Looking back, a good deal of my younger years seemed to be perched somewhere between if only and my fate. If only my hair was straight, if only my bum was flatter, if only our house was ordinary, if only mum didn’t speak Welsh, if only dad could settle in Wales, if only I lived somewhere else, anywhere, anywhere but here. I often felt just too big for my world, out of place. Suspended on a faultline of creative adaptation, I invented Tessa. Tessa was blonde and white and lovely, and she lived somewhere in my dreamscape. She provided me with a lot of comfort in my small girl days, an escape from an odd reality. This may be a known story by now, the story of rural assimilation, mixed-race psychic angst and adaptation, but in fact the story was never about me, or my escape from being me. It is really a story about Wales.
I grew up in the 1960s in Llandudno in North Wales, a small seaside town that everyone from the northwest has either been to, or will come to, for a day out at least once. A pastel arc of holiday hotels hugs the shoreline in the bay between two slumbering headlands. A town that once attracted the Victorian and Edwardian monied classes and, later, in droves, factory workers from the northern towns with their newfound leisure time, stepping off the steamers on to the longest pier in Wales. The town offered them, among many pleasures, N-word minstrels and other curiosities in en-plein-air concerts in Happy Valley and in its various indoor theatre halls.
This is a town that has ultimately morphed into the perfect retirement spot, a promenade full of white-haireds, sitting on the death benches that memorialise those who came before them. It’s a place where the seagulls and the thrum of the waves sing a fanciful reprieve before the serious mountains that rise up into wild Wales. Not exactly the welcome-in the-hillside Wales, nor the poverty-stricken scar of industrial Wales; not the Welsh-speaking Wales that Owain Glyndwr fought for, not even a place with the distinctive accent of the bustling southern urban centres. Rather, my hometown is that crystalised epitome of the Victorian seaside town, with its seasonal tide of visitors washing in and out, confuddling any sense of an identifiable culture. A place that at one time had seemed to me, well, pointless.
It was always an anomaly to me or, more accurately, I was an anomaly to it. At 10 years old, I hid my difference with style, a loud voice and a sense of fun, just about carrying it off. At 16, I pressed the living daylights out of my hair and learned to manage a discordant shame. And there, in my early 20s, I asked more stridently: “What in God’s name is a Black woman doing here? What am I to do with all this? Why me?” Back then, everything important seemed to be going on elsewhere. Somewhere else a race riot was raging; somewhere else people were sporting protest Afros, somewhere they were writing books, singing and reciting poetry about injustices, making speeches, standing on soap boxes in the epicentre of Black Britain. Somewhere else… troubling on things this part of the map was just too white to care about.
Yet my upbringing was interspersed with spells in Africa and, interestingly, Tessa never came with me. I even went to school in Lagos for a while between the ages of 10 and 12. To-ing and fro-ing, I’d leave the maroon community, to cross the Atlantic and be reunited with the tribe. Then home again to Wales. “We spend whole days out on the decks, hair fuzzy and free, skin colour changing from pale to mellow browns,” is how I describe those sea crossings in my memoir, Sugar and Slate. “And by night we sleep in the belly of the ship lulled to sleep by the hum of the engines and the creaking of the old boat’s aching structure as she rolls with the waves. We are suspended, with the echoes of our forefathers rumbling below.”
Between there and here, here and there, is a place of becoming. My dad, an aspiring young Caribbean artist and academic, full of his own psychic angst, was asking his own questions about diaspora and return to origins; his own questions about how Eurocentrism infected his work, his thinking and who he was – a Black man from an elsewhere place traversing that historic transatlantic triangle, Africa-Wales-Guyana. And there’s Ma, herself a subject of the first internal colony of Empire, teaching us those big words: colonialism, imperialism, cultural theft. She knew why her language and culture were so disparaged and she knew what that does to your soul. She was, after all, Welsh. Oh, the conversations! The conflicts. Tessa, get me out of here!
I saw the two of them lying in bed, two continents side by side, as I put it in my book. I saw the intimacies of Empire and how our private and personal lives refracted those big entanglements of the past. Was my landscape really so devoid of these recurrent intermixings and interminglings? What was this Wales that couldn’t see its place in the world? “Poor old mixed up Wales quite as mixed up as I was,” I write, “confused about where it had been, what it was and where it was going, rapidly rewriting history to make sense of itself as some kind of monolithic whole and it just wasn’t working.”
In this complex of mixedness, I needed to find a way forward and, of course, it was all there, just under the surface, when I started looking. Over the hills in another seaside town, lived John Ystumllyn or “Jac Ddu”. A Welsh-speaking resident of North Wales in the 1700s, likely an ex-slave, he worked as a gardener and married a local woman with whom he had children. A marker for my mind map. The earliest record of a Black gardener in the UK. Today, a rose bearing his name blooms in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. And there, in the 1800s, just along the road from our Llandudno home, a missionary college full of Black boys from the Congo and across Africa quietly getting on with their studies, talking and walking those same seaside streets. Their school would later become the maternity unit where I had my first child. The graves of those boys lost to colds and flu just here, here forever, their story built into the very architecture of the town. And perhaps most stunning, visible across the fields, the magnificent Penrhyn Castle built on the proceeds of sugar plantation slavery and slate-vassalage; a history that connects the sugar countries of my father and the slate-quarrying history of Ma. History matters. History has come to matter. Here is a Wales real to me, to who I was, and who I am, and a Wales I have come to love.
We have a Welsh word for that kind of love, cynefin. A word that conjures the love of attachment to place. Roughly translated, it refers to walking the old sheep trails, the routes and roots of a habitat that is so familiar to you and you to it. A place where you feel you belong, filled with known customs and norms, history and culture. The place of collective memory that has meaning for who you are. It is the place from where you imagine all else, your central point of reference. I would write my way into that Wales and put down a sheep trail for others. I would carve out my cynefin.
Unlike me, today every child in Wales has the opportunity to understand that “black history is Welsh history and Welsh history is black history”, as our first minister has said. They have the opportunity to understand Wales’ connections with slavery and Empire, its colonial entrepreneurs and the ventures of its missionaries that followed in their tracks, its migrations out and its migrations in. And all schoolchildren, irrespective of their background, will be enriched by these stories that are part of their cynefin.
So yes, my cynefin is right here and ever changing. As I have said, my cynefin is a place where histories collide, where Babel sets the language tone, where often unremembered Black people appear from the past, pop up and ask questions of the present, where the line of a song jars with those of other lands in new syncretic tones and where surprises appear that beckon new sites of recognition. A boy dancing in the crowd with just the hint of an African movement, the light-skinned Black woman with the freckled skin that signals our tribe of mixed heritage, and the sun pulling out the floral coconut smells of the gorse and glimmers of the Caribbean colours, in that very familiar Welsh way. The signs are all there if you look for them, in the land, the soil and in the shared memories.
Sugar and Slate by Charlotte Williams (published by Penguin as part of its Black Britain: Writing Back Series, £9.99) is available from guardianbookshop.com for £8.36
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