New Statesman Scotland - A nation in need of pointed ears
Some days after the results of the devolution referenda were announced, I was passing over the border from Tanzania into Malawi. The Malawian customs official deliberated on the match between my passport photograph and my face, which was glistening with sweat from lugging my backpack, then broke into a broad smile. "Ah, Scotland," he enthused, "you have your freedom. You must be very happy, yes!" I explained that it was not quite freedom we had voted for, but extra control over our own affairs, but he was not to be dissuaded. "Ah, but you will have your freedom, you will." Scotland would, like Malawi, cast off the colonial yoke - it was just a bit behind-hand doing it.
Two days before, on a bus from Dar es Salaam to Mbeya, I had enjoyed a more involved discussion with a Tanzanian doctor regarding Britain's membership of the EU, the SNP's position of independence in Europe and Scotland's recent vote. I should not have been surprised by an African concern with matters relating to independence, but nevertheless the range of interest showed the willingness of Africans to listen in to the outside world.
It was a point well made on one of the World Service for Africa programmes I tuned into while on my travels. A correspondent, recently returned to Britain, talked of how appalled she was by the parochialism of our news service. Any minuscule raising or lowering of interest rates, any changes in pensions, she found, gained prominence over matters of global or humanitarian concern. She contrasted this myopia with the times she had watched Africans bent over buzzing old transistors, tuning in to the wider world.
And my border guard's enthusiasm for the referendum was not misplaced, after all; there was an excitement about the referendum and the issues that surrounded it which did not pertain to the election itself, despite the journalistic hyperbole. The time of braying and posturing, of Braveheart and "Flower o' Scotland", is past; now is the time for listening in Scotland, for holding devolution closely to our ears and finding out how each part of the delicate mechanism works - and works together. The next election will be a far more robust affair.
The theme of listening surfaced again recently with Andrew Motion's long-trailed appointment as Poet Laureate. On Radio 4 Motion declared a wish to broaden the base of the concerns of the past, saying he wished to write about, for example, matters of national identity. Such avowed intent naturally pricked the ears of a Scotsman who had seen Motion's most successful writing to be those Secret Narratives of empire, work that is essentially elegiac. In fact his comment showed that the cultural issues which had in many ways driven devolution would intensify with its achievement. Certainly, from my experience of a year living in Canada, even political independence does not grant cultural autonomy - one is always in bed with the elephant.
However, with a fine sense of serendipitous irony, earlier that day on Radio 4 the afternoon play was Kathleen Jamie's imaginative foray around one of Middle England's sacred texts, Philip Larkin's Whitsun Weddings. With acute sympathy, Jamie's verse drama breathed life into the marriages Larkin had sketched. True, most of the monologues were stories of disappointment - lives of quiet, inhibited desperation. A younger character spoke for Jamie's generation and the new freedoms it has enjoyed, while acknowledging at the end of the piece that, like her mother's thrown wedding bouquet, things "came down in much the same arrangement - women and children and men".
It is hard, if not impossible, to imagine an English writer making use of a Scottish work and catching, as Jamie does, the nuances of a life we used to call in the fifties "British", but which is revealed as so very English now. Jamie is at an advantage, as we all have been, in being able by osmosis to absorb the details of our dominant culture. Yet, rather than snub Motion, we should encourage him to attempt what Larkin never showed any inclination to do, what Jamie did and what Edwin Morgan cannot help but do - to imagine another way of being on these islands and in the world.
To succeed in this, he will have to listen with care as, in the new dispensation, we are having to listen to each other, from Shetland to Galloway - without forgetting our obligation to listen in to the world beyond. As Morgan put it in his election-day poem, "The Storm": "You have to get in training." He recommends "pointed ears".
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