National Collective’s #TradYES

This isn’t much of a political blog but my curiousity has been piqued by a new post over at National Collective which has just launched their #TradYES campaign – a means by which traditional artists can explore the correspondence between their craft and support for a YES in the indyref.

Anyone with a knowledge of Scotland’s oral traditions might expect this to be a vehicle for an all too familiar brand of cultural nationalism. The carrying stream of Scottish ‘folk’, epitomised by the School of Scottish Studies, has long had something of a nationalist undercurrent. Two of their most renowned collectors, Hamish Henderson and Calum Iain Maclean, were not shy about making their sympathies known.

For Maclean, there were two approaches to the oral tradition: what he called ‘the scientific’ and ‘the nationalist’ (I’ll let you guess which one he thought more important). The whole task of collecting was of the utmost urgency as Maclean felt that the oral traditions, particularly in the Gaidhealtachd, were passing away before his eyes. ‘I’m really afraid’ he wrote to Henderson in 1957, ‘that the old Highland spirit is as dead as could be’. To another audience he cautioned that ‘we may very soon learn to our cost that we cannot at the one and same time serve the God of Gaelic culture and the Mammon of English imperialism’. You get the picture.

So I was interested to note that National Collective #TradYES campaign was launched by my Edinburgh University colleague Mairi McFadyen whose PhD is from the School of Scottish Studies. The stall she lays out, however, is significantly different from these earlier movements.

For one thing, it sees aspects of Scottish tradition within a much wider cultural frame. It also displaces ‘the national’ for ‘the local’ – an interesting move. What strikes me as most important is that #TradYES is both generative and future-orientated. For all the ‘trad’ in ‘#TradYES’, National Collective’s campaign represents more a bringing-to-life than a saving-the-past. That distinction may prove significant.

And the bid to foster an ‘evolving sense of self’ may resonate with a greater diversity of voices than could have been foreseen by Henderson and Maclean.

Interestingly, #TradYES has articulated something from which their Unionist opponents have long shied away. For those in the No camp it may seem a peripheral problem that National Collective are stirring conversations and ideas about a cultural future. But it comes across as another instance where in saying nothing Better Together have nothing very much to say.

 

 

Blackbird and the oral tradition

Any film which stars Margaret Bennett and Norman Maclean is, in my opinion, off to a great start. They are among Scotland’s most notable tradition-bearers and have spent their lives shuttling between Highland fireside and lowland media.

Bennett appeared in Timothy Neat’s wonderful if eccentric Play Me Something (1989) about fog-bound travellers at Barra airport, also featuring John Berger, Hamish Henderson and Tilda Swinton. Maclean too was cast by Neat in Walk Me Home (1993), though not as The Guardian had it Play Me Something.

It seems as if Tim Neat has bequeathed another cinematic legacy by introducing Norman Maclean to debut director Jamie Chambers, whose film Blackbird premiered last week at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Chambers has given us a fine film, a worthy showcase for the manifold talents of Maclean, Bennett and as well as another superb traditional singer, Sheila Stewart.

The film is focused on the character of Ruadhan, played by Andrew Rothney, a young man determined to save the songs of the village elders before they are lost amid economic change, signalled in this case by the decline of fishing and the arrival of the bistro.

Blackbird is an accomplished film. Beyond the memorable performances and some skillful cinematography, Chambers has created a plausible town that is irreducibly Scottish but avoids being tethered to a specific place. This is essential if the film is to stand in for the oral tradition in the widest sense, from Gaels to Travellers.

It is not a perfect film (perfect films don’t get made) but it is, I think, an important moment in Scottish cinema. I say this in part because its primary theme – the mechanics of cultural transmission – has to date received scant attention.

The oral tradition has long provided a little background colour for filmmakers (think of the faux puirt a beul drinking song in Whisky Galore), but rarely does it constitute the action.

Even in Play Me Something, one of my favourite films, the oral tradition played second fiddle to John Berger’s grand trans-cultural humanism.

Blackbird is significant because the plot centres on the anxieties about who is culturally eligible to listen, learn and sing. The song is here portrayed as a gift of high value and, as with all gift economies, the burden placed on the recipient – in this case young Ruadhan – is sometimes more than he can bear, particularly if the gift is withheld.

Ruadhan’s desire to save the songs is set against the wariness of the tradition bearers to pass them on to a generation whose way of life is so different from their own.

There is a clever ambivalence in Blackbird about the premise that the oral tradition is dying and must be saved.

In one scene, old Alex, played by Maclean, resists his liberation from a nursing home by young Ruadhan shouting: “You? Are rescuing me?!”

It raises a welcome question about the familiar imperative of the ‘salvage paradigm’.

The film is plainly informed by the work of twentieth century folklorists and ethnologists – epitomised by the School of Scottish Studies – who patiently recorded stories and songs. The paradox of this work, however, is that in wanting to preserve the oral tradition, ethnologists sometimes felt that wax cylinders and magnetic tape were more reliable repositories of culture than the people to whom it belonged.

The collectors, believing that the mechanics of cultural transmission had broken down, came bearing the salvific recording machine – useful but not uncomplicated. In Blackbird, this tension is expressed in Amy’s iPod.

But a culture that frames itself as perpetually on the edge of extinction may arguably be better equipped to survive. Stories and music which were once passed from one generation to another at the fank or in the berryfields, in the kitchen or around the fire, are now more often transmitted through different means.

They are performed at school or the Mod or at fèisean and the like, events which in turn draw their funding from Bord na Gaidhlig, Creative Scotland, LEADER and The National Lottery. They have their own designated quasi-public spaces – community halls and heritage centres. (Blackbird’s bistro feels a bit 1990s – modernity’s current guise is more likely to come in the form of a third sector wifi-enabled community arts portal).

It should not surprise us that oral life is allied to the world of work. And that for young people, work in rural Scotland – if it exists at all – it is often as part of a service-orientated precariat in which cultural distinctiveness is pressed into the service of local development. This is not always comfortable and, by definition, change involves a loss of sorts.

But perhaps Blackbird gives a glimpse into the disavowed truth about Scotland’s oral traditions: it is less that they are all dying than that some survive under cultural conditions that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.