Review: Hunangofiant Dyn Positif: Bywyd a Gwaith by Wayne Howard

Des Clifford

The memoir is a popular and perennial genre in Welsh due, perhaps, to the relative intimacy of the language community.

In a small but highly networked world poets, preachers, politicians, singers, sports people, farmers, actors, musicians and journalists have shared their self-stories and collectively plotted a sort of perimeter boundary around the perception of lived experience through the Welsh language.

The bias is weighted towards creative arts, liberal politics and smalltown Wales.

Wayne Howard presents his life as a black man and former steel worker in east Cardiff, an original and boundary-shifting offering in Welsh.

Love Island

Outside of Welsh language circles Wayne came to wider prominence when he was “discovered” as the father of Connagh Howard, a Welsh speaking participant on Love Island.

Interest in the family from Cardiff’s Docks and their journey towards speaking Welsh led to a father-son TV series, “Cymru, Dad a Fi” (Wales, Dad and Me).

The two sailed around the coast, exploring their relationship with Wales and each other.

They came across as engaging and interested. Wayne particularly emerged as a natural force, at once opinionated, open-minded and open-hearted.

I first came across Wayne being interviewed on stage at the Lleisiau Eraill/Other Voices festival in Cardigan a couple of years ago.

He spoke with charisma and sincerity about identity and said that speaking his nation’s historic language was the greatest source of pride in his life, other than his family.

Learning any language as an adult is immensely hard work and most people make only limited progress.  To achieve fluency through years of commitment, one course building on another, after long hard shifts of manual labour at a steelworks, is little short of incredible.

If the Eisteddfod’s Learner of the Year were supplemented by a Lifetime Achievement award, then Wayne Howard should, surely, be among the laureates.

If Wayne had achieved nothing else outside the Welsh language, his story would be compelling enough, but that’s not the half of it. The book’s title translates to English as “Memoir of a Positive Man”, and he’s not joking.

Cardiff’s docklands

Wayne grew up in Cardiff’s docklands long before swanky “Cardiff Bay” was invented, to a local mother and a Windrush father from Jamaica.

His mother offered warmth while his complex father was difficult and strict. The family was large, the house cramped and money short. The family faced racism and poverty.

After some small misdemeanour Wayne’s angry father punched him in the mouth and made him mop up the blood. And yet his father worked incredibly hard, as did his mother, to keep the family afloat.

His father gardened, kept racing pigeons and koi carp and became an adherent of theosophy.

Remarkably, he developed a personal philosophical vision which he called SOLO, based on a fusion of individuality and collective purpose; he wrote it down in a text which he preached around Cardiff.

Unusual, but great religions have started on a similar basis.

You can see clearly the inherited source of Wayne’s curiosity and his zeal to communicate what he understands.

Wayne left school without qualifications, clearly the damning result of educational and social inequality and nothing else. His employment prospects were limited to manual labour and he worked for decades in Cardiff’s steel industry.

Industrial injury

Wayne is positive about his work mates but suffered a serious industrial injury and was among the pensioners deprived of their full pensions at the collapse of ASW, for which they have campaigned ever since.

Wayne and his wife Linda (she came second in the Miss Wales body building contest and deserves a book of her own) decided to send their children to Welsh medium schools to improve their prospects, perceptively as it turned out.

Wayne began learning Welsh to show commitment to the school and to help his children. As this book shows, he succeeded abundantly.

It’s a challenge to write a book in your mother tongue but to write one in a learnt language puts you in a club with Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov and Kazuo Ishiguro!

When Wayne was made redundant from the steel works in his 50s he trained to become a Welsh tutor, an impressive leap.

He faced and overcame other challenges, family tragedy and a period of severe mental illness.

He competed in numerous sports, collects comics, reads science fiction and has a wide interest in music from around the world.

In recent years he has studied, and practices, shamanic trance music and dance. Wayne is passionate about all these things, “…it’s part of my personality to examine, to search, to test, to understand, and not to conform.”

He has gained recognition for his achievement, certainly in the Welsh language community, and is a familiar figure in the media and on public platforms.

Racism

Describing his experience of learning Welsh he says, “perhaps there was an element of elitism or racism in the Welsh speaking community; honestly, that’s how it felt to me at the time. And it really got under my skin when I was learning Welsh.”

There’s food for thought. Most Welsh speakers are encouraging but everyone has met pathetic Colonel Mutation whose self-worth is boosted by denigrating other peoples’ Welsh.

Confidence-killers are the enemy of the Welsh language, however perfect their mutations.

Wayne’s embrace of Welsh has enriched the language community. As Wales changes, the profile of people who speak Welsh should change with it.

The language should look and sound like the people who live here.  Reliable figures are hard to come by but there’s evidence of slow change.

Wayne and his family are part of that change but the tent needs to be widened and made more appealing.

Not everyone will have Wayne’s incredible commitment-level and we surely need a stronger, more generous and more imaginative offer for adult-learning if we are to realise the Welsh Government’s ambition to grow the Welsh speaking population to one million by 2050.

Welsh schools can’t bear the whole weight of this expectation, nor should they.

We need a stronger sense of seriousness and national mission around the adult offer – and the resources to back it up.

Wayne’s story shows what fascination is on the doorstep if you bother to look.  Abandon celebrity Instagram accounts and those lifestyle magazines. If you’re searching for inspiration, try the guy next door or the family round the corner.

Originality, uniqueness and achievement is all around us if we but look and listen and take notice.

Hunangofiant Dyn Positif: Bywyd a Gwaith is published by Y Lolfa and is available here.