JP Seabright: How I Wrote ‘Mamgu’

Interview by Zoë Brigley

“I guess it was an attempt to convey on the page the way the mind and memory works combining the known past (my mother reciting the town name), the unknown past (how my grandmother died and why my mum never spoke of her) and the in media res present“

Mamgu

Llan
             my mother’s party piece
                          (I am searching for her birth certificate online)
Fair
             the taste of valley vowels
                          (this is difficult because I do not know her name)
Pwll
             a delicacy in her mouth
                          (I start looking for a record of her death)
Gwyn
             otherwise she never spoke
                          (I know her married name      I know the year)
Gyll
             her mother’s tongue inside our house
                          (I was two      she was sixty-two      and her daughter)
Ger
             never spoke of you or her Welsh family
                          (was seven months pregnant with my brother)
Chwyrn
             shock and trauma buried under pit-black soil
                          (I find her death recorded in the town of my birth)
Drobwll
             did she blame me for your death      if you hadn’t been
                          (her maiden name Morgan      born Pontypridd 1913)
Llan
             pushing me in my pram      perhaps an ambulance      a chance
                          (mum never said your name      not because you were estranged)
Tysilio
             a heart attack carves a faultline across the border
                          (but the opposite      the loss too great to articulate)
Gogo
             I never knew you but you loved me      your only granddaughter
                          (I discover Muriel in Celtic means sea-bright)
Goch
             what are the odds you’d marry a man with the same name
                          (I carry your name with me to speak my own hy/stories)
…
             there are some things for which my English tongue is silent and bereft
                          for those there is hiraeth

(i.m. Muriel Seabright 1913-1975)

The above is an attempt to recreate Mamgu within the confines of our website’s formatting. Read the original piece below:

Mamgu-JP-Seabright Download

It’s a funny thing, but wherever I go, be it the UK or working in the States or somewhere else, when people find out I’m Welsh, they always want to hear me recite the town with the longest name, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch – just like the mother in the poem! I shake my head, but it’s actually a beautiful name. It’s full of churches and whirlpools and willows. It’s a short story in itself, and I love how you break it down here. What gave you the idea of using the place name?

Unfortunately I don’t have enough knowledge of the Welsh language to even attempt to say this correctly – I should learn to! But it was indeed my mother’s ‘party piece’ and the only Welsh language I ever heard in our home, so it’s stuck with me over the years. It is a beautiful name, with a whole lot going on in there! As well as wishing to be true to real events and honour my grandmother in this poem, I felt using this town name gave some narrative structure to the piece, although Llanfair PG is in the north in Anglesey and my grandmother came the Valleys in South Wales. There was also an irony with my mum choosing to show off her Welsh on rare occasions, yet never spoke of her family there. My grandmother died when I was two, so I don’t remember her, and I’ve never met any of my Welsh cousins. I only found out how she died (explained in the poem) when my Aunt told me, when I lived with her for a while as a teenager.

I like how you use brackets in this poem with asides featuring your own relation or reaction to what is being described. It almost feels tactful? Like you are privileging your grandmother’s story most of all?

I was trying to find a way to convey two different narratives at once – an account of events and direct dialogue with my dead grandmother, and that of my thoughts in the present as I try to find out more about her. I tried several different formats, and hope this one sort of works, but I guess it was an attempt to convey on the page the way the mind and memory works combining the known past (my mother reciting the town name), the unknown past (how my grandmother died and why my mum never spoke of her) and the in media res present. I was actually trying to track down her birth and death certificate whilst I was writing this poem, and in the midst of this discovered her first name, Muriel, means sea-bright, the name I chose as a pen name for myself when I started writing again a couple of years ago.

Do you feel like Wales or the Welsh language has influenced your writing generally at all given your Welsh connections?

I wish it had influenced me more! I do find the Welsh language fascinating, it’s pretty unusual in origin and pronunciation and sounds beautiful of course. I use the South Wales word for grandmother (‘Mamgu’) as the poem’s title, and at the end chose to split histories into hy/stories to gain both meanings – hy in Welsh meaning ‘bold’.

This is a subject I’ve wanted to write about for a while, but didn’t know how to begin to enter it – given the intergenerational trauma, and my genuine lack of knowledge about what actually happened. My mother is alive, but we’ve never spoken about this, it’s still a topic too painful for her to discuss.

For me this poem is not just in memoriam for my grandmother but a kind of mourning for a family and culture and language I never knew, yet keenly feel the loss of. Perhaps it was a subconscious yearning to connect to that lost family when I chose the Seabright name. Hence, I also chose to use the other commonly known Welsh word hiraeth at the end, as I feel its meaning of longing encapsulates this sense of loss and wish to be (re)rooted on Welsh soil.