by Jim Aitken
The Scots word ootlin refers to someone deemed a stranger, an outcast, a despised or neglected member of a family. It is an awful word to use and an even worse word to have to hear if that word is directed at you. Jenni Fagan uses it to describe her years in care in a harrowing memoir that is ultimately uplifting, dignified and incredibly courageous.
The book is dedicated to ‘all those who traverse the underworld on nothing more than a feather.’ Such a dedication is designed to prepare her readers for the horrors that she will recount, but before that happens there are a few more quotations she uses with both tact and care to guide us through her memoir.
One is by the artist Louise Bourgeois who said, ‘Tell your own story and you will be interesting.’ Such advice may seem obvious but many would think their own lives not worth recounting, that nothing much is worth retelling and, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The other quote comes from the black American writer and activist James Baldwin – ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.’
The clever use of such quotations enables Dr Fagan’s readers to slowly adjust themselves in preparation for the memoir itself. But before this happens, she gives us another cautionary moment by telling us, ‘There is always a story before the story and this first one, too, starts long after it all begins.’ Her birth mother suffered from mental health issues no doubt occasioned by grinding poverty from the family she grew up in. This is the story before Fagan’s story.
As a result of Fagan’s mother’s inability to look after her the baby girl becomes ‘born and owned by the state.’ She had been born out of any wedlock and suggests ‘I was a sin.’ Her mother’s family were Catholics and there would seem to have been a sense of sin at Jenni’s entry into the world.
What comes through is the psychological scarring a child endures by being ‘owned by the state.’ Obviously, that need not have been the case had the state she was born into lived up to its duty of care and looked after her, loved her, nourished her with all at its disposal. As we all know, however, the public sector has been ransacked for the last five decades to give tax cuts to the rich, instead of providing decent public services.
Fagan realised fairly early on in her life that the society she was born into was diseased because it would ‘cast its own people out all the time.’ She had been moved ten times during her first three years of life. She also realised early on to ‘stay away from men. I don’t like them.’ She hated her situation and began to consider that she herself was defective because of the situation she found herself in. She muses at one time, ‘I am clearly awful or why would everything have been like this for me?’ In exactly the same way a hugely unequal state like our one works to blame the poor for their poverty, the homeless for their homelessness, the unemployed for their unemployment.
At five years old she can say that her ‘whole life has been a series of entire streets and houses and people and accents and skies and rooms disappearing over and over again.’ Though the memoir recalls trauma and sadness, it does so with a beautiful poetic style that ennobles the person recalling her story.
After several temporary placements she is adopted by a couple who live in a mobile home. Fagan tells us, ‘mobile homes are twice as big as caravans.’ Her new mum ‘is angry everyday.’ The mum believes that ‘children need to be hit when they do something wrong. It is how they learn.’ Naturally, children learn through love, through praise, through patience, care and kindness yet these dark attitudes still prevail in backward societies like our own one. Money never trickles down and with the social fabric of the state made increasingly bare, a brutal fight for survival invariably ensues along with ideas that should have been banished long ago.
Fagan has her mouth washed out with Fairy Liquid to keep her talking out of turn. As a child from a mobile home – along with the other children from the caravan park – she is called ‘Gypsy Jenny’ by the other schoolchildren. In a class-divided society everyone knows who is better than everyone else. At night she says, ‘I chase memories away at night when I go to sleep.’
There are a couple of aspects that work to save her. She realises she is ‘a shining thing.’ Fagan mentioned this in her novel Hex (2022) set during the North Berwick witch trials of the late sixteenth century. Her main character Geillis Duncan possesses ‘the purest light.’ This light is also possessed by Dr Fagan and many who possess this light seem to ‘attract the most impenetrable darkness.’ The light can be equated with joy, goodness, openness, innocence and all humans can possess this but the forces of darkness, often embodied by men, will seek to snuff this out. A rotten economic system will seek to snuff this out. Trump and Musk will seek to destroy such light just as weak people like Starmer will do nothing to prevent the darkness from taking over. This has been Fagan’s story of her early years, but her light refused to go out and today it shines brightly.
Words are magic
The discovery of words and books played a pivotal role in keeping her inner light on. A library van would come round the caravan park and Fagan would read books and words and this made her realise, ‘I have found a way to escape my world at night… Words are magic.’ She writes poems and keeps them hidden but writing for her becomes ‘alchemical, like moving things slowly with mind control.’
She has trouble at school with others who pick on her. She is told by a precious girl she calls Princess ‘you’re ugly, that’s what you are … adopted, isn’t it?’ Such comments do not snuff out her light. She excels academically and realises, ’There is a light in me that has such force.’ She soon realises, ‘People can be more than we are.’ What a wonderful thing to have realised! If only the state and its politicians realised this how better everyone would be.
A nearby dump to the caravan park would be a place for the children to examine and play. Jenni would play there but the light within her would make ‘walking the dump like a catwalk in Milan wearing haute couture.’
She grew up during what was called the recession. This was the era of Thatcher. Her unknown grandparents would have grown up during the depression and today we label it the cost- of- living crisis. There was no depression and no recession for the rich, and there is no cost-of-living crisis for today’s rich. However, Jenni quickly realises ‘people in poverty are dying while rich people think they are vermin.’
Teachers praised her work. One decent teacher said she would one day ‘go into a bookshop and find a novel with my name on the spine.’ Prophetic words indeed! Books and words open other worlds for her and they change her reality – ‘When I go into a book the unbearable hideousness of life is left behind.’
It is the harsh reality of her life, however, that changes her sense of herself. She is regularly smacked, shouted at and given endless chores. All this makes her realise that ‘when a child is treated too harshly their soul retreats from their body.’ Her treatment also makes her wish she ‘did not have a woman’s body.’ And she fears that she may fall victim to the mental health problems experienced by her mother.
She attempts suicide and even after that her adoptive mother refuses to visit her in hospital because ‘she didn’t want to encourage your behaviour.’ This painful episode leads to further foster placements and she suggests at the tender age of twelve that her ‘childhood is over.’ But Jenni continues to shine despite all that has happened to her. And despite getting picked on at school, she shines and excels in her subjects. In a particularly twisted way her academic prowess is too much for some of her fellow students. You must never shine in any way for some in Scotland, where over 400 years of Calvinism has left an awful mark so that Fagan can say, ’We don’t let people just swan around fucking shining in Scotland.’
Dr Fagan recalls running away. She would hide in the woods and commune with the spirits of nature. She would also sleep in doorways, roundabouts, bushes, graveyards and on the streets of Edinburgh. She loathed others ‘feeling sorry for her.’ She finds herself in court, finds drugs far too easily available and is abused by men. She becomes harder inside herself to cope with everything that has happened to her. None of this is her fault. Never once did anyone ever asked her, ’What can I do for you?’
The state has clearly failed her, neglected her and many others just like her. Jenni becomes a confidante to many of the other young people who are in care. They tell her some tragic stories concerning abuse, incest, a mother on the game, a family living with HIV. All these tragic tales are tales of state neglect also. Her world is full of her own pain and of the pain of others.
Drugs can temporarily ease the pain and act as a salve for a while. Yet the world of drugs is made up not only of pain but of exploitation. It mirrors the society at large. Jenni is lucky to have survived this world and on a few occasions she may not have. She deals drugs and that way she makes money, but there is always a predatory aspect to this world, an exploitative element that is utterly without any sense of empathy or solidarity. Drugs, like everything else in our society, is an individual business of getting and using. And no-one cares about what happens to you on drugs.
The turn to culture
Jenni’s reputation for being hard and tough creates other problems for her. Others want to fight her and others want to see her fight. On one occasion a group of young folk want to set up a fight with Jenni and another girl in care who has a similar reputation for being hard. Jenni meets the girl but realises that any confrontation between them would simply be for the amusement of others. She asks the other girl if she wishes ‘to be the entertainment’ for everyone else and no fight takes place as the other girl realises the wisdom of Jenni’s words.
This episode made Fagan realise the number of children in care she has known ‘who are dead, in prison, on the game, junkied, mental.’ It is a slippery slope for many but Jenni survived. As well as reading she also wrote poetry from the age of seven and this enabled her light to stay on inside her. This helped her shine. And the discovery of what she calls her ‘literary mothers’, women like Nina Simone and Maya Angelou who had similarly troubling earlier lives she could relate to spoke to her of how one can struggle through and shine. Her reading of such work was her own cultural turn. She chose culture and has now become part of culture herself.
Fagan did speak about religion too. When she was having a particularly bad reaction to a cocktail of drugs, she called out to her ‘angels and the ones who met me on the other side last time’ during her attempted suicide. She also speaks of her God as the ‘Primordial Matriarch’ who created everything ’13.9 billion years ago out of a huge explosion of energy.’ And at other parts of her memoir, she shows an interest in wiccan practices. All this shows her attempt to be grounded, to be rooted to something beyond herself because of the defective nature of the state. And every day she would look up at the sky to realise that she was at one with everything else in the universe.
The state represents an officialdom that is uncaring, remote and alien to her. Yet she says, ‘I can hold my own with psychopaths but put me anywhere official … and I close down.’ This is how an uncaring state can estrange us. Even when she turned sixteen and was due to leave care, she tells us she ‘had to apply to be allowed to leave.’ This is the Kafkaesque world she entered on the day she was born. This was her trial.
Fagan chose life and literature, reading and writing. She chose to live ‘as an act of love’ and she chose to ‘always look for beauty.’ As readers we remain grateful for her choices. Yet we must also demand a change in the way our society is run. Fagan askes, ‘Why don’t we write the story where we change the course of human history entirely?’
Right now our government seeks to create growth and more growth. It is a forlorn wish because it only measures growth in economic terms, terms that will benefit those who are already rich but who must have more. The growth that should be sought should be the growth in our people and in our communities. Grow our public services and our people will be nourished by care and they will flourish. This is what will benefit society. A society that places welfare above that of warfare is an intelligent one and a healthy one. Reading Ootlin makes us realise that ‘the course of human history’ has to take an urgent turn in favour of our people and our planet. The light that emanates from Fagan’s words demands nothing less.
