ABSTRACT
The above quote is taken from The Diviners (1989), a novel by the Canadian writer of Scots-Irish descent, Margaret Laurence, in which Morag, the heroine of the book, makes a journey from Manitoba to the Scottish Highlands, the old country from which her ancestors had emigrated. Laurence describes a quest to a place that had been imagined long before even the possibility of visiting it could be conceived of. The shock of discovering that that iconic site of Highland identity, Culloden, actually exists, ‘in the external world’, outside of Morag’s personal imaginings and the cultural narratives which give rise to them, is a profound one; equivalent, perhaps, to the ‘peak experience’ described by Alex Haley in his seminal family saga, Roots, after journeying to his ancestral home in the ‘back country of black West Africa’ – ‘that which emotionally, nothing in your life ever transcends’ (Haley 1991: 676).1
