Guest vocals: Mike Small
As Brown's newly inherited "Britain" dissembles before our eyes, minority culture will be at the heart of a newly articulated Europe, as diverse and vibrant as the old states are locked in stagnating imperial centralism. Rather than grip the handrail with dread, we should mount the bow of the boats heading to unchartered waters.
The conventional view, not confined to the Anglosphere but readily put out by many Scots saturated with decades of cultural self-hatred, goes like this: Gaelic is a marginal obsession for the parochial. A dying language for a culture obsessed with insular nationalism. A more contemporary view sees that Gaelic is being reborn, a crucial element of a cultural revival placing diversity and dynamism against suffocating monoculture.
An international project, St Kilda, A European Opera, with Gaelic song at its heart, launched this week and is testimony to this. St Kilda was performed simultaneously in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Scotland, with elements transmitted by live satellite link from St Kilda itself. Performances were set against a backdrop of a vertigo-inducing film of the French vertical dance company Retouramont, performing an aerial ballet suspended from the cliffs.
It spits in the face of the idea that devolution equals regional narrowness and points to a need for inter-disciplinarity and diversity against monoculture.
The project is inspired by St Kildans who inhabited the UK's most northwesterly landfall for 3000 years, before being evacuated in 1930. Their Gaelic language originated in central Europe more than 4000 years ago and their archipelago was known to ancient navigators as "the islands at the edge of the world".
This is a powerful purgative for Brown's attempted re-treading of British identity. The arguments used against Gaelic are the same as those used against self-determination: "Just Don't". These notions are based on fear and familiarity. Instead, it's clear that micro-regional identity can flourish on an international stage. Gaelic, like Scotland, can be forward looking. Here, five nations and four art forms have combined in synergy.
The irony is clear: for the "island at the edge of the world", nowhere is isolated any more. New media and old art forms can interact with spectacular results if the basic idea has real integrity.
What is that idea? We're reminded that the St Kildans "had no words for trees, war, writing, mirrors or money". The idea is: we're all marginal now, struggling to survive in harsh unsustainable conditions, only there is no mainland to be evacuated to any more.
Mike Small is a writer and new media developer. He is a contributor for Variant and The Guardian. This is an edited version of an article on progressive policy website www.scottishfutures. More details at www.stkilda.eu
