ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm so convinced that transphobia, biphobia, homophobia are such an integral part of colonisation, I reject that as a colonial construct, I reject it as racist.
As they took our land - tried to take all of our land, tried to take all of our language and suppress our culture, they also took our expressions of sexuality and gender. And that is important to us in a core part of our culture, especially because the way that the institutional racism, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of colonisation has impacted on us and the levels of discrimination against people with diverse genders, sexualities and sex characteristics, that we see that all of this, all of this was a massive attempt to cover up what was already there and pretend it never happened.
Allusionist 117 Many Ways At Once transcript
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Our behaviour and our desires will always exceed any terminology that anyone can come up with. And so rather than trying to find the right terms - and this for me is like what working in, what trying to come up with an LGBT Scots glossary does: it's a chance to imagine. It's a chance not to come up with the right way of saying things, but to say: what if we thought about it this way? What if we thought about it that way? What assumptions are built into the languages that we use?
Read moreAllusionist 78. Survival part 2: Oot in the Open - transcript
ISHBEL McFARLANE: I remember speaking to a friend of mine and saying, "I used to have another language, I used to be able to speak another language." And she was like, “Speak it then.” And I remember not having anything, I couldn't say anything.
HZ: This is Ishbel McFarlane, a theatre maker and campaigner for the Scots language. Although for many years of her life, she did not want anything to do with the Scots language at all.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: So my mum and dad deliberately brought me up speaking Scots when I was wee, partly because they both grew up in moderately complicated but Scots language environments, and they were themselves Scots language campaigners, and so they really wanted me to have access to it. So that would be my sort of home language. But then because of a whole load of reasons, centrally that it's not seen as a language by many people, I wasn't allowed to use it at primary school or at nursery or playgroup or even when I was with my friends and their parents.
MICHAEL DEMPSTER: There's no name for our language, apart from "Shut up" or "don't talk like that".
Read moreAllusionist 77. Survival part 1: Second Home - transcript
It’s Friday night. I’m in a church hall in the small town of Gaiman in Argentina, about 1200km south of Buenos Aires, watching a concert in which locals are singing songs in Welsh. Three thoughts are rotating in my mind:
1. These people are REALLY good singers;
2. If I die here, people are going to think, “What on earth was she was doing in a church hall in a tiny town in rural Argentina?”
3. We are 12,000 km from Wales. The Welsh language is not widespread. Why are there people speaking Welsh in Argentina?
