My birthday wish for 'banned' Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht

Lloyd Smith

It’s my birthday on Monday. Frankly, the prospect of celebrating another year passing fills me with existential dread. There comes a moment in every life when you realise that no-one lives forever. That summers are not endless, that death is not just a trope beloved of writers, but the inevitable end to a life, your life, my life.

Death has been the recurring theme of my summer. My mother died suddenly in June, followed within days by the death of one of my closest friends. For weeks now, I have been immersed in the detritus of death. Emptying a cottage packed full of 80-plus years of trinkets and books. So many books. Arguing with insurance companies. Reminiscing over too many gin and tonics.

Lloyd Smith

Then just as I was finding some balance between grief and joy at the unexpected sunshine, I found myself plunged into a national controversy over a book I had conceived and edited with Lucy Hunter Blackburn. The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by 34 women, was excluded from the National Library’s centenary exhibition Dear Library, despite winning a place, after the National Librarian, Amina Shah, deemed it too risky to be on public display.

The row even made the latest edition of Private Eye, where I was described as a “perma-polite veteran journalist”. My husband, used to my swearing and ill-temper, was bemused by “perma-polite”. “It’s satire,” he concluded. I was personally offended by “veteran” until I realised that is exactly what I am. Old. I may feel little different to the teenager who played Bowie’s Rebel, Rebel for hours at a time, much to the consternation of my mother, but I am old. I have a bus pass. And high blood pressure.

The book’s exclusion, and the furore surrounding it, has affected me deeply. Far more than I anticipated when Lucy and I first discovered that our work, and the voices of the women who wouldn’t wheesht, had been silenced. On a personal level, I feel robbed of a defining moment in my career, one that I will never have a chance of repeating. Like Ms Shah, books and libraries have been central to my life. As a child living in rural poverty. As a young, single mother in Wester Hailes. As a writer who had her first book published in her sixties. To have my work on public display in the mothership of libraries would have been unthinkable when I was packing supermarket shelves. To have won a place in the National Library’s landmark exhibition, only to have the opportunity snatched from me, is heartbreaking.

My repudiation by a hugely successful woman was reminiscent of the mean girls at school who bullied me because I was too poor and too clever. It reminded me of social security staff who looked down at me because I needed benefits to feed my children. It had echoes of the Edinburgh establishment figures who treated me like an alien creature, even when I was a leading councillor, because I lived in a housing scheme. The rejection was personal and it hurts.

But my sorrow goes far beyond my own feelings of being ostracised. It is for every woman and girl who has been ignored, her voice silenced, her potential suppressed. My grandmothers. My mother. Girls today who are victims of the education attainment gap our government doesn’t understand and seems helpless to fix. Girls in Africa, denied an education because their mother has no money. Women in Afghanistan who cannot speak in public for fear of punishment.

Women who wouldn't wheesht | contributed

Amina Shah spent some of her childhood in a council flat in Wester Hailes. I may even have seen her as a young child when she visited the library in Sighthill, on the edge of the estate. And it was for children like her that, as a councillor in the 1990s, I campaigned for a library in Wester Hailes. It opened its doors in 1997. She understands adversity. The need to have your voice heard. She claims to understand the rights of women.

When she gave a lecture at Edinburgh University last year to mark International Women's Day (IWD), she contemplated her upcoming 50th birthday through the stories of women who had inspired her, of women who had broken barriers and defied expectations. She spoke with passion of how women in her family used books, libraries and education for their liberation.

She listed the writers who had inspired generations of women: Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath, Jeanette Winterson. She spoke of her memories of the green spines of Virago Press books, of the “many ways to tell the story of being a woman.” And she argued that "we must urgently support women's rights organisations...battling to make women and girls' voices heard."

Yet Amina Shah decided that a book, one written by women desperate to have their own voices heard and who felt an urgent need to speak up for those women and girls denied a voice, was too much of a risk to the national library’s reputation to be put on public display. Too ‘harmful’ to her staff to be given its rightful place.

Shah describes the National Library as an “oasis, open and welcoming to all, where stories are shared and new stories are written”. But only for those women whose views chime with those of the ruling elite, it seems.

In her IWD lecture, Amina Shah said she “loves birthdays, my own and everyone else’s”. All I want for my birthday is for the Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht to be put back in the Dear Library exhibition, where it belongs. But I fear I will be disappointed on Monday morning.

She finished her talk with this assertion: “when we [women] stand together, we are stronger”. Here's your chance Ms Shah to stand in solidarity with your sisters. To live the words you use so glibly. Do you have the courage?