If I were hosting a literary flatwarming in Edinburgh, I would want writers who show different versions of Scotland. Edinburgh is very tied to its literary and historical past, so my guest list would include writers who have complicated that tradition through exploring questions of race, queerness, class, and belonging.
First through the door is Hannah Lavery, the former Makar (poet laureate) for the City of Edinburgh. I would invite Lavery because her writing confronts and contradicts the sentimentality of belonging to a place. Her poem Scotland, You’re No Mine is a furious, affectionate love song confronting racism and historical amnesia (“For making us complicit/ handing us whip and chains, an officer’s coat”). At a flatwarming, she would bring the parts and questions of Scotland I most want to talk about. Along with her other work, Lavery writes into questions of justice and Scottish identity without softening their contradictions.
My second guest would be Shola von Reinhold, a Glasgow-born Scottish-Nigerian writer whose novel LOTE follows Mathilda Adaramola, a researcher fascinated by forgotten Black trans and femme artists, whom she refers to as “Transfixions”.Mathilda’s discovery of the fictional Black Scottish poet Hermia Druitt leads her into the strange world surrounding a group known as the ‘Luxuries’. I love the way LOTE treats glamour and luxury as a form of resistance, particularly against ideas about whose art is considered tasteful or important. (It goes without saying that Von Reinhold would probably also be the best dressed person at the flatwarming).
Finally, Tendai Huchu, a Zimbabwean author based in Edinburgh, can bring the ghosts. His series, the Edinburgh Nights novels take the streets of the city I walk through every day and transform it into a sprawling world of fantasy, of magical institutions, and occult rivalries. The protagonist, fourteen-year-old Ropa Moyo, has left school and become a ghostalker, delivering messages between the living and dead of Edinburgh with the help of an mbira, a traditional thumb piano from Zimbabwe. Huchu’s fantasy is grounded in commentary on class, academia, and science, and is a welcome fresh take on the genre.
The three writers create very contrasting, yet complimentary versions of Scotland, with Lavery’s contested sense of belonging, von Reinhold’s glamorous prose, and Huchu’s supernatural Edinburgh. They would create the kind of flatwarming I would want to stay at all night—analytical, glamorous, haunted, full of people depicting and reinventing Scotland through the literary arts around the kitchen table.
Photo by Svetlana Gumerova on Unsplash.
