In Debatable Lands - an unsettled settler?

In 2007 having just completed an MA in Performance Making I was invited to respond to an artist’s book called In Debatable Lands.  Written in epistolary form the book is a collaboration between artists Iain Biggs, Jane Miller, Samira Abbassy and Gary Peters, and a mixture of text, images and songs with the understanding that, ‘…new arrangements of songs, images and texts and our reflections on these can generate an understanding that unsettles our categorical sense of self.[1] The broad theme of the book is the area of land between England and Scotland known as the debatable land and a collection of ‘border ballads’ that relate to it.  The book explores the way these songs, chiefly characterised by turbulence and melancholy, have been dispersed and transformed as they’ve migrated in particular to North America. The book offers an extended reflection on identity and disrupted senses of self in relation to place.  

In his 1975 book A National Future for Wales Gwynfor Evans states, ‘As a nation the history of Wales starts with the age of the saints’.[2] It was about this time that the earliest surviving literature in the Welsh language was composed one such example being a poem by Aneirin dating back to the sixth century. Y Gododdin is set in the North of England and opens with the words Gwyr a aeth Gatraeth (tr. men went to Catterick). Y Gododdin refers to a battle that took place in the sixth century at a time when a proto-Welsh speaking people still occupied the western seaboard of Britain as far north as Edinburgh.  Y Gododdin commemorates as heroes men from the Brythonic Kingdom of Gododdin, slaughtered fighting the invading Angles at a place named Catraeth (widely considered to be modern day Catterick).  According to one section of the poem of the three hundred that go into battle only one returns.  The Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting termed Y Gododdin a ‘grim elegy’[3].  

The work I created for In Debatable Lands was a short film. In describing this film for the benefit of a festival programme shortly after its making I gave the following explanation as to its content: “As a person born and educated in Wales and imbued with a knowledge of Welsh language culture the book In debatable lands immediately bought the heroic epic Y Gododdin to mind.”  In truth what the book In Debatable Lands bought to mind was a particular re-inscription of that poem undertaken in the late nineteen eighties; a collaboration between the Welsh performance company Brith Gof and the London based industrial music collective Test Department.  

Brith Gof’s Gododdin was originally staged in the abandoned rover factory in Cardiff and subsequently toured around other post-industrial sites in Europe.  It was a visceral re-interpretation of the poem juxtaposing a literal performance of the defeated warriors physical exertions with Aneirin’s text (sung by Lis Hughes Jones, a founding member of the company).  Though popular the work was not without criticism. When the performance toured to Germany it was accused of glorifying war whilst back home in Wales, despite the Welsh subject matter, there was a sense that the company had lost touch with its grass roots in the Welsh speaking communities of the rural west. Without this production however, I doubt the poem would have gained quite the foot-hold it had in my psyche. 

The film I created in response to In Debatable Lands was accompanied by my own short epistolary text addressed to the book’s editor:

Dear Iain,

I want to share a part of my family history with you as it connects with the region that holds your debatable land and points toward my own.  Let me start with a photograph.

This is a photograph of my Grandmother. She is working for the Ministry of Agriculture during the Second World War, advising farmers as to the best use of their land in time of military conflict.  My Grandmother was born during the conflict referred to as the Great War.  She was brought up on a tenant farm just outside Catterick, North Yorkshire, called Lingy Moor.  In 1953 she moved to rural west Wales.

When I was about 8 my Grandmother had taught me how to skin a rabbit.  The implement she used was a small hand-held axe.  The event is imprinted on my memory because of the incongruous use of weaponry for what apparently amounted to a domestic chore.

In August 2008 I travelled to Berlin to undertake a residency in a gallery where I had proposed to make a performance based around the idea of skinning a rabbit.  I took with me the suitcase my grandmother received for her 21st birthday and her kitchen knife.

In Berlin I dressed as a soldier and standing next to a pile of 300 carrots chopped two hundred and ninety nine of them.

Whilst working on my response to In Debatable Lands I had applied for a residency in Berlin with a proposal to explore the commemoration and memorialisation of war. In August 2008 I travelled to Berlin to undertake that residency in the gallery Art Claims Impulse which culminated in the durational carrot chopping performance described above. As I chopped the carrots I sang a song from the First World War, the time my grandmother was born, Let the Great Big World Keep Turning with the opening line, “If I knew that someone cared for me I’d let the world go by”.  Was I an Angle whilst I sang?

The farm my Grandmother first moved to Treleddyn Uchaf was in Bridell, North Pembrokeshire. In Bridell she attended the local church it being a short walk from the farm.  In 1962 she and her family moved to Rhos-y-gadair uchaf, Felinwynt, South Ceredigion.  In Felinwynt she tried to attend the local chapel, again a short walk from the end of the farm lane.  Family anecdote recalls she was discouraged from attending but her children were not.  She did not send her children to chapel. In 1956, just as my Grandmother was settling in Wales a protest took place in Liverpool.  The protest was in opposition to the building of the Tryweryn dam and the subsequent flooding of the Tryweryn valley.  This would result in the drowning of the village of Capel Celyn and the dispersal of its Welsh speaking community in order to supply that city with water.  In a photograph of the protest taken by Geoff Charles a little girl carries a poster baring the words, ‘Windermere or the Ribble Not Tryweryn.’[4] I included this photograph in my epistolary text. The text was also interspersed with couplets from the Gododdin poem which appeared without commentary but were translated in the footnotes. The Anglo Welsh poet and artist David Jones prefaces his account of his experiences as a soldier during the First World War In Parenthesis with the following words taken from Y Gododdin: 

         Seiniesyd ei gleddyf ym mhen mamau

         tr. His sword rang in Mother’s heads

I first came across the work of David Jones whilst an undergraduate at Cambridge University.  At that time, 1995, my college Magdalene was a comparative newcomer to the presence of female students having only become mixed sex in 1988, the year I started secondary school, the year the National Curriculum was introduced and Welsh made a compulsory subject in state sponsored secondary schools. [5]  On the day that women first gained entry to Magdalene College the staff and students wore black armbands.  On first being told this story I laughed.  Laughter enables doubt, free examination and experiment. My college, Magdalene, was just round the corner from Kettle’s Yard, a private house and gallery where David Jones had been a visitor in the 1930s.  The house contained a small collection of his prints and drawings.  That gallery also gave me my first introduction to time-based contemporary art and moving image work.  At the point of making my film all of my higher education had taken place outside of my native Wales and through the medium of the English language.

When I arrived home from Berlin a friend saw the red beret I had worn for my performance and exclaimed immediately, ‘Free Wales Army!’. In Berlin I felt proud standing outside the gallery watching a trailer for my performance that credited Wales Arts International as the sponsor of my work.  Writing in the forward to his work, The Location of culture, Homi K. Bhabha notes, “In another’s country that is also your own, your person divides, and in following the forked path you encounter yourself in a double movement…once as a stranger, and then as a friend.”[6]. My grandmother’s final home was a bungalow in Felinwynt that she named (with the help of her Welsh speaking grand daughter) Rhos-Y-Grug after her farm in the North Riding. Rhos-y-Grug translates into English as heather moor.  Lingy is a dialect word for a type of heather.

My film during it’s production went by the title When unicorns break cover the start of a passage from David Jones’ In Parenthesis that both graphically and mythically describes a mortar attack:  “As to this hour when unicorns break cover and come down and foxes flee, whose warrens know the shock, and birds complain in flight, for their nests fall like stars and all their airy world gone crazed and the whole woodland rocks where these break their horns.” [7] A unicorn is a mythical creature that has sometimes been cast as a hybrid but that is not strictly correct. By the time my film was finished it was called Menyw a Ddaeth o Gatraeth / A Woman who came from Catterick, an allusion to a 6th Century Welsh poem.

A Welsh proverb states, gorau arf, arf dysg. [8]

Footnotes

[1]  Evans, G., A National Future for Wales (John Penry Press, Swansea, 1975), p. 14

[2] Biggs, I, In Debatable Lands Vol. 1, (Wild Conversations Press, ), p. vi

[3] Bunting, B, (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) Complete Poems, Briggflatts, p. 76 Basil Bunting refers to Y Gododdin in his autobiographical work Briggflatts, a poem that takes its name from a Quaker meeting house in Cumbria.  Until 1974 Brigflatts was part of West Yorkshire.  

[4] The photograph was of Eurgain Prysor Jones and can be found in the Geoff Charles collection at the National Library of Wales titled, ‘Eurgain Prysor Jones, Capel Celyn’, GCH13497_t.  

[5] Richard Daugherty & Prydwen Elfed-Owens University of Wales, Aberystwyth, The National Curriculum in Wales: Early policy developments 1987 - 1989 Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference, Cardiff University, 7-10 September 2000 http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001583.htm

[6] Bhabha, H., The Location of Culture, (Routledge, Abingdon, 2004) t.xxv.  

[7] Jones, D. In Parenthesis (Faber & Faber, 1978), p. 166

[8] Tr. Learning is the best tool.

Grateful thanks to Allan Harris for inclusion of Cofiwch Dryweryn milk stand image.

4th February 2021