English and Creative Writing

Anne Wetherilt, PhD student, English

In November 2020, a one-day online conference brought together scholars, journalists and readers to celebrate the centenary of the feminist magazine Time and Tide.  Speakers highlighted the magazine’s progressive interwar agenda, and the contributions of well-known writers such as Rebecca West, Winifred Holtby, E. M. Delafield and Cicely Hamilton.  Although the magazine had no overt party-political affiliation, it engaged with topical issues, including women’s political rights, their role in the workplace and their cultural interests.  In the late 1920s, it also embraced an internationalist agenda, committed to peace and disarmament.

However by the late 1930s Time and Tide had evolved from a feminist magazine, aimed primarily at educated middle-class women and their political and cultural interests, to a general interest periodical with an increasingly male and conservative readership.  After World War Two, the magazine moved further to the right and women no longer played a key role. Its post-war coverage has attracted limited scholarly interest.

I first became interested in Time and Tide’s post-war history as I was researching the late colonial fiction of Elspeth Huxley.  Best known for her fictional autobiographies The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) and The Mottled Lizard (1962), which depict an idyllic Kenyan childhood in the early decades of the twentieth century, Huxley was a frequent contributor to Time and Tide in the 1950s and 1960s, commenting on political developments in Britain’s overseas colonies. Although she came to accept African independence, Huxley was the voice of a conservative readership, consistently arguing against an accelerated timetable for decolonisation and expressing concerns about the future of African nations, governed by, in her view, ill-prepared indigenous politicians.

Widely recognised as an expert on African matters and praised for her lyrical descriptions of the African landscape, Huxley’s contributions provide a fascinating insight into the politics and lived experience of decolonisation.  But they also tell us something about Time and Tide’s post-war readership: interested in the Empire, willing to adopt a critical stance towards the British government, but not immune to sensationalist accounts of nationalist violence and African ‘savagery.’  Huxley’s journalistic output was substantial and varied, but two examples may illustrate these points.

In late 1953, Huxley reported on a recent trip to Kenya, providing first-hand experience of the Mau Mau insurgency.  Her articles contain a fascinating mix of location and character sketches: the reader walks with Huxley on the streets of Njoro, her former hometown, climbs on a jeep to visit a detention camp and witnesses the ‘brutish, sullen look of hatred and inhumanity’ on the faces of Mau Mau detainees.  These pieces combine factual reporting and an earnest attempt to understand the causes of the uprising, ranging from rural land poverty and urban unemployment to the loss of tribal customs and a desire to end colonial occupation.  But this is combined with more subjective, and at times racist judgement.  Thus, Huxley compares the Mau Mau uprising to European medieval witchcraft, a spiritual cancer, and its adherents to Nazi stormtroopers.  Equally controversial are her descriptions of the infamous Mau Mau oaths, which echo sensationalist media accounts, yet were based more on hearsay and less on fact:

There are seven grades of Mau Mau oath and now an eight has been added in the forest.  The ritual of the first three is disgusting and barbaric, but not unprintable, and a good many have taken at least the first two under duress.  Those who have taken the fourth oath and upwards have done so, it is believed, because they wished to and have performed such acts of bestiality (in its true sense) and perversion that many doubt whether these men and women can ever again take their places as decent members of a civilized society

Writing at the height of the Emergency, Huxley’s vision for a peaceful, independent Kenya is rather vague.  She recommends development in agriculture, irrigation and industry, alongside the eradication of racial barriers: ‘All Kenya’s races must work together towards coalescence as a nation.’

In August 1959, mere months before the British government lifts the Emergency and invites the various parties to the negotiating table, she offers a more focused commentary on Kenya’s political future.  Here, she reveals a deep unease with African leaders’ inclination towards one-party rule and dismisses what she views as the naïve British belief that newly independent nations will follow the Westminster model of democracy.  She further urges the Tory government to provide safeguards to Asian and European minorities ‘against being swamped by an enfranchised flood of Africans quite without experience.’

Huxley also criticises Labour for turning colonial politics into a major election issue, accusing them of undermining efforts to install democracy, by backing ‘self-rule plus autocracy.’  What is fascinating about this later piece is that it draws a clear line from colonial to metropolitan politics: Africa is to be a ‘stink-bomb’ in the forthcoming general election.  But, yet again, Time and Tide readers are given a topical political commentary, which is balanced precariously between factual reporting and lingering colonial discourse.

To conclude, by the 1950s, Time and Tide had travelled a long way from its suffragist and internationalist origins.   For me, this brief case study is relevant for two main reasons.  First, in light of the ongoing re-assessment of Empire, it is crucial to listen to a wide spectrum of voices, even when they express views that are ambivalent.  And second, not to abandon a historical source when its original commitment is a distant memory.

Sources:

‘The Kenya Scene – I: A Raid against Mau Mau’, Time and Tide, 28 November 1953, pp. 1539-40

‘The Kenya Scene – II’, Time and Tide, 5 December 1953, pp. 1569-70

‘Kenya Screening’, Time and Tide, 26 December 1953, pp. 1695-6

‘The Issue in Africa’, Time and Tide, 1 August 1959, p. 820

Further reading:

David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006),

Catherine Clay, Time and Tide: The Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018)

Angela V. John, Turning the Tide: The Life of Lady Rhondda (Cardigan: Parthian, 2013)

“Walk under the full moon” by Mara ~earth light~ is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Hannah Hunt, Honorary Associate, FASS, Soc Sci & Global Studies

How has lockdown impacted your local community? And how can you stay creative when so much is in flux, and expected ways of being together are denied us? These are questions I have addressed over the last year in my work with Leeds Church Institute as their poet-theologian in virtual residence. LCI is a charitable, faith-based organisation which fosters continuing learning, mutual support and engagement with the arts.

In a previous life, I studied the theology of the early eastern Christian church, and LCI’s invitation to become their poet-theologian in virtual residence drew on my academic credentials as a theologian as well as my skills as a poet. For a year, starting last April, my task was to reflect in a spiritual manner about the impact on the communities of Leeds of the lockdown – using poetry as a medium. Week by week I distilled the statistics, rumours, anecdotes, experiences and fast-moving changes in rules and regulations governing our public and private lives, and sifted them into a 500 word blog. I drew on visual arts, music and the Bible, and both my own poetry and poetry of other poets which resonated with my experiences.

Sometimes I found that a poem I had written some time ago found new voice. Other poems grew new roots in this rich soil (and yes, as a gardener I know the benefit of waste products in compost heaps!) I found the ratio of thinking/research time to writing time meant comparatively little time actually sat in front of the screen; as a poet, I describe myself as a kinaesthetic writer: I need to literally ‘take a poem for a walk.’

As the weeks went by, I found I could not confine myself to Leeds. The Black Lives matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, the devastating explosion in Beirut, the tragic loss of lives of migrants attempting to reach sanctuary in the UK all featured alongside the success of Leeds United, the fortnightly filming of snippets of The One Show on my street, and other more local lockdown phenomena. There are perhaps many opportunities to write about one’s ideas and experiences but it was exciting to be paid as a professional writer/theologian to conduct this reflection.

I should say that in sympathy with the ‘continuing education’ ethos of both LCI and indeed the OU, all my postgraduate degrees (MA, PhD in Theology and MA in Creative Writing) were undertaken as a busy adult, juggling family and work commitments. I am so grateful that despite the rigours of lockdown, its isolation, its loneliness, its anxieties, I have been able to engage in new creativity to share with others.

Hannah Hunt (AL A335, A332).

These are some of the issues addressed in my latest book Reflections: A poet-theologian in lockdown Leeds, published by Maytree Press in February 2021. In addition to my work as an associate lecturer teaching level 3 English Literature and Religious Studies I have a portfolio of activities as a poet, editor and convenor of literary events in my adopted home city of Leeds. I publish my poetry under the name Hannah Stone.

Creative Writing Associate Lecturer Csilla Toldy has won an award for Best Street Art Film at the Berlin Underground Film Festival for her film poem ‘Belfast Exposed’. Sally O’Reilly interviewed her about her work and how this project developed.

Still from ‘Belfast Exposed’ by Csilla Toldy.

You can watch Csilla’s video on Youtube here

How does ‘Belfast Exposed’ relate to your previous practice as a writer/poet? How long have you been working with images?

I have been writing poetry for much longer than making video poems, but because I am a scriptwriter and I had an interest in art films and experimental films, I started to research video poetry as an artform. After making my first video poem (Point) with the support of Northern Ireland Screen, and having been selected with another (Hommage) to the Videoholica Video Art Festival in Varna, I was invited as a speaker for the Mix2 Conference of Digital Writing at Bath Spa University, where I delivered a paper on “Metaphors in videopoetry”. This paper is now published on academia.edu.

Is place in general and Belfast/Northern Ireland in particular important in your work more generally?

Yes, I wrote many poems about the cities I visited, and place is important in my prose as well. I lived in many different places during my life, and being on the move, on foot or by vehicle always inspires me.

How did you come to write this? What came first, words or images, or did it evolve in a different way? Was the idea of using multiple voices to create a choral effect there from the beginning?

I wrote the poem in the voice of a Syrian immigrant around 2015, when the migrant crisis started in Europe. It became one in a series of poems that I wrote about cities and I read them at venues in Belfast, Dublin and Bray. In 2019 I was selected to take part in the New Voices of Ireland Series 7 organised by the Centre for Creative Practices in Ireland. They select 10 migrant artists for each series and Series 7 had the theme of Cultural Memory – Transition, Temporality, Transcultures. I used the voices of my co-artists and put out a call for local speakers on Facebook to give me their voices for the film. I was interested in the diversity of accents. The idea was that I would use the footage of Belfast in movement with special focus on the murals and use the voices of migrants and locals mixed as a soundscape. People could interpret the poem as they pleased. The choral effect was developed during the editing phase.

Can you tell me about the process of producing it? How long did it take?

Filming happened during a couple of afternoons. I knew the places I wanted to show, East Belfast and West Belfast, the two hemispheres with their opposing murals, but we start the film in the Cathedral Quarter, the cultural hub of the city where the gay bar the Kremlin is situated with its Lenin Statue and the rainbow flags. I found this always exhilarating, for I grew up in socialist Hungary in the shadow of this icon. Each, the Protestant and the Catholic communities have marked their territories with their murals, of course, but the film finishes with the Rise sculpture created by Wolfgang Buttress, symbolising unity. Collecting the voices took longer and editing took about a week, which I did on my computer.

When did you receive the award? Was there a virtual ceremony? (Shame not to go to Berlin!)

I heard about being short listed at the beginning of a week in October and by the end of that week I got the award. It all happened very quickly. It is a shame that they had to cancel the physical event, but they will screen all the winning films next year and I am hoping to go to Berlin then.

What are you working on now? And do you have future plans for similar collaborations/multi media work?

Around this time last year I was commissioned by the Executive Office of Northern Ireland to create a public artwork for Holocaust Memorial Day 2020, to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. I worked on this video poem in the first ten weeks of 2020. The launch was planned for 15th April, the day when the British liberated the last camp, Bergen-Belsen, but the pandemic made this impossible. The finished video poem, “Here I Stand” will be launched on Holocaust Memorial Day 2021, on 27th January online on the website of the Executive Office and the Holocaust Memorial Fund. It was a great honour to work on this film and it was a deeply emotional journey. For this, I wrote the poem at the same time when I applied, so it started with the text as well, but I created a story board in tandem. I travelled to Paris and Budapest to shoot and I used archive footage as well. The poem was inspired by the story of a boy, who survived Auschwitz because he lied about his age. His mother told him to join the other line and go with his older brother and thus she saved his life. The poem is voiced by the mother and the son as an old man, looking back. Alongside the video poem, I made a 30-minute reportage with survivors of genocides in the 20th Century for educational purpose. I am very upset about the rise of the far right in Western countries, including Hungary and Germany and even the UK, and I feel that living witnesses have to be given a voice. I was privileged to interview survivors from Auschwitz, Rwanda, Cambodia and Bosnia, and asked them what their message was for the youth of today.

My next commission is an eco-video poem for Earth Day 2021. This will have multiple translations of the same poem about the earth, which I wrote at the age of 18 in Hungarian, originally. I asked the translators to voice the poem for me in their own language. I am trying to get voices from each continent, and even in languages that are on the brink of extinction. I started to collate the footage during lockdown. It will be the same field and the same beach over the seasons, near the place I live, but you can imagine that the beach is polluted with the debris from the sea, plastic and…masks! This is work in progress, but I am hoping to raise awareness for environmental issues as well, and the often-neglected fact that the earth is our shared home.