Dig Where You Stand: Zakia Sewell, interviewed

April’s Book of the Month is Zakia Sewell’s Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain (Si apre in una nuova finestra) (Hodder Press). In this month’s author interview, Zakia speaks to CBTR’s Tallulah Brennan about enacting rebellion and dissent, finding stories in the margins, and the importance of confronting complicated relationships with England.

Zakia Sewell, photographed by Buster Grey Jung

A couple of quick-fire questions to start.

You note in the book that there is something quite specific about geographically isolated communities. For example, folk customs have remained very strong in Cornwall, with some of its inhabitants citing living at the land’s end as a reason connections between people have remained so strong. I wondered how you relate to this as someone who lives in a place defined by its vastness and huge number of people — but also as someone who has experience of quite the opposite, in rural Wales?

I was lucky to have a split screen, or a kind of double experience of growing up. At my family home on the outskirts of West London, I was allowed to cycle around my block of flats but not really go any further. I lived in incredibly close proximity to people in a council block, and yet didn’t really know any of my neighbours. That experience contrasted with my time spent with my grandparents  in Wales, in a township called Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, where there was a real deep sense of community. That included longer term residents with a generational relationship to the place, along with newer incomers — it was a community bound together by pubs, and the carnivals that happened every summer, and the ‘common walk’ which happened every three years, which I write about in the book. There were all of these community events which really bound people and gave them a sense of local pride. I feel very lucky to have had that experience, and also the experience of visiting the Caribbean. Where my grandparents are from, Carriacou, similarly, there is a real sense of island pride. And again, if we’re thinking about isolated communities, Carriacou is tiny, it's 7 miles long, and each village has its own traditions and customs and its own distinct sense of identity. So, I suppose the book draws upon my experience of all of those places, the urban and the rural, the sense of community here in Britain and that in the Caribbean. This is very much the perspective from which the book is written.

There’s a moment in the book in which you write: ‘When I’ve not left the city for a while, I find it's easy to forget there is moist, damp earth beneath the concrete; that the hills of Highgate and New Cross were once covered in grass and wild flowers, or even forests, roamed by wild boars and wolves.’ Are there daily rituals or routines you have which allow you to connect to the land despite the ease of forgetting you describe?

Forcing myself to get out for a walk. It’s very easy, when we’re busy running around in our city lives, to forget to pause and take time to notice the natural landscape. For much of my life, I barely looked up to notice the trees were in blossom, or that the leaves were withering. One of the lovely things about starting to follow the wheel of the year, albeit in quite a gentle way, has been to reroot myself in seasonal shifts, and to mark them. Even if it's in a small way, like making the effort to step out and go for a walk, or doing a little ritual with friends. It’s made me so much more aware and made me feel so much more closely connected to those seasonal shifts and cycles, which, even if you’re in the centre of a big city in London, you can access.