Rabbie’s red roses came with thorns
OBVIOUSLY the question on everyone’s lips this week is whether Robert Burns would have gone to the President’s Club, the all-male event where young women were sexually harassed under the cover of raising money for charity?
Scotland’s bard, celebrated in dinners everywhere from Downing Street to Darwin, was undoubtedly a “blaigeart”, whose treatment of women in his life cannot be skimmed over in the #metoo era. Yet one of our contemporary distinguished poets, Liz Lochhead, got herself into trouble with the keepers of the Alloa flame for suggesting Robbie, through our eyes, might be viewed as a sex pest.
Lochhead, in her own defence, points out the great beauty of Burns is that as well as the poetry and song, he can be interpreted any way we wish.
We reinvent him every season to suit our purpose. Burns was undoubtedly a product of his age.
You have to remember the impoverished ploughboy was about to board a ship for the West Indies to take up a post as overseer on a slave plantation, before his poetry shot to No1 in the Edinburgh singles chart of 1786.
He wrote beautiful love verses, expressing deep respect for the women he encountered, then betrayed and ridiculed them in letters to friends. Burns was a complicated character, but true to himself.
In Scotland we use Burns to fool ourselves that we are nationalist and internationalist, that we are magically free of racism because we can raise a sentimental refrain “that man to man the world o’er, shall brothers be for a’ that.”
Burns holds up a mirror up to us. When it comes to the politics of gender or race, we shouldn’t kid ourselves.