Borrowed Land: A Highland Story by Kapka Kassabova review: 'tartan Orientalism'

Kapka Kassabova | Contributed

When I closed this book, I sat for a long time staring into space and turning over one question in my head: what kind of a book have I just read? Let me quote the very first words, not even from the text but the flyleaf: “This is the story of a Scottish glen and its inhabitants, and of how I came to call it my glen”. Although it will assuredly be shelved as “non-fiction” that foregrounding of “story” carries with it an afterglow of fictionality, a sense that the inhabitants are also “characters”. In the book we have places like “Monks’ Place” and Talorgan, which you will not find on any map; and in an afterword these are identified as Beauly and Kiltarlity. What moral or aesthetic significance does such pseudonymy bestow, or is it just a form of baroque ornamentation? Moreover, it puts the reader in a rather problematic place in terms of the other registers of the book. It is as if it says: “it is imperative you believe the truth about a fictionalised place.”

Likewise, the jacket copy notes that “deer emerge, god-like”, a hankering and over-writing of the mythic over the actual: deer emerging deer-like is good enough for me. Despite the text taking a predictable stance against “the forces of colonialism, industry, depopulation and private property speculation”, I must confess that such a stance jars and jibs with the rather proprietorial reference to “my” glen. (There is an epigraph from McCaig – “who owns this landscape?” Are we being asked to accept that the answer is “Kapka Kassabova”?)

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The default mode of “creative non-fiction” these days is hybridity, so in part this is a memoir, but it is also a polemic. In part it is a work of “new nature writing” and in part it is local history. There are sections which are small sociologies of field “sports” – deer-stalking and angling – and others which deal with the anthropology of folk tales. In order for this not to appear to be a form of anthology it is almost over-structured. There is a kind of clockwork movement between the genres described above, interleaved with chapters on their house, “The Crossing Places”, with these in turn counterpoised to chapters headed “Chì mi” – “I see” – a traditional phrase used in a form of Gaelic poetry, and such sections can be gallimaufries of different observations and insights.

After quite a while wool-gathering and pondering I came up with my answer: this is tartan Orientalism. It might have been subtitled “Out of Darkest Glen Affric”. Many of Edward Said’s observations and arguments might be easily deployed to a different cultural frame of reference. There is, for example, a pronounced strain of exoticised supernaturalism. There is the Cailleach, banshees and someone who genuinely believes that Columba encountered a plesiosaur and it or its descendant shows up for out-of-focus photographs to this day. Kassabova’s “neighbour is a Celtic witch. She makes voodoo dolls of people she doesn’t like.” (I’m sorry to be a pedant but voodoo is surely more Haiti than Altnahara?) There is a lot about the Brahan Seer, who purportedly foresaw North Sea oil and Margaret Thatcher, but nary a mention that all the most conscientious and reputable scholarship sees the Seer as an invention of the folklorist Alexander Mackenzie. But in orientalist discourses, the validity is less important than the impact, and to situate the Highlands as against the capitalist, materialist, rationalist “dominant” is more important. Similarly there are assertions like “the Picts were a matrilinear society”, for which the evidence is not entirely uncomplicated or definitive.

Another sphere would be “colonialism”, a term which has bedevilled Scottish cultural studies. I’ll be facetious: there is a difference between the Amritsar Massacre and being ticked off for saying “braw”. Kassabova sees the Clearances (and, oddly, the Jacobite Rebellion) as the psycho-traumatic wound of the Highlands. She writes, “In the north of Scotland, people still speak of Culloden with sadness. And in the south, with detachment. The south benefitted from the tragedy of the north – and does to this day.” All I can say is that this is assuredly not my experience, and I would care to see some evidence of the benefit “to this day”. Has Kassabova visited Hawick or Dumfries or Stranraer recently?

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The best parts are about energy policy, which at its best ought to be a boring technocratic discussion. She is good on the often opaque and contradictory language, and ironies such as “constraint payments” – compensation paid for not producing power because the plants are working so well they overload the grid. But this raises two points. It strikes me as absurd that Kassabova doesn’t realise that energy companies don’t make energy, they make profit. You might not like it, but to think otherwise is a category error. Secondly, although I can appreciate the reservations some on the green part of the spectrum feel about hydro companies, if they do wish to decarbonise and won’t countenance nuclear and no-one wants a job down a mine and solar panels are eyesores – well, I’m open to suggestions. Magic, I presume.

There are so many clichés in this book – “It was just more fun” reminisces one voice, “there was craic. More like a ceilidh than work. You got on with it and you were in it together. We had community”. And yet a few pages back: “No more ceilidh. Ceilidh is pronounced Kaylee. It’s Gaelic for gathering. A ceilidh is wherever people come together in a spirit of kinship, to share news, stories and song. It’s the Highland way”. My overriding thought: who is this for?

Borrowed Land: A Highland Story by Kapka Kassabova, Jonathan Cape, £22

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