Migration and Materialism: David Greig, Gregory Burke and Sounding Scottish in Post-devolutionary Voicescapes

Abstract

The opening of a new Scottish Parliament following devolution in 1998 focused a re-articulation of Scotland’s place and position with regard to the United Kingdom and beyond. An already existing inclination to use the poetry of eighteenth-century Ayrshire poet Robert Burns to voice a uniquely Scottish sounding identity served for this critical moment of national self-interpellation. To some, the tendency had caricatured Scottish rustic life with ‘pathos, whimsicality, sentimentality, nostalgia or dialect humour’, but in 1999 the singing of the poet’s ‘A Man’s A Man for a’ That’ at the opening of Parliament seemed to condense, unite and channel a disparate national identity performed through an act of vocal solidarity.¹ The act resonated with the Scottish oral tradition, calling to mind post-colonial writer Edward Braithwaite’s claim that the oral exchange of ‘nation language’, being of the ‘breath’, creates a live continuum of meaning between speaker and audience.² Donald Dewar’s address, with its references to the ‘shout of the welder’, ‘the discourse of the Enlightenment’, ‘the speak of the Mearns’, and ‘the wild cry of the Great Pipes’ carefully selected the sounds and strains of distinctly Scottish voices and traditions, that have resonated within Scotland’s borders and beyond. In so doing, Scotland’s first First Minister suppressed the nation’s internal histories of dialogic tensions that have centred around the use of Scots, Gaelic and standard English, and the sense of fracture in Scottish identity well documented in historical and cultural scholarship.³