New notes for an old Manifesto…

In February 2021 I was invited to give a workshop as part of Oriel Myrddin’s National Lottery Funded project Hoelion Wyth / Pillars of Society looking at public memorials and commemoration in Carmarthen.  This work has coincided with my gaining a place on a mentoring scheme with the creative agency Addo and the prospect of researching and developing a new project. Whilst I have the opportunity to think about the new, these monuments seem initially to be pulling me back to old work.  Or perhaps it is an opportunity to reflect on the seam that holds it all together.

The workshop for Hoelion Wyth will explore the role of the artist in public commemoration through consideration of the Gorsedd Stones in Carmarthen Park and the plaque erected in 2016 commemorating the election of Gwynfor Evans in 1966 as the first Plaid Cymru MP.  I have touched on these things before in my work and writing, firstly in a manifesto I wrote as part of my MA in Performance Making in 2007 for a module titled Radical Performance.  I was writing then to answer an essay question: 

The writing of manifestos has been a characteristic of much avant garde artistic practice throughout the 20th century to the present. With reference to the artistic and critical sources, socio-political events/or personal experiences that have influenced your ideas, write your own manifesto for Radical Performance in the 21st century.

Throughout the module I had been increasingly irritated by the anglocentric nature of the performance work cited to illustrate and explain radical performance something I sought to redress in my own manifesto which was dated the 23rd April and started like this:

St. George’s Day: I don’t want to change the world, I’m not looking for a new England

“All passionate language does of itself become musical – with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a woman even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song.” Thomas Carlyle

a) 1977 – No future: Sod the Jubilee 

I was born in Wales. I was born in the country. According to Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society Country has two different meanings in modern English: a native land or the agricultural part of it.  This dialectic can only be resolved through international socialism.

I was born, Elvis died. Elvis’ death coincided with a high point of the Welsh cultural year, Eisteddfod week.

The Eisteddfod is a festival peculiar to Wales celebrating literature, music and performance. The name derives from the verb eistedd – to sit and reflects the central ceremony of the occasion, the chairing of the winning bard or poet. This traditional meeting of Welsh artists is traditionally dated back to 1176 when Rhys ap Gruffydd, ruler of the Kingdom of Deheubarth, held his court in Aberteifi/Cardigan. I was born in Cardigan/Aberteifi.

We don’t translate Eisteddfod. This is an example of code-switching.5 We do translate Aberteifi.

Footnote

5 “Untranslated Welsh words or phrases used in Welsh writing in English serve as synechdochic signifiers of difference and – potentially – of absence, while they may also work to undermine the balance of power between dominant or more or less subaltern languages.” Bohata, K, Postcolonialism Revisited, p.126

What followed was a fairly irreverent romp through selected episodes of Welsh history starting not inconsequentially with a walk made by Iolo Morgannwg:

b) 1792- From Primrose Hill to Penglais Hill

In 1792 Iolo Morgannwg walked up Primrose Hill in London with a group of cymrodorion (tr. Comrades). Their intention was to re-enact a ceremony that according to Iolo was based on the activities of the ancient druids dating back to the time of Christ. This re-instatement of the Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain (Community of Bards of Briton) was adopted in 1819 by the Eisteddfod and remains, to this day, its ceremonial hub. The leader of the Gorsedd is called the Archdderwydd/Archdruid. Incumbents have sometimes used the position to make political statements.

The politician Gwynfor Evans figured as not much more than a footnote in my manifesto, a footnote which read:

40 Plaid Cymru is the Welsh Nationalist Party in Wales. Gwynfor Evans was their first elected MP in 1966. He was a committed Christian and a pacifist and declared himself a conscientious objector in the Second World War. He was born in Barry and did not learn to speak Welsh until adulthood. He came fourth in the poll 100 Welsh Heroes. 

100 Welsh Heroes was an internet poll created in 2003 by Culturenet Cymru a not-for-profit company, based at the National Library of Wales and funded by the Welsh Assembly. My manifesto in fact gave more air time to this poll than Carmarthen’s 1966 bi-election. The poll was the flagship project of Culturenet Cymru who had been set up with the aim of promoting and increasing knowledge relating to the history of Wales in an online setting. The poll was used to launch the organisation and was conceived in response to the BBCs 100 Great Britons poll of 2002. The poll offered the opportunity for the public to vote for their favourite Welsh hero from a selection of one hundred names. Heroes included politicians, writers, artists and musicians amongst others.

The poll was won by Labour MP and founder of the National Health Service, Aneurin Bevan. Medieval Prince, Owain Glyndwr, leader of the last credible rebellion in Wales against the English crown came a close second.

Iolo Morgannwg came 81st in the poll which dubbed him ‘Wales’ greatest ever faker’. The historian Geraint Jenkins, who spent much of his life researching Iolo Morgannwg once said in a television documentary on S4C exploring the stone mason’s life, ‘without Iolo there’d be nothing’.

My manifesto continued:

Felinwynt, Aberteifi: Portrait of the artist as a young farmer

I was born in Cardigan and raised on a farm in Felinwynt, West Wales. My childhood experience was pastoral, bucolic, agricultural, of the countryside, and surrounded by nature; Welsh and not Welsh. As an agriculturalist my world was dominated by cows and everything smelt of manure or fermented grass.

The farm on which I was raised was owned by my grandparents and worked by my parents. My mother was Anglo-Welsh, born in Shrewsbury and raised on a farm near Cardigan. My father was Anglo-Irish born in London and raised in the Cromwelian stronghold called St Ives (East Anglia). They met at agricultural college. She had land, he didn’t. He was a Digger.

I didn’t speak Welsh at home but I learnt in school. I also learnt Welsh folk songs including one about a horny sheep that had a great weight of fleece. This I sang at a local Eisteddfod. I didn’t win. At home I sang Irish rebel songs. My father cried whenever we played a particular record which had a photograph of a beach in Galway on the cover.

In Primary school I was English but I didn’t realize it mattered then. In Secondary school I was Irish, this seemed to help. At one of the most important institutions of the Anglocentric hegemony of Britain I was finally Welsh.

Working in libraries the length and breadth of Wales I read feminist texts and discarded all faith in national boundaries. I returned to the countryside and became a fluent welsh speaker.

The weight of history is too much for one person to bear. A literal translation of eisteddfod would be to sit and be (fod mutated from bod).

My manifesto explored the weight of Welsh history as it seemed to bare on my experience at that point in time from the Last Invasion at Fishguard to the Rebecca Riots, the treachery of the Blue Books, Dai Jones’ Cefn Gwlad and Iolo Williams’ Wild Wales. All was framed by Raymond Williams’ work the Country and the City where he states,  “the model of the city and the country, in economic and political relations, has gone beyond the boundaries of the nation state…what was happening in the ‘city’, the ‘metropolitan economy, determined and was determined by what was made to happen in the ‘country’: first the local hinterland and then the vast regions beyond it, in other people’s lands…one of the last models of the ‘city and the country’ is the system we now know as imperialism.”[1]  This understanding of the relationship between the country and the city, Wales and England reflected the cultural imperialism I saw being played out in my MA Module Radical Performance.

In my manifesto I proposed the term radical pastoral as a descriptor for my work citing the definition of pastoral as the name given to a type of stage work from the 15th to 18th century which was a forerunner to the opera. Pastoral included music and ballet in the portrayal of a rural subject and usually a mythological element - a musical play based on a rustic story. My hope was to define my own work which was developing around the live a cappella singing of folk songs as soundtrack to bucolic video imagery and simple performed actions as radical performance. The manifesto became the basis for a performance lecture which I presented on route home to West Wales from London after completing my MA. The performance was called Cerdded Adre: The Long Walk Home.

The performance appeared to be the organic next step of the manifesto itself, an act of self-foundation and self-creation in the fashioning of the future. Political manifestos are instances of performative speech in the sense used by A. L. Austin and designed to leave their traces on history because of their theatricality.[2] During my lecture tour I was particularly struck by a comment from one audience member who seemed surprised at my presenting my own life experience in relation to the life and thought of such public male intellectual figures as Iolo Morgannwg and Raymond Williams. If the roots of a postcolonial study of Wales can be traced to the work of Raymond Williams, Kirsti Bohata’s Postcolonialism Revisited: Writing Wales in English expands and explores the implications and contradictions of articulating Welsh identity in the shadow of cultural imperialism whilst acknowledging the added complexities of sex, ethnicity and class. Complexities brought out by the following section of my manifesto:

d) 1847 – Brad y Llyfrau Gleision: Cof y Corff

Whilst Marx sat in the British Library writing about serfs and the proletariat a report into the state of education in Wales was published. This document later became known as The Treachery of the Blue Books partly because of its blue binding. The report was used to support the erasure of the cultural and specifically, linguistic difference of Wales. [3]

“Welsh Nationalism has focused on resisting the cultural imperialism of England, with political autonomy regarded as a means to securing and protecting Welsh cultural difference. It is this cultural imperialism and the resistance to its organizing principles that form the axis of a postcolonial study of the literature and/or history of the Welsh”. [4]

In condemning not only the state of education in Wales, but the morality of the nation as a whole, the Blue Books report focused on the role of women, in particular as the moral guardians of the nation.

The following text about the effects of the Blue Books report are taken from the programme notes for the live work Cof y Corff/Muscle Memory, subtitled an essay on foot featuring dance, music and text, set in a digital environment performed by Welsh artist Eddie Ladd:

“Conflating language, retardation and immorality and fixated with the bodies of Welsh women, the report has a profound effect on behaviour. All of its claims were denied – then most of its recommendations were carried out. The Welsh language was driven out of schools, so maybe it is here that we see the beginnings of the bitter divisions between the rural and urban working classes.”

My journey home in 2007 started on Primrose Hill at the spot that Iolo Morgannwg’s original bardic ceremony had taken place. There is now a plaque inlaid in the ground commemorating Iolo’s actions. My journey concluded at a milk stand in Felinwynt at the entrance to the farm Rhos y Gadair Uchaf, where I grew up. In making that journey and writing my manifesto I was trying to find my place, voice and cultural space within a devolving United Kingdom and a post devolution Wales. The milk stand stood at the end of a lane a place where the private world of the family met the public realm of the community, the market and the world. My manifesto also included a reflection on the aboriginal experience of time:

k) Time immemorial - Radical pastoral: the nomad and song

Aboriginal people do not perceive time as an exclusively ‘linear’ category (i.e. past, present and future) and often place events in a ‘circular’ pattern of time according to which an individual is in the centre of ‘time-circles’ and events are placed in time according to their relative importance for the individual and his or her respective community (i.e. the more important events are perceived as being closer in time). [5]

Aboriginal people are nomads. Nomos is Greek for pasture. They move from pasture to pasture. Theirs are not the concepts of imperial national boundaries or the division between the country and the city. For the aboriginal songs not things are the principal medium of exchange. [6]

“Aboriginal songlines are intricate series of song cycles that identify landmarks and subtle tracking mechanisms for navigation. These songs often evoke how the features of the land were created and named...An interesting feature of the paths is that, as they span the lands of several different language groups, different parts of the song are said to be in those different languages. Thus the whole song can only be fully understood by a person speaking all the relevant languages.” [7]

My manifesto concluded with this series of pledges:

a)  My work includes an element of code-switching. Code-switching necessitates speaking in different languages. 

b)  To fake is to create; to create is to fake. 

c) I will endeavour to play the goat

ch) I will walk everywhere. 

d) I am a woman. 

dd) I will use the terms radical pastoral/pastorale when discussing my work. 

e)  I will cross dress. 

f)  I will cite Eddie Ladd as a key influence on my work. 

ff) I will seek out flat bed trailers for use as performance spaces. 

g) I will not fetishise Wales or the countryside.
ng) I will explore identity through song.

h)  I will nourish myself and others. 

i)  I will not be afraid to fall on my arse. 

l) I will present myself in performance. 

I have titled my workshop for the Hoelion Wyth project, ‘From National Eisteddfod to A National Future for Wales’. A National Future for Wales is the title of a book written by Gwynfor Evans setting out the argument for Welsh independence in English. It was published in 1975.

[1] Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), t. 278.

[2] A.L. Austin, How to do things with words, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), t. 6

[3]Bohata, K. Postcolonialism Revisited: Writing Wales in English, p. 60

[4]Bohata, K. Op cit. p. 9

[5] Aleksander Janca, Clothilde Bullen (2003) The Aboriginal concept of time and its mental health implications Australasian Psychiatry 11 (s1), S40-S44

[6] Chatwin, B. The Songlines, p.64

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songlines 19th April 2007. Wikipedia is a virtual encyclopedia that gathers the voices of different people in order to establish a common truth.

Bibliography

Bohata, K. Postcolonialism Revisited: Writing Wales in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004).

Ladd, E. Programme notes, Cof y Corff/Muscle Memory, Eddie Ladd, Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, February 2007

Puchner, M. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, manifestos and the Avant Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Williams, R. The Country and the City (Oxford: OUP, 1973).

Williams, R. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (Oxford: OUP, 1983).

28 January 2021