Sugar and Slate is a memoir that uses a mix of poetry and prose to explore the complexities of identity.
Williams grew up in the coastal town of Llandudno in North Wales, the daughter of a white, Welsh-speaking mother and a Black Guyanese father. She returns again and again to the feeling that to be half-Welsh and half Afro-Caribbean was to be half of something but never quite anything whole.
… to be mixed race is not to be half of anything; mixed but not mixed up…
Her book considers the challenge of trying to “fit in” while always feeling that you belong elsewhere. As she charts her movement between Wales, Africa, and the Caribbean in search of a self that that she could fully claim, she finds that her mixed background made her feel an outsider wherever she was. She’s too Black for Wales and too Welsh for Guyana.
In her childhood years, though Welsh-born, she and her sisters were made to feel an outsider, being the only people of colour in the town of Llandudno. The townspeople considered themselves “respectable” so Charlotte and her sisters were not subjected to outright racist comments. Instead they were on the receiving end of what she calls “polite racism” — questions and attitudes that embodied assumptions of inferiority.
Her family lived in an up and coming middle-class part of town, amongst some of the most respectable members of the community — solicitors, teachers, doctors. And yet they were still considered different and not part of that class.
She recalls for example one day when she and her sister caught the bus home from school and the conductor — despite their immaculate uniforms and perfectly brushed hair — assumed they were disadvantaged “Barnado’s children” who couldn’t afford the fares.
Small-town thinking has its own way of managing differences. It both embraces and rejects it. In its ambivalence you become a one and the same time highly invisible and punishingly visible. ‘We never really noticed you were coloured,’ they would say in condescending tones or ‘You’re not really black, you’re just brown.’ and we would all be relieved of the onerous impoliteness of being black.
The discomfort of not fitting in continues when she travels to the Caribbean. She’d imagined she’d be welcomed as one of their own, returning to her roots. But that doesn’t materialise. Instead, she finds herself reading the culture from the outside again, now as someone whose skin may match but whose formation does not.
Sugar and Slate is a fascinating book though it does require concentration because of its fragmented structure. Williams moves from history, to memories and personal reflection, including snippets of Welsh, poetry and some of her father’s writings. It’s worth the investment of time however for, as much as this is a book about personal identity it’s also a book about a nation’s identity.
What is Wales, is a question she considers on her return from Guyana. It’s a country as mixed-up as she is, she concludes. A country populated largely by those from outside Wales — English, Italian, Polish, Asian, Africans, Irish — but alienated by increasing nationalism.
Amid campaigns aimed at prioritising the Welsh language and protecting the housing stock against non-resident second-homers, the various ethnic groups end up “fighting amongst ourselves for the right to call ourselves Welsh and most of us losing out to some very particular idea about who belongs and who doesn’t.”
Thought-provoking and beautifully written, Sugar and Slate is a book that made me see my country’s history in a new light. The questions she poses about identity and belonging stretch well beyond the geographic boundaries of Wales. They’re questions that are worth asking wherever you live.