A blight on Burns?

Published on Thursday 22 January 2009 20:00

AS SERIOUS Burnsians and enthusiastic amateurs alike gather to celebrate the Ayrshire bard this weekend, the emphasis inevitably rests on his image as champion of the common man, composer of the egalitarian anthem A Man's A Man For A' That. His internationalist credentials also ensure he is routinely toasted by gatherings ranging from dewy-eyed expats in Hong Kong to haggis-eviscerating Muscovites.

This weekend is likely to see the poet's 250th birthday celebrations set a new record for the number of Burns Suppers worldwide.

But as the Bard goes global, we should also consider the difficult period in his life during which he almost emigrated to Jamaica. There he would inevitably have become embroiled in the slave trade. In the event, the success of the Kilmarnock Edition of his poetry enabled him to stay in Scotland.

The episode will be marked on Sunday, when Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival throws a "Jamaican Burns Night" featuring the legendary Jamaican rhythm duo Sly and Robbie. However, the "what if?" question concerning Burns and Jamaica has until recently been one upon which Burnsians have been loath to dwell.

In September 1786, a disillusioned Burns had booked his passage on board the Bell from Greenock to Jamaica, where he had been offered a job as a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation. He and his brother, Gilbert, were labouring fruitlessly on Mossgiel Farm and he was in a state of emotional turmoil, his likely "marriage by declaration" to Jean Armour having been torn up by Jean's vengeful father, and he may have asked "Highland Mary" Campbell to emigrate with him.

We may talk in terms of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment, but its benign radiance only shone so far: Scotland was deeply involved in the West Indian slave trade, and the composer of The Slave's Lament would have been aware of what awaited him in Jamaica. In a letter written later, he recalled the publication of his poems and how "'twas a delicious idea that I would be called a clever fellow, even though it should never reach my ears, a poor Negro-driver…"

So how would someone so celebrated for his humanity have coped with the iniquitous trade on which the prosperity of so many Scots was founded? Two years ago, the Fife-based author Andrew O Lindsay fictionalised a possible outcome in his novel Illustrious Exile (Peepal Tree Press), which took the form of a supposed journal kept by Burns during his time in the West Indies. But the author doesn't believe the episode should sully Burns's reputation. "Ruling all of this was his navety," says Lindsay, whose wife is from Guyana, where his fictional Burns ends up. "He was only about 28, he was broke, he was being chased by Jean Armour's father, he wanted to get away with Highland Mary…

"I don't think he thought much about the implications," adds Lindsay, who reckons we tend to shy away from confronting our historical involvement in the slave trade.

The artist Graham Fagen has recorded Burns's Slave's Lament on two occasions – once in London with the Rastafarian songwriter Ghetto Priest, blues musician Skip McDonald and reggae producer Adrian Sherwood for an exhibition at the Tramway, Glasgow; secondly in Jamaica, with the trio Frank, Swallow and Polkadot, for his GoMA exhibition marking 2007's bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade.

Fagen regards it as a mistake to judge Burns with a 21st-century mindset: "Many poor Scots indented themselves and left for the Indies in the late 1700s. The effect on Burns was profound and it can be seen through his work and letters for the rest of his life."

Asking Jamaicans descended from slaves to listen to The Slave's Lament might have been a daunting task, he says, "but their only comments really were that they thought it was a strong enough song to perform their own version."

Geoff Palmer OBE, a Jamaican-born professor emeritus at Heriot-Watt University and a long-standing race-relations activist, also believes that Burns's near-entanglement with the slave trade is not something Scots like to contemplate. "But I think we've moved on and we accept that he was planning to go. The question is why? Scotland had been given the OK to get involved in slavery by the 1707 Act of Union and, by 1800, you had 300,000 slaves in Jamaica, 10,000 Scots and about 10,000 English. Burns would have been just one of many young men who went there to make their fortunes. It was a case of economics; he wasn't really concerned that, as he said himself, he was going to be a slave-driver."

Palmer points out that Burns didn't write The Slave's Lament until 1792, by which time Wilberforce had initiated the abolition movement. Palmer believes that when Burns was condemning slavery he was referring more to the oppression of working people like himself. Palmer's mother was a Lamond, descended from Scots-owned slaves in Jamaica, but he doesn't think we should be too hard on the poet: "I wouldn't judge him because he bought his ticket to go and work there, but Scotland should not lose sight of its involvement in slavery."

Burns still has much to say to us, he believes: "His view of justice, as applied to the circumstances in which he lived, is very valid."

&#149 Jamaican Burns Night, with Sly & Robbie and company is in the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, on Sunday. On 14 March, Graham Fagen presents I Murder Hate, a sequence of Burns poems and songs, with Ghetto Priest, Adrian Sherwood and others, at the Tolbooth, Stirling

Burns around the World

&#149 THE Ayrshire Bard is recognised globally in towns named after him – Burns, New York, and Burns, Oregon are just two – while his statue gazes over townscapes as far-flung as Dunedin, New Zealand and Hamilton, Ontario.

&#149 Burns Suppers held in extraordinary situations have further endorsed his internationalist status. Four years ago, the then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, addressed a gala Burns Night at the UN headquarters in New York, calling on a troubled world to "dream, as Burns did, of a true brotherhood – and sisterhood – that embraces and encompasses all humankind".

&#149 Tom Sutherland, (pictured) the US-based Scot held hostage for six-and-a-half years in a Beirut cell, says he stayed sane by reciting Burns's poetry to his bemused cellmate, the French journalist Jean Paul Kauffman.

&#149 The late Andrew Winton, an Edinburgh art teacher, escaped from a German PoW camp only to be overtaken by the Soviet advance on Berlin. He was ordered by a female Russian tank commander to celebrate Burns Night on the banks of the Oder, surrounded by snow and tanks.