Excerpt from Paul Basu's 'Highland Homecomings' (Introduction, pp.1-4):
Early morning, Morag looks out the train window. Small rocky hillsides are sliding past, and fir trees, and white birches. Brown creeks (here called burns?) tumble along over stony riverbeds. A station flashes by. The train does not stop, but Morag reads the sign.
CULLODEN
There is such a place. It really exists, in the external world. Morag feels like crying.
– Margaret Laurence, The Diviners
The above quote is taken from The Diviners, a novel by the Canadian writer of Scots-Irish descent, Margaret Laurence, in which Morag, the heroine of the book, makes a journey from Manitoba to the Scottish Highlands, the old country from which her ancestors had emigrated. Laurence describes a quest to a place that had been imagined long before even the possibility of visiting it could be conceived of. The shock of discovering that that iconic site of Highland identity, Culloden, actually exists, ‘in the external world’, outside Morag’s personal imaginings and the cultural narratives which give rise to them, is a profound one; equivalent, perhaps, to the ‘peak experience’ described by Alex Haley in his seminal family saga, Roots, after journeying to his ancestral home in the ‘back country of black West Africa’ – ‘that which emotionally, nothing in your life ever transcends’.
This short excerpt from Laurence’s novel introduces an essential aspect of the nature of the Scottish homeland for people of Scottish descent dispersed throughout the world. Scotland is at once a notional and a material reality, an imagined place as much as a geographical territory, a symbol, even a sacred one, that may yet be seen, touched, photographed, driven across, walked upon. This book is concerned with the relationship between Scotland as homeland (‘home-land’ embodying this notional-material duality) and what may be construed as the Scottish diaspora. More particularly it is concerned with examining the phenomenon of ‘roots tourism’ in the Scottish Highlands and Islands: journeys, such as that described by Laurence, made by people of Scottish descent ordinarily living in the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other regions where Scots have historically settled to the Scottish Highlands and Islands to search for and visit places associated with their ancestors.
Read the second page of this excerpt