9/7/2023 0 Comments Slate charlotteIron, copper, cloth, ships were worked, owned, manufactured by the people, so much so that a ‘Welsh’ was a recognised piece of currency, the length of cotton cloth used as coinage in the Trade. At the same time, few villages or towns in Wales did not benefit from slavery. Wales is itself colonised, un-tongued, its people forced to mobility and estrangement. It could be considered the apex of that deadly triangle, the overbearing statement of conquest in its fantastical re-enactment of Edwardian might. On a clear day, the castle he built with the profits of caned sugar and fractured slate can be seen from the top of the Great Orme on the Llandudno peninsula, where the young Williams girls might have climbed to watch the ships in the Irish sea. Unsurprisingly, he was a prominent advocate for the Trade. The money he used to establish the quarries came from his large estates in Jamaica worked by enslaved people from Africa. Richard Pennant, the Liverpudlian who became the first Baron Penrhyn, owned the quarries, and became one of the wealthiest men in Britain on the backs of those Welsh labourers. She left behind the life of the quarries of North Wales, home to the longest industrial dispute in history when the indentured, ill-treated workers fought for better pay and conditions. She tracks them down, discovering her mother lost her own mother young and ended up fostered into England, and hence to London to meet Dennis. William has a mountain of family in Bethesda, that little, Welsh-speaking town of slate-workers and all the trades needed to support them. In the end, she realised, she must return to Wales, and there ‘change my perception of what it was to be Welsh or what it was to be Guyanese, or both,’ if she is ever to ‘feel the satisfaction of belonging.’ Through these wanderings, these journeys that not always physical, she is ‘dislodged, dislocated.’ With her sister, she takes her own apocalyptic journey into the jungle to return angrier than before, knowing that so many more journeys lie ahead. It is another twenty years before Williams closes the ancient, traumatic Triangle and goes to live in Guyana, re-meeting her estranged father and finding out that there, in the Creolised, syncretic Caribbean, she does not blend in save as the ‘mix’ the privileges of pale skin and western money set her apart. The small cargo of brown girls were marooned with their white mother in the dusty Victoriana of the busy seaside town, facing every variety of casual racism and misogyny with few weapons at their disposal beyond the their familial, intense difference. Dennis stayed in Africa, visiting for several months every summer, until he found another woman and came no more. She describes long, sleepless afternoons in Khartoum, pays poetic homage to a Lagos girlhood, describes the vivid impact of those dug-up relics on her father’s paintings.Īfter a decade, her mother decided she wants her daughters to grow up in Wales and returned to Llandudno. She spent several years in Africa, from east to west, and accompanied her father on his archaeological explorations of the ancient art of the continent. Williams had an unusual upbringing for a dual heritage child of her time. Yet the book opens with Charlotte, her sisters and mother on a cargo ship heading for Sudan, to join Dennis in Khartoum. There he met and married Kate Alice, the ‘contrary, confrontational, biblical and passionate’ woman from North Wales.įor a decade they lived a glamorous life in the arts world of the time, Dennis building a reputation from the beginning. Williams’ father was a distinguished artist and academic, the first Guyanese to win a British Council scholarship which brought him to London to study art in 1946. The links are twisted, underground and often denied through her personal narrative she pulls them out into the light, whether ugly or beautiful, and forces the confrontation with the history which has made her, the Welsh-Guyanese writer and academic, and made us, the Wales of the twenty-first century. ‘the Africa thing hung about me like a Welsh Not, a heavy encumbrance on my soul: a Not-identity an awkward reminder of what I was or what I wasn’t.’įrom the beginning, she invokes a connection between this country of lost languages, of peregrination and devotion, and that distant Africa, the revered and unknown mother. In her very first paragraph, Williams says. Williams pushes us to ask what ‘Welsh’ means, what Guyanese means, as much as her luminous words and intricate structure force a deeper understanding of ‘classic’. Parthian are to be praised for this new publication, along with the Welsh Book Council for their support. Sugar and Slate is a ‘classic’, enshrined in the pantheon of Welsh literature, yet too little known. This is an easy review to write: I loved this book. Sugar and Slate by Charlotte Williams is published by Parthian
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