An Open Door

Writers featured: Eluned Gramich / Grace Quantock / Faisal Ali / Sophie Buchaillard / Giancarlo Gemin / Siân Melangell Dafydd / Mary-Ann Constantine / Kandace Siobhan Walker / Neil Gower / Julie Brominicks / Electra Rhodes The history of Wales as a destination and confection of English Romantic writers is well-known, but this book reverses the process, turning a Welsh gaze on the rest of the world. This shift is timely: the severing of Britain from the European Union asks questions of Wales about its relationship to its own past, to the British state, to Europe and beyond, while the present political, public health and environmental crises mean that travel writing can and should never again be the comfortably escapist genre that it was. Our modern anxieties over identity are registered here in writing that questions in a personal, visceral way the meaning of belonging and homecoming, and reflects a search for stability and solace as much as a desire for adventure. Here are lyrical stories refracted through kaleidoscopes of family and world history, alongside accounts of forced displacement and the tenacious love that exists between people and places. Yet these pieces also show the enduring value and joy of travel itself. As Eluned Gramich expresses it ‘It’s one of the pleasures of travel to submit yourself to other people, let yourself be guided and taught’. Taken together, the stories of An Open Door extend Jan Morris’ legacy into a turbulent present and even more uncertain future. Whether seen from Llŷn or the Somali desert, we still take turns to look out at the same stars, and it might be this recognition, above all, that encourages us to hold the door open for as long as we can. -- Publisher: Parthian Books
As Steven Lovatt suggests in his introduction, travel writing in the twenty-first century – the age of global pandemics, of enforced dislocation, and mass migrations – has to reinvent itself, has to be written out of and for ‘a precarious century’. An Open Door suggests ways in which this might be achieved. It is a collection of 11 essays, written by authors who are Welsh or who have very strong Welsh connections. Wales, as Steven Lovatt also suggests, has been exoticized too often by travellers from elsewhere. Here, Welsh writers look out on the rest of the world, often confronting alienation, and conflicting cultural experience and tradition. Eluned Gramich, for example, writes of a visit to Rio de Janeiro at New Year to visit her Brazilian fiancé’s family, struggling with a new language in which she is far from proficient, negotiating differences and cultural misunderstandings. As she says, ‘When you marry outside your nationality, you are bound not only to the person but also to their culture.’ This can sometimes be a hard lesson to learn, especially perhaps for parents of mixed marriages whose children grow up in the language and culture of one parent. This is explored by Sophie Buchaillard whose son has grown up in Penarth. She takes him to her native Paris for the first time to meet his grandmother. For Sophie, Paris and its vibrant culture is home; for her son, though, it is alien. Home for him is Penarth and south Wales. Permutations of the theme are to be found in Giancarlo Gemin’s essay. His mother left Venice when she was 22 to join her Italian miner-husband in the Rhondda. After her husband died she decided at the age of 79 to return to Italy, to her own culture which she remembers fondly and where she feels is ‘home’. Giancarlo, growing up in the valleys feels differently, of course, but his mother too finds that, ‘at home’ near Venice, she does not quite fit in any more. She is in a sense lost, caught between two worlds. So it is, too, for Somali-British Faisal Ali, brought up in what was Tiger Bay. This is home to him, but it is not for his mother. On a first visit as a teenager to what she considers home in Somalia, he is introduced to a very different world with layers of family tradition and connections folded in on one another. Many of his people still live a nomadic life. Faisal Ali leans into this world, becomes accepted by his cousins, though language here too is a problem. It is not home for him, though it is a part of what he has inherited, and in a sense of what he is. Siân Melangell Dafydd reverses the process. Her essay begins in France but centres on the ancient yew trees in the churchyard of her ancestral village, Pennant Melangell, where she takes her young son, Ewen, named after the tree, to re-integrate him in a very literal way with the roots of his world. Kandace Siobhan Walker travels a lot further, to the Sea Islands of Georgia to visit her grandmother in what remains of the Geechie community on Sapelo Island. As with Faisal Ali, she comes into contact with layers of history, much of it brutal – the slavery on the islands that black people endured; the enforced expulsion of Native American tribes on the ‘Trail of Tears’; expulsions, too, during the Highland clearances, which fed into the complex mix of the island. The shortest journey is Grace Quantock’s, from her flat in Pontypool to Pen-y-fal in Abergavenny. Once the site of Pen-y-val [sic] Asylum, which housed 1,770 patients at its peak, the original building has been repurposed as apartments, there is a private housing estate in part of the grounds, and expansive lawns beneath the ancient horse chestnut trees. Here Grace Quantock can feel a certain freedom in her wheelchair, a certain openness and hope. I have a personal interest in her essay, because when I was a child, Pen-y-val Asylum loomed over our street, with its high retaining walls, its massive, stone-built wards, long since demolished. From a neighbour’s garden you could look down into the exercise yard and watch grey-clothed patients wandering aimlessly, muttering to themselves, sometimes screaming. Now and then a siren wailed and a warden came knocking on doors warning that someone had ‘escaped’. Seen from the outside as a child, it was a forbidding place, a place that hung over your street like a frown. Grace Quantock is aware of the site’s history which is woven into her essay, yet, still, it is a place of solace for her in the here and now. For myself, I could never go there, the ground would seem too stained with sorrow and pain. In a short review, it is impossible to do justice to all the contributions. There is, however, not a weak essay among them. An Open Door amply achieves what it sets out to do. It is entertaining and thought-provoking, and deserves to be widely read. -- John Barnie @ www.gwales.com