A trio of Sarabanders
A Review by Jennifer Morag Henderson
There She Goes: New Travel Writing by Women
Edited by Esa Aldegheri
Saraband (2025) £
Dark Skies
Anna Levin
Saraband (2024) £
The Salt and the Flame
Donald S. Murray
Saraband (2024)
In There She Goes the contributors take many different types of journey, but the link between all the essays is that this is travelling done by women. The editor, Esa Aldegheri, argues in the introduction that women have a different experience of travel. They have societal challenges – dealing with peoples’ perceptions of them doing an activity that is traditionally associated with men – and they have personal bodily challenges – dealing with periods while mountain climbing, for example. Aldegheri is the author of “Free to Go – across the world on a motorbike”, and she says that she not only wants to reclaim travel literature as a space for women, but also redefine what travel literature can be: it doesn’t have to be about conquest and endurance, but can be about the “everyday reality of what happens when women move through the world in their brave, scared, messy bodies.”
Some common themes repeat in the essays, particularly what it is like to travel with children, or after having had children. There are also some wildly different journeys, from Palestinian artist Leena Rustom Nammari’s minutely-described trip over the bridge that crosses from the Israeli-occupied West Bank to Jordan, to Lee Craigie’s description of an endurance cycle race.
In an anthology, different essays will resonate with different readers, and some appealed to me more than others. There was some similarity in the approaches of some of the writers: not so much the common threads of being a woman, but a common interest in things like wild swimming, for example, or the discussion over whether covid lockdowns brought us closer to nature. There are consecutively-numbered endnotes throughout the book, perhaps a decision that was meant to give a cohesiveness to the collection as a whole, but which disconcertingly caught my eye by the end of the book. I felt there was inconsistency, too, in what these endnotes were for: were they academic or not?
The final essay in the book was my favourite though: Margaret Elphinstone’s “Sea Crossings: Time Circles”; her account of travelling in Scotland, Faroe, Iceland and Greenland while writing her wonderful novel “The Sea Road”, an account of Gudrid and the Viking exploration of the North Atlantic. The novel is a vivid reimaging of the travels and life of an extraordinary woman; this essay brings it together with the writer’s experiences and the lives of others she met as she researched and wrote. I had read a version of this essay – or elements of it – online before, but this is more polished. It would be great if it brought more people to this extraordinary novel.
Dark Skies is part of Saraband’s ‘In the Moment’ series; short books that “explore the role of mind and body in movement, purpose and reflection, finding ways of being fully present in our activities and environment”. From the series, I had previously read “Atoms of Delight: Ten Pilgrimages in Nature” by poet Kenneth Steven, which is a lovely collection of short essays or meditations. Well-suited to the format, “Atoms of Delight” is a book I recommend and gift to others.
In Dark Skies, Anna Levin looks up into the night. Starting from a personal perspective, she talks about her desire to get away from all-pervasive light pollution and see true darkness: wide open skies full of stars. The chapters summarise the current situation with light pollution and its often-overlooked effect on our body rhythms and on the natural world around us, making the science accessible; feature journalism spread out. The dangers of darkness – such as city streets at night – are touched upon. The book then collects together some of the responses to this problem, including scientific conferences and Dark Sky Parks.
Anna Levin is enthusiastic about the people she meets who are working to restore and manage dark skies, such as the “upbeat swirl of stargazing, science, art and tourism” of Europe’s first Dark Sky Places conference, where people travel from “New Zealand, Chile and Israel to share their stories under the promise of pristine night”.
Any ‘return to nature’ nowadays will always be fraught: it can become an artificial creation with its own subculture. The problem of light pollution, however, is a serious one; personal solutions will not be enough and there needs to be a wider discussion. As Anna Levin acknowledges, it doesn’t seem right that to get to the mythical preserved Dark Skies, we drive a long way, in cars with headlights, under streetlamps, polluting in many ways as we go.
The Salt and the Flame tells the story of people from the Metagama, an emigrant ship that left Lewis in 1923 for Canada. Mairead and Finlay leave their island home and eventually find themselves in Detroit.
Donald Murray, along with Liza Mulholland and others, performed the show “In the Wake of the Metagama: An Atlantic Odyssey in Story and Song”, which brought together music, writing and art to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the boat’s departure from Lewis. The show had a successful tour around Scotland, including an excellent performance at Eden Court Theatre in Inverness, and will shortly be available as a CD recording, while Liza and Donald’s process of researching in Detroit was featured in a fascinating BBC Alba documentary.
“The Salt and the Flame” goes deeper into the story, taking the fictional Mairead and Finlay and exploring not just the initial moment of emigration and adjustment to the new world, but taking their story right up to 1970: through the Depression and Detroit’s race riots, through the personal disruptions to their family and on to their children’s choice of different paths in life.
This is the story of two people and their decision to emigrate, but it’s more than that: it’s the story of how this choice of emigration was made by thousands of people. It’s not so much a personal exploration of how it feels to be adrift in a new country, but a picture of what that emigration means to whole communities. Mairead and Finlay have their problems, but the book shows that these individual challenges are part of a much bigger story.
Once they get to America, the people from Lewis find that they are only one group among many: they might have their unique culture, but there are other immigrant groups dealing with many of the same issues. Mairead feels sympathy for others who have troubles, but Finlay finds that the best way to find work, especially as the Depression hits, is to band together with his fellow Scots – to the exclusion of other groups.
As the novel progresses on to the 1950s and 60s, the racism and deep societal divisions of Detroit are revealed. Sometimes it feels like major events – Finlay’s growing dependence on alcohol, for example – are raced over lightly, but what we end up with are individuals that are placed within the context of the wider society made up of many different peoples, each with their own history, all suspicious of each other. We also continue to follow the story of Mairead’s brother Murdo, left at home in Lewis, still dealing with the aftermath of the First World War, and trying to make a life in a place that many of his peers decided was not worth it. Murdo tries to imagine Mairead’s new life, while Mairead is unaware of how life back in Scotland is still changing and evolving. Leaving is also the story of those who are left behind.
I have enjoyed all the iterations of the Metagama story: the show, the music, the storytelling and now this novel. It’s a sustained exploration by a whole group of talented artists of an important part not just of Scottish history but of the wider history of emigration and how it made up the world we live in now.
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