We have plenty of political speeches from actors nowadays: how convincing they are probably depends on how much you agree with them. Most of them, though, feel like compelled speech; the current dogma, and the current rhetoric. In contrast, Michael Sheen's Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture (2017) feels like free expression, in the best sense.
If oratory is effective political rhetoric, this is a reminder of what oratory can do. At best, it extends how you understand things, and what you can express. Welsh actor Sheen - known for The Damned United, The Queen and Frost/ Nixon - touches on Welsh history and politics; identity and belonging; the individual and the community; the relationship with England and Britain; the role of culture in politics, and much else. In the Welsh tradition, his language is full and compelling, and the rhetoric is high sometimes. But however compelling it is, it is more than just vivid or moving words. Even the strongest feelings come and go, and lasting political rhetoric has to be based in more than just emotions. Sheen's lecture reflects on his experience, and on what's good. It's the free expression of an uncoerced person.
Without external resources, you need inner resources. Orwell's Newspeak, for example, set out to deliberately constrain language; not just to reduce what could be said to what the regime deems acceptable, but to reduce what ideas could be thought. A person is made easier to dominate by hollowing out their personal experience. Engaging with skillful, challenging language does the opposite. It strengthens the dialogue you have with yourself, and your ability to clarify what is meaningful. It strengthens the sense of self you need to persevere in adversity, and respond robustly to external conditions.
In easy times, you can get by without much of a moral life. Today, that option’s not worth very much. Sheen says, "It is easy to speak of a proud independent people. The rhetoric warms the heart, but you can be proud without being independent. You often have to be."
Personal experience of Welshness (5:00 -12:00 mins)
I'll begin with the only thing I feel I have any kind of authority to be able to stand here and speak to you about tonight, which is myself my own personal experience. And even that can get a little bit slippery, to be honest. I've spent most of my life outside of Wales. I left my home in Port Talbot to go to drama school in London when I was 18 years old, and I've lived in one place or another on the other and at various distances from the Severn Bridge ever since. It was only when I left that I even began to be aware that there might be such a thing as Welshness, like a fish only knowing what wetness is once it's landed on the shore, mouth gaping and eyes bulging. I'd been so in it, but I hadn't known anything different to compare it with.
Thinking back, I turned up in London with no real sense of being different, no sense of coming from a particular culture or class or anything like that. Really I'd been aware of events going on around me growing up, particularly in the mid '80s of course, but I was so myopically focused on being a teenager with all the self obsession that can involve that I haven't really understood the full significance of what was going on in Wales at that time. And I suppose I just assumed that it was pretty much no different everywhere else, that the world was probably just the same as Port Talbot but just more of it. I barely went to Neath, let alone any further afield. And then one day, not long after I'd arrived in London, I walked into a McDonald's and no one could understand me when I asked for milk. Milk? Milk! I mean, it's not that hard is it, milk! Oh, Milk! Come on, really, is it that different?
Anyway I suppose that's where it started the having it reflected back to me that I was different thing but I didn't like that. I mean I want it to be different, I just wanted it to be in a way that I chose. I didn't like how exposing it felt. I didn't want my difference to be something that was defined by other people. I wanted to be in control of it. And so I started adapting shifting my shape to hide that difference so I could control when it was seen or not. In the first couple of weeks of being a drama school, I remember one of the voice teachers asking if she could record me speaking. She said she did that with a lot of students who had quite strong regional accents when they arrived: she used them as teaching aids for when someone might need to learn a particular accent for a play. She said she had to do it in the first few weeks, though, as people tended to lose their accent so quickly and then it would be no use. I'd be so interested to hear that tape now. I have no idea how I must have sounded then.
...I wasn't embarrassed about being Welsh or anything like that. I think I just realized without it ever having to be said that I was faced with an utterly overwhelming and totally implacable field of otherness all around me, towering above me like a huge wave, rising up, pushed forward by unseen but dimly visible forces that I knew would roll over me without a second's hesitation and I found I had very little to hold on to to resist its ineluctable currents on some level without being aware of it. I decided I would turn and swim with the current. I would leave negotiating my difference until later once I'd learned how to swim within the racing tide.
It took me a very long time to even begin to understand the consequences of how you respond to having your sense of difference be defined by others. The difficulties it can create around developing a genuine sense of identity; the ways it can disconnect you from your past. My difference, my Welshness, was first presented to me in the form of a shock from outside - a crisis of recognition; and I responded with a form of assimilation and accommodation that I thought I was in control of. But, actually, it just confused my sense of identity in such a way that it would take me many years to even begin to come to grips with.
The area of our discourse. (1hr 33 - 1hr 42 mins)
In 1985 Raymond Williams wrote a review article entitled "Community". In it, he wrote about two books by different authors, each about a different aspect of Welsh history. At one point, he uses a phrase that has stayed with me ever since I first read it. It's become a sort of touchstone for me...the reason why that phrase has stayed with me and has become so meaningful for me is because, to me, it's saying that the place where we meet, where we share who we are, what we dream of, where we've been, what we suffer, how we find joy - it's that place that is the more profound community. The area of our discourse: what can and cannot be said: The scope we allow ourselves to have the conversation and how many of our people are able to have their voice be heard in it. That's what makes us not just a community but the more profound community. We don't have to agree but we do have to engage...
...it is truly remarkable that a small country like Wales. with no real political identity, or clear legal status to our nationhood has managed - in the face of being enveloped by a huge imperial power like Britain - somehow to hold on to our sense of being different with our own cultural identity in all its complexity and our own language in spite of everything. Remarkable. Seen in this way, it is a story of extraordinary resilience. But, if we are to have any kind of a future, then we must face the reality of our present. And that means a reckoning with the legacy of our past...
Like I said at the beginning of this, I have spent most of my life outside of Wales. So what right have I to stand here and speak about these things? No right. No right at all. I'm just one of those many Welsh voices. But I do have a voice. And unlike many my voice can be heard. Many of us in this room today can have our voices heard. And I have come to feel the responsibility of that and the opportunity of it. When I walked into that McDonald's all those years ago, newly arrived in a strange familiar land, little did I know - or care - that vast currents of history were swirling around me - unseen but pushing and pulling like the ocean against a small ragged piece of coastline. An incident without importance or meaning to anyone but me. And yet at the same time a moment repeating back over and over through the past and on and on into the future; experienced by multiple generations, and continually shaping, with each response and reaction to it the possibilities for our self definition and shared identity. I felt my difference and, shifted drew back, as William said, skillfully accommodated found my few ways to be different and cultivated them.
When the door was opened to that larger society as it was in the age of Henry and his acts of Union I ran through it. When the promise of British respectability and the fruits of individual opportunity were offered up to me - as they were to those in the 19th century - I took them gladly and without a second thought. But slowly, over time, through becoming more engaged, sometimes by design but more by accident - and always because of the example of others - I have come to feel differently. I begin to understand now what Bevan said - what Bevan meant - when he said the purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away. And when Raymond Williams wrote "as so often in Welsh history there is a special strength in the situation of having been driven down so far that there is at once everything and nothing to lose and in which all that can be found and affirmed is each other."
We must affirm each other. That is where our real future lies. That is where we build from: each other. Use what voice we have in the service of each other. Whenever we can, join our voices together to help create a Wales that is our own world, as Williams described it. A world that can argue and challenge and question and explore; a world that can encompass multiple histories and diverse experience; a world that does not avoid its past or ignore its divisions; a world where our difference can become the source of our strength. Confident enough to take control of our own energies and our own resources; connected to each other and taking responsibility for ourselves. That is how we build our dragon: put real flesh on its bones and hope that one day, it will fly.
Thank you.