Hugh MacDiarmid's writing career was a committed act of engagement and identification with the land of his birth, a poetics of place striving to reveal the essential totality of the nation:

In A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle he claims that ‘a' that's Scottish is in me’ (CP1, 145). The Drunk Man's self is compiled of ‘a composite diagram o' / Cross-sections o' my forbears' organs’ and although he attempts in self-disgust to exorcise this haunting by his ancestors he finds that ‘like bindweed through my clay it's run’ (CP1, 93). On examination of himself, the Drunk Man understands that his innermost spiritual identity is irredeemably connected to a metaphysical Scotland:

In ‘Dìreadh I’ MacDiarmid names the nation as his Muse, ‘the very object of my song / – This marvellous land of Scotland’ (CP2, 1168), while ‘Conception’, one of a number of poems to paintings by fellow Borderer William Johnstone (1897–1981), gives birth to a new idea of Scotland that is at one with the poet's identity:

The Autodidact

When James and Elizabeth Grieve moved their young family to Parliament Square in the centre of Langholm in 1899 they unwittingly introduced Christopher, their eldest son, to a realm that was to dominate his adult life, one through which he would both challenge the power of metropolitan English rule and conform to the dictates of native national mythology. MacDiarmid's book learning – never systematic, or systematised by a university education, always driven by his own idiosyncratic needs as a poet – began with his omnivorous trawling through the library that occupied the upper storey of the building in which the family lived. MacDiarmid claims it was access to this library ‘that was the great determining factor’ (LP, 8) in his becoming a poet, boasting somewhat fantastically in Lucky Poet of having read every book in the library before the age of fourteen – some twelve thousand volumes.

Such exaggerations in the cause of self-styling are common throughout MacDiarmid's career and are hardly unknown amongst poets. Robert Crawford describes MacDiarmid and Ezra Pound as ‘man-myths’. Fellow modernist, political extremist and autobiographical fabulist, Pound was one of MacDiarmid's heroes, also preferring a poetics of lengthy, generalist displays of learning. In Lucky Poet, once more in braggart mode, MacDiarmid claims, ‘I could go up into that library in the dark and find any book I wanted’ – a library that was, however, ‘strangely deficient in Scottish books’ (LP, 8). It took this Scottish autodidact until the age of twenty-seven to find his way out of the darkness into which Scottish culture had allowed itself to fall as ‘an inevitable consequence of the relation of Scotland to England’ (LP, 15).

Leaving Leith on Tuesday, 2 May 1933 on the St Magnus bound for Shetland, MacDiarmid was sailing against the tide of urbanised modernity. Only three years previously, on 29 August 1930, the HMS Harebell carried the last people from Hirta, the main island of St Kilda, most westerly of the Hebrides. Refused permission to film on St Kilda by owner Lord Dumfries, director Michael Powell headed for Foula off the west coast of mainland Shetland. After a seven-year ordeal of frustrated planning and four gruelling months of filming, The Edge of the World, Powell's dramatisation of the evacuation of St Kilda, was finally released in 1937. Blending an almost mystical romanticism with a realist's grasp of the importance of location, Powell's experimental film movingly marks the tragedies of depopulation in all of Scotland's island groups.

Calling the St Kildan evacuation ‘a very curious matter’, MacDiarmid's ‘The Modern Scene’ (1934) pushes beyond Powell's film to question the political purpose of peripheral clearances:

When Chris Grieve was born in Langholm at the end of the nineteenth century provincial Scotland was most famously associated in the national literary imagination with the couthie Thrums of J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), the author's fictionalised account of his Kirriemuir birth-place. Barrie established the Kailyard novel in Auld Licht Idylls (1888) and A Window in Thrums (1889). From a small Scottish town to triumph on the metropolitan stage, Barrie's career is archetypal of the lad o' pairts: up-and-out through talent and ambition, allied with a democratic Scottish education and Calvinist industriousness, to financial success in the city. Aiming his modernist critical guns at a literary commercial giant, in the Scottish Educational Journal of 26 June 1925 Grieve writes that he believes, ‘so far as Scottish literature is concerned, Barrie has long severed any effective connection he ever had with Scottish life or thought’ (‘Sir J. M. Barrie’, CSS, 17).

Researching the roots and determining principles of those in positions of educational authority, Andrew McPherson concludes that, even as late as 1961, in Scotland ‘the locus of social identity has indeed been that of the village or the small town and not that of the city’; this ‘symbolic world bounded by Angus, standing for the East and North and with Kirriemuir at its heart’, evinces ‘a nation of small towns, and implicitly, therefore, a Protestant nation’. MacDiarmid's politics of place oppose the parochial, sectarian values of what McPherson calls the ‘Kirriemuir career’.

Emerging from his emotional nadir, Jock McLeish reaches this understanding of the centrality of place to his personal growth close to the conclusion of Alasdair Gray's 1982 Janine. By painfully gaining this ultimate acceptance of home, Jock, the Scottish Everyman, signals his willingness to proceed in a realistic yet hopeful manner with his life in actively local terms. Learning to refuse the self-hating escape clause of misogynistic fantasy, for Jock life is positively not elsewhere. The ‘process’ (as Marshall Walker puts it) of Jock's renewal also marks the beginning of the end for the Scottish cringe.

Published in 1984, the anachronistic date of the title relates Gray's novel to the Falklands War of March–June 1982 – a British victory with echoes of imperial grandeur that paved the way for Margaret Thatcher's second-term General Election landslide of 9 June 1983. Jock is at war with himself at the same time as Britain is at war with Argentina for the Falkland Islands, a place he describes as a ‘remote souvenir of the Great Britisher's Empire’.

High modernism was cosmopolitan and elitist. Many of its canonical literary artists left their country of birth, seeking in foreign metropolises for new experimental perspectives that they believed could not be envisioned in the philistine provinces of home. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce sends Stephen Dedalus into Continental exile ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’. Intended to ‘Hellenize Ireland’, the linguistically intimidating modernism of Joyce's Ulysses (1922) was a pan-European creation, written in Trieste, Zurich and Paris between 1914 and 1921. Born in St Louis in 1888, T. S. Eliot travelled to England looking for knowledge and experience, searching also for the traditional culture he thought lacking in the United States. Ironically, European civilisation was in the process of being fragmented not only by the Great War but also by the American populism from which the Harvard- and Oxford-educated poet wished to flee. Eliot's idea that the centres of Western culture cannot hold – the ‘Falling towers’ of ‘Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London’ are ‘Unreal’ – is of regret to a modernist concerned with upholding conservative values. Ezra Pound was born in Idaho in 1885 but moved to London in 1909 in a cultural bid to ‘MAKE IT NEW’. He established Imagism in 1912 with H. D. and Richard Aldington, and coedited the influential Vorticist review BLAST with fellow radical reactionary Wyndham Lewis before being attracted to Italy by Mussolini's Fascism.

French Aid (1): 1963–79

Filmmaking south of the Sahara has long been a matter of concern for the French government. As a result, although we are dealing with films that often have a distinctly anti-colonial edge and a clear insight into postcolonial realities, it is impossible to understand the existence of these films without considering first the attitudes and policies of the former colonising power, France. A good starting point is the concept of ‘Francophonie’. The word itself dates from the nineteenth century, but its modern political sense of a union of those countries where the French language is used in government, commerce, administration and culture has a part-African origin, in the thinking and policies of three post-independence presidents: Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), Habib Bourguiba (Tunisia) and Hamani Diori (Niger). These national leaders were ‘preoccupied with maintaining privileged links with the former colonising power within the perspective of postcolonialism’. In world political terms, ‘la Francophonie’ is an organisation comparable with the British Commonwealth, present in all five continents and with forty-nine member states (twenty-six of them African) and three observers.

A New Generation

In one of his last articles on African cinema, written in 2000, Pierre Haffner posited the existence of three waves of African filmmaking (the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s–1990s). This present chapter argues that it is now possible to see the outlines of a new wave or generation, the first to be comprised entirely of filmmakers who, because of their date of birth, never experienced life under colonial rule. Filmmakers born since independence now make up about 15 per cent of the total number of francophone African filmmakers – and a far greater proportion of those currently active (they are responsible for almost a third of all features made in the five years since the beginning of 2000). They have also begun to dominate African film festivals, with Ayouch and Sissako winning at FESPACO in 2001 and 2003 respectively, and Asli at the JCC in 2004. Forty filmmakers – five of them women – have given us over fifty feature films in the years since the late 1990s. About two-thirds of these new filmmakers come from the Maghreb: one from Algeria, thirteen from Morocco and ten from Tunisia. The rest come from nine of the independent states south of the Sahara.

Introduction

One way of examining the issues raised by the development of African cinema in the course of the three ‘generations’ defined in the previous chapter would be to deal with them in terms of a simple realist/modernist dichotomy. There is much to be said for such an approach, but there are difficulties in applying terms with such distinct Western connotations to African culture, and the approach perhaps overemphasises differences, where continuities are also equally important. The approach adopted here is to consider African filmmakers in terms of the subject which concerns them all, that of their African cultural identity. As Raphaël Millet points out, because of the heritage of colonisation and the present reality of dependence ‘the cinemas of the South inevitably have to discourse about identity as much as about independence’.

Stuart Hall's definitions in his article on ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’ offer an extremely useful way of approaching this question of identity. As Hall rightly observes, ‘identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think’. Instead of thinking of identity ‘as an already accomplished historical fact, which the new cinematic discourses then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a “production”, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation’. Hall goes on to contrast two ways of thinking about cultural identity, distinguishing between those who see it as a matter of ‘being’ and those for whom it is a matter of ‘becoming’.

Introduction

The situation facing the new African filmmakers is very much akin to the predicament which Réda Bensmaïa, from a Maghrebian perspective, attributes to contemporary Algerian writers: ‘Under today's postmodern conditions, it is not geographical or even political boundaries that determine identities, but rather a plane of consistency that goes beyond the traditional idea of nation and determines its new transcendental configuration’. To help define this new relationship between artists and their national context, Bensmaïa coins the term ‘experimental nations’, so named because ‘they are above all nations that writers have had to imagine and explore as if they were territories to rediscover and stake out, step by step, countries to invent and to draw while creating one's language’.