It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. [W]e will in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands.
(Rushdie, Imaginary 10)
The suicide bombings which sent shock waves across London and the whole of the UK on 7 July 2005 led to the sudden realization amongst British people of the cruel fact that there were “enemies within.” The three bombers were reportedly young, British-born Muslim men of Pakistani origin who had been living in Yorkshire. Colin MacCabe subsequently posed a crucial question, when he asked: “What turned Kureishi’s fanatics into murderers?”1 Two years after the bombings, in voicing his
1 The 2006 issue of Critical Quarterly invited writers Monica Ali, Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie, academics Paul Gilroy and Colin MacCabe, and teachers Natasha Serret and Sandra Young to take part in “Multiculturalism after 7/7: A CQ Seminar” to discuss the possible reasons for the proximate cause of this tragedy and the problems in multicultural Britain. At the very start of the discussion, MacCabe pointed out that Kureishi had given direct prophetic warnings in his short story, “My Son the Fanatic,”
which is concerned with an ultra-fundamentalist ethos amongst second-generation British Muslims;
however, Kureishi’s warnings had been ignored. MacCabe noted that, “If one ever wished for proof of the uncanny prescience of the literary imagination, it came on 7 July 2005 in London when four young men, very similar to Kureishi’s ‘son,’ blew themselves and fifty-two others to death on London’s public transport” (“Multiculturalism” 2).
assessment of the events, Sir Ken Knight, the head of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, warned that: “These were born-and-bred UK citizens. They were born, bred and educated in the UK. It’s not a matter of border patrol. We need to find out how to re-engage those people who are so disengaged”.2
Over and above the public response of shock and fear which prevailed, besieging British citizens in their own homeland, the specific cause which drove these young, British born-and-bred Muslims to commit such atrocities puzzled both critics and the public alike. In 2005, however, long before the bombings, Hanif Kureishi had written about such a Muslim fanatic in his short story “My Son the Fanatic”; thus, prior to the public’s bewilderment at martyrdom-seeking young extremists in their own backyard, Kureishi had developed his own observations on the problem of identity amongst young, second-generation Asian people who had been home-grown in Britain.
Much of Kureishi’s early work is grounded primarily in such conflict, racial and cultural conflict, the conflict between British mainstream culture and ethnic minority communities, the conflict between the cultural claims that the first-generation immigrants were prone to clinging onto and the sense of belonging which their children aspired to develop in mainstream British society. To the children of immigrants, particularly the offspring of those who had migrated from British Commonwealth or ex-colonized
2 See Knight (2007), “Safety Workers told how London Battled New Terrorism.”
countries after the Second World War, any reflection on Britain, or their parents’ homeland, in terms of “home” may differ significantly from that perceived by their parents.
As a writer born and bred in Britain of a Pakistani father and an English mother, Kureishi reflects upon his own identity in a different way, affirming in an interview his own sense of identity by seeing himself as British: “Critics have written that I’m caught between two cultures. I’m not. I’m British; I’ve made it in England. It’s my father who’s caught. He can’t make it” (Pally 53). Elsewhere he proclaims his British identity in a
similar way:
I’m British, as I wrote in The Rainbow Sign. Just like Karim in the Buddha.
But being British is a new thing now. It involves people with names like Kureishi or Ishiguro or Rushdie, where it didn’t before. And we’re all British too. (Kaleta 8)
Kureishi differs from the first-generation immigrant writers such as George Lamming and Sam Selvon in very distinct ways, particularly in his perspectives on his protagonists, showing how they perceive their positionality in England. In Kureishi’s case, his protagonists no longer feel exiled; for example, in Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, the story opens up with a statement by Karim Amir on his hybrid identity:
My name is Karim and I am Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. (Suburbia 3)
Karim therefore serves as the spokesman for the novelist, negotiating with both Englishness and cultural identity, in a sense of “hybridity,” during the process of
searching for his identity. Commenting on Kureishi’s focus on the theme of hybridity, Kenneth Kaleta argues that he attains such hybridity from his own experiences; thus, Kaleta defines Kureishi as a “hyphenated Anglo-Asian author” (7).
For Kureishi, and his protagonists, notably in The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, the notion of hybridity, of ethnically mixing, has been through some
considerable negotiation of Englishness; thus, a hybrid identity challenges the “fixed”
notion of Englishness, which has, in the past, been defined simply in terms of race and blood. As Robert Young puts it, hybridity is “a key term, in that, wherever it emerges, it suggests the impossibility of essentialism” (27). According to Homi Bhabha, hybridity also opens up an “in-between” space:
What is theoretically innovative, and politically critical, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjective, and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These “in-between” spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiates new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestations, in the act of defining the new idea of society itself (Location 1-2).
Commenting on Bhabha’s notions of “hybridity” and “in-between” space, John McLeod notes that such concepts are very useful for diaspora people as “a way of thinking beyond exclusionary, fixed, binary notions of identity based on ideas of rootedness and cultural, racial and national purity” (Beginning 219).
The “hybridity” theme is prevalent throughout Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
and The Black Album, in which the very tensions of hybridity versus Englishness are staged, with hybrid protagonists struggling to define their positionality, somewhere in between the South Asian culture of their parents and their own English upbringing.
Whereas issues of place and hybridity dominate the narrative of The Buddha of Suburbia – which, in many ways, concerns Karim Amir’s struggle between divergent cultures – in The Black Album, given his in-between identity, Shahid Hassan is confronted with diverse
choices, in terms of new ethnicities, religion and multiple identities. It is, thus, regarded here as essential to examine the race riots of the 1970s and 1980s, since both novels explore the themes of racial tension, youth, class and sex, albeit with Kureishi presenting them in a satirical manner by interrogating a hybrid British-Asian society.
“Here to Stay and Here to Fight”: The Race riots of the 1970s and 1980s
3Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album respectively span the 1970s and 1980s, with the former beginning with Karim Amir at high school, and ending on the eve of the 1979 General Election which brought Margaret Thatcher to power, whilst the latter writes about London in 1989, the year of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The political setting of each of these novels is integral to
their narratives, with the identities of Asian British youths being central to the story.
3 The phrase “Here to stay, here to fight” is borrowed from the subtitle of an essay written by Mike and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: the Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain, where they discuss the political atmosphere of 1970s Britain, revealing the rising self-consciousness, amongst young black people, of their identities; see Phillips and Phillips 269.
One particular perspective on 1970s Britain is that the racial conflicts experienced at high school by Karim Amir show “a shift towards an insular, isolationist Britain”
(Phillips and Phillips 270); and indeed, for second-generation immigrants, the seventies were to emerge as a time for negotiating relationships with Britain in ways which
differed from those adopted by their parents. As Paul Gilroy puts it:
It’s the younger generation that take the front line in the seventies, and they are a deeply troubled generation, because they’ve never seen the Caribbean, nothing to do with it. They called themselves African for a long time, but of course they’d never been to Africa either. They are saved, spiritually and culturally, by the advent of Rastafarianism and by Reggae (Phillips and Phillips 296)
In Gilroy’s view, the rhythms of reggae and military ideology of Rastafarianism had become central elements in an increasingly unique black youth culture of the 1970s.4 It was relatively important for second-generation British people of Caribbean and Asian origin to develop their own black youth culture, as some very significant issues were arising. Most significant of these was the increasing size of the black teenage population, since it was the 1970s that witnessed the coming of age of the children of the migrants who had come to Britain from the Caribbean or Asia in the 1950s.
British-born black youths were ready to fight racial discrimination and ethnic
stereotyping much more aggressively than their parents. In the seventies, these youths
4 The most notable features of Rastafarianism in 1970s Britain included “a distinctive social outlook, language and lifestyle,” and more particularly, “the wearing of clothes mark red, gold and green,” “the populisation of reggae music,” “the adoption of dreadlocks and head covering and incorporation of specific words into the vocabulary.” For more details on Rastafarianism, see Kalbir Shukra 36.
were seen as “living in a world in which all their experiences were racialised” and were therefore “conscious at every stage that their race determined how they were seen and their chances in life” (Phillips and Phillips 295). It was the colour of their skin that led to them getting into more trouble with the police or having a reduced chance of finding a job after leaving school, so they began to adopt different ways of negotiating their relationships with English society. A powerful example of this is found in the assertion by Linton Kwesi Johnson, an acknowledged poet of the seventies generation of black British youths. In an interview, Johnson told of his experience with
negotiating his identity:
The problem was racism. . . . [W]e were the generation who changed things, because we didn’t have the kind of constraints that your parents had. . . . I think that having our own independent cultural institutions made it possible for us to cope with the alienation that we felt from British society, because of the racism, the racial oppression, institutionalised, and otherwise. These things gave us a sense of our own identity, made us feel that we had something going for ourselves that made us proud and strong and independent. (qtd. in Phillips and Phillips 298)
Embracing one’s own culture in order to change British society, as advocated by Johnson, presents his identity politics in terms of empowering, assertive, positive aspects.
In other words, he fervently believed that young black people in 1970s Britain should have been striving for an individuality that was unique to their experiences. Fryer observes: “This generation strove to make sense of the situation they found themselves born into” (Staying 386).
The 1970s also saw racism as a much more pervasive, institutionalized characteristic of British culture, with British minority communities being attacked or bullied throughout this era by white racists and police. According to Fryer, approximately 31 black people in Britain had reportedly been murdered by white racists between the years 1976 and 1981, although “in almost every case, in the teeth of the evidence, the police denied there had been, that there could have been, any racist motive” (Staying 395). Thus, since it had become clear to them that no one was prepared to help them, these black British youths were ultimately compelled to defend themselves.
The rebellion by black British youths within the inner cities was logical enough;
John Solomos points to the tension and conflicts between young blacks and the police, noting that together with the rebellious protests of the 1970s, they had succeeded in laying the foundations for “the severe breakdown of relations between young blacks and the police in the 1980s” (137). The most significant outbreak of race riots in the early eighties took place in Brixton, south London, when, on 10 April 1981, approximately one hundred young blacks rioted against the local Brixton police,
apparently as a result of being provoked by police harassment.5
5 According to Solomos, there were three major examples of urban unrest during the early 1980s, with the first outbreaks of race riots occurring in the St Paul’s district of Bristol in April 1980, the second being the race riots of 1981 in Brixton, and the third involving the violent confrontations which broke out in the Toxteth area of Liverpool in July 1981. For further details on the race riots of the 1980s, see Solomos 143.
Commenting on this event, Gilroy suggested that the police harassment and the resultant confrontations with the young blacks resembled “a sort of revenge swamping,” clearly echoing the “swamping” statement that had been made in the seventies by Margaret Thatcher when she said, “People are really rather frightened they might be swamped by those of a different culture”.6 The action of “revenge swamping,” as Gilroy further argues, is that “they wanted to swamp the streets of Brixton; they wanted to target young men in particular” (Phillips and Phillips 358).
The Brixton riots of April 1981, and the subsequent nationwide riots which broke out in July 1981, aroused passionate media attention in which “race, racial discrimination and black youth were given a central place, either implicitly or explicitly” (Solomos 146). However, the race riots of 1981 had triggered a series of investigations. The Scarman Inquiry, an investigation undertaken at the request of the Margaret Thatcher government, considered that the riots were caused by the alienation and powerlessness which were suffered by young blacks living in poor districts of cities.7 Thus, Lord Scarman presented the following policy proposal indicating: “I recommend that local communities must be fully and effectively involved in planning, in the provision of local services, and in the management and financing of specific
6 For further commentary and details on Gilroy’s overall views of the 1981 race riots, see Phillips and Phillips 358-359.
7 Lord Scarman’s 1983 Report represented the response by the Thatcher government to the race riots of 1981. By referring to the racial disadvantages among black British communities, the report prescribed much-needed “race-training awareness for police, community liaison, and both community and joint efforts to reduce the social and economical dimensions or racial disadvantages” (Malik 18).
projects” (qtd. in Solomos 152).
Whereas the 1970s saw the increasing alienation of young blacks from British society and growing tension between the police and black communities, the 1980s was to witness highly volatile unrest and disorder in urban cities. Although equal opportunity programs had been introduced following a series of race riots in the early 1980s, racial discrimination and racism still prevailed, and, as a result, an appeal for
“unified” power was aroused amongst the black British. As Kobena Mercer argues,
“black” had become more of a political, rather than radical, category:
Throughout the seventies and eighties, the re-articulation of this term as an inclusive political identity based on alliances among Asian, African and Caribbean peoples, brought together in shared struggles against racism in Britain, has helped to challenge and displace common sense assumptions about “blackness” as a fixed or essential identity. (Jungle 81)
The label “black” has been used by British citizens of African and Asian descent as an alliance against the racial discrimination and racism, being a term of “inclusiveness”
which “carried a meaning that was concerned with the politics of solidarity across different racialized categories of people of colour” (L. Young, “Hybridity’s” 155).
Although the inclusive feature of the term “black” had, in the 1970s and 1980s, provided a way of suppressing differences amongst coloured communities, the hybridization of the term “black British” distinguishes itself from other (white) British subjects.
In “New Ethnicities,” Hall suggests that the first moment of black British cultural
politics was that in which
the term “black” was coined as a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain and came to provide the organizing category of a new politics of resistance, among groups and communities with, in fact, very different histories, traditions and ethnic identities. (441)
This was the moment of engaging, rather than suppressing, differences; a moment in which Hall recognizes the term “black” as a product of political struggle and challenge against the mainstream culture. Yet, the second moment of black British cultural politics, according to Hall, shifts from the struggles of representation to a new politics
of representation which
has to do with an awareness of the black experience as a diaspora experience, and the consequences which this carries for the process of unsettling, recombination, hybridization and “cut-and-mix” – in short, the process of cultural diaspora-ization (to coin an ugly term) which it implies.
(447)
In this second moment, black subjects and black experiences are not determined by nature, but constructed by history, culture and politics; thus, Hall refers to this as
“ethnicities.” In Hall’s view, the new politics of ethnicities are based on difference and diversity, operated by connecting “the relation of these cultural practices to the past” and
“complexly mediated and transformed by memory, fantasy and desire” (447). In his very precise explanation of Hall’s notion of “new ethnicities,” James Procter comments that such notion “foregrounds the positionality and contextuality of diaspora identities rather than a ‘free-floating’ subject” and is “an alternative to the nation-centered ‘hegemonic
concept of Englishness’” (Stuart 131).
The race riots of the early and mid 1980s not only witnessed the emergence of hybridized black British identity, but actually contested the whole notion of Englishness. Equally significant was the 1989 Rushdie Affair, which succeeded in obscuring the dynamics of Englishness. In response to Salman Rushdie’s publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a “fatwa” on Rushdie, and British Muslims called for blasphemy against Rushdie’s book. A book-burning was generated by a group of impassioned British Muslims in 1989;
however, the event indicated disparate responses amongst black British communities.8
As Tariq Modood points out:
It generated an impassioned Muslim activism and mobilization that no previous campaign against racism had been remotely able to stir. Many “lapsed” or
“passive” Muslims (especially non-religious Muslims, for whom hitherto their Muslim background was not particularly important) (re)discovered a new sense of community solidarity. What was striking was that when the public rage against Muslims was at its most intense, Muslims neither sought nor were
“passive” Muslims (especially non-religious Muslims, for whom hitherto their Muslim background was not particularly important) (re)discovered a new sense of community solidarity. What was striking was that when the public rage against Muslims was at its most intense, Muslims neither sought nor were