and the differing tartans and the Highland clearances, but not that in Jamaica in 1770 there were 100 African people called MacDonald” (Kay 2007b). She therefore insists that “It’s time that Scotland included the history of the plantations alongside the history of the Highland clearances” (Kay 2007b). As Nigel Leask has underlined, even if “the Highland Clearances have 12

On the contradictory opinions about slavery to be found in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and philosophy see Chapter I in Blackburn 1988; Whyte 2006; Murdoch 2010a; and Angeletti 2010.

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assumed a role in modern Scottish literature approaching that of the notorious ‘Middle Passage,’” Scottish emigration paradoxically “coincided with periods of prosperity rather than dearth” (Leask 2007, 153). Both Highlanders and African people were cleared off their lands, but many among the former chose voluntary exile, owing to the changing nature of land settlement at home, whereas no choice was allowed to those forced out of the Slave Coast, the Ivory Coast, and the Guinea Coast, and transported as slaves to a foreign country. Kay wants her readers to recognise this difference without launching an invective against the Scots, but with the aim of making them see that “the history of the slave trade is not ‘black history’ to be shoved into a ghetto and forgotten […] It is the history of the world. It concerns each and every one of us” (Kay 2007b). She lets her five characters evoke this sense of universal responsibility, since, as I have already mentioned, one of her central purposes in The Lamplighter is to give a voice to the “missing faces” of all those slaves who died during the Middle Passage, in “the open-grave-green sea” (Kay 2008, 12) or in the tobacco and sugar fields, but even to those who managed to survive and experience emancipation – an uncountable anonymous and unheard humanity that deserves as much attention as the few who are named in cultural or literary histories, such as the runaway slaves James Somerset and Joseph Knight or the authors Sancho, Cugoano, Mary Prince, and Equiano. The articulated words of Kay’s four protagonists represent all of those whose voices have been engulfed by silence. How is this achieved, and how does Kay engage with Spivak’s argument, that is, how “can the subaltern speak”? “Everybody’s writing is political,” admits Kay in an interview (Hewitt 2009). In The Lamplighter her stance, either a conscious or unconscious one, seems to be a response to Spivak’s claim that the voices of the subaltern cannot be retrieved without being somehow manipulated, coopted or denatured, to sociologists such as Maurice Halbwachs, who opened the door for “memory studies” with his On Collective Memory (1992), and to writers such as Wole Soyinka, who believes that “a people who do not preserve their memory are a people who have forfeited their history” (Soyinka 1999, 58). How to preserve memory, particularly when it involves the powerless and the dispossessed, is an agonising problem for historians, artists, and writers, given that what we know about the subaltern is mostly derived from Eurocentric travel narratives, official documents, commercial reports, and private papers. Should, for example, a writer deploy postmodern devices, such as textual gaps, fractured narratives, to signal the presence/absence of the subaltern, like Friday’s cut

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tongue and “O”-signs in Coetzee’s Foe (1986), or should she attempt to “appropriate” and reproduce their voices? History and memory are intertwined. However, Kay believes that memory does not have to be confined by historical rigour, but rather can look for alternative ways of representing and recognising traumatic, yet also formative, historical moments and experiences. Kay’s dramatic poem is about memory, about how the pain of remembering is a necessary step towards the understanding of the self and the other, the past and the present, and the acknowledgement and guilt demanded by historical atrocities such as the transatlantic slave trade. In fact, The Lamplighter does not merely intend to commemorate the abolition of slavery. The success of the abolitionists is important and worth celebrating, as the many 2007 commemorative acts and events managed to prove, yet it cannot cancel the reality of Britain’s complicity in the Atlantic slave trade, a painful recognition that imaginative works such as Kay’s try to foreground with a positive intent. “I am a girl. I am in the dark,” says Anniwaa, the Lamplighter’s childhood self, at the incipit (Kay 2008, 9), but the darkness slowly vanishes once the mature woman begins to realise the significance of her experience and of its narration, both for herself and others – “I carried the light to light the lamps / The lamp across the wide dark sea” (Kay 2008, 42), the dark sea of silence and (un)conscious amnesia, a darkness she is able to dispel through the light of memory.13 National hypocrisy and guilt are unveiled mainly from the subaltern multiple perspective of the once enslaved women, who tell their single and choral stories in order both to remember and to forget the endured traumas, their loss of homeland, family, freedom, identity, name and agency. In some of the West Indies colonies, many, sometimes even most (as in Barbados), of these slaves (not only in the fields but also in the household and urban sector) were women, who, as Hilary McD. Beckles and Walvin point out, constituted a source of labour reproduction, and were therefore constantly subject to sexual abuse (Beckles 1989, and Walvin 1992). This dark story also features in The Lamplighter.14 Thus Kay focuses on the female experience, to restore history to them as both subaltern and women, and to combat the stereotypes of the dehumanised, 13 Hence her symbolic designation, although “the Lamplighter” derives from the pub in Avonmouth where Anniwaa was sold. 14 Beckles and Walvin provide Kay with much of the information she translates into her drama, as when Mary reports: “At Worthy Park [Jamaica], 89 of the 133 field slaves were women.” Black Harriot’s words “Running away was a leap in the dark” (Kay 2008, 27, 47, 66) echo the title of Chapter 17 in Walvin 1992 (“A Leap in the Dark: Runaways”).

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lazy and silent slave. In fact, the characters are not presented as passive victims, not even when they are being raped, like Mary, who resisted in silence until one night she “hit him and hit him again” and “let out a roar” (Kay 2008, 30) thus liberating her repressed rage. Kay’s protagonists are autonomous subjects, aware of the best behaviour to assume or of the wiles to adopt in order to cope with their lot – “And I learnt how to, how not to,” says the Lamplighter (Kay 2008, 19) – ready even to support revolutionary action (as in the penultimate scene, entitled “Resistance”), action which actually occurred, as we learn from historical records and slave narratives.15 It is through memory that these narratives survive for the enslaved themselves and for us. We are asked not to forget their stories, because remembering them becomes a means of understanding history outside imperialist records, to “brush history against the grain,” in Benjamin’s famous phrase (Benjamin [1950] 1999, 248) – “don’t forget to remember me. My voice is coming back,” implores the Lamplighter (Kay 2008, 20). Kay’s drama uses the historical records to write a new history, “embodied” by the female slaves’ corporeal experiences, that demands to be heard: physical pain, hunger, and especially sexual exploitation, rape, and violence – all these leap out of the text in such a way that the historical becomes located in the personal, emerging as something audible and sensuous, speaking to a contemporary audience intensely and intimately, arousing outrage rather than mere sympathy. This is in line with Kay’s general idea of theatre as a mode of expression releasing “raw energy,” without “polished edges,” a theatre that “makes you feel slightly embarrassed when you are watching it, involved and awkward, so that you are affected by the genuine, powerful emotions of it” (Kay 1996, 256). Hence she does not spare us the reality of the crudest details of tortures and mutilations inflicted on the slaves. As the Lamplighter says: “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. / […] my description falls far short of the facts. It is not my intention to horrify” (Kay 2008, 15). The four women “write their selves,” to paraphrase Hélène Cixous, and through their bodies they manage to liberate their voices, and enact a form of écriture feminine: “Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard” (Cixous 1976, 880). The Lamplighter, for example, remarks, “I […] can smell it again, taste it again. Slavery. The feel of it” (Kay 2008, 20), Constance 15 Kay’s characters refer to specific slave rebellions occurred throughout the Caribbean in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as, among others, Tacky’s rebellion in Jamaica (1760), Cuffy’s rebellion in Berbice (present Guyana, 1763), Fédon’s rebellion in Grenada (1795-96), the revolt in Saint Dominique leading to the creation of the Republic of Haiti (1804), etc. (Kay 2008, 86-90).

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dwells on “Mouth, lips, teeth” (Kay 2008, 17), and Black Harriot notices that “MOUTH” is how many slave ports’ names terminate (“PortsMOUTH, PlyMOUTH, DartMOUTH”: Kay 2008, 16), suggesting a social and economic system that devours humanity. Although Kay creates a multivocal female slave narrative within a specific historical context, this narrative has a resonance for all human beings who, at any time, have suffered marginalisation or physical and mental enslavement.16 She concentrates on the experience of female slaves, yet, at the same time, she clearly dissociates herself from any essentialist tendency to generalise female experience regardless of class and race – an aspect confirmed by the fact that one of the most viciously negative characters is The HouseLady, depicted “as demanding / As any field driver” (Kay 2008, 37). The characters and their experiences “are a fantasy created out of a historical reality.” This is in fact Kay’s comment on the Cape VerdianIrish painter Ellen Gallagher’s 2007 exhibition at Tate Liverpool, entitled “Coral Cities” – drawings and films imagining that all the black slaves drowned, thrown off the slave ship Zong, captained by Collingwood in 1781, or lost at sea, are still underwater living in a black Atlantis (Kay 2007a). Macbean mentions the tragedy of the Zong in Scene 9, in his usual algid tone, which is strongly counterpointed by the poetry of Black Harriot, whose lines – “Those were the deaths with wings, / Like songs, like freedom songs” (Kay 2008, 55) – anticipate the following scene about death as liberation from enslavement. Although this event in its full truth is irretrievable, as are the slaves’ voices, Gallagher, like Kay, through art and imagination, not through historiographic and theoretical analyses, attempts to plunge into that silent ocean and retrieve all those missing faces, those “echoes of lost voices” (de Michelis 2009, 80). So if, at the incipit, the little traumatised Anniwaa is a repressed voice in the protagonist’s unconscious and finds herself unable to speak – “I don’t know how long I’ve been kept in the dark,” “My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth” (Kay 2008, 9-10) – at the end her adult self can begin telling, or re-telling, her story, starting from her childhood, since she has found the thread between past and present and is thus able to recompose her fragmented identity: One day, I finally managed to tell My story. I wrote it down. It was printed and reprinted

16

Kay’s sexual politics in The Lamplighter find a theoretical backup in several of the texts included in her bibliography, in particular Hall 1988.

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We may certainly agree with Linda Alcoff that “such representations are in every case mediated and the product of interpretation” (Alcoff 1991-92, 9), but perhaps what Kay and Gallagher do is to speak “nearby or together with” rather than “speak for” or “about” the subaltern (Minh-ha 1989, 101). Works of literature, in Lars Eckstein’s definition, are “mnemonic machines” (Eckstein 2006, ix) that can dialogue with the past in different ways from historical factual representation and mainstream interpretation, to review it imaginatively and open it up to new and challenging readings that may enlighten the present and even shape the future. Kay’s images and words may be defined, in Foucault’s words, as a “fictioning,” an “imaginative reproduction” of history, which speaks to her country to tell the untold, to show how to go through the darkness and re-emerge into the light: this is also the message conveyed both by the play’s title and the protagonist’s echoing line “I carried […] / The lamp across the wide dark sea” (Kay 2008, 42). “This happened to me, the Lord knows it’s the truth,” is Mary’s last line (Kay 2008, 95). The “true tales” of Kay’s heroines remind us that, if the abolition of the slave trade ended a tragic chapter in mankind’s history, the heart of human darkness is still beating, and that is why the past, rather than abandoned to the archives, has always to be imaginatively foregrounded in the present.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS GIOIA ANGELETTI is a graduate of Bologna and Glasgow universities. She is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Parma. Her publications include: as author, Eccentric Scotland: Three Victorian Poets. James Thomson (“B. V.”), John Davidson and James Young Geddes (2004), and Lord Byron and Discourses of Otherness: Scotland, Italy, and Femininity (2012); as editor, Emancipation, Liberation, and Freedom: Romantic Drama and Theatre in Britain, 1760-1830 (2010), and, with Valentina Poggi, a volume on the Scottish playwright Joan Ure (2010). Her current projects mainly focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century diasporic Scottish writers, and contemporary Italian-Scottish women playwrights. JOAN ANIM-ADDO is Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies. Her publications include the libretto, Imoinda (2008); the poetry collection, Janie Cricketing Lady (2006); and the literary history, Touching the Body: History, Language and AfricanCaribbean Women’s Writing (2007). Her co-edited books include Interculturality and Gender (2009), Caribbean-Scottish Relations: Colonial and Contemporary Inscriptions in History, Language and Literature (2007), and I am Black, White, Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europe (2007). She is co-editor of “Affect and Gendered Creolisation,” Feminist Review, Special Issue, 104, forthcoming. She is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Research Network: “Behind the Looking-Glass: ‘Other’ Cultures Within Translating Cultures.” IAN BROWN is a playwright, poet and Professor in Drama at Kingston University. Currently President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies and Chair of the Scottish Society of Playwrights, he was General Editor of The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (EUP: 2007). He is joint series editor for the International (formerly Edinburgh) Companions to Scottish Literature and joint editor of the International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen. His edited collection, From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and

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Myth, was published in 2010 and Scottish Theatre: Diversity, Language Continuity is scheduled for 2013. He has written many journal articles and chapters on a wide range of topics related to theatre history, language and theatre and cultural policy. LIAM CONNELL teaches at the University of Winchester. He has published widely on the cultural aspects of Scotland, nationalism, and globalization. He is the co-editor of Literature and Globalization: A Reader (Routledge, 2010). His current research is on the representation of white-collar work and neoliberalism in contemporary fiction. MARINA DOSSENA is Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo (Italy). Her research interests focus on historical pragmatics, historical dialectology, especially in relation to the history of Scots and English in Scotland, and the history of specialised discourse. A member of the International Committee of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, she is currently compiling a corpus of nineteenthcentury Scottish correspondence. She has authored two monographs and more than eighty journal articles and contributions in edited volumes; she has also co-edited the proceedings of numerous international conferences, in addition to specific collections of essays. BASHABI FRASER’s research interests cover postcolonial literature and theory and diasporic studies. She has published on Scots in India, Tagore Studies and Transnationalism. Recent publications include Ragas & Reels (2012), Scots Beneath the Banyan Tree: Stories from Bengal (2012); From the Ganga to the Tay (2009); Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter (2006; 2008), A Meeting of Two Minds: the Geddes Tagore Letters (2005) and Tartan & Turban (2004). She is Professor of English and Creative Writing and Joint Director, Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs) at Edinburgh Napier University and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Dundee. SHEILA KIDD is currently a Senior Lecturer and Head of Celtic and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow. Her research to date has dealt with Gaelic literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century with a particular focus on Gaelic prose in periodicals and newspaper columns, on the social and historical dimensions of these texts and on the interface between orality and literacy. More recently she has turned her attention to Gaels in the East and West Indies and she is completing an

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edition of nineteenth-century prose dialogues for publication by the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society. GAIL LOW teaches at the University of Dundee in the areas of her main research interests, namely book history and contemporary literatures in English. She is the author of Publishing the Postcolonial (Routledge, 2010) and White Skins/Black Masks. Representations and Colonialism (Routledge, 1996), and is the co-editor of A Black British Canon? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). GRAEME MACDONALD is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick where, among other things, he teaches modern British and World Literature. He is co-editor of Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), as well as author of various articles and essays on nineteenth-, twentieth- and twentyfirst-century literature and culture. He is at present engaged on a monograph on Scottish fiction and World Literature. PETER MACKAY is a writer, academic and broadcast journalist. He has a PhD from Trinity College Dublin on the work of Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth, and he is the author of Sorley MacLean (RIISS, 2010) and From Another Island (Clutag Press, 2010). He also coedited Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is currently a freelance news producer working for BBC Alba. WILSON MCLEOD is a Senior Lecturer in Celtic at the University of Edinburgh. He was previously a Lecturer at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic College in the Isle of Skye. He earned his BA from Haverford College, his JD from Harvard Law School, and MSc and PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He has published extensively on Irish and Scottish Gaelic literature of various periods from the late Middle Ages to the present, as well as on issues of language policy and cultural politics in Scotland and Ireland. DAVID RICHARDS is Emeritus Professor of English Studies at the University of Stirling, having previously held posts at the universities of Leeds and Birmingham and at the Open University, where he was the founding Director of the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian

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Studies. He was the Deputy Director of the Centre for African Studies at Leeds and was the Director of the Stirling Centre of Postcolonial Studies. His chief research interests are in the areas of colonial and postcolonial literature, anthropology, art history and cultural theory. His published work includes studies of individual writers, the representation of other cultures in literature, anthropology and art, cultural production in post-colonial cities, and discourses of the ‘archaic’ in colonial and postcolonial cultures. JACQUELINE RYDER is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her thesis is supervised by Dr Eleanor Bell and Dr David Goldie and focuses on the work of Naomi Mitchison. She co-edited the AHRC-funded Cross-currents publication, Further from the Frontiers (2009), and was also the Reviews Assistant for the International Journal of Scottish Literature. CARLA SASSI (editor) is Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Verona and specialises in Scottish and postcolonial studies. Her publications include Why Scottish Literature Matters (2005) and, as a co-author, Caribbean-Scottish Relations (2007). She has edited a special issue of the International Journal of Scottish Literature on “Caribbean-Scottish Passages” (2008) and of Anglistik (2012) on “Focus on Scottish Studies.” She is currently editing the International Companion to Scottish Poetry (ASLS). She was a Royal Society of Edinburgh Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Stirling (2008) and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow (2010-2011). SILKE STROH studied English and Gaelic at the Universities of Aberdeen and Frankfurt, where she completed her doctorate on “(Post)Colonial Scotland? Literature, Gaelicness and the Nation” in 2006. Having taught at the Universities of Frankfurt and Giessen, she now works at the English Department of Münster University. Publications include the monograph Uneasy Subjects: Postcolonialism and Scottish Gaelic Poetry (2011), various essays on postcolonialism and anglophone Scottish writing, as well as the co-edited collections Hybrid Cultures, Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World (2010) and Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking (2013).

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THEO VAN HEIJNSBERGEN (editor) is Lecturer in the department of Scottish Literature in the University of Glasgow, with Scottish medieval and Renaissance culture in a European perspective his main research field. After a co-edited volume with Nicola Royan on Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland, his latest publications are on early modern travel writing, literary networks, Renaissance court culture and Jacobean poetics. He is currently working on a contracted monograph on “The Culture of Literature in Early Modern Scotland.” He is also an Executive Officer of the Scottish Text Society.

REFERENCES Where potentially helpful, we have provided dates in brackets to indicate when a text was first published, and modern English versions of the names of Gaelic authors and their titles. Note that the spelling of some Gaelic names and words below is not fixed. 1807 Commemorated. The Abolition of the Slave Trade. 2007. Accessed February 11, 2013. http://www.history.ac.uk/1807commemorated/index. html. Achebe, Chinua. 1988. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 19651987. London: Heinemann. Ackerman, Robert. 1987. J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adam, Frank. 1934. The Clans, Septs and Regiments of the Scottish Highlands. Edinburgh: Johnston. Adams, Gene. 1984. “Dido Elizabeth Belle: A Black Girl at Kenwood.” Camden History Review 12: 10-14. Addison, W. Innes. 1913. The Matriculation Albums of the University of Glasgow from 1728 to 1858. Glasgow: James MacLehose. Alcoff, Linda. 1991-92. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20: 5-32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354221. Angeletti, Gioia. 2010. “Debating Colonialism and Black Slavery on the Scottish Stage: Archibald MacLaren’s The Negro Slaves (1799).” In Emancipation, Liberation, and Freedom: Romantic Drama and Theatre in Britain (1760-1830), edited by Gioia Angeletti, 59-85. Parma: MUP. Anim-Addo, Anyaa. 2011. “Place and Mobilities in the Maritime World: The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company in the Caribbean, c.1838 to 1914.” Unpublished PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London. Anim-Addo, Joan. 1998. Haunted by History. London: Mango Publishing. —. 2007a. “A Brief History of Juliana ‘Lily’ Mulzac of Union Island, Carriacou and Grenada: Creole Family Patterns and Scottish Disassociation.” In Covi et al., 46-92. —. 2007b. Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women’s Writing. London: Mango Publishing.

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INDEX OF PERSONAL NAMES First names of historical figures or of authors referred to in the text but not given there have been added below at editorial discretion in square brackets. Likewise, a small number of page references have been included to texts and authors which are referred to in the text, but whose title or name has not been explicitly stated there; in such cases, the page numbers are in square brackets. Achebe, Chinua 109, 200-202, 211212 A Man of the People 109 Arrow of God 109 Ackerman, Robert 24-25 Adam, Frank 45 Adams, Gene 177 Adams, George 143 Addison, Joseph 24 Addison, W. Innes 52 Aesop 117 Agricola, [Gnaeus Julius] 83 Alcoff, Linda 210, 228 Alexander I (King of Scotland) 23 Amin, Idi 152, 157 Angeletti, Gioia 13, 223 Anim-Addo, Anyaa 178 Anim-Addo, Joan 9, 12, 168, [173], 174, 175, 177, 181 Appadurai, Arjun 90 Armitage, D. 216 Armstrong, Isobel 214 Armstrong, R.A. 59 Arthur, Pat (daughter of Peter Gownmill) 142-143 Ascherson, Neal 156, 158 Ashcroft, Bill 6, 30, 81, 85 Ashley, Kathleen 169 Balfour, Jim 146 Ballantyne, Tony 125

Bandopadhyay, Kausik 90 Banks, Iain 153, 159, 161 Business, The 161 Transition 153, 159 Barbieri, Daphne 148 Bateman, Anthony 90 Bateman, Meg 32 Baucom, Ian 169, 179 Bayley, Frederick William Naylor 178, 183 Beattie, James 223 Beckles, Hilary 176-177, 181, 225 Behn, Aphra 185 Oroonoko 185 Belle, Dido Elizabeth (Lindsay) 177 Benbow, John 119 Benjamin, Walter 23, 226 Bennett, Audrey 147 Bennett, Margaret 46 Bent, J.H. 173 Benton, Jill 207 Berkley, John 173 Beveridge, Craig 8 Bhabha, Homi 89, 139 Bhatter, Sheokissen 141 Bickham, Troy 186 Birla, G[hanshyam] D[as] 141 Birla, [Jugal Kishore] 141 Bissett, Alan 3 Black, Ronald I. 31-35, 46, 53-54, 56, 63, 68, 71, 75

Within and Without Empire Blackburn, Robin 221, 223 Blaeu, Joan (cartographer) 20 Blair, Hugh 38-39, 41, 223 Blair, Toni (Prime Minister of Great Britain) [153], 162 Blàrachs, Donnchadh 81 [Bonaparte, Napoleon] 192 Bourdieu, Pierre 18-19, 21 Brady, Patrick 146 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 182 Brènus 43 Briggs, Asa 110 Brodber, Erna 109 Myal 109 Brodie, Kirsty 52 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre 219 Brougham, Henry (anti-slavery campaigner) 223 Brown, Christopher Leslie 221 Brown, Ian 12 Brown, Matthew 96, 97 Brown, Mr 140-141, 144-145 Brown, Mrs 140-141, 144-145 Brubaker, [Rogers] 142 Bruce, Robert (the) (King of Scotland) 163 Buchan, John 20, 111-112 Buck-Morss, Susan 23 Bueltmann, Tanja 141, 142 Bunyan, John The Pilgrim’s Progress 111 Burke, Gregory 153-154, 156, 161163 Black Watch 153-154, 156, 158, 161-164 Burns, Robert 2, 139, 142, 191, 193, 212, 219 Burton, Antoinette 169, 178 Bush, George W. (President of the USA) 162 Bush, Julia 125, 127, 132-134 Byrne, Michel 46, 54, 72, 73 Caesar, Julius 83

269

Caimbeul, Donnchadh (Duncan Campbell) 41-43, 61 Caimbeul, Tormod 11, 77, 83-90 An Druim bho Thuath 83-84 Deireadh an Fhoghair 84 Shrapnel 85 Cain, P.J. 138 Calder, Angus 7 Calder, Jenni 202-203, 206, 211 Calgacus 81-82 Calloway, Colin G. 193, 199 Cameron of Lochiel, [Donald] 47 Cameron, G. (cartographer) 20 Cameron, Mairead 50 Campbell, Alexander (in Grenada) 174 Campbell, Archibald, 2nd Earl of Argyll 73 Campbell, Carl C. 110, 114115,116, 118, 121 Campbell, Sir Colin 63-64 Campbell, David (9th Laird of Glenlyon) 53-55 Campbell, Dugald 60 Campbell, Duncan 53 Campbell, Duncan (son of the 7th Laird of Glenlyon) 53 Campbell, Duncan see Caimbeul, Donnchadh Campbell of Auchinbreck, Sir James 47 Campbell, Sir James (in Grenada) 173, 174 Campbell, John (7th Laird of Glenlyon) 53 Campbell, John Francis 187, 190, 193-196, 198 Campbell, J.L. 81 Campbell, Robert 143 Canning, George 95, 96, 104 Cardell, Kerry 46 Carlyle, Thomas 4 Carnegie, James 187, 190, 194 Carolan, Janet 124 Caroline of Ansbach (Queen consort of George II) 103

270

Index of Personal Names

Carson, [Christopher Houston] “Kit” 197 Carswell, Catherine 2 Carswell, John 53 Cartosio, Bruno 186, 196 Cary, Joyce 201 Mister Johnson 201 Cashman, Richard 90 Castle, Kathryn 124 Cave, Roderick 121 Ceanadach, Donnchadh (Duncan Kennedy) 63 Chapman, Malcolm 36, 37, 79 Chatterjee, Rimi B. 110 Cheape, Hugh 40, 41 Checkley, Francis Yelvington 173 Checkley, Revd Mr 173 Checkland, Sydney 97 Chorùna, Dòmhnall Ruadh (Donald MacDonald) 70 Christie, Isabella 134-135 Cixous, Hélène 226 Clancy, Thomas Owen 46 Clyde, Robert 31, 45 78 Cobham-Sander, Rhonda 121 Cody, “Buffalo” Bill 186 Coetzee, [J.M.] 225 Foe 225 Colella, Silvana 98-99, 100 Colley, Linda 104, 216 Collingwood, [Luke] (Zong massacre) 227 Collis, John 79 Columbus, Christopher 108-109, 115, 117-119 Connell, Liam 8, 11-12, 15-16, 102 Conrad, Joseph 20, 200 Covi, Giovanna 9, 169, 179 Cox, Brian (actor) 148 Cox, Edward L. 174, 177 Crabbe, Tim 90 Craig, Cairns 8, 158 Crawford, Don. 54 Crawford, Dougal 55 Crawford, Robert 8-9 Creft, Miss 173

Cudjoe, Selwyn 121 Cuffy, also known as Kofi (slave) 226 Cugoano, [Ottobah] 224 Cumming, Cliff 46 Cumming, Robin 124, 135 Cunningham, William 222 Cutteridge, J.O. 108, 114-118, 120122 Daneshvar, Simin 150 Savushun (A Persian Requiem) 150-154, 160 Dangaremgba, Tsitsi 109 Nervous Conditions 109 Daudin, Jacques 171 Davidson, Neil 156 Davies, [Francis] (General) 125127, 135 Dawood, Adamjee Hajee 141 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe 109, 111 de la Rue, Frances 52 de Lisser, Herbert 122 de Michelis, Lidia Anna 215, 227 Dempster, John A.H. 111, 112, 113 Devine, T.M. 6, 9, 136, 137, 139, 155, 156, 158, 216, 217 Diawara, Manthia 90 Dickens, Charles 117 Dobson, D. 217 Donaldson, Gordon 78 Donn, Rob (Robert MacKay, Rob Donn MacAoidh ) 51-52 Donnell, Alison 122 Dorsinville, Max 6 Dossena, Marina 12-13, 186, 187, 188, 195 Drake, Sir Francis 119 Drescher, Seymour 221 Dryden, John 185 The Indian Emperor 185 Drysdale, W.J. 130-131 Duckham, Baron F. 5 Dùghallach, Ailein Dall (Blind Allan MacDougall) 65

Within and Without Empire Dumas, Alexandre 117 Dunbar, Robert 46, 55 Dundas, Robert, 2nd Viscount Melville (Lord Melville) 96 Dunn, Charles W. 46, 48 Dury, Richard 187 Eckstein, Lars 228 Edgar, Mr 173 Edgar, Mrs 173 Edmond, Rod 101 Elgin, Lord 162 Eliot, T.S. 28 Elsasser, Albert B. 196 Equiano, [Oloudah] 224 Ewers, John C. 196 Fabian, Johannes 14 Falla, Jonathan 152, 159-161 Blue Poppies 152, 158 Glenfarron 152, 158-161 Poor Mercy 161 Fanon, Frantz 7-8, 204 Farred, Grant 8 Fazzini, Marco 7 Fédon, [Julien] 226 Fee, Margery 211-212 Ferguson, Adam 43, 223 Ferguson, Margaret 146 Findlay, J.L. 131-134 Finkelstein, David 112 Fischer, Bram 213 Flahive, Joseph 61 Foden, Giles 152, 156-158, 161 Last King of Scotland, The 152, 156-158 Forster, [William Edward] 111 Foucault, Michel 228 Fraser, A.J. 139 Fraser, Bashabi 12, 129 Fraser, Eugenie 143-145, 147-148 Fraser, Robert 109, 110, 112, 113, 115, 121 Frazer, Sir James 24-28 Frazer, Lilly 24

271

[Frederick II] (King of Prussia) 39, 41 Freud, Sigmund 27 Fry, Michael 6, 136, 137, 155, 217 Fryer, Linda G. 59 Fulford, Tim 101-102, 186 Fyffe, Will 220 Gallagher, John 95 Gallagher, Ellen 227-228 Gandhi, Mohamdas Karanchand (Mahatma) 85 Gardiner, Michael 1, 7, 14, 16, 21, 28, 78 Gayer, Arthur D. 97 Geertz, Clifford 22 George V (King of Britain) 147 Gellner, Eric 138 German, Lindsey 154 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic (James Leslie Mitchell) 2 Gibson, Mel 162 Gillies, Anne Lorne 51 Gillies, John 41, 54 Gillies, William 61 Gilmore, Leigh 168-169, 179-180, 182 Gilroy, Paul 221 Githae-Mugo, Micere 201 Gittings, Chris 7 Glass, Rodge 153 Dougie’s War (with Dave Turbitt) 153 Glassford, John 222 Glissant, Édouard 6, 169, 172, 182, 183 Goddard, David 27 [Goldsmith, Oliver] 192 Goonewardena, Kanishka 153 Gordon, Charles 57, 59 Gordon, Lewis 57, 58 Gottlieb, Evan 103-105 Gow, Col 143 Gow, Dr 143 Gownmill, Peter 142 Graham, George 114-116

272

Index of Personal Names

Grant, Alexander 58 Grant, Elizabeth (daughter of Peter Gownmill) 142-143 Grant of Monymusk, Sir James 56 Grant, James Augustus 27 Grant, Ludovick 47 Gray, Alasdair 2, 3 Lanark 8 Greene, Graham 201 “Gregor, Prince” see MacGregor, Gregor Gregory, Derek 17, 151, 157 Greig, Andrew 152 In Another Light 152 Greig, David 153 American Pilot, The 153 Dunsinane 153 Grey, W. 54 Griffiths, Gareth 6, 30, 81, 85 Grimble, Ian 52 Guha, Ramanchandra 90 Gunderloch, Anja 54 Gunn, Neil 11, 77, 80-83 Butcher’s Broom 77, 81-82 Hakluyt, Richard 185 Halbwachs, Maurice 224 Haldane, J.S. 207 Haldane, Kathleen 207 Hall, Catherine 168, 227 Hall, Edith 30 Hames, Scott 10 Hamilton, Douglas J. 47, 51, 59, 172, 174, 216, 217, 222 Hardt, Michael 12 Harley, John B. 17 Harper, Marjory-Ann D. 59 Harris, Wilson 7 Harvey, David 154 Harvey, Keppel 127-128 Hasbrouck, Alfred 97 Hawkins, John 119 Hay, Deòrsa Caimbeul (George Campbell Hay) 71-73, 83 Hechter, Michael 16, 21 Hector, Leonard “Tim” 90

Henderson, George 49, 50 Henry I (King of England) 23 Hewitt, Willow 224 Hinson, Andrew 141, 142 Hobsbawm, Eric John 5, 197 Hogg, James 186 Homer 39, 109, 117 Iliad, The 39 Odyssey, The 39, 109 Hooks, Bell 169 Hopkins, A.G. 138 Howard, David 17 Howe, Stephen 125 [Hugo, Victor] 192 Hukumchand, Tilokchand 141 Hulme, Keri 211-212 Hume, David 4, 223 Hunter, James 46, 82, 91 Husserl, Edmund 18 Hutcheon, Linda 169 Hutcheson, Francis 223 Jackson, Ellen-Raïssa 7 James, C.L.R. 90 James, Simon 79 Jameson, Fredric 155 JanMohamed, Abdul R. 80 Jarltzberg, [n.d.] 197 Jekyll, Walter 122 [Jenkinson, Robert] (Prime Minister of Great Britain and 2nd Earl of Liverpool) 97 Johnson, Samuel 40 Johnson, Simon 3 Jones, S.P. 114 Kamtekar, Rachana 30 Karras, Alan L. 47, 55, 217 Kay, Jackie 13, 214-228 Lamplighter, The 214-216, 218228 Red Dust Road 219 Trumpet 218 Kearton, Mrs 176 Keay, John 96 Keene, Michael 54

Within and Without Empire Kelman, James 3, 9, 153, 159 Translated Accounts 153 You Have To Be Careful in the Land of the Free 153, 159 Kennedy, A.L. 153, 159 Day 153, 159 Kennedy, Charles 59 Kennedy, Robert 59 Kerr, Andrew 97-98 Kerrigan, John 9 Khama [III] (Chief/Kgosi) 206 Kiberd, Declan 4, 78 Kidd, Sheila M. 11, 47, 54 Kincaid, Jamaica 108-109 Annie John 108 Kingsley, Charles 117, 120 Kipfer, Stefan 153 Kitchener, [Horatio Herbert] Lord 128 Klein, Naomi 159 Knight, Joseph 219-220, 224 Knox, Robert 4, 78 Kutzer, Daphne M. 124 Kydd, Robbie 219 The Quiet Stranger 219 Lambert, David 172, 178 Lamming, George 119 In the Castle of My Skin 119 Lanchester, John 100 Landsman, Ned C. 176, 216 Lane, Allen 111 Lane, Richard 164 Lang, John 108 Lassner, Phyllis 201, 212 Laurie, Robert (cartographer) 20 Leask, Nigel 9, 223-224 Lehner, Stefanie 1, 9 Leneman, Leah 66 Leonard, Tom 2, 3 Lessing, Doris 203 Lester, Alan 172 Lhuyd, Edward 42 Linchwe II (Chief/Kgosi) 200, 203204, 206, 213 Lindsay, Andrew O. 219

273

Illustrious Exile 219 Lindsay, Dido Elizabeth see Belle, Dido Elizabeth Lindsay, John 177 Linebaugh, Peter 5 Liverpool, Lord see Jenkinson, Robert Livingstone, David 101 Lloyd, David 80 Lodbrog, Regner 38 Longchamps, Miss 173 Longchamps, Mr 173 Longchamps, Mrs 173 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 192 Hiawatha 192 Loomba, Ania 9 Lorde, Audre 169, 182 Lorimer, Charles 143, 147 Love, Thomas George 96 Low, Gail 12 Mac a’ Ghobhainn, Iain (Iain Crichton Smith) 2, 87 Mac a’ Ghobhainn, Iain (John Smith) 65-66 MacAoidh, Dòmhnall 68-69, 75 MacAoidh, Rob Donn see Donn, Rob MacAskill, Kenny 136 Mac-an-Tuairneir, Paruig see Turner, Patrick Macaulay, James 187, 190-191, 193 Macaulay, Zachary 223 MacCoinnich, Aonghas 46 MacCoinnich, Coinneach (Kenneth Mackenzie) 43-45, 50 MacColl, Evan 55 MacColl, D.G. 55 MacDhòmhnaill, Alastair 63-64 MacDhòmhnaill, Domhnall Ian (Donald John MacDonald) 7374 MacDhomhnuill, Raonull (Ronald MacDonald) 39-42, 54 MacDhunlèibhe, Donnchadh (Duncan Livingstone) 75

274

Index of Personal Names

MacDiarmid, Hugh (Christopher Murray Grieve) 2, 78 Macdonald, Graeme 1, 8, 78 MacDonald, John 39 MacDonald, Ronald see MacDhomhnuill, Raonull MacDonell, Margaret 46 MacDougall, Allan see Dùghallach, Ailein Dall Macdowall, Daniel 58 MacFhionghain, Alasdair (Alexander MacKinnon) 31-32, 33, 42, 45, 63 Macgibbon, Patrick 54 MacGill-Eain, Somhairle (Sorley MacLean) 2, 71-72, 83 MacGillivray, William 56-59 MacGregor, Gregor (“Prince Gregor”) 97 MacGregor, John (Iain MacGhrigair) 42 MacGregor, Martin 62 MacGregor, Rob Roy 32 MacGregor, Stuart 83 MacGriogair, Iain 67 MacIlleathain, Iain 81 Macinnes, Allan 47, 48, 59 MacInnes, John 32, 34-35, 42, 64 Macintyre, Duncan Bàn 54 Maciver, Ruairidh 42, 64 Mack, Douglas S. 9, 217 Mackay, Alexander 26 MacKay, Donald 47 Mackay, Hugh (Colonel) 52 MacKay, Iain R. 47 Mackay, Peter 11, 35, 44, 71 MacKay, Robert see Donn, Rob Mackay, Rupert 52 Mackay, William 47 Mackenzie, Henry 43 Mackenzie, John 32 MacKenzie, John M. 9, 101, 156, 217 Mackenzie, Kenneth see MacCoinnich, Coinneach Mackenzie of Gruinard, William 58

MacKillop, Andrew 31, 44 MacLachlan, Donald 52 MacLachlan, Ewan 39 MacLachlainn, Iain (John MacLachlan) 52-53 MacLaren, I.S. 196 MacLean, Donald 56-57, 58 Maclean, John 42 MacLean, Sorley see MacGill-Eain, Somhairle MacLeod, Angus 61 MacLeod, Norman 45, 59 MacLeòid, Eachann (Hector MacLeod) 33 MacLeòid, Iain 84 Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, Alasdair (Alasdair MacDhonuill; Alexander MacDonald) 33-37, 39-43, 45, 53-54, 81 MacMhuirich, Lachlann Mòr 32 MacNeill of Taynish 47 MacNicol, Dugald 48-50 Macphail, John 60 Macpherson, James (“Ossian”) 3641, 43, 55, 57, 78, 186 Fingal 37 Fragments of Ancient Poetry 37 MacQueen, Angus 47 MacQueen, James 178 Macqueen, William 54 Majumdar, Boria 90 Makdisi, Saree 16, 17, 18 Malcolm, Richard 123-124 Maley, Willy 7, 8 Malinowski, Bronislaw 27 Mandela, Nelson 213 Manning, Frank 90 Manning, Susan 78 Mansfield, Lord see Murray, William Martin, James R. 198 Mary Queen of Scots 73 Mary [of Teck] (Queen consort of George V) 147 Maxwell, James Rivers 54 McArthur, John (cartographer) 20

Within and Without Empire McCallum, Hugh 55 McCallum, John 55 McCaughey, Terence 62 McCleery, Alistair 111, 112, 121 McCracken-Flesher, Caroline 98, 100 McCrone, David 146 McDermot, Thomas 122 McDonald, Allan 54 McEwan, Miss 173, 174 McIntosh, John 194 McKitterick, David 110 McLarty, Colin 58 McLauchlin, Archibald 219 McLean, Marianne 55 McLeish, Henry 136 McLeod, Wilson 11, 32, 61, 67, 68 McNabb, John 123 McNeil, Kenneth 9 McQueen, James 178 Meek, Donald E. 32, 39, 56, 63-66, 81 Meek, James 153, 158-159, 161 We Are Now Beginning Our Descent 153, 158-159 Melville, Lord see Dundas, Robert (2nd Viscount Melville) Meyer, Duane 46 Mighty Sparrow, The 122 Millar, John 223 Miller, David 4-5 Miln, David 137-138, 140, 143-144, 148 Milton, John 108 Paradise Lost 108 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 30, 210, 228 Mintz, Sidney W. 12, 221 Mitchison, Naomi 13, 200-213 African Heroes [202], 208-209, 213 Africans, The 209, [211], 212, [213] Corn King and the Spring Queen, The 207 Other People’s Worlds 202

275

Return to the Fairy Hill [200], 202, [203], 204, 206, [207], 208, [210], 211 When We Become Men 204-206 Mohammed, Patricia 169 Moireasdan, Aonghas (Angus Morrison) 67-68, 75 Moireasdan, Dòmhnall (Donald Morrison) 70 Moll, Herman (cartographer) 20 Morgan, Edwin 2, 3 Morley, Vincent 63 Morris, Anne 141 Morris, John 141, 145 Morton, Graeme 141, 142 Mphahlele, Ezekiel 85 Mulzac, Charles 170, 171, 177-178, 182 [named off-spring of] 171-172, [182] Mulzac, Hugh 168, 170, 178, 181, 182 A Star to Steer By 168, 170 Mulzac, Juliana “Lily” 168, 170172, 177-184 Munro, G.G. 173, 174 Murdoch, Alexander 217, 223 Murray, A.R. 140 Murray, Isobel 205 Murray, Jim (librarian) 46 Murray, William (Earl of Mansfield) 177 Naipaul, V.S. 109, 118 A House for Mr Biswas 109, 118, 121 Mystic Masseur 109 Nairn, Tom 153 Neal, Larry 96-97 Negri, Antonio 12 Neill, William 11, 77, 80, 83, 91 Nelson, [Horatio] 115 Newbolt, Sir Henry 112-113 Newton, Michael 43, 46, 48, 50, 62, 63, 75 Nic a’ Ghobhainn, Magaidh 68-69

276

Index of Personal Names

Nicolson, Douglas 146-147 Nilsen, Kenneth E. 56 Ní Suaird, Damhnait 62 Nora, Pierre 215 Norquay, Glenda 8 Norrie, John 146 Norrie, William 137, 140, 143, 145 Nugent, George 175 Nugent, Lady Maria175-177, 179, 183 O’Farrell, Maggie 152 Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The 152 O’Gallagher, Niall 1, 8, 78 Ogborn, Miles 121 Oliver, Fiona 7 Ormerod, Beverley 183 ‘Ossian’ see Macpherson, James Palmer, Geoff 214 Park, Mungo 160 Parry, Benita 11, 85 Paterson, Daniel 176 Pausanias 25 Peters, Gerald 169 Phillips, Caryl 201 Phillips, Mike 90 Phillips, Trevor 90 Phillipson, N.T. 96, 98 Pilane, Amos K. 210 Piper, Karen Lynnea 17 Pitt, [William, the Younger] (Prime Minister of Great Britain) 95 Pittock, Murray G.H. 78-79 Plato 30 Pococke, [Richard] (Bishop) 222 Pollard, Velma 9, 175, 222 Pont, Timothy (cartographer) 20 Poovey, Mary 99 Pouchet Paquet, Sandra 183 Praeger, Michele 183 Pratt, Mary L. 177 Prebble, John 44, 45 Price, John Vladimir 38 Prince, Mary 224

Purchas, Samuel 185 Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 27 Raleigh, Sir Walter 25, 109, 119 Ramsay, James 223 Ranger, Terence 197 Ray, Arabinda 139 Rediker, Marcus 5 Reid, Bill 121 Reid, Diane 148, 149 Rhodes, [Cecil] 206 Rhys, Jean 219 Wide Sargasso Sea 219 Riach, Alan 7 Rice, Duncan 223 Richards, David 11 Riggs, Paul T. 8 Rignall, J.M. 104 Rivers, W.H.R. 27 Roberts, Peter A. 121 Robertson, Annie 181, 182 Robertson, James 152, 155, 219-220 Joseph Knight 152, 155, 219220 Robertson, James Irvine 58 Robertson, William (anti-slavery campaigner) 223 Robinson, Ronald 95 Rock, David 96 Roscoe, John 24, 26-28 Rosenberg, Leah 121 Ross, James 51 Ross, Neil 71 Rostow, W.W. 97 Rothach, Iain (John Munro) 70 Rothbard, Murray 97, 99 Rowley, Miss 173, 174, 176 Rowley, Owsley 173, 176 Rowlinson, Matthew 97-99 Roy, William (cartographer) 20 Rushdie, Salman 30 Ruxton, George F. 197 Ryder, Jacqueline 13 Said, Edward 17 Sancho, [Ignatius] 224

Within and Without Empire Sandiford, Keith 90 Sandru, Cristina 6 Sartre, Jean-Paul 204 Sassi, Carla 8-9, 164, 214, 217, 219 Scheurmier, H. 115 Schiefelbein, Michael E. 101 Schoene, Berthold 7, 10 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe 194 Schwartz, Anna Jacobson 97 Scott, Jean 144, 147 Scott, P[aul] H[enderson] 82, 94 Scott, Sir Walter 11-12, 14-19, 2124, 26, 28, 58, 94-107, 186 Antiquary, The 98 Chronicles of the Canongate, The 14, [27] Fair Maid of Perth, The 22-23 Guy Mannering 102-104 Heart of Midlothian, The 102, [103], 104, 106 Letters from Malachi Malagrowther 94-101, 103-104, [105], 106 Pirate, The 101 Surgeon’s Daughter, The 104 Waverley 14-21, 101 Seacole, Mary 169, 179, 183, Selgin, George 99 Selvon, Samuel 109 Senghor, L.S. 85 Shakespeare, William 117, 179, 185 King Lear 179 Shaw, William 54 Shepherd, Nan 2 Sheridan, Richard B. 52 Shirrefs, Andrew 59 Simpson, Alexander 188, 191-193, 196 Sinclair, Alexander Maclean 81 Sinclair, Archibald 51, 63 Sinclair, John C. 48 Sinton, Thomas 48 Skinner, Andrew (cartographer) 20 Slater, David 5 Smith, Adam 105-106, 223 Wealth of Nations, The 106

277

Smith, Angela 9 Smith, Iain Crichton see Mac a’ Ghobhainn, Iain Smout, T.C. 216 Smyth, Gerry 8 Solomon, Pam Fraser 217 Somerset, James (runaway slave) 224 Sontag, Susan 23 Sorensen, Janet 186 Soutar, Bill 146 Soutar, Dot 146 Soutar, Mr 140 Soutar, Mrs 140 Soyinka, Wole 224 Speke, John Hanning 27, 157 Spiers, Edward M. 156 Spivak, Gayatri 219, 224 Stafford, Fiona 8, 36 Stead, C.K. 211-212 Stephen, James (anti-slavery campaigner) 223 Stevens, C.J. 194 Stevenson, George 143 Stevenson, Iain 111 Stevenson, Robert Louis 101-102, 141, 188, 194-195, 199 Stewart, Alexander 41 Stewart of Garth, David 48, 58 Stewart, Donald 41 Stewart, Gordon T. 137-142, 145 Stoddart, Brian 90 Strachan, Arthur W. 129-130, 135 Strachan, Dr John 123-124 Stobie, James (cartographer) 20 Stroh, Silke 1, 9, 11, 75, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84 Sussman, Charlotte 102-103, 106 Sutherland, Kathryn 106 Swiggers, Pierre 194 Tacitus 81-83 Agricola 81, 83 Tacky, also known as Takyi (slave) 226 Taylor, A.E. 30

278

Index of Personal Names

Taylor, George (cartographer) 20 ten Kortenaar, Neil 109, 110 Thomson, Derick 35, 51 Tiffin, Helen 6, 30, 81, 85 Tomlinson, Jim 148 Treece, Henry 206 Trumpener, Katie 80 Turbitt, Dave 153 Dougie’s War (with Rodge Glass) 153 Turnbull, Ronald 8 Turner, Patrick (Paruig Mac-anTuairneir) 41, 54 Turner, W.H.K. 136 Urmston, [Edward Brabazon] (Colonel) 127-128 Vertovec, Steven 138, 146 Victoria (Queen of Britain) 14, [67] Virgil 39 Wade, George (General) 20 Wagg, Stephen 90 Walcott, Derek 109, 169, 179, 183184 Omeros 169 Wallace, D.R. 142 Wallace, Diana 207 Wallace, William 73, 162 Walvin, James 221, 225 Watson, Moray 85 Watson, Roderick 7

Watson, S.B. 113-115 Watt, James 217 [Webster, Daniel] 192 Webster, Jane 30 Webster, Mr 148 Webster, S. 15 Wedderburn of Inveresk, James 170 Wedderburn, John 219-220 Wedderburn, Robert 170-171, 177 Welsh, Irvine 3, 8 Trainspotting 3, 8 Welsh, Sarah Lawson 6, 122 Whatley, Christopher 136-137, 139141 White, Lawrence H. 99 White, Peter R.R. 198 Whittle, James (cartographer) 20 Whyte, Iain 47, 217, 223 Wighton, Alex 147 William, [Kaiser] (Wilhelm II of Germany) 70 Willdey, Thomas (cartographer) 20 Williams, Eric 221 Williamson, Karina 46, 48 Williamson, Kevin 3 Wilson, Janet 6 Wilson, Kathleen 168, 172-173, 216 Withers, Charles W.J. 20-21, 55, 61 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 28 Wormius, Olaus 38 Yaeger, Patricia 10 Young, Robert 4, 9, 85