When I’m back in my hometown, I see red everywhere. The lips of women walking down St. Mary’s Street are red. Sensually patriotic. Red is the colour of blood, of passion, alarm, danger, the colour of my socks, of storefronts on Queen Street, of the flag flying high above Cardiff Castle, it’s the colour of my homeland, of Wales. Our mascot, the Welsh Dragon, proud and statuesque on our flag. Ddraig—dragon— also means “warrior” in Welsh, and the red dragon (Y Ddraig Goch) that has been the symbol of Wales for centuries is said to have battled a white dragon—the Saxons—in mythology.
And though we are small—Wales is the smallest country in the United Kingdom, attached to England—we are mighty. In Wales, patriotism is still a calling, a blood sport. In rugby, men tackle and swarm one another like it’s life or death, and the crowd—all in red—go wild. This sort of primal fever sweeps the Millenium Stadium like something from the Mabinogion, the collection of Welsh Celtic folklore that speaks of the king of the Underworld and family members turned into beasts. Our language has roots that predate the Romans—emerging in the sixth century BCE, it’s the oldest living language in Europe. It’s the language of singers and poets. Miners and sheep. Our industrial heritage expresses itself in the sharp, guttural bite of certain sounds-the throaty rasp of ch in bach, like you’re clearing your throat. The Ll of Llanelli or Llyfr, like a breathy hiss. Welsh is like poetry you make with your teeth that whistles through old ruins.
I am, unfortunately, not a fluent Welsh speaker. Hailing from Cardiff, the capital, I grew up in a world that felt Anglicised: English signs and English shops, English spoken at home. My A* in Welsh A-Level couldn’t compete with that. Here, Welsh is spoken by 12.2 percent of the population. At school we had Welsh classes from the age of two. And what I retain is the child’s vocabulary of colours and sounds: Coch (red), tân (fire), gwdihŵ (owl), Glawog (rain), the hilarity and onomatopoeia of poppity ping! (microwave).
I’ve always loved language but something about Wales made me squirm. It didn’t feel sophisticated, or cultured. It was always the country getting derided, jokes made about sheep-shaggers, “isn’t Wales just England with a speech impediment,” and the Welsh national sport—having to explain that Wales is not a part of England.
Some say it’s the influence of the Welsh Not, a practice in humiliation for kids. In nineteenth-century Welsh schoolhouses, kids were forced to wear a yoke around their neck, a punishment for speaking Welsh. The English wanted to Anglicise us and suppress our language and they succeeded—the effect of the Welsh Not has trickled down through the generations. Instead of lyrical and singsong Welsh, our classrooms and signposts are mainly in English, the language of the oppressor.
When my dad passed away without warning back in 2022, I moved back home and heard his voice everywhere: the rolling r in “alri,” the thunderous, booming laugh, the way he said “yer” instead of “hear”. The Splott cadence was suddenly something I craved, not something I laughed at.
Dad was the one who told me about Hiraeth. Hiraeth in Welsh means a type of homesickness or longing for a place-particularly in Welsh culture. It has no direct English translation. Some say it’s a longing for a Wales that never even existed, a yearning to go back to a time and place that can never be again.
I found that the term belonged to me—a person not without direct translation, but without a direct home, always feeling on the outside, always desperate to escape where I come from.
This spring has been the third year without Dad. The first week of April, the sun is bright and casts a red glow on the mountains of the Brecon Beacons. My friend L and I are driving from Cardiff to Aberporth- the mouth (Aber) of the port (Porth).
I think of Dad on our past car rides, how he would pretend to spit out of his rolled-down window as we enter England, and shout “GOD’S COUNTRY!” as soon as we crossed over into Wales.
It’s hot in the car. We drink San Pellegrino lemonades. The traffic is bad. The roads start to wind and gradually we are just in the trees, then farmland, then the sea emerges like a blue mouth. The last time I was here was in 2022. It was three months before Dad died, but we didn’t know that then, that he would drop dead. We swam with porpoises and sat on rocks underneath cliffsides while Dad told me about Jason and the Argonauts and how Wales is dotted with the ghost skeletons of shipwrecks, how they haunt shorelines—over six thousand of them.
First we head to Llangrannog beach. It’s 6:30/7pm and the sky is a melted popsicle, lilac and periwinkle. It looks good enough to eat. Barbeques from the day still linger in the air, and the waves are muscular, roaring and crashing against the shore, showing off. I get emotional. Wales has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. We sit and drink 0% Asahi and talk about grief. The corner of rock we are perched on is clean and smooth, grey with black tiger streaks, almost as if made for a film set. People having a bonfire on the beach are listening to the Proclaimers song “500 miles” on speakers. Kids run with kites. The surfers and bodyboarders who will populate the same stretch of sand in the morning aren’t here yet. Soon they will be. Right now, here it is still, and people eat fish and chips with their curry sauce—a distinctly Welsh delicacy or affectation, depending on who you ask.
Dad used to call the bits of chips left in the bag “scrumpies.” They were his favourite parts so they became my favourites too.
When I came to this beach with Dad three years ago, he still had his grey panther tattooed on his lower arm. It had a green tongue sticking out in my memory, but I don’t know if this is accurate.
He told me that he got it done when he was 17, to cover up a mistake. Mam tattooed on his arm, a joke, he did it himself. A dedication to someone who never even came to his funeral.
There was a “T” etched above the panther’s gaze. It reminded me of an evil eye.
Something to ward off spirits.
The next day we go swimming at Tresaith beach. The sky is blue like a photograph or a postcard. The sea is a shockingly bottomless blue. I overhear a group of middle-aged women talking about Putin. “I have an Israeli Jewish cousin,” one says. “Being racist against the English, that’s ok,” another says.
They all hobble over the rocks to climb into the sea, try and master those waves—they’re knocked down in their modest one-pieces. Their laughs ring out.
Two small sausage dogs wear out their legs clambering over rocks. There is a sign up in the cliffs: “MISSING DOG.”
We climb over big, smooth ones to look at the waterfall. It’s April and it’s 19 degrees and if you tune out the Welsh accents you can almost imagine you’re in Gotland, or Akureyri, or Sicily, except for once I am not wishing to be somewhere else.
My lips taste like salt and my clothes hoard remnants of sand.
When I think of going back in time, I think less of a physical place than a feeling, a state of mind.
This weekend in April, I think of my dad and how he’s there, in the blue jagged shorelines and in the lilt of the voices saying “come yer” instead of “here,” and even in the specks of sand, and I feel it: hiraeth.