Welsh Keywords: Dychwelyd
From Planet 250
by Casi Dylan
This is the forty-sixth contribution to our Welsh Keywords series – inspired by Raymond Williams’ Keywords – which offers perspectives on words in Welsh and how shifting meanings continue to shape our society. Casi Dylan reflects on the personal and cultural pull of returning.
to return v. dychwel-
to go back v. dychwel-
to revert v. dychwel-
‘Home, once interrogated, is a place we’ve never been before.’
Kamala Visweswaran (Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 1994)
The visits back home had been becoming rarer. Back ‘home’ home, you understand me. And even though recent travel moratoria brought on by a pandemic and public transport strikes offered an easy rationale, I do wonder if the pull of staying put where I live now had begun before then. It is hard to counter, perhaps, the inertia of an increasingly settled late-thirties life. The exhausted evenings of busy days, the demand for lazy weekends. But when last Christmas the decision was made – by me? By circumstance? I’m not too sure – not to return ‘home’ home over the festivities, it felt somehow a marker of change, as if my definition of necessary travel, even of home itself, was shifting.
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Casi Dylan is a cultural producer working at the intersection of arts, education, and public engagement. Originally from Cwmystwyth, she is now based in Scotland and works as the Events and Engagement Manager at the University of Glasgow's Advanced Research Centre. She writes a regular column on the book industry for O’r Pedwar Gwynt.
