Resist: Stories of Uprising

"Bidisha was asked to write a short story about Boudica, but her piece is very much an interpretative, artistic interpretation of Boudica. The Resist book is about rebels. I think the publishers are trying to make people aware of people in British history who have rebelled against particularly masculine authority or state power. What I find very interesting about the book is the way people use history. In archaeology, we are taught that we should use history very carefully. I suppose that traditional historians would say that we try and understand what might actually have happened in the past, but every generation has a different interpretation of the past. So, how we receive Boudica at the moment probably depends on how people feel about government, as much as anything. She’s a powerful figure of resistance. Some people during the Brexit debate saw her as an inspiration for getting independence from Europe. You could also see her as a symbol of resistance to our current government, if you wanted to. The book in which Bidisha’s story is included is an attempt to communicate cases in history in which people did resist. Boudica is a difficult example because we’re also told she did some awful things, or her followers did some awful things. She wasn’t like Gandhi , she didn’t look to be peaceful. She looked to drive Rome out of Britain and killed lots of people. She went first for Colchester, because Colchester was the dominant Roman urban centre. It was a colony of Roman citizens, founded in 49 AD. It was only 11 years old when she burned the place down. It had a temple of Claudius and they were building a grand, substantial classical Roman temple in stone. Boudica and her followers sacked Colchester and killed everybody there. Then they marched to London, and they drove people out of London. Some people would have remained behind and they would have been killed. London at the time was also a new foundation, but a major settlement and trading centre. Then she goes and burns Verulamium, St Albans as we know it, an oppidum (Iron Age centre), just north of London. After that, she’s defeated. They killed thousands of Romans and Roman sympathisers during that process. It’s a work of fiction. She’s looking into the identity and the influence of a female figure resisting power. Boudica has been picked up in that way in the past. She was taken up by the suffragists as a heroine. Bidisha’s doing something that is much more about contemporary society, really. Everybody who uses Boudica tends to do that. Bidisha tells her tale in the words of an average member of an Iron Age community seeking to avenge the attack of the Romans on Boudica and the narrator’s kin."