Berkley Center

A “ScotLit” lecturer was speaking on the strong embodiment of place in Scottish literature. “A landscape looks different to those who lived in it from how it looks to those who did not,” he said. “Now, hands up if you’ve gone to school in Scotland.”

Less than a dozen hands floated up in a classroom of about 100.

“Raise your hand if you’ve been taught Scottish literature in Scotland.” Perhaps three hands. Students murmured and shifted in their seats in surprise. When the lecture was over, I spoke with another student as we packed up. She looked at least 50, and her Scottish accent was softened.

“I think this is a wonderful class,” she said. “It’s very good to have, when you’ve been taught earlier in school to despise your own literary traditions.”

Despise?

After we parted ways, I found myself at the ScotLit student representative meeting, wondering if I was sitting in for empty space, not truly understanding a thing. Soon I discovered that another representative I was adjacent to was also a one-semester American. It was at the end of that meeting where I asked one of the ScotLit professors about what the older student had said.

He informed me that although this was just now starting to change, Scottish students were largely taught only English literature. The most Scottish literature a student would read was in primary school, where the verses of Robert Burns were called bairnsangs and treated as nursery rhymes for children, despite containing themes and forms beyond a child’s comprehension. The collective impression was that English literature was literature, and Scottish literature was “not.”

“But don’t think of ScotLit as reactionary or fighting the good post-colonial fight,” the professor cautioned. Literature from Scotland had existed on its own, and on its own traditions, for a long time. It was never limited to a simple borrowing or subverting from English; it borrowed from and subverted itself. It was not a reaction, but a source of its own actions.

And yet that older student used the word “despise” to capture an attitude towards ScotLit. I asked him why.

He answered, “There’s this idea that Scottish literature is more parochial and it seems that a lot of Scottish folk have turned away from Scottish literature so they can be more cosmopolitan. Well, it’s just the impression that I’ve been getting. You know.”

I nodded slowly. There are just so, so many people who read. Does anyone know what all those people are reading about?

The professor laughed with the chagrin that accompanies ambiguity. “So, maybe things aren’t this way. I could be wrong.”

A landscape looks different to those who lived in it.

I try to think of my favorite place in Glasgow. Not George Square. Not the Barras marketplace. Not the city center, where employees in top hats and tuxedos decorate the Argyll Arcade. Not the GoMA—not any other museums either, really. I do love all of these places, but loving is a land away from knowing.

The Necropolis is another place that I love. I had brought my sketchbook with me when I first visited. I detailed a few of the tombstones closest to me and shaded in the rough shapes of the background very quickly because I got tired of sitting for too long.

A couple of locals came up the hill and plopped against a tombstone near me, cracking open cans of beer. They were just staying there.

The next time I came, I sat on a stone wall while sipping warm cider and from the hill of the Necropolis I watched the line of the city. There were looming structures that I recognized from my student city tour and past them, blue rectangles soaked softly into the blur of the horizon. It was a stretching blue, bigger than the trace of my footsteps and bigger than what my eyes could see. I stayed on the stone wall, sipping, blinking, until the sun faded and everything before me grew dark.