|
|||
Financial Times Review
MY BATTLE OF HASTINGS A memoir steeped in English history Chinese-British novelist Xiaolu Guo chooses East Sussex to explore themes of migration and memory… By Catherine Taylor, July 17 2024 What is it about an English seaside town that is such a draw for artists and writers? Think Tracey Emin’s (and TS Eliot’s) Margate, or Alan Ayckbourn’s Scarborough. Downbeat, disillusioned, yet doggedly resilient as such places often are, the choppy history of this fabled island nation seems best approached via its coastline. For the Chinese-British novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, whose work consistently explores themes of migration and memory, Hastings, in East Sussex on the south-east coast of England, is where she sets her new memoir. My Battle of Hastings follows Guo’s previous accounts of the journey from her upbringing in China (Once Upon a Time in the East, 2011), and a year’s sojourn in New York (Radical, 2023). It is the third of what is now termed “living autobiography”. This form of life-writing is not merely personal, but aims to be political, foundational and future-forward, in a vibrant, varied tradition that includes Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living series, the auto-fiction of Annie Ernaux. Crucially, it is women in middle and older age who are publishing these societal and self-examinations. Virginia Woolf would be proud. As an immigrant, Guo is well placed to observe the bigger picture of “English” history, (which is not fixed, but hybrid, as she points out). Often she filters this through the lens of her Chinese background. The “world order”, we are reminded, is “white Anglo-Saxon-centred”; by immersing herself in its past, Guo hopes to understand “key elements” of its present. This is equally illuminating, if not uncomfortable, for a native “insider” to learn about. Guo has objectivity, unconventionality and does not judge. (Good-naturedly, she notices that the only time the television is off in the pub is when the football isn’t on). As for herself: “Being a woman does not entirely define me, being an artist describes more my way of living.” Following time spent away from her child and partner and post-pandemic, Guo craves a new space away from their London flat. For economic and reasons of accessibility she settles on Hastings. Using a small inheritance, she moves part-time to an anonymous seafront apartment in early 2022, a year which will prove to be constitutionally convulsive for the UK — three prime ministers and the death of the monarch in just a matter of months — all of which fuel Guo’s meditations on the randomness and rituals of what we collectively call history. Hastings is pivotal to the rather confused notion of Englishness. Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king, lost his life there in 1066 in the battle that set the path for the Norman conquest of England. References to this ancient, bloody and desperate episode run throughout the book. Partitioned into the four seasons that mark Guo’s year of habitation in the town, the book is prefaced by “Afterwards”: her imaginative depiction of the aftermath of that defining conflict. Guo hones her solitude, rather like the “coughing, ale-loving” monks of old, who sat by flickering candlelight and compiled reports of battles such as Hastings to make up what is now the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The ninth-century annals put together by anonymous churchmen to record the history of Anglo-Saxon development and culture is Guo’s primary choice of reading. Her interpretation is also a marvellous reminder of what an extraordinary, overlaid work the Chronicle is. She walks the beaches and hills, pondering over the stories behind monuments and statues, imbibing local news and customs against the backdrop of the town’s faded grandeur and endless rubbish, the winter storms and acute summer heatwave presaging climate change. Memoir is as much about what connects as what is disconnected. In Hastings, Guo is pulled back in a way that never appears contrived: “I thought about growing up by the East China Sea, and how we watched the waves every day on the littered beach. My grandfather was a fisherman . . . ” she notes. Towards the end of My Battle of Hastings she writes: “This is my second year in Hastings. Now I count as an old Anglo-Saxon.” Displacement becomes an act of placeholding; perhaps, in the end, the writing of personal history is really just a means of marking time.
My Battle of Hastings: Chronicle of A Year By the Sea
|
|||
| © Xiaolu Guo | |||