We asked Gerry Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow, to expand on these themes and are grateful for his essay:

Clearance. Colonialism. Empire. Emigration. Exile. Diaspora. Settler. Oppressor. Victim. Each word conveys huge experiences. Each is also a headline for the various judgements we make on the Scottish historical account. As prejudices change with time, we interpret and re-interpret. Once, there was a narrative of downtrodden highlanders, exiled to the Americas, who nevertheless carried across the Atlantic the seeds of civilisation, enlightening terra incognito. Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) expressed such an idea in his long poem, Gertrude of Wyoming, marvelling at how the one-time victim became a symbol of freedom:

Who taught those sires of empire yet to be,

To plant the tree of life, to plant fair Freedom’s tree!

The moral currency of our own time repudiates the notion that the white man brought civilisation to non-European continents. But we can still hear echoes of British supremacy in the idea of Westminster as the mother of parliaments, or our zealous promotion of conflicting human rights. The Scottish experience pulses through our confused judgementalism. Fleeing Jacobites were our indigenous persecuted tribespeople, or they were tenants betrayed for sheep, or they were slavers in the Caribbean, or they were battalions of fighting Jocks, conquering “new” lands. Truths and stereotypes go hand-in-hand. 

What do we really know of individual human beings in these situations? If we did know, we would no doubt condemn some and sympathise with others. But we are often more in love with collective stories, made via group symbols: the big account. 

Whatever the moral conflicts of the Scottish diasporic experience, one thing may be claimed quite neutrally: that it involves transformation. In his “Elegy for Angus Macdonald of Cnoclinn”, one of the great poets of Scottish descent, the Australian Les Murray (1938-2019) sums up how the “savages” became the “settlers” and the displaced became the displacers.

Exile’s a rampart, sometimes, to the past,

a distiller of spirit from bruised grains;

this is the meaning of the New World.

Is the “rampart” of exile an offensive or defensive condition? Whisky and human spirit are distilled out of the hard old world. This seems to make poetic sense, but Murray’s tongue is always eloquently reaching for his cheek. The “New World”, that western-centric concept, is spun so that it relates to art and experience. What is solid about our knowledge of our ancestry, of ourselves? Not very much. We play with received ideas, with symbols, but if we wish to challenge our own place we need to reach for new perspectives, not be bound by the past, nor to settle it.

As Les Murray did, Shaun Fraser and Will Maclean draw aesthetic capital from the experience of diaspora, revealing a painfully converting currency.

Gerry Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow

Owners of the Soil: Will Maclean & Shaun Fraser, part of Edinburgh Art Festival, 29 July - 28 August

For all enquiries please contact edinburgh@thefineartsociety.com