Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism

Diversity and the Millennial London Novel

Michael Perfect

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137307125
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism analyses novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that explore ethnic and cultural diversity in London. It contributes to key, ongoing debates in literary and cultural studies and, in particular, to debates over the status and relevance of multiculturalism today.

1

Multiculturalism and the Work of Hanif Kureishi

For more than a quarter of a century Hanif Kureishi has been one of the most prominent and most important literary commentators on contemporary London. Indeed, Kureishi’s work has focused almost exclusively on the contemporary moment – to date all of his writing has been set in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century – and almost exclusively on London; the 2013 filmscript Le Week-End, set in Paris, and 2014 novel The Last Word, set in rural Somerset, are Kureishi’s first major works not to be set primarily in London. Moreover, Kureishi’s writing has frequently sought to address the multicultural and multi-ethnic character of the city, and has done so with a great deal of insight; accordingly, Kureishi has rightly been identified as a key voice in debates about multiculturalism. However, critics have often attempted to emphasise his importance for such debates by endowing his work with representational status, and this has led to a failure to recognise the multiplicity of his writing and to engage fully with its complexities. Moreover, while it is fair to say that until very recently Kureishi’s work was obsessed with London, and while Kureishi has often written about the city’s multicultural character, one cannot say that Kureishi’s work is obsessed with multiculturalism; much of his writing has very little indeed to do with questions about ethnic and cultural diversity. As such, criticism of Kureishi has often been at its most confused when it has attempted to account for his entire oeuvre, and there has been much anxiety over the issue of who or what his writing finally ‘represents’.

Focusing primarily on Kureishi’s fiction but with some reference to his work in other forms, this chapter argues that it is not productive to think about Kureishi as a ‘representative’ writer of any sort and theorises a new way of understanding the significance of his work for debates about multiculturalism. It argues that the notion of abandonment – while not necessarily the major theme of Kureishi’s oeuvre – offers a way of thinking about his importance for debates about multiculturalism without taking authorial ethnicity as its starting point and without taking Kureishi to be a ‘representative’ writer.

Reading Kureishi as ‘representative’

During the 1980s Kureishi was widely considered to be a ‘minority writer’ whose plays and films explored and celebrated ‘minority culture’. Although his work enjoyed some mainstream recognition – perhaps most notably, the Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination that 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette received in 1987 – it was perhaps only recognition at all in that Kureishi was recognised as ‘an important minority writer’ or an iconic ‘representative’ of minority culture. While this was always a rather clumsy account of his early work, in 1990 Kureishi published his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, to massive critical acclaim and immediately established himself as a major writer in the contemporary canon. The success of Kureishi’s subsequent work has both cemented his place in the canon and reinforced his status as a crucial figure in debates over ethnic and cultural diversity.

Since 1990 Kureishi has, variously, been read as an ‘ethnic’ writer, as a representative of ‘the British Asian experience’, as a ‘postcolonial’ writer and as a ‘postethnic’ writer. In his essay ‘Pop Goes the Centre: Hanif Kureishi’s London’, Sukhdev Sandhu asserts Kureishi’s importance for contemporary discourse by observing that ‘Academics and – more importantly – fellow artists have cited him as the canniest and most entertaining chronicler of the black British experience’ (Sandhu 1999, p. 133). Strictly speaking, of course, Sandhu is correct; they have. However, that Kureishi has been described as a ‘chronicler’ of ‘the black British experience’ – which, tellingly, is here spoken of in the singular – reflects a widespread tendency to take the fact that he is a member of an ethnic minority as sufficient grounds on which to consider him a representative of the experiences of members of ethnic minorities in general. Interestingly, when Kureishi has written about issues other than ethnicity – most notably, in the late 1990s, his work shifted its primary focus to the issue of gender – critics have often sought to maintain the notion of his being representative by describing his work as having come to represent post-feminist masculinity rather than postcolonial ethnicity. Kenan Malik said of Intimacy (1998), for example, that ‘[the novel] speaks to, and for, a lost generation of men: those shaped by the Sixties, disorientated by the Eighties and bereft of a personal and political map in the Nineties’ (Malik 1998, np). Upon the publication of Something to Tell You (2008), Kureishi’s first novel in a decade, critics were quick to declare that it marked a ‘return to the territory of his first and still best-loved novel, The Buddha of Suburbia’ (Mars-Jones 2008, np). Something to Tell You does, indeed, explore ethnic and cultural diversity in a much more explicit way than anything Kureishi wrote in the decade that preceded it, and his most recent novel The Last Word (2014) – while not a novel about London – is a work which takes not just a migrant but a ‘postcolonial writer’ as one of its major characters (one that seems to have been loosely based on V. S. Naipaul; indeed, in the London Evening Standard, David Sexton went as far as to state that Kureishi’s Mamoon Azam is ‘unambiguously modelled on Sir Vidia Naipaul’ (Sexton 2014, np)). While a great deal of Kureishi’s recent writing in other forms – such as, for instance, filmscripts The Mother (2003), Venus (2007) and Le Week-End (2013) – has had very little to do with or say about multiculturalism, Kureishi is still known predominantly for his fiction and there is perhaps a danger of his two most recent novels being taken as confirmation of his status as, ultimately, a representative ‘ethnic’ writer.

The label most commonly attributed to Kureishi has been that of ‘postcolonial’. The year 1998 saw the publication of the first critical overview of Hanif Kureishi’s work, Kenneth Kaleta’s Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller. Convincingly enough, Kaleta argues that, having produced plays, filmscripts, novels and short stories, Kureishi is best considered a ‘storyteller’ rather than, for example, a novelist or playwright. Crucially, however, he offers no justification for ‘postcolonial’, and the term does not even appear in the volume’s index. The assumption made throughout is that literary explorations of ethnic and cultural diversity in Britain are best considered ‘postcolonial’ and, indeed, that this is so obvious as to not require any critical qualification whatsoever. While I certainly do not want to suggest that Kureishi’s work cannot usefully be read within postcolonial interpretive frames, I do want to contend that critics have often been too quick to assume that Kureishi is best considered ‘postcolonial’.

Critics have often attempted to strengthen the case for Kureishi as a postcolonial writer by comparing him to Salman Rushdie. That Kureishi’s second novel, The Black Album (1995), explores events surrounding the fatwa pronounced on Rushdie in 1989 following the publication of The Satanic Verses the previous year has been repeatedly used by critics to forge connections between the two writers. However, while there is certainly some worth in comparing the work of the two, the comparison has often been a rather forced one. Bart Moore-Gilbert, for example, observes that the work of both writers alludes to Rudyard Kipling, and suggests that this is an ‘area in which Rushdie’s influence on Kureishi can be detected’ (Moore-Gilbert 2001, p. 127). The assumption made here is an odd one; it seems much more likely that the two have both been influenced by and have engaged with Kipling, not that Kureishi’s interest in Kipling is symptomatic of his being first influenced by Rushdie. The implication is that Kureishi is imitative to the point of actually taking up Rushdie’s literary influences, and that Rushdie has been a formative, primary influence on him.

Critical comparisons between Kureishi and Rushdie have often led critics to attempt to account for the general absence of postmodernist or magical realist aesthetics in the former’s work. For example, worried by the realist narrative mode employed in The Black Album, Maria Degabriele tries to reinvest the novel with a sense of formal subversiveness by suggesting that it is a ‘parody’ of The Satanic Verses, and although she rightly observes that both novels offer parodic accounts of the transcription of divine instruction into religious text,¹ she gives no justification for considering Kureishi’s novel as a full-scale parody of Rushdie’s (Degabriele 1999). Also comparing the two novels, Frederick M. Holmes goes to great lengths to account for what he sees as the puzzlingly traditional realist narrative frame which The Black Album employs, finally suggesting that Kureishi’s ‘frustrated desire for solidity and significant purpose […] led him to seek a compensatory stability in the aesthetic realm. Such a hypothesis would account for the conservative, rather old fashioned novelistic form of The Black Album’ (Holmes 2001, p. 302). Notably, both Holmes and Degabriele make a comparison between Rushdie’s Saladin Chamcha and Kureishi’s Shahid Hasan, but it is one which is, again, strained, even false. Holmes mistakenly calls British-born Shahid a ‘migrant’ (p. 296) and an ‘immigrant’ (p. 298), and while we might consider him a migrant from the suburbs to the city, he is certainly not, as Holmes suggests, a South Asian (im)migrant to Britain. Here, the attempt to locate The Black Album within a postcolonial interpretive frame affords the critical conflation of characters whose cultural heritage is very different indeed under the category ‘postcolonial subject’. The key point here is that critical eagerness both to liken Kureishi to Rushdie and to read him as a postcolonial writer has often led to critical confusion over his work.

Shortly after the publication of Something to Tell You, Nicholas Spice complained in The London Review of Books that Kureishi had made Jamal Khan, its psychoanalyst narrator, his ‘surrogate’, ‘giving him the right to create the other characters and dispose the events of the plot’; Spice goes on to argue that the ‘absence of any ironic distance between the novel and Jamal turns Something to Tell You into Jamal’s dream, as though, were he a novelist in our real world, this is the novel he would write’ (Spice 2008, pp. 21–2). As has occurred frequently in critical responses to Kureishi’s work, here Spice takes issue with a lack of ‘ironic distance’. As Ruvani Ranasinha has shown, Kureishi’s work is characterised precisely by its ironic distance (Ranasinha 2002), and in fact there are numerous occasions on which such distance is discernible in Something to Tell You. For example, Jamal is often dismissive of other people’s ideas of what his job involves; when people presume to know anything about what he does he is quick to correct them with a glib, rather self-important riposte. He repeatedly refers to himself as an analyst and is often dismissive of other ‘word doctors’ such as psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors and therapists; when one person presumes that he is a therapist he immediately replies ‘The difference between therapy and analysis is that in therapy the therapist thinks he knows what is good for you. In analysis you discover that for yourself’ (STTY, p. 146). Just 12 pages after this, however, upon meeting someone for the first time Jamal tells them ‘I’m a therapist’ (p. 158). Given that Kureishi goes to such lengths to show the cool assurance with which Jamal speaks about what he does for a living, it seems unlikely that this inconsistency is an authorial error; moreover, the fact that it occurs over the course of just 12 pages suggests that Kureishi is actively drawing attention to it. For all Jamal’s conceited posturing about his livelihood, Kureishi seems to suggest, he can often clumsily slip into endorsing the very things that he claims to be dismissive of. Indeed, the implication seems to be that – while he would never admit it – Jamal arrogantly assumes that he knows what is good for others. As is common in his work, Kureishi here undermines his narrator but does so fairly subtly. Critics have perhaps been too quick to read Kureishi’s work as somehow oddly lacking an aesthetics of destabilisation.

That Kureishi’s work does not generally tend to go about obviously destabilising its own representations by deploying glaring metatextuality or magical realist aesthetics has meant that critics have tended to read it as presuming to be representative. Kureishi has often been attacked for his pretensions or his failings as a representative of some form by critics, the British media and by those who know him. His mother, for example, took issue with the portrayal of Karim Amir’s adolescence in working-class London suburbs in The Buddha of Suburbia, protesting that Hanif had made his family ‘sound like the dregs of society because it suits his image and his career. I suppose it’s trendy nowadays for an author to pretend they had a working-class background, but Hanif had everything he wanted as a child’ (quoted in Brown 2008, np). Upon the publication of Intimacy in 1998, Kureishi’s ex-partner (and ex-publisher at Faber and Faber), Tracy Scoffield, complained that the book was a wholly unfictionalised account of the end of their marriage, and that he was trying to ‘pass it off’ as a novel. ‘He says it’s a novel,’ she was quoted as saying, ‘but that’s an absolute abdication of responsibility – you may as well call it a wet fish’ (quoted in Mack 1999, np). Interestingly, it is not clear whether ‘absolute abdication of responsibility’ refers here to Kureishi’s responsibilities to his ex-partner, to his readers or to the novel form itself, in which case the implication is that it is a writer’s artistic responsibility not to represent his own experience in a direct, accurate manner. While these two objections are of an opposing nature – with the latter, Kureishi stands accused of being too autobiographical; with the former, of not being autobiographical enough – each takes issue specifically with the ‘irresponsibility’ of his representations of his own experience, and indeed assumes that he either is or should be representing that experience. Although both complaints emerged from Kureishi’s immediate familial circles and are themselves of anecdotal rather than critical value, each was given sympathetic coverage in broadsheet British newspapers and has been referred to by literary critics, who seem to have much enjoyed the idea of Kureishi being ‘exposed’ as a literary impostor by those closest to him. Intimacy also drew objections from Kureishi’s sister who, one reviewer reported, ‘refuted certain of Intimacy’s familial facts, accusing Kureishi of fictionalising their family into a stereotype of alterity easily digested by the masses’ (Aldama 1999, p. 1097).² The differences between Kureishi’s family and Jay’s family are here taken – by a literary reviewer as well as by a member of Kureishi’s family – as being symptomatic of Kureishi’s misrepresentation of ‘fact’ rather than indicative of the novel’s status as a fictional work. Of the relative successes of Kureishi’s first two films, Tim Bevan said ‘the best films of this sort always come out of some form of autobiographical honesty […]. I think there’s truth from Hanif’s life in [My Beautiful] Laundrette. There wasn’t that truth in Sammy and Rosie [Get Laid], and the audience felt that’ (quoted in Kaleta 1998, p. 57). What Bevan means by ‘films of this sort’ is ambiguous, but it seems that Kureishi’s work has again been labelled as somehow ‘ethnic’ and its artistic shortcomings attributed to its failure to ‘represent’ accurately enough Kureishi’s own experiences.

It has repeatedly been implied that Kureishi’s work is somehow representationally deceptive, and the critical assumption which underlies such a complaint is that Kureishi is, or at least should be, a writer of representational status; that his experience either has a particular, sociohistorical significance – namely, that it warrants narrative representation and that this is (or, again, at least should be) the specific value of his work – or that his experience is not as significant as his work attempts to suggest. The former has led to Kureishi being criticised for failing to adequately represent – or, perhaps more accurately, for failing to take up the task of representing – the experiences of marginalised ethnic peoples; the latter to his being condemned as a self-exoticising performer of cultural alterity.

The comparison between Kureishi and Rushdie is useful here for the distinctions that it allows to be made between the two. Contemporary criticism has questioned the appropriateness of considering ‘cosmopolitan’ writers such as Rushdie as representatives of third-world nations, and has done so with much justification. The status of cross-cultural commentator which Rushdie has, for more than three decades, aspired towards (and has, largely, been successful in achieving for himself) is vulnerable to critique because of his pretensions to represent, in terms of both standing for (performatively) and speaking for (politically), India and Indianness whilst enjoying a Western, metropolitan lifestyle and writing exclusively in a language that is not spoken by the vast majority of Indian people. While it is clearly of major cultural, political and formal significance, Rushdie’s work can be difficult to defend against accusations of self-exoticisation and often ‘performs’ Indianness for a Western literary mainstream (see Huggan 2001 and Wachinger 2003). Kureishi’s work, it might be said, tends to shy away from the kind of representational status which Rushdie’s has tended to court.

A close reading of short story ‘With Your Tongue Down My Throat’, published in the 1997 collection Love in a Blue Time (but written earlier), serves to illustrate the ways in which Kureishi’s work has tended to shy away from, rather than court, representative status. In a sense, ‘With Your Tongue Down My Throat’ might be considered one of the most ‘postcolonial’ pieces of work that Kureishi has ever produced. Set in both London and – at least, seemingly – in Pakistan, it is one of very few of his works that has any of its events take place in ‘the East’ (as above, prior to the 2013 filmscript Le Week-End and 2014 novel The Last Word, Kureishi had rarely written about anywhere other than London). Moreover, ‘With Your Tongue Down My Throat’ employs an uncharacteristic narrative trickery: it is revealed in the final stages of the story that the first-person narrator is not in fact British Asian adolescent Nina but, rather, white British, middle-aged writer Howard. The story’s narrative voice is shown to have been an entirely invented fiction; even Nina’s enjoyment of feeling exotically ethnic when wearing ‘Paki gear’ (LBT, p. 69) in Lond...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Multiculturalism and the Work of Hanif Kureishi
• 2 'Fold the paper and pass it on': Andrea Levy's London Fiction
• 3 Multicultural London in Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000): A Celebration of Unpredictability and Uncertainty?
• 4 Permanence and Transience: Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003) and In the Kitchen (2009)
• 5 Mis-marketing Multiculturalism? Gautam Malkani's Londonstani (2006)
• 6 London as a Safe Haven? Asylum, Immigration and Missing Fingers in Chris Cleave's The Other Hand (2008) and Brian Chikwava's Harare North (2009)
• 7 London as a 'Brutal', 'Hutious' City: Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English (2011)
• Coda: The Prophet's Graveyard
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index