KYLE LEGALL | INTERVIEW
Hailing from Butetown in Cardiff, artist Kyle Legall has brought the city’s seldom-spoken-of race riots of 1919 into the 21st century – via an illustrated digital graphic novel, Cardiff 1919: Riots Redrawn, and funding from National Theatre Wales. Launched online at the end of July at www.cardiff1919.wales, it depicts how Cardiff city centre was pitched into four days and nights of violence which left three dead, many injured and buildings ablaze.
Recalling how he got involved in the project, Legall explains, “I started with National Theatre Wales as an emerging director, and I got involved in doing a series of plays with them. One was a play called Storm 2 [about the 1919 riots], although it was more like a show than a play, like a live documentary. It had a map of Butetown and Cardiff on big tables, and mugshots of all the people arrested during the riots. I was watching the rehearsals and the imagery sort of started coming to me, so I started doodling on the side of my script where I storyboarded a couple of instances. A couple of people saw it, and I was encouraged to continue the work, as this was one of the topics I joined NTW for in the first place.”
How did Legall first become aware of this part of history? “My auntie and father used to tell me about how their grandmother would say, when she had dementia, ‘Cover the baby, they have the bricks!’ – she was talking about her experiences during the riots. The white women of the Bay who went into town with their brown babies had to cover the pram with a Welsh throw so that people around Cardiff didn’t kick the pram over.”
Hard as this may be to process even now, this is history that is local, and needs telling. The subject of the Cardiff race riots isn’t taught in schools: not entirely erased from Welsh history, yet you’d be hard-pressed to locate anything written in more than a handful of books before the appearance of the internet.
How might we best look back at it through a contemporary lens, and with the context of present-day racism? “I think it’s perpetuated constantly in the media,” Legall says, but [the 1919 riots] are an embarrassment for Wales, hence why most will not have heard about it 100 years later. It’s probably a bitter pill to swallow as we are now such a multicultural society in our capital.”
With this being a huge part of black history in Wales, this topic is now reenacted via the process of modern technology in the form of an online magazine. Legall aimed to present the artwork as it might have been drawn at the time: “I wanted it to look like something from the 1920s; it was initially going to be a black and white graphic novel. I usually draw black people, but this is the first project where I’ve drawn lots of white people, so I was excited about that. I also knew that the NTW was big on environmental issues, so I decided not to use paper and ink but to do it all digitally.”
Cardiff 1919: Riots Re-drawn is at www.cardiff1919.wales. It contains images and descriptions of extreme violence and includes language, including racial slurs, drawn from historical documents and accounts which may be offensive to a modern audience.
words CARL MARSH