Commissioned for our World Storytelling Day event 2021, here’s a sneak preview from contributor Sunnah Khan. Read the poem below or listen to Sunnah’s reading.
In Scottish folklore faeries are spirit creatures or ‘hidden people’ who come in many different forms and temperaments. I was particularly intrigued by the good household faeries, goblin like creatures of the Highlands, who do odd jobs and help out around the house.
South Asian migrants are a well-known part of Scottish society, having settled in Scotland for over half a century. While stories of arrival have been orally passed down to me by my own mother, there’s a mythical quality to the lack of formal historical account and the quiet ways the first generation learnt to adapt and exist.
I was also intrigued by dictionary definitions of the word immigrant, one of which was ‘a permanent move to foreignness.’ I thought this was such a strange idea, to be forever trapped in the definition of not belonging.
Inspired by all these ideas I re-imagined a modern Scottish myth of a ‘hidden people’ and their arrival in Glasgow.
Asian teenager in turban washing his shop window in Easter Road laundrette in Edinburgh, January 1974.
A Permanent Move to Foreignness
Our father a foreign land, sorcerer in a black coat
We watched him sleep
watched him rise with the Others
prise himself out of our sardine can suitcase
we were truly prisoners then
trapped in our tongues, extradited from the sun,
no spells or safe words without him
our magic carpet was just a carpet
Our father, a desert tropic swamp – peripatetic rock
We became creatures of the shadows
hiding behind the bins hiding
while we learnt the names for things
the first words we learnt were GOOD and MORNING
we could turn a Glasgow grey day just by calling it so
we curled the Good around our tongues, sewed Good into our seams
stuffed Good into our pockets our hands
stripped fish, bone cold
we wore coats on top of coats, socks over our sandals
they called us the ABOMNABLES
Our mother, a singing bowl, her grief capsized
We washed once a week down
the Steamie where they called us dirty
brownies our faces red
from daily scrubbing
we took turns to sit in the bath,
returned to our true forms then
little gods of the Indian ocean
We lassoed the sun a honeycomb sponge
lathered ourselves
electric
We dreamt
ourselves back
to warm laps and wide beds
Grew arms and octopus legs
crossed the Atlantic down the globe
of our golden bellies traced home past
the equator of our bellybutton
A birth-
marked broken, under a British flag
Our father a moon bird, vertebrae possessed
Our shape shifting father turned bus conductor
Our father in the gutter, emptying out the bins
Our father reborn a storm, wholesale purveyor
of secrets
stirring in the night to the poetry of Fiaz
Our fathers wet face, tired morning
Our father – a turbulent sea god. Forever
in his foreignness.
Asian businesses in Glasgow, May 1972
All images © The Scotsman Publications Ltd. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk
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