Review by Heather
‘It was strange to be alone. I walked the quarter-mile uphill to where a wall topped with a tangle of briars marked the border of the village. On this side of the wall there were grasses and wild-flowers, butterflies and dragonflies. There was a copse of trees where the stream entered the village lands in a sparkling sheen. One could worship this laughing water. It is the font of life.’
The poet and writer Kathleen Jamie is the current Scottish Makar. Her most recent book of prose is Surfacing, which follows from Findings and Sightlines. Each of these is a wonderful read, I can get absorbed in Jamie’s words very easily, they’re so beautifully written, considered and inspiring.
This spring I read one of her earlier books Among Muslims. It tells of the people she met while travelling in the Northern Areas - the Karakoram mountain regions of Pakistan, a volatile place close to China, Afghanistan and India. Jamie travelled there in the ‘90s, crossing into Pakistan from China. She stayed a while in the mountain village of Gilgit, and this is where most of the book in centred.
Jamie writes of the characters she meets in Gilgit - Rashida, Jamila, the Major, of their lives, their husbands, wives and children. Warm words that bring out the kindness of the strangers she encounters as a traveller, who soon become her friends. A lone young woman, these people were as concerned about her as they were interested in why she was on her own. ‘It is my honour’ the Major’s constant refrain - he simply must make sure Jamie is safe and comfortable in the accommodation he provides for her.
Among Muslims was originally published in 1992 as The Golden Peak. In the early 2000s, when there was growing anti-islamic sentiment in the UK, Jamie’s present publishers contacted her, feeling her book (at the time out of print) told a much needed story.
By then she had two small children of her own. Jamie travelled back to visit her friends in Gilgit, and this journey forms an Epilogue to the updated book, republished in 2002. Since then it’s remained in print.
Among Muslims stands out. Not least because it has come from one of Scotland’s greatest writers. More than that, in an age where many people have written of their personal triumphs and tribulations in the mountains of Pakistan and journeys along the Karakoram Highway, Jamie’s stories of her time in these mountains are not really about herself and her own adversities. The mountains are always there - she writes of them poetically throughout the book - but it is the characters in Gilgit we learn the most about. Her writing makes us care for them, in the same ways we care for our friends and neighbours.
Heather Dawe's latest book is Mountain Stories, an illustrated memoir of journeys through some of Scotland's most beautiful landscapes, including Skye's Cuillin, Knoydart, Assynt and the Far North. Writing during lockdown, author and artist Heather Dawe finds telling these stories a powerful means of reconnection with the mountains when they are physically inaccessible. Dawe's journeys are made by walking, running, cycling or sea-kayak. These stories are a reflection of the importance of wild places and the inspiration, art and culture associated with them.
Mountain Stories has a foreword written by Arran resident, Mountain Leader and President of Ramblers Scotland, Lucy Wallace. You can order it from our online bookshop below.