I think the complete bloody mess we’re in has its roots in environmental breakdown. People’s unconscious fears are manifesting themselves in defensiveness, aggression and activism
Kathleen Jamie
“Our human lives with their ups and downs have always played out against a greater natural system, which we used to turn to in times of grief,” she says. “We were able to say: ‘Yes, I am heartbroken right now, but the geese are returning and spring will come again.’ That’s breaking down so we can no longer go to the natural world for solace.”
What does being stripped of that solace do to us? I ask. “I think the complete bloody mess we are in – all the conflicts, the warring with each other, the polarisation – has its roots in environmental breakdown. People’s unconscious fears are manifesting themselves in defensiveness, aggression and activism, which is tipping into coercion.”
The activism point is interesting. We are speaking less than a week after the Hay Festival dropped sponsor Baillie Gifford due to pressure from Fossil Free Books, which claims it invests in companies involved in Israel and the oil and gas industry; hours later, the Edinburgh Book Festival will follow suit.
Jamie’s writing has never been polemical, but as climate change has intensified, it has become more politically charged. So you might expect her to have some sympathy with Fossil Free Books. Instead, she says the move is counterproductive. “I don’t want Baillie Gifford investing in oil and gas,” she says, “but I think book festivals are the wrong target. Our public discourse is collapsing and book festivals provide a space for civil and frank exchange.”
Kathleen Jamie is not against activism. But she is not someone who would glue herself to an oil tanker; nor does she believe writers have a responsibility to be activists in a narrow sense. “An activist knows what they want and goes out to get it,” she says. “Writers like me have no idea what we want. But when everything is so parlous, we need all hands on deck, and that includes people who live in their imagination. It includes novelists, who can work out dialogues. It includes poets who are always pressing into language.”
A writer’s contribution could be to advocate for other species. You can see that in Cairn where Jamie imagines what it’s like to be the flowers of the yellow hawkbit who “know nothing of what is to come”. “Other species, especially other species in crisis, need to be brought to the table, but they can’t speak,” she says. “It’s up to us to speak for them, not in a Disneyfied way, but trying to [work out]: if a river system or an endangered butterfly had rights, how would they express them?”
On human mortality, Cairn is equally profound. “One by one the parents are leaving now, he reaching for that same saggy jacket, she her depthless bag,” Jamie writes. One of the book’s most touching passages sees her clearing her parents’ house and unwrapping the Doulton figurines many of us remember from our own childhoods: “Lasses trigged out in velvet gowns, poke bonnets, ermine muffs.”
She takes comfort in the fact their deaths came “in the natural order”, and in her relationship with her children Freya, 26, a nurse who is living and working in New Zealand, and Duncan, 28, who is doing a master’s degree in planetary science at Aberdeen University. “When he comes home I say: ‘What did you learn today? Tell me all about the moons of Jupiter’.”
Now in her seventh decade, she says the “shape of [her] life’s arc is becoming visible.” Brought up in Midlothian, her early days were marked by overcoming discrimination and the cutting down to size of her Presbyterian background. “I felt shame for a long time,” she says. “I was brought up in an environment where you were supposed to know your place. The act of writing could be done in secret, but when you published it, it was like: ‘Who do you think you are?’. It took me until my 40s to slough that off.”
Turning 60 brought, not so much a panic, but an acknowledgment that the decades ahead were finite. Kathleen Jamie says she is not afraid of being dead, though she believes in life after death “only in the sense that we continue to exist in each other’s memories”. Nor is it a question of what she still wants to achieve. “I just like being alive,” she says. In the short term, she is looking forward to “staying up all night and watching the Tories be obliterated”.
One highlight from her three years as Makar, a role which ends in August, was the creation of a national poem – The People of Scotland’s Address to World Leaders – constructed out of lines sent to her from across the country. She has made several since, including one not yet published by prisoners on the theme of “hope”, which she describes as “the most powerful yet”.
“We have been talking about the collapse of public discourse,” she says. “Poetry is a place where people, even if they don’t write it, even if they don’t read it, think language is speaking truth. The words are not in the mouths of politicians or advertisers. It maintains an integrity people respond to. We have to try to keep that: a place where language is capable of nuance, capable of subtlety, capable of feeling, capable of truth.”
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie is out now (Sort Of Books, £9.99).You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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