4/30/2023 0 Comments Slate charlotte![]() She spent several years in Africa, from east to west, and accompanied her father on his archaeological explorations of the ancient art of the continent. Williams had an unusual upbringing for a dual heritage child of her time. Yet the book opens with Charlotte, her sisters and mother on a cargo ship heading for Sudan, to join Dennis in Khartoum. There he met and married Kate Alice, the ‘contrary, confrontational, biblical and passionate’ woman from North Wales.įor a decade they lived a glamorous life in the arts world of the time, Dennis building a reputation from the beginning. Williams’ father was a distinguished artist and academic, the first Guyanese to win a British Council scholarship which brought him to London to study art in 1946. The links are twisted, underground and often denied through her personal narrative she pulls them out into the light, whether ugly or beautiful, and forces the confrontation with the history which has made her, the Welsh-Guyanese writer and academic, and made us, the Wales of the twenty-first century. ‘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.’įrom the beginning, she invokes a connection between this country of lost languages, of peregrination and devotion, and that distant Africa, the revered and unknown mother. In her very first paragraph, Williams says. Williams pushes us to ask what ‘Welsh’ means, what Guyanese means, as much as her luminous words and intricate structure force a deeper understanding of ‘classic’. Parthian are to be praised for this new publication, along with the Welsh Book Council for their support. Sugar and Slate is a ‘classic’, enshrined in the pantheon of Welsh literature, yet too little known. ![]() This is an easy review to write: I loved this book. Sugar and Slate by Charlotte Williams is published by Parthian ![]()
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