Editorial - Issue 61, Autumn 2003

How Black is Noir?

It takes a brave critic to identify trends in contemporary Welsh writing. Half the books you are dealing with have hardly been reviewed yet, let alone penetrated the academic, cultural and critical consciousness which has dominated debates on Welsh writing in English. This difficulty is compounded by the evident shifts in cultural and civic identity which have taken place since the establishment of the National Assembly, and the re-focusing of external perceptions of Wales.

An increasing acceptance of Welsh fiction outside Wales – Niall Griffiths, Sean Burke, Trezza Azzopardi and Erica Woof are all published by London publishers, for example – has been paralleled by a burst of creativity. What has emerged from this surge in new writing is the instability of the fictional landscapes and realist modes which have traditionally been the preserve of Welsh writing in English, and the evolution of fresh preoccupations and new genres that need to be understood within re-defined political and literary parameters.

Tony Bianchi is possibly the only critic to have attempted to make some kind of sense of the mass of fiction which has been published by Welsh writers in both languages since devolution. In the articles he has produced recently for Planet and Transcript, he has pinpointed the shifts in the Welsh novel from kulturkampf in the style of Emyr Humphreys to what he calls ‘the retreating subject of national allegory’ to be seen in the shape of Ianto, the protagonist of Niall Griffiths’ Sheepshagger:

"Instead of narratives of continuity and change, loyalty and betrayal, action and consequence, we have topographies filled only with motion and its dysfunctions: infirmity, mutilation, illness, madness, confinement, disorientation, endless oscillation, paralysis and death. If history was once a metaphor for the expansion of empire (and for Wales its accommodation within that empire) are these reduced spaces now, in turn, metaphors for the end of national history?"

Bianchi has also located the emergence of a genre new to Wales, the noir, which, he says, although informed by British and American noir and neo- noir writing, has its Welsh roots in Duncan Bush’s 1991 novel, Glass Shot, and can been seen today in the work of several different urban writers, from John Williams to Erica Woof. He also refers to significant performance work, including Rain Dogs, a recent production by Mike Brookes, Mike Pearson and Ed Thomas, and Eddie Ladd’s Club Luz. Noir, according to Bianchi, has ‘finally emerged as part of the pathology of national decay. This should not be surprising. A Los Angeles is not necessary to generate fictions of paralysis, morbidity and entrapment.’ The most prominent and popular locations in the noir novel are Cardiff (Duncan Bush, John Williams, Sean Burke) and Aberystwyth (Mihangel Morgan, Niall Griffiths, Malcolm Pryce).

Bianchi’s arguments are both dramatic and compelling: dramatic, because they have recourse to the metaphors that so strongly inform critical theory, such as maps and cartography, the body and reproduction; and compelling because there is comfort to be had from an argument which helps to make sense of the apparent disintegration of ‘national narratives’ in Wales since devolution. His thesis is, of course, open to question – why is it, for example, that he shows so little interest in the work of historical writers such as Sarah Waters and Stevie Davies? Is it because – unlike Rachel Trezise and Erica Woof, it seems – they aren’t gritty and urban enough to fit the parameters of his argument? Surely Sarah Waters’ protagonist in Tipping the Velvet – admittedly a Londoner rather than a Cardiffian – is as much a flâneuse as Lloyd Robson or Sean Burke’s Jack Farrisey. Equally, to include Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place in his list of novels which demonstrate aspects of noir seems to be distorting the generic boundaries somewhat.

Bianchi is, however, aware of the need for qualification when discussing novels that demonstrate some but not all aspects of noir. In his most recent article, ‘Maps and Travellers’ (Planet 160), he concedes that John Williams’s Cardiff Dead is ‘a much lighter shade of noir than [Sean Burke’s] Deadwater’. Nevertheless, noir as a useful frame of reference within which to consider new Welsh fiction is clearly here to stay: in her recent review in The Guardian of Williams’ latest novel, The Prince of Wales, Stevie Davies playfully refers to the genre as ‘y nofel ddu’. Expecting to see ‘y nofel noir’ as opposed to ‘y nofel ddu’, I was surprised by this conflation of colour and literary form. Clearly Stevie Davies is making no explicit reference to issues of race here: she is simply, like Tony Bianchi, locating The Prince of Wales as a peculiarly and joyfully Welsh expression of noir. Despite that, quite aside from John Williams’s avowed ambivalence towards the Welsh language, I couldn’t help wilfully reading (or misreading, in this context) ‘y nofel ddu’ as the ‘black novel’ as opposed to the noir novel.

Pursuing this accidental parallel, I thought of what Bianchi had to say about noir as an expression of the pathology of national decay, and the overriding concerns of the novels he writes about: dislocation, dispossession, places which are now empty spaces because they are increasingly becoming emptied of their political and cultural significance and history. Displacement, loss and otherness are also the dominant preoccupations of a very different book, this year’s English-language Welsh Book of the Year winner, Sugar and Slate by Charlotte Williams.

This is an autobiography which pushes against its own generic boundaries quite as much as any of the new noir Welsh novels, and is clearly far more of a ‘nofel ddu’ than noir will ever be. The book’s progress is roughly chronological, as Williams traces her ‘journey to self-awareness’ and her ‘unpicking of childhood ignorances’ towards an understanding of her cultural identity as a mixed race Welsh Guyanese writer. After growing up ‘black’ in the overwhelmingly white town of Llandudno, she felt as if she was fated to experience her cultural identity as a permanent sense of dislocation in the face of the bigoted ‘polite racism’ of a small seaside town. Black in Wales, white in the Caribbean, she felt – despite the deep cultural resonances ingrained in her by her Welsh-speaking mother, and also the double marginalisation she experienced as a woman who is both Welsh and of mixed race – that there was no place for her in Wales. It was only relatively recently, after a period of time spent living in Guyana, that she was able to home in on Wales once more, having processed and ‘re-interpreted’ her identity, as it were, in terms which she knows profoundly challenge the status quo of conservative cultural politics:

How could anyone think a culture stands still? Or that we can hand it over intact like a book? It’s more like the re-telling of a story. It changes every time we put our own spin on it and pass it on. We add our own little bits, forget others and get some of the story completely mixed up.

There is a sense in which Sugar and Slate is itself an enactment of this process: Williams flicks through the reel of images in her ‘memory eye’ in order to ‘replay the past as part of the present’. She presents us with intimate conversations, remembered childhood memories and present-day reflections on her process towards a feeling of belonging. One of the strongest aspects of the book is the way in which Williams moves easily and comfortably from one register to another: scenes relayed in a personal voice are interleaved with more straightforward historical description, as in her re-telling of the tale of the Congo Boys brought by a well-meaning missionary to north Wales. Elsewhere, the story is spiced with the magic realism of a vibrant, chaotic party scene at her sister’s wedding. Several poems are also interspersed in the text, their strong rhythm and dialect adding to the texture of the whole.

As the book draws to a close, Williams thinks of her granddaughter Ruby, and turns her attention to the future, to the potential for multiple cultural identities under the dragon of the Welsh flag:

I dream Ruby’s Wales, a future Wales where the search for one voice gives way to a chorus of voices that make up what it is to be Welsh. I know why it is that I like Wales. I like it because it is fragmented, because there is a loud bawling row raging, because its inner pain is coming to terms withits differences and divisions, because it realises it can’t hold on to the myth of sameness, past or present. I ponder what is to come. I hope for a place where we won’t be just a curiosity to be tolerated like the Congo Boys, or somewhere where we are paraded as a quirky interest like the black person who speaks Welsh, or a team of black mountain climbers or a black ballerina. Just a normal space will do.

Ironically, although Charlotte Williams is the first mixed race writer to win the Welsh Book of the Year Award, she writes that she hopes that the Wales she envisions will not resound with the echoes of ‘an endless round of “first-tos” or “been-tos”… the first black Welsh man to have done this or the first black Welsh woman to have been there’. Aware of just how easy it is for a culture to slip into such tokenism, I asked Charlotte Williams to discuss her work with Leonora Brito, author of Dat’s Love, for New Welsh Review (their conversation will be published in the next issue). Among other things, they discuss the localised differences in their upbringing in north and south Wales respectively, and also the way in which it seems to be the breakdown of ‘national narratives’ identified by Tony Bianchi in Welsh writing which has actually opened up a space for different stories of belonging, what Charlotte Williams calls ‘writing ourselves back in – inscribing the nation’. Leonora Brito talks of the way in which Tiger Bay has become a useful and easily recognisable setting for Cardiff writers rather than the place out of which they write, thereby obliquely raising some interesting questions regarding the underlying politics of Cardiffian noir.

For me, one of the most resonant images in Sugar and Slate came out of the story of Charlotte Williams mother, a Bethesda woman who, at the age of eighteen, went to Liverpool to find work as a nurse. A Welsh speaker, she could understand only a little English, and often made mistakes, as she couldn’t understand the instructions that she was given. Finally, she was sacked. When she married Charlotte’s father, a Guyanese artist who was for a time artist-in-residence at the Slade in London, he ‘became the interesting chap to have at parties; a curiosity, a poodle, the comfortable stranger. Ma was not so easy. She was Welsh and uncomfortably different. “You’re the English one,” she used to say to Dad, knowing in her heart that she was the real dark stranger.’ It is this subtle alertness to the ‘shifting sands’ of identities, of partnerships, of cultural and personal interactions that informs the entire book, and that challenges each and every reader to re-consider his or her own fragile foothold on the place that we know as ‘Wales’.

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