@islaybookfest said I’d tell you about growing up as an Edinburgh Gael. It’s a tricky subject for me, because it’s a very personal thing and I get tied up in knots trying to explain. But deep breath, here goes (thread):
Till I was 5 I was fully bilingual, but my dad was the only Gaelic-speaker in my life. There were bodaich who came round for a dram and a song, but we were always packed straight off to bed. There was nothing in my east Edinburgh neighbourhood to make sense of me.
When I went to primary school I stopped speaking Gaelic, but Dad didn’t. So I became a fluent listener. And when we moved to Peebles for my high school years, any chance of being part of a Gaelic community was blown. I had this sense of not being in any way a *real* Gael.
I didn’t know anything about cutting the peats or the call of the corncrake. I didn’t know one island from another. I felt like my sister and I were unique oddities, Gaelic speakers but not Gaels, isolated in a city bubble. I had no idea that Glasgow was full of kids like me.
I ended up studying Gaelic (a bit), and in my 20s I finally started speaking it to my Dad again. Since then I’ve made 3 short Gaelic films (I’m working on my 4th about the #Iolaire) and 3 Gaelic books. And still I often feel like a fraud. A wannabe Gael.
But I take strength from the man at the centre of my book, #SlyCooking, Fr Allan McDonald: the caring, humble, hard-working and culturally curious “high priest” (he was tall) of South Uist & Eriskay, from 1884 until his death at 45 (snap! gulp) in 1905. He was from Fort William.
Fr Allan's school forbade Gaelic. “Though I hate it with heart and with spleen,” he wrote in his diary, “my Gaelic will always have the harsh stammering unpleasant accent of the English speaker which a tongue-tied, limping, stiff-worded English education has left in my head.”
He felt inadequate. An outsider with ugly Gaelic compared to the “beautiful talk” of the locals. He wasn’t of course. His Gaelic was lovely. But to see him scold himself for wasting time on local lore and words – some of them already slipping away – is horrifying.
What if he had decided he wasn’t good enough and stopped? That’s what convinced me to knuckle down, learn what I can, share what I can, do what I can. I’ll never be truly authentic, but Gaelic needs all of us, the natives, the learners, the geeks, the foreign enthusiasts.
#Gàidhlig needs the old folk who nod knowingly at the words in my book, and the SMO kids who’ll invent the Gaelic hashtags. It needs the learners who reach astonishing fluency and those who only learned ciamar a tha thu but get excited to use it whenever they can.
And that’s why I’m coming to #IBF18. Real Gael or not, it doesn’t matter what I am. I love what I’m doing and I love sharing it. If you’re around for @islaybookfest, please come and say hello, and if not, you can always find me here. #Gàidhlig #SlyCooking #FrAllan
