Lesson One: Simple Greetings

Halò a Chaluim, ciamar a tha thu fhèin?
Tha mi gu math, tapadh leat, an-dràsta.

Now you’ve paused: I trace a line,
let my tongue tip linger, whet my lip
and speak.

..............And then your alien tongue slips in
to tease my teeth, ease my stiffened lips apart,
mouthing words I cannot understand.

Long forgotten foreign sounds, distant cousins,
burnt out, whipped out, language left without
a forwarding address. Adrift.

Hello Malcolm, how are you yourself?
– I am fine just now, Catriona.



I read an article about a poet called Marlene Nourbese Philip "discourse on the logic of language". She talks about a mother's tongue on a baby: a black mother wiping the creamy white vernix from a baby. She also talks about the disconnection of slaves from their mother tongue - a deliberate policy of splitting up slaves from linguistic groups so that they would have to learn a new language.

I have a love of language: the feel of it in my mouth, especially. And as an antidote to this interminable degree (from which I am escaping even now by writing this blog instead of concentrating on my essay) I started doing a 'teach yourself Scottish Gaelic' course on the train at http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/alba/foghlam/beag_air_bheag/flash/index.shtml. I like the sounds and the alien feeling in my mouth. It's quite sensual. And the weird thing is that the male speaker in the audio clips is called Malcolm. I find myself addressed by Catriona as 'a Chaluim', my own name translated.

When Ellie and I walked the Great Glen Way last summer, we stopped off at the Clan Cameron museum: I was at first repelled by the hordes of Americans seeking out some sort of connection in a seedy, run-down estate, and by the tartan curios on sale. But the stories of clearances and wars are very romantic and sad - much more, I think, than English history. So it seemed like a lucrative imaginative vein to mine. I can't imagine that anyone in our family has spoken Gaelic in recent history, and suspect that no one did in the deeper past. I also dislike the bonkers Celtic/Lunatic Fringe idea of separatism.

I like the idea of this odd, old language as a way of gaining an imagined connection with a country and a nationality that has little to do with me. I'd like to use it to resist being pigeonholed as purely English and to play around with what being partly Scottish might be about. Yesterday's 'Excess Baggage' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/excessbaggage/) was about Celtic identities. One of the speakers, Manchan Magan, set out to walk around Ireland speaking only Gaelic. He comes from a family of English speakers who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, decided to speak Irish as an act of resistance to the English, and to identify themselves as Irish nationalists. Manchan himself, when he discovered that his grandmother wanted to recruit him as part of the next generation of linguistic revolutionaries, decided to speak only English. After all, he said, he loves the English. And he said that the Irish government's efforts to make Irish compulsory in schools appealed the the naturally disobedient Irish spirit: kids actively resisted learning their 'natural' Irish language and stuck to English.

So I'd like to develop a challenging, questioning approach to Scotland, its languages and possible identities. I'm suspicious of tartan, clans and kilts because so much of it was re-invented by the Victorians and it probably has little to do with lowland or East-coast Scots. I quite like some of Runrig's music, but feel a little queasy at the Scots victim cult that seems to surround the group. I'd like to see where a twenty-first century, post-modern, post-industrial, bastard Scottish identity can take one. Scotland is not immune from immigration though, as Jackie Kay brilliantly describes, to be of mixed race in Sixties and Seventies Scotland was to be an oddity. To associate with any Scottish identity, do I have to eschew all things English, or can I have a great 'pick and mix' sense of myself? Can I have it all, and even make it up as I go along?

I am also fascinated by the Anglo-Saxon side of things. My poem 'Dancing Dog' is a deliberate attempt to write to an Old English tradition: clouty language and lines that split into two. And look at who has written the most fantastic translation of Beowulf: Seamus Heaney. The first sentence of his translation was, "So." This, he said, came straight from the language patterns of his elders when he was growing up in Northern Ireland.

I went to hear Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith and Jackie Kay speak and read on International Women's Day. There was a singer there too, Karine Polwart. Fantastic, I thought. She's lowland Scots and sings songs, I think, that could come from either side of the border. One of them I really liked: 'The Dowie Dens of Yarrow'. Reminded me of my Grandad's tours around Selkirk - always pointing out Yarrow Ford, where my great-great-etc Grandfather had been the blacksmith. She's a great folk singer who also writes about modern things: another example of not getting stuck in one rut.

And Erica Wagner (http://www.ericawagner.co.uk/), who read when I did, at that first 'Writ Loud', sang an unaccompanied Northumbrian song and uses local stories and settings for her novel, Seizure (which I read - splendid). She's American, from New York, but finished her schooling at St Paul's Girls School, Cambridge and then the Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia (which produces many good writers, one or two of whom worked with me at OGC). I like the 'borderland' aspect of this association.

Anyway, this poem: when I read it out in class, it was described as sexual and disturbing. Firstly, a bit of tonguing doesn't sound too sexy - leastways I didn't think so. Secondly, when someone said it was disturbing I inadvertently said, "Good" because that's what I want my poems to do: to disturb and disrupt what is complacent, easy and normal. I bloody well hope it just gets even more disturbing! I must thank the class, though, for helping me with the sloppier aspects of my first draft: this is re-worded, re-ordered and, I hope, more unified in its content, form, sound and tone.

What's this all about? Everything being connected, and everything needing a good, sceptical shaking.