Borders and Stories
by Ian Stephen
The word ‘random’ took a grip in the speak of my home town and its surrounds, about the time the lads were going through secondary school. Maybe it was a bit like ‘far out’ when a few ‘alternative’ phrases filtered through to the island when I was at their stage. I remember asking my mother to translate ‘Far out man’ into Gaelic, about the time the film, ‘Woodstock’ was on general release. Now we are in the territory of the unpredictable, no matter where we go. We can’t take the ‘going’ for granted either. Even before the Covid pandemic many of us were thinking twice and three times before booking air travel or going by other carbon-heavy means.
Stories still prevail unlike winds which seem less and less predictable. Maybe we all have to consider becoming more like ‘armchair travellers’. An imprint of Haus Publishing sounds something like that. The Polish-Canadian poet, Marius Kociejowski, now a Londoner, is about to publish his celebration of Naples in the ‘Armchair Traveller’ series.(1) But it is the reissue of his previous title, ‘The Street Philosopher & the Holy Fool’ (2) which brought me where I could not have journeyed. Marius does move, physically, to different places, which is how we met here on Lewis. It seems to me that the most significant travels are in his conversations. Like my son Ben, who cycled through Ukraine not long after Crimea was ‘annexed’, I could not understand why the seizing of territory did not seem to even slacken trade with an increasingly autocratic Putin regime. But neither did the destruction of Aleppo,
Marius’s book on Syrian travels was first published in 2004. It’s re-issue in 2016 comes with the terrible undersong of destruction. The architecture of Aleppo, as complex as the webs of Islamic and Christian relationships, mostly doesn’t exist now. The traveller’s daring is not so much in climbing or facing big waves. It is a willingness to engage in conversation. Not snatches but sustained through sometimes episodic charting of a sustained inquiry built on friendship. The complexities of character and belief are not simplified. What comes across though is the creative ways individuals could live with their neighbours, contradictions and all, until all these people were caught up in an international power-struggle. Empires are not just a faded shading on a political map, after all. If ‘the west’ was to support the ‘Arab Spring’ of uprisings against despots (though only up to a point) then ‘the east’ would extend its own sphere of influence by supporting people like Assad.
The political and physical clashes are reflected in conflicting narratives. Persecution and destruction are of course only directed at ‘terrorists’, said the hired propogandists for Assad (the younger despot). A similar tone was to be struck in Putin’s speeches when he would refer to the mission of ‘denazification’ of Ukraine. A minority from right-wing, nationalist groups fighting in the Donbas region provided the imagery needed to give some credibility to the myth, once free reporting was closed down.
Considering Syria again, Marius quotes in full a translation of ‘the Tattoo’ from the one he calls, ‘the wild card of Arabic poetry, the boldest and certainly the most unpredictable’ – Muhammad al-Maghut 1934 - 2006). The fellow-poet’s introduction wryly comments that we have come a long way from comparing eyes to those of gazelles. To those who speak out, apprehension is the norm. (3)
‘Whenever I hear a knock on a door, or see a curtain move
I cover my papers with my hand
Like a prostitute in a raid.’
The Syrian poet could also speak for those courageous citizens of the Russian Federation who risked a 15 year prison sentence for calling the ‘operation’ an invasion or even a war. When the overt message is prohibited, somehow the story will still be passed on. From this island, (Lewis) exposed to the weather but somehow still a bit sheltered, I can continue to research and sometimes find how familiar a story from ‘foreign’ parts can be.
I’m remembering referring to a variant of the story of the king’s daughters, come to most of us through the most literary of sources – the tragedy of King Lear. It seems a likely provenance of the story I first heard, (‘I love you more than salt.’) in the accent of northeast Scotland, is Syria. It’s international nature is confirmed by being also claimed as both a Slavik tale and an English one. Then, rooting through references for variants of the tale of the serpent-prince, I find that there is a well-documented story from the Ukraine. As with the selkie legend, it seems there are male and female variations across a huge geography. In 1916 the collector and translator R Nisbet Bain published ‘Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales’. Unlike Arthur Ransome’s retellings of the Russian stories he researched, including using the voices of his invented characters, Bain’s are told in what now seems an archaic style. But the story is the story.
As you might expect from one of the the world’s great breadbasket agricultures, sheafs of corn are a dominant motif. But a great serpent guides a lonely peasant to one sheaf. He first has to burn the corn but then the best and most beautiful of wives appears. You might guess, like the seal-wife relationship and the woman who has come with her dowry of black cattle from the lake, nothing is forever. A rash phrase cannot be taken back and so the wife returns to her serpent form. She had not brought him fabulous riches but she had made a home of a hut and brought peace and prosperity.
It seems that such security can vanish after a few words are uttered. Yet the depth of pain brings a new knowledge with it. As with the eating of the flesh of the white snake in Grimms and variants told by travelling people, loss can bring something more than compensation. In this case it is not only the understanding of all languages or the languages of all the animals but the knowledge of ‘everything that is going on under the earth’.
As an invading force retreats in some areas only to bombard others, that knowledge includes terrors. But already there are demonstrations of justice. Forensic evidence is being assembled and cases have already begun to be heard.
But each morning brings a new setback to democratic process. I follow the news on Tunisia as Ben now lives in Tunis. I used to have a dream of picking him up, under sail before movement of yachts became more complex with Covid and Brexit. Today, 27th July, 2022, Tunisia’s democracy ‘verges on collapse’ and the only new democracy surviving since the Arab Spring gives way to sweeping presidential powers.(4) The same morning saw The New York Times analyse the descent further into state terrorism in Myanmar, following execution of four respected political activists. This has the echo of the fascist regimes our parents and grandparents thought they had defeated. It seems to me, from this island, that the United Kingdom can’t be complacent. Had the Johnson government succeeded in its attempts to bypass parliament, its democracy too would be in name only. As in the United States the voting system continues to distort results, resulting in ‘landslide’ victories on small percentages of the vote.Yet opposition parties in the UK, Labour in particular, have consistently ruled out closer alliances with fellow centrist parties which might fairly represent a more moderate majority. A more hopeful sign is the savvy shown by voters in 2022 by-elections in very different parts of England. Labour voters held back or voted tactically to give a better chance of the LibDem candidate overcoming a huge majority and a parallel trend seems to have helped Labour regain a seat in what some people call ‘The North’. Both unspoken pacts achieved the result willed by a true majority.
If UK politics were less like football matches, where winning is the goal in itself, I probably would not be seeing Scotland’s separation from the Union as the best chance for democracy. If an ‘Islands Alliance’ of the Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland, Faroes and Iceland looked like a possibility I might be equally keen on supporting that. Right now a new move for Scottish Independence seems to me to offer the best chance for a restoration of democracy, even with huge issues, such as the nature of the border with England, unresolved. Right now the dotted lines don’t seem as real as the tone of the shared stories.
A new mountain (5)
Christine said, ‘There’s a new mountain.’
As if Sutherland changed overnight.
That hill-line does as all do
but we don’t usually see the wear and tear
unless rocks become quarry.
Can’t say why
cloud-cover comes in eights.
Can’t grade visibility
as one beholder
though you see the line go
from sharp. Back to the wash
before near-erasure.
Christine says ‘smirr’
when mist and drizzle merge
to smudge
Suilven and Canisp
over Tiumpan Head
though a Minch away.
Today is different.
Some refraction replaced the mountains
with a new single shape, mild and more rounded
like it wasn’t just weather
but had been weathering a while.
I thought of Mariupal.
That shape also changed.
Now looks like Aleppo.
They won’t be restored
any time soon
in any change of light.
Blood’s drained or
dried on lime.
Bones are resilient
even as splinters.
Souls change status to ‘lost’
even when directed
to places
on trains, trucks, ships.
(1) ‘The Serpent Coiled in Naples’, Marius Kociejowski, Haus Publishing, London, 2022
(2) ‘The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool’, Marius Kociejowski, Eland, London, 2016
(3) as above p 253
(4) nytimes.com
(5) Portraits of the individuals who were executed, the Guardian, link in Myanmar summary Jul27 2022:
(6) first published in ‘The Earth is our Home’, poems from Scotland, compiled by Gerry Loose, 2022