Community Festivities and Future Visions

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Discover more at Arlo.com Every now and then we all have days where the rise of the far right, the kind of incompetence of this Labour government and a general feeling of toxicity in the air kind of hangs on our shoulders. And if I'm being really honest with you, I'm having one of those days. So Zakia feels like the perfect guest. She's someone I've admired and loved for a long time. I can remember times during the pandemic and afterwards where I would just sit and listen to the tunes that she play ed so often, so soulful and mellow, full of her folk heroes and heroines. So I'm delighted that she's come on the podcast today to talk about her new book, Finding Albion. This is my conversation with DJ ,rit wer , journalist, and activist, Zachy As ul. So one of the things that people say to me a lot is how do you not find your job stressful? And most of the time, I just find it really hopeful and really inspiring, and people are doing amazing things. And then every so often I have a morning, like I've just had, where reform are kind of pushing the most negative, uh, xenophobic kind of policies. And I just feel like I need to cleanse. And then you've come into my life today, Zachia. And I feel like you're that amazing cleanse. I want to talk about you and the work that you're doing at the moment, but I also just want to let the viewers know that I'm fanboying hard right now. Um because there's a digital music station called NTS, uh, which is really cool. People should check them out. And you did a show on there for years that I used to listen to every single week. So I'm very used to having your voice in my ear. And indeed you and your mum, Amy, would often do the show together. And then you moved on to the BBC um to do dream time. How are you finding that kind of shift? Well I have to say, yeah, it's um to know that we have uh you know one of our foremost political leaders listening to my show is uh is really an honor. And he it means he's got great taste as well. So um yeah, thank you for listening. And um yeah, it's been an interesting transition, sort of going from NTS, which is very much a kind of DIY kind of station, you know. I was there in the early days of the station when it was just in a kind of a little box off a square in Dalston in East London to the BBC. But it's been a wonderful journey and you know, I just I just love being able to share the music that I love and tell stories through music and, I suppose the the book that we're going to talk a little bit about is a kind of continuation of that kind of that weaving, that sort of um yeah, weaving together of different traditions and trying to find kind of common narratives. I suppose that's the kind of parallel between what I do in music and what I've done with the book. I love that. And in the book's introduction, which sorry, the book's called Finding Albion. In the introduction you say not a lot of people necessarily know what Albion means or they might not have heard the word unless they support certain football teams. So what does Albion mean? So Albion is the ancient name for Britain. So kind of in some of the early earliest texts, you've got ancient Greek geographers referring to the island of Britain as Albion and default sort of um distingu ishing it from Ireland, today's Ireland, which they called Ivernia. So it's this kind of ancient word, nobody really knows where it came from, nobody really knows the kind of the true etymology of the word. Some people say it has a connection to the Latin word albus meaning white. Um that could be the white cliffs of Dover. Some people who have um rather dark visions of Albion say that it's a reference to the white skin of Albion's true inhabitants . But it's a word that is sort of, because we don't really know exactly where it came from or what it means, it's a word that is sort of rich for dreaming about sort of alternatives for Britain. The incredible visionary and polymath William Blake wrote extensively about Albion, and he described Albion as a kind of primordial giant that sort of represented the soul of the nation. And Blake wrote that Albion had once contained all of heaven and earth in his limbs. He was this kind of great majestic cosmic being, and yet he'd fallen into a kind of deathly slumber. And Blake saw this as the consequence of the kind of rationalism and material And yet he promised that the spirit of Albion would rise again to restore enchantment and hope and uh you know to revitalize the nation. So my sense of Albion is very much kind of informed and influenced by Blake's. I see it as an alternative spirit of the nation, one that runs through certain aspects of our culture and in the landscape that kind of rises up, I suppose, in times of need and I would say that we are in one of those at the moment and and that's why I've gone sort of searching for visions of Albion in this book. I love that so much. And so in the book you're going round the country looking for stories of heroes and myths and and folk like Are there any highlights? Uh obviously people should read the book to get the the real details, but are there any highlights where you thought yes this is this really feels right. Well perhaps it'd be good to start with one of the early legends of Albion . So in the book, as you mentioned, I'm kind of drawing on our older tales and customs and stories. I've always been really drawn to kind of folk culture because of the very different sort of vision of of Britishness that we get when we look to some of these older customs and tales. When I started the research for this book, I I was aware of a kind of famous legend of Albion written by the 12th century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, and he um in his history of the kings of Britain, I put you know history in inverted commas because although I think a lot of what he wrote was sort of believed up until the seventeenth century, we now see it as largely largely fictitious. He wrote about Albion being a land inhabited by a race of demonic giants until the arrival of the Trojan hero Brutus, who kind of came and wiped out the giants and colonized the land and named it Britain. But other scholars and poets, they wanted to fill in the gaps, and they asked, well, how did those giants get there? And then you end up with this very interesting story of Albina and her thirty sisters. And according to legend, Albina was the daughter of a sometimes Syrian, sometimes Greek king. And um she and her thirty sisters were known for being extraordinarily beautiful, but also very disobedient. So they plot to murder their husbands in the night, and they are exiled, and they sail the seven seas until they reach a beautiful uninhabited island, which Albina names Albion. So she and her sisters they live in a kind of feminist utopia on this island for many years they learn to they sort of commune with the land, they learn to hunt its wild animals, they forage, um, and then, you know, eventually they begin to pine for male company and they procreate with some demons and they give birth to the race of giants. Now, obviously, there are kind of some misogynistic sort of you know ideas in that story. But I think that it's very, very fascinating that in some of the earliest stories about Britain and some of our kind of origin stories, we have this tale of immigrants, refugees from Syria arriving on these shores to start a new life. And I think that, you know, we could what would happen if we repurpose this myth, if we reclaimed this old myth, if we made Albina uh you know, made her a kind of symbol of Britishness, what how how how might it kind of change the way we think about people arriving on these shores today if we know that kind of in our earlier stories that idea was there. So that's that was one of the stories that really kind of blew my mind. I think, why didn't I learn about this? You know, why didn't I know about Albina? Why was I not taught the legends of Albion when I was at school? And you know many other countries really hold those kind of national myths as sacred. Um we don't really here in Britain. Do you have a theory why we don't really hear about those stories? Because I'm hearing some of these for the first time when I looked through your book, I had no idea about whether it's history or whether it's myth, and obviously sometimes those things are blurred. It feels very rarely in this conversation do we have a conversation about those things. Other than maybe Shakespeare being the exception that often uses these myths. Yeah, well in the book I kind of write about Wales as an example 'cause I grew up in London, um my dad's side of the family are English, my mum my grandma has a connection to Wales and lived there for many, many years. My mum's side of the family are from the Caribbe an. And um I I spent a lot of time in Wales growing up and always felt really at home there. It was where I first made a connection to the landscape, I suppose where I first made a connection to some of those kind of older myths and legends, you know, like there were stories of Merlin and all of that kind of just in the air in the ether in Wales. But it was also where I encountered a sense of national identity that felt welcoming rather than threatening. You know, even though me and my mum were like the only black faces around for miles when we visited. I used to kind of encounter these characters, they'd be singing Welsh hymns in the pubs, you know, and you'd see the Welsh flag, you know, the the incredible red dragon, sort of everywhere. But it never brought about a kind of fearful response in me in the same way that perhaps the sort St. George's Cross does. So in the book, I started to really um question why that was, and I sort of was learning about the kind of flourishing of Welsh national consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That was largely a response to the union of 1707. You know, Wells had been in this kind of quasi-colonial relationship with England for many centuries beforehand. And after the Union there was this attempt to really define uh Welshness in a way that it hadn't been before. And obviously, so this is a kind of national identity that was developed in opposition or in almost kind of in defence against a kind of dominant um neighbour. And that you know there were poets and scholars and writers and aristocrats kind of really drawing for those older myths and symbols and or in their kind of attempts to conjure a kind of a sense of Welshness that could hold its own within the Union. So they look to their old stories. You know, half the symbols that we associate with Wales today, the the leak, the bard, the druid, the triple harp, these were kind of symbols that had their roots in older customs and stories, but they were really um kind of held up as symbols of Welsh identity during that era. Um so although I had this sense that the kind of Welshness sort was like this or the kind of symbols of Welshness had always had just sort of sprung organically from the earth. In fact the Welsh symbols as as we know them today were collectively consciously conjured. So and the English never really did th the same thing. I think that for a for a long time Englishness was sort of enmeshed with the British project. So in many cases our kind of British and English symbols are kind of uh ble merged or blended. It's quite hard to sort of um distinguish them from one another and Caroline Lucas writes about this very well in her book Another England where she says it can be quite hard to sort of locate an Englishness as distinct from Britishness and that is sort of a result of the British proje ct. Whereas the Welsh and Scots have a very clear sense of who they are outside of Britishness and I feel like the English don't in the same way. And is there a danger here? Because I'm someone who supports uh the right of Scottish people to have an independence referendum, and I also support the right of Welsh people to have a Welsh referendum. But what does English nationalism look like? And if we don't have a version of that, there's a worry that another group of people who might not have good intentions might have their very specific version of English nationalism. Well, absolutely, and this is this is what we're seeing at the moment. You know, I think that many of us who have roots in England we kind of dismiss our Englishness because we don't want to be kind of lumped in with those who hold very sort of toxic and exclusionary visions of what Englishness is and who can be a part of it. And so, you know, I've always called myself British rather than English. And I think now that I start to think about it, I think that's me that's a kind of avoidance in a way, because I've all I was born in England, I know I've always lived here. And I think that lots of other people feel the same, but the problem is that when we do that, when we sort of reject our Englishness or we try to claim some kind of Irish, Scottish or Welsh kind of distant relative and and kind of you know latch uh latch onto that identity and and heritage, we're handing it over to people often with sort of darker more exclusionary visions of what Englishness is to define that identity. And you know, what's been really important for me in this book has been to seek out those other examples of English culture, English heroes, alternative histories that actually make me feel a little bit more proud about being English, you know, not those histories that are enmeshed with the kind of reverence of military monarchy and empire, but rad icals and eccentrics and people who have fought against oppressive systems and structures throughout history. And I think that finding those people who've fought against you know the oppressive structures and systems and so it's made me feel a little bit more at home with my Englishness. I love that. So I asked the question as if it was abstract, but actually it's not abstract at all. We know that Tommy Robinson and many people were marching through the streets with the St. George's Cross, uh with the the Raising Flags uh March, and also we've seen the flags popping up all all over England. If we're not to give that space to the likes of Tommy Robinson or I would say Nigel Farage , who are our alternate stories? Who are the heroes that we should be pushing forward? So one of the wonderful things about folk culture, whether we're talking about old songs that have been passed down for generations, uh, you know, seasonal community customs that are practiced in various places around the country, or kind of older stories . These aspects of culture are have traditionally been the expressions of marginalized people, of the working classes, of women. I look at also, you know, the expressions of the subjects of the of the former colonies , you know, people who have been sort of excluded from the academies, the institutions, and whose kind of perspectives are rarely included in the kind of dominant history. So when we look to some of these alternative forms of culture and we look to folk culture, um, we often find stories and perspectives that sort of trouble the dominant narratives and that's one of the reasons that I'm really interested in them. So in one of the chapters in the book, I'm looking at the kind of folk song reperto ire um in England. And in this kind of incredible body of songs, many of which were collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we get tales of rebels and kind of um outlaws and I look at this particular song called The Rufford Park Poachers, which was collected by a folk singer in nineteen oh eight, but it speaks of a a real life clash that happened between poachers and gamekeepers in eighteen fifty one. And there's a radical sentiment in this song. The lyrics are a buck or doe, believe it so, a pheasant or a hare, we're set on earth for everyone quite equal for to share. So poach a bold as I unfold, keep up your gallant heart and think about those poachers bowl that night in Rufford Park. And the reality is that during this time, um, if a working person sort of killed a a hare or um or a doe, they'd be transported to the colonies for up to fifteen years for doing so because you know, working people were not allowed to hunt game freely um in the way that the aristocracy were. And there were major, major clashes about the increased legislation against poaching during this era. So the more that I was sort of l reading into the history of the song and the context of the song, you know, it tells the story of a real life clash between gamekeepers and poachers on the lands of the Earl of Scarborough in the 1850s. It revealed this kind of radical history of protest, you know, from the Luddites who set fire to factory mach inery in a similar area to where the clash happened, to you know, the toll puddle martyrs, um going all the way back to the diggers of the uh English Civil War who believed in the abolition of private property and declared the land a common treasury for all. And you know, I found these tales so inspiring. Very, very English, you know, these are these are stories of English heroes who were not on plint, or who are often not sort of taught about when you learn history at school. But I think they're a really fertile source for those of us who are seeking out alternative English heroes. You know, why don't we look to the history of kind of English radical action and we're when we're thinking about alternative kind of symbols and sort of stories of Englishness on the left. So that is that is just one of the kind of strands that I found incredibly inspiring . And also, you know, that that chapter's also about the history of enclosure. So I spoke with contemporary members of the Right to Rome movement, including one woman called Nadia Sheikh. And she was talking about this link between the fates of rural working class people in England who were shoved off the land through various acts of enclosure and the people who were being exploited and enslaved across the empire because it was the profits from the empire , many landowners received massive payouts. There's been lots of incredible work kind of making this kind of money flow visible in recent years. That so much of that, that the profits or the money that people were given by the government after the abolition of slavery was put back into the land and further um you know shoving more uh working class white English people off the land. And so here is this story of ultimately a shared struggle and yet, you know racism is what kind of prevents us from being able to recognize where our struggles are shared . This is your business. This is your business supercharged with the help of zero accounting software . These are your numbers. These are your numbers sorted with the help of zero accounting software. This is you. This is you taking business we want with the help of zero accounting software. Hello ! This is your business supercharged with the help of zero and having your numbers sorted all at the same time so you can finally focus on taking business where you want to . Supercharge your business today with the help of zero. Search zero with an X What happens when you're not home? Most security camera systems react after something's already happened. Arlo's early warning system with new cameras, Pro 6 and Ultra 3, does more. Arlo AI actually understands what it sees and knows if it's a stranger, a familiar face, a vehicle, an animal, even fire. So you get alerts that matter when they matter. Arlo . Home. Where you need us to be. Discover more at arlo.com. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start , run, and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there, integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time, from startups to scale-ups, online, in person, and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your one dollar a month trial at Shopify.com/slash setup . Uh and one of my faviteour bands actually of all time is a folk band called Seize for Day. Uh they perform a lot at festivals and I would say that they would describe themselves as a protest folk band. But they have a beautiful song about Luddites and Chartists and it it kind of tells the history of that song. So I'd encourage people to check out C laude Day. Um I think you named something there, which is racism. Um and obviously it y your book doesn't talk about it in such terms, it's much more hopeful and positive than that. But also I'm I'm pretty sure a degree we can't uh deny that racism exists and we need to kind of acknowledge that. What do we do about the fact that we talked about the story on the left and we talked about dominant narratives? How do we find a way to bring people together when things feel increasingly divided. Well, you know it's um it's a very intoxicating idea, you know, an idea the idea that you uh ul ultimately, regardless of your life circumstances, regardless of uh you know, whether you have a loving, prosperous, fulfilling life or not, that you are always gonna be better than this group of people because of the colour of your skin. That's a very intoxicating and seductive idea. It's going to be difficult to kind of get people to let go of that because then it also if once we once we remove that idea then people are often having to face the hars her realities of of their own life or their own failings or or or whatever. Also, when we're thinking about kind of the nation, you know, think of all of the atrocities and the horrors that have been committed sort of under uh uh unjustified using this lie of racism. You know, uh I can enslave this person, I could, you know, steal the land of this person, I can oppress and brutalize this person and I can still be a good moral moral person because they are lesser due to the colour of their skin. So if we re you know, in order to sort of detoxify our society and kill this virus of racism.' Thsere going to be a lot of shadow work that's going to have to you know, people are going to have to really come to terms and and sort of um deal with all of the horrors that have been kind of committed under the spell of this lie. And so you can see why people don't want to do it. This is kind of where we're at in Britain. You know, there's been incredible work done over the past few years to make visible and to sort of reveal the undeniable fact of the of the horrors of the British Empire. You've got people who've been educated to believe that, you know, we have been this guiltless, faultless nation that brought civilization to kind of vast, you know, swathes of of humanity. Quite a quite a kind of you, know a, a high position to be occupying. And then the alternative is offered and that is that British people are kind of murdering exploitative enslavers. And you can see why people don't want to go there. You can see why people have such a strong reaction to those of us who dare to say the Empire was not, you know, all sunshine and roses. This is where it's really important for new ones. And this is something that I try to sort of bring into my reflections in this book is you know, can we can we can we find the middle ground? Can we have a story that is honest about our trespasses, that is not afraid to shy away from the darkness of our past and our present , but that can also hold the hope and the magic and the enchantment at the same time. And I think that that is so important. And I think that if we can if we can sort of offer an alternative story that is a little bit more balanced, a little bit more honest , a little bit more nuanced, perhaps we'll be it'll be more able to kind of convince people who've been quite wedded to the kind of story of perfection, the story of we defeated the Nazis and we are the goodies of history to something that's a little bit more subtle. And you know, I I I hope that once that kind of alternative story that is a bit more honest, that is a bit more nuanced, sort of be sort of becomes more evident, that we'll be able to get people to hop over. Fingers crossed. That's so interesting. Do you have um thoughts about how we do that? And it it's perfectly legitimate to turn to me and and go, you're the politician, you tell me. But I I think that like I think that's with Winston Churchill, for instance, that there's this kind of uh narrative, predominant narrative, that he was this amazing prime minister that wasn't problematic at all. And it feels like when anyone tries to have a conversation about someone can have done both some good things and also have been deeply problematic. So there feels like there's no nuance for that space in the conversation. Um so you've written a book, you're uh always using music and art and culture. Uh I feel like I'm leading with this question because I feel like that's a way to change things, but but what do you think? Some people see folk as, you know, it's got to be Morris dances, it's got to be bells and ribbons, and it's something that kind of happened many, many centuries ago that people are sort of reenacting. But um in one of the chapters in the book, I uh went to a new folk tradition in in Penzance. It's Montal It Happens at the Winter Solstice. And I actually got involved in the tradition, so you know, most of the time I'd sort of been like on the sidelines taking photos and sort of studiously taking notes, but someone didn't turn up for this procession, so I ended up, you know, with a wolf mask on, like howling at children. And it felt really good. But you know, one of the things that I think that experience taught me was actually what these traditions are about is community . It's about that local sense of community. And a sense of community that kind of transcends political differences, uh, back, you know, backgrounds, where you might be from. It's like in that moment, it's about everyone coming together, using the kind of communal resources that you have. You don't have to be a great singer, you don't have to be a great artist or dancer or whatever. But everyone's kind of like getting together because they care about the place in which they live and they want to do something nice for the people that they live with. In today's world, most of us are kind of part of communities of interest, right? We kind of hang out with people that we like, that like the same things as us, that are interest, that have the same politics as us, that maybe like the same music as us. And I spoke to this amazing kind of Gallic community practitioner on the Isle of Mull, and she was saying that up there, the sense of community is about everyone. It's about the people who you disagree with, the people who whose views you might despise, and yet, you know, if there's a storm, if a log falls down and gets in the way of the road, you're still gonna go and check on that person. And so this is where I think the idea of community festivities is one way that I think we could perhaps start to kind of mend those severed ties and sort of um alleviate this kind of, as you say, this polarization that is on the rise in our country. You know, that getting together and like singing and doing a silly dance with your neighbours, whether or not they could be on the they could be on the right, you could be on the left, but in that moment you you connect with something more and something bigger, which is your shared humanity. And I think that that is the thing that we lose sight of when we're sort of like arguing online with people that you know don't share the same views as us, is that we're all I know it sounds a bit utopian and hippie, but you know, that sense of humanity that even though I might disagree with you, that I respect your humanity and therefore I'm gonna treat you with dignity and respect. So this is one thing that I think that kind of these acts of coming together in dance or song or storytelling can do. And another aspect, no, I was listening to um Dr. Cornell West on a podcast earlier, and he said something about artists and creatives authorizing new kind of visions and new realities that other people can't see. And he's sort of talking about the deep kind of power and potential of the imagination and creativity. And you know, whether you're a a songwriter or a sculptor or kind of a storyteller, those of us who kind of um work within those creative spheres, we we're dream ers, and it's so important that we can dream of new new realities and new possibilities. Otherwise, how will they ever come to be? So I think that the arts is such a vital kind of way for us to envision new realities in Britain. And I don't think that that is separate from the kind of political work that you do. I think that these things absolutely work in tandem with one another. That was one of my favourite answers anyone's ever given out. I guess I'm you know, I'm a former theatre actor that got into politics and I'm listening to it and I'm like, that's just it though, isn't it? It's people coming together to create new stories in symbiosis with what's happening in the world and then to vision a future. I think so often the things that hold us back is billions of pounds have been spent on propaganda telling us things can't be different or they have to be this way, or the toxicity and division are exactly how it should be, as opposed to people are fueling that and they're being paid to fuel that and actually, we could create something different. Before we go into complete utopia, which I'm totally there for, uh there are people though who would identify as right-wing or indeed even far right. And no matter what humanity or community we put them in, they are uh set on destroying or pushing this toxicity. Do we think we can change their minds or is it a case of building a society that doesn't include them? Well it's it's interesting. I was thinking about this phrase , you know, this term far right because as I mentioned, I've you know got a lot of horrible racist comments on a video that um uh that was posted about me speaking about these subjects and and sort of amidst all the kind of horror and the and and the kind of drudgery of of the comment you know, there was one comment that stood out and it was this woman and she was saying, you know, who are the far right? Who are you talking about? And she was kind of saying, We need to be careful about the language that you we're using because there are people who, you know, are kind of concerned about immigration in this country, who, you know, are quite sort of attached to the traditional kind of visions and ideas about Britishness and uh feel that that is under threat. But they're not necessarily neo-Nazis. And and it kinda got me thinking, I thought, well, yeah, because I I sort of use this term the far right, the far right. And I'm like, well, who are we talking about there? And are we in danger of alienating this people who are perhaps more moderate, the the people who we could actually sort of converse with and commune with and perhaps who we might be able to whose minds we might be able to change, are we alienating them by sort of lumping them all over into this kind of this this this sort of category of the far right? And it's not something that I'd really considered before. And again, that division that you're talking about that is being promoted and funded, that we end up sort of replicating it or kind of fueling ourselves in the language that we use. So I think there are some people who are, you know, too far gone to ever um you know to th there's sort of no point wasting our kind of precious energy to try and reclaim them. But I do think there are lots of people who probably have valid concerns if we sort of were to have those convers ations we would and I'm sure that you find this and the people that you speak to. Actually, when we really boil it down to the things that they're worried about in this country, you know, what's happening with the economy, um, you know, the exploitation and the greed of these kind of you know big companies and and the and indeed the you know pol politicians that actually there's a lot of common ground so that idea of kind of humanity and what are the stories that where we can actually finds things that we agree on, you know, seeking those out is so important. And as and you know, as you have been an ex an ambassador for hope, you know, I think that it's so important to try and cultivate that sense of hope, not just within the left, but trying to sort of spread that to people who are on the right as well because I think what many of us share is a sense of disillusionment um about what's happening in Britain today. And how important do you think stories of a future are? Because we spent a lot of time talking about myths and history. But actually do we need projections and creative kind of, I guess, vision, visioners and dreamers of the future? And where where do they come from?