Cwen
A storm, a disappearance, a band of women and a remote island where anything is possible...
Throughout the Orwell Festival we are sharing new writing and insights from this year’s Orwell Prize finalists. Our next piece is an exclusive extract from Cwen by Alice Albinia, which was recently shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022.
On an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Britain, Eva Levi has made it her life’s work to build a community truly run by women. Now she has disappeared, rumours spread that it will be destroyed. But Cwen will never let that happen.
Cwen has been here longer than the civilisation she has returned to haunt. Her name has ancient roots, reaching down into the earth and halfway around the world. The islands she inhabits have always belonged to women. And she will do anything she can to protect them.
This remarkable novel is a portrait of female power and potential, both to shelter and to harm: it reaches into our mythical past and opens up space for us to dream of a radical future.
One of the women, Gayatri, whom some islanders were overheard calling ‘the Paki one’ – her family was from India, though she had a degree from a university in Britain – opted to do the weekly shop. Every Thursday afternoon at two o’clock, Fred waited for Gayatri at the Skellar landing stage, and ferried her over to Lerston. He reported that she always bought milk (the commune didn’t yet have electricity or a fridge), packaged bread, fresh vegetables and fruit. He watched her munching on an apple as she prowled the aisles; purchasing candles, porridge oats, biscuits and pasta; a bottle of whisky. She disliked any foodstuff with an explicitly male name or history – Uncle Ben’s, McVitie’s, Cadbury’s.
The commune soon declared its intention to hire only workwomen. The first female plumber, from Edinburgh, left in a huff, and was replaced by another from North Berwick, tutored from the boat by her brother. Fantastic-looking bathroom fittings were carried over by the sceptical ferryman. These were followed by an expensive gas stove with cast-iron hobs, many gas bottles, and a kitchen table which the commune had persuaded the joiner from one of the Scottish skerries to help his daughter make from timber imported from the mainland.
At the beginning of September, a notice went up on the pinboard in the post offices in Lerston and Ayrness. It addressed itself to the Women of the Archipelago, and offered a trial evening class that Wednesday in ‘Cleansing Thought’. Those interested in the workshop were to wait at the pier for Fred at six o’clock. The boat would return to Lerston at eight, but a night’s accommodation on Skellar was offered; sleeping bags were recommended. Eva was the only woman from the islands who showed up at the commune that Wednesday. In her notebook she records that she enjoyed the diatribe (as she put it) and liked the women who gave it. They were on Skellar to live out the principles of the Women’s Liberation Movement. All nine women took their turn to speak about this. The ‘blonde one’, Gloria, started by talking of culturally-ingrained patriarchies. She began with the church, the male god of Christianity, the male god’s male son, the death of the pagan matriarchal goddess; went on to speak of the modern political system (no mention was made of Margaret Thatcher), the unjust judiciary, the dominance of men in banking, media and manufacturing. After that, Gayatri spoke about words and their meanings, and possibly about colonialism, although by then Eva felt her brain aching as never before with the effort to keep up. She followed the argument of the third woman, Mary, a little better. Mary wore a black hat and white dress, and soliloquised on the oppression of beauty. Simone interrupted, to be brusque about the tyranny of the female body. Audre, whom Eva had assumed was French, too, until she began speaking, reminded Simone about the useful directions in which Gayatri had taken the conversation on race and oppression. Before things got too heated, a sixth woman, Betty, made an announcement: they were changing the name of the island to Gyno or Vagina or Bean (the Gaelic word for woman); voting would take place that evening, after refreshment. Eva couldn’t help laughing. ‘You think it’s so funny?’ said Gloria. ‘Is it funny to call a tiny island after women? I don’t hear anyone laughing at the Isle of Man.’ Eva, chastened, sat quietly after that. She listened as Christine discussed myths and legends, especially the Amazons. Donna provoked a lively discussion of how women had become conditioned to imbibe the violence of their menfolk through the horrific deaths meted out to cows, chickens, pigs and sheep; and the state of things on the islands was worse, for gun-blasted fauna were offered up as dinner. (Eva shuddered; the Harcourt-Vanes owned a whole moor which was rented out for stalking.) Finally, Judy spoke. She was the sternest. Her speech concerned the nature of the commune, and its wider purpose. She exhorted Eva to return with other women of the archipelago, so that they could all learn, hand in hand, how to insert themselves and their achievements into the course of history, retrospectively. She wanted women of the future to grow up under a just dispensation, and she was sure Eva wanted this too; plus, it was worth bearing in mind that no woman could consider herself truly free until she had rid herself completely of reliance, however trivial or loving, on husbands, brothers, male authority figures, and all types of tradesmen.
When the talking was over, Gayatri came forward with plates of refreshment, which consisted of onion pakora accompanied by island-grown rhubarb chutney (made by Mrs Anderson from Upper Braeside Farm), and the name of the island went to a vote. Bean was chosen by a narrow margin.
On Thursday morning, when Eva stepped off Fred’s boat again, she was still telling herself that everything the women had said was just a little too much. Then she drove back to Ayrness, and she saw it as if for the first time: men everywhere she looked: in the political structures of the islands and the country, running the council and the college, in the names of the streets, the churches, on lamp posts, road names, even drain covers. Overhead, underfoot, men were predominant without even trying. She parked her car, and walked up the road towards the college; she felt as if the women had inseminated her with ideas, and that her life up to that point had been a big joke. She shouted up at the birds wheeling overhead, and shouted out at the milkman (Billy, whom she had known for about ten years), and shouted hello to a male student coming down the hill the other way. The shouting made her breathless, removed from her body. She felt elated. Her attitudes, her thoughts, her demeanour – she wanted to change it all.
During the autumn, Eva visited Bean as often as she could. She took along a new friend she had made through her book group, Lucette, who had begun becoming a woman only after moving to the islands – she said she found them ‘freeing’.
Alice Albinia is the award-winning author of twinned works of fiction and non-fiction. Her first two books explore overlapping cultural and geographical territory in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Tibet. Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River, published in 2008, won six prizes in Britain, Pakistan, France and Italy. Leela's Book, published in 2011, was long-listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award.
Her two new books are about Britain and its islands. The Britannias, a portrait of Britain which knocks the centre out, is forthcoming from Allen Lane/WW Norton in 2023. Her new novel, Cwen, set on an archipelago off the east coast of Britain which comes under female rule, is out now with Serpent's Tail.