Scottish Community between Essence and (De-)Construction: Suhayl Saadi

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on the small group of Suhayl Saadi’s short stories that address Scottish communal identity. Contrary to Jackie Kay’s stories that are permeated by a deconstructive understanding of community, Saadi’s Scottish stories differ greatly from each other. Jansen demonstrates that the stories’ representation of community ranges from traditional identitarian notions of community on the one hand, to deconstructive concepts on the other. Stories like “The Queens of Govan,” “The Dancers,” and “Bandanna” imagine a postethnic and polycultural urban community whose members are nonetheless unified by their essential ‘Glaswegianness’. Other short stories explore Scottish national community more generally. Set in different rural locations, stories like “Imbolc,” “Beltane,” “Samhain,” and “Braga” caricature and thereby deconstruct essentialist notions of community that associate Scottishness with a specific phenotype and a fixed set of national characteristics. Like Kay’s stories, they imagine a singularly plural, non-essentialist, and inoperative Scottish nation.