Like the donkey in the Aesop fable, the US-Scottish writer Deborah
Moffatt speaks a language 'sharp and barbed'. She knows it is 'better
to eat thistles' than 'to survive in a nation born of vanity.' And that
those who close borders, soon turn against their own, 'maddened by
power, powered by madness.'
Drawing on Scottish and Irish Gaelic poetry and other literary and folk
traditions, Eating Thistles transplants, transforms and re-imagines
contemporary and historical events through Aesopian language, slipping
between history, myth and memory - Syria, St Kilda, the Sudan, Latin
American dictadura and the mass-executions by the SS of Soviet Jews,
Roma and prisoners of war. Eating Thistles is a powerful and original
study of guilt, denial, innocence and complicity.