As she "imagines a country", Ali Smith's waking dream evokes the power of the climate strike kids
From Scotland, quite a publishing event - 90-odd of that nation’s writers, activists and imagineers coming up with 500-800 words that answer the injunction, “Imagine A Country”. Many of the ideas respond to Scottish conditions, but are of relevance to any community or polity, at any scale. Next week, we’ll run A/UK co-initiator Pat Kane’s proposal for “constitutes” called Makar Houses - a development of ideas ventilated here.
But we are delighted to have been given permission by Bloomsbury, in this bewildering and unsettling week, to run this chapter of the book, which made us thrill and surge - written by the novelist Ali Smith. It doesn’t have a title in the collection - but it’s an obvious celebration of the power of children, nature and the activist imagination. We’ll let you dream up your own.
Ali Smith
Once there was a small gang of kids. Well, I say small, maybe seven or eight of them, maybe twenty, maybe fifty, here they come right now, roistering round the corner with their arms linked, past the lamppost, past the waste grounds left over from bombing in the last war, past the past, past the crazy money towers of the Boris Johnson city, then right past the present because they’re on their way to the future, they’re pals for life forging along the pavement and they’re singing this song, a simple song, it goes:
One planet earth.
There’s only one planet earth.
One planet earth.
There’s only one planet earth.
They don’t know it because they’re young, but the tune they’re singing is an old one, the tune of a song called ‘Guantanamera’, about a place in the world that’s beautiful, though nowadays cynical people have turned it into the foulest sort of prison, but that old song’s words hold the place’s older story of an old truthful man, he’s dying, he wants before he goes to tell the story of his soul and the place he lives and how these two things, soul and place, are rooted together. He sings about the sea, and how he loves the beautiful little mountain streams, and how what’s been wounded in life can come to the mountains to heal, and how all things grow, whether they’re flowers or friendship or understanding, and how the way to deal with the bad times, and with the cruelty of cynical people, is to turn to the earth, cultivate its beauty, help it grow the beautiful things.
But back to the gang of kids singing and forging ahead along the pavement, because behind them, look, there’s a swell of people, a swell that started as a stream and is now the size of a sea, no, maybe several seas, thousands and thousands and thousands of people, so many that they’re the size of a country themselves, together they make a whole new country, no, a continent, all the people rebelling right now across the world at how this world with all its countries and continents is being treated, all the people who give a damn, people of all ages, genders, persuasions, shoe sizes, walking alongside a small gang of more than a million kids all refusing to go to school till their countries get educated about what’s happening.
Then the plants and flowers that know they’re threatened are pulling their roots out of the ground like they’ve just heard a mythical Orpheus, and they’re hurrying along too, dragging dribs and drabs of earth and clean soil, sweet-smelling, all across the pavements of the city, and they’ve got their branches round the shoulders of those singing kids and the shoulders of those people who’re giving a damn, and with them, all round them now, baying and barking and mewling and squeaking and growling and flapping like a massive Noah’s ark parade, are all the creatures of the earth, air and sea likely to go extinct pretty soon too, the leopards and rhinos and orangutan and gorillas and turtles and tigers and elephants and porpoises and wild dogs and ferrets and whales and huge tunafishes with blue fins, and chimps and bonobos and penguins and dolphins and pandas and sea lions and seals and sharks and hippos and iguanas and bears, and polar bears standing on a sliver of ice, and jaguars and plovers and bison and foxes and macaws and tree kangaroos and butterflies and salmon and frogs, and right at the back the sloths, and they’re all singing the song. Look up – all round them in the air above the march, invisible, evanescent, the spirits of all the already extinct species, the gone mammals and insects and fish, the dead plant-life, the burnt-black trees and creepers waving their ashy leaves, and with them all the spirits of the people and creatures who’ve already perished because of what’s being done to where they live, and even some lifeforms from other planets are zooming down through the galaxies and joining the march, they can’t not, because they know too, like the kids are singing, that there’s only
One planet earth.
There’s only one planet earth.
One planet earth.
There’s only one planet earth.
And those kids at the front of the great march on their way to the future spill across the borders like borders can just be dissolved, like they’re not real, and they stop outside the houses of government and the banks and the offices of the huge conglomerates and industries and media giants and tech giants and oil companies, because they plan to look them straight in the eye, the politicians, and the rubbish world leaders, and the CEOs – who are all looking pretty embarrassed, pretty shifty, the smirkers and the shirkers of real responsibility – so they settle themselves down, they’re not going away till this is sorted, and this story hasn’t got an end because everyone in it who gives a damn is working against the kind of end that ends everything.
Seven or eight kids. A new country. With all their urgent patience they sing it again, and again, then again.
One planet earth.
There’s only one planet earth.
One planet earth.
There’s only one.
-o0o-
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Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her books have been translated into forty languages. Imagine A Country: Ideas for a better future, edited by Val McDermid and Jo Sharp, is out next week on Bloomsbury.
A/UK co-initiator Pat Kane wrote his column in The National this week mapping the book’s content
Slideshow above from The Independent