Reclaim our Land, Sea and Sky: The Welsh Peace Movement
From Planet 233
by Mererid Hopwood
Mererid Hopwood reflects back on the 2014 to 2018 commemoration of the First World War in Wales and the UK, asking what these activities say about memory, mourning, nationhood and inequality; looking to the future to offer proposals for how Wales can contribute to the struggle against 21st-century militarism.
We know from the ‘Welsh Keywords’ series in this magazine how it is often difficult to carry meaning from one language to the next in boxes of equal sizes. Hiraeth, tangnefedd, crachach, cywilydd, all singular nouns in Welsh have needed whole articles to convey their meaning in English. In ‘commemoration’, we find the reverse. This powerful English noun, along with its related verb, ‘to commemorate’, calls for at least six Welsh words to get close to its meaning: dwyn i gof ar y cyd.
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