The C Word.

Why is No-one Talking About it?

I’ve been at the UEA for over six months now. Yesterday I reached peak word salad. I’m a woman who knows her limits. I am not interested in translation. I’m interested in community. I’m interested in stories; the kind that keep folk awake for hours round a fire at night or captivated on very long walks. Stories about real people. Stories about struggle and survival. Stories which offer maps and keys. Stories which may help us make sense of and navigate life on this earth.

Here is a painting by a female artist living in Cornwall. As well as producing soulful paintings, Sophie Dennett is a gifted photographer and a single mother of five children. Like my mother, she struggles. She and I do not always fit in. Inspired by music and reality, our art is about the marginalised, the powerless, the forgotten. We may be outsiders who can’t spell or pronounce academic word salad but does this make our stories any less valid?

Yesterday I attended a lecture on art and protest. The keyword for this seminar is as unpronounceable as it is difficult to spell. The woman who coined it is an American academic. I’ve been told she’s having fun with words but to me her fun is exclusive, her verbosity incomprehensible. Is this the purpose of academia? Exclusive incomprehensible gobbledygook? The author, like countless other academics I’ve encountered in the last six months, bangs on about colonialism, race and gender, but never class. It’s as if class doesn’t exist. Why does everyone shy away from the the c word?

I recently fell down a fenland rabbit hole. Mum and I travelled across the fens from south Norfolk in horse drawn vehicles twice in my lifetime. This mysterious, flat landscape is entirely drained and cultivated. There’s almost no common land to pull onto. It makes for tough travelling territory.

On searching the university library I found a thin pamphlet entitled Fenland Lighters and Horse Knockers compiled by a man called R.H Cory. Cory describes fen lighters as “…barges whose dimensions and design had probably changed little since Roman times.” Such barges usually travelled in gangs of four worked by two men and a boy called a ‘Horse Knocker’. The fore lighter had a haling mast at the top of which was a towing rope. The small boys who drove the horses towing the lighters were usually young and poor, their faces prematurely aged by hard work and harsh weather. Cory writes,

“They had to be tough to survive the rigorous life of squelching bare footed along the wet clay or peat of the haling-way for up to twenty miles a day.”

These haling-ways frequently frozen solid in the winter and were cruelly dried out in summer, making it tough terrain for little bare feet. Small boys were expendable and more easily replaceable than horses, which meant the welfare of the latter was of greater concern to the lightermen. What kept them going?

I was captivated by what Cory wrote next,

“As they plodded along, or rode on the horse’s back, these boys habitually sung a peculiar chant, one which was no doubt of great antiquity, claimed in fact by some writers to have been a relic of a Viking’s war-song. The chant began with a low note, followed by a long high note which lasted as long as breath would allow. The chant then concluded with a mournful wail.”

As a young girl, I often sung or played my wooden recorder in time to the clip clopping of our horse’s hooves. I wanted to hear the timeless singing of these poor, barefooted boys. I disappeared down another rabbit hole, that of Viking War Songs, part of a genre I’d not heard of before called ‘dark folk’. I scoured the internet for something which might sound similar to Cory’s descriptions of the plaintive chant of these brave boys…

A historian friend recently told me that certain types of drumming and music have been proven to increase testosterone levels. Certainly drums and bagpipes can be very emotive. Every year on St Piran’s day my adopted town’s parade, replete with dancing children, Cornish bagpipes and drums never fails to increase my heart rate. After six months of grey, rain and mud the coming of spring induces a kind of melancholy sadness exacerbated by this musical folk tradition.

But the Viking war song I found took me to a place of anger and disenfranchisement. It invoked in me an image of ordinary people. Folk who struggle to put clothes on their children’s backs and food on their tables. People who stand to gain more by claiming benefits than working. People for whom meaningful employment is not an option. People alienated by the school system, capitalism and globalisation. People who do not know nature because they live in boxes in concrete jungles with almost no greenery. People whom academics appear to have forgotten about.

This leads me to a question I put to Monday’s lecturer, a question she did not appear to understand: why would a people divorced from the natural world want to protect it?

This is the post industrial landscape of a part of Cornwall almost never visited by tourists. You won’t see this image on postcards or in ice cream shops. Cornwall is not the only part of the British Isles which has been wrecked by industry or which suffers from deprivation caused by lack of industry, unemployment and lack of prospects.

The words graffitied on the wall tell a different story to the ‘Pornwall’ frequently seen on TV or depicted in storybooks. It reads,

CORNISH LADS ARE FISHERMEN, AND CORNISH LADS ARE MINERS TOO.

BUT WHEN THE FISH AND TIN ARE GONE

WHAT ARE THE CORNISH BOYS TO DO?

These are important questions. I don’t have the answers but they merit serious thought, not least by academics who use long words.

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I refuse to accept that the only victims of capitalism and climate change exist in the global south. The Cornish motto Onan Hag Oll translates as One and All. We are all interconnected, all equally members of the human race, all sharers of planet earth, all arguably part of nature. Can we then please stop indiscriminately using the word ‘privilege’?

It seems to me that it’s time to listen well to the rallying cry of the poor. It’s time to call people in, not shame and alienate them. We need to connect before correcting those who are truly responsible. Time to democratise nature, to disentangle ourselves from the lies of debt, empty individualism and the fake promises of consumer culture.

The question is. How?

Perhaps the artistic endeavours of ordinary women can help pave the way. To me Sophie’s artwork is emblematic of pictures which speak a thousand words.