The Lights from Ouessant

IAN STEPHEN reports on a gathering of Scottish island writers in Brittany that will have ongoing repercussions

MORE THAN a few summers back, I had a gig, telling stories at Dingwall Folk Festival. I met a duo of singers from the States, collectively called Magpie, and we exchanged work. I listened to their albums the other night and found the singing still as strong and fresh.

That, for me, is what Festivals are about. Exchanges and continuing relationships that are more than the sum of individual events.

One summer back from the one just past, Rob Gibson, former organiser of Dingwall Festival, came to see me. He had contact with the organisers of an island book festival on Ouessant, an island out in fierce tides off the coast of Brittany, the converging of seaways. The plan was to feature Scottish Island writers in 2007. Was I interested?

People always used to confuse my former career as a Coastguard officer with that of a lighthouse keeper. But come-on, there used to be a clear connection. The strongest lighthouse in Europe is at Creac’h, Ouessant. The architecture of all of them is as stunning and functional as that of the Stevenson dynasty.

And the ferry for the island departs from Brest Le Conquet, site of an international radio centre I had contact with often. Stornoway Coastguard would liaise with Brest over communications with a French trawler requiring assistance while out near Kilda or Rockall.

And late that same long weekend, like the ring of poetry, Christine’s book won the poetry prize. A result for Scotland. But I came to think it was all a result.

One more connection. My neighbour, Catriona, at Benside, Laxdale, told me a family story. She showed me a copy of the ‘Daily Record’ with a date towards the end of the 19th century. Her relative had been lost when a ship called Cyanus failed at “Ushant”. A Shetlander, the sole survivor, told of the crags that tore the ship from under their feet.

But there was a twist. Catriona said that her relative, Johnson, the first mate of the ship, had been out to the moor, shooting, at Benside the night before traveling to join the ship at Bilbao. A tall man, he bent in under the low lintel. His wife saw a shimmer in the air around him and knew he was not going to return.

There was no point in even trying to tell a master mariner that she’d seen something that should prevent him from sailing. Instead she took twists of wool of contrasting colour and marked all his socks.That was how his body was identified and buried on Breton soil.

Communications with the Festival went a bit quiet and then it was all happening in August of this year. I travelled by train so had a night and morning exploring the harbour and fortifications of Brest. Strong signs of the strategic importance of this area. It’s part of Finisterre. Remember it on the shipping forecast before they changed the name to Fitzroy. So what was wrong with the name for the end of the world? This is where you fall off the charts.

When you see the coastline for the first time it strikes fear into your mariner’s heart. Think of Mangersta, West Lewis or the wilder sections of Orkney or Shetland coast then multiply the reefs and skerries. But we, as a tribe of Scottish island writers, were met with generosity and easy humour, the moment we landed.

Along with Lise Sinclair, from Fair Isle, I was billeted with a local family. Perig, from mainland Brittany, is a retired psychologist married to Anna who is from the island. They were renovating and expanding the original building but maintaining original features and keeping the scale of development modest.
 
In a few days we were friends. Before Perig even heard Lise sing her own or other folk’s songs he said, “Lise talks in music.” The Fair Isle twang can’t be modified much.

The Festival has been running for 9 years. It’s a book-fair with a focus on books from or about Islands all over the world. Annual awards are made for different categories of Island literature. Conferences are held throughout the day, some more formal than others.

The Scots, used to quite tight programmes and intense schedules of workshops and generally singing for your supper, were at first thrown by how little it seemed we had to do.

Christine de Luca, a poet who writes in Shetland dialect, has a handsome book in a parallel text edition published by Federop. So she was scheduled to read and discuss her work. And Alastair McIntosh, who grew up on Lewis, was programmed to give his lecture on the lessons to be learned, for Islanders everywhere, from the battle to save the mountain of Roineval on Harris from an inappropriate scale of quarrying. And we would all join to deliver a group presentation.

But of course the catering was superbly organized. And that’s where most of the literary ceilidhs really developed. I met a Breton piper, Patrick Mollard, who had studied with Scottish masters of the instrument. I now know that most, who know about piping, would rate him firmly amongst the world’s top exponents of the Scottish bagpipes.

I told him how I was moved and fascinated by what I’d heard of pibroch and pibroch song but didn’t fully understand the form. Was there room for improvisation within the variations?

Pibroch, said Patrick, was often inaccurately compared to Indian raga where there is clear space for improvisation. Pibroch might have been like that once but now the variations were fixed. Most of them were so highly developed that it was difficult to imagine how they could be improved.

And, I asked, it seemed to me that there was a time in the evening when the piper would just go for it, maybe like the time for a slow air.

More than that, Patrick said, it was not only mood. The pipes had to be working at their best, everything tuned. Temperature and moisture. And sure enough, that same evening, at the pub which became the later forum of writers, makers of books, artists and readers, he tipped me a nod and broke from jigs and strathspeys straight into the big one.

I won’t forget it. I went to get him a dram. They’d stopped serving. For the piper I said, an Islay. Of course. No charge.
 
Creac’h lighthouse contains a fine museum displaying historic lenses as sculptures. It also has an intimate cinema. Roger Hutchinson, author of a book on the true story of the wreck of the SS Politician, gave a warm introduction to a subtitled showing of “Whisky A Go Go”.

The Scots representatives warmed things further by dispensing drams. From the laughter which followed on every cue, not a lot was lost in translation. Afterwards people kept telling their Ouessant rum-barrel stories. The time grandfather disappeared for a week but was in the attic all the time. A true chord across language. Like bagpipe music.

And late that same long weekend, like the ring of poetry, Christine’s book won the poetry prize. A result for Scotland. But I came to think it was all a result. Our hosts were mainly volunteers. The whole community seemed to be involved in promoting a world scale literary event but with plenty of laughter coming from the busy kitchens.

And the small assemblies or impromptu conferences all added up. I’m thinking to the moment at a lunch when Miles Campbell, a native Gaelic speaker from Skye engaged with Vitally Lubin, a woman of African descent. She is fluent in German, French and English. Her Danish and Norwegian aren’t too bad.

And it looks like she now finds Gaelic grammar a structure that she has to study. We’re all sipping and savouring the joy of unpretended passion. Like when you’re at a boat-festival and suddenly realise there is no social quota on maritime talk.

And something happened within the disparate group of poets, novelists, dramatists, singer-songwriters, propagandists, purveyors of non-fiction and jobbing journalists which comprised the Scottish Island dimension.

We became a team and are desperate to continue the inter-island links as well as continuing the Breton connections. To this end the Northerners have taken the lead. Christine and Robert Alan Jamieson have drafted a list of aims as part of a strategy for continuing the spirit of Ouessant. Here they are. Discussions are in progress. Maybe we next convene on Skye or at Inverness?

Draft of purposes of a proposed Salon of Scottish Island Writers (from Robert Alan Jameson and Christine de Luca). To:

• build literary friendships across Scottish island communities

• learn more about each other’s literature, language, culture & heritage

• work on common projects including translation

• build literary friendships between Scottish island communities and other island communities

• support existing literary organisations and festivals in the Scottish islands

• bring together established writers and new talent, so fostering excellence

• develop links between creative writers and academics in the field and thus raise the quality of criticism and profile of island literatures

• create occasional events which are accessible to local island audiences and which encourage their support as volunteer ambassadors for their island(s)

• advise on and arrange representation at book festivals elsewhere in the UK and beyond

• create a catalogued archive of text, video and image of the proceedings of the ‘salon’ for use in the academic network, but particularly the University of the Highlands & Islands

• establish a website for publication of the ‘salon’ and its archive

(Ian Stephen’s new collection of poems, Adrift, is published by Periplum)

© Ian Stephen, 2007

Links

• Periplum
• Ouessant Festival