Mark Ryan Smith: Notes on an Island

ISSUE 51

Words on an Island Mark Ryan Smith

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In Shetland last year there was a mini-controversy about language. The spat kicked off when a piece in the local newspaper, the Shetland Times, said that lessons in Mandarin were to be offered in some Shetland schools.

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After the report was published, comments started to appear on local internet forums, some of which were straightforwardly racist (jokes about Chinese takeaways were popular), but others which were marginally more considered. One of the things that emerged from the discussions was that some people were worried about what the lessons might mean for the local language. Would the introduction of an additional foreign language mean another nail in the coffin for the distinctive version of Scots spoken by Shetlanders for centuries?

People were worried about the threat to local particularity. They were concerned that, if the native language is eroded, then a native Shetland identity gets eroded too. I’m not sure about this, mainly because of the racist undertone, but also because the notion of a uniform Shetland identity doesn’t make any sense. People are all different, even if they do live in the same place.

It’s not hard, though, to understand why people might think this way, because global capitalism, as it becomes more pervasive and hegemonic, does tend to do away with things it has no use for. Differences get ironed out, and people have the right to be concerned about the pressures local cultures are under. We’re all familiar with

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the shops that appear in every town and city, and with the adverts for brands like Nike or Coke that are so ubiquitous we hardly notice them.

Sometimes, for novelty value, marketing people even try to incorporate out of the way places like Shetland into their campaigns. A dancing Shetland pony called Socks, for example, recently appeared in an advert for mobile phone network Three. The CEOs and Brand Managers who run the world can put up with that, but they probably have less of a place for a vernacular spoken by about 20,000 people. Obscure local words from remote places won’t help Apple or Disney flog their latest product line.

With the creep of mass global culture, is there still a space for local languages? Can dialects which are closely tied to particular places and only spoken by small numbers of people hold their own in an ultra-branded, hyper-corporatized world?

If we accept the idea that the world – what we like, what we read, what we want – is increasingly shaped by the likes of Apple or Amazon, what place does a language like Shetlandic have?

Global capitalism might not have much of a place for the peculiarities of Shetland’s language and culture (except, maybe, as a piece of occasional exotica), but that doesn’t mean people aren’t 5

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paying attention to these things. Perhaps because local traditions are seen as being under threat, there are active attempts to hang onto things that have existed here for a long time.

There is, for instance, a Shetland dialect advocacy group called Shetland ForWirds, which puts a great deal of time and energy into encouraging the use of the language. The group holds concerts, publishes books, does work with schools and so on. My kids, both at primary school, spend some of their time learning songs and rhymes and writing poems in the same language spoken by their great grandparents.

In addition to this, there are dozens of dialect poems and stories published every year, mostly in the quarterly journal the New Shetlander. For a language that’s sometimes seen as being in its terminal stages, dedicated people ensure the last rites are still premature.

So, despite threats to the local, the Shetland language persists. And that’s surely a good thing.

It’s entirely a good thing that the local language is an accepted and important part of Shetland’s culture. It’s a good thing that kids don’t get told off for not ‘talking properly’ and are encouraged to express themselves in whatever way they feel most at home. Indeed, self-expression in the Shetland language has a long history. The writing produced by islanders over the last two centuries isn’t well known, partly due to the prominence of dialect, but it is a rich and idiosyncratic body of work. Shetlanders’ passion for their language has led to the creation of a literature which has their language at its core. And that literature, despite the flattening pressures of globalization, is still expanding.

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Shetland dialect writing really got going in the 1870s (there were a few earlier experiments), with the poet James Stout Angus and novelist George Stewart. Both men wrote pioneering dialect texts and, in the following decades, dozens of writers followed suit. Notable contributions to the tradition include Basil Ramsay Anderson’s poem ‘Auld Maunsie’s Crö’, James Inkster’s enormous serialised prose piece Mansie’s Röd, and the work of blind writer and scholar J.J. Haldane Burgess (1862–1927).

Burgess is undoubtedly the most influential of this group of dialect-writing Victorians. His book of verse Rasmie’s Büddie (1891) is made up entirely of dialect poems, and displays a thoughtfulness and sophistication that hadn’t been seen in the literature until that point.

The book is written in the voice of an old crofter, Rasmie, and his mind ranges wide. There is, for example, a meeting with the devil in one of the best-known Shetlandic poems, ‘Scranna’. There are ruminations on the monarchy (Burgess, who became a committed Marxist, didn’t have much time for the royals) and poems about rural working life. And there are careful theological meditations, one of the finest examples being Burgess’s poem ‘Da Blyde Maet’ which explores Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden.

Burgess was a brilliant man who wrote a book of complex, intelligent poems in the voice of a working-class Shetland crofter. This was a new development in Shetland’s nascent literary tradition and, so the story goes, Burgess created Rasmie when he overheard two men claiming that the Shetland dialect could never be used for abstract purposes. His book kicks that notion firmly into touch.

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The figure of the crofter became totemic for later Shetland writers. Sometimes, in the work of Joseph Gray in the thirties for instance, he is a figure of ridicule, with confusion caused by just about any kind of modern technology or non-rural situation. And, in our own time, there are still poems, stories and cartoons in the New Shetlander which display Burgess’s influence.

The wry, canny, afftakin, skympin (meaning to comment sarcastically or ironically) local who deflates pretension, new-fangledness or hifalutin ways with a few Shetlandic words is a long-established presence in Shetland’s cultural landscape.

Taking pretentiousness down a peg or two is never a bad thing. And, as most Scottish readers know, the use of words and speech patterns from particular communities can be very powerful indeed. James Kelman, for instance, sometimes causes literary critics and Booker prize judges to foam at the chops by using words you can hear in Glasgow every day. Kelman, like Tom Leonard, or Irvine Welsh, isn’t afraid to be a so-called regional writer. Their work shows that writing which emerges from the language of a particular place or social group needn’t be any of things often levelled against it – parochial, impenetrable, vulgar and so on. They put working-class Scottish voices into books. It sounds like a straightforward thing to do, but the force and intent of their writing it obvious to anybody taking the time to read it.

Perhaps the work of some contemporary Scottish writers might be seen in a similar way (albeit with a wider audience) to that of Haldane Burgess, because they, like him, try to represent the voices of working class people. They create a space where words and phrases which might be thought, by some, to be non-literary can exist.

They write in a way that challenges the view that only a certain kind of English voice, which has its roots in a certain class, a certain kind of educational system, a certain kind of post-imperialist point of view, can say things about the world. Burgess’s use of Shetland dialect was a challenge to a restrictive linguistic worldview, and so is James Kelman’s or Tom Leonard’s. But does it automatically follow that the Shetlandic writing influenced by Burgess has similar radical, anti-establishment credentials? Is writing in non-standard linguistic 7

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forms, especially in the face of the global hegemonic forces discussed above, an inherently rebellious act?

It isn’t, I don’t think, quite as simple as that.

Kelman and Leonard’s work emerges from working class communities which suffered badly in the eighties and nineties. Their work is so potent because it puts those communities into the literary world. It gives voice to what some people in those communities feel. Shetland writers of the last thirty or forty years, on the other hand, have not had to write from the position of an underprivileged underclass or decimated community, because, when heavy industry was being hammered in Central Scotland in the eighties, Shetland was getting enormously wealthy from North Sea oil. Shetland dialect writing today doesn’t represent the voices of people under the cosh. It isn’t an expression of working-class lives and is more concerned with preservation – of words, of traditions, of older ways of life – than with writing about drug addiction, unemployment, depression, alcohol abuse or poverty (all of which, despite the oil money, still exist in the isles). These are the things that affect people and, if writers don’t take them on, then they’re not doing their job.

As Kelman and other have shown, if a form of local words can be found which tackles these things, the results can hit hard.

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For anybody who chooses to write in Shetland dialect, it’s hard to transcend the voice that has developed since the 1870s. A major exception, which there isn’t space to explore here, is the poet William J. Tait (1918-1992), who, influenced

by MacDiarmid and other Scottish Renaissance writers, wrote some of the most brilliant and atypical Shetlandic verse ever. Despite his efforts, though, the wry, afftakin voice which has its roots in Burgess’s writing, still pervades contemporary Shetland dialect literature. If Shetland writers want to realise the radical potential that can come from writing in non-standard languages, then the community, as it is, not as it was, needs to be represented, even if what’s there contradicts the view of the archipelago as a rural idyll. James Kelman’s work gives voice to his community and, because of that, because he shows that working people can be intelligent, angry, eloquent and engaged, then he’s a threat to the established notions of things. He gives us an alternative view of working lives. Every day in the media working class people are represented as feral, benefitscrounging morons. It’s uncomfortable for some people to hear that this isn’t the case.

Scottish writing which emerges from working class communities is often radical, politicised, and fundamentally anti-establishment. In Shetland, however, dialect writing is the establishment. For nearly a century and a half, Shetland dialect writing has had an accepted Hopefully Shetland writers can get there. place in local culture. There are dozens, perhaps References to contemporary themes do exist in hundreds of books, featuring the language.

Shetland writing, and I don’t want to give the There are several dictionaries. There are dialect impression that local writers are all backwardlessons in schools. And there is a journal, the looking nostalgists, pining for a time when folk New Shetlander, where dialect writers will always spent most of their time fishing for piltocks (coal find an open, encouraging platform for their work. fish) or planting neeps. That’s putting it far too But this healthy situation, where people can simply. But there is a prominent element in the publish within the isles for a receptive readership, contemporary Shetland-dialect literary voice hasn’t yet produced anybody as challenging or that gives the modern world a sideways glance confrontational as Kelman, Leonard, or Welsh. and says ‘it wisna lik yun in my day’. Trying to It hasn’t produced any contemporary writers who make a literary place for an everyday vernacular, use the words of their community to really attack as Burgess did, is a noble aim, but later Shetland the established order. And, in my view, until writers have sometimes found it too easy to take writers do that, until we can read dialect stories the voice he inspired and retreat into a rural world and poems about local life in in all its forms, then of crofts and peat hills and wise dialect words the literature isn’t doing all that it can. heard at the side of granny’s fire.

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The question comes down to how the local can be represented on the page. Should Shetland writers simply do away with local words and write in English? They would certainly increase their readership and, as George Mackay Brown’s work shows, a small northern archipelago can be written about brilliantly in that language. Brown, though, was hardly a radical, and there isn’t the same tradition of dialect writing in Orkney that there is in Shetland. Shetlanders have a rich local linguistic and literary tradition and the best way to preserve what’s there isn’t to retreat into the past, or to moan about children getting lessons in Mandarin. The best way to keep the tradition alive is to use the language in new ways, to keep giving it new life, to use it to present alternative views of the world. The challenge, for people who choose to write in the language, is to go beyond the conservative voice that we often hear in Shetlandic literature and rediscover its radical roots.

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