NL: The Welsh Girl

This time we read The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies. I really enjoyed this book, and recommend it highly. What follows are some thoughts on the role of langauge in the story.

The Welsh word cynefyn plays a huge part in this book. When the title character, Esther, defines it, to herself or others, it's as "the flock's sense of place, of territory." It's what keeps the sheep grazing on the same farm, why flocks are sold with farms, since you can't move new sheep in and expect them to stay. (Thus, Karsten's final act in the book, spending eighteen months with a new flock to bind them to the land, assumes a dimension of greatness as well as irony.) Passed from ewe to lamb since "the old days", cynefin binds the flock to their own land, and, crucially, "the English don't have a word for it. As if it's an essentially Welsh characteristic." The word is in my Geiriadur Mawr, though; it tells me that as a noun it means "habitat" and as an adjective "acquainted, familiar." It's derived from the prefix cyn-, which is the Welsh cognate of the old Indo-European prefix we have in English as co- or syn-, the Old English ge- having been supplanted by the similar Franco-Latin borrowing, and the root gef * which is something which holds - there's gefel, "tongs", and gefyn, which is "fetter". There's another old, related word, gefyniaeth, which is an old word for "confinement", a word whose double meaning Esther ponders, thinking of prisons and of child-bearing. And all these meanings - familiar fetters, habitat, sense of place, and even confinement - resonate throughout this rather simple-on-the-surface story of three people whose lives briefly cross.

Language plays a large part in the book in general, in fact. The three main characters are all bilingual, excellently so in Rotherham's case, functionally so in Karsten's, and in between them in Esther's. For all, it's English that's their second language, and it's in this second language that they communicate, not only with each other but with the larger world around them.

Karsten is from the Harz, meaning Saxony-Anhalt, ironically. (His fictional town would thus have been on the inner German border, meaning that Rotherham's guess of Eastern Zone might be correct.) Rotherham is from Berlin, son of a Jewish father and German-Canadian mother, native, so he feels, of nowhere. Esther is Welsh. The book takes place in Wales, barring a bit of flashback and one trip to Liverpool. Her English - learned in school - is a source of contention between her father - who speaks it well enough to get by but despises it - and her, who sees it as a way out. And it's because she can speak English that she can talk to Karsten, a young German POW, whose English is a source of shame and life - without it, he couldn't have surrendered, but his surrender is a constant source of friction between him and his fellow POWs including (perhaps not surprisingly) the older soldier who convinced him to. As for Rotherham, he drifts between being German, being Jewish - though he never thought of himself as Jewish until he saw Triumph of the Will and knew he and his mother had to leave - and being English, anglicizing his name and denying his origins... until a conversation with Karsten leaves him with the realization

that he could be unashamed of fleeing, of escaping, of living. Of being Jewish--if that was what he was. And suddenly it felt not only possible but right to not be German or British, to escape all those debts and duties, the shackles of nationalism. That's what he had glimpsed at the pub... The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimization, it seemed at once such pure freedom to be without a country.

Freedom to be without "shackles of nationalism" - the familiar fetters of cynefin. Perhaps Kris Kristofferson was right: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose". At least, perhaps freedom's another word for being unfettered - even to a place you love.

Patriotism, love of country, is a thorny issue for all three characters, even Esther. Yes, she lives in her homeland, but she feels its colonial status and yearns for escape - to America with Karsten, she dreams at one point; to England with a soldier; maybe even just away, anywhere with the young Welshman who wanted to marry her but for whom she had no affection until after he left... And yet she knows she won't go elsewhere, that the cynefin passed through her mother will bind her to the farm. And she wants that as much as she doesn't - she's always wondering why she has no heritage, no birthright, and the farm her father hates while he serves it - "isn't this my birthright, she wants to cry out", and she hopes the child the English soldier left inside her will be a daughter. Karsten is accused of being loyal to "landscape, at least", but his escape from the POW camp is motivated much less by patriotism, something he barely comprehends, in fact, than by a desire just to be alone for a change, and to erase the stain on his honor (a stain that, as Esther sees, can be erased though her honor is gone for ever). Several times in the book Esther ponders the meaning of patriotism, once when Karsten asks why she doesn't turn him in, why she betrays her country.

"Besides, it's not my country, not in the way you mean."

He frowns. "You do not feel this ... die Vaterlandsliebe? Fatherland-love. Der patriotismus."

Patriotism? She's never seen before how love of country is so wrapped up in the love of fathers, but it suddenly seems so typical of the way men would ask for love. No, not even ask. Demand, as a duty.

"And if it were called motherland-love?" she asks Karsten once, and much later in the book she wonders about it again.

She wheels the bike into the barn, lingers there a moment, thinking of the German. He'd asked her once about patriotism. Fatherland-love. Why fatherland and not motherland? she'd wondered. But now she thinks: Why would the love of fathers or mothers be equated with love of country? Couldn't you love your country by loving your children? Weren't they your nation, at the last? Your childland, then. Your child-country. It sounds about as awkward in Welsh, but then it occurs to her to wonder if there's a better word for it in German.

There wouldn't be - it would be Kinderland (which sounds like a playground, doesn't it?). Esther's English isn't good enough for her to realize that the patri- in patriotism is "father", too, but it's all new to her because the Welsh for "patriotism" is gwladcarwch, country lovingness, not connected with fathers in any way (though, to be sure, the national anthem is called Hen Wlad Fy Nhadiau, The Old Land of My Fathers). But isn't it an interesting concept: love of country equated with love of the next generation? Thinking about how to take care of and protect it, instead of serving it - and the old men running it?

Instead, we have love and duty, the twin ends of gefel, the tongs. Cynefin, the fetters that bind us to our place.

* Not to get into too much detail, but Welsh words (like Gaelic ones) often mutate at the beginning; here the 'soft mutation' means the G drops out.

(next time: Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. Join us, why don't you? Just read, and post something - not necessarily a review, just something inspired by the book - on April 18. Here's the home page of the NL for further info.)