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Jim Aitken<\/strong> reviews a book of radical women\u2019s voices: <\/em>Quines<\/a>, by Gerda Stevenson<\/a>. Accompanying illustrations of textiles are by artists from EDGE: Textile Artists Scotland.<\/em><\/p>\n The second edition of Gerda Stevenson\u2019s \u2018Quines\u2019 came out with some fanfare as it was launched to coincide with International Women\u2019s Day. The launch at the Central Library in Edinburgh was also accompanied by a unique exhibition in honour of some of the poems in the book by EDGE: Textile Artists Scotland.<\/p>\n The new front cover of this second edition arose out of the Scottish artist Helen Flockhart hearing Gerda read the poem \u2018The Abdication of Mary Queen of Scots\u2019 \u2013 a poem in the book \u2013 on Radio 4\u2019s \u2018Woman\u2019s Hour.\u2019 Helen\u2019s painting was part of her own exhibition \u2018Linger Awhile\u2019 based on the life of Scotland\u2019s tragic queen in 2018-19. Gerda commended \u2018the creative sisterhood\u2019 that came with the launch of the second edition of her poetry collection.<\/p>\n A quine, it should be said, is the Scots word for a girl and it is being used to name all the women featured in the book. The first edition came out in 2018 and was reprinted in 2019. The new second edition of 2020 has four new poems along with a new introduction and is currently being translated into Italian by Laura Maniero with a grant from Publishing Scotland. \u2018Quines\u2019 is clearly a major work. It took Stevenson four years of research along with a few chance encounters that had entered her poetic imagination for this book to take shape.<\/p>\n Textile by Moira E. Dickson<\/em><\/p>\n The name Frances (Fanny) Wright is certainly one I was not familiar with. She was born in Dundee in 1795 and was very much a product of the Scottish Enlightenment despite that period not being particularly enlightened with regard to women. She was a writer, orator, feminist, abolitionist, champion of the rights of workers, a critic of the banks of her day and a critic of religious institutions. She spoke openly of the pleasures of sexual passion while also seeing marriage as a form of bondage, and campaigned for divorce, for birth control and for property rights for married women. She was also the first woman to edit a newspaper, \u2018The Free Enquirer\u2019.<\/p>\n She had gone to America and became hugely respected by Walt Whitman who said \u2018she was a brilliant woman\u2026who was never satisfied unless she was busy doing good \u2013 public good, private good.\u2019 She had also been admired by Mary Shelley and they were close friends. Mary Shelley had died before Fanny Wright and this enabled Stevenson to call her poem \u2018Fanny Wright Meditates on Mary Shelley\u2019s Death.\u2019<\/p>\n As she laments her death she recalls her own life and mentions some of the terms that had been labelled against her \u2013 she was \u2018The Red Harlot of Liberty\u2019 and \u2018The High Priestess of Infidelity.\u2019 In her sadness for Mary she reflects on their achievements:<\/p>\n Those I\u2019ve loved are gone, and now you too,<\/em> These touching lines show the debt that women of this era had to the \u2018torch\u2019 that was Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley. Her \u2018Vindication of the Rights of Woman\u2019 appeared in 1792, where Wollstonecraft sought to apply the egalitarian principles of the American and French revolutions to women.<\/p>\n Though the backwoodsman Walpole called her \u2018a hyena in petticoats\u2019 many modern feminists have returned to her hugely significant work for inspiration.<\/p>\n Stevenson had first come across Wright in Barbara Taylor\u2019s \u2018Eve and the New Jerusalem\u2019 (1983) and in Celia Eckhardt Morris\u2019s biography \u2018Fanny Wright: Rebel in America\u2019 (1984). While performing in New York in 2012 Stevenson visited the Walt Whitman Birthplace Historic Site at Long Island. On entering the building the first thing she noticed was a portrait of Fanny Wright placed between portraits of Whitman\u2019s parents.<\/p>\n A year later, while working in Shetland, she had gone to Lerwick\u2019s Shetland Museum and saw the reconstructed head of a young woman. There were, she says, \u2018five thousand years between us\u2019 in her Prologue poem \u2018Reconstructed Head of a Young Woman.\u2019 She begins to imagine what this young woman\u2019s life had been like, as she observed the hair that \u2018falls like mine,\u2019 the \u2018salt-washed cheeks\u2019 and her \u2018fearless gaze of hope.\u2019 By the time Gerda had landed back on the Scottish mainland she had written the poem of her encounter with the young Shetlandic woman.<\/p>\n Scotland’s Forgotten Women<\/strong><\/p>\n We are often what we were before. The young woman in Lerwick Museum and all young women today hold much in common. They have shared hopes and dreams and know acutely what it means to be a woman. Like Fanny Wright the young woman with the reconstructed head had been forgotten about, relegated from history, their existences marginalised.<\/p>\n The encounter through a pane of glass in a museum has much in common with Seamus Heaney\u2019s discovery of P.V. Glob\u2019s \u2018The Bog People,\u2019 first published in English in 1969. In this book Heaney discovered that the bodies that had been preserved in the bogs of Jutland and elsewhere in northern Europe gave him a much-needed metaphor to compare what was happening in Northern Ireland during the so-called Troubles.<\/p>\n Ritualised murders and scapegoating had taken place thousands of years ago and this enabled Heaney to relate this to the sectarian and community conflicts being waged in Northern Ireland, as the peaceful civil rights demonstrations began to be attacked and then descended into violence. Also, by referring to those ancient murders Heaney could allow his poetry \u2013 particularly his collection \u2018North\u2019 (1975) \u2013 to rise above any partiality on his part and to universalize the horrors that were playing out in his own North at the time. Similarly, Stevenson could see the affinity she had with the young woman of Shetland in that, like her, she was female and part of what Simone de Beauvoir labelled \u2018The Second Sex\u2019 (1949) in her ground-breaking study of women.<\/p>\n Visits to museums can crystallise ideas but what had to be done first was to do the background work, the reading and research into many of Scotland\u2019s forgotten women. That research took four years and it was \u2018The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women\u2019 (2006), reprinted in 2018, which Stevenson has said was \u2018an invaluable resource.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018Quines\u2019 brings together a diverse array of Scottish women \u2013 politicians, queens, a salt seller, a half-hanged woman, scientists, writers and artists, singers, a dancer, a fish-gutter and others. They are all remarkably well studied, vital individuals who, like the young woman of Shetland, had fearless gazes of hope for all women and indeed for all. They also had fearless voices and an innate determination to be heard and seen. While not all men have been able to do this in class-ridden societies throughout history, it has been doubly difficult for women. As James Connolly succinctly put it when he first saw the poor women of Dublin, calling them \u2018the slaves of slaves.\u2019<\/p>\n Further back, nearly three thousand years ago, Homer told us in \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 that various groups of men had arrived at the home of Odysseus to hear if there was any news of his homecoming. His wife Penelope had been waiting for news herself and she is about to talk to the guests when her son Telemachus tells her \u2013<\/p>\n Go back into your quarters and take up your work, on the loom\u2026speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power of this household.<\/em><\/p>\n At the outbreak of the First World War the British Government\u2019s War Office had told Elsie Inglis and her Scottish Women\u2019s Hospitals \u2013 \u2018Good lady, go home and sit down.\u2019 Clearly, there had been no change in attitude to women since the days of Telemachus. Stevenson gives Elsie her voice back in \u2018Elsie Inglis Prepares for her Last Journey\u2019 in a sensitively written poem where Inglis, dying from cancer, considers the impact that she and her comrades of the Scottish Women\u2019s Hospitals have made:<\/p>\n my women, saving lives, proved<\/em> A Fearless Gaze of Hope<\/strong><\/p>\n Mary Beard tells us in \u2018Woman and Power\u2019 (2017) that in classical times women were not allowed to talk in public unless they dealt with their own sectional interests or their victimhood. Yet today when women do talk in public they are viciously abused, with women MPs receiving more vitriolic and obscene abuse than their male counterparts. And as for social media the most common comment directed at women is \u2018Shut up, you bitch.\u2019 Stevenson knows all this but both she and her book have simply sailed through these rough seas without even getting wet. Her book of Quines rises above such negativity with \u2018a fearless gaze of hope\u2019 and optimism.<\/p>\n This poetry collection also features women who were not born in Scotland but came from other countries to live here. Some of her quines, though Scottish by birth, had emigrated from Scotland. What is significant about this is that her only criteria for women being included in \u2018Quines\u2019 is that those who were in Scotland and played their part here can be seen as Scottish, as Scottish as they ever wanted to be.<\/p>\n This chimes particularly well with the recent Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014. Eligibility to vote in that referendum was based simply on being in Scotland, living there and working there. This, of course, was in sharp contrast to the Brexit Referendum of 2016 that excluded EU citizens living and working in the UK. Gerda\u2019s generosity with all those included in \u2018Quines\u2019 seems to mirror the current mood of openness that is being shown to migrant workers in Scotland, as there is the recognition that the economic contribution they make to Scottish society is extremely valuable.<\/p>\n The three languages of Scotland are all represented, with Stevenson showing that she is as skilled in Scots as she is in English. She also uses Gaelic words and phrases in poems where her women have come from that culture or have been referred to by that culture. She takes a chronological approach to all her women placing them in their own times and in so doing she brings the rich tapestry of Scottish history to life with its incursions from Ireland, from Viking lands like Norway and from elsewhere.<\/p>\n Nessie, the Original Sexy Beast<\/strong><\/p>\n The collection begins with Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, who is indisputably female. Stevenson does not even mention that according to Adomnan, in his life of St Columba, believed to be written between 697 -700, that it was the saint who was supposed to have tamed the monster. Nessie was clearly not for taming as her \u2018fearless gaze\u2019 seems to \u2018strike terror in your hearts.\u2019 Yet this monster is much more than a figure of fear. Her \u2018paps slope with the grace of Jura.\u2019 Gerda uses the Old Norse word \u2018paps\u2019 meaning \u2018breasts\u2019 and the Paps of Jura were named by Norse settlers to describe the look of the three mountains on that island. This word, it has to be said, has also been used by many a Scottish schoolboy directed at his female class-mates. Gerda, however, reclaims the word for Nessie and then describes her \u2018nipples bright as fresh water pearls, sleek hips fit for tender cargo.\u2019 In this description she cleverly creates for us the original sexy beast.<\/p>\n However, her Nessie, though clearly happy in her own skin, also has a mind \u2018broad as your kyles.\u2019 She has been around \u2018long before the Romans named the Picts.\u2019 She has seen our entire history and will continue to \u2018elude your sonar probes and camera clicks.\u2019 Nessie possesses depth and will only reveal herself when we \u2018can see beyond the surface.\u2019 This is a playful poem on one level but deeply serious on another.<\/p>\n Textile by Sue Fraser<\/em><\/p>\n In \u2018The Abdication of Mary Queen of Scots\u2019 Stevenson informs us in the biographical note between the title and poem \u2013 a clever technique she uses throughout the collection \u2013 that Mary miscarried twins while imprisoned in Loch Leven Castle in 1567. Mary talks in Scots to her last lady-in-waiting, Mary Seton, who is tearful at her Queen losing her crown:<\/p>\n \u2026..och, Mary, Mary Seton, last<\/em> These lines are among the most emotionally charged ones in the collection. Mary is saying that a bit of gold and glitter (\u2018bitte gowd an glister\u2019) is nothing compared to the lives of the twins she lost. Mary offers Seton her arm \u2013 \u2018haud ma airm\u2019 \u2013 rather than Seton offering Mary comfort. The repetition of \u2018dinna\u2019 is written as an exhortation that masks the utter desolation she actually feels. These feelings of sadness and loss, however, are not for the loss of her crown but for the \u2018twa bairns\u2026.twa scraps o heivin.\u2019<\/p>\n Sugar, slavery and exploitation<\/strong><\/p>\n The poem \u2018Demerara\u2019 introduces us to Eliza Junor who was born in Demerara, now modern day Guyana, to Hugh Junor, a slave owner from the Black Isle, and an unknown mother who would have been a slave. Stevenson tries to imagine Eliza in her new land detecting the strange contradiction of where she now finds herself in \u2019the Black Isle of white people, where I\u2019m glad no cane grows.\u2019<\/p>\n Eliza had won a prize at Fortrose Academy for penmanship and Gerda cleverly uses the words of the \u2018dominie\u2019s wife\u2019 (teacher\u2019s wife) telling Eliza about all the other \u2018tawny\u2019 types like her who are appearing in Cromarty, Tain and Inverness. The teacher\u2019s wife was pouring tea and when Eliza declines any sugar the wife exclaims: \u2018But it\u2019s Demerara\u2026It\u2019ll make you feel at home.\u2019 Declining sugar is perfectly understandable for Eliza since it conjures up the horrors of the slavery that went into its production. Eliza watches \u2018the gold beads\u2026melt in the peat-brown pool\u2019 of the cup.<\/p>\n This poem is incredibly important, because it deals with Scotland\u2019s role in the slave trade. It is only in the last fifteen years that any serious academic research has gone into the role played by Scots in that ghastly trade. In one of Walter Scott\u2019s novels, \u2018Rob Roy\u2019 (1817), there is a passage that shows how there was a refusal to adequately admit to that role:<\/p>\n When the cloth was removed, Mr Jarvie compounded with his own hands a very small bowl of brandy-punch, the first which I had ever the fortune to see. \u2018The limes,\u2019 he assured us, \u2018were from his own little farm yonder-awa\u2019 (indicating the West Indies with a knowing shrug of his shoulders).<\/em><\/p>\n What happened \u2018yonder awa\u2019 was brutal exploitation, and it should be remembered that Scotland\u2019s greatest poet Robert Burns had at one time seriously considered becoming \u2018a negro driver\u2019 in Jamaica. Stevenson\u2019s poem also mentions several Highland place names \u2013 Cromarty, Tain and Inverness \u2013 and these places seem at odds with the narrative that Scots have often nurtured about the brutality they suffered during the Highland Clearances when houses were burned and people forced to emigrate in large numbers to make way for the more profitable sheep that came with Union. While that episode can never be ignored, these place names in the poem show that many Scots, as well as being oppressed, were in fact oppressors themselves.<\/p>\n In \u2018Reconsidering Scotland\u2019s Slavery Past\u2019 (2015) Tom Devine brought together various academics to seriously look at Scotland\u2019s role in the slave trade associated with the Caribbean. Scots had been numerous in Demerara. The slaves, it was said, called prawns \u2018Scotsmen\u2019 not because their skin turned pink in the sun but because they all stuck together. Herring caught in the North Sea had been mixed with oats to provide meals for the slaves, and the canvas clothes they wore had also been manufactured in Scotland and sent out to Demerara. Slavery had a massive economic impact beyond institutionalising free labour.<\/p>\n This is uncomfortable history but it is a history that has to be told. David Hayman brought out the TV programmes \u2018Slavery: Scotland\u2019s Hidden Shame\u2019 for BBC Scotland in 2018 and these programmes explored those uncomfortable truths particularly well. However, that was what Union was all about. Union with England was an imperial construct whereby Scotland gained access to England\u2019s \u2018overseas markets.\u2019 \u2013 its colonies. Along with imperialism abroad there was the spin-off from industry at home as goods from those markets came back here to be manufactured.<\/p>\n The arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes summed it up quite aptly when he said: \u2018To avoid civil war at home, we must become imperialists abroad.\u2019 He recognised the class divide and saw in Empire, with its crumbs thrown at the working classes, the solution to the maintenance of that divide. Today, however, with empire gone and large-scale industry also gone, the Union is decidedly shaky. All that seems to remain of that imperialist legacy are the awful ditties like \u2018Rule Britannia\u2019 (1740) and \u2018Land of Hope and Glory\u2019 (1901). The national anthem \u2018God Save the Queen\u2019 is also part of this imperialist legacy. These songs seek merely to perpetuate the national notions of former greatness.<\/p>\n So it was ludicrous to listen to Rees-Mogg and Widdicombe saying that they wanted Britain to break free from \u2018the imperial yoke of the EU\u2019 as if Britain had become enslaved, when it was Britain that had developed and sustained slavery on an industrial scale.<\/p>\n![\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/EDGEmoira_e_dickson_resized.jpg\")
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who held your mother\u2019s torch, the flame that grew<\/em>
with every step we took to forge a world<\/em>
pledged to the common good\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Mary](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/Mary-Wollstonecraft.jpg\")
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what\u2019s plain as day: that we are equal<\/em>
daughters, sons, husbands, wives.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"EDGEsue](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/EDGEsue_fraser.jpg\")
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o ma fower leal ladies, dinna waste yer tears <\/em>
on gien up a bitte gowd an glister, haud ma airm<\/em>
if it helps, but dinna, dinna greet fur this.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"scotland](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/scotland-and-slavery.jpg\")
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