On a stormy night, with serious flooding to the south and Met Office warnings to avoid driving, there was still a sturdy local attendance for this thought-provoking double bill at Barmouth’s Dragon Theatre on November 23rd. Tayo Aluko had driven up from Cornwall in the morning to be ready to perform his one-man play “Just an Ordinary Lawyer” in the evening slot at 7.30pm. This was preceded at 5pm by the multilingual local launch and community discussion of the Island Voices video cluster, “Jamiekan ina Wielz” featuring Audrey West.
In addition to Jamaican and Gaelic, the introductory documentary video is currently also available online in Welsh, English, and Portuguese, with the prospect of other languages to follow, in line with our “Other Tongues” and “Extensions” initiatives. We didn’t get a chance to sample all of these on the night, but we were pleased to include Welsh, in addition to Jamaican itself, through the skilful chairing of panel presentations and the wider discussion by Ifor ap Glyn (National Poet of Wales 2016-2022), who had himself supplied the Welsh translation and narration of the film.
With contributions also from Rita Stringer at the Diversity Project of the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, and from Island Voices’ co-ordinator Gordon Wells, the discussion was wide-ranging, touching on what we mean by “Black history” or “Welsh history”, or indeed “everybody’s history”, as well as languages and linguistics (particularly in relation to multilingualism in present-day society). Audrey herself talked freely about her personal, professional, and artistic journey up to today, and was happy to answer questions from the audience about the Jamaican language, for example about the origin of words like “pikni”.
It was a full hour and a half of viewing and talking in total. This short video gives a taste of some of the topics covered as well as snippets from the video in question in Welsh, Gaelic, and Jamaican.
The multilingualism poses something of a challenge for YouTube’s subtitling services! But auto-generated English titles are enabled, as well as Welsh and Gaelic transcriptions in appropriate places. (For non-speakers of these two languages you can get auto-translations through YouTube’s settings wheel.)