The Tip of My Tongue
Page 10
by Sioned Davies (Oxford World’s Classics, 2007).
Afterword
There’s an old Welsh proverb which declares: ‘Be she old, or be she young, a woman’s strength is in her tongue.’
Growing up in the 1970s as the youngest of six daughters, it seemed to me back then that – if my mother was any example – a woman’s strength lay in her ability to cook, clean, iron, mend, do four different jobs, and still find the energy to play with her children, plait their hair, listen to their grievances and adjudicate in arguments: and there were quite a few of those. If my mother had no time for quarrelling, us girls made up for it in spades. Even now, the catchphrases of our junior years still ring in my ears: from the universal ‘It’s not fair’, and the non-negotiable ‘No deal, Buster’, to the evocative, economical, ‘You’re dead.’
So when I was invited to reimagine one of the tales from the Mabinogion, the story of Geraint and Enid immediately ‘spoke’ to me. A seemingly straightforward romance, it features a husband and wife whose relationship gets into difficulties. Geraint is a rich and powerful knight, Enid a beautiful maiden, both of whom – through a misunderstanding on his part – undergo a long journey and together face a number of trials before finally conquering a range of assorted enemies and their own personal difficulties.
But it wasn’t the marital entanglement or the perilous journey – which resulted in Enid saving the day – that attracted me. It was the opportunity to explore the idea of the female voice as powerful, as a tool – as a weapon. I also wanted to utilise some of the more traditional fairy tale elements of the story and locate them in a light-hearted and modern setting. It is Enid who embodies the essence of the traditional fairy tale, but who has the most unusual role in the narrative. In the original tale, Geraint, misunderstanding Enid’s words, believes she is about to be unfaithful; as a punishment he takes her on a gruelling trek across the countryside during which he will prove his manhood and fighting prowess, and punish her for her seeming infidelity. Not only does he command her to ‘clothe thee in the worst riding-dress that thou has in thy possession’, he puts her in charge of the ever-increasing spoils of his victories – numerous horses and wagon-loads of armour – and then complains when he sees how difficult it is for her to manage this task. But his cruellest punishment is enforcing her silence:
‘And whatever thou mayest see, and whatever thou mayest hear concerning me,’ he says, ‘do thou not turn back. And unless I speak unto thee, say not thou one word either.’
As it turns out, it’s also the least effective punishment, because despite this interdiction, Enid so loves her boorish husband that – even on pain of death – she disobeys him whenever she realises he might be in danger. This leads to a series of increasingly comic exchanges where the exasperated – but perpetually saved – Geraint keeps telling Enid to be quiet.
After the first time she warns him, he admonishes her: ‘Say not one word unto me, unless I speak first unto thee. And I declare unto Heaven, if thou doest not thus, it will be to thy cost.’
Enid demurely replies: ‘I will do, as far as I can, Lord.’
It’s the ‘as far as I can’, which is telling here; it’s Enid’s get-out-of-jail card and she’s not afraid to use it: ‘as far as I am able, Lord’, she says, and again, ‘I will, Lord, while I can.’
His command for her silence and her ‘silent’ refusal to obey is at the heart of what Vladimir Propp, in his study of Russian fairy tales, describes as the ‘violation of an interdiction’.
Greek myth, fairy tales, modern literature and horror films are full of such interdictions: don’t look back, don’t stray from the path, don’t open the door, don’t pick up phone... and for Enid, it was: don’t speak. This particular interdiction harks back to the bible: ‘Let your women keep silence... for it is not permitted unto them to speak’ (Corinthians); and it resonates through our culture, from the medieval Scold’s Bridle right up to the recent tirade of verbal abuse heaped upon feminist and women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke by the Republican ‘talk radio’ host Rush Limbaugh. His attempt to negate her right to speak through slander and ridicule on the airwaves might be seen as the 21st century way to silence a woman’s voice. In the voice lies power. All around the world, from Lincoln to Liberia, oppressed groups and organisations use the word ‘voice’ to convey a sense of unity against discrimination, a sense of identity and of solidarity in the face of enforced aphony.
I have written about so-called ‘elective’ mutism before: but in Geraint and Enid, the whole point of the story is that Enid’s voice is a potent force which cannot be silenced: silence will result in death. I wanted to explore the voice as innocent, unflinching, but also without guile. And for me the most immediate way to do this was to write in the voice of a child; to reveal her thoughts, her questions, and her assertions.
Although my Geraint and Enid are cousins and far from romantically attached, and even though the story is set in 1976, I wanted to retain some of the architecture of the tale. So Geraint is a rich, spoilt public schoolboy who lives in a mansion in Devon, and Enid is from a council house in Splott. Enid takes an enforced ‘journey’ in the sense that she goes to stay in Devon while her mother is in hospital, and she has many trials and challenges to undergo throughout her stay (some inflicted by her cousin, but many of her own invention). But more pressing was my intention to explore a liminal space: the spiritual and emotional wilderness of loss and grief: not just of wandering through unknown territory, but of rendering the inarticulacy of childhood longing in simple terms, with all the misunderstanding and humour that might entail.
In the original legend, Enid does a lot more listening than she does talking, and what she hears allows her to save Geraint time and again. So, my Enid is obsessed with becoming a spy, one of the Champions, perhaps, or Wonderwoman. And like the original Enid, she can’t help but say things she really shouldn’t. Neither could be described as ‘passive’ characters by any means: the original Enid’s dilemma was an emotional one – whether to speak or be silent – but, to rephrase the cliché – her words spoke louder than actions. In my interpretation, Enid’s quest is similar: to negotiate the strangeness of the world she’s found herself in, and for her, the natural way to do that is to question everything. So, when Geraint commands her to obey him ‘upon pain of death’, Enid instantly agrees and then violates his interdiction at the first opportunity.
Other echoes of the original tale cried out for modification: the darkly comic episodes – when Geraint is challenged to kill three, then four, then five horsemen, then a clatter of knights, then a few giants – are transformed into boyhood obsessions: becoming an instant expert on ants or the movement of the tides or left-wing politics; laboriously constructing a Skylab model (a quest that may take a lifetime); discovering and therefore knowing absolutely everything there is to know about punk rock...
And even though ‘my’ Enid may question everything, I wanted her to retain an element of her namesake’s eloquent silence; so she refuses to ‘spill the beans’ when faced with an interrogation, and has the insight to ‘save’ Geraint by not speaking up. But I also wanted to show the ‘mists vanishing’ from their relationship, and to suggest a future where they might meet with equanimity.
And, of course, remembering how difficult it is for the younger child to ever win the battle, I wanted Enid to have the last word.
Trezza Azzopardi
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Seren for giving me the opportunity to take part in this series, and especially Penny Thomas for her help and advice.
I’m indebted to my family and friends for reading, inspiration and kindness.
Seren is the book imprint of
Poetry Wales Press Ltd
57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE
www.serenbooks.com
© Trezza Azzopardi 2013
ISBN 978-1-78172-107-0
The right of Trezza Azzopardi to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Mathew Bevan
The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.