Though class is no longer the primary determinant of personal identity in postmodern society, The Black Album, set in the turbulent late nineteen eighties, nonetheless explores the impact of familial class background on the major characters, and especially the protagonist. In tracing the origin of Shahid’s individual identities and consumptive mode, it is appropriate to begin with his father, a travel agency owner whose work ethic is as solid as his material consumerism. Twenty five years ago, Papa and Shahid’s mother were merely employees of a little travel agency.
Despite Papa’s death, Shahid’s family came to own two shops in Sevenoaks, Kent at the beginning of the novel (Album 16). Papa’s entrepreneurial success and his early death shrouded in the shadow of overwork testify to the Weberian Protestant ethic he held, where constant saving and reinvestment for accumulation is the norm.45 He
45
otherwise had little chance of improving his prospects, much less of becoming a more accomplished entrepreneur than his former boss, given his ethnic inferiority in the British job market.46 Shahid has a vivid description of the working attitudes held by his parents: “My family’s work has always been to transport others around the world.
They never go anywhere themselves, apart from Karachi once a year. They can’t do anything but work” (Album 15).
Papa’s workaholic mind-set does not however immunize him from the lure of the romantic ethic. It is his work ethic, and its generous entailing remuneration, that sublimate consumerism into the redemption of life. Shahid’s family home, “an immaculate 1960s mansion,” reflects Papa’s erratic consumerism:
Papa had constantly redecorated it, the furniture was replaced every five years and new rooms were necessarily added. The kitchen always seemed to be in the front drive, awaiting disposal, though it appeared to Shahid no less “innovative” than the new one. Papa hated anything
“old-fashioned,”47 unless it charmed tourists. He wanted to tear down the old; he liked “progress.” “I only want the best,” he’d say, meaning the newest, the latest, and, somehow, the most ostentatious. (Album 48)
But “new” things and experiences are not necessarily better products, when it comes to quality or originality, than older ones. Such Postmodern insistence on newness certainly has a whiff of the progressivism in modernity. As Campbell notes:
[s]ince the permanent consumption of ‘novelty’ lies at the heart of
Representing “a deceased parent’s continuing presence in an adult child’s reality,” “Papa is part of Shahid’s thinking” (Kaleta 135). In Shahid’s and Chili’s reminiscences of him, Papa has become an incarnation of work ethic, of the father’s law that both sons can never morally deny. For instance, even if Shahid refuses to take over Papa’s business, he unconsciously inherits Papa’s diligence in his writing.
46 Racism has become a major rationale for Islamic fundamentalism, which embraces an imaginary and purified Islamic society fighting against discriminative evils of the West.
47 Papa’s preference for marketable old-fashion recalls the emergence of a heritage industry under Thatcher’s administration. For a detailed discussion, refer to Ryan S. Trimm’s “Haunting Heritage and Cultural Politics: Signifying Britain since the Rise of Thatcher.”
self-illusory hedonism, patterns of ‘taste’ – in the sense of our choices of those things which yield pleasure – must themselves be undergoing endless, if gradual, change. . . . This does not mean that the modern consumer typically gives expression to idiosyncratic tastes. Rather it means that the only fixed, or ‘basic’ standard of taste adhered to is a preference for proximate or ‘fresh’ pleasures, those on the borderline between the experienced and the yet-to-be-experienced, those where imagination embroiders existing reality in tantalizing ways. (The
Romantic Ethic 94)
While furniture and upholstery transform given spaces, the consumer’s imagination has already transformed that space before actual construction is completed. Rather than an inflexible preference for a specific style, this sort of imagination is a taste claiming newness itself, whether it is from a particular designer or as a general fashion promoted by the upholstery industry. Through consumption of these new commodities and spaces, Papa creates his own space where material success and cultural taste ensure his sense of self and self-image, despite the fact that, for some, his inferiority as an immigrant is unmovable.
Papa’s travel agency operates in the way of a typical small business most encouraged by Prime Minister Thatcher at that time. Due to its small scale and a more casual division of labor, the entrepreneur usually has to see to every task and detail in order to maintain the operation and its profitability. To this, a travel agency in the postmodern 1980s represented a nodal point articulating the link between consumption and work. “[T]ransport[ing] others around the world” (Album 15), the travel industry affirms transnational journeys as being must-do consumptions in the age of increasing globalization. With the advancement of transportation and convenience of travel, pursuing novelties around the world becomes a means of self-fulfillment for postmodern subjects. Those who materialize their transnational imaginations are often like Shahid’s father, disciplined by a strong work ethic in the
office regardless of how much consumptive space they have created. These contradicted spaces manifest that no matter how much is said about the dominant roles played by consumerism and simulated information, production in postmodernity is no less significant than that found in an earlier form of capitalism.
Toil during business hours and material pleasure during leisure respectively hold their interior ethic, which, however, cannot be defined as a value for pious Islamic fundamentalists. Shahid is questioned about his family’s ethic as he relates Papa’s travel business to Riaz, leader of a militant Muslim group in this novel: “And did they lose themselves when they came here” (Album 15)? However, “[a]t home Papa liked to say, when asked about his faith, ‘Yes, I have a belief. It’s called working until my arse aches” (Album 102). Rarely bothering himself with the Muslim way life, Papa evinces another possible faith in a post-colonial/postmodern society. This is not so much a Weberian transition from Protestant ethic to the spirit of capitalism as a quasi-religious faith that buttresses benefit-seeking capitalism with an ethical foundation. Papa’s faith also constitutes a salient part of the diasporic identity, though not so alluring for critics in that it seems too Westernized. In My Ear at His Heart, Kureishi’s memoir of his father, he holds that “[i]f the absence of belonging is considered to be the immigrant’s particular bugbear, dad was fascinated by another kind of belonging, which might be called a vocation” (99). Papa’s work ethic avoids loss of himself at the core of the former Empire, and makes Riaz’s interrogation untenable.
Though Shahid and Chili choose different paths from Papa, the latter’s emphasis on stylish consumption greatly orients their identities. A representative example is Papa’s insistence on scrupulous dressing. Papa’s concentration on the catalogue by the store Burtons the Tailors was “like [that of] scholars peering into manuscripts.” “Papa took his boys personally to the shops, ensuring that both he and they had the finest
clothes,” repeatedly considering how tie, vest, and suit would match up with one another. Papa was also meticulous about personal grooming, taking “Shahid and Chili into the bathroom to demonstrate the only correct way to shave, the loading of the brush and angle of the razor, soaping, rubbing, scraping, and pinching the flesh,” still followed “by an illustration of how to powder the balls, armpits, and between the toes” (Album 62). Traditionally attributed to femininity, body care is now marketed to male consumers with leisure time and a certain amount of wealth, providing them the opportunity and means of constructing self-identity on a physical level. Papa’s requirements for his sons reflect an inscription of the romantic ethic on the male body.
A plethora of personal care articles allow and encourage modern men to achieve a perfect image—something otherwise attributed with female ideals. In doing so, they realize “commercialization of the self,” as termed by Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen (215). As shown in Kureishi’s novel, this creates a new generation of British men much different from those of the 1950s. In his book, Cultures of Consumption: