Minority Voices

Time: 35-45 minutes

Purpose: Using UK literature to stimulate student awareness of minority groups round the world especially in their backyards

Materials: two R.S.Thomas poems

Preparation: copy the poems; bring in a large map of UK

Lesson Outline:

1. Ask the students, working individually, to draw a map of the UK. Now ask them to draw English-Welsh border. (This may mean re-drawing their maps!)
2. Show them the map of UK.
3. Run a blackboard brainstorm of everything they already know about Wales.
4. Divide your class up into groups of 4 to 6 students. Go for even numbers of groups, 2 or 4 or 6. Give Group A Welsh , give Group B Welsh Landscape, Group C Welsh....and so on.
   Ask each group to build a "statue", using the people in the group, a statue that captures what they feel to be essential feeling, the essence of the poem.
   Give them 10 minutes for this.
5. Each group shows their frozen statue to the class and holds the pose for 15 seconds. After the presentation of the first statue, a person from Group A, reads Welsh to the class.
   Group A now present their statue for another 15 seconds.
   Group B repeats the above procedure but with Welsh Landscape.
   In turn, the other groups present their statues.
6. Allow time for everybody to read both poems carefully and answer any cultural or language questions they may have.
7. Ask the students to think of minority groups/peoples in their own countries.
   What, in these two poems might appeal to them?
   General discussion.

Note: The wish to visualise accurately normally leads to very detailed and careful reading of the text. In a way filming a page like this is a kind of translation.

From Broken April, Ismail Kadere, 1991, Harvill Press, London, translated from the Albanian

P.11
Night had not yet fallen when he reached the village. It was still his fateful day. The door of the kulla** was ajar. He pushed it open with his shoulder and went in.

"Well?" someone asked from inside.
He nodded.
"When?"
"Just now."

He heard footsteps coming down the wooden stairs.
"There's blood on your hands," his father said. " Go and wash them."
"It must have happened when I turned him over"

He had tormented himself needlessly. A glance at his hands would have told him that he had done everything in keeping with the rules.

There was smell of roasted coffee in the kulla. Astonishing, he was sleepy. He yawned. The gleaming eyes of his little sister, who leaned against his left shoulder. Seemed far away, like two stars beyond a hill.

"And now? He said suddenly, to no one in particular.
"We must tell the village about the death," his father answered. Only then did Gjorg notice that his father was putting on his shoes.

** A stone dwelling in the form of a tower, typical to Albania.

Welsh Why must I write so?
I'm Welsh, see:
A real Cymro,
Peat in my veins.
I was born late;
She claimed me,
Brought me up nice,
No hardship;
Only one loss,
I can't speak my own
Language - Iesu,
All those good words;
And I outside them,
Picking up alms
From blonde strangers.
I don't like their talk,
Their split vowels;
Names that are ghosts
From a green era.
I want my own
Speech, to be made
Free of its terms.
I want the right word
For the gut's trouble,
When I see this land
With its farms empty
Of folk, and the stone
Manuscripts blurring
In wind and rain.
I want the town even,
The open door
Framing a slut,
So she can speak Welsh
And bear children
To accuse the womb
That bore me.

Welsh Landscape

To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilt blood
That went into the making of the wild sky,
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses.
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And the hum of the machine
Of strike in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.
There is the language for instance,
Soft consonants
Strange to the ear.
There are cries in the dark at night
As owls answer the moon,
And thick ambush of shadows,
Hushed at the fields' corners.
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcass of an old song