Serenity amidst the chaos by Menna Elfyn

It is fifty years since the ground breaking radio lecture by Saunders Lewis Tynged yr Iaith (Fate of the Language) was transmitted in 1962. Whenever I hear the word ‘tynged’ I’m back home - an eleven year old listening to my father telling us at the dinner table all about Saunders and ‘tynged’ and that the language could die. The word feels strangely un-Welsh, or else too much like an echo of the English ‘tongue’. And yet, my mother instilled me with informal lessons in Welsh. She would bring out the book of easy grammar each evening called Help Llaw (Helping Hand), and I learned that Welsh and English had very different foundations. For example, plas (mansion) in Welsh was not to be called palas (palace) because we had no palaces in Wales.

I came to realise that Wales was a pretty poor country not to have such opulence. Yet what many of us did have were two tongues. I spoke Welsh in chapel and at home, (and ‘proper’ Welsh at that being a minister’s daughter), while English was for school or for playing with my Welsh-speaking friends. But whenever I spoke one language rather than the other, there was always another’ voice at my side’, if I can borrow R. S. Thomas’s words. And that voice was later to be recognised not only as Cymraeg (Welsh) but also as the voice of a Cymraes (Welsh woman).

Around the same time too, the word ‘Tryweryn’ cropped up and the whole injustice of the drowning of the valley for Liverpool’s water weighed heavily on me. If ‘Keywords’ was an inquiry into language, as Raymond Williams asserted, then the words that unsettled me were – tynged, Saunders, Tryweryn, and another called Waldo. My elder sister bunked off school one morning to greet the poet Waldo (another very strange name to me in my early teens) from Swansea prison. This too seemed to me puzzling, for poets and prison didn’t really sit together to a twelve-year-old’s mind. But on hearing that he was a pacifist and refused to pay part of his income tax as a protest against the war in Korea, I realised that being Welsh meant to make a stand, a reminder of the annibyniaeth barn (independence of mind) that Waldo wrote about. By the time I was fifteen, I too had become a pacifist, joined CND, wrote a few poems and protest songs about the Vietnam war at the same time as campaigning for the language. A decade later, I became the subject referred to by Saunders Lewis in his Foreword to the second edition of Tynged yr Iaith, where he states:

Y mae’r tair merch sydd heddiw,a minnau’n sgrifennu, yng ngharchar Bryste wedi eu rhwystro rhag siarad eu mamiaith wrth eu mamau, yn pigo cydwybodau hyd yn oed Aelodau Seneddol Cymreig y Blaid Lafur’.

(As I’m writing this there are three women today in Bristol Prison being refused the right to speak in their mother tongue to their mothers; they are pricking the conscience of even the Welsh Labour Members of Parliament.)

One of the most memorably painful events of my life was trying to talk to my parents in English after being imprisoned for contempt of court during the first conspiracy trial against leaders of Cymdeithas yr Iaith (Welsh Language Society) in Swansea Crown Court in 1971. Perhaps my defiance of authority was nurtured in my schooldays. My mother would always write an absence note in Welsh as it came naturally to her. Yet each time I’d hand the note to the teacher I awaited the admonishment, “Tell your mother not to write in that language”. I never did, for I knew full well that she would have complied.

To be a member of Cymdeithas yr Iaith in the seventies was so much more than being part of saving a language. Many of us felt we were part of changing the world as we emulated the civil rights movement in America and read about Gandhi’s non-violent strategies. I read Martin Luther King’s works believing that we too were “prisoners of hope” as we displayed solidarity with other campaigns. The seventies was a decade of being involved in direct non-violent action: road signs campaigns, television protests, car discs removed. Even going on the train from Carmarthen to Ferryside and refusing to pay the fare seemed a daring act. Quite a few of those protests didn’t cause much of a stir or even made it to court, for the authorities did not want the exposure of court proceedings. Today I get a certain frisson when I’m standing on a platform whether it be in Cardiff or Carmarthen and hear announcements made clearly in both Welsh and English.

But my need for solitude in order to write was hard. I struggled to write daily as that made me feel in tune with Charles Simic’s belief of poetry as “serenity amidst the chaos”. However, my early attempts were lyrics for songs and playing the harp and guitar in a folk band. We won the ‘pop group’ competition at the National Urdd Eisteddfod in 1967, appeared in concerts and on television, and even made a record with Recordiau’r Dryw.

But song writing was a poor substitute for the voice I wanted to be heard. Merely writing about yr achos (the cause) seemed futile as we felt unease at ‘armchair revolutionaries’ (another keyword) with their easy poems. To believe in the language one had to be prepared to act and not seek comfort in some Plato’s cave. And yet, and here’s the rub, I never felt comfortable in the role of a political activist even though I embraced the belief that the existing order could be overturned if we strived long and hard enough. I entered the eighties unable to leave activism and yet not quite comfortable as a campaigner or organiser.

As Status Officer for Cymdeithas yr Iaith in the mid-eighties, my role was to raise awareness about the dismal status of the language. A national conference was arranged to discuss a new Language Act that would give the Welsh equal status with English. We even appointed our own Ombudsman as a forerunner for the possibility of some kind of Commissioner (little did we believe in the eighties that this would happen in 2012). We met with the then Minister of State for Wales Wyn Roberts who dismissed the idea outright - so we left the meeting abruptly.

Later, Dr Meredydd Evans and I met in Morgans’ café in Aberystwyth, enamoured with a blueprint law drawn up by a well-known Welsh judge and patriot Dewi Watcyn Powell. It was the starting point of the Colloquium of eminent citizens such as Lord Gwilym Prys Davies. With the help of their consistent deliberations we achieved the momentum needed and were, for once, on the right side of the law. Indeed, the authorities began to listen and take heed of the inadequacy of the David Hughes Parry Language Act of 1967.

It was at this juncture that I realised how little I relished politics with its need for patience, persuasion and compromise. It was also the time when I began to channel my full energy into writing with invitations to write libretti in the US and appear at festivals abroad. It was in the early nineties that I realised that if my work was to be understood then I would need proper translations in English. In reading to audiences that did not understand Welsh, such as the Miners’ strike events, Friends of the Earth, CND and Anti-Apartheid readings, I found myself making quick versions in English. These readings I relished, believing that Cymraeg belonged to all. It’s worth noting that we also campaigned for an English language channel for Wales, one that would not then portray a regional view of Wales. One of our failures was not to continue with this demand once the Welsh television channel was realised. Alongside campaigning for the language, I was also involved with other causes as is echoed in a poem No 257863 H.M.P:

I’m here for a cause,

But found new causes.

After all, wanting the language to survive and flourish was only one part of my identity. As a young girl, I discovered the remarkable hymnist Ann Griffiths whose work was only published posthumously. A woman who wrote hymns, a female poet? It was my epiphany. If she could, so could I. I was already drawn to the poetry of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson and later Adrienne Rich and others. Slowly, another political consciousness was emerging within me—the need for a Wales that was not based on patriarchy or dependent on the stereotypical ‘Welsh Mam’. Again, though I campaigned and voiced feminist values, I still relished the solitude of being ‘the other’, distant and aloof. Once again, women have travelled a long way since those decades. How gratifying it was that the first members of the National Assembly were equally divided between male and female AMs.

However, writing Welsh language poetry in the seventies was a lonely activity, as I had no female role model. But being near the edge and alone has always been part of the poet’s domain. I took refuge in the sideways wit of the Polish poet Wislawa Szmborska who, when awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996 said that poets must always say ‘I don’t know’. This is so very different from the kind of assuredness of the bardic tradition whose work it is to say they know this and that, Indeed, cynghanedd demands such precision and know-it-all. My voice seemed in comparison ‘husky - but hopefully ‘vibrant’ as echoed in R. S. Thomas’s translation of a poem I wrote after speaking in Welsh one morning to a BT operator. Though the opening of the poem is rooted in the ‘local’ its ending recognises the diaspora of all people, as with the plight of the Kurds driven from their lands in the early nineties, following the first Gulf War:

Speak up is, of course,

the command to speak English.

I sentence myself to a lifetime

of sentences that make no sense.

The vulnerability of the opening is overtaken by its strident ending:

I will suggest, the superfluousness of barbed wire,

since our language has berylled wares.

I will sing and make contact

In cynghanedd, as the small nations do,

a people in counterpoint

to the leit-motif, dominant

though its pitch be,

ending each time on the same

obstinate monotone

with the same passionate concern

though mortally muted our metrics.

Song of a Voiceless person to British Telecom, trans. R. S. Thomas

Thankfully, today this poem is less meaningful as I can now ring BT, if I so wish, and speak in Welsh to an ever-helpful team of Welsh language operators. Once again, due to campaigning, a new element of respect for the language seems to be in operation. Likewise, a poem such as Will the Ladies stay Behind written for a feminist production Rhyw Ddydd (Some or Gender Day) in 1984, is also now the subject of embarrassment when deacons or ministers have this announcement to make as they always apologise by way of the poem.

So much has changed in the second decade of the 21^st Century as I straddle two languages, moving between both as the occasion demands. The Wales I grew up in, bilingual but set apart for a time thanks to the negative views of mainly Labour MPs (the kind who’d say that northern and southern Wales wouldn’t understand one another because of different dialects) has long disappeared.

As a child I saw the tinplate stacks being blown up near the canal in Pontardawe, an omen of the de-industrialisation that was to follow. We saw new schools, overflowing with those wishing to give their children another language alongside English. I still remember being invited to conduct a poetry workshop at a new comprehensive school in Swansea and a young mother telling me nonchalantly, “I’m poor, a single mum, but what I can give my son for free is another language”. That is the change in attitude that has pervaded Wales in the last fifty odd years. It is for the likes of such women that I cherish all my bilingual poems. It’s with the hope of reaching her son that I want to continue as a poet who writes between languages. In this, I am grateful to the faithful team of translators: Tony Conran, Gillian Clarke, Nigel Jenkins, Joseph P. Clancy and Elin ap Hywel for allowing me the ‘space’ to continue to write poetry solely in Welsh. I’ll leave critical essays to others to ascertain how critical this was in the eighties in blending together Welsh language poetry through English translation.

The South African poet Antjie Krog, an ANC activist whom I met at the Rotterdam International festival in 1990, says in her book of essays, A Change Of Tongue:

“Within English a new South African literature was being formed for the first time. Writing from all backgrounds, languages and cultures started to come together in English. Those writing in Zulu, Sepedi, or Afrikaans simply became voiceless in the cul-de-sacs their languages had become in a country where people were desperate to find one another after so many years of being kept apart. To stay in your language meant to stay apart.”

She then goes on to say:

“Despite wanting to be a part of the new, I wanted to make it clear where I was coming from. I didn’t come from nowhere. I carry a past with me. I do not want to become English but stay Afrikaans within a new South Africa milieu which happens to be English. In English I wanted to stay the other.”

That generosity of spirit in wanting to keep one’s identity but at the same time share with other cultures and peoples is at the heart of what I also believe. Walter Benjamin portrays an image of people in a forest, their sounds reverberating to others, not unlike Robert Frost’s poem, The road not taken. We may never know exactly what the other road has to offer but when we arrive at the crossroads we can surely share our differences in retelling what we witnessed and the other voices heard. I have resisted the desire to say what kind of future Wales should have. However, whenever I read to the various ethnic communities in Wales, I always murmur the words of the great Marxist historian Gwyn Alf Williams who said in Radical Wales:

“There is a higher law than the law of the market; it is the law of survival, of communal survival. We have a border in Wales (Act of Union). No one proposes to make it a Berlin Wall but it exists. Everything west of that line is Wales, everyone west of that line who commits herself or himself to Wales is a member of the Welsh people. I don’t care what language they speak, I don’t care what colour their faces are, and I don’t care where they come from. If they live in Wales and commit themselves to Wales, they are Welsh people.

This is the kind of Wales of which I too want to be part. I hope that tribalism doesn’t persist in Wales and that we will find within the democratic system a plurality of ideas and voices, including that annibyniaeth barn, that independence of mind embraced by Waldo. And the language? If we are losing three thousand people every year, as is believed, what of those we win? Do we count the newborn in Wales who might speak the language?

During my lifetime, I have seen a kind of familial evolution happening in my family? My father, who saw the ministry as his vocation was also a renowned hymnist (Bryn Terfel recorded one of his hymns), and was an occasional satirical poet. He was brought up at a time when the chapels were full and ministers were also leaders (another kind of minister has now taken over the light). He was also an ardent pacifist and radical socialist who believed in a ‘free Wales’ without quite knowing what that would mean in realistic terms. For a time I, his daughter, became, a language rebel and campaigner for women’s rights, went to Greenham, broke a fence at Brawdy, and marched in London against-apartheid and other causes before realising that writing too was a vocation requiring total dedication. My solidarity turned into solitude. Octavio Paz says that being a poet is to be

not the voice of history

or the voice outside history

but the voice within history

which is still trying to say something different.

I like to think of myself as a non-conformist who is, at times, an anarchist. And so, I turn to my daughter Fflur Dafydd whose path seems to reflect again the era into which she was born. As singer-songwriter, novelist who writes in both languages, in Welsh and English as the case may be, it seems to me that she has extended and enhanced the aspirations of both language communities in Wales. She has bridged the gap left by her Welsh language grandfather, and bilingual-only-in-name-mother. Interestingly, her novel Twenty Thousand Saints is an arresting parable of Wales as it moved from the failure of the early devolution to the one we now experience. Little did I think when she was three months old visiting her father, Wynfford James in Swansea Prison for conspiracy to damage Blaenplwyf mast in the campaign for the television channel in 1978 that she, too, would be watching with her daughter children’s television programmes in Welsh decades later.

Walter Benjamin writes of tracks left by different storytellers as stories are passed on. I daresay that the story of Wales is still evolving. The recent accomplishment of completing a footpath around the whole of Wales seems a pertinent metaphor. We are indeed a small country, but with a large track. It is also a plucky rebuke to the eradication of our railways. ‘Beeching’ is another keyword I grew to loathe when growing up. But as I write this, passengers are alighting at Fishguard and Goodwick for the first time in since British Railways closed it during the Beeching cuts 48 years ago, in 1964. The tracks, be they for feet or trains is another metaphor of evolution and change. It does indicate that Wales is constantly on the move and the notion of ‘Welshness’ has a new journey.

Whenever I’m invited to readings outside of Wales, I always begin with Handkerchief Kiss, a poem which resonates with all people who feel the need to share their identity, and to seek a new kind of confidence and self-worth. It also alludes to the secretiveness of the past in terms of the Welsh language and the way we’ve kept ourselves in the dark, fearful not only of ‘the other’ but ‘the others’:

Let the poem carry a handkerchief

And leave on my lip

It’s veiled kiss.

Handkerchief Kiss, translated by Gillian Clarke

On hearing me read poems about such subjects as Harlem and Broadway an Afro-American observed that we spoke the same language in terms of connection and ideas and asked me, “What’s Welsh about your poetry?” I answered that only the ‘tongue’ is different and that poetry (pretty much like humanity) probably begins as a stirring that does not discriminate towards any language. Instead, it starts with the heart palpitating, willing its recipient to sing. And only then does it arrive in the language of my imagination. And then I’m back to tynged again, with fate and tongue being ominous siblings.

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On Jan. 6 Menna wrote

Here is a recent chapter which explains a little of why I still write in Welsh even though I teach a Masters course mainly through the medium of English!  
Menna

Dr. Menna Elfyn
Cyfarwyddwr Ysgrifennu Creadigol
Prifysgol Cymru Y Drindod Dewi Sant
Campws Caerfyrddin SA31 3EP

Director of Creative Writing
University of Wales Trinity Saint David
Carmarthen Campus SA31 3EP

It is a chapter of a book made available by the Institute of Welsh Affairs and can be bought by following this link.

Permission was granted by both

John Osmond, Director / Cyfarwyddwr

Sefydliad Materion Cymreig, 4 Heol y Gadeirlan, Caerdydd CF11 9LJ
Institute of Welsh Affairs, 4 Cathedral Road, Cardiff CF11 9LJ

T: 029 2066 0820 | F: 029 2023 3741 | E: johnosmond@iwa.org.uk | www.iwa.org.uk

and

Kirsty Davies, Deputy Director / Dirprwy Gyfarwyddwr

Sefydliad Materion Cymreig, 4 Heol y Gadeirlan, Caerdydd CF11 9LJ
Institute of Welsh Affairs, 4 Cathedral Road, Cardiff CF11 9LJ

T: 029 2066 0820 | F: 029 2023 3741 | E: kirstydavies@iwa.org.uk | www.iwa.org.uk

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Serenity amidst the chaos by Menna Elfyn