A Question of Identity

Anne J. Kershen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138608795
• eBook ISBN: 9780429862311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Publishedin 1998, this bookis a multi-disciplinary exploration of one of the most vital issues in the contemporary world. Never was this topic more relevant than now, on the threshold of the twenty-first century. At a time when the global economy, European citizenship and worldwide religion are the order of the day, nationalism - as in eastern Europe and the Balkans - and regionalism - Wales and Scotland provide perfect examples - ride high on the agenda. It is the problems and paradoxes that emerge immediately the subject is raised that form the core of this book. A Question of Identity breaks new ground by drawing together eminent academics from a variety of disciplines including; anthropology, history, law, linguistics, politics, psychology and sociology, to examine the way in which issues of identity have impacted on society and the way in which changes in society have resulted in a re-evaluation of identity. Topics covered include, 'Britishness' within the context of devolution; language and identity; religion, gender and identity; the political and legal problems of European citizenship; elderly migrants and identity; and German identity after reunification. The book explores questions of identity in two sections: British and global. The main conclusion to be reached is that at any period of history the question of identity is complex composed of interacting facets which combine in larger or smaller proportions to create the whole, be that individual, group, ethnic, religious, national or supranational. This book sets out to identify some of the facets that contribute to the whole and by so doing answers some of the questions which are currently circulating around the question of identity.

PART ONE
BRITISH IDENTITY

1 Being Born Lost? The Cultural and Institutional Dimensions of Welsh Identity

WAYNE PARSONS

We are exiles within

our own country; we eat our bread

at a pre-empted table. ‘Show us,’

we supplicate, ‘the way home’,

and they laughing hiss at us:

‘But you are home. Come in

and endure it,’ Will nobody

explain what it is like to be born lost?

(R.S. Thomas, from ‘The Lost.)¹

I have been a multitude of shapes,

Before I assumed consistent form.

(The Book ofTaliessen)²

Every day when I wake up

I Thank the Lord

I’m Welsh

(Catatonia, International Velvet)³

In the Shadow of the Dragon: Wales and the Making of Britishness

Flags are potent and visible symbols of collective identity. In war people rally to them and die for them and are buried under them – pro patria. Politicians, as a last refuge, can wrap themselves in the flag and call upon their people to wave and follow the primary symbol of who they are and what they share. The flag is the first thing to go up and the last thing to come down. That Wales and the Welsh can lay claim to a distinct national identity which has existed for many centuries may be illustrated by the fact that the ancient symbol of Wales, a dragon, is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) national flags in the world. The symbol that is displayed in public buildings, uniforms, on sports shirts and elsewhere today, is a manifestation of an identity which has been possessed by the Welsh for as long as the people who occupy the country have seen themselves as a people. YDdraig Goch, the Red Dragon, was brought to Wales by the Romans over 1,800 years ago, and was adopted by the British Kings. It was, so tradition says, the flag of Arthur and Cadwallader from whom the Tudors claimed their ancestry and the right to the throne.

The English have the cross of the dragon slayer, George, and the Scots, St Andrew, but the Welsh, despite (unlike the Scots or the English) having a proper, bone fide indigenous saint, (Dewi, or David) have retained the dragon. And, of course, there is no dragon in the union flag: the crosses of saints, but no pagan red dragon. As a point of entry into understanding the complex nature of Welsh identity the red dragon is, perhaps, as good a place to start to unravel the way in which identity has been shaped in Wales as any other. For a country whose identity has for so long been virtual, rather than institutionally or politically meaningful and real, the mythical beast is a somewhat appropriate symbol to represent Wales. The dragon exists as a state of mind, rather than as an actual living, breathing creature. Both the Welsh for dragon (ddraig) and the English come from the Latin and Greek root ‘drakon’ which means serpent.⁴ The dragon symbol has been used widely in both the West and the East to represent both the unity of opposites and destructive chaos. One recent authority on the subject observes, for instance, that:

... combining characteristics of the four elements ... the dragon symbolises light and dark, sun and moon, masculine and feminine and the unity underlying these opposite forces ... In the East and in pre-Christian Europe, the dragon was seen as helpful and kind – indeed, the red dragon is the symbol of Wales. But Christianity, which saw the serpent as a symbol of evil, also viewed the dragon as a creature of ill-omen, representing destructiveness and inner chaos.⁵

Stories of dragons often involve battles and the quest of heroes to defeat and destroy the beast. The story popularised by Geoffrey of Monmouth is that the Welsh red dragon myth concerned the conflict between the Welsh and the Saxons. In the story there is a battle between a red dragon and a white dragon which the young Myrddin (Merlin) foretells will end with y ddraig goch driving out the white (Saxon) dragon.⁶ In this account the dragon is both a symbol of unity and represents the triumph of a British order over Saxon chaos. Hence it is the red dragon which was to be flown at the Battle of Bosworth and it was the red dragon that became be a symbol of the Tudor state. From then on the dragon becomes a very British symbol indeed: it comes to represent the way in which the Britons, through a descendent of the ancient Welsh kings, have once more taken control of their country as had been foretold by the prophecies of Myrddin.

The dragon embodies much of the way in which Welsh identity was to develop. From the beginning the Welsh came to see themselves as being truly British, and that their identity as Welsh people was not undermined by being part of Britain, so much as it was underpinned by their claim to be the true Britons. The Red Dragon is the symbol of the Brytaniaid, the survivors of Roman Briton. Indeed, it is important to note that it was not until around the twelfth century that the Welsh refer to themselves as Cymru, or compatriots, rather than Britons. The term Welsh, which derives from the Saxon for stranger or foreigner, was the word that the people of the white dragon were to use to describe them, the Britons. Thus it was that the people who rallied to the dragon flag were, quite early on in their history, a very mixed up bunch. They had, as it were, three identities: they were Brytaniaid or British, the first of the ancient Celtic peoples of the Island; they were the Cymru, the people who had to band together to fight off the Saxons, Picts, Vikings, and Normans; and they were the welisc or wealh (the ‘Welsh’), the people who were deemed to be strangers in their own land. This multiplistic sense of identity has been an enduring theme: in the 1920s, for example, Sir Alfred Zimmern saw Wales as being composed of a ‘Welsh Wales’, an ‘English Wales’ and an ‘American Wales’.⁷ More recently a popular idea has been that of the so called ‘three Wales model’ consisting a of Y Fro Cymraeg, (a Welsh speaking heartland), a ‘Welsh Wales’ and a ‘British Wales’.⁸ Thus in so many ways the people of Wales are still trying to grapple with and manage these layers of interweaving identity, which have evolved over hundreds of years. The dragon is an object of a continuing quest: the Welsh are still trying to find their way around what ‘Wales’ or Cymru means.

One famous dragon myth is that of uroboros who recreates himself by eating his own tail. There is much of this in the history of the land of the red dragon: for the story of the country is about a struggle not just with the outsiders, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a struggle between the Welsh themselves. The Welsh have had outbreaks of unity as other countries have had episodes of internal dissension. From the beginning the land of the dragon has been one in which much national energy has gone into consuming itself in disputes between different parts and groups of the country. Indeed, this lack of unity is one plausible reason why the Welsh originally lost their independence in the first place. Uroboros-like, out of this process of internal conflict and dispute has evolved something called a national identity. The history of this struggle is really the history of a people who, although sharing a belief in themselves as having an identity, have consistently lacked any sense of unity or consensus as to what this identity means or what the political significance of this identity may be held to be. Welsh identity has not been possessed so much as it has been processed, with the result that it has rarely, to use the words of Taliessen, been consistent in form, but invariably multiplicitous in shape. Welsh identity has, for the greater part of its history, been composed of levels and layers. Yet, despite being a small people annexed to a powerful imperial power, and having been on the verge of extinction too many times to count, Wales is still here. In an age when the problem of identity is increasingly a global phenomena, the continued existence of Wales is an experience which has, perhaps, a relevance to other peoples who, if not (as R.S. Thomas has it in his poem) born lost like the Welsh, feel that they are becoming so.

The early history of Wales is largely the story of a collection of Brythonic-Celtic tribes endeavouring to defend themselves from successive waves of invaders. The first invaders were the Romans who arrived in AD 43, and left in AD 383, bequeathing Wales improvements in agriculture and technology of all kinds as well as many Latin words which remain in modem Welsh to this day. After the departure of the Romans the Celts had to contend with numerous other invaders who pushed them further and further north and west. They called their land Breithyn or Prydain. The people who became known as the Welsh once occupied a much larger area of the island of Britain than the 8,000 square miles which now composes their homeland. They occupied the western half of Britain from what is now called Cornwall and Devon, up to Strathclyde. The extent of British Britain may also be seen in the many place names which are Welsh in origin such as: Cumbria (from Cymru), Glasgow (meaning green hollow, or glas cou), Melrose (moel rhos, meaning bare moor land), or Avon, (meaning a river). These Britons were called foreigners by the Saxons (Wealas) and there are a number of places outside Wales which signify that they were once British (that is foreigner) settlements: such as Wallasey and Walton. By AD 655 the Saxon invaders eventually succeeded in cutting off the Western peninsula from the other Celts of Cornwall, Devon and North Britain, and from this time onwards the border between Cymru and Saeson, Wales and the English, became well defined. So much so that the boundary constructed by Offa of Mercia at around AD 784 constitutes a dividing line between the Celts and the Saxons which has lasted with remarkably little change over the successive centuries.

In the dark ages Wales was a patchwork of kingdoms which, although they forged a common identity as a result of fighting the Vikings, Saxons and Irish, were not to develop a common political and institutional structure. Periods of unity were somewhat sporadic in comparison to the position in England where, under Alfred, Edward and Athelstan, a centralised and well organised form of state was to evolve prior to the Norman conquest. But Wales from its very genesis, was a country which, although possessed of a clear and well defined sense of a common identity, lacked a political unity. It was a nation, but never a state of the kind that the English were to establish. Wales was obstinately decentralised and centred on cooperative communities rather than the rule of one authority or power. The invasion of the Normans in 1066 presented another threat to the existence of Wales; it survived and in 1267 was recognised as a separate principality under the Treaty of Montgomery. The Treaty was broken in 1282 and Wales was made a Dominion of the English King. However, for a brief time during the fifteenth century Wales once again became independent. Between 1400 and 1415 Owain Glyn Dŵr waged a long war of independence, but with the defeat of Owain, Wales was absorbed into the English state until it was finally annexed under the Act of Union in 1536.

The idea of being a separate nation state died with Owain, but in its place emerged another vision, one which had been foretold by Myrddin himself, that one day a Welshman would come and free the Britons from the yoke of the invader. That day was deemed to have arrived when, in 1485, Henry Tudor landed in Pembroke and with his fellow country men marching behind the dragon of Cadwallader, went on to defeat Richard III at Bosworth. The Welsh were no longer foreigners, they were once again Britons and their King was victorious. Well, that is what they told themselves. This myth also suited the Tudors, keen to stress their Welsh ancestry. In Shakespeare’s Henry V we find an apt illustration of the relationship between Wales and England and the British state in the part played by Fluellen (Act IV: Scene VII).

K.Hen Then call this the field of Agincourt, Fought on the day of Crispin Crispianus.

Flu Your Grandfather of famous memory, an’t please your majesty, and your great-uncle Edward the Confessor, Plack Prince of Wales, as I have read in the chronicles, fought a most prave pattle here in France.

K.Hen They did, Fluellen.

Flu Your majesty says very true: if your majesties is remembred of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps; which, your majesty know, to this hour is an honarable badge of servic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Contributor
• Preface
• Introduction: A Question of Identity
• Part One: British Identity
• Part Two: European, African and American Identity
• Index