'Eadar a’ Chlach is an Sgrath: ‘Òran Anyox’ mar òran in-imrich is às-imrich taobh siar Chanada' ('Between the Rock and the Turf: 'Song of Anyox' as an immigration and out-migratoin song from the Canadian West')

In this paper from the bi-annual Scottish Gaelic conference series "Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig 6" ("Gaelic Research 6"), the author examines a never-before published Gaelic song-poem composed/written in the Canadian west and collected by the author from Gaelic-speaking Canadian informants in the 1990s. The song-poem is remarkable in that it enacts the tri-partite moves of emigration/immigration from the Western Isles in the 1920s to Western Canadian prairie homesteads; then an act of out-migration from the prairies to the west coast of British Columbia; and final a projected return migration event back to the Glasgow metropolitan centre (second city of Empire) the speaker sees as his final destination. By using recent theories of 'ecriture migrante' and migration studies in general, the author sujbects 'Òran Anyox' to a close critical reading bolstered by the above critical apparatuses and buttressed by the work of Harold Innis concerning staple colonial economies in empires and the pull and push of centre-periphery modules of migration studies in general. The paper is written in Gaelic.