VORRAG Kolloqium Dezember 2003

THE OTHERING OF GOOD OLD `ENG. LIT. ´OR

ENGLISH FACETS OF POSTCOLONIALITY

PETER O. STUMMER

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for coming and – what is more

important – your interest in the subject. I`ll try and not

tresspass on your patience for too long. However, allow me to

make a few preliminary remarks.

One. It just so happens that this talk here must appear as some

kind of stock-taking. It was in the late seventies that I gave

a presentation in Professor Clemens´ room – for this was then

where the Coloquium took place – on what it meant to be Black

and British. In those days this was regarded by many as a

topic belonging primarily to the realm of Landeskunde, if it

deserved some academic interest at all. The nearly thirty years

which have elapsed in the mean time have completely changed

this outlook, which I suppose everybody present will,

no doubt, agree upon.

Let me illustrate the fact that this situation of the early

beginnings was not so very different in England itself by a

little anecdote. When, in the mid-seventies, I was looking

for Linton

Kwesi Johnson´s collection Dread Beat an´ Blood , nobody had ever

heard of him in all the big bookshops in London. Nor had they

heard of the publisher Bogle-L´Ouverture with its

markedly Caribbean echoes. Some of the more discerning

booksellers eventually sent me to

a music shop, on the assumption that I must be looking for a

record. The publisher was a one-man affair in Ealing and when

Dread Beat & Blood appeared in 1975, it conspicuously tied in

with the emancipatory struggle as you can see from the cover,

Young Linton with woollen cap and megaphone, and the

description on the blurb, “ Dread Beat and Blood is perhaps the

most important commentary on the condition of Black people in

British society which any of out poets have achieved so

far. ... No amount of comment by journalists or sociologists

could speak of our experience quite as these poems do.” In his

introduction, Andrew Salkey, Jamaican writer of an older

generation, puts things more in perspective when he writes,

Needless to say, much of that [writing], if not all of it,has come out of

embattlement and struggle, a continuing confrontation withplace and language.

I [Salkey] well remember what he said to me, some time ago. “ The kind of thing that I write and the way I say it as a result of the tension between Jamaican Creole

and Jamaican English and between those and English English. And all that, really,

is the consequence of having been brought up in a colonialsociety and then coming

over here to live and go to school in England, soon afterwards. The tension builds up.

You can see it in the writing. You can hear it. And something else: my poems may

look sort of flat on the page. Well, that is because they´re actually oral poems, as

such. They were definitely written to be read aloud, in the community.

( loc.cit. p. 8 )

It is because of this that later, as we all know, texts like

Sonny´s Letta and Inglan is a Bitch

became canonised to a degree. The Kwesi , incidentally, should

not be rendered as [kwisai]

as it is inspired by the Rastafarians´ harking back to Africa

and actually means Wednesday,

in view of the West African custom to indicate in the name the

day on which one was born.

Preliminary remark Number Two. Or perhaps it should really

have been the first.

Exactly when I sat down to put together some notes for this

talk in September this year,

I heard of the death of Edward Said. I had known of his serious

illness, it is true, but the

news of his death was nonetheless a considerable blow, in

particular since I had met him twice in person and was duly

impressed by the man. It is perhaps also worth mentioning

under the present circumstances that outside the academia

postcoloniality let alone post (-)

colonial studies are not as widely accepted now as it may seem

from within. I say this because of the semi-public altercation

I had with a man called Lau from Die Zeit because of his vicious

portrayal of Said as father of these, as he put it, completely

superfluous postcolonial studies in particular amongst

anglicists. So if you do not deem this too presumptuous a

gesture, I should like to dedicate our discussion today to

Edward Said and his memory.

Preliminary remark Number Three, then, refers to the

implications of today´s topic for our

system of categorising the books in our library. Let me

mention just a few cases in point. Most recently I was happy

to see William Boyd´s opera being acquired in greater number,

obviously he is 20th century mainstream. When I bought his A

Good Man in Africa (1981),

for convenience´s sake, since he had not yet made it to the

crest of the wave literature then, we put him under `Africa´

in the New Literatures in English section. I take it that the

man himself would presumable prefer to come under Scottish

these days, a section which we do not have, in literature at

least. Another telling example went the other way round. I

had taught and therefore bought the early Caryl Phillips and

since there was not anything else in those early days put him

under 20th Century Contemporary British. It is because of

this that we are in the possession of some bibliophile

rarities, viz. the early plays from his days at Oxford.

However, today most people look for him under Africa. Cas

himself in a slightly facetious mood the other day maintained

that his location was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic

really. The good thing is, or could be, that because of what

things are like, his books ought to be, and were recently,

paid for from the general English literature funds. The two

most famous examples for this kind of problem are the so-called

cosmopolitan writers, such as Naipaul, or Rushdie, of course,

and Seth to a minor degree. As is well-known Naipaul “

migrated” from the earlier rubriks of Caribbean, because of

his Trinidadian origin, via Indian , because of his descent

and his writing on India, to finally the dyed-in-the-wool

donnish, conservative mainstream writer. Not so widely known

might be my last example, Timothy Mo. Because of historical

vicissitudes in the development of our library , he got himself

stranded with the New Literatures written in English as well,

or at least partly.

Of Hong Kong origin, after writing about Chinese immigrants in

Britain, he more recently chose to write mainly about the

Philippines and the Pacific ( e.g. Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard,

1995). By this rather anecdotal survey of problems with our

shelf marks in the area of contemporary Eng.Lit., it has become

apparent that nowadays the criteria of origin

and/or descent vie with permanent abode and/or subject-matter.

However, let us come back briefly to the view of the

matter from within. As early as 1984, it was the Anglican

Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, who spoke in the 12th

Richard Dimbleby Lecture with regard to Black Britons of The

Other Britain. For in the theatre some kind of cultural

separatism got under way, then. TALAWA was founded as a black

company by the Jamaican Yvonne Brewster in 1985; and in 1989

TAMASHA Theatre Company was started as a British Asian

activity. Let it be noted in passing that the name talawa

derives from the Jamaican expression “ me lickle but me talawa”

meaning: do not underestimate me, I might be little but I am

really tough. It just so happens that Yvonne retired earlier

this year as artistic director. Looking back at her beginnings,

she liked to tell the anecdote of a little theatre in

Cricklewood, when they toured the country with Smile Orange by

Trevor Rhone, and the frightened locals burnt the place down

when they saw arrive that many blacks in their neighbourhood

who wanted to see the play. Well, times change, thank God.

WASAFIRI, another enterprise of the period, originally operated

on a very smal scale, it was organised as self-help by a

teachers´ organisation who wanted to cater for their black

pupils´ cultural needs. It has gradually turned into a very

impressive literary journal for black writing to this very day

of its glossy high quality. In the beginnings, the journalist

Maya Jaggi was contributing editor of Wasafiri for a while and

was later in 1995 given the Race in the Media Award in the

national newspaper category devised by the CRE (Commission for

Racial Equality). In 1996 she wrote a seminal essay on “ the

new Brits on the block ” (in: THE GUARDIAN of July 13) where

she argues, a new generation of British-born black and Asian

writers was rising, leaving the `ethnic´ ghetto behind and who

were changing the way “ we see ourselves.” In an extra

accompanying background piece she provides a sweeping survey of

“ two hundred years of black bestsellers ” , ranging from

Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho to Jackie Kay and Bernadine

Evaristo, signalling in passing that near the end of the

millennium it was also black women who had finally found a

voice of their own after the beginnings with Buchi Emecheta,

Debjani Chatterjee, Grace Nichols and Amryl Johnson.

Concerning terminology , it is perhaps worth noting here

that Black has become an important signifier within four

different discourses. A. It is used in political jargon. In

the seventies it was even suggested as an umbrella term

comprising black and Asian minorities, in order to forge some

unity and provide it was hoped additional political clout.

However, this was of no great avail and the attempt dismally

foundered after a short while. Ever since Black and Asian have

had very distinctly different group references. B. It is used

in analytical language, academic or otherwise, signifying a

specific cultural section of society. C. The same holds true

for comparable activities outside Great Britain, for example

here amongst practitioners in the context of English Studies.

D. There is the limited field of self-referential usage by

non-white writers who want to underscore their otherness.

Some walk the tight-rope between separatism and ghetto

mentality because of their

political commitment. Suffice it to mention but two. In the

realm of politics , the most well-known journalist is perhaps

Darcus Howe, who for instance castigated recently the Tory

party for the way it was dealing with the black candidate for

Windsor, Adam Afriyie, against a backdrop of the fate of black

Labour candidates, from Paul Boateng to Bernie Grant.

(NS, 13 October 2003: 13).

In the field of poetry, the palm must surely go to

Benjamin Zephaniah, with acusatory poems such as “ Appeal

dismissed” , where the speaker is a smug magistrate who throws

out the case of a black woman rape victim on the grounds that

it was “ one of the things that can happen to a woman”

irrespective of colour or accent, and “ The Death of Joy

Gardner ” which Zephania must deem central since it figures on

the poet´s own website. There the four stanzas describe in no

uncertain terms the dreadful circumstances of deporting an

illegal immigrant, wrapped up in 13 feet of tape, with the

observer ambiguously stating;

“ we must talk some Race Relations / With the folks from immigration/ About this kind of deportation / If things are to improve. ”

http://www.benjaminzephaniah.com/rhymin/death.html

James Proctor in his Writing black Britain 1948—1998 of (2000)

reprints Zephaniah´s

accusatory poem “ What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us ”(1998),

where the poet laments the latent racism in high places and

resignedly states,

“ The death of Stephen Lawrence Has taught us That we cannot let the illusion of freedom Endow us with a false sense of security as we walk

the streets,”

A slightly more sensational case of cultural

separatism is the work of painter Chris Ofili, whose trade

mark has become the ostentatious inclusion of elephant

droppings in his paintings. He became notorious when New York

Mayor Guiliani attacked The Holy Virgin Mary, (of 1996) a black

madonna with one dung breast, as “dirty and disgusting” and

promptly cut the subsidy to the Brooklyn Art Gallery where it

was showing.

Things have clearly changed when a professor of the London

School of economics , Martin

Jacques , - “ The Global Hierarchy of Race” , The Guardian, (20

Sept., 2003), 17 - , can coolly analyse the latent racism in

English society now (not least on the basis of the experience

of his Indian-Malaysian wife) and someone like Yasmin Alibhai

Brown can even seriously write about integration a few years

earlier- “Bring England in from the Cold”, New Statesman, (11

July, 1997), 24—26 - . When the linguist Paxman emphasises the

shift from British to English as overdue, and the philosopher

Scruton begins to worry about the increasing threat to

Englishness.

Roughly two years ago, the British Council sent a handful of

writers on a tour through Germany under the label black

writing, nowadays the very same writers appear fully integrated

in a remarkably long line of literary festivals from Leicester

to Cheltenham.

And last not least, I cannot help observing the striking

changes in the proceedings of the German Anglistentag since the

year 2000. The time-honoured association recently not only

introduced a postcolonial section, but started to invite people

like Mike Phillips, Farrukh Dhondy and Tariq Ali as guest

speakers. Although it has to be admitted that not so many

participants, for instance, had a very clear picture of who

Tariq Ali was, and some of those who had, the rumour went,

felt a bit squeamish about this all too liberal procedure

anyway.

On the other hand, both Phillips and Dhondy advanced fairly

conservative arguments.

The former stressed the creation of a new British identity by

repeatedly referring to elements of mixing, be it expressions

like chicken tikka masala which does not exist in India, or

the band Apache Indian, who combine bhangra and calypso so-to-

speak, and Ali G, the

notorious white comedian whose stage persona is an Asian who

pretends to be black.

With regard to stand-up comedians, the Muslim Shazia Mirza, who

performs with headscarf and all, is nowadays much more

remarkable, I would claim. The Parsee Dhondy , on his part, not

only praized Naipaul for not subscribing to the fashionable “

nationalism of race”, but severely chastised muslims of

Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin as “the Trojan horse of a

fundamentalist movement” who in their support of the Taliban

and Al Qaeda had become “traitors to the country that brought

them up.”

Mike Phillips, “The Theory and Practice of London´s Multiculturalism”, Anglistentag 2000 Berlin, Proceedings, ed. Peter Lucko & Jürgen Schläger, Trier: WVT, 2001, p. 81—94.Farrukh Dhondy, “The Ideologies of Immigration”, Anglistentag 2002 Bayreuth, Proceedings, ed. Ewald Mengel, Hans-Jörg Schmid, Miachel Steppat, Trier. WVT, 2003,

p. 191—197. Tariq Ali, “On History and Fiction”, Anglistentag 2003 München, to be published.

Gail Low´s attitude, writing in The European Messenger (XI/2

(2002), 17—21, is also noteworthy. It is not for nothing that

her contribution bears the rather ambiguous title

“ The Challenge of `Black British´.” While, on the one hand,

calling for a “ relentlessly historicised approach and

multidisciplinary focus ” (p.20), she perceives on the other

hand

the challenges posed by Black British for English Studies as

clearly demanding “ a new language of criticism – one that is

sensitive to specific intersections between national and

transnational modalities and adroit in its handling of the

complexities of aesthetic modes and generic crossovers” . At

closer scrutiny, there can be detected some lurking

defensiveness in this argument, which becomes even more

striking when it turns out that this approach is intended to

give – from its Scottish perspective – a new strategic twist to

the Scottish / British relationship .

Against this complex background I wish to argue and maintain in

the following that what used to be a black minority as

described for example by Dilip Hiro in his Black British,

White British (1971), and consequently saw their literary

activities as being undertaken in some sort of a cultural

ghetto, has eventually managed to permeate the literary

mainstream of long guarded traditional Eng.lit. and by othering

it, by altering it from within with various traces of

postcoloniality has succeeded in completely changing its

nature. Nowadays we do not encounter an alternative mainstream,

which would constitute a contradiction in terms anyway, but a

culturally considerably different mainstream.

For the sake of clarity, I suggest to distinguish four

aspects of this ongoing process; admittedly not entirely

without facetiousness, I call them The Dub Conspiracy, The

Atlantic Triangle Revisited, The Ramayana in Hampstead, and

The Guayana Complott.

The already mentioned Timothy Mo could actually be accorded

an extra category , which I should like to label

Cosmopolitanism with a vengeance. However, he need not concern

us here at greater length, since I wish to concentrate in the

following on only a few hopefully telling examples. Although

to prove my general point that we encounter a statistically

relevant phenomenon, I have to drop a few names for each of

these categories. Had I more time, Edgar White, Mustapha

Matura, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Benjamin Zephaniah,

and Jackie Kay ought to be discussed under Dub Conspiracy.

Instead I shall concentrate on Bernardine Evaristo only.

The Atlantic Triangle Revisited, then, should comprise,

apart from Caryl Phillip, at least Joan Riley, Buchi Emecheta,

Ben Okri and Diran Adebayo.

The observations on The Ramayana in Hampstead should broach

Adam Zameenzad ,

Tariq Ali, Farukh Dhondy, Hanif Kureishi, and Meera Syal.

Although it would be very tempting to talk about Dhondy´s

Bombay Duck, I shall limit myself to a few remarks with regard

to Seeyal and Kureishi.

As far as the Guyana Complott is concerned, David Dabydeen,

Fred D´Aguiar, Pauline Melville, and above all, Wilson Harris

would deserve a detailed discussion. On the assumption that

they have already gained a wider readership on the continent

anyhow, not least on the basis of several translations into

German, in particular in the case of D´Aguiar,

I shall completely bypass them today.

The three texts, then, which I suggest to discuss in greater

detail in the following will therefore be: Bernardine Evaristo,

The Emperor´s Babe (2001), Meera Syal, Life isn´t all ha ha hee hee

(1999), and Hanif Kureishi´s The Body and Seven Stories (2002).

Evaristo was the Poetry Society´s Poet-in-Residence at the

Museum of London in 1999, and she represented Britain on the

Literaturexpress Europa 2000 Tour, which took 105 European writers

through eleven European countries over six weeks by train,

travelling from Portugal to Berlin, via Belgium, the Baltics

and Russia. The black paper The Voice rightly characterized The

Emperor´s Babe , which is a novel in verse, on its publication in

the following manner. “ A world where ancient and contemporary

zeitgeists converge, it offers a whole new take on the London

novel.” For, as another critic had it, this “ verse romp” is

set, around 200 A.D. or so, in Roman Londinium. Young

Zuleika ,“ Illa Bella Negreeta”, the heroine of the novel, came

to “ the jungle that was Britannia teeming with spirits and

untamed humans” with her parents from the Sudan and sees

herself as Nubian, with a subliminal element of pride added,

since her father archly pretends to being the exiled King of

Meroe, the last of the great pharaohs (p.38). The reversal of

perspectives has this “less than dazzling little colonia”

appear as cold and backward and unappealing as can be imagined.

The extremely witty language contains tags of Latin, and

anachronistically, sassy teen

slang of a sexy girl about town. Not only does the emperor

employ spin doctors (p.142) , but he also sports a purple

Armani toga (p.170). The ten verse parts cover many registers

and gradually change from the hilarious to the melancholy and

the tragic. The serious side of the project implicitly

thematises above all the early existence of blacks in England,

and from a position of power at that, since the young Zuleika

encounters for a short time the great Septimius Severus, the

emperor who is said to be of Lybian descent and of a black

skin colour. The two scenes of the consumation of their love

are really great achievements. D.H. Lawrence, if it was

possible, would no doubt have grown pale with envy, I am sure.

On the plot side it has to be mentioned that Zuleika has her

roots in the slums of Gracechurch Street,

where she is befriended by the scallywag (p.27) Alba and the “

lady with a prick and no tits” (p.48) Venus, née Rufus, with

discus-thrower´s calves (p.50) who runs a tavern ironically

called Mount Venus. At the age of twelve Zuleika is married

to a patrician´s son, Felix, more than twice her age, who is

often away on business, leaving her in her gilded cage under

the tutelage of his “ bulldog” majordomus, Tranio.(p.70), who

had entered “ Blighty” , the text says, as his manservant, and,

as the ruthless sycophant that he was, had been swiftly

promoted to “ Head Honcho”. Under the care of a certain

Theodorus, she studies poetry and

therefore some parts ,in the second half of the novel, are

preceded by genuine latin mottoes, slyly documenting her

progress. Consequently she renames two filthy and savage

Caledonian

slaves, whom she acquires on the market, as Valeria and Aemilia

(p.56). Appropriately enough, it is they who betray her love

affair with the emperor to her husband Felix after the emperor

´s sudden death. Small wonder, that, being steeped in poetry,

Zuleika begins to write herself and to see herself as the

Nubian poet. What develops, is a striking carnevalesque

undercurrent of the novel. For with considerable effort, she

organizes Verbosa Orgia in her house, and, in the process, for

instance an old poet who is not listened to and who finds no

end, mutters, when thrown our, margaritas ante porcos (p.198).

Another one, by the fancy name of Hrrathaghervood, amuses the

crowd by putting on an, as we later learn, fake accent

of some pictish patois (p.195). Zuleika, on her part, develops

her craft; she begins by a trite identity poem (which

incidentally is an authorial send-up on many similar poems

among

contemporary blacks ):

Identity Crisis : Who is she?

Am I the original Nubian princessFrom Mother Africa?Does the Nile run through my bloodIn this materfutuo urban jungle Called Londinium?Do I feel a sense of lackbecause I am swarthy?Or am a just a groovy chickLiving in the lap of luxury?Am a a slave or a slave-owner?Am I a Londinio or a Nubian?Will my children be Roman or Nubinettes?Were my parents vassals or pharaohs?

And who gives a damn! (p.201)

Eventually, she finds her voice, or so she claims, under the

influnce of small doses of arsenic

administered to her food by behest of her husband.

Imminent death allows the birth Of new perspectives (p.247)And similar lines culminate in the composition of her epitaph,

which she makes her friend Alba promise to put on her

tombstone.

To the spirits of the departed And the memory of our pal Zuleika, Who in her final summer Lived a life fuller than any other! (p.249)

She dies shortly before reaching her nineteenth birthday.

Remarkable, and indispensible for the well-calculated

composition of the narrative text, is what precedes the already

mentioned oestrus, the passionate frenzy of her intimate

encounter with Severus, the man not the emperor, on an

excursion to the woods, where in splashing mud and pouring rain

, she momentarily imagines Rome, straddles and rides the

moaning man and for a while manages to “ play at being Boss”

(p.226). Earlier on she had to be content to be just an

ordinary member of the numerous retinue of the emperor´s

entourage, when they went in grand style to see the Munera.

Zuleika is shocked by the female beast-fodder with which the

lions gorge themselves, by the bloody spectacle of the

gladiators fighting each other to the death. Zuleika dismisses

the privilege of the the raised thumb and finds deeply

repellent the wcome attraction which the spilling of blood

obviously represents for the roaring masses. She repeats

therefore under the title “ Abyssus Abyssum. (One Depravity

Leads to Another) ad nauseam the wellknown line: Ave

Imperator. Morituri te salutant. The only fault I could find,

so that I do not sound too carried away by the impact of this

novel in verse, in the context of this

organised public spilling of blood, was the coinage über-hunks

for some of the seemingly specially fed huge gladiators. In

order to remember that this text also deals with problems of

present day England, allow me to come back briefly to the

strategy of reversed clichés; for when Septimius Severus goes

into raptures describing the many assets of his beloved Sahara

(p.221), he explains, we call it Bahr-bela-ma, sea without

water and then somewhat at a loss for words exclaims,

You cannot imagine how beautiful it is, Zuleika.Britannia is like pigs´ ca ca in comparison.

Let us turn more directly to the present state of affairs,

then, in the guise of Meera Syal and her novel Life isn´t all ha ha

hee hee (1999). What sounds like a Roddy Doyle echo, Paddy Clarke

Ha Ha Ha (1993), is in effect the advice given by the mother

of Chila to her daughter who is one of the three central

characters of the novel, (p. 27), and who, it is insinuated

quite unobtrusively, has come to England with her (Indian)

family as refugees from Africa.

Things get off the ground with a doli ccelebration, a marriage

ceremony that is, with Chila aged 32, being married to the

businessman Deepak. Centre stage is the friendship of three

girls all of the same age , viz. thirty-two. Chila, Sunita and

Tania.

Sunita it becomes clear abandoned some of her ambitious

projects, like studying law, relatively early in her career,

got married to Akash who works as a rather succesful

psychotherapist., expert in transcultural therapy particularly

competent since he is bilingual (47). He and Sunita have two

kids , Nikita and Sunil. Sunita´s job is with the community

and amounts to being a social worker of sorts.

The central figure, with undounbtedly certain autobiographical

echos, is certainly Tania Tendon, attached to Martin, a white

Englishman, who has worked on his knowledge about India and

even tried to pick up some Punjabi to impress Tania´s parents.

Professionally though, as a TV script writer, he is having a

bit of a writer´s block at the moment.

Tania is a television journalist and is engaged in shooting

documentaries. She is clearly also the most successful and

emancipated of the threesome. Her deportment is accordingly,

cool,

success-oriented and slightly dismissive of her Indian

heritage.

The fact of being British Punjabis (p.43) is not made much

of, it comes up occasionally matter-of-fact wise merely. It

turns up in a very nonchalant way, together with references to

British bhangra bands (p.43) and their masala music (p.45 ).

In the same vein, it is laconically stated that some young

girls might be wearing customized punjabi suits and wear “

bindis all around [ their ] perfect belly button” (p.44).

Linguistically the prose does not hanker after Indian English

really, nonetheless it creates in a very leisurely and relaxed

way some kind of a British equivalent, with ever so many words

taken from Hindi which are being used quite naturally in a

very unobtrusive manner. Of course they are neither put in

italics nor are they explained; a glossary, like in some

Indian English novels geared for the international market, is

not even dreamt of. On the other other hand, in view of the

obvious generation gap, we encounter the occasional reflection

on good Punjabi, or rural one with the elderly, or, with the

young ones in particular, only using a rudimentary,

imperfect or even faulty Punjuba lingo. So the model husband

for some girls can be summed up in sentences like this one :“

Western enough to be trendy, Indian enough to be pukka ” (p.

37).

Tannia actually makes fun of all the earlier clichés of the

seventies, such as having a sense of dislocation ,of not

belonging, of being a culture clash victim, or an oppressed

third world woman. On the contrary , being different is

regarded as something like having an

“ objective third eye” (p. 56), which is after all quite

useful in her line of business. On the other hand, there are

people like her boss in the television company, Jonathan, who

wants her to transgress up to a point all the standard

stereotype aspects of a ghettoized existence in her

documentaries.

quote : `Bit samey I thought. Touch of the earnest ghettocreeping into your ideas. Surprised me actually...´ Tania watched the bubbles rushing madly to the rim of her glass. She scrolled through her proposal ideas: the new Asian underground music scene, the Harley

Street scam in replacemnent hymen sugery for Asianand Saudi women, the balti kings of Birmingham. Not one mention of arranged marriages, for fuck´ s sake, ho heavy exposés of mad Muslims, nothing involving hidden cameras. She had talked through all her ideas with Jonathan just two weeks ago and he had claimed to love them all. She wanted to ask the question that hovered at her lips during so many meetings where a panel of forty-something white men told her what was important and real. All those moments where she hadsat tight-lipped and buttocks clenched as Rupert or Donald or Angus nibbled on ciabatta and explained to her what it meant to be Asian and British at leasr fot the purpose of television. (p.63)

unquote

It becomes apparent that there is a female emancipatory angle

to the whole enterprise, with Sunita explicitly being compared

to Sita, the good Hindu wife who walks through fire for Lord

Shiva, as a model (p.48), which eventually will be discarded as

the novel progresses, when Sunita will have succesfully fought

for her chance of being given a wider practical and emotional

berth.

The plumb and simple-minded Chila gives birth to a son,

undergoes the frightful experience of the scion being kidnapped

by his father who is ,however, contrary to the tragic case

mentioned in the novel of a divorced father kidnapping his kid

and burning himself to death with him, returned to the mother

without a scratch.

The gender aspect is given its clearest emphasis, when Tania

speculates about the problem of her being professionally more

successful than her partner Martin:

Scratch a new man and a prehistoric snake always slithers out. His testosterone

levels are so high, he´s choking on his own basic instincts. He wants to be happy for me, but how can he when I´m doing better than him? I tried to be as sensitive as I could, I tried explaining that me having a joband him not being able to get one did not mean I was standing over his bollocks with a mallet in my hand.

I even tried to explain why I can´t play the shucks, this is just a hobby game

with him, not only because I respect him and expect more of him than that,

but mainly because it made me sick, watching my mother contort herself to

bolster my father´s fragile ego. (p. 144) Some passages read like an affirmative rebuttal to Margaret

Drabble´s The Millstone (1965),

where unwanted pregnancies and possible abortions for up-and-

coming female academics were examined, when Chila finds

fulfilment in the life-giving event and drops her unfaithful

husband, unheard of in a traditional Indian marriage, thereby

-with hindsight- giving an ironical twist to the doli

ceremony at the beginning of the novel.

Things turn tragic in the middle of the novel, and the racy

funny style becomes serious.

For Tania had shot a documentary on `unassisted marriages´, the

coinage to avoid the more

confrontational arranged marriage in order to show truthfully

the many-faceted marital bliss amongst couples of Indian

descent. Publicly the film is praised. Privately it almost

destroys the friendship between the three women, since it was

based on a downright betrayal of their trust when Tania uses

material of her friends which was shot on the assumption that

the

video camera had been switched off. The documentary had

unfortunately become a mockumentary (p. 251), as the novel

aptly puts it.

Tellingly enough it is in an altercation with an influential

agent, Mark Stein, that Tania decides to give up marketing her

background, asking Stein whether being Jewish informs his every

daily activity, and on his slightly bemused flat denial ,

insists on her part

“ No more grubbing in the ghetto , I´m mainstream

now” (p. 258)

It nicely ties up with this streak of self-assurance that Tania

also seeks to dismiss the cruder forms of racism, it is true,

but refuses to gloss over its more hiddeen and less talked

about manifestations:

When I get asked about racism, as I always do in any job interview

when they´re checking whether I´m the genuine article(oppressed

Asian woman who has suffered), as opposed to the pretend coconut

(white on the inside, brown on the outside, too well off and well spoken to be considered truly ethnic), I make up

stories about skinheads and shit through letterboxes, because that´s the kind of

racism they want to hear about. It lets my nice interviewer off the

hook, it confirms that the real baddieslive far away fromhim in the SE postcode

area, and he can tut at them from a safe distance. I never tell them

about the stares and whispers and the anonymous gobs of phlegm at bus

stops, the creaking of slowly closing doors.... (p. 144—145)

In this context, it is worth mentioning that Syal, who wrote

the script for Gurinder Chadha´s film Bhaji on the Beach (1993-95),

where she was anxious to provide – in contrast to Farukh Dhondy

´s practice in Bombay Duck – a relatively positive portrayal of

a young black of Caribbean descent, goes a bit over the top

here in the novel by episodically introducing Yaba a statuesque

Nigerian, of African royal blood (p. 87) who decidedly corrects

white liberal understanding of circumcision, or Female Genital

Mutilation, amongst student feminists by this haughty remark:

“ Our ancestors were living in cities with drainage systems while they

[ that is your white forbears] were still shitting in caves. They ain´t got

no culture which is why they´re trying to own ours.” (p. 88)

For the last so many pages she concentrates on her father, who

is in hospital comatose, without any chance whatsoever of

waking up again. Memories of her father´s life vy for attention

in her mind with the bleep on the monitoring screens. Here

unwelcome Western thoughts seep in like the premature

deliberate termination of this unconscious existence(320)

against a background of stories regarding one of her father´s

friends, a wealthy Sikh ( 258),

who bewails the hectic business life claiming that each million

pound gained had meant one heart by-pass operation, and that he

fears the third million will probably kill him. Somehow

he prefers the peanuts of their youth to the diamonds he

carries presently in his pocket .

Appropriately the novel ends with a rather cheerful cross-

cultural remark made by a regular

visitor to the cemetary where Tania´s father is cremated:

“ Mr Keegan slowed down a little. He had never dared say, but he looked forward

to these foreign cremations. There was always a good turn out, they seemed to have a lot of friends, the deceased, and it cheered himup no end, seeing all those cream

and snowy silks instead of the usual black stiff suits, which always reminded him of scavenging crows ” (p. 331)

To a degree my thesis can be solely documented by a significant

re-orientation within the work of the writer Hanif Kureishi

whom many will know as the script writer of films such as My

Beautiful Laundrette, and, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and as the director

of London Kills Me. However, the playwright also developed

increasingly an interest in writing narrative prose; with an

eye, as some will no doubt point out, to an easy adaptability

to the screen, as in The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), or his story “

My Son the Fanatic” , which appeared first in The New Yorker, and

was then published in the collection Love in a Blue Time (1997). His

second novel The Black Album came out in 1995. But I intend to

base my argument on the most recent collection of 2002, The Body

and Seven Stories. There I shall proceed from the

story “ Touched” of thirteen pages, to the novella “ Goodbye,

Mother” which comprises forty-six pages, to the short novel,

which provides the title of the collection, Body, of 123

pages.

“ Touched” was also first published in The New Yorker. It

concentrates good-humouredly

on the experience of a thirteen-year old boy, of mixed descent,

whose father is Indian and works in a solicitor´s office and

whose white English mother adds a meagre salary as a nurse to

the family income. Part of the humorous appeal lies in the

invasion of this nuclear family by innumerable uncles and

aunties from Bombay. The brothers are all doing well, as a

factory owner, as a well-known political journalist, as an

engineer, who is famous for the dams he builds. Nonetheless

they still see Great Britain as the land of opportunities and

are disappointed by the lack of achievement of their brother,

who they feel has married beneath him. The eldest brother has

been paying for a law correspondence course; all to no avail so

far, since the London relative has failed his exam. The boys

from the neighbourhood clearly speak Cockney and occasionally

will use terms like darkies and explicitly refer to skin colour

by the word brown, but on the whole are relatively good-

natured. The funny side of cross-cultural communication is

brought home to the reader by the male visitors keenly watching

the Cricket Test match details on television and completely

misunderstanding the proud mention of the possession of a

washing machine by the English housewife, when they dump all

their dirty linen before her. Moreover the timid boy is

surprised by the forwardness of his female cousin, who is just

one year his elder, and almost manages to seduce him in the

attic. When she invites him to their home in Bombay, he cries

quite happily, “ Tell India I am coming”. A slightly more

serious element is brought in with the figure of a blind single

white female neighbour, who gives the boy the odd half crown

for letting her call him Alan instead of Ali and for allowing

her to run her fingers all over his body, thereby indulging in

fond memories of her father who had been a tea trader in India

for twenty years and had never tired of praising the “ lovely

country” . Thus the story manages playfully to activate

several colonial and postcolonial clichés, but also mediates a

very positive image of colourful Indianness when the numerous

aunties in their interaction remind young Ali of a French

painting (p. 256).

The novella Goodbye, Mother is a completely different affair.

Race and cultural difference do not play a role at all. It is a

critical stocktaking of contemporary middle-class life with the

dreary division of labour between the sexes, with the women who

do not have a job carrying the madness for the men (p. 175).

What holds the narrative together structurally is a middle-aged

son, TV journalist, economically successful, two kids, a house

in the country, who is constantly on edge in the attempt to

drive his very difficult mother to visit his father´s grave.

Intertwined with this present frame are all sorts of

reminiscences and reflections, delivered in a very convincing

free indirect style. They range from the advice of a friend

well-placed in business, who has already had his heart-attack,

to his father as a patient in Harley Street after retiring

from his furniture shop who was simply given pills to treat his

feelings of depression.

What is examined is the modern yearning after happiness,

communication problems with the

journalist´s 14-year old daughter, the relation to his wife who

rejects the routine of organised daily labour and wants to

become a therapist.

What makes the man tick is his desperate attempt to hold on to

reality and rationality, Enlightenment, Richard Dawkins an´all

(p. 185). Very conspicuous metaphors also provide an

additional weft and warp in the texture of the story, like “

Harry´s face looked as though it had been dug up with a trowel”

(168). More important with regard to my main argument is the

fact the text explicitly puts itself in the mainstream

tradition with a reference to Sons and Lovers on the one hand and

to The Piano on the other. The story culminates in the

journalist´s eventually successful attempt to disentangle

himself from his mother´s “ wise view” (p. 190)

Happiness was impossible, undesirable even, an unnecessary distraction

from the hard, long, serious business of unhappiness.Mother would not be

separated from the sorrow which covered her like a shroud.

In The Body there are again explicit references to Frankenstein,

to Dorian Gray, and to The Seventh Seal, with a distinct overall

dystopian effect. With the mention of Euripides, Goethe and

above all Nietzsche (p. 97), we encounter the endeavour to “

create a new class, an elite,

a superclass of superbodies” in the design to outwit death and

reach for some kind of immortality. The core of the narrative

is the offer to abandon one´s old and ailing body and

acquire a new one like a new suit in an intricate operation.

The successful writer Adam accepts the six-months trial period

of the “ short term body rental” (p. 21). Inspired by a whiff

of Australian culture, he tells his family that he intends to

go walkabout for half a year.

The writer is in his mid-sixties and presumably white and the

body he selects, so-to-speak

off the peg, has a brownish tinge, comes from LA and is in his

thirties. What the text seeks to explore is the

interdependence of a body and a brain which have distinctly

different backgrounds and histories. Obviously the story

unravels a variation on the theme of identity

construction, in particular in view of the fact that the new

body also has a history of its own which was not completely

shed in its premature demise. Adam manages to adjust to the

intricacies of an existence as a Newbody. He travels a lot; he

visits all the European cities where he could not go when he

was young and ends up in a community of mainly English middle-

class women on a Greek island with a middle-aged woman as a

leader and a guru.

He makes himself useful as the odd-job man in order to eke out

an existence which does not

cost too much in order to stretch his dwindling financial

means. He befriends a young would-be female poet and ends up

being used as a sex object by the leader of the women´s

community in what he sees as feminism-inspired reverse sexism.

Things accelerate when

he runs eventually into other Newbodies. A young playboy who

had invited the entire community onto his yacht turns out to

be in reality an octogenarian who has been living for three

years already in the bought hide of a young man under thirty.

This man turns violent and when Adam refuses to sell his new

body on the spot for the sake of saving the terminally ill

brother of the boat owner, he manages to make a narrow escape.

With the help of the budding poetess he escapes to London,

where he wants to get his old body back. Unfortunately the

playboy´s henchmen are already waiting for him at the

clandestine clinic. With a bit of luck he hits on the idea to

pour petrol over him and with a lighter in his hand manages to

ward off the attack. Given this constellation, however, his

chances of getting out of his present skin

and back into his old one are very dim indeed. When he talks

to his wife, without being recognised , of course, the sad and

dismal story comes full circle. The likelihood looms large

that he will not be able to return to his former body and

existence for a considerable time. On the contrary, in all

probability, he will continue to be on the run for what looks

like a very long and dreary period.

To conclude: let me point out that, in October 2000, the

notorious Roger Scruton felt obliged to publish, in book form,

an elegy on England , England: an Elegy , and in an article

sought to exhort the English to reclaim England , “ The

English must reclaim England”, New Statesman (2 Oct. 2000), 25—

27. There the Burkean traditionalist (Mike Hume from the LM)

bewailed the radical disenfranchising of the English (the Scots

govern) and the end of the characteristic attachment to the

countryside. With a direct bearing on our topic, he complained

that there were black or Bangladeshi Britons, but not black or

Bangladeshi English. In other words the English have lost their

identity:

The English were, for centuries, self-confident enough to need no

definition; they knew who they were, but not what they were. Losing

their confidence, they now look aroundin vain for their identity: are we a nation, a territory, a language, a culture, an empire or just an idea? All answers seem inadequate or wrong. (p.25)

However, already a year earlier Maya Jaggi had claimed that

Black Britons had a right to see their heritage justly

represented and that they should cast off the shackles of

history. Quoting

a public statement by Stuart Hall, she called for a “ radical

transformation of social memory”

to reflect “ the black British presence and the explosion of

cultural diversity and difference which is everywhere our lived

daily reality.” The Guardian Weekly, 18—24 Nov. (1999), 24.

Jaggi was concerned with other sides of the story which were

beginning to demand their place in museums and art

institutions. Today, Farah Damji, the editor of Indobrit , a

new quarterly magazine for British Asians, can claim: “ we

came, we stayed, we conquered.” Gone are the days of the

corner shop wallah, she underscores, the fashion and creative

industries are bursting with Indobrit talent. I hope to have

been able to demonstrate that this is no vain claim and that it

is also valid in the field of literature.

Select Bibliography STUMMER 10/2003Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, “ Bring England in from the cold”, New Statesman ( 11July 1997), 24-26. - Who Do We Think We Are? Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001.Baker, Houston A.Jr et al (eds), Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.Cashmore, Ellis & Barry Troyna, Introduction to Race Relations. London: The FatherPress, 1990.Cathcart, Brian, The Case of Stephan Lawrence. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. Chadha, Gurinder, “ Eastisus- Britain may not have a Denzel Washington- but it does have multicultural audiences”, The Guardian, (11 April 2002), 9. [re: release of Bend It Like Beckham]Dabydeen, David & N. Wilson-Tagoe, A Reader´s Guide to Westindian and BlackBritish Literature . 2nd ed. revised [1988], London: Hanslib Publications, 1997.Donnell, Alison, Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture London and New York: Routledge, 2002.D´Aguiar, Fred, “ Against Black British Culture” , Tibisiri, ed. Maggie Butcher,

Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989; pp. 106-114.

Doy, Gen (ed.), Black Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.Edwards, Paul & David Dabydeen (eds), Black Writers in Britain 1760-1890. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. [1991]Fryer, Peter Staying Power. The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1984.Hinsliff, Gaby & Martin Bright, “ Black youth culture blamed as pupils fail”, The Observer (20 August, 2000)Hiro, Dilip, Black British, White British, A History of Race Relations in Britain. London:Paladin, 1992. [1971]Innes, C.L., A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain 1700-2000. Cambridge: CUP, 2002. Jacques, Martin, “ The global hierarchy of race”, The Guardian, (20 September, 2003), 17.

Jaggi, Maya, “ The new Brits on the block”, The Guardian, ( 13 July 1996),31. Low, Gail, “ The Challenge of `Black British´, The European English Messenger,XI/2 (2002), 17-21.Luyken, Reiner, „ Gut gemixt und doch getrennt“ , Die Zeit, ( 10. August, 2001), 9.Meraz, Cesar & Sharon, Black British Literature: Bibliography. [authors: 1974 - 2000]

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/ ~bump/E388M2/students/meraz/biblio.html (01 July 2003).Mercer, Kobena, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies London: Routledge, 1994.Newland, Courttia & Kadija George Sessay (eds), IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain. London: Hamish Hamilton,2000.Nowak, N. “ Black British Literature – Unity or Diversity?”, Unity in Diversity Revisited?

ed. Barbara Korte & Klaus Peter Müller, Tübingen: Narr, 1998. Owusu, Kwesi (ed.), Storms of the Heart: An Anthology of Black Arts and Culture. London: Camden Press,

1988.

- Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader . London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Paxman, Jeremy, “ The Rediscovery of Englishness”, Anglistentag 2001 Wien Proceedings, ed. Dieter

Kastovsky et al. , Trier: WVT, 2002; pp. 273-281.

Phillips, Mike, Windrush: the irresistible rise of multiracial Britain. 1998.Phillips, Mike, London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain. London and New York: Continuum, 2001. Proctor, James (ed.), Writing Black Britain. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.Ramdin, Ron Reimagining Britain. 500 Years of Black and Asian History. London: Pluto Press, 1999. Rifkind, Malcolm, “ British Champion”, Prospect, (January, 2000), 26-29.Rosenberg, Ingrid von, “ Young, British, Black. An overview of recent Black British Fiction with special reference to the search for identity and genderrelations”, From Empire to Multicultural Society, ed. Ulrike Bergmann, Trier: WVT, 1999. Scruton, Roger, “ The English must reclaim England”, New Statesman, (2 October, 2000), . Stein, Mark, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004. Stummer, Peter, “ Die Rassenfrage im zeitgenössischen England”, anglistik & englishunterricht,

Race and Literature, 16 (1982), 9-30.

STUMMER Names being dropped in order of appearance (December 12, 2003)

Linton Kwesi Johnson Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems (2002)

Andrew SalkeyWilliam Boyd A Good Man in Africa (1981)Caryl Phillips Cambridge (1991)Timothy Mo Brownout on Breadfruit

Boulevard (1995)David SheppardYvonne BrewsterTrevor Rhone

WASAFIRIMaya JaggiOlaudah EquianoIgnatius SanchoJackie Kay Trumpet (1998)Bernadine Evaristo Lara (1999)Buchi Emecheta Second-Class Citizen

(1974)Debjani ChatterjeeGrace Nichols Whole of a Morning Sky

(1986)Amryl Johnson Long Road to Nowhere .

poems (1985) Darcus Howe, Adam Afriyie, Paul Boateng, Bernie

Grant, Baroness AmosBenjamin Zephaniah City Psalms (1992)Chris OfiliMartin JcquesYasmin Alibhai BrownJeremy PaxmanRoger ScrutonMike Phillips Blood Rights (1989)Farrukh Dhondy Bombay Duck (1990) Tariq Ali The Clash of Fundamentalisms (2002)Shazia Mirza, Ali GGail LowDilip Hiro Black British, White

British (1973 /1991)Edgar White, The Boot Dance, play (1984)

Mustapha Matura Nice. A Monologue (1973)John AgardJoan Riley The Unbelonging

(1985)Ben Okri In Arcadia (2002) Diran Adebayo Some Kind of Black (1996)Adam Zameenzad The Thirteenth House (1987)Hanif Kureishi My Beautiful Laundrette(1985), The

Buddha of Suburbia (1990) Meera Syal Life isn´t all ha ha hee

hee (1999)David Dabydeen Disappearance (1993)Fred D`Aguiar Dear Future (1996)Pauline Melville Ventriloquist Tale (1997)Wilson Harris The Four Banks of the

River of Space (1990)Margaret Drabble The Millstone (1965)Zadie Smith White Teeth (2000)Farah Damji INDOBRIT

YVONNE BREWSTER

Dr. and OBE

Jaimica- born

- founder of TALAWA Theatre

- came to England in 1956

- attended Drama School ROSE BRUFORD COLLEGE- distinction from ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC

in Drama & Music

- TV shows and drama productions in Jamaica- 1965 founding BARN THEATRE (Kingston) with Trevor Rhone

- 1985 founding Talawa Theatre Company

with funding by GLC

- February 2003 retirement as artistic director

anecdote : when the small company in their beginnings

toured the country with Smile Orange by Trevor Rhone,they place where they played in

Cricklewood wasburnt down, since so many blacks had

come thereto see the play. So the locals got

scared.

TALAWA THEATRE COMPANY

“ Me lickle but me talawa”

= don´t underestimate me, I might be little,

but I am tough & strong

23—25 Great Sutton Street ,London ECIV 0DN 0044- (0)

207251 6644

- established by Yvonne Brewster, Mona Hammond, CarmenMunroe, and Inigo Espejel in 1985.

- Talawa has continuously sought to provide high quality theatre productionswhich reflect the significant role black theatre plays within the United

Kingdom

- Talawa´s founders possessed a vision so clear and so strong

it continues to inform the company´s ongoing development of its artistic policy which distinguishes this small yet stalwart

companyas the new Millennium unfolds.

References to : black culture and British Theatre,

black theatre both nationally and internationally.

Goal : to enlarge theatre audiences from the black community