“Hoots mon! Whar’s me heid?” What If I Sang “Flower of Scotland”? is in some ways a personal project, interweaving language from three strands of research: Scottish history, rugby writing, and Scottish women’s material culture. I am a first-generation settler of almost entirely Scottish descent, and my very Scottish upbringing was steeped in rugby and its values; my father played and refereed the game and one of my brothers played at the international level – and recently a niece has taken it up.
Rugby evolved during the nineteenth century and was shaped by industrial demands – under pressure from factory owners, it was reduced from a multi-day collective communal event to a ninety-minute spectacle between skilled players for audience consumption. Later employed during war to “improve moral” and foster “leadership” and “team spirit,” the game offers a rich vein for a study of violence, its containment and commodification, and its deployment by forces of empire.
I am a devotee of the fibre arts and a descendant of women who might well have used the cooking and fibre-arts objects I find preserved in Scottish archives, and my text prioritizes women typically occluded in the historical record. So just as my use of rugby language gestures to my paternal heritage, my weaving together of three disparate strands of research mirrors and honours the techniques practiced by my foremothers.
The text’s structure will echo that of a rugby match – divided into two halves, with pre- and post-game commentary as well as “shouted” interjections from the “crowd,” drawn from my research into Scottish resistance and rebellion.
Catriona Strang is a first-generation settler of primarily Scottish heritage who lives on stolen xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Lands. Her most recent publication is Unfuckable Lardass (Talonbooks, 2022). She is the author of five other books of poetry, several written in collaboration with the late Nancy Shaw, whose selected works, The Gorge, she edited (Talonbooks, 2017).
