Hannah Lavery and Marjorie Lotfi’s project Other was a conversation in poetry, exploring the experience of living as a mixed race person in Scotland. The project saw Hannah and Marjorie picking lines from one another’s poetry and responding, entering into a poetic conversation inspired by Edwin Morgan, who often wrote openly and candidly about the experiences many others avoided. ‘Other’ took inspiration from that bravery, to tackle some of the racialised experiences (often intensely emotional) with candour and honesty, and from Morgan’s refusal to be categorised. The final work, developed with research time in the Edwin Morgan Archive at the Scottish Poetry Library and realised in the form of a pamphlet and live performance, helped develop insight into how that marginalisation impacts on day-to-day life in Scotland and consider the personal historical legacies and inherited trauma that they carry and how national and often divisive conversations around the legacies of colonisation and refugees impact upon their sense of belonging.
Pamphlet: The World May Be the Same: poems on being and otherness inspired by Edwin Morgan
In spring 2023, Hannah Lavery and Marjorie Lotfi entered into a conversation through a series of poem-letters to explore their experiences of being women and poets of colour living in Scotland. Inspired by the poetry of Edwin Morgan, The World May Be The Same (Stewed Rhubarb Press, 2023) explores what it is to be always asked to represent the notion of ‘shared heritage’ when often, in practice, that heritage means being excluded, belonging to neither.
Performance
Launching The World May Be the Same on 16 August at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2023, Hannah and Marjorie’s performance of their work explored heritage, inheritance and belonging, weaving together their experiences of being women and writers of colour in Scotland with the poetry of Edwin Morgan.
Postscript:
I got up early to send this to you and at my desk I could hear the birds again – it was a raucous welcome.Take heart, you are the
Hannah Lavery, ‘The Starling Letter’, The World May Be the Same
starling. We are the starlings!
Cawing something true.
About the poets
Hannah Lavery is a poet, playwright and director. Her poetry pamphlet Finding Seaglass was published by Stewed Rhubarb and her debut collection, Blood Salt Spring, was published in 2022 by Polygon. The Drift, her highly acclaimed autobiographical lyric play toured Scotland as part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Season 2019. Her play Lament for Sheku Bayoh premiered at Edinburgh International Festival in 2020 and she was appointed Edinburgh Makar in November 2021 for a three-year term. She is an associate artist with the National Theatre of Scotland and one of the winners of the Peggy Ramsay/Film4 Award 2022. She is also an experienced workshop facilitator and won an Leadership Award from Creative Edinburgh for her work with Writers of Colour and her curated film poetry series Sorry I am on Mute for Fringe of Colour.
Marjorie Lotfi is an Iranian-American who has lived in the UK for over 20 years. Her writing considers displacement, home and belonging in the context of the natural world. Marjorie writes with the 12 Collective of women writers and is regularly commissioned to create new work. Her poems have won competitions, been published and anthologized widely (including in Scotland’s Best Poems) and been performed on BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio 4. She is a Scottish Book Trust Ignite Fellow and a winner of the inaugural James Berry Prize. Her first collection will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023 and Refuge, poems about her childhood in revolutionary Iran, is published by Tapsalteerie Press.
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