Friday, August 29, 2014

Exile

29th August 2014

T.S. Eliot: "Every country is home to one man, and exile to another."

I have been thinking a lot about exile, because I live in a kind of self-imposed exile myself, and because when I look at the lives of other writers, it seems to be a common theme. The favourite author of my youth DH Lawrence left his home town of Eastwood, England, and spent the rest of his life wandering the globe trying to find a place he could call home (he never did!) Ireland's James Joyce lived in Paris. Great Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon lived way down in the south of England. Steinbeck removed himself in the end to New York state; Irish writer Edna O'Brien has lived forever more in London.
The list goes on and on, and I think it's because the writer growing up has felt him or herself a step removed from his surroundings. There but not really there, which is the kind of perspective you need to look upon a place artistically. And then, of course, those people who populated your growing up don't generally like it if you turn around and start throwing their way of life back at them.  They find it condescending, because you are after all only the cheeky child who had too much say back then, and they are not about to condone it now. Same goes for the family - no one loves the Joseph character and would rather sell him/her off to the hairy Ishmaelites, thank you.

But in the great irony that most art rests, the writer in exile spends his/her life longing back, looking over his or her shoulder with a wistful "If only" look.



The images in this picture are the kind that get my heart bleeding, and I only have to hear Scottish music for my toes to go into involuntary spasms. You only have to ask me about Scottish independence, and I will talk without ceasing about the case for a Yes vote. I will call on my forefathers and Robert Burns and wax lyrical about Braveheart himself Mel Gibson, I mean William Wallace.
Out of a family of five children, I was actually the only one born in Scotland. Out of my syblings, I was the only one to sit out in the car of an evening by myself listening to the Alexander Brothers singing about the days of their childhood in the Scottish mountains and glens.
And then there's the blood, you see, the dancing gyres of the DNA: Mc (son of - should really be, and is in the Gaelic, Nic daughter of) Dou (Dubh - dark) Gall (Ghall - stranger.) NicDougall. Daughter of a dark stranger, that's me.

So why not go back? Or at least why not stop all this longing, wipe the Scottish dust of your feet and have done with it? It's because you're trapped. "Draining your dearest veins" (Burns) for the life-blood of your art, you still don't really belong anywhere, neither in the old country nor the new. It's too late for me - I am a mid-Atlantic dweller now, my feet in No-man's Land, marooned in a country that like Atlantis does not exist.


As Lawrence so aptly put it: "We're rather like Jonah's running away from the place we belong."






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