Last week, I attended Otago’s wonderful Polyfest at the Edgar Centre, to see my son Caleb perform a number of traditional Tongan and Samoan dances with his Pasifika group. This week sees the launch of Dunedin’s Celtic Arts Festival, a month-long celebration of Scottish and Irish music, literature and dance. It’s heartening that the city can celebrate its dual heritage – Pacific and European – through these events.
This week is also designated ‘Land Sunday’ in the Presbyterian lectionary, and the theme of ‘land’ – being forced from the land, colonizing a new land, remembering the old land – certainly shaped the experience of the Scottish settlers of Otago, as it has shaped much of the art and literature celebrated in our Celtic Festival.
In 1943, the great Scottish Modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid articulated his own vision of the land:
It requires great love of it deeply to read
The configuration of a land,
Gradually grow conscious of fine shadings,
Of great meanings in slight symbols,
Hear at last the great voice that speaks softly,
See the swell and fall upon the flank
of a statue carved out in a whole country’s marble.
In these lines, from a poem called simply ‘Scotland’, MacDiarmid imagines a relationship to the land, defined not in terms of legal possession, or economic exploitation, or political jurisdiction, or military occupation. It’s a relationship of intimacy and deep understanding predicated on love. That we might not simply own or buy or sell or farm or mine or defend but love the land: this is the revolutionary message of MacDiarmid’s poem.
For much of Scotland’s modern history, however, such a loving relationship was precluded by the divisive and traumatic politics of land.
The clearance of Highland straths and glens in the nineteenth century, when a new commercial ethos supplanted the old clan structure of common ownership, and chieftains became landlords, evicting their tenants to make way for more profitable Cheviot sheep, has left lasting emotional scars. We might speculate that a folk memory of the Clearances may well have accompanied the Reverend Donald MacNaughtan Stuart, the first minister of Knox Church, a Gaelic-speaking Highlander from Kenmore in Perthshire, on his arrival in Dunedin in 1860.
The Highlanders were not the only Scots to have their relationship with the land shaped by dispossession. In what historians now call the ‘Lowland Clearances’, the small tenant farmers and cottars of the lowland farming counties were driven from the land, as landlords enclosed common ground and drove up rents, consolidating farms into large commercial ventures in a process euphemistically termed ‘improvement’. The tenant farmers of Ayrshire and Galloway, no less than the clansfolk of Assynt and Golspie, were the tangata whenua of Scotland. Among their number was Robert Burns, whose statue stands in Dunedin’s Octagon. Evicted from the family farm of Lochlie, the Burns family found temporary refuge on the farm of Mossgiel, a name with a certain resonance in this part of the world. No doubt this family memory of dispossession accompanied the poet’s nephew, the Reverend Thomas Burns, when he came to Dunedin in 1848 as one of the founders of the Otago settlement.
One of the myths of the Scottish Diaspora is that most of the emigrants came from rural backgrounds. In fact, most Scottish migrants, especially in the decades after 1860, came from the town and cities, like the great conurbation of Glasgow. At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Glasgow was in its pomp. The Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901 celebrated the city’s position as the Workshop of the World and the Second City of the British Empire. But for the inhabitants of the Second City, the statistics tell a different story. 700,000 people lived in three square miles of Glasgow’s city centre. 70 per cent of the city’s families lived in two rooms or fewer; a quarter of the city’s families lived in one-room dwellings. 98.2 of the city’s homes were rented, often in the kind of slum tenements and ‘rookeries’ that made Govan and the Gorbals bywords for misery. Glasgow’s rate of infant mortality in 1901 – the year of the Great Exhibition – was 149 per thousand live births.
These were the conditions against which the great Gaelic poet, Sorley MacLean protested in a devastating short poem entitled ‘Calvary’, a poem that challenges the Christian Church for its impotence in the face of such misery:
Calbharaigh
Chan eil mo shùil air Calbharaigh
no air Betlehem an àigh
ach air cùil ghrod an Glaschu
far bheil an lobhadh fàis,
agus air seòmar an Dùn-eideann,
seòmar bochdainn ’s cràidh,
far a bheil an naoidhean creuchdach
ri aonagraich gu bhàs.
MacLean’s own translation runs as follows:
Calvary
My eye is not on Calvary
nor on Bethlehem the Blessed,
but on a foul-smelling backland in Glasgow
where life rots as it grows;
and on a room in Edinburgh
a room of poverty and pain,
where the diseased infant
writhes and wallows till death
It’s a stark, angry poem, impatient with niceties of theology in the face of such human suffering. In the image of the dying child, MacLean brings together Bethlehem and Calvary, the manger and the cross; the baby writhing in its cot suffers a crucifixion, one repeated endlessly in the towns and cities of industrial Scotland. It’s a bitter indictment of a society, purportedly Christian, that can tolerate such slaughter of the innocents.
Small wonder that those who fled such conditions for ‘God’s Own Country’ should desire, in the words of the Psalmist, to ‘live in the land, and enjoy security’; that between the Dùn-eideann of MacLean’s poem and the Dunedin in New Zealand a dream should have arisen – the dream of the quarter-acre section, the house in its own plot of land, the vegetable patch to supply the household’s needs.
And small wonder that those who were forced from the land should continue to questions its ownership:
Who owns these ample hills? - a lord who lives
ten months in London and in Scotland two;
O’er the wide moors with gun in hand he drives
And, Scotland, this is all he knows of you!
Thus John Stuart Blackie in 1857. It would take another hundred years before another poet, Norman MacCaig, could ask the same question, and answer it with words not of hate or indignation, but of love:
Who owns this landscape?
Has owning anything to do with love?
For it and I have a love-affair, so nearly human
we even have quarrels.
‘Has owning anything to do with love?’ MacCaig’s almost naïve question takes us to the heart of the matter. It’s not that questions of ownership and dispossession are forgotten; rather they are subsumed in a fare more meaningful type of ‘possession’. Later in the poem, MacCaig returns to his question:
Who owns this landscape?
The millionaire who bought it or
The poacher staggering downhill in the early morning
With a deer on his back?
Who possesses this landscape?
The man who bought it or
I who am possessed by it
We can detect in that last line something of the ‘Zen Calvinism’ that MacCaig jocularly identified as his creed. But we can also see a new dispensation, a wholesale reimagining of ‘possession’. It’s difficult to read MacCaig’s lines without remembering Jesus’ response to the Pharisees in Luke 17:
And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them, and said, 'The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, "Lo here", or "Lo there": for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
And these two insights are connected. When you view the Land as something within you, something loved, it’s easier to extend that perspective to others. Love for the land. Love for your neighbour. Love for your enemy. It’s significant, I think, that one of the first major acts of the new Scottish Parliament was the Land Reform Bill of 2001, giving crofting communities the right to buy their land. But perhaps an even more far-reaching act of the Scottish Parliament was one not of justice but of mercy, even love: the freeing in 2009, on compassionate grounds, of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, can we imagine a more hopeful, a more optimistic, a more loving gesture than this?
W. B. Yeats said: ‘out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry’. I want to finish with a poem made out of the quarrel between two sides of Scotland’s Presbyterian inheritance. On the one hand, a celebratory vision that can see an everyday holiness in the natural world, and on the other, the old negativity. It’s by a Son of the Manse, Alistair Reid, and, like the MacDiarmid poem with which I began, it’s simply called ‘Scotland’:
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’
The poet’s ecstatic epiphany is rudely shattered by the woman’s refrain. But the poet was right to give the nay-saying woman from the fish-shop the last word. If we don’t succeed in pushing through our fear and anxiety and hatred to a Christian ethic of love – love for the land, love for our neighbour, love for our enemy – then we will pay for it. Amen.
Professor Liam McIlvanney holds the Stuart Chair in Scottish Studies at Otago University and is an Elder at Knox Church, Dunedin.
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