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Postcolonialism and Wales: the Effects of Cultural Imperialism

National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.¹

A discussion of Emyr Humphreys as a postcolonial author involves a number of issues alongside an examination of his work, including whether postcolonial theories are in fact relevant in the study of Welsh literature. However, it is clear from international events in the early years of the twenty-first century that concepts of nation and national identity merit careful examination and are still a motivating force engendering significant repercussions. Throughout the twentieth century a variety of commentators from myriad backgrounds took part in the public discussion of what exactly Welsh identity comprises, alongside literary discussions concerning Welsh literature and its relationship with texts written in English. This text will concentrate on the fiction of Emyr Humphreys, who has lived (for the most part in Wales) throughout most of the twentieth century and who is, in the twenty-first century, still writing. The major events of the twentieth century have necessarily impinged upon this novelist’s life and work: even the First World War, occurring immediately before his birth in 1919, dramatically affected the world into which he was born, most personally in its debilitating effect upon his father. Simultaneously, Wales’s particular history has influenced the writer and his work. The importance to Humphreys of the Penyberth bombing campaign (1936), for example, cannot be overemphasized.

Ned Thomas, writing in 2003, argues that the construction of Welsh writing in English as a distinctively ‘national’ body of writing is in its comparatively early stages: ‘where others have a map of their literature which they wish to modify, we are just beginning to construct a map’.² However, he takes issue with Saunders Lewis’s view that it is ‘a community, possessing its own common traditions and its own literature, [that] we generally call a nation’,³ arguing for the plurality of a nation’s possible literatures at the present time:

Today, in the critical climate of the English-speaking world, this seems a rather hermetically sealed account of literature. Are we not all on some cultural border, in some historical interstice, exiles, marginals, members of diasporas, living at some interface, and more so in Wales perhaps than in many places?⁴

It is not the intention here to discuss the intricacies and complexities of the term postcolonial, but to summarize the problems involved with bringing postcoloniality into a discussion of the fiction of Emyr Humphreys, a Welshman writing in English, during the twentieth century and to the present. The sense of writing from a colonized position has been evident in literature for at least a century but established itself first amongst Welsh writers in English in the 1960s, alongside greater Welsh nationalist political activity and an increasing interest in the language question.⁵ It is only relatively recently, however, that critical writing on Welsh literature in English has adopted postcolonial stances. Both Nations and Relations (2000) and the 2001–2 edition of the yearbook Welsh Writing in English contain essays discussing a variety of Welsh writers in postcolonial terms. Indeed, Stephen Knight, discussing Gwyn Thomas, calls him ‘a colonized person, as the Welsh still are’,⁶ admitting that he has only used the term post-colonial for the critics, ‘those now free Indians and West Indians who subtly guide our thoughts on these matters’, whilst in another essay M. Wynn Thomas describes ‘Wales’s subaltern relationship to Britain’.⁷

More recently it has become commonplace to view Welsh literature in English through the postcolonial lens.⁸ Stephen Knight in A Hundred Years of Fiction, for example, asserts from the outset of his study that ‘it sets out to read Welsh fiction in English to understand how the literature of a colony, in the language of the colonizer, has been affected by its situation …’ (xiii),⁹ while Ruth McElroy discusses the multiple and varied positions regarding colonization held by different nations under the umbrella term ‘British Empire’: ‘Whilst neither India nor Wales were technically defined as colonies, both were subject to English convictions of cultural superiority as epitomized in the evolving imperial rhetoric and political practice of the nineteenth century.’¹⁰ Her ensuing detailed discussion of official attitudes to education and the use of the English language in Wales makes a clear argument for regarding Wales as colonized, at least in these areas. Alternatively, a recent television programme, Wales and Slavery: the Untold Story (2007), attempted to define Wales’s role as part of the machine of empire, finding the Welsh nation in the nineteenth century indubitably implicated in, contributing to and materially benefiting from both the British war machine that enabled the forging of empire and the pernicious slave trade which accompanied it.

What is emerging from these explorations is the possibility that postcolonial theories may need broadening in order to contain those nations that, like Wales, are in ambiguous positions in relation to colonial powers. One problem is that much of postcolonial theory is concentrated upon the Third World, and treating a comparatively prosperous European nation as the equivalent of a Third World country can lead to resentment and ridicule. Chris Williams, for example, describes the drawing of parallels between such countries and Wales as ‘little more than self-indulgent and potentially offensive illusions’.¹¹ Nevertheless, basic points made by Edward Said throw interesting light on the discussion of Welsh writing in English. If, for example, we substitute Wales for the Orient, and England for Europe and the West in the following quotation, it becomes clear that there is a very broadly parallel situation, even if in miniature: ‘[Wales] is not only adjacent to [England]; it is also the place of [one of England’s] … oldest colonies … its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.’¹²

There are also similarities between Wales and Third World countries if the process of colonization is examined. For example, Moore-Gilbert describes the mission of French colonialism as being to ‘civilize’ the Africans, ‘which in this case meant to acculturate and “Frenchify”, to make them into Frenchmen by means of education. In order to become French, however, the African self had to be abandoned.’¹³ In a similar way English language and culture was, at least in some respects, imposed upon Welsh people in a long historical process beginning with personal success achieved via assimilation into the English court of medieval monarchs, a process which was accelerated under the ‘Welsh’ Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII. Humphreys himself has pointed out that, after the Tudor period,

The value of Welshness slid down on the stock exchange index of reputation to bottom out just above the level of derision and contempt. The peaceable pretensions of the Welsh were only acceptable when exercised in the service of an expanding English empire. This attitude of amused superiority remains the hallmark of cultural imperialism.¹⁴

Raymond Williams sums up, very succinctly, this history of ‘subordination’: ‘To the extent that we are a people, we have been defeated, colonized, penetrated, incorporated’.¹⁵ In a later essay he outlined the process more fully:

English law and political administration were ruthlessly imposed, within an increasingly centralized ‘British’ state. The Welsh language was made the object of systematic discrimination and, where necessary, repression. Succeeding phases of a dominant Welsh landowning class were successfully Anglicized and either physically or politically drawn away to the English centre. Anglicizing institutions, from the boroughs to the grammar schools, were successfully implanted. All these processes can properly be seen as forms of political and cultural colonization.¹⁶

Eventually a substantial number of Welsh people over many generations came to believe that the best prospects for their children were likely to involve concentration upon English language and culture, and separation from the Welsh language that might also be in their backgrounds. John Prichard has explained:

Not only were we the first radio generation, but we were also the first generation, possibly in the world, to be denied our native language, not by statutory rule or government decree, but by the deliberate choice of our parents. All of us present have, or had, either one or two Welsh-speaking parents. Not one of us can speak Welsh. And the same is true of many thousands of Welshmen.¹⁷

He continues: ‘it would be ridiculous not to recognise that, as a nation, we are committed irrevocably to the English language. Fortunately it is no bad language to inherit’ – sentiments that would perhaps have found a greater degree of approval in 1949, when they were broadcast, than today.

The Welsh writers R. S. Thomas, Emyr Humphreys and Gillian Clarke were amongst those brought up in this situation. However, during the twentieth century public opinion perhaps swung again; indeed, Thomas, Humphreys and Clarke have each made strenuous efforts to ‘master’ the Welsh language. The different stage of ‘Welshness’ they suppose this to represent is implicit in the following comment (made in discussion of R. S. Thomas): ‘[In his case] the quest to become a Welshman is a search for another way of life, to lose what he had come to regard as his outsider status, to move inside Wales, into another cultural community.’¹⁸ In the context of postcolonialism, Stephen Howe emphazises the centrality of this point: ‘In most – maybe all – imperial systems the distinction between centre and periphery, dominant and dominated, was not just one of physical location, political power, or economic clout; it was seen in terms of cultural difference.’¹⁹ Howe then explains that it was typically considered that the culture at the centre of empire was not merely culturally different from but also superior to that at the periphery.²⁰ Certainly Welsh writers, whether in English or in Welsh, have in common a tendency to define themselves against their idea of Englishness. As Dominic Head argues, ‘a sense of national identity in Wales is more commonly predicated on a reaction against Britishness, and the political and cultural dominance it is perceived to represent’.²¹ Or, as Humphreys himself has suggested: ‘If we wish to continue considering ourselves Welsh it becomes necessary, at regular intervals, for us to define our attitude to some of the more widely disseminated cultural artefacts of the English.’²²

Because of the existence for centuries now of Welsh people who are monoglot English speaking, it is easy to dismiss the idea of assimilation. On the other hand the proximity of the two countries, the open border and the fact that they belong (however this came about) to one political entity, has resulted in the thorough mixing in any one generation of people born in Wales and in England. Moreover, the number of people in both countries regarding England-and-Wales as a single undifferentiated political-cultural unit thoroughly complicates the discussion of the Welsh nation as in any way subordinate to England. If the mixed population of Wales itself is now considered as hybrid, this constitutes a kind of Welshness, which has, viewed in the lights of simplistic notions of racial purity, in the past been considered undesirable. Whereas in the (arguably colonial) past the Welsh speaker might have been perceived as inferior (or marginal), today he would be almost unilaterally bilingual and therefore, in terms of culture, both of the centre and simultaneously marginal. Further, his connection with Welsh culture, in spite of perhaps being in the twenty-first century a first-generation Welsh speaker, provides an implied connection with those of Welsh descent, what Gwyn Jones has called ‘the true dancers before our tribal ark’,²³ an expression that can appear denigratory to those who do not speak Welsh. What is needed to prevent such stigmatizing demarcations is an acceptance of alterity, but this is directly opposed to the Saunders Lewis stance, which has been so influential on writers such as Emyr Humphreys and R. S. Thomas, at least in their early careers, and which intimated the necessity for the usage of English to be abolished in order to preserve Welsh identity through the language.²⁴

A further problem in the discussion of Welsh postcoloniality is that most commentators, not only those who would argue against the validity of discussing Wales in postcolonial terms, would agree that many past and present Welsh people have been or are complicit in the process of empire. As Ned Thomas states,

Complicity with the imperial project, whether at the level of Welsh Liberal politics preaching free trade or of South Wales Miners fuelling the gunships of empire, was extensive, and Wales, when the coal economy was booming, could hardly be compared with an expropriated colony.²⁵

James A. Davies goes further, asserting that Wales was an intrinsic part of the British imperial process, not merely complicit in it: ‘Wales is not a colony because, as part of the political entity called Britain, formally so since the Act of Union of 1536, it contributed, willingly, enthusiastically, rightly, at times massively, to the colonizing process.’²⁶ Brett C. McInelly cites Linda Colley, in Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, suggesting that

the British developed a sense of national identity as a result of anxieties relating to their international status. Although marked by a myriad of local and regional differences, Colley contends that the Welsh, Scots, and English defined themselves as Britons because they came to see themselves as a people apart and distinct from other nations and peoples: ‘Britishness was superimposed over an array of internal differences in response to contact with the Other, and above all in response to conflict with the Other’.²⁷

Yet another difficulty is that the original colonizing of Wales took place ‘out of synch’ with the colonialism usually under discussion when the term is used in the context of literature:

Postcolonialism possesses a ‘problematic temporality’. One of the things that postcolonialism does is to undo neat chronologies … The ‘post’ in postcolonial can imply an end, actual or imminent, to apartheid, partition and occupation. It hints at withdrawal, liberation and reunification. But decolonisation is a slow and uneven process.²⁸

This extract clearly indicates some of the parameters usually envisaged when the term postcolonial is used, and in doing so immediately suggests some of the difficulties of applying the term to Wales. Whereas it was fashionable for a time (after Michael Hechter wrote Internal Colonialism (1975)) to qualify any discussion by describing Wales as an ‘internal colony’, a variety of commentators soon questioned the term’s use in discussions of Welsh issues.²⁹ John Lovering argues that the theory cannot be applied to Wales, because the condition of Wales, politically and economically, fails to coincide with Hechter’s original premise for internal colonies, where ‘the core is seen to dominate the periphery and exploit it materially’.³⁰ He likens Wales to any disadvantaged region, suggesting that economically Wales is no more an ‘internal colony’ than is, for example, the north-east of England. Williams agrees, quoting N. Evans’s argument: ‘Wales moved from being a colony to being a part of the Kingdom. At no stage was it an internal colony’.³¹

There is also the example of Irish writing in English.³² A great deal more has been published about Irish than about Welsh postcoloniality. The Irish Republic’s completely separate political status means that there are perhaps more recent similarities between the relationships of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales with England, even though there are also clear differences between each of these. Richard Kearney, for example, stresses the ‘alien-nation’ characteristics of Ireland including amongst them its overseas status: ‘overseas if only a little over – but sufficiently to be treated like a subordinate rather than an equal neighbour like Wales or Scotland’;³³ this is a description by an Irish-American that would infuriate most Welsh nationalists. Although much of what Kearney describes of the relationship between England and Ireland could equally be applied to England and Wales – its function as ‘other’ against which to define self; the belittling, scapegoating, even monstering of the colonized in order to bolster the image of racial superiority; the image of the nation as female victim/goddess etcetera³⁴ – the thrust of his argument is that ‘British national identity is contingent and relational … and is best understood as an interaction between several different histories and stories’. He then refers to Linda Colley’s thesis ‘that most inhabitants of the British Isles laid claim to a double, triple or multiple identity – even after the consolidation of the British identity around 1700’,³⁵ by which he refers to the political unification of England, Wales and Scotland. Kearney argues that the empire forged by Britain over the following centuries followed this practice begun in the British Isles of containing such plural identities, and in doing this whilst identifying itself against the concept of others the British nation became a ‘narrated community’.³⁶ He would argue, then, that it is possible for the individual to see himself as simultaneously British, Welsh and an inhabitant of a smaller locality – town or village, for example. For some Welsh people, however, there will still exist a need to maintain an identity of Welshness in opposition to Englishness, and to regard Wales as a separate nation under the umbrella of Europe not of Britain;³⁷ to refute, that is, any existent or necessary connection with the concept of ‘Britishness’.

There are, then, a variety of reasons for considering the viewing of Welsh writing as postcolonial problematic. Much of the argument against the discussion of Welsh postcoloniality depends on political rather than cultural analysis. One of the strongest reasons against the exercise is the length of time that has elapsed since the English attempted to colonize Wales contrasted with the corresponding length of time that the two nations have formed one political entity; however, this argument fails to convince if the mindset of the writer is considered to be paramount. Should a writer feel his nationality is constrained by the political or social constraints of colonialism, and consequently write in a given way in order to promote aspects of his national culture, history or background (or to undermine those of the dominant nation), then it is arguable that his work is postcolonial regardless of whether or not the critic feels the writer’s assessment of the situation is accurate. Indeed, Williams describes Humphreys’s theories about the postcoloniality of Wales as bizarre.³⁸

In chapter 2 Emyr Humphreys’s attitudes towards Wales and what it means to be Welsh will be discussed in the light of this tangled complex of issues, including an examination of his non-fictional writings on the subject, which lay bare the mainspring of the majority of his novels. Further chapters will examine the various ways in which Emyr Humphreys chooses to contend with the colonized nature of Wales as he sees it, finding ways in which to assert the existence of a separate nation and culture for Wales, whilst writing through the medium of the English language – ‘the language of the oppressor’³⁹ – and in a political situation (for the larger part of his career) in which Wales, Scotland and England are governed as one entity by the British government. Before the term magic realism was widely used, Humphreys was producing a mixture of social realism (mostly set in Wales) and indigenous myth, legend and history, which he wove into his fiction in a variety of ways; the end result, however, was to educate readers, whether Welsh or not, through the medium of English fiction about the history and culture of the Welsh nation. Postcolonial theory would identify this as one of the strategies of liberation used by writers in countries which are or have been colonized. In one of the earliest postcolonial texts, The Empire Writes Back, the authors argue that ‘the seizing of the means of communication and the liberation of post-colonial writing by the appropriation of the written word become crucial features of the process of self-assertion and of the ability to reconstruct the world as an unfolding historical process’.⁴⁰ Humphreys, born almost on the border between England and Wales and brought up with English as his first language, has spent his life appropriating ‘english’ for Welsh ends.⁴¹ He has described his writing in English as a ‘Kulturkampf, between the imperial language and the defeated native language’, arguing that in his writing he is, whether he likes it or not, ‘using the language of cultural supremacy to try to express something that comes directly from the suppressed native culture’.⁴² He is, therefore, explicitly aware of the postcolonial nature of his work.

Meanwhile, returning to John Prichard’s comments on growing up in ignorance of ‘one’s native language’, Prichard argues that,

It is an experience which possibly tends to develop a peculiar sensitivity to language. Could this be the reason why so many Welshmen of our generation have such an absorbing interest in the English language? I think it is certainly one reason. Having been denied our native tongue, the only form of revenge we can take is to turn the other cheek, as the Irish have done, and try to write English better than the English.⁴³

Prichard’s conclusions are very different from those of Humphreys. By the time these views were broadcast in 1949 Humphreys had made the effort to learn the Welsh language. Prichard concluded that ‘surely the time has come when we should look forward instead of ever backward … For my part, I would gladly dispense now with the dismal deacons, the odes, the comic nightshirts, the mediaevalists, the burning aerodromes, and even Welsh rarebit’.⁴⁴ Humphreys was to spend the next half-century enormously influenced by those same ancient themes, convinced they were essential in the construction of Welsh identity. Prichard’s view also holds validity, and chimes with Raymond Williams’s future thesis, when he says: ‘ethnologically and philologically, we are all mongrels the world over’.⁴⁵ Williams’s awareness of the variety of ways of constructing identity has already been mentioned. What emerges from examining Humphreys’s fascination with the Welsh past, whether historical or mythological, are the problems that ensue when the word Welsh is used to discuss both ‘nation’ (which must include all of those born or living in Wales, people who have a variety of other backgrounds and histories, alongside those of Welsh descent) and ‘race’ (which has its own problems of definition, since racially/biologically indigenous Welsh people are as mixed as the inhabitants of various other countries). Humphreys’s use of the word tribe is interesting in that it avoids some of these pitfalls (whilst also hinting at the links between the Welsh and the Jews as Chosen People of God); however, it would be unpopular politically, in that it would further remove the nationhood status, which is so much in contention. Indeed, Humphreys has commented that ‘“identity” is a better term than “nation”, because when you get down to what a nation consists of, and what institutions a nation needs, we fall apart’.⁴⁶

From the few quotations of Humphreys already cited it is clear that as a writer he is self-consciously aware of being in a postcolonial condition. This is manifested in a variety of ways. He recreates the country of Wales as a backdrop in his fiction and the landscape is particularly important to him as a means of conveying the mythic and historic past and its relationship with the present.⁴⁷ Most of his novels, and particularly the more successful, deal with Wales as a subject, with the different ways of being Welsh and with the differences within Wales being of paramount importance. There is also an educational drive often apparent, a desire to teach readers, or remind them, about Welsh history and legend. One of the most interesting aspects is Humphreys’s relationship with the English language, which he has continued to use almost exclusively in his fiction, in spite of his bilingual ability. We have seen already that he has referred to English as ‘the language of cultural supremacy’, but he has also explained more constructively the effect of ‘using English to write about a way of life that is inseparable from the Welsh language’.

English has shapes and constraints within which you have to work, and that is partly why I try to reduce my language to a minimum; by being minimalist I try to minimize the distortion involved in this kind of cultural ‘translation’. So I try to turn the weakness into a strength, using this kind of stripped-down English in an effort to capture the quintessence, as opposed to the general texture of the Welsh life with which I am dealing. So, too, the small scenes are attempts at recording epiphanies, moments of heightened insight into this world which is foreign to English.⁴⁸

This postcolonial condition, the need both to claim and to repudiate the language of colonization, has affected writers in English the world over. It is unmistakable in writers as diverse as Chinua Achebe and Alice Walker. We must recognize its effect on Humphreys, a Welsh writer writing in English.