History is a warning. It is a weapon that can be used to oppress, repress and subjugate. It can be used to disorientate and dishearten us.
History is a heartening. It is a remembering, an uplift that reorientates us. It reminds us that we do not need to comply. It shows us how to organise, how to unionise, collaborate and uprise. It speaks to us of revolution and that other worlds are possible.
History is a way of seeing and unseeing. It is a lens. History is a compass, a tool to guide us, it is a lighthouse that illuminates dangerous, murky waters and heralds new routes forward. History holds the past and if we deploy our imaginations and work collectively, offers the possibility of a future.
History is held in our bodies and history is held in the bodies of our children.
History is a telescope, it allows us space to zoom in and out and consider horizons and reflect on whether or not we are being good ancestors.
Histories can be wilfully hidden. Histories are erased as a form of intentional special warfare aimed at annihilating cultures, movements and languages of solidarity and connection and to remember with an intersectional gaze is a political act of radical self care. To be an active part of holding and cherishing radical grass-roots histories, away from the erosive gaze of colonial and oppressive heteronormative, capitalist modernity is an act of resistance.
History is an act of safe guarding when we actively choose and cherish the generous and beautiful things that we want to remember and centre about ourselves.
History is held in our relationship with the natural world
History lives in the land.
History is present in the thinning of birdsong, the absence of our cousin hedgehogs, hares, butterflies, badgers, stoats, moths, foxes and whales, wild horses and pigs. History is the rasping lungs in urban tenements and the eroding of the great Caledonian Forest. History is in Faslane and Torness. History is the North Sea oilfields and the treeless climes of the Northern Isles. History underpins the climate emergency.
History they say collects dust in libraries and in hard backed reference books.
History they say exists in the abstract conversation of academics.
Historical research, methodology, critical analysis and historiography are important tools but are of no use without the application of a compassionate, intersectional lens and collective dialogue. We understand that history plays an important role in society, informing present culture in a myriad of ways and what we must keep in mind is what isn’t present, whose voice and story is not here and why would that be? Who benefits from this erasure? How does that absence shape how we experience and understand our land, our culture, our people and ourselves? How does this limit the possibilities of other understandings and experiences and our connection to the world? How do absences, silences, erasure and lack of imagination curate our lives?
Living in Shetland, Scotland’s most northerly isle I am often perceived as an ‘incomer’ or outsider despite the fact that an attentive view of the Isles can reveal many brown and Black people living and working on the isles, often in care giving and key worker professions. During a project researching the history of brown and Black people and other migrants to Shetland I came across an extraordinary photograph in the local archives that revealed layers of hidden history. A beautiful dapper South Indian man who had been a village doctor in the 1800s. Dr Elphinstone Mumford Joseph de Sylva had been forgotten, just another image in the archives, despite being a pioneer and well liked (I found letters and articles relating to the positive impact contribution he made to the community) and responsible for the safe birth, health and well being of generations of Shetlanders. This find seems radical in a time of state sanctioned hostile environment and where popular discourse demonises immigration. His letters revealed that Dr de Sylva and I were linked as both ‘incomers’ and two people of Indian heritage deeply enamoured with the wild, sacred landscape of Shetland. In the same archive I found untitled photos from the 1800s and 1900s of Innuits and a Black sailor, all of whom at some point made Shetland their home. I felt a real resonance that we were all interconnected and were the kind of new Shetlanders that had never had the space to be seen, valued and known before. That I was part of a little known heritage and history, the value of which lay in my hands and not in the gaze of those who reduced me to ‘incomer’, outsider, migrant and immigrant.
Shasta Ali writes about finding a corner of Pakistan in the Highlands - “ between the rugged hills and towering mountains of the Cairngorms, you will find Kingussie in Inverness. The quiet village tells the little-known story of World War II Punjabi soldiers in Scotland. [They were the] Force K6, an all-Muslim Punjabi regiment in the British Indian Army, were thirteen World War II soldiers [who] died whilst training in Scotland. Far from home, nine of the Force K6 soldiers have found their final rest in graves in Kingussie cemetery. They were from present-day Pakistan. Isobel Harling, a local Scottish woman, has tended to the nine graves in Kingussie with kindness and dedication for more than 70 years.” Reading about Isobel offers another shape to this history for me. That despite the tragic legacies of war and colonisation, a new thread has emerged of care, ritual and remembering that shows an altruistic aspect of humanity. This wee piece of land in Kingussie now has a new history that ties itself to Punjab.
When we think of Scottish histories we must look beyond the limited scope of the education system and the skewed, reductive cultural production that creates a generic tartan and shortbread version of Scottish history. We should remember that Scottish history includes a history of violence, and of violent colonisation – that it involves a complex weft of being both oppressed and the oppressor. For example, during the British rule of India, Scots accounted for 25% of all British personnel despite only making up 9% of Britain’s population, this is a fact that is conveniently factored out of contemporary Scottish history and identity making. Junaid Ashraf writes that “Within the psyche of many Scots today the understanding is that the British Empire was an English enterprise when in reality this is simply not the case. Scotland was not a minor player in the proliferation of growth of the British Empire’s rule in the world. We were a significant and crucial component and Scotland was a key ingredient to the British Empire’s success.” The popular Sceptical Scot Blog states that “The reality is that for more than 150 years the Scots of all classes were enthusiastic participants in running the empire. Scots fought for the British empire in two world wars. Only with the rapid withering of the empire post-1945 was there a resurgence of interest in a Scottish identity.”
Dr Eloise Gray writes in her research into Scottish gentry families that “Scottish men, and their families at home, became what they were, in part, because of anxieties about colonial others... The individual lives of colonial others were central to our white histories, yet obscured from view. These lives were interconnected and our feelings, so intensely implicated in how we create groups, differentiate ourselves from others, and respond to historical events, are too.” Gray further asserts that “As white Scots it might be time to take a step back, give space to the past and the pain, violence and loss that continues to be felt by some whose ancestors were colonised or enslaved. We need to resist the ‘moves to innocence’; instead de-centre ourselves, listen to the feelings and anger our national story has produced, and learn to sit with discomfort.”
History lives in our song, our art, our languages, our dialects, our culture.
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde famously wrote. We now understand how true this is and how history has been weaponised against us. How is has been used to shame and silence us. How it has held our guilt and complicity alongside the wounds and trauma of whiteness, capitalism and patriarchy. We understand that history can be both balm and irritant but when we choose to remember the discomfort, and we need to seep ourselves in this for any true futures to emerge. This is the complicated ask – to be with the shadow-side aswell as actively searching for and turning towards the light. When we accept the complexity of this and allow suppressed voices to sing and share hitherto unrecognised and unvalued experiences and histories, alongside radical acts of collective care and compassion, we are nudged brightly into realms of potential futures where other worlds are possible.
When we actively align with histories of care, solidarity and liberation and choose to use these moments as a kind of true North, a reorientating with intentions of radical solidarity, then history can become a form of radical emotional cartography and human geography. One that isn’t in denial about the parts of our shared histories soaked with betrayal, pain and violence but allows for a spacious connection where trauma can held and acknowledged. An enfolding that can offer a deeper and sustainable weave that holds the breadth of weft that carries the weight of all our histories and collective futures.
History is a heartbeat
History is a drum
History through the gaze of the working class, queer, disabled, people of colour and women - not elites, colonisers or heteronormative white structures, is a radical, rich and enriching history alive with reflection, intersectionality and compassion. It allows us to know ourselves in a new light and heartens us.
History allows us to stand in the knowledge that other worlds are possible and that there were those in the past that worked to encourage and inhabit this and that there are those alongside us now who share our desire for compassionate, collective futures that belong to all and not just the few.
History is the art of recovering and remembering. Of understanding and knowing. Of returning the gaze back through time of those who have struggled before us and with those who struggle beside us now.
History is a siren.
Histories of disability, queer histories, women’s histories and working class histories, histories of Black and brown peoples all hold the fact that other lives have been lived and loved and that other worlds have always been present. That we have always been here with acts of love and self care and collective action but have been de-centred, displaced, silenced and erased. The history books did not accommodate or remember us but still we remembered, still we yearned, knowing that there were other lives lived and that other worlds were possible if we could only find our way towards each other in solidarity.
History is the soil in which we attempt to root and we must choose the most fertile place that nurtures our body, mind and spirit.
History is remembering and let us be sober about what we remember. Let us be courageous to know where the faults lie and our place within these fault-lines. Let us know that with our attention and intention we can make other worlds possible.
twitter: @MundairRaman///IG @ramanmundair + @rmundair///linktr.ee/rmundair2022
Raman Mundair is working class, Queer, disabled and neurodiverse. She is a writer, artist, activist, filmmaker, and playwright. As well as writing for the screen and theatre, she writes for Bella Caledonia and is the award winning author of 'Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves', 'A Choreographer’s Cartography', 'The Algebra of Freedom' (a play) and is the editor of 'Incoming: Some Shetland Voices'. She has won multiple awards for her practice, including the Robert Louis Stevenson Award and a Leverhulme Fellowship, is a Royal Literature Society Fellow, and has been commissioned to produce experimental artists film by organisations such as Tramway and CCA in Glasgow.
Raman was the recipient of an All3media award for her scriptwriting, her short film 'TROWIE BUCKIE' was shortlisted for the BFI/Scottish Screen Sharp Shorts and her feature, A Girl Called Elvis has been awarded a First Features award and her short Tongue was shortlisted for Sharp Shorts 2022 and the Disney/NFTS incubator fund. She is the IASH Playwrighting Fellow for Traverse Theatre. She has also worked as a mental health support worker and for Women’s Aid.