Kevin P Gilday: CILIPS24 Speech
Category: #LibrariesAreEssential, Blog, News
Poet, Writer and Performer Kevin P. Gilday.
The following is a transcript of a speech I delivered as the after-dinner speaker at this year’s CILIPS annual conference in Dundee. CILIPS is the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland, an organisation representing librarians and information professionals across the country. I was asked to address the conference’s key theme of ‘information for all’ while speaking to my personal experience of the importance of libraries in my development as a poet.
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As we know, the theme of the conference this year is ‘Information for all’ which feels like a straightforward statement of intent. Peel the layers though and we start to see how complex a goal that is.
Information is moving faster than it has at any time throughout humanity, at a speed we find almost impossible to keep up with. Every day we are bombarded with a new set of temporary circumstances, a callous and contradictory news cycle, a zeitgeist that haunts for a day or two before being consigned to history. Stories and trends that would have lasted months – or even years – in the past are played out in a matter of hours, with some new vacuous content always ready and waiting to fill the void. We need to keep pace with this ever-changing landscape in order to confront the erroneous information that is permeating it.
We live in a society that is divided in a very real way by this unfettered access to unregulated opinion. Information literacy is fast becoming one of the most important things we can educate people on. There are bad actors looking to use the constant stream of information to their advantage, utilising the evanescent nature of our engagement to stoke hate and division. The points of schism they choose are often about information, or our interpretation of it. The culture war that we find ourselves embroiled in is a manufactured binary conflict created by those who do not wish to accept inconvenient truths. That believe facts to be negotiable depending on feeling.
Binary thinking is nothing new in this country. In fact, Scotland has its own term for the idea that we often exist within two binaries simultaneously – Caledonian Antisyzygy. A term first quoted in 1919 in relation to Scottish literature, but which now seems like an apt description of our society at large. I’d like to read you a poem of mine on that subject just now, it’s called My Quantum Scotland and it does require some audience participation…
My Quantum Scotland
This is not a country
It is a contradiction shaped as a land mass
A polarity carved carelessly into ancient hills
A dual personality imbued into every brick of our grand cities
A wound bound together by a shared history of oppression
And the occasional sporting near miss
We are a binary people
A simultaneous society
Split personality
Two places at once
Because this is the land
Of Catholics and Protestants
Celtic and Rangers
Glasgow and Edinburgh
Jekyll and Hyde
Nationalists and Unionists
Remainers and Leavers
Yes and No
Where the wind howls
And the rain lashes
And the heather is slightly perturbed
And this explains
The listlessness that permeates
The rift at the centre of my Caledonian heart
Because you birthed me
All misshapen and angry
And here I am
Yours truly
And truly yours
My quantum Scotland
Caledonian antisyzygy
A constantly repeated anomaly
Square pegs in round holes
The jigsaw pieces from the other side of the board
Forced into imperfect union
There are two of us
Living side by side
Forever in dispute
Like warring siblings
Or fractious neighbours
Because this is the land
Of highlands and lowlands
Landed gentry and slum dwellers
Bearsden and Drumchapel
Beaujolais and Buckfast
Cybernats and nawbags
Salt n vinegar and salt n sauce
Mogwai and The Proclaimers
No and Yes
Where the wind howls
And the rain lashes
And the heather is slightly perturbed
And this explains
The listlessness that permeates
The rift at the centre of my Caledonian heart
Because you birthed me
All misshapen and angry
And here I am
Yours truly
And truly yours
My quantum Scotland
How did we get this far?
With a fatal injury inflicted in our infancy
The blood trail annotating our journey
The cleaving apart of a society
Open the shortbread tin in the wardrobe
Liberate the needle and thread
And stitch these two cloths together
Until something resembles a nation
Where the wind howls
And the rain lashes
And the heather is slightly perturbed
Thank you for indulging me. Now, I feel like everyone here is in general agreement that libraries are alright. Generally, quite good. But that is a very modest mindset. I think maybe you need to see yourselves in a new light, to reconnect with the miraculous nature of what you do every day. Because libraries are the in many ways the zenith of the human project. They represent the best intentions of civilisation. That’s not just to do with the importance of books and our access to them but something much deeper. It expresses our hope for the growth of strangers who we have never met. It is a testament to the optimism we feel for each other. Libraries are the great equalizer of inequality. They are symbols of self-improvement, totems of connection. They tell us that access to information is for all, that art is democratic, that the future is written by those who dare to. A library says, ‘yes, even you’. So please, don’t take them or your position within their infrastructure for granted.
So often I feel like we get sucked into debates about the importance of libraries within our pyramid of needs. ‘Well, libraries are great but what about housing, what about food, what about healthcare, what about education’. We can’t get drawn into these bad faith arguments where we are forced to pick one basic right over another. Libraries and the access to information sit alongside these tenets as the foundations of a functioning society. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that a library is a luxury because we have foodbanks, only one of those things is the product of greed. Our access to quality information, our ability to pick up a book and read a story that transports us to another place or time, these are vital for our emotional wellbeing and must be protected with the same ferocity that we would a hospital or a school. Libraries are not a luxury, they are an essential element of a healthy society. They are symbols of how much we value our citizens. An indicator of our civic health.
Beyond information, beyond growth, they also engender a vital element of society – community. As our lives become more atomised and insular we need spaces to co-exist more than ever. We need to know that we reside as part of a larger entity outside our front door. Tesco can’t be the only place we see other humans. We need spaces of connectivity. To information. To ourselves. To other people. Thankfully we already have them.
As our public spaces are slowly, or in some places rapidly, corroded or rendered inaccessible, we must desperately hold onto the places where society can meet and interact. Libraries are bastions of connection. Connection is how we fight loneliness. And loneliness is the thing that threatens to bring our society to the brink. Loneliness is the dominant factor behind our discord, our fractures, our cruelty. Loneliness promotes conflict from behind isolated screens, connection only leads to understanding. And connection happens at the library.
What other space welcomes all generations under one roof? The toddler reading nursery rhymes and the grandfather researching his family tree? When do the student and the job seeker ever type away side by side? This might sound like a regular day to some people in this room but let me tell you that it is sadly not normal, it is – once again – miraculous. And it promotes the most important thing we need in order to create the society we want to see: Empathy.
Empathy is a muscle. It needs to be trained in order to be strong enough to resist the simple narratives we’re presented with daily by the media. Being an active part in our community is one of the ways in which we strengthen our empathy. Sharing space with people who have different lived experiences than us is how we broaden our view of the world. It helps us to understand the importance of other people’s rich existences. This happens by osmosis, without much effort, it occurs by simply holding a space and sharing it. Libraries hold this space for us to co-exist with a whole cross section of society.
The deepening of that empathy comes from words, or more accurately, the sharing of our words. I’ve seen it first hand in my own career. I’ve facilitated countless poetry workshops from primary school children to recovery groups, and always words are the key to a deeper understanding of another’s experiences. I’ve said it many times before, but poetry is an empathy machine. You start off one person and you emerge changed at the other end of a great poem. It is an opportunity to walk in a stranger’s shoes, to live within their world for a few lines.
Libraries are living archives of these myriad experiences. A room full of other people’s lives waiting to enrich our own. Access to stories outwith our own lived experience is imperative to seeing the world as it is – complex, varied, nuanced and messy.
I’ve known the importance of libraries since I was a child. Growing up in a household restricted by budget, libraries were a haven for a beleaguered mother and her bored children. Free, accessible, with no money required to change hands, no rush to buy something and be on your way. An activity without expectation. They became places for us to linger. To be present.
I actually had two library cards when I was wee, one for Glasgow and one for North Lanarkshire. My home bases were Riddrie library in the East End and Stepps library even further out. I still remember the tiny plastic chairs I would park myself on for hours on end, the miniature book stands designed for you to flick through the wares like a vintage vinyl hunter, the smiles of the librarians, imperious behind their circular desk. But mostly I remember the smell. A rich scent that seemed to suggest that the books had always been there, that they always would. These were rooms filled with other voices, filled with possibilities, filled with hope. And I was allowed to be here.
That permission is taken for granted by people in power. They think that their experience of feeling comfortable in a multitude of spaces means that everyone else feels the same. It certainly didn’t feel like that for me. Everywhere I went I was looking for permission. Permission to exist, permission to interact, permission to be heard. And not many places reciprocated. Classrooms could be war zones. Social situations were fraught with cultural potholes. There were many rooms where I did not feel welcome – from my childhood onwards – because of where I’d come from. Libraries were not one of those places. The permission they gave me was the permission to dream, the permission to be seen, the permission to feel.
I quite simply would not be living the life I am now. Spending my days writing, creating, performing, teaching, sharing – and all these other wonderful, positive things. If it wasn’t for those two little pieces of plastic. Those library cards that gave me permission. And my mum who opened the door.
I’m going to share a poem with you now that is about community, about the challenges that deprived communities face and the resilience of the people who live in them. This is a poem about my own neighbourhood of Springburn in North Glasgow. I ask that you approach it with empathy and respect and allow yourself to live with another’s experiences for a few minutes.
Excess (noun)
We have too much round here
An excess in these parts
More than our fair share
And enough to spare
Mortality
It seeps from our taps
A slow dancing poison
Climbs perilous out the window
Of the high flats
Dives for fag doubts
Outside the shopping centre
A surplus of this mortality
This city breathes it in
A profusion of cessation
Particles plunged into the air
From ancient factory pipes
Laden with asbestos
An industrial nightmare
Oblivious to the winds of change
Down the road they have just enough
But here we are inundated
This ‘Glasgow effect’
That turns beloved sons
To drug addict statistics
That strips a diet down
To tins and boxes
A glut of mortality
Your maw would always claim she didn’t have a favourite. But it was definitely you. We could tell as she put you in the ground. Our dear green place is fertilised with the bodies of the forgotten. Your membership to that Tuesday morning Methadone crew. Nerves jangling, until one day they didn’t.
And no-one can tell us why
Why we keep dying
Why there’s a funeral parlour in every scheme
Why our wake outfits
Hang heavy with expectation
On the back of bedroom doors
So we learn to wallow in the waiting
Biding time til our turn
Scanning the Evening Times obituaries
Memorialising colleagues and classmates
Faces revealing themselves
From foggy memory
Like a brass rubbing
‘Right enough, the big man wasn’t looking too good last I saw him’
They don’t seem to have an answer
As to why it resides here
Our ASBO neighbour
Aggressively lurking at the close door
Funny how this excess
Sits neatly in a postcode like a stray
And for the life of you
For the life of us
No-one can say why
And what should I say to the teenage mothers pushing firstborns in second hand prams? Babies fed on mould and spores. Expectancy stunted. A life interrupted, by this exorbitant mortality.
And I wait every day
For this invisible force
To add me to the graph
An outlier
Marking the trend
Beside family and friends
Our little crosses
Recorded on a whiteboard
A sociologist’s nightmare
And I dispute the details
Of my mother’s death certificate
That did not record poverty,
A lifetime of it,
As cause
But round here
They call it excess mortality
They call it inevitable
They call it life
If they had the courage
They would call it what it is –
They would call it
Genocide
I appreciate how heavy that poem can be, particularly in a setting like this where we are enjoying the privilege of great company and a great meal. But its important that we don’t shy away from the real-life experiences of those on the edges of society. Your empathy is so important as librarians and information professionals. You are both the gatekeepers of these stories but also their witnesses.
But the impact of libraries isn’t just felt in a community context. In my role as an arts educator and workshop facilitator I’ve seen first-hand the importance of libraries in a school setting. They become a hub for calm in a hugely pressurised environment, a place for understanding in the midst of chaos. They transcend being merely a place to borrow books. They are a haven for those being bullied. A safe space for those who don’t fit in. A palace of alternative thinking. They are part of a larger network of pastoral care that creates a safety net for children who are at risk of slipping through society’s ever widening cracks.
Many times, when I am invited to schools to read my work or facilitate workshops it is the school librarian that has made it happen. They are liaising with organisations like the Poetry Society, the Scottish Book trust or the Scottish Poetry Library to invite artists like me into the building. They are the ones who are curating this space, making it safe for students to be themselves in an environment that requires them to pretend on a daily basis.
Access to quality information is a front-line conflict on the playground and has far reaching consequences. Every school I visit, anywhere around the country, I come up against the debris of these online culture wars. Young men being radicalised by the toxic masculinity of Andrew Tate and other con-artists, rising racism, homophobia, transphobia. There are battle lines being drawn in our schools backed by bad actors sharing their dodgy information, promising belonging in return for loyalty. School libraries are some of our best weapons in fighting this rising intolerance. Providing access to different viewpoints and quality information is our best bet in disrupting these dangerous narratives.
But access to information is just the start, it’s what we do with it that counts. That is the infrastructure we need to preserve. Because information without ethics is nothing, knowledge without context is useless. And that brings me to everyone in the room. The multifaceted role you play in society is not one that can be replaced by AI or digital terminals. It is your humanity, your experience, your expertise that give us the guidance we need to make the best use of the information we discover. It is your humanity that helps us understand the emotional quality of this knowledge. That helps us to grasp the significance on a human level. That is something that is irreplaceable.
Close your eyes for a second. Imagine a world without libraries. A world where information can only be accessed by those who have the means to do so. Where knowledge is kept hidden behind walls. Where people can no longer find stories to enlarge their lives. There are forces in the world determined to make this a reality. That are determined to cut funding until our institutions collapse. Who see access and advice as a luxury instead of a fundamental right at the basis of our society.
Quality requires quality. The quality of work, the quality of advice, the quality of information requires a quality of investment. When our service providers become businesses then we’re in trouble. Some things are richer than money. Information and art are two of those things. Both reside in the modest walls of our local library.
So many of us become trapped within the confines of our own stories. We look at our lives and the lives of those around us and we see repeating narratives. A few set archetypes to choose from. Some of us reside in places where those narratives are writ large across our environments. Poverty, addiction, loneliness. These stories pervade our sense of self, they seem like they might be the only outcomes available to us.
It is access to stories from outwith our bubble that opens us up to possibility. That allows us to understand that there are lives besides the ones we see modelled around us. That is the importance of libraries, in our schools and in our communities. They are doors to other worlds, yes. They are mental weights that build our empathy, yes. But they are also choices waiting to be discovered. Voices that have been recorded in order to give us an insight into the life we may choose to live beyond this one.
Access to stories outside our own is necessary for a society to have the capacity to care. We say information for all. But also, empathy for all. Understanding for all. A future for all. Equality for all. The power to understand these concepts and put them into action resides in rooms across the country. Including this one. Examples of what a better society can look like are already with us. They are our libraries. It’s up to us to maintain the miraculous.