THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Seasonality journeys through the year, looking at British wildlife across the seasons, and also about our own relationship with it. Ian Parsons writes exclusively for Books from Scotland to tell us a bit more about the heart of the book, the changes of the seasons, and introduce readers to his work.

 

Seasonality: A personal account of nature through the seasons
By Ian Parsons
Published by Whittles Publishing

 

Seasons come and seasons go, in an uncertain world, the changing of the seasons, from spring to summer, to autumn, to winter and then back to again to spring is a reassuring constant. Each season brings with it its own beauty, a beauty that we can immerse ourselves in if we allow it. These last few years have proven to many of us how important it is to let wildlife into your life, to watch it, to listen to it and to enjoy how it makes you feel.

Spring is a month of renewal, from tree leaves bursting forth out of their tightly packed buds through to the liquidity of morning bird song, the nature that surrounds us seems extra busy in the spring time. There are many indicators that spring has arrived, from the fluttering of butterflies, to the blossoming of trees, but for me, my favourite sign that spring is here once more is the return of the swallows. The swallow is a bird that doesn’t know what winter is, joining us in April after an epic migration from southern Africa it spends our spring and summer with us and then departs, as our summer ends, to head back to the southern hemisphere to enjoy its spring and summer.

They are beautiful birds and I love seeing them that first time again, cutting graceful arcs through the sky as they return here to breed. But it is when they come into perch that you can really see their beauty, the blue/black plumage on their upperparts has a glorious iridescence that reflects the spring sunshine in dazzling brilliance. Their forehead and throat are blood red in colour, adding to their beauty; these are birds that are well worth looking closely at. Before long they have settled down to start to breed, often returning to last year’s nest site. As they start breeding so spring slowly slips into summer.

The British summer can be a fickle thing, idyllic days under clear blue skies can be followed by sodden ones under drab grey clouds, but whenever the sun shines you can find a fantastic and beautiful symbol of the season, butterflies. A butterfly fluttering by is something that always brings a smile to my face, they are beautiful insects and no summer would be complete without them decorating the day. Some species are restricted in range, but others are much more widespread, species like the Painted Lady and the Red Admiral are well known and common and then of course there’s the fabulous Peacock, a butterfly that as it flashes its wings it makes eyes at you. These insects are very fond of the buddleia we have growing in the garden, the long flowering spikes as popular with them as they are with us.

Butterflies though are somewhat ephemeral, and as summer draws to an end, as the days grow shorter, so they begin to dwindle. But don’t despair, colours are still aplenty in the autumn and one of the most beautiful displays in nature is about to begin.

The show of autumn colour put on by our trees is rightly famed, suddenly the greens we have grown accustomed to become yellows, oranges and reds. Not all species do this of course, but those that do, do it wonderfully. From the Field Maple highlighting itself in yellow to the Rowan glowing orangey red, our gardens, towns, parks and the wider countryside can take on a whole new palette at this time of the year. Of course, the trees aren’t doing it for our benefit, it is a process they go through to reclaim and recycle the goodness from their leaves before they discard them, the colours we see are a byproduct of this process, but what a byproduct they are! Autumn colour is a show to enjoy, but like the butterflies of summer it too is ephemeral, the leaves soon drop and as they do so winter joins us once more.

Winter is a season that can sometimes be described as bleak, and when the weather rages it can seem so, but there is beauty in the winter just as there is in the other seasons of the year. A twinkling coating of frosty ice crystals transforms even the drabbest road verge into a magical looking place, cold and crisp mornings may mean wrapping up and scraping the windscreen, but that shouldn’t lessen their beauty. Flocks of birds visit garden bird feeders, bringing with them an opportunity for people to appreciate their feathered beauty close to.

My favourite winter visitor is the Fieldfare, a large species of thrush that joins us from Scandinavia and Russia each winter, seeking our milder climate and the red berries of the hedgerows and gardens on which they feed. They are beautiful birds and always a pleasure to see, but it is their wonderful cackling call that I most enjoy, an almost other worldly laugh that says winter to me whenever I hear it.

The seasons are full of beauty, most of it close to our homes and my new book Seasonality is my own personal account of the journey through them each year, a guide to the wildlife of the seasons. It is about what I see, what I hear and what I feel as I observe the ever-changing beauty that surrounds us all.

 

Seasonality: A personal account of nature through the seasons by Ian Parsons is published by Whittles Publishing, priced £18.99.

The Forgery pays homage to greats like Juan Rulfo and Luis Barragán, traversing late 20th-century Guadalajara with the exuberance and eccentricity of an 18th-century picaresque. You can read an exclusive introduction to the first chapter below.

 

The Forgery
By Jennifer Croft
Published by Charco Press

 

My name is José Federico Burgos. I’m a painter. I make copies of Renaissance paintings and the occasional forgery. I’m sitting on the edge of the highest wall on the property. I’m going to jump. I’m going to do it any second now. The dawn cold numbs my legs as they dangle over the abyss. The streetlamps are starting to turn off as the sunlight peeps over my shoulder. Sunbeams cut through the haze lying over the hamlet. I hear a cockerel’s cry, but it must be miles away. This yellow morning light might be the last thing I see.

Now that it’s getting brighter, I look down and try to calculate, again, the consequences of my fall: the wall is about six metres high, but then there’s another fifteen- or twenty-metre slope of scrub and stone. The branches should help break the fall, but there’s always a chance I’ll crack my head open on a rock and be left paralysed. Not that I have any alternative. Going back to that house would be worse than plunging to my death.

I shift my weight over the edge and my buttocks begin to slip. No going back now – I’d have to hang on with both hands and one of them is already broken, cradled against my heart, smashed to pieces. I jump, pushing hard away from the wall, and scream in mid-air. It’s a short, dry scream, and it reaches me as if someone else had screamed it. My nerves stand like barbs, registering the details of each millionth of a second. I can’t feel the wind, just a force sucking at me like a dark mouth; the gap between my body falling and what it falls away from, along with my stomach. Like when you go over a dip in the road at full speed. Then my feet hit the ground and my whole weight comes smashing down. I may not weigh much, but six metres are six metres, and gravity does its work. My legs spasm and an electric shock runs up my torso to my arms. My head snaps back, although not too hard. Then immediately, movement. I’m dragged down through the stones and branches, skidding head- long between hard clods and rocks. I can’t keep track of the scrapes and blows and grazes. In the cloud of dust I’m raising, the distance feels much further than I’d calculated. An eternal expanse in which everything crunches and cracks and rolls and rips, but I can’t be sure whether what’s crunching and cracking are branches or my own bones and flesh. I feel a stab in my side, a twinge that could just as well have been a thorn or something piercing deep into an organ – who can say, the pain is the same. Flesh or bone? is the only thing I can think. Flesh or bone.

Finally, I come to a halt. My blood beats in my temples, in my hands. I’m conscious. Stunned, but conscious. My hand! I think with a start, as though anticipating a pain that then instantly erupts, my right arm twisted to one side like a piece of spaghetti. My whole body is spaghetti-soft.

I open my eyes, or it feels like I open my eyes, into the gradually dispersing cloud of dust. I’m very close to the edge of the road – surely someone will see me, someone who’ll pick me up and take me to hospital, or call an ambulance. It’s just a question of waiting. Waiting and managing the pain. Staying very still so the pain doesn’t take over my thoughts. Then I really would be lost. It’s odd, the pain isn’t localised in my broken arm any more, nor in my scrapes; it’s a dull throbbing that envelops me entirely. Like a speaker muffled by a cushion.

I hear the drag of footsteps along the ground, to one side of my head. I can’t turn to look. A force like a hand is stopping me. From the footsteps, I deduce that there are two people,

but all I manage to see is the toe of a shoe. It’s a leather shoe, a very fine one, perfectly clean, not a single blade of grass clinging to it.

‘You won’t be able to play with those clubs here. You need a five-wood titanium head, so you can lift it with those flimsy little biceps of yours,’ I hear the closer voice saying.

‘I’ve ordered some Dunlops, but they haven’t arrived yet. Once they get here I’ll give you a run for your money, you’ll see. It won’t do you any good trying to measure the course with your architect’s eye,’ the other replies, with the harsh accent of an old-time rancher.

The man in the clean shoes crouches down beside me. ‘Let’s go. Leave him, he’s alive,’ says the man further off. ‘Did you see him jump? I think he’s one of ours.’ ‘What else is he gonna be, man. Come on, take your shot and have done with it.’ I hear the click of a lighter, then smell tobacco.

‘Hey, kid… Kid, can you hear me?’ the man by my side insists. I catch a momentary glimpse of his face: his wide bald head, his curly eyebrows and impish eyes.

‘Hang on in there, they’re on their way. We can talk when you get back,’ I hear him say. He gets up and walks off.

‘Yeah, get some rest in the cemetery!’ his companion says, and they both laugh heartily.

‘Bet you anything I’ll make the next hole in three, tops.’

‘You serious? With your arthritis? I’d bet on Miracle that you can’t.’

‘That horse is past his prime. And you’d gone grey before he was even born…’

I hear the clean sound of a ball being putted. The voices grow distant. I struggle to turn over but can’t manage it. What they’re saying makes no sense, there’s no golf club here or anything like it, it’s a patch of wasteland by the side of the road and I’m in urgent need of some- one’s help, someone who can call an ambulance.

My head finally frees itself of the weight that had kept it from moving, but there’s nobody there. I’m surrounded by spiny shrubs, dry earth. Below me, a few metres away, I can just about see the black strip of asphalt and the gutter alongside it. I hear the roar of a large engine. The pain stirs. It’s a shot that shatters every nerve, a lightning bolt into an old tree. It doesn’t even leave me time to scream. The pain immediately absorbs all my strength and I’m unable to endure it. It’s about to annihilate me when something surges from within my own mind and sucks me into its tiniest corner. A dark, quiet box where time stands still.

 

The Forgery by Jennifer Croft is published by Charco Press, priced £9.99.

Scotland is one of the oldest nations in the world, but to some it is hardly counted as a nation at all. The story of Scotland is one of innovation, exploration, resistance and global consequence, one that Murray Pittock dives into with great detail across its history in his new book. You can read an extract below on Books from Scotland exploring the classic Auld Lang Syne.

 

Scotland The Global History: 1603 to the Present
By Murray Pittock
Published by Yale University Press

 

‘Auld Lang Syne’, now often accounted the second most widely used song globally after ‘Happy Birthday to You’, has a much longer history since it appeared in Robert Burns’ version in 1796. Sung in benefit concerts and entr’actes from the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was also inscribed on a snuff box given to George IV on the occasion of the royal visit to Edinburgh in 1822 when the king also enjoyed a ‘gala performance’ of Rob Roy Macgregor, or ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

From 1818 at least, it was sung at Burns Suppers, first appearing in Philadelphia. The radical Andrew White, transported for his part in the 1820 Rising (discussed later in this chapter) referred to it as a New Year song as early as 1822. Used in political discussion in England from the 1817 Pitt dinner and in Continental opera, ballet and drama in the 1820s, by 1850 it had become – like ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the Queen’ – a national song, performed on social occasions to express Scottish nationality on British ceremonial and imperial occasions. In the 1830s it was being sung by enslaved people in the Caribbean, and from at least 1852 was being played when British ships left port; by 1864 at the latest it was also used in ceremonies when ‘regiments bade farewell to their old colours’.

Used in the United States by Union troops in the Civil War and during Lincoln’s funeral, and in British politics as a political anthem associated with W.E. Gladstone, it was also the subject of a statue erected in Central Park in the 1860s and provided a reference point in Victorian fiction and popular culture. In 1877, Alexander Graham Bell used it to demonstrate the telephone, and it was one of the first songs recorded for gramophone in 1890. In 1892, the Burns scholar James Dick termed it the ‘most widely diffused song in the civilised world’, and by this period it was regularly being played as a New Year song on both sides of the Atlantic. It subsequently became a song of the Scout movement, and was played at graduations in the US and Asia, where it was played at the British exit from Hong Kong in 1998, and can be heard signifying closing time in Japanese bars and supermarkets.

‘Auld Lang Syne’ is also played at funerals in Taiwan, as well as providing the closing ritual for millions who attend Burns Suppers worldwide, as it has done since at least 1890. Translated into many languages, it even made a brief appearance as the national anthem of the Maldives, as the Burns scholar Morag Grant informs us. Auld Lang Syne’ was popularized as a New Year song for radio by Canadian musician Guy Lombardo at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York from 1929, and later emerged in transmuted form in the hands of Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen among many others.

The song has made repeated appearances in American cinema, most often in a romantic context with a New Year reference – Holiday (1938) is an early example. Such repeated uses in modern culture demonstrate ‘Auld Lang Syne’’s symbolic power, conveying over-whelming sentiment in a language not quite like English, where the characters do not always know what the words ‘even mean’ and some-times say so. (‘Old Long Since’ is not an adequate translation and ‘Old Long Ago’ is not either; nor is it useable English. Scots allows for the use of a double intensifier, and ‘syne’ itself has multiple meanings, which allow the term to have an evocative ambiguity as well as a quality of positive nostalgia unavailable in short English words.) In films such as When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and Sex and the City (2008) the song has played out as a moment of romantic climax and change, symbolized in the changing of the year.

From It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) onwards it has also been a Christmas song. Less positively, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ has been used to reference the loss of the antebellum South. The Cameron family in D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation (1915) reflect the core Scottish martial values of bravery, chivalry and openhearted decency trans-planted into a defence of white supremacy in the Confederate states before, during and after the Civil War. The ‘Little Colonel’ Cameron is presented in the film as the chief defender of racial politics against Black rights and miscegenation who keeps the world of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ alive in his bravery and resourcefulness in founding the Klan. The myth of the ‘Celtic South’, argued for in the historian James Michael Hill’s Celtic Warfare (1986) and still widespread today, was deeply reinforced by Griffiths’ film, originally to be titled The Klansman. Convivality, fraternal organizations (Grant argues that the crossing of arms which closes communal singing of the song derives from Masonic practice), social occasions and nostalgia for friends and the happy years spent with them are not always positive emotions, but Burns’ version of this ancient – and in his day Jacobite – Scottish song in praise of a lost past (as all pasts are) is in many respects the signature tune of the Scottish brand.

 

Scotland The Global History: 1603 to the Present by Murray Pittock is published by Yale University Press, priced £25.

Patrick Jamieson discovers two impressive debut novels from two of Scotland’s most successful comedians.

 

Meantime
By Frankie Boyle
Published by Baskerville

The Black Dog
By Kevin Bridges
Published by Wildfire

 

In a publishing climate dominated by celebrity memoirs and political diatribes, you could be forgiven for approaching the debut novels of Frankie Boyle and Kevin Bridges with an air of cynicism. Meantime (Baskerville, July 22) and The Black Dog (Wildfire, August 22), both written during lockdown and published this summer, have been granted pre-ordained status as major literary events thanks to the reputations of the two beloved Scottish comics. Thankfully, neither make any apologies for this, and within just a handful of pages it becomes clear that these stand-up comics are more natural authors than most influencers or stale politicians.

Of course, this should come as no surprise. Since the New Wave in the 1950s and 60s, stand-up comedy has increasingly become a narrative artform anchored by storytelling. The performance of a stand-up comedy routine requires many abilities familiar to the novelist: a sensitive consideration of audience, a sophisticated understanding of structure, and the ability to elicit pathos. More and more comics play with the rules and expectations of the form in a manner reminiscent of post-modern literature, while the authored personas of many comics speak to a deep sensitivity for character and an ability to blur fiction and reality so characteristic of much contemporary fiction. In fact, it’s a wonder more haven’t taken to writing novels.

All of these traits come to the fore in Meantime and The Black Dog, which offer different but equally impressive examples of comic-authored debuts. In Meantime, the drug-addled Felix McAveety teams up with his unstable neighbour Donny and dying crime-writer Jane Pickford to try and solve the murder of his friend Marina. Traversing post-referendum Glasgow in a haze of valium, LSD and whatever else they can get their hands on, the three unlikely PIs uncover a chain of lies and deception reaching out from local independence groups through youth centres all the way to the pharmaceutical industry and police force. Throughout, Boyle illustrates a genuine gift for imagery (‘I opened the curtains and watched a seagull laugh across a shock of morning sky’), and in the hilarious McAveety, his characteristically crushing social observations are given new life. Like with Boyle’s stand-up, however, this critique is often undercut by an implicit self-effacement, as shown in an interaction between McAveety and his therapist:

‘You’re swearing a lot lately.’
‘Maybe Scottish people have been imprisoned in the English language and we are trying to blow our way out.’
‘Yes… Scottish people weren’t all Gaelic speakers, you know.’
‘I know everybody needs to feel like they’re right all the time, but I’m often wrong, and I’m okay with it.’

Boyle is unafraid to approach the bigger topics with the kind of balance and self-awareness often absent in the age of social media, though – like McAveety – he often hides this behind a front of humour and cynicism. Like the most effective stand-up comedy routines, it is only when the novel ends that its deeper message becomes clear: set against the polarizing backdrop of a referendum during which ‘everybody felt like they were right’, the fatal duplicitousness and mind-bending punchline of Meantime shows that, for Boyle, the ability to admit to being wrong is not only acceptable, but potentially life-saving.

Meantime is a cerebral novel, and Boyle makes no qualms about that. In a move reminiscent of Muriel Spark’s The Comforters, McAveety continually worries that his life is part of a simulation. A funny and familiar expression of drug-induced paranoia, it also winks towards the authorship and construction of a novel that is complemented by its deconstruction of the crime fiction genre and deep concern with the notion of truth. All assumptions are questioned, and a running theme of rewriting history is surmised when McAveety notes, ‘Describing fiction as history and vice versa was very much Donnie’s vibe. Maybe it made sense, or as close to sense as we could make.’ For Boyle, there is no truth, only the performance of truth, and in fiction as on stage, he takes this to extreme and sophisticated lengths for great comedic effect.

While less feverish and fast-paced, the Glasgow constructed in Kevin Bridges’ The Black Dog is too written with the familiar ease of the local, drifting between the worlds of two men: college student and Morrisons shelf-stacker Declan, whose dreams of being a writer appear to be halted by a combination of depression and a run-in with a local gangster, and James Cavani, a successful writer from the same area who has returned home from the US to care for his sister. The stories of these two men are set on an unlikely collision course and Bridges reels in the reader with an impressive pacing that belies a debut—this is clearly a comic well-versed in structure. The novel moves comfortably between vernacular and standard English narration, exhibiting the same balance between authenticity and universality that undercuts so much of Bridges’ comedic appeal. His is a voice sensitive to pace, informed by the natural rhythms and schisms of speech, and his dialogue – especially in the character of Doof Doof, Declan’s philosopher-come-greenskeeper sidekick – sparkles with the wit and character of the best comics’ social observation:

‘You’d be surprised how fucked up some people feel, Declan. Embrace the sadness sometimes, man, get to know it, it’s normal, man, it’s human. Remember it’s your heed, it’s your home, your home game, don’t let it be an away game, man, a tough place to go, fucking Tynecastle or somewhere.’

Bridges’ novel is no doubt a more straightforward story than Meantime, but The Black Dog, too, explores questions of authorship and the distinctions between truth and fiction. ‘The Black Dog’ is the name given to Declan’s script that he sends to James Cavani, a script he hopes depicts ‘real life shit’, ‘all the frustration, the anger, the confusion, whatever it was […] authentic, propelled by real-life energy, real experiences.’ Declan’s approach to writing is a cypher for Bridges’ wider feelings about art and stand-up comedy. It is precisely the magic of Bridges’ comedy – his ability to mine the humour in the everyday ‘real life shit’ of working-class Glasgow – that gives life to The Black Dog, and he is acutely aware of this, drawing a fine line between fiction and real-life experience that gifts his characters a familiarity and compels us to invest in their story.

Both Meantime and The Black Dog draw us in like the setup of a great joke, hit us with the punchline, but do so in ways characteristic of each comic. Meantime is a jet-black hallucinogenic noir full of biting cynicism, blacker, ironically, than The Black Dog, which for all its vivid representations of the everyday struggles of working-class life and open intention to ‘embrace the sadness’, has earnest hope pitched firmly at its centre. Yet much like Boyle’s stand-up, if one is willing to chip away at the brash exterior, what is revealed is a genuinely tender portrait of apathy, loss and redemption not unlike Bridges’ work. Closing the book on Meantime and The Black Dog, what we are reminded of is not just the ways in which the formal boundaries between stand-up comedy and literature often dissolve under closer inspection, but that at their heart both art forms are concerned with the same thing: the tragicomedy of human experience. So sit back, open a can or order a takeaway, and enjoy these two entertaining rides. It’s fucking life, man.

 

Meantime by Frankie Boyle is published by Baskerville, priced £14.99.

The Black Dog by Kevin Bridges is published by Wildfire, priced £20.

Stuck at home during lockdown Esa Aldegheri revisited her memories of a road trip from Orkney to New Zealand and put pen to paper. Free To Go is an excellent memoir that explores both those events, and she written exclusively for BooksfromScotland about what freedom and constraint mean to her.

 

Free to Go
By Esa Aldegheri
Published by John Murray

 

When I woke up on the 1st of February 2020 I didn’t know that by evening I’d have planned out a book on freedom and constraint, borders and connectedness, motorbike journeys and motherhood. All I knew was that the insides of my eyelids felt they had brambles for capillaries, and that my stomach was twisting in knots of deep apprehension.

I was hungover from having raised too many parting drams outside the Scottish Parliament the night before, at a defiant gathering of people who sang and wept as the United Kingdom left the European Union and took Scotland with it. I was sick with worry and fear for the future of my Italian-Scottish family and many others. As the day jangled on, my anxiety clotted into anger, then urgency: the need to weave a story to help navigate times of increasing restrictions, where wide horizons and the freedom of adventuring were somehow in dialogue with borders, restrictions and fear.

Between mugs of restorative coffee, I turned to what I knew: my own memories of open borders, when I drove a motorbike halfway across the world with my husband. I planned to juxtapose the vast freedoms of a motorbike adventure with the limitations on free movement brought by Brexit. Of course, another thing I didn’t know was that in a few weeks my Brexit worries would be eclipsed first by the catastrophic impact of Covid in Lombardy, where my Italian family live, and then by the pandemic lockdowns in Scotland.

Free to Go evolved during months of claustrophobia and fear when my main escape was into memories of free travel, and as my mind flitted between memories and reality the book shaped itself around the twin strands of freedom and constraint. The adventure of travelling is narrated in the past and progresses geographically, following the motorbike journey from Scotland to New Zealand. Remembered journeys are interwoven with a narrative in the present tense which is anchored to the cycle of seasons through one year of pandemic restrictions.

At first I thought it would be simple: then, freedom; now, constraint. But as the book grew, I saw that these two strands are so closely woven that one never exists without the other being close by. The motorbike journey featured many constraints – from visa refusals to physical attacks and almost being deported – which enraged me and made freedom of travel shine all the brighter. Over a year of pandemic living I found new ways to regain a sense of freedom, and those discoveries delight me still.

Delight and freedom, constraint and rage recur throughout Free to Go. A lot of the rage comes from the fact that I travel this world as a woman – and in my experience it is a world which often assumes that women drive pillion, both on motorbikes and in personal relationships. Far too many men have interrupted me, when I started telling them about Free to Go, with variations on “Oh, how nice – a view from the pillion!”. No, pal. Just – no.

This is also a world which I travel as a white woman with a strong body and a Good Passport, accidents of birth which mean that I have liberties which many, many others lack. Writing Free to Go made me appreciate just how much the freedoms I enjoy as a traveller – to go where I decide, to leave if I want to and return safely home – are extraordinary and precious. I would like to see more travel writing which celebrates the delight of moving with curiosity in the world while also acknowledging that not everyone is equally free to go.

The process of bringing a book into the world also confirmed that, to me, writing is in itself a freedom. As a child in Italy I learned a song with the refrain i libri sono ali – books are wings – and I found this to be true, in the sense that writing Free to Go freed me to fly across the world through words, away from the suffocations and fears of lockdown. Writing is also an act which takes memories, thoughts and stories out of my mind and sets them free into the world, like birds. Who knows where they will roost and nest – what an amazement, thinking of that. What a delight.

 

Free to Go by Esa Aldegheri is published by John Murray, priced £14.99.

 

Corinna Campbell has followed up her magical picture book The Girl Who Stole the Stars with another beautiful picture book, The Boy Who Rescued a Rainbow. Here, Corinna takes us through the story and its message of what it means to have courage.

 

The Boy Who Rescued a Rainbow
By Corinna Campbell
Published by Little Door Books

 

 

The Boy Who Rescued a Rainbow by Corinna Campbell is published by Little Door Books, priced £7.99.

Scottish-Mexican poet Juana Adcock’s latest pamphlet, Vesitigial, is a collection of poems written after Alasdair Gray’s seminal work, Lanark. It was published in June by Stewed Rhubarb Press.

 

Vestigial
By Juana Adcock
Published by Stewed Rhubarb Press

 

Vestigial is a commissioned body of poems. How did the original commission come about and when did you write it?

I was commissioned to write a response to Lanark during the first two lockdowns, as part of the first Alasdair Gray conference and as a creative response to go alongside the academic papers. It took six months or a year to finish writing. I hadn’t read Lanark until the first lockdown. Before I’d started reading it, I’d thought about leaving Glasgow. I felt the city wasn’t working for me – typical lockdown crisis! But reading Lanark while going on these lockdown walks…the city looked completely different. I noticed things I’d never seen before. The original commission was just for one poem, but there were so many layers of stories, t was so hard to condense that into a single poem. I don’t know how anyone could have done that. It’s huge, anarchic, a labyrinth.

 

What was the response when you produced a pamphlet instead of a single poem?

I think Rodge Glass [Strathclyde University, Chair of the Alasdair Gray Conference Committee] was like ‘are you okay? Are you sure you’re not overextending yourself?’ I kept thinking, maybe I can write lots of different drafts and then choose one poem to focus on, the best one, and send that off. But I couldn’t choose. I just sent it off as lots of different poems. I presented it at the conference on Zoom, read a couple of poems, and then found a home for it a year or so later.

 

I suppose that shows just how much you connected to Lanark.

I found it really generative and it really did give me all these different ideas. It wasn’t just reading the book – I wrote to the Alasdair Grey Archive and asked if I could go. It was during a lockdown, so me for it was a huge adventure to get on a bus and go all the way to Maryhill! They were so generous. I was shown all these drafts, his own library, notes he’d added to books. If he wanted to correct something, he would add liquid paper and a Post It note, then write on that. Everything had all these layers. It connected me to a story Rodge told me – Alasdair Gray painted a mural for a church that was due to be demolished. He painted this elaborate mural, even when he knew the church wouldn’t exist for much longer. It made me think about the creative process in a different way – it’s about the process, not the end results.

 

What was it like at the archive?

It’s beautiful – it looks like it could have been his living room. There’s furniture from his flat, his original desk, bookshelves filled with his actual books. You actually feel that you’re in his space.

 

How did that feel as a writer, going into his space?

It was really somehow liberating. You get the feeling he was not some god that was out there making this consecrated art – he was a struggling artist, always skint, having to improvise with whatever elements he had around him. I was shown a notebook he rescued from a skip, this old accounting book he’d used as a sketchbook.

 

You’ve got your own collections of poetry out; what was it like, producing work written entirely after someone else? Did you feel any pressure?

I was worried I would be departing too far from Lanark. I kept wondering if I should include more recognisable elements or incorporate more classic scenes or bring in characters. But then I thought, no. What I think I’m responding to is his vision of the creative process, rather than the novel’s actual plot or its content. I was trying to get nearer to the way he thinks. I find that the most fascinating part of connecting with anyone’s work.

 

Quite often poets write in response to other poets, or poems, or artwork. What was it like writing poetry in response to a novel?

A narrative element came into the poetry, I feel. I was trying to think of poems but kept thinking about different stories. I could have kept going, writing loads of narrative poems, but I had to stop at some point! In classic Unthank style, it’s all a fight against bureaucracy and how powerless one is against the system. I did end up visiting art galleries and looking at the physicality of paintings, and thinking about the physicality of the archives though.

 

I think physicality really comes through with the different forms you use in Vestigial. ‘After Eden’ and its use of footnotes feels like those layers of Post It notes you saw in the archive. How did you find the forms you use?

There was a lot of stream of consciousness, scribbling away or typing away. Then when I’d look back at drafts I’d notice form, which I’d been thinking about a bit. In ‘My chi moves like arrows’, I use a lot of ‘<’, which looks like an actual arrow. It’s a math sign, also used in coding. When I switch my keyboard between English and Spanish, sometimes when I try and write a comma, < appears instead. So, I decided to make it part of the form, and it matches the theme of arrows, and the image of St Sebastian and his arrow wounds.

 

There are different languages at play in these poems too.

Yeah, there’s English, Spanish, a little Persian, and Dutch. It was always just a conglomeration of whatever was going on on my screen at the time. Usually when I’m writing drafts, probably half will be Spanish, some will be Spanglish, some English. There’s always an anarchy of languages going on that I have to go back and tidy up.

 

You’ve also invented your own definitions, the work is punctuated with these meanings of ‘vestigial’.

That was a last minute addition! All these poems without titles were going to be called ‘Vestigial’, but I didn’t like the word floating on the page on its own. So, I made these fake definitions and connected them to the poems. I liked the idea of creating these literary spaces where you can imagine a different reality where a certain word means something else. Similar, I suppose, to Unthank.

 

Vestigial by Juana Adcock is published by Stewed Rhubarb Press, priced £5.99.

With summer in the air there’s no finger time to turn your hand to something new – find below a recipe for a sweetcorn and cashew curry from Urvashi Roe’s Biting Biting: Snacking Gujarati-Style to test out for yourself. You won’t regret it.

 

Biting Biting: Snacking Gujarati-Style
By Urvashi Roe
Published by Kitchen Press

 

Makai Kaju nu Shaak
SWEETCORN AND CASHEW CURRY

Grilled corn rubbed over with butter or ghee, chilli powder and salt is a fantastic snack. We enjoy it often. But when you want something a bit more substantial this is the shaak to make. The cashews add such a wonderful nuttiness. My husband will eat this in one sitting if I let him.

Serves 4–6

100g cashew nuts
2 tbsp sunflower or rapeseed oil
2 tsp mustard seeds
4 tsp finely chopped green chillies
300g floury potatoes, cut into 3cm cubes
400ml tin coconut milk
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp cumin powder
1½ tsp salt
3 sweetcorn cobs, cut into 6cm pieces
3 tbsp finely chopped fresh coriander

Toast the cashew nuts in a dry wok over a medium heat until they start to brown and fill your kitchen with a wonderful nutty aroma. Set to one side.

Put the wok back on the heat, add the oil and heat for a few minutes, then add the mustard seeds and let them crackle and pop for a few seconds. Next, add the green chillies closely followed by the potatoes.

Turn the heat to low and stir in the coconut milk, turmeric, cumin and salt. Fill the empty coconut milk tin with water, scraping down the edges to get all of the coconut, and pour that in, stir and bring to a simmer.

Leave to cook for five minutes and then add the sweetcorn and toasted cashews, reserving a few to garnish. Cook for another five minutes with the lid on until the potatoes are soft, the sweetcorn just tender and the cashews a little softened.

Garnish with the fresh coriander and the reserved toasted cashews, roughly chopped. Serve as is or with crusty bread, on rice or on quinoa.

 

Biting Biting: Snacking Gujarati-Style by Urvashi Roe is published by Kitchen Press, priced £20.

Across 2022, Publishing Scotland will be curating a series of online content to tie in with Visit Scotland’s Year of Stories. Each month we will share the features, profiles and interviews that you can find over on their website.

 

You can visit Publishing Scotland’s Year of Stories homepage here.

In June, Publishing Scotland’s #YS2022 theme is SANCTUARY.

 

Each month Publishing Scotland will be offering Publisher Spotlights, so you can get to know some of Scotland’s publishers. Catch up with the latest profiles.

Publishing Scotland spotlight Black and White Publishing

 

Each month Publishing Scotland will have features too, including book recommendation lists and author interviews.

Click here to read an interview with Trishna Singh about her book A Silent Voice Speaks: The Wee Indian Woman on the Bus.

To read an interview with Lauren T. Davila about editing the anthology When Other People Saw Us They Saw the Dead, click here.

For a LBGTQ+ reading list for Pride month, click here.

 

If you want to take part in the Year of Stories, follow the hashtags #YS2022 and #TalesofScotland, or visit the VisitScotland website.

Polaris is the latest gaelic poetry collection from Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, an ambitious collection that explores the history and languages of the UK along with the lives of marginalised communities. Here, we publish a few of the poems from the collection and their translations.

 

Extracts taken from Polaris
By Marcas Mac an Tuairneir
Published by Leamington Books

 

Am Facal

But just because I am a woman, why must I not write
of the goodness of God?
– Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

 B’ aithne dhi rùchd nan carbadan
a thàinig gus na cuirp a thogail,
am breum ag èirigh bhuapa is iad
caithte an uaighean gun chomharra.

B’ ann aig àm a cruaidh-chàis
a chuala i am facal, lìon e i
bho bhun gu bàrr,
le gràdh iol-iadhach màthar.

Bha an còmhradh sin
mar thogail uisge bhon tobar
agus, basan sgaoilte,
crom ri leacan a’ chaibeil,
b’ i am fianais a h-adhlacaidh fhèin.

Ga cumail bhon t-saoghal,
na tèarmann le trì uinneagan,
sgrìobh i fad deich air fhicead bliadhna,
a’ cumail, ma briathran taobhanach,
doib a cànain, uile gu lèir.

B’ euchd a mhair nan aoisean,
aig làmh leth-oireach a bhuin
do thè a chanadh, na h-irioslachd
rithe fhèin, creutair neo-litireach.

 

Sgrìobhadh an dàn seo às dèidh prògram aithriseach aig an Oll. Janina Ramírez fhaicinn mu dhèidhinn na mnà-ònaraine Julian de Norwich. Rè a beò, sgrìobhadh Julian cunntasan a cuid aislingean anns an leabhar aice Revelations of Divine Love, an leabhar as sine againn, sgrìobhte ann am Beurla aig boireannach.

 

 

The Word

But just because I am a woman, why must I not write
of the goodness of God?
– Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

 She knew the rumble of the carts
that came to lift the dead,
the stench rising from them,
as they were cast into unmarked graves.

It was in her own extremis
she heard the word, it filled her,
wholly, with the all-encompassing
love of a mother.

That conversation
was like taking water from the well
and, palms outstretched,
crouched into the chapel’s flagstones,
she was witness to her own interment.

Sequestered from the world
in her three-windowed sanctuary,
she wrote for thirty years,
augmenting the wattle of her word
with the daub of her entire language.

It was a work to outlive the ages,
from a hand in isolation, which
belonged to one, who in her humility
named herself unlettered creature.

 

This poem was inspired by a documentary with Dr. Janina Ramírez. Throughout her life, Julian would continue to have religious visions, writing detailed accounts of each of them in her book Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest book ever written in English by a woman.

 

 

Briathrachas
Mar chuimhneachan air Eideard Dwelly

Sa Bheurla
’s mo shùil air tighinn tarsainn
air briathar gun fhiosta dhomh,
bidh mi a’ cruinneachadh tiùrr is murag, sligean is gainmheach nam
faclan mun cuairt air,
gus drochaid a thogail thar
a’ chnap-starra ron chèill.

San fhaclair,
buailidh mi air a’ bhàrr,
gus mo bhrùthadh foimhpe,
a-steach do luasgadh nan duilleagan.
’S tric a thèid mo shlaodadh,
mar bhùidh gun acair,
gus an ruig mi an grunnd.
Mo chorragan sgaoilt’,
air mo shnàgaran, lìonaidh mi
mo phòca le neamhnaidean,
criomagan longan briste,
bleideag òir air a rùsgadh o
aghaidh ìomhaigh umha, air chall.

Sa Ghàidhlig
agus corrag a’ tarraing loidhne
gu fàth-fiata fon teagsa,
tha feadhainn dhiubh mar
smàil dhubha, còrr datha
air tighinn le gob na cleite.
Thèid an diùltadh,
na faclan nach do dh’fhàs
o bhuachair na croite, nach d’ rinn seirm ri gliong
glainne an taighe-chèilidh.

Ged nach aithnichear iad,
’s iad tha dhòmhsa gun phrìs. Na clachan-bhuadhach, obair-ghrèise an t-sìoda,
an cruan a nì an cliath
cho grinn.

 

 

Lexicon
In memory of Edward Dwelly

In English
as my eye alights
on a term unknown to me,
I gather flotsam and jetsam, grains of sand and the shells of words that encircle it,
to build a bridge beyond
the barrier to meaning.

In the dictionary,
I dive beyond the surface, propel myself below,
within the roll of the pages. Often I am adrift,
like a buoy without an anchor, until I reach the seabed.
My fingers spread,
scrambling, I fill my
pocket with pearls,
shipwrecks’ fragments,
a fleck of gold peeled from the face of a vanished bronze.

In Gaelic
as the finger draws a line invisibly below the text,
some appear like stains,
black, a surplus of ink
from the nib of the quill.
They are rejected,
the words that did not grow
out of the mud of the croft,
that did not chime, clinking
with a cèilidh house glass.

Though they are known no longer, to me, they are precious.
The amethyst amulets,
the silken embroidery,
the enamel that makes the latticework so fine.

 

Gille Grinn

Don chlann gèidh a dh’èirich suas fo sgàil
Earrann a 28 agus daoine mar Sheumas Mòr Whannel
a strì air ar son.

 

Bha rudeigin san dòigh a shuaith e
ghruaig far a bhathais is a
làmhan air a chruachan aig
cùl sluagh cloinne-nighean.

Ge ‘s bith brag a’ bhàl a sheachnas e,
no an còmhrag ’s a bhios e ’n sàs,
‘s ann ann an ceàrn ciùin eanchainn,
bhios seanais amharais a ghnàth.

Bidh an gille sin na dhannsair,
na dhealbhadair, na bhàrd,
ach bheir e ùine fhathast,
mus lìonar na tha na bhroinn de bheàrn.

 

Mar mhòran òigridh anns gach ceàrnaidh nan nàiseanan seo, chaidh mi tron sgoil fo sgàil Earainn a 28. Rugadh mi air 28mh na Samhna, 1984. B’ e àireamh a 28 air a taigh againn, is tha fhathast.

 

Fioliome Fantabulosa

For the gay kids raised under the spectre of
Section 28 and folk like Jim Whannel
who fought for us.

I vardad something in the way
she ȝooȝed her ends from her eek
cackling, lill-on-hip, ajax
a gaggle of billingsgates

Maybe the schonk of the ball
she swerves, or in barneys, battyfangs,
but in the munge of her mind,
savvies a doubt that nantie scarpers.

Mais oui, dolly may a walloper be,
a jogger, a screever in her time,
but it’ll take a longola time, no flies,
to josh up the nishta deep inside.

 

Like many young people belonging to these nations, I went to school under the shadow of Section 28. I was born on 28th November 1984. It was a number 28 on the house I grew up in and, indeed, it still is.

 

 

Geallaidhean

Brexit, nul points!

Cuine chaidh a chluinntinn,
an duine a ghlaodh ris a’ ghaoith

Is na geallaidhean air an aiteamh,
gus gealagan fhailleanachadh?

’S dòchas beag a tha sin,
nach mair ach fad ainmsir

Gus nach eil againn air fhàgail,
ach dìleas na dìle.

Cò riamh a lorg politigear,
nach do dh’inns breug?

No uas-fhlath a bha deònach,
a leantainn, làmh-fhalamh

Ge b’ e prionnsa òg alainn,
no amadan sailleach òglaidh

Na shuidhe mu dhealbh-cùil
Oir Dhè Rìoghail.

A bheil ùidh aca
an cruinnich sinn

An Downing Street,
no Taigh an Ròid,

Pàrlamaid na Brùiseil
no anns an lios-càil?

Nach iadsan an fheadhainn,
a shiubhlas first class,

A chlaonas na cosgais,
ge ’s bith am blas?

Dè an diofair dhaibhsan,
a bheil thu beairteach no bochd?

’S e bochdainn tha faisg,
tha nas buinneach thar chàich

Gu dearbh.

Nach sin an teachdaireachd
is tu brùchdadh don bhòt?

Ri car a’ mhuiltein
is an gealladh a’ tighinn dhut.

 

Coltach ris na taghaidhean Ameireaganach na bu thràithe, dhùisg mi air madainn 24 Ògmhios, 2016 le mì-chreidsinn gu tur. Bidh sinn ancòmhnaidh Eòrpach.

 

 

Voos
Owerset bi Stuart A. Paterson

 Brexit, nul points!

When’er wis a chiel tentit
whae skreigh’t et the wun

An the voo thowed oot
tae seed the snawdrap?

It’s a wee howp yon
whilk lests jist yin season

Till a we hae left’s
the bowder’s fell lealty.

Wis there e’er a politeecian
didnae lee

Nor a laird wi a likin
fur peyin through the neb?

Gin a bonnie young Prince
nor a crabbit auld taed

Baukit afore
Royal Deeside’s braw launs.

Wad ony keep mind
gin we gaithered thegither

In Downing Street
nor the Palace o Holyrood,

In wur ain kailyaird
nor in Brussels’ Big Hoose?

Ur thon no the yins
whae stravaig First Cless,

Whae pauchle their expens,
nae matter their accent?

Whit care they gif
yer mintit nor puir?

The hame-toon puirtith
owergans them a.

Richt eneuch.

Are thur no yer lairins
as ye breenge oot tae vote?

Gan heelster-gowdie
for glib-gabbit voos.

 

As with the earlier American election, I awoke on the morning of 24th June, 2016 in utter disbelief. We will always be European.

 

Polaris by Marcas Mac an Tuairneir is published by Leamington Books, priced £12.99.

David Robinson speaks to Cynthia Rogerson about her latest book, her memoir Wah! Things I Never Told My Mother.

 

Wah! Things I Never Told My Mother
By Cynthia Rogerson
Published by Sandstone Press

 

‘The end, it is near. You must come.’

The voice on the phone from California was that of Ateca, the Fijian carer of Cynthia Rogerson’s mother. The end, though, wasn’t near at all. Sometimes it was years away, sometimes just months. But each time she was summoned, Rogerson flew halfway across the world from her Highland home to her childhood one at San Rafael, half an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. It was here where her mother finally died, aged 87, in 2018. She had vascular dementia, albeit one of the more merciful versions of the disease that left her free of anger and still able to show affection. For the five years Ateca cared for her, though, conversation was starkly limited. Asked a question – whether she wanted dessert, whether she was happy – her mother’s usual response was to spread out her hands, palms upwards, and say just the one word: ‘Wah!’ She said it with a smile, as if saying: ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about and I don’t mind!’

Rogerson chose this as the title for her first non-fiction book, she explains, ‘because it’s about accepting, with good grace, a certain degree of incomprehension. In my mother’s case, because of Alzheimer’s, and in my own because I never understood my mother.’ So while Ateca and her mother settled down to watch daytime TV, Rogerson went into her dead father’s study and tried to find words for her memories.

In the first story she wrote, her mother hardly figured. It was a memory of being 18, and coming back home, face still flushed after sex with the boy next door. Her father threw a glass of wine over her and ordered her to get out of the house. Her mother was probably there at the time, but not the way Rogerson remembers it. She was always daddy’s girl. Her mother was self-effacing, subservient, undemanding: the young Rogerson looked down on her as ‘just a housewife’, someone who loved her children unconditionally but hadn’t a career of her own.

Rogerson no longer condescends to her mother, so her memoir is in part a work of atonement. Yet it also manages to be as self-deprecating and funny as anything by David Sedaris. As Rogerson excavates her 18-year-old self, the wild and dangerous absurdities of her life rear up again: the 30-year-old man who picked her up while hitch-hiking and who lived in a foam factory; the late-night hitch to visit him when she is mistaken for a prostitute (‘Hey, you working?’). All these are, in the words of her memoir’s sub-heading ‘Things I Never Told My Mother’. And yes, there’s a massive irony here. ‘I never expressed these things to my mother,’ she points out, ‘yet here I am telling them to the whole world.’

She sent that first chapter off to her younger sister, a journalist in San Francisco, and when she got a positive response, carried on writing. Out it all poured, interspersed with scenes of visits to her gradually declining mother. The marriage in Reno when she was 22 to a handsome Irishman who claimed to be in the IRA and on the run. That first time she hitched round Europe, aged 17, when she was raped in a van in France. Life in a commune in Scotland looking after a pig called Priscilla. Riding the rails to Mexico with her brother. The drummer in a new wave band in Leeds who became a husband. More hobo holidays to Mexico. A husband who lived in the extension of their house after their divorce. An old friend who moved into her house  because he needed a room but who then became a husband. Running with her brother, stoned and naked, across California’s Highway 1. Hiding some of her father’s ashes in the flat of the woman she was convinced was once the love of his life. Somehow, hardly mentioned, there were four children, and a job teaching creative writing.

This is, as Bernard MacLaverty points out, ‘a selfie of a tearaway with a real writer in control of the chaos’. He at least knows just how good a novelist Rogerson is: far too many people don’t. This can often happen: publishing is a lottery, and although Rogerson has had five novels published and although her short stories have been broadcast, anthologised and shortlisted for prizes, her work remains less well known than it ought to be. Yet she is, as Alan Bissett has suggested, ‘Scotland’s very own Anne Tyler’.

That comparison is, I think, even more perceptive than he realises, and is more than just a similarity of style and tone. Not only is Tyler one of Rogerson’s favourite novelists but she shares Tyler’s fascination with fictional explorations of long-lasting marriage. This was the subject of her last novel, Wait for Me, Jack (2017, written as Addison Jones), which traced the slightly wandering course of true love between parents Jack and Milly over six decades. I ask how different they are from her own parents, George and Barbara. ‘They’re not!’ she laughs. ‘I only have one subject – them!’

She tells me that she’s currently working on another novel and I ask if her parents figure in it, too.

‘Yes. I can’t let them go. I’m obsessed with them.’

‘Why?’

‘They were both charismatic people, good-looking and charming and I’m susceptible to that. And they had a marriage that was full of love, though they didn’t always treat each other well, and I was fascinated by that too.’

But I wonder whether there is an even further link. Tyler’s novels often feature at least one character who is out of step with the rest of the family. Lindy in The Amateur Marriage, Jenny in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Denise in Clock Dance, Denny in A Spool of Blue Thread, boy-crazy Lily in the new one, French Braid: all are offspring or in-laws who go at least mildly off the rails, or whose parents would have worried about them, the way Rogerson’s would surely have done, if only they had known about her. And the tone with which Tyler writes about those familial black sheep – wise, accepting, stoical – is so very similar to that with which Rogerson writes about her own brushes with danger and damage in Wah!.

‘In many ways,’ says Rogerson, ‘there wasn’t any real difference between writing this and fiction – it’s the same artful shaping and framing of events in order to make an emotional impact. The only difference is that I didn’t have to make up the events.’

A worse writer would have written a more self-regarding memoir, but for someone as self-deprecating as Rogerson, that was never on the cards. ‘My aim wasn’t to impress. To be honest, I haven’t done much that is impressive – maybe nothing. But I did have to be ruthless with myself sometimes and tell the unflattering stuff.’

Did the scrapes she got into shock her, looking back? ‘Not really, because of course, to me, they are old hat. They make me smile – though I do cringe slightly when I think of my children or grandchildren reading about them. Then again, why be embarrassed that I wasn’t always the sensible age I am now? That I had a foolish youth?’

There should be a word, you can’t help thinking, that covers both love and regret. A word you could use to tell a mother whose mind is lost to Alzheimer’s and whose body is losing to multiple sclerosis, that you now realise how much more there was to her than you realised as a child and young adult. A word that marks the difference between forgetting and memory, death and life, and yet doesn’t have a trace of sentimentality about it. I think there is such a word. And by now you should be able to guess it.

 

Wah! Things I Never Told My Mother by Cynthia Rogerson is published by Sandstone Press, priced £9.99.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony is Arun Sood’s debut novel that follows four estranged friends reunited for a motorcycle trip up the Isle of Skye in the hope of coming to terms with how their lives have splintered since a transformative ride in Northern India years earlier. In remembering their pasts and looking to the future the friends explore family, friendship, race and belonging. In this extract, we introduce Rajeev Sabharwal, an anxious, expectant father.

 

Extract taken from New Skin for the Old Ceremony
By Arun Sood
Published by 404 Ink

 

Rajeev Sabharwal (Raj)

A silent sterility fell over the dusking second bedroom of Raj and Ibti’s third-floor Deptford apartment. Grey streaks of late London light added colour to porcelain walls, provoking an undefined melancholy over the failings of the powder spray paint can Raj was wielding. He was trying to decorate what had recently been dubbed “the baby room”, and previously called “the art studio”. But for every snowy ejaculation of glow-in-the-dark paint, the stencil frame of stars lifted to reveal his creations flake and flounder and disintegrate into the nothingness of the too-white walls. It seemed like a futile exercise, and Raj was glad to see Ibti’s vibrant green eyes glance around the bedroom door.

—Don’t bother too much with that, love. Just relax tonight. Before you go.

—Ach, I just wanted to get a bit done, y’know. Feel guilty as it is, leaving.

—Raj, I’m not popping anytime soon. Just go. And be careful.

—Not sure what we’re even doing, to be honest.

—Well, you can stay and watch birth partner vids with me instead then.

—God, they’re shite, eh.

—Hey, if I can get a back massage out if it . . .

Raj smiled at Ibti as she slinked back around the narrow corridor in her loose black pantsuit and headed towards the exercise ball in the small square living area overlooking cranes and KFC and, in the distance, a murky bend of the River Thames. For all his love and well-meaning articulations of guilt about swanning off to Skye, Raj was feeling more fragile about his ongoing numbness towards impending fatherhood than he was about leaving Ibti. It was the unexpected anaesthesia of it all. It was unsettling. No dread nor excitement, no fear nor quiet confidence. Nothing. Just a dull acknowledgement of what many call a miracle. The thought of Ibti glowing, happy, and plump in belly kept him going; but it had little to do with fatherhood or facing the unprecedented flurry of first times that are supposed to be exciting or scary or special or . . . something. He didn’t really feel much at all.

Raj fell back on the floor, supporting himself with one arm and using the other to gently spray a star-stencil banner onto the left shoulder of his black slim-fit shirt. It disintegrated to a stain of faded particles that would probably never wash away. He wouldn’t be wearing it to any more PR meetings at Whitehall. Tracing the outline of five forgotten points, he remembered the red stars he used to sew into vintage army jackets back at uni; the lively pride with which he espoused communism, anti-fascism and realpolitik! in the face of disinterested peers and pub-goers.

Raj brushed over the snowy particles with a nervous index finger, unsure if his guttural recoil was shaped by retrospective naïvety or a shrinking inability to reconcile his past self with who he was now. Shared homeowner in a gentrifying suburb of South London; financially secure; tenured to Her Majesty’s government; married to a brilliant middle-class Brazilian immigration lawyer engaged in social justice struggles from the NGO ivory tower of a Regent’s Park mansion. And now . . . soon-to-be father. Only the latter news had sparked unrepentant flashbacks. A pining for the irretrievable past. A hazy mist causing a cold in his soul. A malady of longing to feel life like you once did whilst simultaneously spluttering at the person who felt it.

Raj ruminated as the particles faded and freckled and streaked. A verse he once read by the Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross came to mind. It described – as Raj thought, at least – some kind of temporary spiritual crisis. An emotional vacuum that was necessary for one to live through before the birth of a new belief, bond, or perhaps being:

In an obscure night
Fevered with love’s anxiety
(O hapless, happy plight!)
I went, none seeing me
Forth from my house, where all things quiet be

The sound of crushed ice avalanched into the room and Raj wiped his shirt clean. Ibti, his sublimation, called into the wilderness from the small square living area.

—Raj, come through. Made you a marg. Even did a non-alcoholic one for me!

—Thanks, ma love. You’re right. Let’s make a night of it. I’m gonna miss yi.

 

New Skin for the Old Ceremony by Arun Sood is published by 404 Ink, priced £9.99.

 

Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian writer, musician and academic working across multiple forms. He was born in Aberdeen to a West-Highland Mother and Punjabi father, and has since lived in Glasgow, Amsterdam, DC, and now Plymouth, South Devon. Arun’s critical and creative practice ranges from academic publications, editorials, poetry and fiction to ambient musical tapestries. Broadly, his varied outputs engage with diasporic identities, mixed-race heritage, ancestry, language and memory. @arunskisood

 

Wacera Kamonji is a film Curator and Creative Cultural Practitioner who has a passion for film and social policy. Here she writes about how creativity can provide sanctuary.

 

 

In Tiwa Savage’s song Koroba, the first line to the song is ‘I no come this life to suffer’.

And it is true, we didn’t.

We hope that when we are born, we will be afforded at least the bare minimum to be able to live. But recently with the rise in cost of living many are finding themselves surviving.

With countries across the world emerging from the pandemic and many more countries fighting for survival, an increase in cost of living has put our most vulnerable in a more precarious situation.

In the United Kingdom, the 7^th richest country in the world, where our most vulnerable were already fighting tooth and nail to be able to afford the bare minimum for themselves and their loved ones, the cost of living increase, doubled with the reduction or freeze in pay and aid, has left many grappling with what to do to keep themselves going.

After the second world war, the UK created a safety net, social security, providing healthcare and other public services for free. This meant that decent quality of life was guaranteed for all.

Now this social security is called welfare, and its often mentioned with such distain especially in relation to those who rely on these services who are looked down upon as beggars of the state, freeloading off other people’s money when all they need is a helping hand.

There have been and currently are many efforts by individuals and organisations who cater to the most vulnerable, but the problem is growing.

When I first moved to the UK, I thought it was great that there was a system available for people who were struggling to get by, that there was government help where people could get financial aid to be able to pay for their food, rent and bills, and at least afford a decent standard of living that would enable them to live, not just survive; that was their sanctuary.

But that sanctuary has been slowly pulled from under them, and people are protesting as to how many of the services they rely on are being decreased and that it is becoming harder and harder for them to cope. The 2019 Channel 4 documentary Growing up Poor: Breadline Kids gave an insight as to how some of the 4.1 million of children and families survive in poverty, with many detailing skipping meals, living in poor housing condition and their living conditions having an effect on their mental and physical health.

Throughout history, we see that the best way for all of us to live and thrive is by adopting the idea of community living. Where we help those who are struggling, providing the best care we can for our most vulnerable so that no one falls through the cracks. But with inflation rising quicker than dough, and budget cuts and freezes being introduced, we are abandoning others in the name of saving ourselves.

Recently MP Rachel Mclean came under fire for saying that for people to cope with the rising cost of living they should ‘work more hours or get better paying jobs’ adding that this method may not work for those with multiple jobs. Many found the statement tone deaf and insensitive as millions are working, taking extra shifts, and still struggling to make ends meet.

Many around the world, via Twitter or radio shows, have addressed their grievances to the government on how much the rise in cost of living has affected them. This has often been met with what some would call performative sympathy while not giving a solution to address the problems of the people.

The individualistic approach that some of the richest in the world have when it comes to tackling community issues is problematic to say the least. The idea that if you just work harder and pull your socks up will pay off doesn’t work for everyone. We all need help and support to be able to get over the hardest hurdles that daily life lays for us.

Celebrities as well have come under fire for similar sentiments, talking down to the masses about their lack of work ethic while sitting in their ivory towers, out of touch with many who don’t get to enjoy the same luxuries and necessities as them.

A community approach encourages equity and social connectedness. It means that people will have better control over their health and their lives and will aid the inequalities we have in this country.

So how do we implement a community approach to improve standard of living and quality of life? First by listening to each other. We all have our own subcommunities within wider society where we discuss issues that affect us, but we focus so much on an individual approach without thinking how one issue can aid in solving another. From home to charity and religious organisations and even in government, the individualistic approach is often pushed to benefit the few instead of thinking how it can benefit all.

Instead, we are fed the lives of the rich through reality tv shows as a way to escape – I’m guilty of watching such shows; Selling Sunset, anyone? – but though we may see those who managed to work extremely hard be able to afford the best of the best, it’s good to remind ourselves that we are only one pay check away from bankruptcy, it’s easier to lose it than to gain it and the mental strain it takes to work hard to reach a comfortable level of living can be both physically and mentally straining.

We rely on our government representatives to support us, be the voice of our needs and to bring balance and harmony to the country. But how can that harmony be achieved when they laugh at our pain, dance on our grievances, and steal from our pockets?

Every day, we see for ourselves our sanctuary crumble. That the idea of living life without hurdles is pushed out the window and that to survive and be successful and have a decent standard of living, we must first toil.

But why must it be so? Some say suffering makes you strong, a productive member of society. We celebrate those who manage to claw their way to the top, marvel at their struggle stories, hype 24/7 hustle, but it’s having a helping hand that strengthens you. To have people around you that support you, who you can lean on during hard times is vital. They say it takes a village to raise a child. It could be argued that it takes a community to build a stable society.

Sanctuary means a sacred place, a place for prayer, and has come to mean somewhere you feel safety and refuge. Sanctuary is in the silence where you are able to listen to yourself and your surroundings. Our world is sacred and should feel so and be treated as such, and we as a people deserve to feel safe, to know that no matter what happens we can find refuge in the spaces we create, in our own homes, in our communities, and the wider world around us.

Sanctuary can also be a place to discover and enjoy a sense of purpose. For many this may be found in the arts; being creative or appreciating creativity can be a way to find that enjoyment and a community of common purpose. Over the past two years, being confined to our own houses had made it hard to find or create these communities. But thank goodness for the internet and video call: many events were moved online, and this allowed many to be connected beyond their postcode. For me, personally, groups such as the Scottish BPOC Writers Network allowed me to explore my creativity in writing and challenge me to step out of my comfort zone, delve deep into my imagination and investigate topics that I am interested in exploring. Writing allows you to discover your thoughts and work through emotions, create worlds, and communicate to those around you. It allows you to reach different people, voice your opinions and even find the inner peace you have been searching for.

Having creative spaces allows you to channel and stress into something beautiful whether you want to share it with others or keep it to yourself.

As someone who has always found refuge in a creative experience, be it a movie, writing or dancing, I strongly advice everyone to pick up an artistic activity. You don’t have to be perfect at it, showcase it or monetize it. You might be surprised what you find out about yourself.

At a time where it feels we are all at competition, constantly striving to one up each other, and most likely having the worst work-life balance we have ever had, finding a community where you feel supported, safe, and heard is a way we could all find our purpose for living.

So why can’t we be each other’s refuge, and our world a place of refuge?

 

Wacera Kamonji is an Edinburgh based creative who works in various roles within festivals and grassroots organisations. She hopes to grow her work in film curation, exhibition and performance-based work collaborating with organisations to create space and opportunity for BIPOC and economically disadvantaged people to apply for roles, receive education and encourage diversity within the creative industries.

Lorraine Wilson is an up-and-coming writer of gothic, dystopian fantasy novels. Her second novel The Way The Light Bends will be released later this year by Luna Press Publishing. Here she writes of her work mentoring aspiring writers.

 

Perhaps the greatest thing about being a writer is the communities you discover – a group of fellow debuts, your trusted Critique Partners, genre peers … or writers who are similarly marginalised. It is an uncomfortable truth that while the community is wonderful, institutional change leaves a lot to be desired. We all know the stats and have heard enough anecdotes to suspect the stats are only the tip of the iceberg. Marginalised writers are confronted time and again with proof that the publishing industry should value us more. Instead, it often favours habit and comfort over uncomfortable change, and even those ‘like us’ who have succeeded can still be on the outside the moment the wagons circle. This can be deeply hurtful, and makes it hard to keep trying to write, especially if you feel alone. I believe the world of books needs us. Readers need the unheard, the unfamiliar and too-often-erased. What does not change stagnates, and the stories of the marginalised are the oxygen this system sorely needs. And so, I was propelled into action.

What could I, a new author with a very small platform, do to be part of positive change in publishing? I can write stories, creating characters and exploring themes that matter to me. And I can support other writers who are a rung or two below me on the ladder. Last autumn, after wrestling briefly with imposter syndrome, I took a deep, rather angry breath, and launched Rewriting The Margins.

Rewriting The Margins is my mentorship scheme for under-represented writers. I offer critique and advice, for free, to two randomly selected applicants every month (almost; it depends on my health). The free and the random are key. Financial constraints and other marginalisations are often intertwined, and too many opportunities for under-represented writers function on a competitive basis, which inherently disadvantages those who are already the most disadvantaged. What I critique varies depending on what the mentee needs, and I have had mentees at every stage from novice to prize-winning. The aim is simply to give each writer two things: 1. A way forward with their writing, and 2. The confidence in themselves to take that step forward. These two are equally important because as I said above, navigating a publishing industry that is difficult at best and downright hostile at worst can chip away at your self-belief. Everyone experiences that, of course, but multiply it many times over for those whose voices are made to feel intrinsically unwelcome.

One of the most wonderful and most heartbreaking things about running Rewriting The Margins has been the number of mentees who have told me my feedback made them cry, for all the right reasons. I am profoundly glad and honoured that my critique has given them insight, direction and validation; but I am also so sad, and so angry that their confidence has been torn down to the extent that just one person believing in them can mean so much.

I know what that feels like, but I’m lucky enough to have writerly friends who pick me up and remind me that yes, I do belong in this space and yes, there is a readership for my stories. Not-entirely-tangentially, I have recently fallen in love with the term ‘third culture person’ for those of us who are mixed-race or children of immigrants or both. We are often, I think, shaped by rootlessness; by the question of where we belong, and who gets to decide that. Perhaps it is not surprising then that these questions influence my writing, with themes of identity, the inheritance of trauma, and belonging threaded through my novels. Where my debut This Is Our Undoing explored personal agency and the legacy of loss, my upcoming second novel, The Way The Light Bends, looks at the consequences of being rootless within your own family. Very different books but they both hopefully represent a safe space for readers too used to seeing themselves erased or stereotyped in fiction.

We should not need safe spaces as readers or writers. But the brutal truth is that we do. Readers need positive representation; writers need sanctuary where our peers can support us, understand us, and empower us to come out fighting. Prime examples are the amazing work of the SoA’s new Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses group, and, of course, the wonderful Scottish BPOC Writers’ Network, and I’m lucky to be involved in both of these groups. I see my mentorships as another way of providing a safe space and a helping hand. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s my small contribution to the rising tide of change. And I do think change is happening. The industry might resist but those who want change are manifold and determined. And, crucially, there is a demand for our stories. Look at the success of The Hate U Give. Or Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, N. K. Jemisin’s record-breaking Broken Earth trilogy, or the success of Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse TV adaptation.

Now, most of us are unlikely to scale those particular heights. But that does not make our stories, and the diversity that we create in those stories, any less important. There is space for the marginalised in this industry; not least because we are carving it out ourselves. Every writer who perseveres, and every book that includes positive, thoughtful representation, is one more necessary step forward. Whether you are marginalised or not, whether you are writing about that marginalisation or not, every story that presents diversity as the norm and not ‘other’ is a step towards diversity being perceived as normal, and not ‘other’. Which can only make publishing a richer, stronger world.

 

Having spent many years working as a conservation scientist in remote corners of the world, Lorraine Wilson now lives by the sea in Scotland writing stories influenced by folklore and the wilderness. Her short fiction has appeared in (amongst others) Strange Horizons, Forge Lit, The Mechanics’ Institute Review and Boudicca Press. Her debut novel, the dystopian thriller This Is Our Undoing, was released in 2021 and has been shortlisted for several prizes. A second novel, The Way The Light Bends is a dark folkloric tale coming out in August 2022. She runs the Rewriting The Margins mentorship scheme for marginalised writers, tweets @raine_clouds and her books and website can be found at https://linktr.ee/raine_clouds.

 

 

BooksfromScotland is particularly excited to read Alycia Pirmohamed’s forthcoming poetry collection Another Way to Split Water, which will be released in September. Alycia tells us more about what to expect on publication.

 

Another Way to Split Water
By Alycia Pirmohamed
Published by Polygon

 

Another Way to Split Water deals with themes of migration, inheritance, ancestral experience, and belonging, among many others. Could you talk a bit about that and what readers can expect from the poems in this collection?

I wrote the poems in Another Way to Split Water over several years, and so I think of the collection as capturing the different ways I’ve encountered and written about these themes as I’ve changed and grown. In my earlier work, family and familial stories and traditions are of particular importance. I also felt drawn to use my writing as a way to challenge misrecognition and Islamophobia, and to feel more connected with my faith. Figurative language gave me an opportunity to reflect on and interrogate slippery concepts like ‘homeland’, to cross borders, to write to the ghosts of people and places. For me, writing poetry is always a form of questioning, a search to better understand myself and to think more deeply about how my experiences fit into a larger context. Navigating how I belong in different spaces, what I’ve inherited, and what histories were passed down to me or written on my skin, has helped me uncover various truths about myself and the world I live in. I think of my work as constantly shifting and moving, finding shape in themes of womanhood and sexuality, as well as in meditations on the natural world. One of the most thrilling aspects of putting this collection together was placing some of this earlier work next to newer poems, and seeing what resonances and echoes were created between them.

 

What does the title come from, and what role would you say water – literally and figuratively – plays in this collection?

I find titles extremely difficult, and the manuscript had a lot of previous names. But it’s funny how now the collection has become sort of its own entity – I can’t imagine it being called anything else; it’s grown into its title. Another Way to Split Water came from one of the poems in the book, a poem that nods toward the collection’s different motifs: migration, inheritance, ecology, storytelling, reflections and selves, and multiplicity. Water, in all its forms, becomes one of the collection’s major metaphors, representing liminality, spirituality, crossings, and time as recursive. I feel water is so rich with imagistic and metaphorical potential, being a reflective surface as well as a site of nourishment, suspension, and erosion. I’ve been circling this idea of water as both a mode of connection as well as separation in my work.

 

The poems in this book often draw on nature and the natural world as lenses through which to express their themes. How would you say coming from two distinctly different national landscapes – Canada and Scotland – has influenced your depictions of and attitudes toward the natural world?

Sara Ahmed writes that for immigrant bodies, ‘the physical sense of moving through space is enough to trigger a memory of another place.’ I reference this quote a lot – it has deeply impacted the way I think about place, and the way I conceptualise my own interactions with place and the environment. I ask myself questions like, what does it mean for my particular body to take up space? What does it mean for me to walk the seams of different places; different environments? What have I asked the land to give up so that I can witness and feel and document these ways of moving and remembering? In terms of crossing borders, in writing about the natural world while simultaneously rooted/unrooted, I write toward figurative homelands, where spaces coexist, where the birch trees of Alberta and Edinburgh grow together. This extends beyond just these two places as well, and is multidirectional; in these poems, the sounds of water birds entwine with and repeat like prayer, or the rain falling in the prairies sounds like my first language.

 

In addition to your poetry writing, you’re involved with Ledbury Poetry Critics and have also taken part in interdisciplinary academic projects relating to poetry. How have your experiences in these areas shaped your approach to writing poetry?

I love this question because I’m increasingly excited by work that blurs the boundaries between genre, and between critical and creative writing. I used to feel conflicted, like I had to choose to be a creative writer or an academic, or like I was always a step behind other researchers because my degrees are in creative writing. But what I’ve learned about myself is that my critical research – whether that’s writing articles or facilitating workshops and other practical work – contextualises and feeds into my creative work. And, I’ve found myself engaging more with academic writing that is perhaps more self-reflective, or that edges toward a lyrical or creative writing style. I suppose my poetry is leaking into my essays and vice versa.

 

What advice would you give to new/emerging poets?

I think it’s important to connect and build relationships with other writers, to share work with each other and feel like part of a poetry practice outside of just your own. This is really difficult to do at first, and I know from experience that it’s easy to become isolated. Some of my tips include looking toward local bookshops. Edinburgh has the amazing Lighthouse Books, and they not only host poetry events and book launches, but specifically cultivate community through groups like the Nature in Colour reading group. Portobello Bookshop is another great space that hosts several events and cultivates a wonderfully warm atmosphere. Otherwise, Glasgow Women’s Library is an inclusive and safe space that has a number of community oriented programs, and Open Book similarly brings readers and poetry lovers together. I can’t forget Scottish BPOC Writers Network either, for all the beautiful spaces the whole team (past and present) have created.

 

Another Way to Split Water by Alycia Pirmohamed is published by Polygon, priced £10.00.

 

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. She is the author of the pamphlets Hinge, Faces that Fled the Wind, and the collaborative essay, Second Memory, which was co-authored with Pratyusha. She is co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network, a co-organiser of the Ledbury Poetry Critics, and she currently teaches on the MSt. Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Alycia received an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. In 2020, She received the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.

We continue our ‘Introducing . . .’ series, where BooksfromScotland highlight the work of up-and-coming writers, with poetry from Shasta Ali.

 

Threads across borders

‘One day this’ll be yours’
the words hang in the air waiting to be held
You cast a fleeting glance over
half noticing the way your mother
surrounded by a pile of neatly pressed clothes
sits, a queen on her throne
yet the throne seems fractured

You’re distracted as a series of alerts
glide across your screen
book a lunch
plan a date
pay an invoice
schedule an appointment

You catch a glimpse of her meticulously
folding, unfolding, refolding
a creamy offset white dupatta
It shimmers with silver vertical lines
imprinted with flowers running down the fabric

And you think how the duppatta
with its on trend silver fringed border
will match your white outfit
for the many invitations pending

You watch as she gently lifts a green kameez
sparkling with golden sequins
And you know its a colour where endless debates will ensue
throughout changing seasons and lights
where no one will settle on the colour
but the colour will remain true
for four decades and more

Her hands flatten the creases over and over
as her fingers loop around the swirls of gold
tracing a path long forgotten
A reminder, her once nimble fingers
stitched each golden sequin one by one

Whilst her cataracts cloud her eyesight with doubt
She marvels at her once intricate handiwork
A single tear rolls out the corner of her eye
and lands like a coin dropped in a golden wishing well

Time sprints around you, refusing to slow
yet the memory of the golden thread tugs
threatening to unravel
and among the chaos
You crave a stillness
that never comes

You’ll remember that time
Your mother spoke of silks and fabrics
of a white dupatta gifted by her mother
for the wedding yet to be

Of a 15 year old daughter
who by the solitarily glow of an antique oil lamp
eagerly sat through the stillness of the night
painstakingly threading a silver fringed border

A new chapter loomed ahead of her
as excitement and fear churned inside her
She embroidered, knitted and sewed her anxieties calm
carefully sealing her dreams into beautiful crafted pieces

And so the dupatta travelled
along its very own Silk Road
from Pakistan to Britain
Wrapped up in a collection of hand stitched clothes
of sindhi, moti and sitara kadahi
eager to be worn on the most special of occasions

Milestones came and went
Houses turned into homes
The family grew and grew
Yet the special moment was yet to arrive

The dupatta would wait patiently
away from the heat, the sun and light
in a battered old suitcase
surrounded by the chitter chatter of children
raised voices and laughter

Days turned into weeks
weeks into months
years into decades
and those voices faded and returned
and disappeared once again
but the special occasion was yet to arrive

Here You sit, decades later
folding, unfolding, refolding
the unworn dupatta that crossed lands and seas
the silver patterned flowers catching the morning light
dancing a thousand unspoken stories

You’ll think of threads across borders
holding family ties and memories together
and while you’re searching for a sense of belonging
through archives, people and places
amid hidden histories and untold stories

You’ll find it, somewhat, in a tale about a dupatta
delicately handled by four generations of females
a skill you’ll hear, taught from a grandmother, to a mother,
from an aunt to her daughter
legacies tangled and woven through time

And like threads across borders
stories unite and weave communities together
just as a single silk thread drifting in the wind
carries strength in its own tale

And suddenly it makes perfect sense
this sanctuary you seek
in finding your place in the world
is not actually a place, a person or thing
but a connection within
It’s a love for yourself and all that you are

 

Shasta Ali works in the Third Sector and is a writer, anti-racism and women’s rights campaigner.  Her writing explores race, identity and heritage, with work published and featured in Scottish BPOC Writers Network, The National, STV Scotland and Fringe of Colour Films, among others.  Shasta lives in beautiful Edinburgh and can often be found with a cup of tea, pondering over how we’re all part of a global story, with more uniting us than dividing us. @ShastaHAli

Leela Soma is a writer based in Glasgow. Here she gives us the story behind the formation of the Kavya Prize.

 

The new Kavya Prize, which I established this year for Scottish writers of colour working in all genres, started as a small idea that was partly conceived through inspiration, but also by a need to carve out a space for writers of colour to capture their stories on paper for future generations. Scottish literature and arguably Scottish culture have always been seen as somewhat separate from the body of British (although predominantly English) literature and culture, and oftentimes as monolithic.

The latter part is completely untrue, as Scotland is a nation with a rich history that has been shaped by people from all over the world. Over the centuries, the tapestry that makes up Scottish culture has been woven together by voices from different ethnicities, religions, and languages. As a writer of colour myself, I often noticed how my journey to publication involved several challenges, most notably that I was often told that literary works by writers of colour were unlikely to be commercial enough.

Given the wide variety of voices, from Robert Burns to Jackie Kay, which have shaped Scottish literature over the years, I have always found this viewpoint to be puzzling. When I began my journey into writing, I was determined to author a novel that captures the Scottish Indian experience with the caveat that like the Scottish experience, I recognize that there is no singular Scottish Indian experience. However, my hope in writing my first novel, Twice Born, was that future generations of Scottish Indians and other Scottish writers of colour would see an experience that reflected that of their own or that of their parents or grandparents.

As the 21st century continues to unfold, Scotland’s future and place in the world are still being formed. Whether as a part of the UK or as an independent nation, I know how important younger generations of Scots of colour are to shaping our country. Drawing inspiration from the Jhalak Prize for UK writers of colour, I began to get a sense of urgency to ensure that the next generation of Scottish writers of colour face less of an uphill climb than those who came before them.

After the warm reception to my debut crime novel, Murder at the Mela, I revisited my idea about how best to encourage future generations of writers of colour. The way my first crime novel was received showed me that there has been some progress and there is more of an appetite for diverse voices within the Scottish literary scene. On the heels of such a positive change, my initial idea was to have a small prize every two years, which would be presented at a local library. I approached a generous benefactor, who has asked to remain anonymous, about financially supporting such a prize. He was incredibly supportive and said that provided I was able to demonstrate there is a need for this, he would be happy to sponsor.

Shortly after my conversation with him, I approached Zoe Strachan at the University of Glasgow’s Creative Writing Department. She has been absolutely wonderful and has been working tirelessly along with a team of talented people at Glasgow University to get the prize off the ground. Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Centre for Creative Writing, will offer a residency for the winner of the prize and the Association of Scottish Literature will provide some administrative support. Our judging panel was comprised of three tremendous Scottish writers and critics: Leila Aboulela, Tawona Sithole and Professor Bashabi Fraser.

The judges worked hard at this new prize and had encouraging words for all writers of colour. This is the first year of this unique prize so just raising awareness among emerging writers is a huge task. We were delighted to see the entries for the prize, and after much deliberation, the judges chose a shortlist of six superb pieces of literature:

The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters by Katie Goh (404 Ink)

Lament for Sheku Bayoh by Hannah Lavery (Salamander Street)

Toy Plastic Chicken by Uma Nada-Rajah (Salamander Street)

Sorrow, Tears and Blood by David Onamade (Arkbound Publishing)

Sikfan Glaschu by Sean Wai Keung (Verve Poetry Press)

This is Our Undoing by Lorraine Wilson (Luna Press)

The winner of the Kavya Prize – Toy Plastic Chicken by Uma Nada-Rajah – was announced at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library on 21 May as part of Aye Write, the second biggest book festival in Scotland and the biggest in the city of Glasgow. Bob McDevitt, the Director of the Aye Write Festival said, and I quote:

‘I’m especially inspired, this year, by the mix of authors: those long-established and much acclaimed; those who are just coming into our field of vision; those with their own personal stories to tell; and those whose mission it is to tell the stories of others.

Storytelling is what we’re all about here at Aye Write, and we hope that our packed 2022 programme will be the next compelling chapter in our very own story.’

What do I hope this unique prize will achieve? In the past few years, there has been clamour in the publishing world and demand from readers for more inclusive stories. The Kavya Prize will celebrate marginalized writers who have their own stories to tell. This is the Year of Scotland’s Stories 2022, a perfect start for Scottish writers of colour to contribute to mainstream Scottish Literature. The Kavya Prize will empower them to raise their voices, tell their stories and reach a wider audience. This biennial prize will ensure that writing in all genres is recognised. It also offers mentorship for aspiring writers, providing more role models that younger writers can look up to and setting a new standard for the future. I hope that the Kavya Prize will be a legacy that will place Scottish writers of colour on the literary map of Scotland, and a sanctuary for both writers of colour and their many readers in these dark times.

 

Leela Soma was born in Madras, India, and now lives in Glasgow. Her poems and short stories have been published in several anthologies and publications. She has published three novels, short stories and two collections of poetry; and a chapbook, ‘Chintz’, published by Dreich Press. Her poems have been published in Gutter, The Blue Nib, Anthropocene, Black Bough Poems, The Glasgow Review of Books and many others. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2020 and has been appointed Scriever 2021 for the Federation of Writers, Scotland. She has just been added to the Scottish Poetry Library’s Guide to Scottish Poets. Murder at the Mela, the first DI Patel mystery, was published in 2020.

 

Etzali Hernández is a nonbinary latinx queer fierce femme poet, coder, dj and no borders organiser. Their pamphlet from murky waters, we rise will be published later this here, and you can catch a preview below.

 

Extracts from from murky waters we rise
By Etzali Hernández
Published by Forest Publications

 

ode to rainbow friendship
in memory of Shaun Mitchell,

i remember looking at you for the first time and immediately wanting to
be your friend. your hip and sharp demeanour. the realness of your
being, pouring uncontrollably.

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember calling you when I was about to board a plane for the first
time in years. i’m humming a made-up song, and you immediately say:
are you twerking?!

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember celebrating my birthday, rainbow cake and spliffs, tequila
and prosecco. the three of us were laughing. i’m about to open a
bottle while you’re shouting: don’t shake it, open it in the shower!

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember travelling on the night bus to birmingham, a baby crying
the entire journey, working on a technical task for a job interview, and
finally eating in a mcdonald’s crowded with drunk youngsters at 6 am.

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember travelling back to glasgow via manchester. a taxi arriving
way too early for us at your cousin’s, making a stop to eat chinese
food, hopping on the tram and getting lost, missing the train and
laughing hysterically at our mistake.

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember messaging you for the last time, a casual check-in in the
middle of a pandemic, a chat of chronic illness and medical racism as
we often did. a quick goodbye that says i am thinking of you.

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember us calling hospitals in the middle of a spring night and a
few days away from your birthday. we are looking for answers as to
why your door was broken. no one is telling us anything. calling here
and there is like an electric circuit having a shortcut.

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember him video calling me in the middle of my work shift. a
brown face, swollen red eyes and the damn answer. when i told her,
she fell to the ground like hurricane debris, and her cry made the flat
howl like a wolf lamenting after losing a cub.

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember burying you, a dystopian moment. 2 meters apart, without
a way of physically holding our broken selves together. i could not
muster the strength to see you once last time. i refused to make my last
memory of you, of us.

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember someone crying for you even after breaking you down to
nothing. the we were best friends claims. the fakeness of some
memorials. they used you as the face of their hypocritical
organisations. whitewash. pinkwash. everyone was washing away your
ideals, wants and struggles, just to get to say your name.

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember us bursting out laughing at their boldness and praying that
you cannot see all the fuckery from wherever you are now, because if
someone deserves better, that someone is you.

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, Trans and magical, Black as
fuck, in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

i remember that i love you now as much as i did when we first met and
i wish i had told you that once more.

seeing you standing, Queer and proud, trans and magical, Black as
fuck in your sea of caps, black hoodies and plaid shirts.

 

i don’t have the stomach for it

remember the hollowness you felt

when she transitioned?

you became a black hole

full of fluid and cavities

emptiness and indigested love

that the first time you took ecstasy,

smoked weed and downed a bottle of alcohol,

was the same night that you had to pee in a glass

in the middle of your dj set

from all things to consume,

you let the four horsemen of the apocalyptic grief

to become part of your gut flora,

probiotics like her love,

tears as your probiotics,

chewed up your depression,

depression as your gastric mucus

gastric acid like her memories.

digest and absorb what is left of us.

 

from murky waters we rise by Etzali Hernández is published by Forest Publications, priced £10.00.

 

Etzali Hernández is a nonbinary latinx queer fierce femme poet, coder, dj and no borders organiser. Their work has been published in Ascend Magazine, We Were Always Here: A Queer Words Anthology, and Ceremony (Scottish BAME Writers Network). Etzali’s first poetry pamphlet from murky waters, we rise is forthcoming from Forest Publications. Website: www.panditita.uk.

As part of the Year of Scotland’s Stories, we are running a series of Responses on BooksfromScotland, commissioning writers to respond to books from the Publishing Scotland membership, engaging with work in different ways. This month photographer Nikki Kilburn considers the academic anthology Hadithi and the State of Black Speculative Fiction.

 

Hadithi & The State of Black Speculative Fiction
By Eugene Bacon & Milton Davis
Published by Luna Press Publishing

 

Eugen Bacon and Milton Davis define black speculative fiction as a genre that refuses to conform to our understanding of genre in the classical form. In part one of their collaboration, they present a catalogue of black authors who disrupt narratives that identify and categorise history, culture, and experience with the dominant white perspective. Among them Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler tell the stories they wanted to see themselves in and read as relatable to their identity. In alliance with a community of writers, their characters normalise and centre the black experience, refuting the othering of their identity and representation. They defy hard-boiled compliance with what constitutes science fiction, fantasy and horror, creating their own classifications rooted in tradition, culture, futurism, and black visionary. Throughout this dive into this vibrant pool of succulent nutrients, I noted anthologies and writers I wasn’t familiar with to and want to explore. I now have a list of new wave treats to indulge my appetite; sharing is caring so I urge you to get stuck in too.

Part Two of Hadithi is a stunning collection of seven short stories. Bacon ends each of her stories with a part of herself. She gifts us the story within the story. Her disclosure of the ‘rage’ she felt when she lost her own sister to AIDS is embodied in ‘Still She Visits’. The spirit presence of the protagonist Segomotsi’s sister Mokgosi in her counselling sessions is, Segomatsi qualifies, her psyche coming to terms with Mokgosi’s death. She is expressing the horror of bereavement by normalising the experience of the spectre as a natural part of grief and experience after the death of a loved one.

The bond between the sisters charts back to childhood when together they held up the sky, Mokgosi the elder lighting the way for Segomotsi’s transition through girlhood. Memories and metaphors that sink into the biology of our being act as a soothing agent for the geographical distance that migrate between two worlds, Botswana, and Australia. Reflecting Bacon’s lived experience, it echoes the occult wisdom of transforming our narratives into a call and response between ourselves and the stories we create.

Through my writing and creative practice as a photographer, I am often working in reverse, putting pen to paper after creating a visual to discover my narrative. It’s a purposeful process of feedback from the parts of myself that have been shadowed by a history of migration and a consequent search for home. Loss is a guiding part of the practice of finding neurological ways to come to terms with what can’t be replaced. I listen and follow the inner signs that show me how to attune to the voices of loved ones calling out from the spirit realm, leading me through the labyrinth into my future self.

In ‘Carnival’ Milton Davis transports us to a Nigeria of the future where DJs reign supreme as influencers. The protagonist Antwon, a code hacker, uses his fame and influence as a DJ to disrupt state control of information. A revolutionary in an apocalyptic world, where life is lived on the ‘Inside’ and the ecology of the ‘Outside’ is a vulnerable alien environment to human interaction. An urban cyberpunk thriller, Milton illustrates a reality that may not be too far in the future where every aspect of our existence is determined and monitored by tech, digital entertainment platforms condition our recreational choices, and where there is a neurotic dependency on universal cryptocurrency. It may be a while however before we have flying cars.

I hurtled through the story stimulated and jarred by proximity to the depicted near future. Like many people, the digital world overwhelms my daily life. One of my coping strategies is falling into fantasy, longing to live an analogue life where I’m not dependent on technology to earn a living and stay connected to the world. Film photography is a small way I can disconnect. Not knowing exactly what has been captured allows me to detach from the immediacy of automation, immersing in waiting, and then enjoying the darkroom process that risks failure. In this unknown landscape, I accept imperfection, depend on my instincts, and lean into the totemic whispers.

Hadithi is many wonderous things including a journey into black ancestry. Bacon’s, ‘The Water’s Memory’ reframes the dogmatic western perspective of arranged marriage where choice is central to the female experience. Joy and curiosity rise from the page, softly thundering a legacy of female voices whose stories have been told for them, not by them. The inheritance of colonialism posits a hybrid identity of opportunity and disease. The incandescent daughter Adaeze goes to a convent school while environmental destruction valleys alongside an innate ancestral relationship with nature. It resonates in ‘Baba Kelp’ and Davis’s ‘Swarm’ mythology, where fantasy and science fiction illustrate the life, death, rebirth cycle, and characters come together to fight with warrior strength to overcome and save people and the land.

Reprisal saunters then gallops through Davis’s ‘Down South’, set in post-war America in the ‘20s. An unassuming war veteran spectacularly annihilates bodies of white supremacy, in a classic superhero tale.

This collection is political, blackness centred by black writers. They push beyond boundaries, their writing cannot be pinned down or simply indexed as otherworldly; they are restating their genre, rewriting history and the future.

 

Hadithi & The State of Black Speculative Fiction by Eugene Bacon & Milton Davis is published by Luna Press Publishing, priced £13.99.

 

Nikki Kilburn is a photographer interested in exploring how identity and lived experience creates complex realities. Her writing and photography has featured in numerous publications and exhibitions among them are Glasgow Gallery of Photography, Juice Magazine, She is Fierce, Audacious Women, Ruthless Magazine, Art Hoe Collective and The View Magazine.

What is sanctuary?

The term is often used for a place of safety, but we often forget that with that safety comes the implication of danger elsewhere, of a hostile world to which sanctuary is the exception, not the rule. In medieval Europe, a person might have sought sanctuary in a church when fleeing persecution (or prosecution) from authorities – in other words, from a power structure that wished to remove their agency and being.

Today, although people are no longer fleeing to places of worship as means of legal escape, the essential concept of sanctuary has not changed all that much. Sanctuaries still exist as spaces where those who refuse to give in to society’s attempts to erase them can come together in safety. The Scottish BPOC Writers Network (SBWN) is one such space, conceived in 2018 as a sanctuary for Scotland’s writers of colour to develop and flourish away from the confines, pressures, and prejudices of spaces dominated by whiteness.

But we could not exist, as a sanctuary or really in any other respect, without the amazing writers of our network – some of whose work you’ll read in this month’s issue – so we reached out to them on social media to find out how they defined the concept of ‘sanctuary’. Among the comments we received were these thought-provoking responses:

 

‘Sanctuary for me is the place where there is warmth, people that understand you and a place with no judgement but a blanket to keep you safe. Allowing you to be the person you are’ – Sanjay Lago

Community is a key aspect of the safety that sanctuary provides. Going back to the medieval European example, the sanctuary of the church was sustained by the people who worshiped there, the clergy who presided over services, and the staff who kept its daily affairs running smoothly; the building may have served as the physical site of sanctuary, but the reality of that sanctuary depended upon groups of people drawing together to offer refuge to those who needed it.

The pieces published in this month’s Books From Scotland explore how such communities may be constructed and approached in a globalised Scottish context. From Lorraine Wilson’s essay on mentoring fellow writers of colour, to Shasta Ali’s long-form poem on the generational histories of migration contained in an item of traditional clothing, to Leela Soma’s article on creating the Kavya Prize for Scotland’s writers of colour across genres, they examine the connections that bring us together and encourage us to strengthen these in our own creative and personal lives.

 

‘Sanctuary is a place of renewal, where what was depleted can be restored and recreated.’ – Zebib K. A.

Seeking sanctuary is often a reaction to loss – not always in a quantifiable sense, but rather in the abstract: mental, emotional, psychological, and/or spiritual depletion, whether it accompanies more quantifiable losses or comes on its own. Sanctuary is a space where we might find wholeness and regain our full personhood, despite what the outside world bombards us with. We see this in, for example, Wacera Kamonji’s essay on carving out sanctuary in the face of hostile UK policies attempting to strip it away, and in Hannah Lavery’s reflection on themes of bloodshed, survival, and pandemic as a Black woman in Scotland. These pieces remind us that the sanctuary we need may be difficult to establish, but that makes it all the more necessary.

 

‘My sanctuary resides in the ancient crevices of my heart. Only I hold the key and I’m locked within.’ – Christiana Aliu

At the core of the community-building and struggles that build sanctuary is what each of us holds in our own heart. Sanctuary emerges from and comes back to these ‘ancient crevices’, acting as a space where we can shore up our innermost reserves: the tools that allow us to restore, renew, and reach out in future times of need. The books we have excerpts from this month – Jay Gao’s Imperium, Arun Sood’s New Skin For the Old Ceremony: A Kirtan, Alycia Pirmohamed’s Another Way to Split Water, the Re.creation anthology of queer poets, and Dean Atta’s Only on the Weekends – draw upon deeply personal wellsprings of experience, of individual histories, of inner conflict, and of breakthroughs.

We hope this issue of Books From Scotland provides a slice of sanctuary for you: a place to (re)connect, discover new writers and new ways of looking at writing, share in other communities and histories, and of course to find joy in the fantastic work put forth by some of Scotland’s many talented writers of colour.

Happy reading!

-Kelly Kanayama and the Scottish BPOC Writers Network