Return of a Native: Learning from the Land

From a fixed point in the middle of English nowhere, Vron Ware takes you through time and space to explain why transcending the urban-rural divide is integral to the future of the planet. Rural England is a mythic space, a complex canvas on which people from many different backgrounds project all kinds of fantasies, prejudices, desires and fears. This book seeks to challenge many of these ideas, showing how the artificial divide between rural and urban works to conceal the underlying relationship between these two fundamental poles of human settlement. This investigation of rurality is oriented from a fixed point in north-west Hampshire, marked by a signpost that points in four directions to two towns, four villages and two hamlets. Through stories, interviews and reportage gathered over two decades, the book demolishes tired notions of rural England that cast it as a separate realm of existence, whether marooned in a perpetual time-warp, or reduced to a refuge for the retired, wealthy urbanites, extreme nature-lovers, and, more recently, anyone tired of waiting out the pandemic in towns and cities. It poses two simple questions- what does the word rural mean today? What will it mean tomorrow? The author is an ambivalent native, held captive to the land by an umbilical cord but always on the verge of fleeing home to the city. She writes from a feminist, postcolonial standpoint that is alert to the slow violence of historical processes taking place over many centuries; enslavement, colonialism, industrialisation, globalisation. Both argument and narrative are propelled by the urgent need to reconsider the concept of 'countryside' in the context of the climate emergency and the patent collapse of ecosystems due to intensive farming which has poisoned the land.

About the Author :
Vron Ware has been writing about racism, gender, history and national identity since the 1980s. Her books include Beyond the Pale- White Women, Racism and History; Out of Whiteness- Color, Politics and Culture; Who Cares about Britishness?; and Military Migrants- Fighting for YOUR Country. She has worked as a journalist, photographer, environmental designer and academic.

Review :
"This incisive work beautifully excavates the troubled, ultimately colonial, inheritance that haunts the making of modern British rural life." "A profoundly affecting and fierce case for re-finding the commons that once traversed and transcended the ownership mantras that have ousted and poisoned so much of the living world. Ware brings the world to bear on a hamlet, the smallest form of human settlement, and the hamlet, a piece of ground, to bear on the world and the planet." "A riveting environmental, historical and personal account, Return of a Native transforms our understanding of the local as Vron Ware reveals the complex connections of the land, its food and animal production and human and nonhuman inhabitants to global networks of agriculture, commerce and politics." "A thorough, enthralling and spirited reconstruction of what it took to be modern, Return of a Native is a gold mine. In this masterful exercise in retrospective geography, Vron Ware invites her reader to learn anew how touching the solid clay beneath our feet can yield such vibrant life, at least for the time being." "In traversing the English countryside, comes an account which thinks beyond local histories and provincial politics. Ware gives us a moving and often funny personal story which offers a fresh look at urgent questions relating to environmentalism, colonial legacies, class, culture and nationalism." “Return of a Native bears the compelling message that if you want to understand the world around you, look to the ground beneath your feet. Vron Ware excavates stories that shed new light on our own age, and should prompt us to rethink the way we relate to the land, to our histories and to one another.” "Like a twenty-first-century William Blake, Ware's view of England's 'green and pleasant land' is haunted by dark shadows and damage from its ruined soil, haunted colonial past, and national self-mutilations of Brexit. A brilliant, beautiful & chilling portrait of England's fateful present." "Ware's subtle and fascinating research steers us round rural twist after rural turn towards what we can only hope will be a more equitable future." "In the wake of the pandemic and as the borders between the rural and urban grow ever more porous, this illuminating anatomy of the English countryside is a timely read." "A sly, luminous, brutal, and funny excavation of rural place through time, Return of a Native brings to mind not only Hardy but also Saramago. The churn of consciousness haunts every page. Ware raises from the ground an English village’s interdependence with otherwises and elsewheres of imperial modernity."