Emancipation & Liberation

This is written for anyone who has ever suffered at the hands (or, more accurately, the mouths) of the Highland midge. Over the centuries the bear and the wolf have been hunted to extinction in the Highlands of Scotland, but it has never been remotely within the scope of possibility that its most voracious predator could ever be removed from that most remarkable of landscapes.

‘Neath oceans glides the great white shark,
In Africa, best fear the dark,
Where night is torn with eerie howls,
Where prides of lions, hungry, prowl.
There’s crocs from Oz, there’s snakes there, too,
They’ll bite, they’ll tear, they’ll feed on you.
But the greatest bloodfest of them all
Takes place ‘tween Scotland’s spring and fall.

By loch, in glen, on rocky ridge,
There lurks the evil Highland midge.
As sun descends this fearsome pack
In squadrons, moves in to attack.
With anguished yelps and flailing arms
Unwary tourists learn the charms
Of this fierce demon of the night,
Which doesn’t bark, it only bites.

The Romans came, they saw, they conquered,
Then thought, “Who lives here must be bonkers!’
History books, they don’t point out,
But I know it was the midge, no doubt,
That made them leave, and southbound haul
To build the dyke called Hadrian’s Wall.
Clans, battles, kings—all come and gone,
But the midge, it just goes on and on.

Old Scotland’s remote north and west,
Ruled by this savage, tiny pest,
Has stores that sell sprays, potions, lotions
All geared to the quite absurd notion
That if you buy them, then all day
They’ll keep the hellish hordes at bay!
Believe that, then you’re not too bright,
They still get through, and still they bite.

How horrid, awful, bad, it feels
Your face a mass of crimson weals.
The fat, the thin, the poor, the rich,
They all fall prey and how they itch!
The midge cares naught for class nor creed
It just sees all as one more feed!
To miss this slaughter just don’t roam,
Stay safe inside, stay safe at home.

by Jim Aitken

Eliot said the game was up
after the First World War. How wrong!
For after the Second we fell
into a state of disbelief
that still must make us shake our heads.

And on then to Hiroshima,
To Korea down to Vietnam,
And all the other names we call-
Cambodia, Timor, Iraq.

The list a litany of grief,
and what now to say about this
except Beckett may have the words
to sum it up: ‘No matter, Try
Again, Fail again, Fail better.’

The Republic of the Imagination

In August 2006, Allan Armstrong interviewed the literary critic and poet John Manson about his life and works

Could you please give us some background information about your life?

I was born on a croft on the coast of the Pentland Firth in 1932. My mother was widowed in 1941. Within that year, 1941-2, she lost her husband, my father, and his brother, who lived with us (both to pneumonia), and her own brother, a wireless operator, whose ship was torpedoed. She worked until 1968 with no pension, except the old age pension at 60.

In 1950 I went to Aberdeen University to study English Literature and Language and completed the first three years. In the winter term of 1952-3, I attended David Murison’s Extra-Mural lectures on Scottish Literature and must have heard of Hugh MacDiarmid’s work there for the first time. At the same time I became interested in Franz Kafka and have followed the two strands of Scottish and European (and World) literature ever since. At the same time, or perhaps a little later, I began to read articles from a Marxist point of view, although I wasn’t living in class-conscious circumstances. I started to do some writing. This was the period of the Korean War, the colonial repression in Malaya and Kenya, and the suspension of the constitution in British Guiana.

At home in the summer of 1953 I began to have a partial breakdown of health (psychosomatic) – no hospitalization – and this went on for a few years. In 1955 my mother and I moved to a smaller place in Sutherland and I recovered my health there to a large extent. For the first time, I felt free from pressure. Later I qualified as a primary teacher and taught in Fife, Edinburgh and Dumfries and Galloway.

I began to read widely in literature. Of the novels I read at that time, I expect the works of Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Sholokhov would most stand rereading. I also read the trilogies of Konstantin Fedin and Alexei Tolstoy. When Dr. Zhivago, Lolita and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were published I read these as well. MacDiarmid published some of the Zhivago lyrics in The Voice of Scotland and introduced a selection of Pasternak’s work in a translation by his sister, Lydia Pasternak Slater (she moved to Britain before the Second World War).

The poets I read at that time were Christo Botev, the national poet of Bulgaria, in Paul Eluard’s French translation; Nicola Vaptsarov, also Bulgarian, who was shot by the Fascists; Martin Carter of (then) British Guiana, whose Collected Poems and Selected Prose, University of Hunger, was published in early 2006; and Nazim Hikmet, who is now regarded as the major poet of Turkey in the last century. I also became aware of Louis Aragon’s poetry in 1956, through his weekly paper, Les Lettres Francaises; and then read two of his 6 volume series, Les Communistes, and other novels in French. I still have a copy of a letter from Collet’s, listing eight volumes of Antonio Gramsci in Italian. Some of the other writers in whom I became interested at this time will emerge during my answers. I read the early works of Alan Sillitoe and Arnold Wesker, nearly all Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, and at least one each of John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Erskine Caldwell and James T. Farrell.

How would you describe yourself in political terms?

A non-Party Socialist, since the dissolution of the CPGB

What do you see as the significance of the literary side of politics?

Politics is part of the public life of the times and it should be recreated as an important aspect of culture.

You see 1991 as forming a break in a certain period of literary politics. Why is this?

1991 witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It’s the end of an era in that sense, but not the end of other Communist Parties. It’s much more difficult to say how this affects the literary side of politics. The Portuguese Communist, Jose Saramago, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, for example.

You see Hugh MacDiarmid as the most important literary figure in Scotland in the 20th century. Why is this?

MacDiarmid was a great lyrical and satirical poet and he was also a national regenerator through his anti-imperialist writing. He had enormous influence on other people, mostly when they were young and this influence extended to the worlds of art, music, history, language, philosophy, politics and economics as well as imaginative literature. He made the greatest single-handed contribution to ensure that Scotland would not be, as in the line from Tom Buchan’s poem, a one-way street to the coup of the mind. He wrote instead:

For freedom means that a lad or lass
In Cupar or elsewhaur yet
May alter the haill o’ human thocht
Mair than Christ’s altered it

I never set een on a lad or a lass
But I wonder gin he or she
Wi’ a word or deed’ll suddenly dae
An impossibility.

(Complete Poems, 1, pp. 257-8, Hugh MacDairmid, Manchester, 1993.)

MacDiarmid was at the centre of a number of political and literary controversies:

• a. His alleged Scottish fascist past
• b. The ‘bomb London’ poem from the Second World War(On the Imminent Destruction of London, in The Revolutionary Art of the Future – Rediscovered poems by Hugh MacDairmid, edited by John Manson, DorianGrieve and Alan Riach, Manchester, 2003.)
• c. His ‘flytings’ with Hamish Henderson and Ewan MacColl.

What are your views on these particular issues?

• MacDiarmid was never a Fascist in the sense of a supporter of a right-wing dictatorship; he didn’t belong to a Fascist group, for example. A study of his article in The Scottish Nation (1923), Programme for a Scottish Fascism, shows that he saw ‘a Scottish Fascism’ as Nationalist –
  

  ‘Scotland First’ for us as it was ‘Italy First’ for them’ – and Socialist – ‘… a Scottish Nationalist Socialism … will restore an atmosphere in which the fine, distinctive traits and tendencies of Scottish character which have withered in the foul air of our contemporary chaos, will once more revive.’

  He thought that …Fascism in Italy must incline to the Left. He also quoted The Fascist Movement in Italian Life where Pietro Gorgolini says that,

  Fascism understands the immense social importance of land, hence it condemns absentee and unproductive possession, which leaves vast tracts of land uncultivated that could be highly productive.

  (Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Prose, pp. 34-8, Alan Riach, editor, Manchester, 2000.)

  Obviously, MacDiarmid thought this kind of ‘fascism’ could be applied to the Scottish Highlands but he failed to give weight to the fact that the Peasant Leagues were being broken up in Italy at this time. At the time MacDiarmid wrote the article he was a member of the Scottish Home Rule Association, the ILP and the No-More-War Movement through the League of Nations. He was also becoming interested in Social Credit.

  Similarly, MacDiarmid took ideas from Wyndham Lewis’s book on Hitler (1931) which seemed to chime with his own.

  Hitler’s ‘Nazis’ wear their socialism with precisely the difference which post-socialist Scottish nationalists must adopt. Class-consciousness is anathema to them, and in contradistinction to it they set up the principle of race consciousness.

  (The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea in Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, Duncan Glen, editor, London, 1969.)

  He takes over the concept of ‘Blutsgefuhl’ or ‘blood feeling’. He equates Hitler’s attacks on ‘Leihkapital’ (loan capital) with Major Douglas’s (the main advocate of Social Credit). MacDiarmid was very impulsive and often wrote reviews and articles in great haste. MacDiarmid was certainly deceived by Hitler as a man in 1932-3.

  Here are some quotations from his Free Man articles At the Sign of the Thistle:

  In view of the recent discussion in Scotland of the necessity of militant action, readers should carefully weigh what [the poet] Mr [John] Gawsworth says:-[Hitler] is as much a prophet as Mahomet, Mussolini, or Lenin, but he is an armed prophet’.
  (23/6/32)

  Compare the mental calibre of the members of the Scottish Development Council with men like De Valera in Ireland, Hitler in Germany, Gandhi in India.
  (9/7/32) The SDC had been formed in 1931.

  … it is just this vital force, this resourcefulness and colour which attracts me in Hitler as, say, against the utter nullity of Sir Robert Horne or the horrible local preacherism, writ large, of Ramsay MacDonald.
  (3/9/32)

  I agree with Hitler in one thing – probably the only thing in which I do agree with him at all – and that is his doctrine that action must not negate propaganda.
  (4/11/33)

• b. MacDiarmid saw London as metropolitan city, the centre of empire.
• c. MacDiarmids ‘flytings’ with Hamish Henderson were public. Ewan MacColl records his private discussions in his autobiography, Journeyman. MacColl writes:

  So why had he chosen to single out the folk revival as a special target for his venom? Because of the kailyard, the nineteenth century parochialism which had poisoned Scots literature and condemned it to a debilitated existence in the cabbage patch. MacDiarmid had rescued it and, with the help of a talented band of devotees, restored it to its proper role. And now it was being threatened again by vandals calling themselves folk-singers, by a movement which had within it seeds which, if allowed to germinate, would produce such a crop of weeds that the kailyard would triumph again. MacDiarmid’s fears were not entirely unfounded.
  (Journeyman, an autobiography by Ewan MacColl, pp. 284-5, Ewan MacColl, London, 1990.)

  Macdiarmid had positives as well as negatives. He drew attention to modern epics such as Pablo Neruda’s Canto General and Hikmet’s Human Landscapes.

Could you explain how you came to persuade MacDiarmid to fully publish his Third Hymn to Lenin?

On my first visit to Macdiarmid’s house, Brownsbank, in February 1955 I asked him if it had been published in full (one-third had already been published in Lucky Poet). I saw he made a mental note and he published it in the next issue of The Voice of Scotland in April. Almost fifty years later I discovered that it was originally written as part of The Red Lion project (in the mid-Thirties) and that he then realised that it could be regarded as a ‘third hymn’ – but it wasn’t directly conceived as a ‘hymn to Lenin’ like the first and second hymns. Although it does address Lenin in parts of the poem it is more of a ferocious attack on the housing conditions in Glasgow and on the modes of thought which allowed these conditions to exist.

How did you discover the material which formed the basis for The Revolutionary Art of the Future – rediscovered poems by Hugh MacDiarmid?

In 1990 the National Library of Scotland purchased (for £250,000) the archive of material which Kulgin Duval and Colin Hamilton had been buying from him in his lifetime. An American University would have paid double. This has been classified into 246 folders and notebooks. As soon as I opened one of these I realised that some important poems had remained unpublished through lack of opportunities at particular times.

Other people had realised this before but perhaps I made a more thorough search than they did and recorded them in typescript. I had made several (more limited) discoveries of uncollected and unpublished poetry and prose on previous occasions, e.g. From Work in Progress in Penguin (1970), now retitled Kinsfolk, and the eight stories in Annals of the Five Senses(1999).

Your house contains many photographs and maps of places associated with MacDiarmid. Do you see ‘place’ as being important in his work?

Yes. Langholm, his birthplace; Whalsay, where he lived in the 1930’s; and also Liverpool and London. In Liverpool he wrote the poems in the abcbdd stanza (with the truncated sixth line) which he didn’t use before or after, when he was thinking back to Langholm; and in London he began The Red Lion project perhaps because he joined the CP there in August 1934 and had also just read Allen Hutt’s pamphlet Crisis on Clydeside.

Scott Lyall’s book, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry of Politics and Place was published last year by Edinburgh University Press.

You have also located unpublished Lewis Grassic Gibbon writings in your researches.

Gibbon signed a contract with Faber to write a biography of William Wallace. He never completed it, but I found the first ten pages in the National Library of Scotland. Gibbon presents Wallace, At the head of a force that bore the significant title of the ‘Army of the Commons of Scotland’ and that after his defeat at Falkirk, not again, tell on tale, did the Commons of Scotland gather to battle under their ain folk till the Covenanting times.(William Wallace – Knight of Scotland, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, with introduction Braveheart in Kinraddie by John Manson, in Cencrastus, no. 61.)

In an important literary/political debate in the 1930’s Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Barke seemed to reject a Scottish national identity. Yet MacDairmid later claimed that Gibbon had become a supporter of a Scottish Workers Republic. What is your view of this?

MacDiarmid may have drawn this impression from his last meeting with Gibbon in Welwyn Garden City in September 1934 but there is no evidence for it in Gibbon’s writing. Less than five months later he was dead.

You have spent some time recently working on James Barke. What do you see his significance was/is in the literary side of politics?

I think The Land of the Leal remains an important popular novel. Major Operation should also be republished though it is spoiled a bit by speeches like MacKelvie’s on materialism (in the context of the novel).

Jim White, a long time member of the Communist Party, has claimed James Barke was a Party member. Why do you dispute this?

Jim only had Bill Cowe’s word for it. I’ve rehearsed the evidence in my essay, Did James Barke join the Communist Party? (Communist History Network Newsletter, 19, 2006, published by Politics section, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, M13 9PL, website)

Why do you think James Barke was a member of the Freemasons?

I’ve no evidence here. Maybe it was the Burns connection? He was also a member of the Boys Brigade 1920-22 and spoke warmly of the Brigade in an article in 1956 (among other organisations).

Sorley MacLean doesn’t appear to have figured as much as MacDiarmid, Barke or Gibbon in your work on the literary side of politics. Is there a reason for this?

The reason is that I have no Gaelic and am therefore dependent on translations of his work. I’ve read his poems and his prose collection Ris a’ Bhruthaich (1985) and Joy Hendry and Raymond Ross’s Critical Essays (1986), the interviews he gave, and I’ve also heard him reading.

You have translated several European writers, particularly from the ‘God That Failed’ tradition, e.g. the Italian, Ignazio Silone; from dissident communists, like Victor Serge; and you have been interested in and sympathetic to non-Communists like the Icelander, Halldor Laxness. Why do you draw from these traditions?

A misunderstanding here. I’ve only translated one letter of Silone from Italian and though I’ve translated two books and a number of articles by Victor Serge I only became aware of him in the 1970s. But I’ve certainly been reading and rereading Silone from time to time since the late Fifties initially because he recreated the life of peasant societies and later because he reveals the debates within the minds of some of his leading characters with regard to the Communist Party.

The poets from whom I have translated the most are Pablo Neruda (Chile), Louis Aragon (France), and Paul Eluard (France)- Communists, though Eluard wasout of the Party for a decade,roughly 1932 to 1942. They had lifelong careers as authors and wrote intensely personal as well as political poetry – Resistance poetry in the case of Aragon and Eluard, anti-Franco and anti- Yankee poetry in the case of Neruda. Another poet I have translated, Cesar Vallejo (Peru), was also a Communist. But I’ve also translated from poets whose political positions cannot be so easily identified, e.g., Eugenio Montale (Italian), Constantine Cavafy (Greek), Manuel Bandeira (Brazilian), Henri Michaux (Belgian), whose work appears in my pamphlets.

Again I’ve read and reread Laxness since the late fifties, initially Independent People, about Icelandic crofters, and Salka Valka, about fishing communities (along with the Latvian, Vilis Lacis’s A Fisherman’s Son). I have read Max Frisch (Swiss), whose novels deal with questions of identity and who was also a great dramatist; Elias Canetti, Nobel prize-winner (1981), for his threevolume autobiography; Andre Malraux (France), for his novels of the political life of the Thirties; Albert Camus (France), for his stories and his posthumously published novel, The First Man, involving the search for his roots (Nobel prize-winner 1957); many of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (France), and more recently, the novels of the recently deceased Pramoeda Ananta Toer, who spent many years in the Indonesian gulag.

What attracted you, in particular, to Victor Serge, who has been part of the anarchist and Trotskyist tradition in the past?

I was first attracted to Serge in the 1970s through his novels, of which six have been translated into English (and one is currently being translated – Les Annees Sans Pardon. It was through Serge’s literary and historical works that I first became aware of the Left Opposition in the Communist Party; and this led to a much slighter knowledge of other Oppositionist novelists like Panait Istrati (Roumania) and Charles Plisnier (Belgium).

Why do you think there has been a resurgence of interest in Victor Serge recently?

I think Serge appeals because of his probity. But this doesn’t mean that I think he was right about all the positions he took up, particularly after the Second World War where he preferred the semi-dictatorship of the right to the Communist government which would have been in power if the ELAS-EAM hadn’t been defeated by our own forces (Carnets, p. 158, Victor Serge, Arles, 1985.). Recently I’ve heard that the well-known American essayist, the late Susan Sontag, wrote a preface to Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

You are not just a literary critic and translator but also a poet. How important is this to you?

It is important to express my feelings but most of my poems are occasional rather than constructed to a theme. It’s only after they’re written that I begin to see the themes.

Why do you see the land as so important in a Scotland that has become very urbanised?

Simply my own experience.

I’ve lived the life and done the work. And it was also the experience of my forebears on both sides.

You have had a working relationship with the writer, David Craig. How did this develop?

I met David at Aberdeen University in 1951. In On The Crofters’ Trail (1990) which is dedicated to me as ‘poet and crofter’, David writes that … our discussions of literature and history have been incessant ever since.

How much influence have the places you have lived had upon you?

Caithness negative (as explained), Sutherland positive (my adopted county] West Fife positive, modern industry (then) and historical background, Edinburgh positive for its libraries and galleries.

You wrote to Emancipation & Liberation, in response to the article, Beyond Bayonets and Broadswords, which was trying to retrieve the revolutionary roots of Scottish Presbyterianism’s left wing. What prompted you to contribute to the wider discussion on Jacobites or Covenanters?

This was purely a literary interest, since the article made mention of MacDairmid’s literary use of the ‘white rose’. (Beyond Bayonets and Broadswords, Allan Armstrong, Emancipation & Liberation no. 5/6, and letter by John Manson, Emancipation & Liberation, no. 10.)

What is your view of the impact of Scottish Presbyterianism on society after your early experiences?

I found the impact of the particular brand of Presbyterianism with which I came into contact (when I was powerless myself) as harmful and repressive. I try to express this in my poem, To An Unconceived Child. Ian Macpherson’s Shepherd’s Calendar (1931) comes closest to my own experience. The author, Tom MacDonald (Fionn MacColla) called it nay-saying.(10 At the Sign of the Clenched Fist, p. 185, Fionn MacColla, Edinburgh, 1967.)

What literary projects are you currently involved in?

I’ve reconstructed the manuscript of Mature Art, which MacDiarmid hoped to publish with the Obelisk Press in Paris (before its occupation in 1940). After that he withdrew, and sometimes adapted, sections of the poem which he included in In Memoriam James Joyce (1955) and The Kind of Poetry I Want (1961). The poem has never been published in full and some parts remain unpublished. I’ve also found the plan of The Red Lion, but not all the parts.

A major project has been making a selection from the letters to MacDiarmid in the National Library of Scotland and Edinburgh University Library, which may well number fifteen thousand.

Smart big awards and prize money
Is killing off black poetry
It’s not censors or dictators that are cutting up our art.
The lure of meeting royalty
And touching high society
Is damping creativity and eating at our heart.

The ancestors would turn in graves
Those poor black folk that once were slaves would wonder
How our souls were sold
And check our strategies,
The empire strikes back and waves
Tamed warriors bow on parades
When they have done what they’ve been told
They get their OBEs.

Don’t take my word, go check the verse
Cause every laureate gets worse
A family that you cannot fault as muse will mess your mind,
And yeah, you may fatten your purse
And surely they will check you first when subjects need to be amused
With paid for prose and rhymes.

Take your prize, now write more,
Faster,
Fuck the truth
Now you’re an actor do not fault your benefactor
Write, publish and review,
You look like a dreadlocks Rasta,
You look like a ghetto blaster,
But you can’t diss your paymaster
And bite the hand that feeds you.

What happened to the verse of fire
Cursing cool the empire
What happened to the soul rebel that Marley had in mind,
This bloodstained, stolen empire rewards you and you conspire,
(Yes Marley said that time will tell)
Now look they’ve gone and joined.

We keep getting this beating
It’s bad history repeating
It reminds me of those capitalists that say
‘Look you have a choice,’
It’s sick and self-defeating if our dispossessed keep weeping
And we give these awards meaning
But we end up with no voice.

Taken from Too Black, Too Strong. Published by Bloodaxe Books (2001)

by Rod Macgregor

On a clear autumn evening I watched the moon rising,
It was big, it was bright, in its heavenly place,
How clever we are, I thought, we’ve walked on you,
And behind us we’ve left footprints on your face.
No wind will blow there to ever remove them,
No one will build over that desolate place,
Till time ends they’re there, a giant leap for mankind,
The greatest exploit of a wandering race.

Aye, we are clever, there is no denying,
We soar higher than eagles on silvery wings,
We talk to each other though vast miles divide us,
Seems every new day some new marvel brings.
Yet, smart as we are, we are not far sighted,
Profit being all makes our actions unwise,
We plunder the earth, take from it its treasures,
Then poison the oceans, the land and the skies.

Cut back, said some sage ones, ignored by the leaders,
Who, asked what was needed, would always say, More.
And so we kept ripping the black oil, the dark coal,
And everything precious from Earth’s bounteous store.
But the Earth was a live thing, and being mistreated,
Ever so slowly it counter-attacked
Against the humans who, clever but greedy,
Just kept on taking and gave nothing back.

Time now grows short, the rainforests vanish,
The ice is fast melting as the temperatures rise,
Four horsemen show face, is their time upon us?
No place is there now for the spin doctors’ lies.
We must listen well to those who would tell us
The old path is done, and is now out of date,
For if we do not, our days may be numbered,
And extinction could well be our ultimate fate.

The seas will rise higher, proud cities will crumble,
Slow aeons will crawl by and wipe out all trace
Of the creature who, in a blink of time’s eyelid,
Moved from the caves and reached out into space.
No worldly hint will remain of our presence,
We treated Earth badly, were laid in our place,
But still on the moon, forlorn, weeps one last sign— ’Twas our cleverest trick—footprints on its face.

by Jim Aitken

One year on
after the wind subsided
and the floods disappeared
there was still a scene
reminiscent of some battle zone
with dilapidated houses
piles of debris lying there
upturned and rusting cars
broken boats moored in-land
amid the empty, eerie desolation

One year on
he said New Orleans will be rebuilt
acknowledging that it had not
but it would be a great city again
in some indeterminate world of time

One year on
from all of this I had read
how the empire abroad expanded
how Camp Anaconda, north of Baghdad
occupying fifteen square miles
with two swimming pools
a miniature golf course, mini-theatre
planned to accommodate 20,000 soldiers

One year on
from all of this I had read
of the 234 military golf courses
around the American world
and of the Air Mobility Command
that flies servicemen and their families
in fleets of long-range C-17 Globemasters,
C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, C-19 Nightingales,
KC-135 Stratotankers and KG 10 Extenders
and for the more senior personnel there are
Learjets, Gulfstreams and Cessna Citation
luxury jets

One year on
desperate people in New Orleans
no longer look at the stars
or listen to the sounds of birds

One year on
after this neglect at home
I had heard about Camp Taji
once barracks to Saddam’s Republican Guards
how it has its own Burger King, Subway and Pizza Hut

One year on
after this neglect at home
I heard about the new Embassy Compound
in the heart of Baghdad
ten times bigger than other embassies
with its own sources of power and water

One year on
in New Orleans and several years on in Iraq
there’s still no water or power

One year on
as the poor scavenge in fear
in the rubble of New Orleans
new bases have been and are being
built
in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Kosovo,
Pakistan, India, Australia, Singapore,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam,
Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Senegal,
Ghana, Mali, Sierra Leone, Georgia,
Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan
and only God knows where else

One year on
if you are poor or homeless in America
you should join the military
doing their great job of extending freedom
and get a posting abroad
for that way you will get yourself a house.

Hamish Henderson, folklorist, poet, Scottish internationalist and socialist died on March 3rd this year. In the year of the golden jubilee, it is worth remembering that Hamish turned down an OBE in 1983. Whilst Scotland’s semi-official nationalist anthem, Flower of Scotland, is sung by Princess Anne at Scottish rugby matches, Hamish’s internationalist anthem, Freedom Come All Ye ranks with Burns’ A Man’s a Man as one of the great anthems written for all humankind.

Freedom Come Aa Ye (Scots)

Roch the win i the clear day’s dawin
Blaws the clouds heilster-gowdie owre the bay
But there’s mair nor a roch win blawin
Thro the Great Glen o the warl the day
It’s a thocht that wad gar our rottans
Aa thae rogues that gang gallus fresh an gay
Tak the road an seek ither loanins
Wi thair ill-ploys tae sport an play

Nae mair will our bonnie callants
Merch tae war whan our braggarts crousely craw
Nor wee weans frae pitheid an clachan
Murn the ships sailin doun the Broomielaw
Broken faimilies in launs we’ve hairriet
Will curse ‘Scotlan the Brave’ nae mair, nae mair
Black an white ane-til-ither mairriet
Mak the vile barracks o thair maisters bare

Sae come aa ye at hame wi freedom
Never heed whit the houdies croak for Doom
In yer hous aa the bairns o Adam
Will fin breid, barley-bree an paintit room
Whan MacLean meets wi’s friens in Springburn
Aa thae roses an geeans will turn tae blume
An a black laud frae yont Nyanga
Dings the fell gallows o the burghers doun.

Freedom Come All Ye (English)

It’s a rough wind in the clear day’s dawning
Blows the clouds head-over-heels across the bay
But there’s more than a rough wind blowing
Through the Great Glen of the world today
It’s a thought that would make our rodents
All those rogues who strut and swagger,
Take the road and seek other pastures
To carry out their wicked schemes

No more will our fine young men
March to war at the behest of jingoists and imperialists
Nor will young children from mining communities and rural hamlets
Mourn the ships sailing off down the River Clyde
Broken families in lands we’ve helped to oppress
will never again have reason to curse the sound of advancing Scots
Black and white, united in friendship and marriage
Will result in the military garrisons being abandoned and empty

So come all ye who love freedom
Pay no attention to the prophets of doom
In your house all the children of Adam
Will be welcomed with food, drink and hospitality
When the spirit of John Maclean returns to his people
All the flowers will blossom
And black Africa will bring crashing down
All Imperialism’s dreadful apparatus of oppression

Translated by Dick Gaughan

by Jim Aitken

Jenin, o Jenin

dust, all over the camp,
has settled like a shroud

and this was supposed
to fight the terror
and deliver whatever

with Apache helicopters
themselves recalling
an earlier ethnic cleansing
raining down missile and flame

what havoc was wrought here
in refugee impoverishment
insults the whole of humanity
but it is those especially
who chose to be silent

and we know who they are
the ones who now prepare
in civilised Christian goodwill
silent too on Manger Square
after the dust has settled here
to change a regime elsewhere

and it is this silence that enabled
all the desecration to descend
the silence of willing accomplices
deliberate stalling diplomacies
while the crazed, cleaving butcher
unleashed his rabid hounds of war
and there are no streets anymore

those who did this seem to imitate
clinicians who once tormented them
with real talk of getting rid of lice
and the barbed camps of degeneration
and the absence of sanitation
no electricity or water
bulldozers shovelling the slaughter
like something from the Warsaw Ghetto

and now how to come back from this
demands psychiatric analysis
where once abused becomes abuser
trapped in the ghetto of traumatised minds
while new masters remain silent and blind
o if only perpetrators could see
how their actions will never make them free
and to excorcise their demons inside
and seek peace with the world on the outside

Jenin, o Jenin…

Jenin was written by Jim Aitken, who read it out to the Anti-War demonstration in Glasgow’s George
Square on April 27th. It is taken from the new book, From the Front Line of Terror, published
by the Stop the War Coalition & the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. £3 from SPSC, Peace & Justice Centre, Princes St., Edinburgh, EH2 4BJ.

Wanted:- Dead or Alive

Wars about wars
Wars about hate
Talk peace & listen
Before it’s too late

But peace is so boring
Let’s go have some fun
Nuke a few gooks
And let the blood run

Saw a swallow nesting today

Wars of attrition,
Some won & some lost
Why try it again?
Think of the cost

Order, fight to the last
There will be no surrender
Then send off the body bags
Return to sender.

Turned on a tap and the water of life flowed out

Wars about oil
In a desert that’s sunny
No, this one’s for real
It’s all about money

So the common man dies
In pursuit of a dream
While the fat cats stay home
And skim off the cream

The coriander bush is flourishing

Wars about space
Where satellites fly
Maybe the birds know
Who owns the sky

Pontificate honour
Our cause is right
So unfurl the flag
To the death we will fight

Rain’s stopped & the sun’s coming out

Wars between classes
To eat cake or bread,
Wars about colour,
White against Red

In the spaces between
Do we find common ground?
Or just take a breather
Before the next round

Built a gate today to keep the dogs in, not people out.
Wars about ownership,
Fight for our land,
Saving our country
Or acres of sand.

Was it all worth it?
What did we gain?
Lives lost for what?
We must be insane

Had a brain once, where the hell have I put it?

Wars of religion
Believe it or not
God’s on your side
Not mine, I’m a Trot.

Christian or Muslim
We say we believe
So why create havoc?
Why make the world grieve?

I thought the code said No women or children?

Wars for the Fatherland
Or is it our Mother?
Sister gainst sister
Brother kills brother

Are we cursed by Cain?
Or are we more Abel?
Put down the gun
Get round the table

When I talk in my sleep, does it make more sense?

Wars of the Mighty
Build more & more galleons
The Lord’s on the side
Of the biggest battalions

Cemeteries full of them
Heroes, but why?
And what of the innocent
Were they ready to die?

Thou shalt not kill. I’m sure I read that somewhere?

Wars of expediency
A pundit will claim
And the shadowy, They
Are the ones you should blame.

It was all done for us
A freedom libretto
So why am I back
In this working class ghetto?

Should I do this in longhand? To remind me I can.

A land fit for heroes
A war to end war
But who really won?
And who was it for?

A war about us?
We’ve fought colour, race, creed
A bloodless good war
Is just what we need

A Fatwa on hunger
A blackout of greed
Not napalm, but aid
To all those in need

Let’s annihilate poverty
Rescue poor from their ditch
Put disease to the sword
And sequester the rich