Diary of a Shopkeeper, 11th December
The past week has been an exciting one for anyone interested in Orkney language writing.
First, Ingrid Leonard and EMEC published a booklet of poems called What the Waves Make. Originally from Stenness, but currently living in Lithuania, Ingrid came home this summer to take up a residency at the European Marine Energy Centre in Stromness. Over a fortnight, she studied the work and talked to the staff of EMEC, in their offices in the Charles Clouston building, but also at their test sites including Billia Cru off Ootertoon and the Falls of Warness west of Eday.
The result of her residency is a collection of nine fine poems, published in an attractive slim volume and available free from EMEC. You can also read the collection online at www.ingridleonardpoet.com. Ingrid’s poems feature glisks of vivid nature writing:
Harshness is thi point in this madrom o wave
an water, this seethe.
But her aim is to move beyond description into analysis and understanding, as the engineers of EMEC do with their instruments and datasets. What the poems seek to understand is the potential of the energy produced in our waters to help save the world:
Prospector, planner, lawmakker -
steer yer thowts tae these trials; thi earth’s
warman up, this is thi last rev o thi dial.
Some of the poems are in English, but for me those in Orkney language are the most powerful and resonant, including Tae Thi Power, which echoes George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe:
must we stand
atween colonisers, at a centre we’ve no right tae?
Hid’ll be up tae you, here’s a good paert o thi answer:
work wi thi folk for thi folk. Don’t trash Thi Bu.
I use the words Orkney language rather than dialect for reasons the Barbadian scholar and poet Kamau Braithwaite explains well, when advocating the ‘nation language’ of his island:
The word ‘dialect’ carries very pejorative overtones. Dialect is thought of as ‘bad English.’ Dialect is ‘inferior English’ […] Nation language is like a howl or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave.
Not inferior at all: possessed of extraordinary power! I nearly wrote ‘superior power’ but remembered the observation of the Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: ‘What is wrong in a country or the world is not the existence of many languages, but their being made to relate to each other in terms of hierarchy. It is anti-language to claim and act as if one language is more of a language than other languages. I reject hierarchy of languages and cultures; I embrace networks of languages and cultures.’
The second exciting recent publication from the network of Orkney writers was another booklet, Gallows Ha, by the members of the Orkney Voices writing group, published by Abersee Press.
It’s based on the script that the group developed for a stage performance during this year’s St Magnus International Festival. It includes a chorus of poetic voices, as well as a play written by Vera Butler which gives the collection its name. All of the pieces look back on women’s experience in Orkney roughly three hundred years ago. By telling stories of witch trials, press gangs, and other persecutions – in the language of the women involved – ownership of the narrative passes back to the previously voiceless. One fine example amongst many is ‘Maggie o Quoys’ by Sheila Garson:
Maggie of Quoys –
Geed aboot the hooses.
Many a bairn sheu delivered.
Many a mither blide o hir skill.
A howdie wife.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote in Decolonising the Mind, ‘The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe.’
With writers using their own language to reinterpret and reclaim the past, and also to describe and come to terms with the most contemporary dilemmas and technologies, this is a great age of Orkney writing.
You can buy Gallows Ha, and all Abersee Press booklets here, as well as IRL at Kirkness & Gorie in Kirkwall and Stromness Books & Prints.
You can read about the European Marine Energy Centre here.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 14th December 2022. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.