Arts

Trimming the wick or putting out the light?

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At ten years old, I began to learn about the history of my people. It was the centenary year of the Crofting Act, and a collaboration between the newly-minted Lanntair, and the same-age-as-myself Comhairle brought about something that neither one could have done on its own: it gave young islanders the dignity of acquaintance with the value of their own culture. Thanks to the vision of these two important organisations, we were being equipped with a vital piece of understanding: though we had always been fighting to make our voices heard, that did not diminish the value of what we had to say.

Forty years on, and the news is dispiriting. A council budget, squeezed beyond endurance, is having to be pared back at the point of delivery. It is difficult, when fundamental care packages are threatened, when bus services are removed, to make an argument for the Comhairle spending money on something that is all too often written off as ‘frivolous’.

You have to be wary, however, of arguments along those lines. I don’t think we should have to choose between decent care packages for the elderly, and arts and culture for all. Somebody who works in an arts centre, or a library, or in drama, does work that is life-enhancing. No, it is not essential for keeping body and soul together – but it does enrich those souls, and surely that is something worth fighting for. Ultimately, if the Comhairle cuts the Lanntair’s funding, will there be more home care hours available? Will there be more frequent bin collections, a better bus service, fewer potholes and –  luxury of luxuries – pavements that aren’t just painted on?

No: the answer is ‘no’. This is not a moral decision between buying food for the kids and going to the bookies with your last tenner – this is further evidence that these islands do not have a voice. Our council doesn’t get enough income. And why doesn’t it? Well, I’ll let you in on a secret that I first learnt at the age of ten . . . no one on the outside cares about us.

They think we’re inferior, and they regard us as a nuisance. Ever since Willie Ross described the Highlander as being on every Scot’s conscience, there’s been a vague sense of annoyance that what had been going on for centuries – the denigration of the Gael – wasn’t quite as socially acceptable as it had been in dear old Butcher Cumberland’s day. No, that pesky HIDB, just by existing, gave people the notion that maybe the Highlanders, and their even more remote counterparts, out in the islands, actually required some attention. Lip service, though, nothing more.

‘Chucking buns across the fence’, is how one writer described public policy in the Gàidhealtachd since the establishment of the HIDB, which I tend to agree with. Only, for quite a while now, the buns have been getting smaller, staler and partially-eaten before they ever land on this side of the rylock.

We are still, depressingly, at the whim of the outsider. Every aspect of our lives – our economy, our transportation, our arts, our language and culture, our land use, our health care – is governed by a quango, usually underpinned by some appallingly outdated slate of legislation, thrown together in a foreign parliament. If we ask for island representation on these boards, we are accused of racism, of not wanting people who know what is best for us, even if they do live hundreds of miles away and can’t pronounce Bunabhainneadar.

As a consequence, we have developed the mentality of the colonised. We sit by the fence, waiting for the substandard buns. When fewer of those arrive, and we protest feebly, we are told that the bakery can’t subsidise our indolence forever, that the cupboard is bare, and we will have to reorganise our priorities.

Culture is always the first thing to be attacked. How far back into our history do you want to reach? The end of the Lordship of the Isles in 1493 – the last time we had local government in the islands until the London Parliament graciously gave us back a tame version of it in 1975? Or the Statutes of Iona in 1609, when clan chiefs were forced, by the monarch, to agree to educate their sons in English? Or the Battle of Culloden in 1746? Or the Clearances? Or the Highland Famine? Or the Metagama?

They were all disastrous in their own way. The only outside attack we came through thriving was the Viking invasion – because at least they had the honesty to wield axes and scream bloody murder. Every other attack on our way of life has come in the same insidious guise: helping and civilising, while quietly dismantling and destabilising. 

Our culture – who we are and how we live – is our foundation, and no one knows it, or values it, but ourselves. The Scottish Parliament doesn’t care whether the Comhairle has enough money to keep its doors open, far less the doors of an arts centre. But we have to care.

I have stood on the stage in An Lanntair’s auditorium a few times. Once, it was at UHI’s research conference; another time, it was to mark the anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, and several time, it has been to talk about different aspects of our Gaelic heritage. Through good times and bad, it has been a platform for all kinds of expressions of island life, whether through music, drama, or film.

I owe the beginning of my own cultural education to a partnership between An Lanntair and the Comhairle, and I want to have faith that outside neglect will not be the means of pulling down that edifice. But if it isn’t going to, some real leadership has to come from within. 

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Arts Centre with an Inferiority Complex

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I turned 11 years old in the centenary year of the Crofting Act of 1886. The social and historical significance of this piece of legislation has never left my consciousness since then – learning about how the Gaels had suffered before security of tenure; of communities broken and scattered; of a way of life halted; of a population depleted; of emigration for want of a better choice. The kernel of truth planted in my young mind in 1986 led me on the path to where I am now, both professionally, and in my concern for this community and this culture.

And the doorway to my own people, to a better sense of my own identity, was opened by none other than An Lanntair.

This was my first awareness that such an organisation even existed. It encouraged schoolchildren all over the island to explore the history leading up to the passage of the Act. The arts centre, operating out of a network of unsuitable rooms in the Town Hall, did a phenomenal job with the iconic Às an Fhearann exhibition. And I cannot have been the only person for whom it was a seminal experience.

It was because of An Lanntair, then, that I set off on a path of discovery which led me to see not just the intrinsic value in Gaelic and crofting culture, but the injustice which our community has suffered down through successive generations.

We were, just a couple of centuries prior to that, a strong, sea-going, Gaelic kingdom. Our laws, our culture, our mindset and, yes, of course, our language, were all thoroughly and completely
Gaelic.

But, by 1886, we were broken, scattered and well on our way to being ashamed of everything that identified us as different.

Different to what, you may ask?

Well, different to the mass culture that surrounded us – the English-speaking, English-thinking, imperialist mindset that could not bear to look upon difference without wishing to homogenise it. They
set about dismantling our language. You have, no doubt, heard tales of
schoolchildren thrashed for using their mother tongue, of the maide-bualaidh, and of the maide-crochaidh.

They didn’t beat our language out of us, though, or our culture – they shamed it out of us. I suppose, they educated it out of us. If you want to get on in the world, you will have to stop being so . . . different. That was the message. And, worst of all, though I say ‘they’, it was more often than not perpetrated by those from inside the culture who had, themselves,been made ashamed of their roots.

Make no mistake, that is still the message. Only now, it is done under a different guise. We are not told to stop being different in order to get on; we are told that preserving our difference breaches equality legislation. And we are told, like before, that our otherness makes us a laughing stock, and an embarrassment to ourselves.

And who is leading the charge against our difference, our otherness?

An Lanntair, sadly, that’s who. Housed these days in an expensive, if ugly, purpose-built centre, the local bastion of arts and culture is turning on the community it was created to represent.

I know the argument, such as it is. It’s all about exploring new horizons, and pushing the boundaries . . . But as a centre for arts in a minority and fragile culture such as ours undoubtedly is, can An Lanntair really look itself in the mirror and say it is doing the right thing? Of course not. This is a clear case of carry on regardless.

We have had two soundings of community opinion in recent times. The Stornoway Trust election showed a real appetite in the community for maintaining the precious remains of our heritage as much intact as we can. And the We Love Lewis and Harris Sundays Facebook group has a membership in excess of 2300 at the time of writing.

An Lanntair has taken no cognisance of what is unquestionably the prevailing
view. It has carried out a frankly bizarre trial, opening one small part of its operation and extrapolating from that to surmise that there will be great demand for its other services. There is no joined-up thinking in evidence here, and there is utter disregard for the culture of the area.

I would support the removal of local authority funding to a different cultural provider. Perhaps the £60k + could be distributed amongst the Comuinn Eachdraidh network, or the Fèis movement to more directly support island heritage. Whatever else An Lanntair is doing, it is not doing that.

Actually, it is complicit in sabotaging a very precious element of who we are, all in the name, not of pushing boundaries, or challenging norms as they pretend, but of appeasing a vocal minority who either understand nothing, or care nothing for the very thing which makes
this place special.

Apologists for this cultural vandalism have tried to invoke equality legislation. Who is being discriminated against? You may well ask.

Well, An Lanntair’s predecessor opened my eyes to who I am, and where I came from, and what is valuable about my history and heritage. My eyes cannot be closed, therefore, to what is being done, or why. This is not about equality; this is not about fairness – it is about shame. An Lanntair is choosing to represent those who are ashamed of this island and its identity, and is disingenuous enough to call that progress.

The shame is all theirs, however. That kind of progress dates back to well before 1886. We fell for it then, but we won’t be falling for it now; we are not ashamed of our heritage, we are not ashamed of who we are.

And I don’t think that an arts centre with an inferiority complex is the kind of thing this community really needs.

 

None So Secular As Those Who Will Not See

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I haven’t read one article from within Lewis which supports the plans of An Lanntair to open on Sundays. There have been several ill-informed ‘national’ contributions, of course, but I think we can safely discount those. After all, what do they know of this community, or what shapes it? And, more pertinently, what do they care?

It takes the arrogance of imperialism to say to a minority cultural group that they are wrong about their own identity. This is not me saying to people who have moved into Lewis that they have no right to an opinion, or a voice. Of course they do. But I am saying that they have no right to tell me that they understand my heritage better than I do. They generously permit tweed and Gaelic (by which they mean the language only, not the other stuff that no one can teach you) and music . . . but not God.

God came here on a magic carpet of stories from the Middle East. He’s the only kind of immigrant the Western Isles Secular Society disapproves of. We’re allowed to call Him an ‘incomer’, or anything else we want.

But they’re not anti-religion. They are vehemently denying that accusation all over social media this weekend. Frustrated by our native ignorance, they keep asking why no one understands that secularism is not against Christianity. If only we would read their mission statement, we would know that they are not against the faith of many in this island.

Oh, aren’t they?

Still, if their Facebook page says so, it must be true. It’s not as though they ever have a go at Christians, or mock their beliefs. They expect us to ignore their sometimes defamatory remarks about individuals, the fact that disgraceful profanity and utter disrespect goes unmoderated, their consistent targeting of the Lewis Sabbath, their blatant lies about the behaviour of local church people . . . and just accept their definition of secularism?

I’m sorry, Western Isles Secular Society, but we Christians are going to need more evidence. We can’t just blindly accept this kind of thing.

What I do see, this week in particular, is a group which cannot tolerate the views of others when they fall contrary to their own. Local blogger, Hebrides Writer, was okay when she was vocally supporting their Sunday swimming campaign, but she has suffered a catastrophic fall from grace by coming out against An Lanntair’s arrogant stance on Sunday film showings. Some have tried valiantly to be measured in their response, but in their own discussion group, she has been pilloried in ways that are utterly unwarranted by anything she has written.

She even has the temerity to be related to someone with connections to An Lanntair. In Lewis! Smaoinich!

And, most defamatory of all, she now stands accused of being ‘anti-secular and pro-faith’. Horror of horrors.

No WISS moderator has stepped in to remove this comment, nor have any of the other members pointed out the obvious. Well, I mean, it contradicts their claim that secularism and faith are not at odds, doesn’t it?

But we don’t need them to tell us what secularism is. We know what it is. God knows what it is.

Actually, the only people who don’t know, are the secularists themselves.

They have long pitied the likes of me in my blind ignorance. Now, they fear for the safety and the sanity of Hebrides Writer because she has deviated from what the cult expects.

I wish they would try to understand, not Christians, but Christ. How I wish they would open their Bibles and read, and find there a man who will tell them everything they ever did.
Just this week, I saw their likeness in His book. On Wednesday evening in church, we read the account of the Israelites and the golden calf they made to worship. When they had built an altar to it, they declared the next day a feast day for the Lord.

They thought, you see, that they could have everything. Their idea was to give themselves over to doing what they wanted, and offer a sop to God to appease Him. It was their way of pretending that there is room for following Him, and for pleasing yourself.

Or, like one of the anti-Sabbatarians put it, ‘before long it will be the new norm and the culture of the quiet Sunday will continue as usual’.

No, I’m afraid that just isn’t how it works. You have to pick a side. And it has to be the right side.

Forget your movies, people, I know how this ends.

I’ve read the Book.