: Charlotte Williams
: Sugar and Slate
: Parthian Books
: 9781914595493
: 1
: CHF 6.20
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 256
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'It is Williams's Welshness that makes the examination of her mixed-race identity distinctive, but it is the humour, candour and facility of her style that make it exceptional . . . an engaging and perceptive voice describing an engrossing and particular personal story.' - Gary Younge 'In its exploration of geographical, racial and cultural dislocation, Sugar and Slate is in the finest tradition of work to have emerged from the black diaspora in recent times.' - The Guardian 'Within this review, I can only scrape the surface of the many dimensions of Williams' memoir, so I strongly encourage you to read this precious book for yourself, and find those parts of it which speak most to you.' - Sarah Tanburn, Nation.Cymru 'Warmly recommended to any curious minds, at 20 years old Sugar And Slate still speaks to us in these modern times, helping to ensure marginal voices remain heard.' - Buzz A mixed-race young woman, the daughter of a white Welsh-speaking mother and black father from Guyana, grows up in a small town on the coast of north Wales. From there she travels to Africa, the Caribbean and finally back to Wales. Sugar and Slate is a story of movement and dislocation in which there is a constant pull of to-ing and fro-ing, going away and coming back with always a sense of being 'half home'. This is both a personal memoir and a story that speaks to the wider experience of mixed-race Britons. It is a story of Welshness and a story of Wales and above all a story for those of us who look over our shoulder across the sea to some other place. It would have been so much easier if I had been able to say, 'I come from Africa,' then maybe added under my breath, 'the long way round.' Instead, the Africa thing hung about me like a Welsh Not, a heavy encumbrance on my soul; a Not-identity; an awkward reminder of what I was or what I wasn't. Once at a seminar, one of those occasions when the word Diaspora crops up too many times and where there aren't too many of us present, the only other Diaspora-person sought me out. His eyes caught mine in recognition of something I can't say I could name, yet I must have responded because later as we chatted over fizzy water and conference packs, he offered quite uninvited and with all the authority of an African: 'People like you? You gotta get digging and if you dig deep enough you're gonna find Africa.'

Charlotte Williams OBE is a Welsh-Guyanese award-winning author, academic and cultural critic. Her writings span academic publications, memoir, short fiction, reviews, essays and commentaries. She is Emerita Professor at Bangor University and a member of the Learned Society of Wales. Her writings have taken her on travels worldwide but her heart and her home are always in Wales.

Foreword

What does it mean for a book to be recognized as a “classic” and incorporated into the Library of Wales series of classics commissioned and funded by the Welsh Government? Why do I pose this question instead of taking for granted the common-sense definitions of “classic” such as: “of acknowledged excellence or importance;” “A work of literature, music, or art of …enduring significance;” “an outstanding example of its kind.”Sugar and Slateis a work of excellence but itsenduringsignificance exceeds conventional judgments of worth in ways that make the work uniquely compelling, fascinating, and important. Classic is an evaluation and mark of recognition granted from the perspective of a status quo, in this case an institution representing the national values and interests of Wales; works endorsed as outstanding are regarded as exceptional in their power to epitomise, sustain and perpetuate the values of this status quo.Sugar and Slate, however, is an insurgent text, it does not seek to embody or affirm common sense or convention but passionately, powerfully and profoundly reveals and transcends the limitations of our measures of Wales and Welshness. Charlotte Williams expands the imaginative possibilities of what it means to be a Welsh “classic”.

The first edition ofSugar and Slatewas published in the UK in 2002 and reprinted five times in the next four years. I live and work in the USA and was not immediately aware of the book. There is no North American publication but many university libraries own either the British or Jamaican edition. Alas, my own institution, Yale, is an exception so the first copy ofSugar and SlateI read came into my hands via interlibrary loan. It pierced my heart in the opening paragraphs. Both Charlotte Williams and I are the offspring of white Welsh mothers and black fathers from the Caribbean: Guyana in Williams’s case, Jamaica in mine. As a child I too had to carry the burdens Williams so vividly and poignantly describes: having to constantly explain where she was from; dreading the constant, awkward reminders “of what I was or what I wasn’t.” The young Charlotte and I were both defined as insubstantial beings, “mixed” or “half-caste,” forms of non-belonging. We were consigned to what Williams beautifully conjures as “a realm of some kind of half people, doomed to roam the endless road to elsewhere looking for somewhere called roots.” By the second page I knew I needed my own copy ofSugar and Slate, one that I could annotate. Through scribbles in the margins, I wished to stage an imaginary conversation with a writer I had never met and didn’t know if I would ever meet but with whom I felt an affinity. I was able to purchase a British edition from a black bookstore in Decatur, Georgia, evidence of who were the earliest readers ofSugar and Slatein the US.

Despite the existence of shared aspects of our racialized and racist experiences of what I felt was a stubborn Welsh parochialism, two distinct cultural and historical geographies of Wales shaped and influenced us. Charlotte’s mother spoke fluent Welsh. In London my mother constantly declared her deep allegiance to Wales but, having spent much of her own childhood in Somerset, she was unable to communicate with her relatives or think in its mother tongue when she stayed with them. The Wales of the long summers of my childhood was in the south, a rural village on edge of the Rhondda Valley where my mother was born. It was small and dominated by the history of coal and a family tied to the Great Western Railway until the arrival of the Royal Mint in 1969 rapidly expanded its population. Charlotte grew up in the coastal resort town of Llandudno, in North Wales on the Creuddyn peninsula that protrudes out toward the Irish sea although no one she knew from within their small community had travelled further than Pwllheli and Prestatyn: “We lived our lives bounded by the sea”, she says, “but very few had crossed it”.

ThroughoutSugar and Slate,Charlotte Williams situates Wales historically and geographically within circuits of the Atlantic world which flow around the story of her emerging sense of self. In contrast to the stasis of Llandudno’s Victorian architecture and residents and the heavy weight of racialization bearing down on her soul “like a Welsh Not”, Williams as a writer creates a subject in motion. The restless currents of the book reproduce the triangle of the Atlantic trade in its three sections, “Africa”, “Guyana” and “Wales”. In its opening pages we meet an emergent subject who, when she thinks about Africa, thinks “about the beginning of my self”. At six years old Williams embarks on her first voyage with her mother and sisters to visit her father in the Sudan, a journey whi