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Annie Finch

On Not Being White: For Robbie Burns Day

The timing was perfect. Just on Robbie Burns’ birthday, a lovely little package arrived from a small town in Scotland–the “Scottish lace panel” I had ordered from Ebay to filter the glare in my writing studio window. It’s replete with red deer, Edinburgh Castle, and the word “Scotland” facing four different directions. What more could a Scottish American poet want?

    Though I was raised with a steady awareness of my roots, I guess my coming-out as a Scottish American really started last year, as I was sitting in on the “writing about race” workshop we have started offering at Stonecoast due to student demand.

In the discussion, Richard Hoffman pointed out that “whiteness” is not a race but a construct, invented as a counterpart to the counterveiling construct of “blackness.” This idea had the ring of truth for me; it passed my truth test of feeling, if uncomfortable at first, in the end genuinely liberatory.

    This month, during a community discussion about race and how it affects our writing, I found myself both embarrassed and deeply relieved to talk about my Scottish ethnicity–and my female identity. I have other ethnicities too–English and French and Dutch, and perhaps a touch of Spanish pirate with Moorish blood–but Scottish is how I “self-identify” right now, and claiming the right to self-identify is a great feeling for someone who’s been stuck being a “white person” in the U.S. all her life.

    Mainly, it’s the relief of feeling visible. For so long I’ve projected the burden of otherness, of having a race at all, onto others, as if my mix of ethnic origins somehow matters less than that of someone who could be labelled “of color.” The difference came to me with a thud when, after i finished speaking, one of our students–the New York based poet Cheryl Boyce Taylor, originally from Trinidad–looked at me and, for the first time, “saw” me. Cheryl was sitting opposite me in our circular discussion, and she looked right at me and said, “Annie, I never knew you felt that way, about being Scottish, and being a woman.” We looked at each other, human to human, for a blessed minute, balancing our particular individual backgrounds. How much richer, more alive, and lighter I felt than I had felt ten minutes earlier. I realized that for my entire life I have accepted the feeling–a kind of shame, I think– that I would simply never have an ethnicity I cared about, and the right to choose to identify with it. I anticipated nothing but the generic mask of “whiteness” that so many of us stumble behind in this country.

    When I named my strange first book The Encyclopedia of Scotland, I did so with great irony, thinking of the name as a kind of existential pun (“scot” means “debt,” as in the phrase “scot-free”) on my heavily indebted economic, spiritual, and aesthetic coming of age. And yet there was some hope and innocence in the act as well. The punk 20-something culture underlying that book was characterized largely by the yearning to be part of a “tribe”–a yearning that now seems to me clearly a response to the racial sructure of this country at the time.

    I knew, even then, that “whiteness” doesn’t do my soul any good. I much prefer feeling like a Scottish American. It led me to wear a skirt made of my favorite tartan (Blackwatch) to the Stonecoast community reading in celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday, and to make a fool of myself singing “My Luv is LIke a Red, Red Rose” during our “Follies” talent show. It brings up wonderful memories of a trip to Galloway with my mother to look at graveyards (one of them the topic of my poem “For Grizzel McNaught” in EVE), when the cab driver who was ferrying us between villages invited us to a village Robby Burns celebration that turned out to be one of the funnest parties of my entire life.

    Fully acknowledging that the free choice to identify with one of my white ethnicities–unlike with my gender– is a great luxury that people of color do not share, one reason I choose to identify with Scottishness right now is simply that it’s more fun. Scottishness feels culturally “realer” to me than English or Frenchness. It’s more of a folk culture, I guess. There’s the distinctive food, the distinctive music, the distinctive dance, and most of all, the national poet. The idea of a national poet of England, or France, doesn’t make much sense–but Robbie Burns is the kind of poet who links together a culture. It’s hard to imagine the Scottish Nationalist movement without him; he’s one of the great examples of the crucial role of poetry in national identity—right up there with Finland’s Kalevala

    So Happy Robby Burns Day. Here’s a present, a ditty by my national poet on my mother’s side, one that she used to sing to me, and that I used to sing my own children to sleep with:

    Flow gently, sweet Afton,

    amang thy green braes,

    Flow gently, I’ll sing thee

    a song in thy praise;

    My Mary’s asleep

    by thy murmuring stream,

    Flow gently, sweet Afton,

    disturb not her dream.

    Thou stock dove whose echo

    resounds thro’ the glen,

    Ye wild whistly blackbirds

    in yon thorny den,

    Thou green crested lapwing

    thy screaming forbear,

    I charge you, disturb not

    my slumbering fair.

    How lofty, sweet Afton,

    thy neighboring hills,

    Far mark’d with the courses

    of clear winding rills;

    There daily I wander

    as noon rises high,

    My flocks and my Mary’s

    sweet cot in my eye.

    How pleasant thy banks

    and green valleys below,

    Where, wild in the woodlands,

    the primroses blow;

    There oft, as mild evening

    weeps over the lea,

    The sweet-scented birk shades

    my Mary and me.

    Thy crystal stream, Afton,

    how lovely it glides,

    And winds by the cot where

    my Mary resides;

    How wanton thy waters

    her snowy feet lave,

    As, gathering sweet flowerets,

    she stems thy clear wave.

    Flow gently, sweet Afton,

    amang thy green braes,

    Flow gently, sweet river,

    the theme of my lays;

    My Mary’s asleep

    by thy murmuring stream,

    Flow gently, sweet Afton,

    disturb not her dreams.

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