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
