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
