Rural radicalism: how playwright Malaika Kegode is rewriting countryside stories at the Edinburgh Fringe
Malaika Kegode explains why she’s confronting the ‘invisible whiteness’ in rural storytelling
I grew up in a small town in Devon, the kind of place where the fields start seconds after the last house on the street. I knew every hedgerow, could hop any gate, and have walked miles down winding lanes after the only bus of the day failed to turn up. I was forged by the quiet expanse of the countryside. As a Black, mixed-race girl, I was also, for most of my childhood, one of very few global majority kids for miles.
These two truths have sat side by side my whole life, bumping up against each other, a constant low-level battle of belonging that for a long time I was keen to ignore. Obviously, I thought, I don't fit in, we can all see that. What a boring story. Let me find a different one to tell, a way to define myself outside of what others can already see.
Throughout my life and career I've been drawn back, again and again, to the countryside I spent my teens trying to escape. Trying to recontextualise it, disrupt it, challenge the assumptions of who gets to tell rural stories and what they should say. You might already be picturing the kind of work I mean: racist farmers, cruel schoolyard comments, being fetishised and underestimated. Those are real memories, but they're not stories I have any interest in telling.
When a global majority writer sets something in a rural landscape, there's an assumption before a single word is read that this will be a story about ‘not belonging’. About arriving, or trying to. The discomfort of being looked at, the loneliness of being the only one, the tedious journey of being let in. It's this kind of work that gets commissioned, published, produced and celebrated. It's comfortable. It flatters an audience's sense of the countryside as a fundamentally white space that people of colour must be granted access to, rather than a place they're already from. It lets people affirm that they feel the right way about a problem without ever having to redraw their mental map. “How awful” they think, “I would never make someone feel they don’t belong.”
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These same well-meaning audiences have come to my work ready to be told how hard it is to be Black in the countryside, only to be led down a different path, one where I might never directly reference my race at all, or do so only in passing. They're confused by this. Rudderless without their reference points. Once, a journalist interviewed me about a show I'd written about drug addiction in rural Devon, and half of his prepared questions were about me being Black. He hadn't read the script notes. He'd seen a photo of me and decided that's what I'd want to talk about.
I'd never begrudge another artist for exploring those harder, more painful feelings. I’m cheering for them. I know that sometimes it's even more difficult to tell these stories because people think they already know them. But I'm drawn less to the fight to belong than to writing from the hard-won knowledge that we already do. That we always have. Global majority people have farmed, walked, loved and lost in rural landscapes throughout time. So instead of stories about earning our place in the countryside, I'm interested in a different truth: that our existence is not a question, but a fact that quietly shapes how we see the world.
My new play Badgers is a folk-inspired storytelling show that invites the audience to step into the role of our protagonist, Meles, voiced by Hanora Kamen, as she investigates a mysterious disappearance in the quiet market town she grew up in. The story is through second-person narration, "you are Meles", and audio drama; the audience inhabit her but never see her. Meles is mixed-race, but that's not a plot point, because her identity isn't the conflict. The folklore is. The mystery is. The ceremony of storytelling itself is. I wanted an audience to step into her shoes for an hour without that step needing a justification, or a hand-wringing lesson in allyship.
That, to me, is the more radical move. Not another story about the fight to belong, but a rural story that just assumes it, the way stories about white rural protagonists have always been allowed to. A fight against the kind of invisible whiteness so normalised in British pastoral storytelling that most people never clock it's there at all.
Any global majority writer making work that isn't explicitly about race still brings a lifetime of lived experience to how they see the world. My characters exist the way they do because I was once the only Black girl in my class, working out who I was in the face of a ring-fence that society had already built around who I was allowed to be.
The current uptick in activity for and about global majority people in rural spaces - walking groups, books, meet-ups and more - is a gorgeous and necessary thing. These are settings where people can speak to their experiences in overwhelmingly white environments, but also be free to speak about anything but that. We deserve for the full extent of our stories to be held and given room to become something nobody could have predicted, where belonging isn't the plot, but the given.
Representation matters in every shape it takes. A meet-up group or political campaign are just as valuable as a ghost story or a folk tale. Culture teaches us who belongs in a landscape long before any of us set foot on it. But culture is all of us. So it's about time we changed it, and started telling the truth.
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