Zakia Sewell: How one writer is utilizing British folks tradition as an antidote to the far proper | EUROtoday

On a sunny March morning in Bunhill Fields, a burial floor in central London, broadcaster Zakia Sewell is musing over whether or not folks traditions can actually be an antidote to far-right nationalism.

The 32-year-old author and BBC Radio 6 DJ has been mulling that query over for a while as she journeyed across the British Isles exploring the nation’s folks resurgence for her debut ebook. Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain builds on Sewell’s hit audio collection for BBC Radio 4, which noticed her hunt down a special, extra inclusive concept of “Britishness” past the same old nationwide myths and symbols. The ebook has been longlisted for this 12 months’s Women’s Prize for non-fiction.

Britain is in a “folk frenzy”, in keeping with Sewell, gesturing to a post-pandemic resurgence in folks tradition evidenced by a brand new slate of pagan festivals in addition to the rising reputation of folks music, dancing, movies – and magazines like Weird Walkwhich takes its identify from a motion that invitations individuals to discover websites wealthy in fantasy and ritual via strolling.

“People are becoming more interested in folk today because they’re searching for alternative visions of Britishness that are more eccentric and fun,” Sewell says. Today, she stands footsteps away from the headstone of poet and mystic William Blake. Born in 1757, Blake was a fellow seeker of “Albion”, the oldest recognized identify for the island of Great Britain.

Finding Albion follows the Pagan calendar, also referred to as the “Wheel of the Year” – which delineates the altering seasons with eight annual festivals across the UK, all of which Sewell attended. She marked the spring equinox with a druid ritual on Glastonbury Tor, celebrated May Day with Morris dancers in Oxford, and noticed Samhaim, referred to as Gaelic Halloween, amid the ghosts of York. During Montol, a midwinter competition in Penzance, Cornwall, Sewell dressed up as a wolf earlier than rounding off her 12 months at Stonehenge for one more spring equinox.

Alongside this resurgence in folks tradition, nonetheless, one other type of frenzy has taken maintain. Last 12 months, “flag fever” emerged on account of Operation Raise the Colours and the Unite the Kingdom marches – two actions with connections to well-known far-right campaigners resembling Tommy Robinson. Street by road, flags proliferated as their that means was debated ferociously in newspapers and on social media: an emblem of patriotism or racist nationalism?

Finding Albion seems to historical past to assist undermine makes an attempt by far-right teams to co-opt conventional symbols and tales to gas division. “Many of our national symbols in England aren’t rooted in English soil at all,” Sewell says, noting how England’s patron saint, St George, by no means set foot in England and had Palestinian roots. And St George’s cross, the nationwide flag, originated because the flag of the Italian Republic of Genoa. “The English even paid Genoa a tax for many centuries for the privilege of using the flag,” she says.

Sewell will not be the one one hoping to grapple with divisive visions of the previous. The LGBTQ+ feminine Morris dancing troupe, Boss Morris, breathes new life into the English folks dance relationship again to the fifteenth century. Based in Gloucestershire, its dancers carry out at festivals and fetes. In 2023, they appeared alongside Wet Leg on the Brit awards.

Boss Morris hopes to redefine “Englishness” into one thing extra inclusive and with broader enchantment by reimagining a contemporary imaginative and prescient of folks tradition away from the darker elements of folks traditions – together with the follow of blackface.

As somebody of British and Caribbean heritage, Sewell’s relationship to her personal Britishness has at all times felt sophisticated. Along together with her love for sunshine and syncopated rhythms, she additionally inherited tales from her Caribbean household of her ancestors who had been transported from West Africa in tightly packed ships and labored as slaves on sugar plantations underneath British rule.

Much of Britain’s inequality Sewell attributes to the spectre of its colonial historical past and the racism that was used to justify it. But via her analysis she has found that, “Britain of the past is not as white as we think,” she says. Take the Cheddar man – the ten,000-year-old Mesolithic skeleton dubbed the “first Brit” was revealed in 2018 to have had darkish pores and skin. Even the ruler of Great Britain in Roman occasions, Septimius Severus, was a North African.

Finding Albion is wealthy with information and insights that assist to pave the best way for a extra inclusive imaginative and prescient of Britain. The ebook’s cowl is an illustration of one thing that appears rather a lot just like the illusive Holy Grail; the ebook is an unbelievable discover.

Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain by Zakia Sewell revealed on March nineteenth by Hodder & Stoughton.