Notes in the North 1 2024

John MacLean

 Violets in the spring

 

It is generally quite hard not to feel the weight of things in the short, cold days of a northern new year. But this new year is especially heavy, bringing as it does daily news of more deaths, more hunger, and so much more depravity and mediocrity in the actions and speeches of our so-called leaders. 

 

We’ve been reminded often enough these past months of the importance of poetry, music and of the arts in general during wartime. So it is good to be able to report that, despite the dark, Celtic Connections, Glasgow’s annual Celtic and world music event, is about to storm back into action again. 

From 18th of this month until 4th February over 300 artistes will be playing in all sorts of combinations in concert halls, churches, art centres and clubs right across the city. 

 

It feels particularly apt that one of the first events in the festival will be a centenary concert for John MacLean, one of Scotland’s great revolutionaries. It will be held in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall on 19^thJanuary. MacLean died on 30th November 1923 at the tragically young age of 44 having served a sentence in Peterhead Prison, frequently on hunger strike, as a result of his principled and implacable opposition to World War 1. 

 

He was born in Pollokshaws and raised in a Gaelic-speaking Calvinist family. Thanks to the support of his church he qualified as a teacher but his time in the mainstream school system was short-lived. He had already been identified by those in power as a dangerous socialist agitator who had to be silenced. He was arrested in 1915 under ‘The Defence of the Realm’ Act and the local school board (in Govan), sacked him from his post at one of Glasgow’s primary schools. 

 

Since he was denied the possibility of teaching children he set about educating grown men and women about Marxist theory instead. He had been lecturing to workers in Bath Street on and off since 1912 and was determined to set up a Scottish Labour College similar to the one established in London, to put his teaching on a more sustained footing. The first meeting of the new college in Glasgow was attended by nearly 500 people representing hundreds of different trades unions. MacLean wasn’t there though. He was back in prison and his inaugural speech had to be delivered by one of his friends. 

 

Perhaps he is best known nowadays, if he is known at all, for his speech to the Edinburgh court at his trial for sedition in 1918. The speech lasted 75 minutes. 

Here is a short sample: 

 

I wish no harm to any human being, but I, as one man, am going to exercise my freedom of speech. No human being on the face of the earth, no government is going to take from me my right to speak, my right to protest against wrong, my right to do everything that is for the benefit of mankind. I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.

 

Among those who will be performing at MacLean’s anniversary concert are Billy Bragg, Karine Polwart, Eddi Reader, Paul McKenna, Siobhan Miller, Karan Casey, Kapil Seshasayee, Megan MacDonald, Ewen Henderson, Jackie Kay and Henry Bell. The start of 2024 seems like a very good time to sing Matt McGinn’s Ballad of John MacLean as loudly and defiantly as possible. 

…The bosses and the judges united as one man,
For Johnny was a menace to their '14 — '18 plan,
They wanted men for slaughter in the fields of Armentières,
John called upon the people to smash the profiteers

They brought him to the courtroom in Edinburgh town,
But still he did not cower, he firmly held his ground,
And stoutly he defended, his every word and deed,
Five years it was his sentence in the jail at Peterhead.

MacLean was a teacher not a poet but we all know that poets, like journalists, doctors, nurses and others who ‘bear witness’, have been dying in great numbers these past months, in both Ukraine and Gaza. The most recent poet to die in Ukraine was killed on Saturday 6^th January. Maxim Kryvtsov was his name and he was 33. 

Not long before him Refaat Alareer, 44 years old - the same age as John Maclean was when he died – was killed in an Israeli airstrike that also killed his brother, his sister and four of her children. 

Here therefore, at the start of this year, are poems to remember each of them by:

Maxim Kryvtsov, 23/01/1990 – 06/01/ 2024

 

My head is rolling from landing to landing

like a tumbleweed

or a ball

my hands are torn off 

will sprout violets in the spring

my legs

will be torn apart by dogs and cats

 

my blood 

will paint the world a new red

Pantone human blood

my bones will sink into the ground

 

create a skeleton

my shotgun

will rust

poor one

my spare clothes and equipment

will be given to the new recruits

I wish spring come sooner

to finally 

to bloom 

the violet.

 

 

Refaat Alareer, 23/09/1979 – 06/12/2023

 

If I must die

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze – 

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself –

sees the kite, my kite you made

flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love. 

 

 

It is 4 o’clock. I look up from the screen and see that the clouds over Arthur’s Seat are tinged with pink, tiny feathers of colour scattered across the grey.