Queer Muslim diasporas in contemporary literature and film

Alberto Fernández Carbajal

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526128126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores the representation of queer migrant Muslims in international literature and film from the 1980s to the present day. Bringing together a variety of contemporary writers and filmmakers of Muslim heritage engaged in vindicating same-sex desire, the book approaches queer Muslims in the diaspora as figures forced to negotiate their identities according to the expectations of the West and of their migrant Muslim communities. The book examines 3 main themes: the depiction of queer desire across racial and national borders, the negotiation of Islamic femininities and masculinities, and the positioning of the queer Muslim self in time and place. This study will be of interest to scholars, as well as to advanced general readers and postgraduate students, interested in Muslims, queerness, diaspora and postcolonialism. It brings nuance and complexity to an often simplified and controversial topic.

Part I

Queer interethnic desire

1

Of interethnic (dis)connection: queer phenomenology, and cultural and religious commodification in Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)

HANIF KUREISHI (b. 1954) has long been considered one of the most prominent literary figures of postcolonial Britain, particularly due to his intersecting explorations of issues of national identity, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. Kureishi’s work has long drawn attention to the racial and sexual biases of the dominant white British majority. Although Kureishi’s artistic beginnings were linked to the stage, he rose to global prominence in 1985 with his Oscar-nominated script for My Beautiful Laundrette, a financially modest film directed by the British director Stephen Frears. The film’s international box-office success took its own makers by surprise. Set in economically challenged and racially restless London during the peak of the Thatcher era, with a young British Asian man as its main protagonist, the film came out only a few years before the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and all its attendant controversies. These polemical events, now commonly known as the ‘Rushdie Affair’, have constituted the foundational moment of British Muslim identity as a political category.¹ Against such a dire watershed, My Beautiful Laundrette (henceforth Laundrette) appears a more invigorating seminal representation of the subcontinental Muslim diaspora’s fortunes in Britain. The film has gradually achieved iconic status as a galvanising representation of diasporic experience in the UK. Tellingly, Gayatri Gopinath (2005) opens her study Impossible Desires with an analysis of Laundrette, and, more recently, Sadia Abbas (2014) examines Laundrette in the initial chapter of At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament, focusing on Islam’s role in British race relations.

Both these critical texts help to confirm the film’s iconic status as a foundational narrative of South Asian diasporic and queer experience. In turn, Kureishi’s debut novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (henceforth Buddha), written as a response to Rushdie’s prompting that Kureishi write a novel, is often considered a seminal literary text in the representation of the first- and second-generation South Asian diaspora in Britain, although its overall stance on issues of ethnicity, race, and sexuality is more ambivalent than the more violent yet ultimately more life-affirming Laundrette. Buddha is set in London in the 1970s, and like Laundrette, it draws significantly from Kureishi’s own experience of the racial, sexual, and cultural conundrums of the metropolis’ multiethnic inhabitants. The pictures these cinematic and literary texts paint of postcolonial and multicultural Britain contain important cultural nuances that mark Kureishi’s distance from Islam and his characters’ ambivalent orientation towards white British culture through their embrace of youth subcultures. In Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin pose an urgent question:

The crucial question being asked is whether cultural difference can be harmonized and a multicultural society created or sustained, or whether the experiment of respecting and attempting politically to include identity positions with values that may jar with those of the majority is a doomed enterprise. (Morey and Yaqin, 2011, p. 44)

I will argue in this chapter that, on the one hand, Laundrette attempts to answer this question affirmatively, trying to pave the way towards a multicultural understanding of Britain as a nation by pushing against socially enforced ethnic boundaries and through the strategic deployment of queerness; on the other, I suggest Buddha offers less optimistic, albeit similarly open-ended, conclusions about the ability of queer interethnic relationships to challenge cogently the pull of dominant white culture in the age of postmodernity. As I will show, Kureishi’s work pulls between the creation of connection and disconnection across ethnic boundaries through the articulation of queerness, a queerness that, despite its initial subversion of societal mores, cannot seemingly stage a radical enough reconfiguration of Britishness alongside intersecting ethnic and sexual lines.

To begin with Kureishi’s first feature film, Laundrette is self-consciously pitted against a series of big-budget films and TV series released in the 1980s whose chief concern was Britain’s imperial past, which have been dubbed, via Rushdie, a ‘Raj Revival’.² Laundrette was meant as a rebuff to, in Kureishi’s own words, ‘lavish films set in exotic locations’ (2000, p. 5) glorifying British imperialism. However, despite its current recognition as seminal film on diasporas in Britain, it was not sympathetically received by Muslim audiences on either side of the Atlantic upon its release. Gopinath reminds us that the film ‘engendered heated controversy within South Asian communities in the UK’ (2005, p. 2). John Hill also notes it ‘was criticized from within the Asian community both for its representation of homosexuality and […] of Asians as money grabbing’ (1999, p. 212). Additionally, Donald Weber records that ‘Pakistani groups in the U.S. protested outside theaters’ (1997, p. 125). Bart Moore-Gilbert cites the case of Kureishi’s own aunt, who ‘berated Laundrette for its supposedly negative vision of Pakistani immigrants and did so partly through comparing it unfavourably with [Richard Attenborough’s] Gandhi’ (2001, p. 74), which, Weber notes, earned her having one of Kureishi’s lesbian agitators in Frears’ Sammy and Rosie Get Laid named after her. Frears and Kureishi’s film clearly succeeded in tickling the sensibilities of its minority Muslim audiences, whose occasional preference for aesthetically safe and politically conservative ‘heritage’ drama colluded ideologically with the tastes of the dominant white audience which Laundrette fearlessly indicts.

At heart, the problem in Kureishi and Frears’ film is what Ruvani Ranasinha calls, via Kobena Mercer, ‘the burden of representation’: ‘Namely, the assumption that minority artists speak for the entire community from which they come’ (Ranasinha, 2002, 39, emphasis in original). Ranasinha usefully maps two camps in critical responses to Laundrette: on the one hand, the faction featuring Mamood Jamal and Perminder Dhillon-Kashyap, who ‘perceive the role of the minority artist as necessarily didactic, so as to reduce “the imbalance caused by decades of misrepresentation and stereotyping”’; and on the other, Stuart Hall, who defends films such as Laundrette for their refusal to depict a monolithic representation of black experience in Britain which is ‘always and only “positive”’ (Ranasinha, 2002, p. 51). I concur with the idea that Kureishi’s craft transcends the pedagogic role of the minority artist, as it refuses to create any images of British Muslims – or of white Britishers – that are solely vilifying or victimising. As Jago Morrison suggests, Kureishi’s texts ‘are far too playful, irreverent and counter-cultural to fit into any orthodox political agenda’ (2003, p. 179). Instead, Kureishi concentrates more keenly on disorientating his audience by challenging essentialist identitarian constructions of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. Kureishi’s contemporary Kenan Malik asserts that, growing up in Britain in the 1970s, he witnessed how ‘“Paki-bashing” was becoming a national sport’ (2010, p. 4). He argues that this polarisation was superseded in the 1980s, particularly after the ‘Rushdie Affair’, by new forms of collective identity: ‘Radicals lost faith in secular universalism and began talking instead about multiculturalism and group rights’ (Malik, 2010, p. 4). I illustrate here how a pre-Rushdie film such as Laundrette had already started blurring the lines between ethnic communities, strategically utilising queerness as a means of challenging the legacies of the racially turbulent 1970s and of forging interethnic connection in contemporary Britain.

Laundrette continues to aid us in the ‘queering’ of postcolonial London by disorganising mainstream Muslim and non-Muslim ideologies surrounding ethnicity and sexuality in a critique that should be envisaged as intersectional. In the first half of this chapter, I argue, first, that Kureishi’s plot and psychological implausibilities enact a queer form of micropolitical disorientation whose effect is that of challenging the essentialist identity categories dictated by mainstream dominant ideologies. Second, I undertake queer phenomenological readings of scenes in the film that queer the diasporic body by merging it with its surrounding bodies and spaces, drawing attention to their ethnic contours. Meanwhile, I also draw attention to how female sexuality and gender non-conformity also subvert normative gendered spaces. Lastly, I delve into the topic of British interethnic connection by undertaking a queer phenomenological analysis of the film’s closing scenes, where the violence suffered by queer bodies in queer spaces generates connection between different factions of British society, hence blurring the lines segmentalising ethnic communities in the multicultural nation.

To offer a brief summary of the film, Laundrette charts the coming of age of Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a British youth of mixed Pakistani and white British heritage. His father, Hussein (Roshan Seth), is a failed South Asian socialist journalist who has had no success in Britain: both his profession and his marriage, to a now deceased white British woman, fell victim to his inability to come to terms with British racial prejudice. Hussein begs on his phone to his enterprising brother Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey) to employ Omar in his garage for the summer months and to ‘fix him with a nice girl’, since he is not ‘sure if his penis is in full working order’ (Kureishi, 2000, p. 12). From the outset, the film’s exploration of diasporic experience in Britain is attuned to sexual exploration. Omar is informally supervised by his cousin Salim (Derrick Branche), who in due course is found out to lead an affluent life through drug dealing. Not challenged enough by car washing, and inspired by keeping his uncle’s accounts, Omar asks Nasser to allow him to run his dwindling laundrette, called Churchills, a name that playfully alludes to a bygone era in British history. Nasser agrees, partly because he envisages him as the heir to his businesses, through his potential marriage to his daughter Tania (Rita Wolf). While planning his takeover of the laundrette, Omar comes across his old schoolfellow Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), formerly a National Front supporter who, despite his devil-may-care attitude and his ongoing friendship with white supremacists, agrees to help him in his new enterprise. The film constitutes, at heart, an exploration of the burgeoning relationship between Omar and Johnny, who eventually become lovers, and who in so doing contravene, on the one hand, the strictures of Thatcherite Britain, with its discouragement of interethnic relations and homosexuality,³ and, on the other, the diasporic Muslim community’s heteronormative and familial values, both within the context, brimming with irony,⁴ of ruthless Thatcherite entrepreneurship. By challenging ethnic and sexual mores, I suggest the film is hopeful about developing a connection between polarised communities, thus paving the way towards an interethnic assemblage of sociocultural perspectives.

The film refuses from the start to vindicate the position of any single ethnic grouping. Its stance is not too congratulatory of the British Muslim community’s licit or illicit endeavours; nor does it completely vilify the white British contingent, with Johnny offering an antidote to the sway of white supremacism. Laundrette is not self-indulgent regarding the complex sociopolitical and affective positions of its characters, who queer British social relations through an investment in interethnic queer intimacy. Hill argues that ‘in common with postmodern thinking, there is a strong sense of the constructedness and fluidity of social identities, and a rejection of any sense of fixed identities or “essences”’ (1999, p. 207). Perhaps more crucially for our purposes here, Paul Dave suggests that ‘the multiculturalism of My Beautiful Laundrette […] cannot be mistaken for an uncritical liberal pluralism in which social heterogeneity is understood as the unproblematic mixing of distinct and self-coherent identities’ (2006, p. 13). Laundrette can be seen as challenging essentialist constructions of the various social identities (i.e., ethnic, national, class-related, sexual) of multicultural British society and, crucially, the blurring of societally enforced barriers – or the ironic inversion of social expectations – contributes to a disorganisation of mainstream ideologies and the assemblage of seemingly contradictory political perspectives. Kureishi’s script hence relies on disorientating its audience in order to start conciliating different political and ethnic perspectives.

Moore-Gilbert notes that Laundrette contains ‘improbabilities at the level of plot which compromise their effectiveness as examples of critical social realism’, and that the film ‘is predicated on the intrinsically unlikely scenario of a young British-Asian man falling in love with a member of a vicious racist gang (and vice versa)’ (2001, p. 99).⁵ By contrast, Buchanan cites Vincent Canby’s idea that ‘characters behave in a way that has been dictated not by plausibility but [by] the effect it will create’ (Buchanan, 2007, p. ix, emphasis added). Ranasinha concurs with Buchanan, suggesting that ‘while Kureishi’s portrayals are not intended as representative, we need to distinguish this from their political effect’ (2002, p. 49, emphasis added). In light of these debates, I suggest that mimesis is not central to Laundrette’s concerns, and that the most pressing questions when interpreting it should not involve historical accuracy (i.e., whether Muslims routinely had sex with skinheads in the 1980s), but, rather, an appreciation of the film’s ‘queering’ of hermetic sociopolitical positions, and the effect that such a ‘strange’ arrangement of human intimacy has on the audience’s collective consciousness. Kureishi himself observes that ‘[f]‌or immigrants and their families, disorder and strangeness is the condition of their existence’ (2002a, p. 3). In this sense, diaspora is almost always ‘queer’ in the extended meaning of the word; it involves unavoidable strangeness, in this case embodied by Omar and Johnny’s unexpected relationship across ethnic lines, whose queerness becomes a transgressive political strategy. Kureishi and Frears are not aiming at mimesis or even realism here, but at disorientating the film’s majority and minority audiences in a manner that shakes up their political complacency, by forcing them to think about the potential to create a less polarised and more multicultural society that pushes against hermetic ethnic and racial boundaries.

Such a disorientation is central to Sara Ahmed’s model of queer phenomenology, especially regarding the confusion experienced by diasporic bodies and its relation to their surroundings. Ahmed observes that ‘bodies that experience being out of place might need to be orientated, to find a place where they feel comfortable and safe in the world’ (2006, p. 158, emphasis added). POWDERS, the revamped laundrette, is such a place of relative safety, where Omar can forge an affective connection with Johnny, albeit not without political complications. Disorientation and reorientation of the British Muslim subject of diasporic heritage is not self-contained; it does not involve only the individual, but also its attendant bodies and spaces, such as Johnny, POWDERS, and their local London community, the nation by metonymic extension, and even Laundrette’s audience, whose political perceptions are being purposefully disori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: Queering Islam and micropolitical disorientation
• Part I Queer interethnic desire
• Part II Negotiating Islamic gender
• Part III Narrating the self in queer time and place
• Conclusion: Thinking across
• Bibliography
• Index