Post-Pastoral: An Interview with Zakia Sewell
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Finding Albion is your first book. What led you to write it?
I suppose I’ve been drawn to British folk culture for a very long time, but I didn’t necessarily grow up in a particularly folky place. I grew up in West London near Heathrow Airport, in a very urban area. I went to a school where there was a big South Asian community, so I grew up with Diwali and Asian dance, but not really any traditional British folk culture. But my Dad was really, really into folk music, and he took me to see the folk jazz band Pentangle when they were having their fortieth anniversary concert back in 2008, when I was fifteen. At the time I was listening to grime and watching Channel U on TV with my schoolmates, but there was something about this music when I heard it that just completely captivated me and so I downloaded it and started communing with it. From Pentangle I moved on to other people like Davey Graham, Shirley Collins, and other folk and psych-adjacent artists, and from there I became curious about pagans and druids and this mystical, mythical, mysterious, alternative Britain. I had caught glimpses of it as a child, when I spent time with my grandparents in Wales, exploring enchanted landscapes and getting a sense of this magic beneath the surface of things. So I started turning up at seasonal folk customs, like May Day Morris dancing and other strange events around the country.
It was only as I got older that I started to question what this fascination was all about, because at the time I didn’t see many other people like me who shared this curiosity. So in 2020 I made a series for Radio Four. In it I asked, what is it about this folk culture, this alternative Britain, that is drawing me in? I realised that it was about my search for aspects of British culture that I could feel more at home or at peace with, as someone who is half white, half black, half English and Welsh, half Caribbean, and who therefore has a conflicted relationship with Britishness. These alternative stories and symbols and customs seemed to speak to a different kind of Britain that had nothing to do with empire and monarchy and military, that I felt more drawn to and more at home with. Really that’s the quest of the book as well.
After making the radio series I realised that I wasn’t alone, that there were loads of other people who were also being drawn to folk culture. I think when I made the series I didn’t realise that we were in the midst of a folk revival, but in the six years since it’s become very evident that this is more of a cultural movement. There are lots of people who are becoming more interested in the old rites and rituals of Britain.
You used the word ‘quest’ there, and listening back to ‘My Albion’ I noticed the first line you say is, ‘I’m on a kind of quest’. In Finding Albion you use this conceit of the quest, and the book is told in this exploratory, on-the-ground way, using the first person and the present tense, as opposed to a top-down, authoritative, explanatory mode. Why did you approach the material in this way?
It was never going to be a polemic. I learned through my work as a radio producer and presenter that there’s a subtle power in allowing people to come to their own conclusions, especially when talking about whiteness, empire, nationalism, fascism. I wanted to allow for nuance and openness while dealing with these very tense and conflict-ridden subjects, and to get the balance between dark and light, or between a harsher, educational mode that addresses the imperial spectres haunting the nation and reparations and other knotty, thorny issues and then the relief of being back in a scene where there’s fun Morris dancing happening or whatever it is. Making radio shows, there’s that flow between moments of intensity and moments of repose. It’s probably also a reflection of my mode in general, my being, my personality.
That doubleness and nuance is clearest in the chapter on Wales, where you present the case for Welsh nationalism as a progressive cause, then immediately counter or qualify it with the idea that Wales is implicated in the broader colonial project throughout the world. Did this doubleness or flow or nuance ever come to feel limiting? You said then that it’s perhaps a reflection of your personality.
It’s an element of the position I’m writing from, where I belong to these two opposite camps. As someone of mixed heritage, I contain or embody the oppressor and the oppressed. I have these two lineages from these two opposing factions. This is something I have been conscious of throughout my life. It can be a conflicting and difficult place to be, but it also gives you a sort of ability to hold two perspectives at once. So I can have the conversation with my cousin in Dorset who doesn’t share the same political views as me, who is white and from a rural background and whose experience is so different from mine, and therefore he might have very different views on immigration and Englishness than those I’m expressing in the book, and yet at the same time I empathise deeply with my black Caribbean relatives, who have had such a different experience of England and who have such a different perspective on the nation’s history.
The desire to hold onto both perspectives or to hold two opposing stories at once is also a deliberate device. Nationalism and identity and whiteness and blackness and empire are knotty subjects and we live in a polarised world where it almost feels impossible to say, ‘What if this and this, instead of this or this?’ And I suppose that’s what I hope comes across in the book, that I don’t have the answer, but could it be possible that these two things are true at once and I don’t necessarily know what the next step is? It’s hard to write a polemic if that’s the perspective you’re coming from.
You’re resisting the dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It’s quite a novel thing to write a non-fiction book in which two oppositional ideas sit side-by-side without resolving. Perhaps it is really quite a childish attitude to expect these things to resolve, whereas the mature position would be to let them sit.
Sit with the complexity, sit with the discomfort. I think this is reflected in my thinking about Britishness and our national story, with all of its magic and enchantment, and the allure of all of these mythical, mysterious aspects that I was first drawn to. I had set off on my quest hoping to discover a utopian, pagan past and then came to realise that that doesn’t exist. Within folk culture, all the darker aspects of Britain’s identity and heritage and history bleed into the nice bits. Morris dancing, for example, is connected to the dark history of blackface minstrelsy. That’s not to say therefore that we need to write Morris dancing off, but rather that it’s important to be able to hold onto the magic and the enchantment while not running away from those darker aspects. Can we hold these two things together, the dark and the light, instead of having to say, There’s light and there’s dark but then ultimately it comes back to light? In the book there’s no resolution, no absolution. I don’t say, Britain is absolved from the sins of the past because it’s got all these lovely folk bits. I want to look at it in its entirety. It’s fertile, the fact that we have this darkness and this enchantment jumbled up together, but that might not be enough for people. People might want that absolution, but they’re not going to find it in this book.
How would you describe your intellectual formation? You previously made a programme on Stuart Hall for BBC Radio 3, and you mention Raymond Williams at one point in the book, alongside Jeremy Deller, Dylan Thomas, and others. Who are you into?
It’s a weird book in a way, because it brings together things that aren’t usually brought together. Brit(ish) by Afua Hirsch is a book about mixed identity and empire that finds its way into Finding Albion without being discernibly there. I suppose in some ways my book is a kind of follow up to Hirsch. David Olusoga’s work revealing the black history of Britain was a massive influence too. Georgina Boyes’s The Imagined Village was one of the first books to really scrutinise Cecil Sharp’s legacy and the ways that folk culture has been romanticised and fictionalised by collectors throughout the centuries. I don’t mention Stuart Hall in the book but his memoir Familiar Stranger is interesting because in that book all of his theory is synthesised into this very personal story about his upbringing in Jamaica. I found that useful for thinking about the relationship between the personal and the political. I think he’s really brave because usually in academia there’s this divide between the lived experience and the theory, but he marries those things together and says, absolutely, my ideological, philosophical output is completely rooted in my personal, subjective experience. I really value and respect that. So he’s in the ether. Akala’s Natives is far more polemical in a way that my book isn’t, but he’s in there too, in the mix. All About Love by bell hooks was also an influence, in the way that she talks about the relationship between the personal and the political and healing, ultimately, and this book is about healing the nation. It’s about what we need to do in Britain in order to heal from the sins of our past. In the book I write about Gabriele Schwab’s idea of opening up the crypt and facing the spectres within. We can understand that on a personal level in terms of psychoanalysis, but what if we apply that to the collective?
In the book you stage a distance between the personal and the collective by performing a kind of embarrassment or cynicism towards the events you’re witnessing or taking part in. In the first chapter, set on the Glastonbury Tor, you ‘cringe a little at the idea of hand-holding so early in the morning’ and then decide to leave after reaching your ‘“woo-woo” quota for the day’. How important is embarrassment in all of this?
Traditional symbols of Britishness and particularly Englishness are so haughty. They are symbols of power and might and success and ruling the waves. I love that folk culture punctures that a little bit. Yes, okay, we may have been the ‘great’ nation who ruled the waves, but then you go and see Morris dancing on May Day morning and it’s a bunch of blokes with beer bellies sloshing around with tankards of ale. It’s amazing and it’s fun and the costumes are incredible, but it’s a bit ploddy and a bit silly and you just think, this is real Englishness. It’s so much more appealing, at least to me. It’s infectious and joyful and eccentric and mischievous and playful. I feel like these are all the aspects that are completely sidelined or eclipsed by these grand imperial narratives that are so dominant when we’re thinking about identity in this country.
I think that embarrassment is important because the reaction that a lot of people have to folk culture is that it’s cringe or uncool. If people have been fed this vision or idea of the English as a superior, ultra-civilised nation, then it is going to be confronting or humbling perhaps to see these silly, slightly ploddy, strange events happening all around the country and realise that this is the real culture of the people. It was only in 2024 that the government opted to protect Britain’s folk culture under UNESCO’s convention on intangible heritage. UNESCO set that scheme up over twenty years ago and Britain is one of the last countries to opt in to protecting their intangible heritage. What’s that about? Why wouldn’t we? Why would we be one of the last? I wonder if that embarrassment is part of it, that there’s something about these aspects of our culture that undercut or challenge the dominant view of who the British are. That sense of embarrassment is important because in a way it brings us back down to Earth.
You said earlier that we are experiencing a folk revival. Where do you think that comes from? Why is folk culture so big at the moment?
It’s interesting because we talk about a ‘revival’ but that suggests that it ever went away. There are these ripples or surges where folk rises up in moments of great change or uncertainty as something that represents a rootedness or groundedness. It makes sense that throughout the ages, whether it’s the industrial revolution, post-war or now, when things are feeling out of control people start to yearn for the traditions of the past, for old tales or songs that feel rooted in the ground. I think there are multiple layers to it. On one level, it is a response to exclusionary visions of Britishness that are becoming more commonplace. There’s a yearning in people to be able to feel proud of where they’re from without being drawn into the toxic visions of nationhood that are conjured by the far right. But it also taps into a wider longing. There’s this broader trend of people becoming more interested in astrology and spirituality and crystals, and Gen Z predominantly identify as spiritual. People are searching for alternative ways of understanding our position in the cosmos and the world around us. We’re seeing a collective leaning-in to the woo-woo. People need anchors, especially in the tumultuous times in which we live.
Another big thing is the environment. Following the Wheel of the Year or attending rituals on May Day morning or the winter solstice satisfy a desire people have to be more connected to the seasons and cycles and wider system of nature, as opposed to being separate from it. In a way it’s undoing or reclaiming many of the ways of knowing or ways of being that were obliterated or banished to the sidelines by the Enlightenment way of thinking that has structured the world in which we live. There’s a yearning to reclaim some of these discarded elements of culture that for so long were looked down upon, and perhaps now people are seeing there’s value in them.
Folk culture also resists the certainty of atheism, especially the swaggering, masculine atheism of figures like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, which is so popular online.
It goes back to what we were saying about nuance and the in-between. Maybe this pagan ritual will bring about a good harvest. Maybe it won’t. Does it matter? Do we need to know? Do we need to find out the science of how much of an impact people gathering together on the summer solstice to ring bells and sing songs might have on the environment? Folk is an embrace of the mystery, the not needing to know. It’s flexible and porous, so you can add a bit of Celtic ritual in with a bit of Malaysian folk practice. The vagueness of it appeals to people. Maybe that says something about where we’re at collectively. People are wanting to embrace the in-betweens and the unknowns.
Do you think there are any limits to this folk revival? In the last chapter you pay nearly thirty pounds to visit Stonehenge, with its ‘mega-modern visitor centre rendered in glass and steel, where pagans in cloaks stand queueing for their lattes’. At the May Day celebrations in Oxford, you watch a ‘sea of glowing iPhones hover above the crowd’. How has the internet shaped things, for better or worse?
The contemporary revival is very much an online phenomenon. It’s a wonderful thing because it means lots of different types of people have been able to partake in this folk surge. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t grow up in a rural village where there’s a seasonal custom that happens every year. People have been able to find and connect with each other and that’s one of the reasons, apart from the demographic shift, that this contemporary folk revival is a lot more diverse than the revivals of the past. I was a weird, folk-obsessed, mixed-race kid and I didn’t have anyone else around me, as far as I knew, who looked like me and was interested in folk, until I started seeing people on social media and connecting with people like Angeline Morrison, who’s just set up the Black British Folk Collective. All of these things are happening and only possible because of the internet. But then of course there is the instagramification and tiktokification of it all, where brands see it trending and want to get their mitts on it. It’s very hard to define what folk is, but one of the defining aspects of folk culture is that it has nothing to do with institutions or corporations. The purity of it means that it tends to be local people raising funds among themselves and spending their money on keeping these things alive.
You end the book by telling the reader to ‘Go forth! Listen, feel and follow.’ I felt emboldened and enlivened by this. But what did you mean?
It’s an invitation to reflect on the aspects of British culture and history and heritage that sing out to you, the things that feel fertile and interesting, that you’re curious about. Like the little fragments of radical history that you want to know more about or an event that happens in your local community that you might like to go to. It’s an invitation to everyone to start pulling at the threads and reveal this alternative Britain that is out there. It’s a very personal thing, but if we all start to talk about it and come together to make this alternative Britain visible, then perhaps we have a chance of conjuring an alternative national story strong enough and convincing enough and appealing enough to counter the basic, negative, toxic visions of Britain that we see conjured in the present day. It’s a collective endeavour of storytelling that can help to make this other Britain more concrete and visible. It’s about moving away from one dominant vision or story and inviting people to collectively conjure or start talking about and connecting with the aspects of Britain and Britishness that make them feel hopeful and inspired, rather than depressed and despairing.
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Zakia Sewell is a writer, DJ and broadcaster based in London. She hosts Dream Time on BBC Radio 6 Music, and used to host the flagship breakfast show on NTS Radio. For the past eight years she has been producing and presenting radio documentaries and podcasts for platforms such as BBC Radio 3 and 4, Tate and Camden Arts Centre. Her acclaimed four-part Radio 4 series My Albion was an inspiration for her book. Her writing has appeared in publications including Tate Etc., Resident Advisor and Weird Walk as well as in the essay collection This Woman’s Work.
Joseph Williams is reviews editor at Critical Quarterly.
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