Kathleen Jamie on why book festivals are the wrong target for climate activists

I believe that the total chaos we find ourselves in has its roots in ecological collapse. People’s unconscious fears are manifesting themselves in defensiveness, aggression and activism.

KathleenJamie

“Our human lives, with their ups and downs, have always played out against a larger natural system that we have turned to in times of grief,” she says. “We have been able to say, ‘Yes, I’m heartbroken right now, but the geese are coming back and spring will come again.’ That system is breaking down so we can no longer seek comfort from nature.”

What does it do to us when this comfort is taken away from us? I ask. “I think the whole bloody mess we are in – all the conflicts, the wars between us, the polarization – has its roots in the collapse of the environment. People’s unconscious fears are expressed in defensiveness, aggression and activism that turns into coercion.”

The point about activism is an interesting one. We are talking here less than a week after the Hay Festival dropped its sponsor Baillie Gifford due to pressure from Fossil Free Books, which claims to invest in companies operating in Israel and the oil and gas industry; hours later, the Edinburgh Book Festival will follow suit.

Jamie’s writings have never been polemical, but as climate change has worsened, they have become more politically charged. So you might expect her to have some sympathy for Fossil Free Books. Instead, she thinks the move is counterproductive. “I don’t want Baillie Gifford to invest in oil and gas,” she says, “but I think book festivals are the wrong target. Our public discourse is breaking down, and book festivals provide a space for civilized and open exchange.”

Kathleen Jamie is not against activism. But she is not one to stick herself to an oil tanker; nor does she believe that writers have a responsibility to be activists in the narrow sense. “An activist knows what he wants and goes out to get it,” she says. “Writers like me have no idea what we want. But when everything is so hopeless, we need all hands on deck, and that includes people who live in their imagination. That includes novelists who can craft dialogue. That includes poets who always push into language.”

An author’s contribution could be to advocate for other species. This can be seen in Stone pile where Jamie imagines what it’s like to be the flowers of the Yellow Hawk, “not knowing anything of what’s to come.” “Other species, especially other species in crisis, need to be brought to the table, but they can’t speak,” she says. “It’s up to us to speak for them, not in a Disneyfied way, but by trying (to figure out): If a river system or an endangered butterfly had rights, how would they express them?”

On human mortality, Stone pile is equally profound. “One by one, the parents leave now, he reaching for the same baggy jacket, she for her bottomless bag,” Jamie writes. In one of the book’s most touching passages, she clears out her parents’ house and unpacks the Doulton figurines that many of us remember from our own childhoods: “girls in velvet dresses, bonnets and ermine muffs.”

She takes comfort in the fact that their deaths were “natural” and draws solace from her relationship with her children, Freya, 26, a nurse who lives and works in New Zealand, and Duncan, 28, who is studying for a master’s degree in planetary science at Aberdeen University. “When he comes home, I say, ‘What did you learn today? Tell me all about the moons of Jupiter.'”

Now in her seventh decade, she says “the shape of her life’s arc is becoming apparent.” She grew up in Midlothian, and her early days were marked by overcoming discrimination and being reduced to her Presbyterian background. “I was ashamed for a long time,” she says. “I grew up in an environment where you were supposed to know your place. You could write in secret, but if you published something, it was like asking, ‘Who do you think you are?’. It took me until I was 40 to shed that.”

Turning 60 was less a panic than a realisation that the decades ahead were finite. Kathleen Jamie says she is not afraid of death, although she believes in an afterlife, “only in the sense that we live on in other people’s memories”. And there is no question about what she still wants to achieve. “I just like being alive,” she says. In the short term, she is looking forward to “staying up all night and watching the Tories get wiped out”.

A highlight of her three-year tenure as Makar, which ends in August, was the creation of a national poem – The Scottish people’s address to world leaders – composed of lines sent to her from across the country. Since then, she has written several more, including a previously unpublished one from prisoners on the theme of “hope,” which she describes as “the most powerful yet.”

“We’ve talked about the breakdown of public discourse,” she says. “Poetry is a place where people – even if they don’t write it, even if they don’t read it – believe that language speaks the truth. The words are not in the mouths of politicians or advertisers. It maintains an integrity that people respond to. We have to try to maintain that: a place where language is capable of nuance, of subtlety, of feeling, of truth.”

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie is out now (Sort Of Books, £9.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, supporting The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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