Land of Change: Stories of Struggle and Solidarity From Wales

Publisher: Culture Matters, 2022 | ISBN: 978-1-912710-46-1 | Format: 21.2x14.8cm paperback | Length: 236 text, 27 colour and 29 B&W illustration pages | Price: £15 inc. P&P.

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‘A vibrant anthology that does not merely reflect the internal differences within working-class solidarities in Wales, but actually substantiates and develops that diversity in its chorus of visual and textual voices. Ymlaen!’

Prof. Daniel G. Williams

‘The breadth and expanse of voices bellowing out from within this anthology is a staggering record of resistance.’

Rhea Seren Phillips, Nation Cymru

‘A fine book, notable for its message of unity through diversity.’

Jim Aitken, Morning Star

from Industry in the Country of the Blind

There is a sculpture outside the train station which serves the Country of the Blind. Cast in bronze, it shows the valley’s discoverer, standing almost at the crest of a crag with a young woman by his side. He gazes southward, past the station towards the mountains into which he made his escape, one hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun, the other holding the woman’s arm in guidance or support. The woman, bare-footed, is nursing a child. Her face is turned towards the ground, while surrounding them both is a sea of uplifted hands, grasping their ankles in supplication or treachery. A plaque in Roman script and Braille commemorates their names, Ricardo Núñez and Medina-Saroté, his lover, after whom the town is named.

The statue is regularly vandalised, and as regularly repaired. The nationalists, the Serenos, paint their slogans over the plinth or hammer them into the bronze in a kind of inverse Braille; they lock fetters round the wrists of those upturned hands, or they cover Núñez’s eyes with goats’ blood as though they have been gouged…

Read ‘Industry in the Country of the Blind’