Exiled On Earth: Govanhill Mythology By Shane Johnstone

Catastrophically ill-equipped though this reviewer is for taking a thorough critical view of a book that is rendered in Gaelic, Glaswegian Scots, French and English, the themes of Govanhill Mythology are so timely and so redolent of the wider zeitgeist that it would seem a dereliction to disengage.

Notionally a long meditation on an area of Glasgow synonymous with poverty, crime and addiction, Shane Johnstone holds up a mirror to a changeful landscape whose recent attempts at cultural makeover resolutely refuse to disguise the scars and scabs of an earlier picaresque. By no means a process of healing, Johnstone’s long poems bring, instead, a forensic intelligence to the exigencies of urban decline and transition, by illuminating the lives of Govanhill’s inhabitants - and its history, architecture and industry – in inventories of locators and disconnected voices, to recreate a terrain at once dyspeptic and listless, colourful and anaemic. Detachment, here, facilitates a sharper view, points up ironies that would otherwise languish unnoticed; the tableau, and the condition of its denizens, demand our attention, if not in the reformist sense of Henry Mayhew’s early sociological dissection of the London poor, then as a unique phenomenon. Johnstone’s eloquence is by no means patronising, not least because he was Govanhill raised and has the inner-vision and perspicacity of a true native.

The poet’s claim to have drawn upon a wide-range of literary traditions is a palimpsest, almost, of Glasgow’s rich socio-historical complexity: a cacophony of migrant languages, melding into the predominating brogue of Govanhill Mythology, finds correspondence in opaque intimations of earlier writers whose presence is tangential but palpable in terms of tonal or stylistic similarity. The opening sequence introduces the reader to the hidden backwaters of the district in an odyssey: a vision of the wider bounds of the city is rendered in the form of a decaying body politic in the katabatic, Miltonic underworld of ‘Reformation’, whose unrestricted flow and staccato rhythm suggest an arrhythmia of decline and temporary re-purposing:

‘The lanes and paths, once
empty as collapsed veins,
refilled, reformed and pumped
blood to the park’.

The metonym is multivalent and profoundly fitting in a district of drug and alcohol abuse, a place of foreshortened longevity where blootered chippy ‘frequenters breathe / oil and fat and begin the stumble home.’ The poem ‘Up Here’, from which this vignette is taken, is immersed in the offal and ‘bile’ of premature biological decline hastened by the omnipresent pull of Buckfast and fags. The ‘reek’ and all-pervasive necrosis of this self-perpetuating world impels the narrator, inexorably, to a sense of objectivity that is expressible only in the phlegmatic sustaining of a metaphor of the corrupted corpus, a city/body in which pubs disgorge ‘innards’ and buses wheeze like emphysemic lungs.

Johnstone’s, in the truest sense, disinterested approach is acutely effective at drawing out the bitterness to yield a landscape - like Douglas Dunn in the back-to-backs of working class Hull - whose margins reveal a miscellany of motives, each mirroring the perception of the narrator. The psycho-geographical exploration of ‘Scarce O Tatties’ unearths the teeming miscegenation of history in the flâneur’s present, trawling archives of experience in the noisy drama of suggestion:

‘At the underground, memories puff into a ball.
You breathe and face Govan as the trenchcoats
glare their backlogged deadlines
into the Inner Circle wall,
the overalls don’t look up at all.’

That Johnstone insinuates alternating translations in Gaelic and vernacular renditions of his poems in an approximation to Govan-Scots, and gives no precedence to either, mimics the full measure of his intention here, each fully warranting its presence in a cross-cultural and oddly inclusive narrative. I cannot comment on the efficacy of the Gaelic, beyond relishing the mellifluous sound of the phrases and marvelling at their linguistic remoteness when set in conjunction with English and its derivations. But the demotic Scots is satisfyingly delivered, seamlessly integrated into poems that prosecute the urban mythologies of a landscape alongside close-cut journeys of dissection and corrosion. At the mercy everywhere of the barbs and oppressions of the senses, Johnstone’s eclectic narrative voices are incarcerated, like Prometheus, in a kind of perpetual moment with acid metaphors for comfort:

‘Swelterin heat pushes
yir cheist like a polis’ finger.
Parched pores suck up memories
til yir skin runs dry. (‘Mythologies 1-8: 1’)

And elsewhere, in a withered description of a decrepit canal barge, the character of the boat is as washed-up as an enfeebled physiognomy: ‘It has suiked thi kauld / fae thi canal wa’er / right intae its tin lungs.’ (‘Mythologies 9-12: 9 – Skipper’). The vagaries of auto-suggestion invest vernacular Govanhill with a sound that works in ontological contiguity with the redundancy it describes. An aid to the imagination, the narrator’s exposition journeys towards an almost onomatopoeic definition of meaning. In ‘The Southside Barista’, an astonishing poem of clotted observation, Johnstone yields a figure who is at once three-dimensional and evanescent as he scans the ‘haunle-less Scandi / pottery’, in an utterly persuasive capturing of the urban zeitgeist:

‘Bak firra visit
in a café cawed The Southside Barista
eh stauns unironic, werrin a luminus
yella Umbro tap
peely-wally legs pushin
ootae green shamrocked shorts
lik droothed trees
thru thi pavement.’

The language squares neatly with the description; unobtrusive, as natural and ‘unironic’ as the character in the poem, Johnstone’s use of the vernacular is consistent with the diversity of his modus, and as indissoluble a representation of the Scots experience as the dialect poems of W.N. Herbert and Edwin Morgan, or the Scots-Yiddish conflations of David Bleiman. Even in literary migration, Johnstone can bring the wit and eloquence of Govanhill to cankerous decline, as he shadows James Baldwin in the melodrama of ‘A Dreadful Narrative’, whose necrotic drama seems more acute in dialect: ‘fae this tree ae growth / fermented an carved / deep ineez bowel’.

And if T.S. Eliot may be heard in the early exchanges, in voices inferred as if through radio aether, then it is fitting that they are disparate, emblematic almost, of a class of people or an attitude, but most of all that they are delivered in a dovetailed patois. The voices are both humdrum and melodramatic, like those of The Wasteland but with side-notes of violence, overheard across rooms in bars or caught invisible amid cacophonies of noises-off, interpolated into the unprepared receptors of the senses. A linguist might call the received effect Bakhtinian, an approximation of meaning defined according to the multi-layering of voices in dialogic relationships. The notion of L’etranger, another of Johnstone’s contiguous motifs in a modern landscape of migration and displacement, is given concise illustration in the Green Pub in ‘Sans Nom’, whose protagonist, presumably a migrant, delivers a question that is answered only with another – ‘wherr ye fae yirsel hen?’. The only other woman present, sensing that, for her, ‘the stars were misaligned’, earns the objectified and declamatory demand of another punter, whose rhetorical ire – ‘ye luikin firra fukin boayfriend then?’ – is neatly corroborated in the figurative resignation of the pub’s architectonics, where ‘Rows of scowl’ eventually soften into ‘a sad sigh’, as though in response.

The slippage - of one form into the fabric of another - is, in the most constructive sense, a commonplace here. Johnstone shapes mood and tone into an idiosyncrasy by conflating human and infrastructural constituencies: with brazen and sometimes acrobatic use of metaphor, the reader is challenged to understand the real, and imagined, people of Govanhill in symbiotic relationship with the industrial heritage, the architecture, and the distinct social networks yielded by both. And if the poet’s latitudinous forays into a kind of impressionism of language and influence render the borders of his own mandate intractable, then there are moment of real beauty in the maelstrom of tentative connections, even in the minefield of literary translation. Johnstone’s transcription of French writer Auguste Poulet-Malassis’ allegorical aphorism about an albatross is a testament both to his erudition, and to his apprehension of the power of the imagination to take wing:

‘Airborne, the poet is like a prince of
clouds laughing down at the storms and archers,
but exiled on earth, lodged between jeers
his giant wings prevent him from walking. (‘Albatross’)


Govanhill Mythology is published by Palavro (2024)

More information here.