Hiraeth
- Melisa Annis
- Aug 21
- 5 min read
A piece created for "Judith Sloan & Friends" - a charity event for Doctors Without Borders.
Presetned and read live, October 28th, 2023 at The People's Voice Cafe, NYC
Hiraeth:
When I was asked to write a little something for tonight, I thought, shit, there’s so much going on in the world, who cares about what I have to say. I don’t know how to talk about war or climate change, what can I say about refuge that hasn’t already been said?… Stories of migration - okay, that’s something I suppose I know a little about, as you can tell I have an accent, I’m from Wales by the way, not England. Home? Maybe I can say a little something about home.
I couldn’t wait to leave Wales. I was twenty two and I had itchy feet. I was done with everyone knowing my business, I was tired of everyone knowing the mistakes I’d made, even if they didn’t know, I knew that they would come to know about them eventually, and it was all just too much for me. I had to get away.
People thought I was nuts, I had a good thing going. I was on tour with a theatre company at twelve, in a soap opera at fourteen, I was hanging out with Shirley Bassey at eighteen, and by the time I was twenty one, I had a constant hangover. Why would I ever want to leave?
You see I’m a strange mix of genetics; my mother is from Wales, North Wales, an area called Ynyscynhaearn - named after the fifth century saint Cynhaearn, who nobody knows anything about. My grandmother claimed that we lived on that land since before the Edwardian conquest of Wales in 1277. She also claimed we were related to saint Cynhaearn, but I think he was a made up saint, so who knows what’s true and what’s not. The point is, we don’t move.
Now my father, he’s a traveler, he has wondering genetics. When people used to ask him where he was from I never knew what he was going to say; some days is was Brazil, other days it was England, if he felt especially European that day he would claim Portugal, France, Ireland, Vienna, when he was in his cups, he was from the Amazon rain forest. My fathers insane, not clinically, maybe clinically, he’s of a certain class and generation that people just call bohemian. I never quite understood why he wanted to lay claim to so many parts of the world - I figured it was probably because he was actually English, and that’s just what they do. It was only when I did one of those silly DNA things, you know the ancestry packs, it’s only when I did one of those did I realize, bloody hell, he really is all of those things, equally. My DNA sequence reads like a student gap-year wet dream. I’m 51% Welsh, and 49% from everywhere else, including, the Amazon Basin - but that’s a different very fucked up story, that I won’t tell you tonight.
There’s no wonder I had itchy feet at twenty two. Because of him, I was genetically programmed to be that way.
And I do love to travel. I’m not the traveler who wants to spend a year in India, or learn how to farm on a Kibbutz - I’m the traveler who gets off a plane, will run around a city for six hours, and then jump on a train and go to another country, just for the sake of experiencing something new. I love airport bars, they're my favorite bars, you never see the same people twice. I just love to keep moving.
Correction; I used to love it.
I don’t know if it was the death of my father, or the pandemic, turning forty, or realizing that I’ll probably never have children of my own, but something has changed in me. Time feels different and my itchy feet are not as itchy as they once were.
Oh God, now regretting using the itchy feet analogy because I’ve made it sound like I have one hell of a verruca on my foot. Do you use the word verruca in this country? It’s a planter wart.
Maybe planter wart is more appropriate, because all I want to do is plant myself somewhere and be still, so still that I can hear the dew falling, and the sun dawning, and the breaths of birds before their first song of the day.
It’s so unlike me. It’s like the two halves of me are in conflict. I sometimes feel like I’m going mad.
Now don’t get me wrong, I still love New York, and once upon a time I felt as though I was woven into the fabric of the city, being married to a wonderful handsome New Yorker who I adore, bartending and partying the years away, creating and collaborating with angels, punks and everyone in-between.
But all of a sudden, and I feel it now… All of a sudden, I miss home.
It’s a weighty feeling, not heavy that’s different. It’s not sad, and I can’t quite find the words in English to describe it really. We call this feeling Hiraeth. Hiraeth.
Wales is a small country, a bit smaller that New Jersey, with a total population of 3.1 million people. Of those 3.1 million people approximately 450,000 of us speak Welsh as a first language. I’m smiling because I’m proud that I’m a Welsh speaker, that the bastards didn’t erase our language because my god they tried; in case it’s unclear I’m talking about the Romans, the Vikings, the Normans, the Saxons, the English all of those who sailed onto our shores and pushed us to where we call Wales today. Our language and our culture was put under an enormous amount of pressure for fifteen hundred years, but we’re still standing.
And there’s that feeling again.
It’s a pull on the heart, and a deepening of breath. It’s a longing for a land or time that may or may not have ever existed. It’s the feeling that something has been irretrievably lost, and you hope it will one day return. It’s a memory of a memory that was seeded long ago perhaps in another life even, an echo of an echo from the past calling you to your homeland, calling you home.
It’s like mourning a loss, but it’s tied up in a bow of hope.
For me Hiraeth is green, and it smells like ancient moss, it tastes like buttered cockles and bara brith, and I hope the old folk song is right and that my Hiraeth will never wear out, because I never want to let go of that feeling that I call home.
Thank you.
Comments