Return of a Native: Learning from the Land by Vron Ware

Return of a Native: Learning from the Land Reviews

• 
  Malcolm

  I have known and followed Vron Ware’s work for many years; her discussions and interpretations of whiteness, of Britishness, and of the practices of nationalism have been important for me in making sense of where I live (although it’s not where I’m from), and of empire (where I am from), and of the ways I and others might make sense of my British-not-British being. Given the myths and ideals of nation and nationhood attached to being British and fantasises that see British/English identities as grounded in the land and landscape that are inventions of modernity and capitalism, I was excited when she turned her attention to that landscape and set out to explore that sense of place. I was not disappointed.
  
  Ware focuses on home, literally – it is a small area of north-east Hampshire where she grew up in the 1950s and 60s, near the borders of Surrey and Berkshire, quintessentially of the ‘Home Counties’ even if not quite within them (Hampshire is not one of those select few counties marked as Home). She starts in that most mundane of places – a cross roads, marked by a sign indicating directions and distances to nearby villages along narrow lanes and roadways. She’s in the north east corner of Pill Heath, former common land surviving (sort of) enclosures of the late 18th and 19th centuries, taken over during the Second World War for food production, never returned to common land, and lost to local farmers despite campaigns for its return.
  
  But this is not a story of land lost; it is, instead, a tale of changing Britain and Britishness told by reading a small area of a landscape many of us know from idealised images, from chocolate boxes and biscuit tin lids. Amid these small villages, many with tied housing linked to farmland and farm work, Ware explores the manor house, goes the short distance across the farmlands to the nearby town of Andover, looks to the former air force base, and continuing military aircraft associated with military training sites on Salisbury Plain to the west. She explores these places through family narrative, through interviews and conversations over the 20 or 25 year period with locals, former neighbours, friends of her parents. Elsewhere she draws on parish newsletters, Women’s Institute records, memoirs, court reports, planning applications, and assorted other public records.
  
  Along the way she explores the centrality of changes in agriculture to the development of capitalism, resistance both in the early days of those changes and continuing direct and indirect forms of struggle, and the state of contemporary agribusiness. She looks at the ways that the development of corporate agriculture changed diets and eating patterns, at the ways that emerging and solidifying capitalist agriculture was and remains deeply embedded in global economies, linked to other forms of exploitation and extraction, to enslavement and imperialism, and the romance of the country retreat. This is not a depiction or exploration of a romanticised, unchanging world, but of a vibrant dynamic space, continually transforming, shaped by the experience and myths of empire, from sugar plantation owners made wealthy by extracting value from Caribbean monocrops and enslaved African labour, and unsettled and threatened by the changes flowing from Brexit.
  
  Yet there is also a sense of the stable – of the interviewees including neighbours and friends she had known from childhood who had worked the same farms for the same families as their grandparents, in some cases inheriting their jobs. Here she identifies those knowledge of the place is deeply embedded in deep knowledge of working the land every day and passed down through family knowledge. Although relative newcomers, Ware’s family seem also to have that knowledge from failed ventures, success in growing on and living in part off the land, and in book learning – Ware occasionally sites sources found on her late father’s bookcases, yet the weakening family connection with place is marked by her mother’s growing memory loss. It is a tale of uneven experience, of the contradictions of continuity and change, of stability and of turmoil.
  
  This is very much a story of place – a small corner of a mythical England – filled with the daily existence of ordinary working people and the well-to-do, of farmers, of their labourers, and the state, of empire and its continuing marking and making of that land so mythologised as unchanging by the reactionary claims shaping much of contemporary British political and cultural ways. But it is an intimate story of place, of empire, of class, of gender, and of race; of the ways place persists not as palimpsest where the old occasionally peaks through but as still lived alongside and with the new, of Pill Heath as no-longer-Commons alongside the increasingly computerised Ocado food warehouse in Andover’s industrial park. It’s also a story of the Parish Council as both parochial and universal, a story of nation and empire in a small corner of its southern metropolitan landscape.
  
  In short, this is a cultural history of Britain in all its messiness, inconsistency, struggle, oppression, repression, resistance, banality, and more. This is Britain’s story not in its celebrated wonder and success, of simple Whiggish narrative, but in its messy ordinariness and inconsistency. Ware is the ideal person for this, as she brings her insights of this place into focus through her extensive work on race, empire whiteness, and Britishness to show how our localities disrupt the fantasies of nation and empire; quite simply, superb.
• 
  Owen Hatherley

  Dig where you stand, even if it's the outskirts of Andover.
• 
  Jeremi Miller

  While the first few chapters are a very interesting description of history of British agriculture and especially its darker side, I’m not entirely sure what the point of this book is. Without being explicit about the underlying motives of the deterioration of the rural life and agricultural production it’s hard to see this book as anything else than a prolonged rant. Disappointing, as the author hints very heavily at the profit motive being the key driver in disrupting traditional, sustainable practices. Ware holds views characteristic of a radical, and even talks about systemic issues, but somehow doesn’t call out capitalism or provide a leftist alternative. Interesting nonetheless.
• 
  Helbob

  Fascinating in places and a very interesting discourse on rural life and history woven around one location in ‘rural’ Hampshire. Occasionally I lost the links between topics when the subject matter seemed to change course abruptly or meander back on itself. But I learnt and I was engaged most of the time.
• 
  Hayley

  Review to come on Joyzine.org