Crossing the bar: deep maps as soul retrieval
In November 2011 Adam Price, leader of Plaid Cymru and current Assembly Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr gave a lecture for the Welsh Political Institute in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. His lecture was titled, Wales the first and final colony and opened with the following words, “We are a hybrid state living in the cracks between a dependent past and an independent future.”[1] In her work Metamorphosis and identity Caroline Walker Bynum questions the usefulness of the hybrid as a concept in that it often represents a hopeless rhetorical attempt to free ourselves from the trap of, ‘this or that’ that we have adopted. Instead she argues, “What we need to think with are not images of monsters or hybrids, creatures of twoness or threeness, stuck together from our own sense of the incompatibility of aspiration and situation, culture and genes, mind and body. What we need are metaphors and stories that will help us imagine a world in which we really change yet really remain the same thing.”[2]
When I first applied for my PhD my thesis proposal was titled Wrth adael yr ynys (tr. On leaving the island). When the work was finished it went by the title Croesi’r Bar (tr. Crossing the bar). This simple phrase had multiple associations one of which I discovered attending the Sir Thomas Parry-Williams memorial lecture at the National Library of Wales in May 2011 where Professor Daniel Williams quoted from R. S. Thomas’ poem Welcome,
“…You can walk this country
From end to end;
But you won’t be inside;
You must stop at the bar,
The old bar of speech.”
Here the ‘bar’ is the bar of the Welsh language as a barrier to belonging fully to Wales. A further literary reference for the phrase comes from Tennyson's poem In Memoriam which I had studied as part of my undergraduate course Background to Modern Theology. In Memoriam is an elegy for the loss of his young friend Arthur Hallam. In that poem the phrase is a metaphor for death. Crossing the bar also refers to a geographical feature familiar to those sailing out of Cardigan. Leaving the river to join the sea requires the crossing of a bed of potentially dangerous sand sediments an impossible and perilous task on the wrong tide. My grandfather was a keen sailor. I had always suffered from sea sickness.
In April 2011 I wrote an essay for the Welsh language magazine Tu Chwith which outlined my desire to create a deep map of the Ceredigion coastal path. The article included a picture of my grandfather (the husband of the woman who came from Catterick) with the following words: “This is my grandfather, Thomas Hugh Jenkins and his sisters on Penbryn beach in 1930. He is seven years old. He comes from a middle class family living in the Handsworth area of Birmingham. In the summer, the whole family travels by train to Aberystwyth and then hires a car to drive them to their holiday home, a farm near the beach on the Ceredigion coast called Cnwc-yr-Hyglyn.” [3] Halfway through the second year of my doctorate, I was still hoping to complete this mapping project for which I had definite plans. I wanted it to be an extended reflection on the experiences of English families who had migrated to Ceredigion in the 1950s buying vacant farms, just as my own grandparents had done. I set to walking the path starting in Cardigan, the town where I was born, walking northwards past Cardigan island through Aberporth, on to New Quay, through Llansantffraed the place I lived when I was writing my thesis and finishing at Ynyslas. As I walked, my mind turned often to McLucas’ experience as he moved to Wales in the ninety seventies. How did his experience of being an incomer to West Wales and his experience of making a living as a cultural producer in that place relate to the work that he had made?
The third chapter of McLucas' proposed book, The Host and the Ghost was titled, 'I am Here on False Pretences'. The title referred to a performed lecture that he had developed in the year preceding the development of his book proposal. The lecture included the voices of other performers though the words were scripted by McLucas himself. In the book the lecture was to be transformed into, “An essay that examines the extensive use of technologies in the works of Brith Gof…and seeks to arrive at an understanding of the deep implications for the nature of live performance within a new and developing ‘digital’ realm…”[4]. In the lecture McLucas considers how the use of technologies such as film and audio recordings change the nature of live performance due to the ability to include external material.
McLucas’ engagement with the developing digital realm was carried further through his development of a form he referred to as a deep map. His first practical deep-mapping experiments were made at the the Oerol arts festival on the island of Terschelling in Frisland[5] following an invitation from the festival’s director. When the original performance work he pitched for the festival was declined McLucas suggested an idea which had its roots in an ambitious broadcast aerial mapping project he had pitched to S4C around the same time. Earste Dagen / The Thirteen Lines [6] (2000) was to include an aerial video survey of Terschelling, a recording of a wild soundtrack from five different locations on the island, an interview with the island's oldest man and a series of digital graphic landscape images mounted in a room-sized installation occupying a former World War II bunker on the island itself.
In an interview for a local news programme about the installation, McLucas proposed the following explanation for his project, ‘We are trying to find ways of portraying places and people with multimedia technologies . . . using video, using still photography, using sound we can mix these things digitally in order to make very “deep” maps of places, very rich maps of places.’ He goes on to suggest a further significance to the project which focuses on language, ‘In fifty years or a hundred years time . . . maybe the language will have changed, for sure it would have changed I would think, and that’s why it’s exciting for us to make a portrait of this point at this time.’[7]
In a presentation about the project McLucas commented on the process of getting hold of Terschelling’s oldest man, “Joop (the festival director) had chosen an old man called Arie Buren for the interview and had sent Sunke off to record him. I had asked for the interviewee to be a Fris speaker – and he was – but unfortunately the interviewer wasn’t. So she interviewed him for perhaps an hour and he replied to her in Dutch.”[8] McLucas resolved to use the interview but presented it as a body of visual material alone so that despite his intention to record the minority language on Terschelling his final product prioritized the visual at the expense of language.
At the start of the performed lecture, I am here on false pretences, McLucas pronounces, “…Welsh speaking women, as far as I can see, hold the key to a more intelligent and advanced cultural practice. I remind you that I am here on false pretences. I am neither Welsh nor am I a woman.”[9] The title of the lecture, and these words reveal a degree of uncertainty about the authority of the speaker (McLucas himself) in a kind of rhetorical self-effacement.
The writer Jane Miller in her work Women writing about men asserts that though bilingualism is an asset to secure its acquisition is not without pain for, "it necessarily involves splits and instabilities, impersonation, and stepping out of oneself." [10] Miller bases her argument on studies she has made in London schools demonstrating a powerful awareness of the psychological effects of bilingualism that can lead to, 'a damaging dividedness' if the process is not discussed, shared and understood, by children in particular. In an interview with a teenage girl with Spanish speaking parents, Miller notes the girl's assertion that her existence between two languages can be painful. The girl refers to returning to London after a period in Spain, “when you start getting used to it you have to come back here and it’s like death…So I think I’ll stay halfway…but you have to sort of sacrifice yourself”[11].
In a collection of essays titled, Witness Literature Herta Muller writes about her relationship with the German language and her experience of growing up as a minority German speaker living in communist Romania. She talks about the process of learning a second language, the Romanian language in terms of a foreign language,
“We gain our mother tongue without much effort. It is a dowry that emerges unnoticed and is judged by a language that is acquired later and in a different way. From then on, the mother tongue is no longer the sole repository for objects, the only measure of things...Our mother tongue is immediately and unconditionally like our own skin. And it is just as easily hurt if it is disrespected, disregarded, or even banned.”[12]
Muller's words emphasize the depth of feeling associated with language acquisition. She states: “I never loved my mother tongue because it was better, but merely because it was the most familiar.”[13]
In the margins of his sketchbook for Prosiect Ogam: a deep map of the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path, his last deep mapping project, McLucas muses frequently on how to include or represent his own presence within the work he is producing. In the same prospectus he goes on to refer to the Welsh language as a ‘foreign’ language:
“those of us who live and work in Wales know full well that there is indeed a living and, in British terms, a ‘foreign’ language and a culture or cultures that are quite distinct. But these things are never portrayed at a deeper level than a somewhat totemistic list of Welsh nouns and their English translations, together with a passing mention of poetry, eisteddfod and chapel.”[14]
According to Donna Harraway, "Language is not about description, but about commitment." [15] In re-writing McLucas’ book in the Welsh language I found a way of highlighting the relationship between his status and his experience as an incomer to Wales to his work in general. In taking on this task, I found a form that allowed me to discuss his work and his experience as manifest in his archive, using my own performance work informed by my experience as the child of incomers, as the basis for that interpretation. As a result, I was able to fuse my own, and McLucas', creative work into a process of critical, academic writing which offered a written record of McLucas's work that took seriously the minority culture to which he committed himself throughout his career as a cultural producer in Wales. In addition, I was able to document the experience of the British incomer who learnt to speak Welsh. The form that allowed me to record that experience was itself a deep map.
In 2006 when I left Wales and moved to London to pursue an M.A. in Performance Making I carried in my grey rucksack, [16] a photocopy of a page from Ned Thomas's book, The Welsh Extremist containing the following extract:
The home ground is the best place to make a stand, because one needs a greater strength and a greater hope…one needs rich traditions of courage and resourcefulness, the support that literature and turns of speech can give one, and even places…Here one can hope to live one’s resistance out with a spring in the step and with a laugh; here one may manage to bring off a small victory for humanity everywhere; and here, if it had to be, would be the best place to die. [17]
During one of the course's practical workshops I was invited to use a text as material to develop a 'solo' performance work. I decided to use Thomas's words which attracted and troubled me in equal measure - having just buried my grandfather after a long illness I did not want to die, I wanted to live - I had a desire for life. McLucas’ text I was invited to this island concludes with the phrase, ‘the future of technology is desire’.[18] Frantz Fanon writes when I desire, “I am asking to be considered”.[19]. Donna Harraway in her work Simians, Cyborgs and Women writes, “the book is appropriate technology”.[20]
My full thesis can be read at the National Library of Wales:
https://discover.library.wales/permalink/f/1norb00/44NLW_ALMA21848455270002419
An electronic copy is also available from the Coleg Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Porth Adnoddau
Selected articles based on the PhD here:
http://www.gwerddon.cymru/cy/rhifynnau/rhifyn17/erthygl2/
https://www.planetmagazine.org.uk/planet-online/223/welsh-keywords-cymysgrywedd
Footnotes
[1] Adam Price, Wales, the First and Final Colony 2009 Lecture, International Politics Department, Aberystwyth, p. 1.
[2] Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and identity (New York; Zone Books, 2001), p. 188[1] Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Brith Gof Collection, G2/14, McLucas Book Proposal, The Host and the Ghost.
[3] Rowan O’Neill, ‘Y Lle Dewisom? Plannu gwreiddiau, claddu gwreiddiau, mapiau dwfn’ yn Tu Chwith 34 Gwanwyn (2011), t. 68.
[4] Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Brith Gof Collection, G2/14, McLucas Book Proposal, The Host and the Ghost.
[5] Terschelling is the Dutch name for the island whilst it’s name in Frisian is Skylge.
[6] Earste Dagen means the first days in Dutch.
[7] Terschelling Interview, uncatalogued video tape, Cliff McLucas Collection, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.
[8] Cliff McLucas, I was invited to this island, Performed Lectures, Cliff McLucas Collection, MCL5, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.
[9] Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Cliff McLucas Collection, MCL5/4, quote from the multimedia lecture, I am Here on False Pretences McLucas presented in a seminar at Lampeter University in 1998.
[10] Jane Miller, Women writing about men (London: Virago, 1986), p. 17.
[11] Miller, Many Voices: Bilingualism, culture and education, p. 24.
[12] Herta Muller, ‘When we don’t speak, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves. Can literature bear witness’ yn Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium gol. gan Horace Engdhal (London: World Scientific Publishing, 2002) pp. 23-24.
[13] Ibid., p. 24.
[14] Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Cliff McLucas Collection, MP2/1, Project Ogam, p. 5.
[15] Donna Harraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the reinvention of nature (London: Fress Association, 1991), p. 214.
[16] Eurohike, Wilderness, 20 litre capacity.
[17] Ned Thomas, The Welsh Extremist, (Tal-y-bont, Lolfa, 1978), p. 29.
[18] Cliff McLucas, I was invited to this island, Performed Lectures, Cliff McLucas Collection, MCL5, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.
[19] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks p. 170 http://abahlali.org/files/__Black_Skin__White_Masks__Pluto_Classics_.pdf
[20] Donna Harraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the reinvention of nature (London: Fress Association, 1991), p.