Three Marys and a Mairi

Reconciling with the world

Last week was Burns Night, a celebration of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns; a time when we gather for supper and recite poetry and sing songs. For a day, I fully embraced all the cliches of being a token Scottish person in England and rolled out a full supper on a tartan table cloth for my neighbours and it left me thinking about the ways in which Scotland is romanticised in the hearts and minds of people all over the world as I munched on a Tunnocks caramel wafer and pretended I knew how to address the haggis.

For my part, I grew up in the city of Dundee, as famous for ‘Jute, Jam and Journalism’ as it later became for teen pregnancy, drug use and then also world-class computer game innovation and medical research. Dundee contains multitudes. I grew up with the songs of Burns and others, learned to musically lament in primary school and had a failed but fun go at the fiddle. Words of loss and longing and oppression and massacres at Glencoe were internalised at a young age.

Dundee is also famous for being a bit matriarchal- when the jute mills would only employ women for cheaper labour, the men stayed home. The ‘Dundee woman’ archetype is a complex character- gentle and strong, independent bread-winner and yet susceptible to domestic violence. All of this and more is in the music of some of Dundee’s finest songwriters. I was lucky to come of age in a truly wonderful group called ‘Loadsaweeminsingin’ (That’s ‘lots of women singing’ to the uninitiated) and to be around the music of Michael Marra, Sheena Wellington and local union hero, Mary Brooksbank, whose lyrics are inscribed on the side of the Scottish parliament building, words as true today as the day they were written.

‘Them that work the hardest are aye wi’ least provided’

Those who work the hardest are least provided for.

The words of the first Mary of my story are deeply ingrained and I left Dundee with them ringing in my ears.

I remember going off to university and feeling like a complete alien. St Andrews, the home of golf, is just a 30 minute drive from Dundee but it is also its own planet. It draws students, tourists and retirees from around the world to its historic buildings, fresh air and bubble-like atmosphere. You could get lost in the romance of it. (In fact, I made a book about that!) A Dundee accent is very much in the minority. It was there while studying Scottish poetry and my own culture through an academic lens that I realised some of the specific cultural experiences I’d had were not quite universal.

Now let me pause here.

I want to proceed carefully.

I want to speak with love.

“What would you write if you weren’t afraid?” 
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

I’ve been listening to writer and poet Mary Karr’s book ‘The Art of Memoir’ while working this week. The second Mary of my story brought forth ideas about truth-telling and narrative in her charming Texan voice that stopped me in my tracks and revealed to me the ways in which I might be engaging sentimentality to avoid painful truths. In her own memoirs, Mary Karr gives a detailed account of her highly dysfunctional upbringing, characterised by things like drugs and violence.

Now, if I ever heard anyone in St Andrews say a patronising word about Dundee, I was the first to defend my home. When I say that I am a proud Dundoneon, it is in complete earnest. Dundee contains people and places I love down to my cells. You would not believe the genius and tenacity in Dundee. However, I also cannot forget the true things I have seen. I have lived in areas where you get to really see what poverty does to people across generations. I’m the result of one of those teen pregnancies I mentioned. The drug-substance issue was not some detached thing- it was in the neighbourhood. (Although, side note, there are plenty of drug issues in the ‘nice’ towns too). I heard things while working at Women’s Aid that I hope you never encounter in your life. Romanticising won’t do if these things are ever to change.

I am not going to talk about too many specific people or occurrences out of respect but I also have a wish to be honest and I want you the reader to know if you don’t already, that there are places where people are in a significant and systemic amount of collective pain and it isn’t all their fault. They share a ten mile radius with you, probably. The lost potential of it all is what kills me the most. Those beautiful wee kids barely getting a chance to ‘become’ before injustice and trauma steals chances away. Perpetuating cycles. Increasing wealth gaps. The world is ill-divided.

When I think about Mary Karr’s words on memoir, I recognise that I don’t have anywhere near her ability to reveal the dark things yet. I’m not as ready to laugh about some of them as she is. I am too protective of what I love and truthfully, I wish sometimes that I didn’t know about those dark things. I selfishly don’t want possession of some of the knowledge that my memory and body carry from my origin story. But I’ve also learned that what I want more is to make peace with all the parts of myself and the experiences that inform who I am today. Mary Karr’s words give me cause to examine the way I present to the world online. They remind me ignore the allure of the instagram aesthetic and the pretty substack layout, to deny the urge to ‘tidy’ everything up and become more of a marketing content-generator than a real artist, to go as far as I can and a little further each time towards telling the full truth. It’s beginning to bother me that my art might be a bit too ‘nice’ and I’m wondering in my quiet times what to do with that.

“Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift”

-Mary Oliver, The Uses of Sorrow

When I first encountered the poetry of Mary Oliver, the last Mary of my tale, I was both captivated by her but also had that familiar feeling of alienation. It was a bit like sitting through a nice afternoon tea on the beach with pals in St Andrews, watching the sun glisten on the North Sea and admiring passing thoroughbred dogs and their owners- a sense of ‘this is beautiful, this is special, this is safe… this is not for people like me’.

A friend of mine who was a GP in a deprived part of Glasgow remarked once that he could never understand why people who lived in poverty in his area would not enjoy a free walk to the beautiful scenic spots nearby to cheer themselves, maybe a mile or two on foot and not incurring any expense other than a sandwich in your pocket. As someone who grew up on the edge of the urban deprivation where the countryside just begins, I could relate viscerally but not quite articulate how it is to just feel that those beautiful places are not meant for you. I personally feel the thing that gets us over that barrier is friendship; a friend who will say ‘hey, come on a walk with me’ and make no fuss about your lack of plant knowledge or correct footwear. This to me is worth more than any government initiative and something many of us could offer.

Mary Oliver still gives me the right words on a lot of days to describe the beauty of the world on the doorstep and I now know how she arrived there from a dark origin story of her own. Encounter something beautiful in nature and you can bet Mary Oliver has already written the perfect words to accompany it. She is quoted on instagram in curly handwriting and stitched into pillows, a national treasure. Her words allow me a childlike wonder that inspires my illustrations and allows me to notice and enjoy the lichen on the pavement outside my door. I follow the writing of Mary and others such as Rumi while pursuing my own journey to a greater sense of safety, joy and secure identity in the world

Like Mary, I continue to be saved by the beauty of the world. I suppose my goal in life is to become truly gentle like that and reconnected with nature, to finish it all as Mary Oliver would say as a ‘bride married to amazement’. The rough round the edges Dundee kid would make fun of me for saying that and the adult me can laugh at myself for being a bit poetic and precious, but still… I really hope that’s what happens with the days I have left.

So here ends the tale of my three Marys and what they’ve taught me...love the world and her creatures, notice things, protect the poor worker, tell the truth, put down the gun & have a sandwich.

And now, music from a favourite Mairi which I feel sums up a lot of these thoughts - Mairi Campbell. We’re all Jock Tamson’s Bairns…

As usual, please forgive any typos, punctuation errors etc in this essay. A new weekly blog is quite a commitment and we haven’t hired a proof-reader yet!

This week:

Please take a moment to go watch this video of my amazing friend Hope Simpson in her debut solo exhibition: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-tees-64471377

Also, please take a moment to check out the work of my favourite Dundee organisation, Front Lounge. I was a founding member of this in 2001 as a teenager, led by a truly remarkable human, friend and mentor Chika Inatimi. Front Lounge is changing the face of fashion education and manufacture in Scotland, led by a group of young mums.

And speaking of changing the face of fashion in the UK, please also show some love to Self Made Studios in Bishop Auckland, Durham, a social venture which I have the joy of acting as non-executive director for. Self Made are a fully inclusive team offering design and manufacture to the whole of the UK while creating opportunities in their local area for training and employment, led by two epic young women Alexandra and Jess. They specialise in working with small businesses and do small minimum orders. Website: www.selfmadestudios.co.uk