I usually try my best to ignore Remembrance Day but it happened that I watched the Welsh language film Hedd Wyn (1992) a couple of days ago and it got me thinking about war which led me to thinking about imperialism.
Hedd Wyn / Ellis Evans was a shepherd, poet and a pacifist during WWI who resisted conscription but like many other working class men and boys was eventually forced to go to the front to die in a war between the elite. He submitted a poem to be judged at the Eisteddfod (a Welsh cultural festival) but ended up dying at the battle of Passchendaele before being able to find out that he’d won.
‘The trumpets were sounded for the author to identify themselves. After three such summons, Archdruid Dyfed solemnly announced that the winner had been killed in action six weeks earlier. The empty chair was then draped in a black sheet. It was delivered to Evans’ parents in the same condition, “the festival in tears and the poet in his grave”, as Archdruid Dyfed said. The festival is now referred to as “Eisteddfod y Gadair Ddu” (“The Eisteddfod of the Black Chair”)’ – (wiki)
Not gonna lie I was in tears by the end credits. Partly because after therapy I needed to have a good cry about death to a sad Welsh song, partly because it is potent imagery to me and its sad to have to think about how working class people have always been used as cannon fodder so the rich can fight over resources. (examples of resistance to avoid total bleakness)
That being said, Remembrance Day has obviously become about remembering something else. Now the memories of all wars since then have been collapsed into one another and weaved into a ‘support our troops’ wristband-wearing grand narrative, a competition to prove your patriotism is beyond anyone else’s. This top-down mourning is an ideological battleground that’s ever-shifting to meet the needs of those in power and legitimise ongoing imperialist interference in other countries.
There is no such memorialisation of the millions killed by colonialism on anything close to the same scale. Even now much of the violence that capitalism necessitates is displaced elsewhere. We conveniently forgot WWI was caused in part by the wane of European imperial control. This brought the turmoil required to sustain the wealth hoarded by Europe back to its borders. Its only when white people start having to kill each other that we are taught to care.
Anyway, I mostly agree with the message of the film and I’m glad his life story has become some sort of counter-narrative to the glorification of war that is so integral to British society. But I also think Hedd Wyn’s story risks becoming part of a powerful pacifist myth that Welsh people cling to as a way to avoid the accountability and scrutiny we need to take on as a western nation.
It’s a pretty common experience for white British kids to go through all their school lives not hearing about colonialism. It wasn’t until I had finished secondary school and became an anarchist and did my own political reading that I began to grasp the sheer scale and atrocity of it and how its still the bedrock for western society as it is rn.
I think Wales has it’s own unique ways of avoiding responsibility on top of just instilling ignorance in each generation of kids. The trope of Wales as this friendly, peaceful, spiritual, morally superior, tolerant land is so so convenient for washing our hands of the part we played in empire. It’s not just specifically Hedd Wyn’s story being repurposed as a means to whitewash the rest of our history. Wales has long been portrayed as the compassionate feminine Celtic heartland that tempers England’s conquering masculinity – but ultimately has never posed any real opposition to the British state’s imperial project. This kindness and friendliness is instead a well utilised myth for minimising Wales’ role in colonialism.
The fact that Wales has historically been oppressed by England and continues to be in an exploitative dependent relationship with the British state means we would prefer to turn the focus onto that rather than examine our complicity. I’ve noticed that more supporters for independent Wales seem to casually and uncritically refer to Wales as having been colonised by England. Maybe that’s acceptable to say (I think it’s a bit of yes and a lot of no but the yes is not discountable) but we can’t seem to accept nor articulate our ambivalent position as oppressed and oppressor.
The displacement of violence to the colonial periphery (the one created far beyond the Celtic fringe) means most white Welsh people are still disconnected from the reality of that history. It is almost too big and awful to comprehend, yet the descendants of the people we helped colonise are still left to struggle with the material and psychological consequences of racism in Wales.
A very white Welsh response to preserving our culture in the face of English interference was to set up a new colonial project but in the name of Gwlad Fy Nhadau rather than Great Britain. Y Wladfa was just another example of the hundreds of years old practice of European settlers attempting to preserve their own ways of life by displacing indigenous ways of life elsewhere. Continued denial of the hand we’ve had in the colonial violence against the very societies we’re trying to compare ourselves to stands directly in the way of our right to claim the position of colonised subjects.
Postcolonial theory definitely has its uses in articulating the uniquely exploitative dynamic between England and Wales. I don’t think this means the type of imperialism that Wales has experienced is the same process with the same consequences as the later form of British imperialism overseas. I do think making sure we reiterate this distinction holds us accountable and reminds us of our context in history. In fact part of the difficulty of tracing and remembering Welsh people’s involvement in Britain’s imperial history is the fact that Welsh agents of imperialism were recorded as being English – that’s exactly the duality we must grapple with.
(edited post 6/12/19 to beef it up and make it more coherent. I also had a bit of a worry that I wasn’t being fair or strong enough in my support for an independent Wales by denying the severity of a possible colonial relationship with England. But I think I just re-convinced myself that it’s still complicated and at the end of the day our majority white nation, like every other one, is yet to answer for its colonial crimes. The independent Wales I want to see is one that fosters real international solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles instead of just making rhetorical comparisons. Solidarity would begin with taking responsibility.)