'Sleeping
Starfish is a work of environmental advocacy and a
love song to an island and its waters and its people. A couple of weeks ago
Deirdre steered me to a talk by the writer Taiye Selasi on identity and
belonging. ‘How can I come from a country?’ she asked. ‘How can a human being
come from a concept?’
Fair Isle is not a concept, it’s a place. A
place of elemental forces and ragged boundaries, unprotected from fog, wind and
storm, but equally uninsulated from the actual rhythms and processes of this
world. You can love the concept of a nation, but you can only know a nation
through its real places and people – through embodied relationship, through a
sense of place, through intimacy with its patterns. ‘My experience’, said Taiye
Selasi, ‘is where I’m from.’
Fair Isle’s patterns are changing – there
are new arrivals in its waters, new absences from its stacs and skies. But
there is always a thread on Fair Isle that knits sea to land and land to mind
and body in tradition, in memory and in practice. Resilience – that most
coveted attribute in our times – means adaptive capacity; maintaining identity
despite change. It’s a learned skill, and it lies in relationship. These makers
and maintainers share their experience of island resilience, so that, tonight, we
can all be from Fair Isle.;
