Multicultural Personae

Chapter 5 Multicultural Personae In the postcolonial era, the question of identity and national affiliation be- comes complex and indeterminate. This is nowhere more apparent than in a post-war Britain facing the challenges of the end of Empire and the process of national redefinition it brings with it, both in terms of international status and demographic composition. The novel has proved to be a fruitful site for investigating the hybridized cultural forms that might be produced in an evolving, and so genuinely, multicultural Britain. This is not, however, a simple story of celebration. The migrant identities that are fictionalized in post-war writing are often embattled and vulnera- ble. This is sometimes due to the transitional nature of twentieth-century postcolonial expression, where postcolonial identity is properly conceived as process rather than arrival; 1 but the evocation of vulnerability has just as fre- quently to do with the inhospitable nature of British, and especially English society, often portrayed as unsympathetic to the goals of a living, interactive multiculturalism. Kazuo Ishiguro’s third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), is a devas- tating portrait of repressed Englishness and an exploration of those national characteristics that must be expunged before an authentic post-nationalism can emerge. Even though the novel’s present is 1956, and its key action occurs retrospectively in the 1920s and 1930s, Ishiguro is still concerned with perceived aspects of Englishness that retain an ideological force at the time of writing. Ishiguro’s own position, as someone born in Japan but brought up in Britain, gives him an intriguing ‘semi-detached’ or dual perspective. The first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), with their Japanese protagonists, utilize a reserve with its roots in conventions of Japanese politeness. 2 This preoccupation is developed in the style of Stevens, the ageing English butler who narrates The Remains of the Day; this reveals a parallel between two kinds of reticence, and implies some kind of broader global observation. The present of the novel, July 1956, is also the time of the Suez crisis, a disastrous episode of late imperial assertion that effectively marked the end of British imperial power. Although 156 Multicultural Personae 157 no reference is made to Suez, the mood of anachronistic self-importance that history attaches to it hovers over the novel. Stevens is butler to the American Farraday, who has taken over Darlington Hall. Wealth and power have passed from English hands, and the traditions that prevailed in the time of Lord Darlington (now deceased) are consigned to the past: Farraday wants a theme-park simulacrum of a stately home, run with a skeleton staff, but complete with ‘a genuine old-fashioned English butler’(p. 124). Stevens’s true allegiance, however, is to the era of Lord Darlington (who had played a key role in the appeasement of Hitler), and the almost feudal pre-war class structure it represents. Stevens’s existence is dominated by the idea of what makes a ‘great’ butler, and he is centrally concerned with the ‘dignity’ that attaches to the office of a true professional in service. The idea of ‘greatness’ is pointedly related to the ‘Great’ in Great Britain, exemplified for Stevens in the undemonstrative rural English landscape ( p. 28); but this restrained ‘greatness’ is actually code for repression or concealment. To illustrate the qualities of a great butler, Stevens cites his father’s favourite anecdote of a butler in colonial India who discovers a tiger beneath the dining table. This butler then discreetly asks permission of his master, who is entertaining guests, for ‘the twelve-bores to be used’. The employer and his guests hear gunshots, and when the butler reappears with fresh tea for them he reports that there will be no disruption to the dinner schedule, and that ‘there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time’ (p. 36). The colonized other, symbol- ized by the tiger in the dining room, becomes almost unmentionable, a real threat to the colonial order that asserts itself through the pretence of being unruffled. In this sense, the professional ‘dignity’ of the butler is an exten- sion of the colonial system that conceals the repressiveness of its procedures beneath a veneer of order and decorum. The need to let off twelve-bores in the dining room neatly figures the violence that underpins this ‘civilized’ order. Stevens recounts the episode in which he is given his own chance to emulate such ‘greatness’: this is the scene of the conference in 1923 at which Lord Darlington seeks to effect ‘a relaxing of various aspects of the Versailles treaty’ (1919) in his anxiety to promote accord with Germany. During this event, Stevens’s elderly father (now an under-butler at the Hall) dies. Stevens defers going upstairs to see his father’s corpse, preferring dutifully to continue serving the distinguished guests, despite his manifest emotional stress (pp. 105–6). For Stevens, the memory of the episode is triumphant, evidence of his possessing ‘in some modest degree’ the dignity associated with the great butlers (p. 110). This transformation of subjection into a spurious personal triumph indicates a complex thraldom that is emotional, 158 The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 ideological, and political; the condition has been thoroughly internalized, making him the ideal conduit for a ruling-class agenda. If reticence, in one form, is a method of repression and concealment, in another form it is the adopted humility that allows exploitation to flourish. If Stevens’s own taciturnity signals the degree to which he has embraced his master’s ideology, and is the marker of his emotional retardation, it is also the characteristic that makes him sympathetic. It is in this sense that the novel’s own undemonstrative style (presented as Stevens’s narrative) can be defended. Within this subtly ambivalent style there is a utopian impulse, stemming from such features as Stevens’s involvement of the reader in his situation of disempowerment (p. 199) (which inspires dissent), and from Ishiguro’s overlaying of different cultural codes of ‘politeness’ ( Japanese and English). He is hinting at a post-imperial, post-industrial world in which the individual must manoeuvre with ingenuity to retain ownership of those cultural codes that are subject to ‘incorporation’ in the world of multina- tional enterprise. This is the contemporary resonance of his observation that an older ideology of ‘Englishness’ served the purposes of Empire very well. 3 Jewish-British Writing The themes and concerns of Jewish-British writing illustrate the problems of identity that are created where the means of cultural renewal are hard to establish. The neglect of Jewish writers, who are sometimes ‘thought not to exist in Britain’, indicates a cultural (as well as a social) process of marginalization, and produces an oppositional stance in the articulation of the Jewish-British experience, a felt need ‘to write against the dominance of an oppressive Englishness’. 4 The antagonism and non-recognition that Bryan Cheyette is here identifying is responsible for the split stance in much Jewish-British writing, the feeling of ‘simultaneously belonging and not belonging’, that can prove to be disabling. One manifestation of this im- prisoning schizophrenia, for Cheyette, is a ‘culture of apology’ in which the essential attributes of Jewishness are diluted, made to conform to the dominant norms of respectability. 5 A more complex instance of this tendency is the combination of social aspirations with the conflicting adherence to traditional Jewish values based on the family. Bernice Rubens’s The Elected Member (1969) is a notable in- vestigation of the way in which traditional Jewish family values are distorted when the family also exhibits a simple desire for material advancement (the worst kind of ‘integration’). Norman Zweck is the victim of this clash of val- ues, a child prodigy whose development is manipulated and curtailed by the controlling love of his family. It is significant that the infant Zweck is found Multicultural Personae 159 to be an accomplished linguist, and becomes fluent in a variety of languages by the age of twelve. This capacity for the growth of cultural fusion is sym- bolically arrested by Zweck’s mother who, from misplaced pride, pretends he is younger than he is to make his achievements seem more impressive (p. 89). Once a brilliant lawyer, Norman Zweck has become insane, prey to drug addiction and hallucination. His decline is due principally to the family’s repressive relations, which result in Zweck’s incestuous relationship with one of his sisters, the suppression of his own confused sexual iden- tity, and his catastrophic infantilization. Rubens borrows from Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ to order her familial theme: the novel starts with Zweck incarcerated in his bedroom, tormented by his fears of crawling silverfish, and ends with the confirmation of his ejection as the family closes ranks. Zweck’s institutionalization marks him as the family’s elected scapegoat, a status he initially resists, but finally comes to embrace (pp. 63, 221). The death of the father Rabbi Zweck, however, implies a loosening of the re- pressive first-generation values that have imprisoned Zweck and his sisters, and for which Zweck is sacrificed. Rubens intends the scapegoat motif to carry its full ritualistic load to connote the expiation of sins, and hope for the future. Such hope is implied in Zweck’s final prayer, which begins in Hebrew, but which ends in a multi-faith gesture, suggesting the need for the adaptation of Jewish identity, a dilution that is not diminution (p. 224). For Jewish writers the feeling of not belonging is, inevitably, shadowed by a history of persecution that is acutely felt. That history often encourages writers to widen their expressive scope in the treatment of international themes, and to experiment with fictional forms. In Blood Libels (1985) Clive Sinclair transforms a latent English anti-Semitism into a new Nazi pogrom (p. 186); but the revision of history in the novel is itself put into question. Narrator Jake Silkstone disputes the ‘holistic’ approach to history conceived as the ‘synthesis of impersonal forces’ (p. 7), arguing that ‘one’s view of history tends to be egocentric’ (p. 10). In fact, the identification between Silkstone and Jewish ethnicity is pushed to absurd limits, as when his sexual possession of a woman is associated with arrival in Israel (p. 140). He is born in 1945 on the day of inception of the new state of Israel (p. 11), and a motif of bodily inscription, or ‘dermagraphia’, suggests that Silkstone carries the text of history on his person (p. 56). This is the ‘psychosomatic approach to history’ that proceeds without reference to facts, but on the basis of ‘what people believed to have happened’ (p. 188). When, on the final page, Silkstone is revealed to have been adopted, and to possess ‘not a drop of Jewish blood’, his function as personifying Jewish identity is exploded (p. 191). Sinclair thus enacts the sense of rootlessness common in Jewish- British writing, and makes a stark formal point in the process: he pushes the private–public identification – upon which narrative realism thrives – so 160 The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 far that it is revealed as problematic, if not meaningless for this purpose. The vacuum that is exposed has two aspects: first the unavailability of a credible international Jewishness; and, second, the lack of an agreed history for Jewish-British identity. Perhaps the most positive strand in Jewish-British writing is, paradoxi- cally, its leaning towards Europe, in response to the inhospitableness of the immediate cultural scene. This is not simply a question of asserting and in- terpreting a shared oppression after the Holocaust (though it is partly that): the more positive aspect to this European leaning is its shared artistic and intellectual project. If this is an implicit aspect of Rubens’s reworking of Kafka in The Elected Member, it is an explicit thematic component in the work of Elaine Feinstein. Her novel Loving Brecht (1992) recounts the ex- periences of Frieda Bloom, a Jewish cabaret singer in Weimar Berlin, and her lifelong involvement with Brecht. By this means Feinstein establishes a historical frame that subsumes the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. Thus, structurally, the novel ‘contains’ this great historical evil in a narrative that focuses on the ongoing difficulties of creativity in different arenas of political suppression: the Third Reich, Stalinism, and McCarthyism. In seeking to define the achievements of Brecht and his collaborators (with a critical eye alert to the personal failings of this fictionalized Brecht) the novel makes its identification with ‘the literary, cultural and intellectual environment of Europe’ that is its ‘claimed inheritance’. Michael Woolf suggests that this claim, which is typical of ‘much Jewish writing’, is ‘not emulated by the British and, particularly, the English novel’. 6 The (familiar) assertion of the latter’s parochialism may be overstated, but the importance of a European cultural inheritance to Jewish creativity is well observed. Central to Loving Brecht is the diasporic identity that Frieda Bloom ac- quires, and, by the end of the novel, is able to translate into a position of coherent and insightful cultural judgement. Bloom’s life is also a represen- tation of the intellectual quest of the migrant Jewish writer, a quest shared by those writers, like Feinstein, Sinclair, and Rubens, who were born in Britain. After a lifetime of displacement, Bloom finally settles in London, and acquires British citizenship, and it is from this position of relative stabil- ity that she visits Brecht, in post-war Berlin, for the final time. Forgiving the exploitative failings of the man, she concludes ‘it is only what a man does that can be judged’. She further concludes that Brecht, whose poems ‘will stand’, will be judged favourably by history (p. 187). The novel is actually ambivalent about Brecht, but it is this willingness to privilege the centrality of work that is significant: I don’t regret the shape of my own life. My work has brought me joy. I never feel lonely now, and rarely sad. In some ways I have been very fortunate. My house is .close to an area of London where several Multicultural Personae 161 generations of European refugees have made their home. I walk on the Heath with relish in all weathers, and watch the seasons change .and look forward to the visits of grandchildren. (p. 187) This closing passage presents London as ‘home’ in a qualified sense, most particularly because, through its enclaves, it preserves the refugee sensi- bility that is an integral aspect of the European-Jewish identity. Bloom’s distinction between the impersonality of work, and the intimacy of family is a crucial clarification that separates out the dynamism of a shared intel- lectual culture from the life-blood of a managed family tradition. Ethnic continuity is thus a combination of European cultural affiliation, and local non-integration. The Empire Within The problem with ‘integration’ is that it often means ‘assimilation’ within a host culture that is insensitive to cultural diversity, and many novelists have been concerned by this new, internal form of cultural imperialism. Salman Rushdie, in an essay from 1982, alerts us to the ingrained problems of understanding race in Britain, where, following E. P. Thompson, he discovers ‘the last colony of the British Empire’. 7 The problem of this new internal empire is its failure to stop seeking, whether implicitly or explicitly, to colonize or demonize aspects of racial difference. Rushdie is concerned about the failure of Britain to embrace the inevitable fact of its postcolonial future, and sees this as ‘a crisis of the whole culture, of the society’s entire sense of itself ’. The misperception of racial and cultural difference extends to those apparently benign attempts at ‘integration’, which Rushdie sees as code for a nullifying assimilation. It is ‘multiculturalism’ that excites his particular ire, a term too often concealing mere tokenism. 8 The point, here, is that the identification of cultural difference does not necessarily entail the attempt to understand or embrace it: the reverse process of ‘making exotic’ may equally result. What Rushdie’s essay implicitly requires is an approach to ethnic diversity that is situated between a glib multiculturalism and a flat assimilation. He is defining the space of the hybridized culture of the postcolonial migrant, of crucial significance to all inhabitants of the new emerging culture. That term ‘multicultural’ need not be as anodyne as Rushdie suggests, however. A. Robert Lee indicates that ‘hybridizations like “Asian-British”, “Caribbean-British” or “African-British”’, which can be further ‘parti- cularized into, say, Brixton-Jamaican, Cardiff-Bengali, Liverpool-Nigerian’, contain also ‘their own internal dynamics of heterogeneity and .tension’. 9 This cultural space of migrant and post-migrant writing is, necessarily, 162 The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 transitional, an interactive site in which multiculturalism must be redeemed as an active, conflictual process. In the post-war era we have witnessed an ongoing practice of redefining and rewriting the nation from within, and eventually, the emergence of what Homi Bhabha, a propos of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, terms ‘a hybrid national narrative’. 10 For most of the pe- riod, however, writers have had to confront the obstacles to this meaningful hybridity. The prosaic and depressing fact of racism is, of course, the primary inhibit- ing factor to the more dazzling creative flights of multicultural expression. In Pat Barker’s grim Union Street (1982) there is a dispiriting portrayal of racism amongst factory workers that is instructive. A ‘West Indian woman’ called Bertha tolerates in silence continued abuse from her fellow workers (p. 81); she ignores the complaints of the ‘nigger stink’ voiced by one particularly vile white woman Elaine, until one day Bertha’s patience snaps and this repeated taunt from Elaine earns her a vicious beating. The onlookers, who had become uneasy at the extremity of Elaine’s victimization of Bertha, now close ranks: ‘Bertha’s use of her fists, the silent ferocity of her attack, was something quite foreign to their experience. And they hated it. More even than the colour of her skin, it confirmed that she was an outsider amongst them’ (p. 84). The antagonism, and the misrecognition – which permits the demonization of the apparent racial other – is presented as deeply ingrained, raising questions about its source. The failure of connection is perhaps still more troubling when it is less tangible, not underpinned by explicitly racist views. Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) is a tale of this more elusive kind of cultural misrecognition. The factory in question is a London wine-bottling con- cern, owned (and staffed) by Italian immigrants, with the exception of two English women, Freda and Brenda, who disrupt the cultural enclave, with disastrous consequences. Brenda is a focus of erotic attention for the manager Rossi, but it is the brash Freda, with her talk of worker’s rights and her de- signs on the owner’s nephew, trainee manager Vittorio, who emphasizes the cultural clash between a populist English feminism, and a traditional Latin patriarchy. The crisis comes to a head in the factory outing that Freda has planned, a picnic and visit to a stately home that, she hopes, will enable her to get closer to Vittorio. Freda perceives her Italian co-workers to be ‘simple peasants’, though with culture and tradition behind them (p. 11), a stereotypical appraisal matched by the sexually charged enthusiasm of the Italians: excited by the idea of the excursion with ‘the English ladies’, they have duly informed their wives and children that the outing is for the workers only (p. 9). The outing begins in farce, but ends in a tragedy when the amorous Rossi, denied by Brenda, comes upon Freda in a wood, she having failed Multicultural Personae 163 in her best attempts to seduce Vittorio. Overcome by a lustful urge, Rossi causes Freda to fall backwards, in the process breaking her neck as he falls on top of her (p. 175). Much Ortonesque business with the corpse ensues, until the workers decide to smuggle it back to the factory, and conceal it in a barrel of sherry bound for Spain in a consignment of empty barrels – if marked as tainted, Freda’s barrel will be discarded at sea (p. 166). The death jolts the novel from its comfortable comedic mode – the unrequited lovers in the wood evoke A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and forces us into a more systematic reading of ethnicity. The outing finds its way to Windsor Castle, on a day when the Queen is in residence, but the scene of English heritage is complicated by the characters’ consciousness that they are also close to the family home of Mr Paganotti, the factory owner (p. 88). There is a memorable scene in which some soldiers, exercising the Queen’s funeral horses, allow Rossi, Vittorio, and Freda to take a turn on their mounts: Freda fancifully imagines herself at one with Vittorio, cutting a majestic figure (p. 108). This is not, however, tantamount to a national ritual reconfigured in a transcultural form. The English historical myth that resonates, in the plan to dispose of the unfortunate Freda, is that of the Duke of Clarence, executed for treason, reputedly by being drowned in a butt of malmsey. But it is not just English narratives that rebound, or are unproductive. Freda, an agent of the popular feminism of the 1970s, is unattractive to Vittorio because she upsets his expectation of taking the leading role (p. 91). According to the patriarchal story that shapes him, he is, in any case, promised to Rossi’s niece, an impending marriage of com- mercial sense that will consolidate the Italian identity of the business, and so help preserve the isolated Italian community of thirty years’ standing (p. 18). The despairing undertow of Bainbridge’s farce is the clear implica- tion that the popular forces of English social change have a long way to go to advance the cause of ethnic integration. The pervasive misperception about ‘race’ has been compounded in the post-war era by the immigration policies of successive governments, making Rushdie’s concerns well-founded. As he has pointed out, immigration is usually taken to signify black immigration, and is seen as a demographic and political problem, regardless of the fact that there are white immigrants too, or the fact that in any one year the number of emigrants from Britain may exceed those immigrating: ‘immigration is only a problem if you are worried about blacks’, concludes Rushdie. 11 A glance at the post-war legislation on nationality and immigration is instructive in unravelling the sources of popular confusion. The British Nationality Act of 1948 confirmed the right of entry to Britain for the citizens of Empire, who were deemed British subjects; since then, however, there has been a steady attrition of these rights. The post-war ‘open door’ 164 The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 policy was ended by the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, which in- troduced a system of employment vouchers, subject to quota, for Common- wealth immigrants. Further restrictions on East Indian Asians (1968) were followed by the Immigration Act (1971), which limited domicile to those born in Britain, or whose parents or grandparents were of British origin. Perhaps the most significant redefinition of nationality and citizenship was enshrined in the 1981 British Nationality Act, which abolished the auto- matic right to British citizenship for children born in Britain. This Act was designed to restrict the naturalization of immigrants’ children, but in the process it removed from the statute book an ancient birthright. 12 This sketch of the legislation demonstrates a number of things: first, that the post-war acceptance of the subjects of the former Empire – who were in some cases positively encouraged to migrate to the ‘mother’ nation – rapidly evaporated in the light of economic change and political expedi- ency; and, second, the shifting policy shows that identity based on national affiliation is a mutable, political construction. A corollary of the construct- edness of national identity is the kind of public confusion that allows racism to thrive. The Janus-faced response to the citizens of Empir e is the most glaring instance of how policy, however pragmatic in intent, has colluded with public misperceptions of nationality, and has helped to foster a denial of postcolonial obligations and a rejection of the postcolonial heritage. ‘Windrush’ and After: Dislocation Confronted Successive novelists have contributed to an ongoing challenge to this cul- ture of denial, gradually expanding the ways in which fiction might treat of migrant experience and the tensions that attend it. These tensions be- came visible with the arrival of the ‘Windrush generation’ of West Indian immigrants in the late 1940s and 1950s, named after the Empire Windrush which docked at Tilbury in 1948. This is usually taken to denote the begin- ning of multicultural, or, as it is sometimes called, ‘multiracial’ Britain. 13 Black people had lived in Britain for generations, of course, notably in well-established communities in port-towns like Liverpool and Cardiff. But the docking of the Windrush signifies, metonymically, a new generation of Commonwealth migrants recruited to a labour market in need of workers to fill unskilled vacancies. 14 The naive sense of hope that this invitation fos- tered is caught in the response of Harris in George Lamming’s pioneering work, The Emigrants (1954), who espies England from a ship’s porthole and reflects: ‘there was life, life, life’ (p. 106). Immigrants from the West Indies viewed England not merely as a land of opportunity, but also as a kind of home, a mother country whose history, culture, and literature were familiar Multicultural Personae 165 to them from their school textbooks. In close-up, however, things looked very different. The experience of disillusionment is artfully rendered in the technically exuberant fiction of Sam Selvon, who migrated with Lamming to England in 1950. If the arrival in the inhospitable mother country was demoralizing, the literature that evolved out of this experience began to transform ‘English literature’ by appending to it a form of migrant postcolonial expression that rewrites the cultural centre. This is especially true of the London novels of Sam Selvon. Selvon’s fiction encapsulates that imaginative freedom of the novel, its ability to anticipate modes of living that are yet to materialize. In essen- tially realistic fiction, like the Selvon novels considered here, this freedom becomes a question of style, ‘a linguistic as well as a social or political quest for freedom’. 15 In such a quest, the writer must find a provisional way of challenging dominant cultural forms. In this procedure an overwhelming sense of displacement – familial and cultural as well as geographical – must be turned into a positive force, an occasion to redefine the identity that might otherwise be overwhelmed. Selvon’s crucial innovation has to do with the rendering of Trinidadian dialect. In an earlier draft of his novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), the dialectal form was confined to the sections of dialogue, with the linking narrative written in standard English. Selvon’s stylistic accomplishment is to have found a way of making the two interact. Refusing to render dialectal speech forms phonetically (a solution that implies that standard English is the norm) Selvon ensures that the language of narration merges with the language of his characters, and that different stylistic registers do not remain distinct. He embarks, in short, on a creolization of the English novel. 16 An- other key source of inspiration for Selvon is Caribbean folk-tale and calypso. The tradition of Trinidadian calypso supplied much inspiration for Selvon’s narrative method, since its distinctive features, ‘subversive irony .farcical anecdotes, racial stereotyping .and the inclusion of topical political material’ are all staples of Selvon’s method. 17 In The Lonely Londoners Selvon brings these stylistic innovations together in a work that addresses the difficulty of creating a community in a hos- tile social setting. The central character Moses Aloetta becomes a filtering consciousness for the disillusioned life of the West Indian Briton, and the ap- parent impossibility of achieving an equal standing in the economy (p. 129). Formally, however, the seeds of cultural hybridity are sown. The novel’s nar- rator speaks a hybridized form of discourse that combines Trinidadian dialect and standard English (as well as, in its allusiveness, literary English). This re- sults in a kind of vacillating narrative stance, by turns withdrawn from and engaged with the characters’ experiences. The duality of the book applies [...]... Barney Fugleman, embodying all that he is not, but Multicultural Personae 179 representing a culture that has begun to take hold of him, but without admitting him, or bestowing upon him a sense of ownership This kind of attempt to reinterpret English ruralism remains unusual, however, and Naipaul’s post-pastoral focus is quite different to that of most multicultural fiction In a key passage he does indicate... is now located somewhere in the past, the arena in which multicultural life can expand has been removed The Satanic Verses is partly a challenge to this circumscribed nationalism, a challenge issued through the attempt to answer the question: ‘how does newness come into the world?’ (p 8) The social necessity of the question is Multicultural Personae 181 clearly signalled in Rushdie’s concern at the... bullies The more important parallel, however, is the shared sense of duty to the Chinese community The Triad philosophy is based on building power through allegiance (though fear and coercion are Multicultural Personae 171 always present), and in feeling ‘no responsibility to outsiders’ (p 181) The reliance on the family structure to preserve migrant identity is treated with irony in the novel, however,... examination Her civilized home life jars with the harsh environment of village life in Tollington, a former Midlands mining village, where the villagers, feeling their enclosed milieu to be under threat Multicultural Personae 173 from external development, begin to close ranks, precipitating the growth of an overt racism from the seeds of unconscious prejudice In Anita, the prepubescent local bad girl, Meena... for continuing his schooling He has no great aspirations, and may pursue unspecified work at the ‘LeisureLand’ complex (p 191) Surinder, on the other hand, works diligently at her studies, and has Multicultural Personae 175 confidence that she can rely on her parents’ pride to support her ambitions for a professional career, possibly as a history teacher, thus eschewing an early arranged marriage (p 139)... emblematic of the waves of inter-continental migration in the second half of the twentieth century (p 130) But this is not a simple instance of symbolic transition, with the migrant writer ascending Multicultural Personae 177 whilst the English landlord fades away Both characters are intrigued by decay, and both are affected by the dissolution of imperial England For ‘Naipaul’, this is a literary-historical... for committed action in the spirit of the Black Power movement, which developed significantly in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s Indeed, Moses’s desire to write is ridiculed by those characters, Multicultural Personae 167 Galahad and Brenda, who are directly engaged with the movement However, Moses counsels against such a reading: One final word It occurs to me that some black power militants might choose... the damaging impact of European imperialism on traditional Nigerian societies, in the mould of Achebe In the Ditch makes the issue less clear-cut, however Emecheta’s description of the landlord Multicultural Personae 169 practising juju is meant, of course, to emphasize his exploitative nature The episode appears to invite assumptions about Nigerian men, thus encouraging (in particular) ‘western feminists... that they are doubly inscribed ‘as pedagogical objects and performative subjects’ What emerges from this double inscription is not oppositional or confrontational Indeed, it is cast as something Multicultural Personae 183 that is at once more productive and inevitable The process Bhabha describes is one by which the discourse of the minority challenges the ‘powerful master-discourse’, but obliquely,... in order to teach him the lesson, which Smith seems partly to endorse, that ‘either everything is sacred or nothing is’ (p 205) Yet Smith is also anxious to demonstrate how the ugliness that is Multicultural Personae 185 dismissed as ‘fundamentalism’ is produced by an exclusive English ethnicity Millat may not have been able to identify Rushdie if he saw him, but he knew other things He knew that he, . Chapter 5 Multicultural Personae In the postcolonial era, the question of identity and national. effectively marked the end of British imperial power. Although 156 Multicultural Personae 157 no reference is made to Suez, the mood of anachronistic