Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia D
IPARTIMENTO DI STUDI LINGUISTICI E CULTURALIC ORSO DI L AUREA M AGISTRALE IN
L INGUE , C ULTURE , C OMUNICAZIONE
Negotiations of identity in British Muslim women’s fiction Letteratura femminile e identità British Muslim
Prova finale di:
Sara De Matteis
Relatore:
Giovanna Buonanno
Correlatore Marina Bondi
Anno Accademico 2017/2018
ABSTRACT
This work is intended to investigate British Muslim women’s identity by means of five different fictional works: The Red Box (1991) by Farhana Sheikh, Only in London (2001) by Hanan Al-Shaykh, Brick Lane (2003) by Monica Ali, Sweetness in the Belly (2005) by Camilla Gibb and Home Fire (2017) by Kamila Shamsie. All these novels contribute to portraying a honest description of the ongoing Muslim female negotiation of identity in everyday British life, beyond all the caricaturised and stereotypical images of the Muslim we are generally given.
A first reflection is made on the history of the Muslim presence in Britain, which is connected to the more general history of immigration in the country, and that is particularly evident in the aftermath of the Second World War. This history deals with many histories of diaspora and displacement, but particular attention is paid to the difficulties experienced by the Muslim community in terms of acceptance, regulations and general perception. The shift from race to religion with reference to immigration policies and legislations is outlined as pivotal. The Muslim is described in all his/her major features, highlighting with greater care the existing difference between what is cultural and what is religious about Islam and explaining the discrepancies felt by the West when confronted to it.
Secondly, the history of the Muslim presence in British fiction is outlined, underlining all the evolutions that characterised the portrait of the Muslim character, with a focus on the impact of the Rushdie Affair on the presentation of the Muslim image. From the first orientalist accounts of women in particular, we shift to native informants’ renditions, to end with more recent and complex descriptions that offer an image freed from stereotypes, together with depoliticised and de- sensationalised characters. A section is devoted to Muslim women, in the attempt of restoring their real image in what is called “true Islam”, highlighting all the cultural and patriarchal features that affect it.
Afterwards, a section is consecrated to an analysis of literary perspectives, with the aim of clarifying central issues such as transnationalism, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. More importantly, the centrality of Esra Santesso’s concept of disorientation is established, together with a strong critique of the idea of hybridity, especially when referred to religion.
The central section of my work investigates the novels in depth, exploring them through all those elements of negotiation of identity that are available for women in their struggle to reinvent their allegiances and to find their place in a new environment: class, religion, clothes and language.
More generally speaking, a reflection is established on what living within a diasporic community in
England means: in this regard, elements such as community change, belonging and coming back are taken into account. Focusing on women, their condition of being torn between the traditional community and the new environment is particularly emphasised: issues such as sexuality, marriage, children, work, powerlessness and alienation are deeply investigated.
RIASSUNTO
Questo lavoro mira ad indagare l’identità di donne musulmane inglesi attraverso cinque opere letterarie: The Red Box (1991) di Farhana Sheikh, Only in London (2001) di Hanan Al- Shaykh, Brick Lane (2003) di Monica Ali, Sweetness in the Belly (2005) di Camilla Gibb e Home Fire (2017) di Kamila Shamsie. Tutti questi romanzi contribuiscono alla rappresentazione di un ritratto onesto della negoziazione in corso, da parte di donne musulmane, della loro identità nella quotidianità britannica, il tutto rifiutando quelle immagini caricaturali e stereotipate che colpiscono il musulmano in generale.
Una prima riflessione è dedicata alla storia della presenza musulmana in Inghilterra, una storia connessa a quella più generale dell’immigrazione nel paese, particolarmente evidente all’indomani della seconda guerra mondiale. Si tratta di considerare molteplici storie di diaspora e di migrazione, con una particolare attenzione alle difficoltà incontrate dalla comunità musulmana in termini di accettazione, di regolamenti e di percezione generale. Lo slittamento poi da razza a religione, in riferimento alle politiche e alla legislazione in materia di immigrazione, è tratteggiato come cruciale. Il musulmano è descritto in tutte le sue caratteristiche principali, mettendo particolare cura nell’evidenziare la differenza esistente tra ciò che è culturale e ciò che è religioso all’interno dell’Islam, spiegando quelle discrepanze percepite dall’Ovest una volta messo a confronto con esso.
A seguire, si descrive la storia della presenza musulmana nella letteratura inglese, sottolineando le evoluzioni che hanno segnato la rappresentazione del personaggio musulmano, ponendo particolare attenzione all’impatto dell’affare Rushdie nella creazione dell’immagine del musulmano. Dai primi racconti di matrice orientalista, con particolare riferimento alle donne, si passa alle rese dei native informants, per terminare con descrizioni più recenti e complesse che offrono un’immagine completamente liberata dagli stereotipi e che raccontano di personaggi depoliticizzati e de-sensazionalizzati. Una sezione è ovviamente dedicata alle donne musulmane, nel tentativo di ristabilire l’immagine che ne dà il vero Islam, liberandola cioè da quelle componenti culturali e patriarcali che l’avevano condizionata.
In seguito, una sezione è dedicata all’analisi di prospettive letterarie, con lo scopo di chiarire temi centrali come il transnazionalismo, il multiculturalismo e il cosmopolitanismo. E soprattutto, si stabilisce la centralità del concetto di disorientamento espresso da Esra Santesso, insieme alla critica espressa sull’idea di ibridità, specialmente in riferimento alla religione.
La parte centrale del mio lavoro analizza poi i romanzi nel dettaglio, esplorandoli pienamente attraverso quegli elementi, a disposizione delle donne, che permettono di negoziare l’identità, di combattere per reinventare i propri legami di lealtà e per trovare un nuovo posto nel mondo: classe, religione, vestiti e linguaggio. Più in generale, viene operata una riflessione su cosa significhi vivere in una comunità diasporica in Inghilterra: a tal proposito, si prendono in considerazione elementi come i mutamenti interni della comunità stessa, il concetto di appartenenza e il tema del ritorno. Mettendo l’accento sulle donne, si vuole enfatizzare la loro condizione, divisa tra la comunità di origine e il nuovo contesto: si approfondiscono, in particolare, temi come la sessualità, il matrimonio, i figli, il lavoro, il senso di impotenza e di alienazione.
CONTENTS
Introduction ... 1
Structure of the work ... 2
Authors, works, plots ... 3
The Red Box (1991) ... 3
Only in London (2001) ... 4
Brick Lane (2003) ... 5
Sweetness in the Belly (2005) ... 6
Home Fire (2017) ... 7
Muslim presence in British history... 9
Englishness, hybridity and diapora ... 13
Who is the Muslim? ... 16
West versus Islam: clash of civilisation ... 17
Muslim presence in British fiction ... 21
From the Middle Ages to the XIXth century... 21
Rushdie affair ... 23
The Post-Rushdie era ... 25
Women ... 28
Literary perspectives ... 35
Transnationalism, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism ... 35
Dislocation, disorientation and hybridity ... 37
Negotiating identities ... 41
Class and in-fighting ... 41
Race and intergenerational gap ... 48
Religion ... 50
Clothes ... 54
Language ... 62
Living in England ... 67
Community change ... 67
Belonging ... 70
‘Back home’ ... 75
Being a woman ... 77
Powerlessness and alienation ... 80
Conclusion... 84
Bibliography ... 87
Primary Sources ... 87
Secondary Sources ... 87
Websites ... 89
1 Introduction
“Never again will a story be told as though it were the only one”
John Berger
“‘What is this work you’re doing? What’s it about?’ asked Nargis.
A simple question, but whenever Raisa was asked to answer it – especially by those outside the university – she had to pause and think, and re-invent. She tried her best. She said, ‘I want to understand identity. I mean, I’m trying to understand who we are, we – Pakistani girls and women in England.’ […]
‘I want to look at what I think I know. I want to look at what has already been written and spoken about us.’ […]
‘I want to show how the official and well-known descriptions of eastern women, of Pakistani women’s lives, don’t really describe or explain those lives.’ […]
‘Unless we understand who we are, how will we ever change the things that hold us down?’”1.
Raisa, an Anglo-Pakistani woman at the centre of the novel The Red Box by Farhana Sheikh, is holding a series of interviews with two pupils at a large comprehensive school in the East London of the 1980s as a part of her Master’s degree in education. In the extract above, she is trying to explain her work to the mother of one of the interviewees. Raisa’s main goal is to understand and maybe define identity, to subvert stereotypes about eastern women and, as a result, to gain a better understanding of her own mother’s history.
This extract offers some insights into the aim of my work: like Raisa, I, too, would like to investigate British Muslim women’s identity, through published novels, as opposed to recorded interviews, in order to understand how they negotiate their identity in fiction that, in turn, mirrors their ongoing negotiation in everyday life. As Esra Santesso (2013) lucidly points out, my objective
1 Sheikh (1991), pp. 142-155
2
is to move beyond the caricaturised and often stereotypical image of the Muslim in general, in order
“to present a pluralistic and humanizing account of the immigrant experience in Britain”2.
My study focuses on five novels: The Red Box (1991) by Farhana Sheikh, Only in London (2001) by Hanan Al-Shaykh, Brick Lane (2003) by Monica Ali, Sweetness in the Belly (2005) by Camilla Gibb and Home Fire (2017) by Kamila Shamsie. The choice was made according to several criteria: first of all a temporal one, since the five works cover different historical periods, providing a good overview across various decades. We start from the 1980s with The Red Box and Sweetness in the Belly (which also moves back to the 1970s in the parts of the novel set in Ethiopia), then we continue with the 1990s and the turn of the millennium in Brick Lane and Only in London to end up with Home Fire, set in present-day London. Secondly, I chose to consider female writers, in order to outline a picture of Muslim women through women’s eyes: for a long time, they have been denied the agency to articulate their ideas and concerns regarding their experiences as Muslim, and the task was often entrusted to male Muslim writers who did not always represent women’s rights and their status, both in Islam and in the West. Finally, I included five works that I loved, that I devoured in a few hours, that were capable of attracting me, of making me sympathize with their characters, that made me cry and laugh.
Structure of the work
After providing an overview of each author, together with a summary of the books, my work will focus on the history of the Muslim presence in Britain, with a particular attention to the phenomenon of post-colonial immigration and the shift from ethnicity to religion that characterised the 1990-2000 period. A long paragraph will be devoted to the Rushdie affair, which contributed to the “Muslim psychosis” perhaps even more sharply than 9/11. Then my attention will shift on the history of Muslim presence in British fiction, with a particular focus on women, on the Orientalist tendency that has for long influenced their portrayal, on the concept of agency and of their three- time diasporic identity (Hasan, 2015). A theoretical chapter will follow, dealing with issues such as transnationalism, globalisation and hybridity. An important critical perspective is provided by Esra Santesso’s concept of disorientation, an unending process of negotiation lived by the Muslim immigrants to weave their cultural and religious values together with the western environment. The central section of this work will outline how the novels focus on different elements of identity such as class, race, religion, clothes and language but also on issues such as community change,
2 Santesso (2013), p. 3
3
belonging, powerlessness and alienation, together with the desire of coming “back home”. The aim is to try to understand how the protagonists of these books shape their identities negotiating multiple categories.
Authors, work, plots.
The Red Box (1991)
Farhana Sheikh was born in Pakistan. She lives in London where she works as a teacher.
The Red Box, published in 1991, is her only novel. As already mentioned before, the main character of this novel is Raisa, a young British Pakistani woman who is investigating the concept of identity for her MA dissertation. In order to fulfil her task, she conducts several conversations with her interviewees, two students of an East London comprehensive school, Nasreen and Tahira: their talks focus on topics such as family, religion and community, but also memories and fantasies, in a sort of investigation into diasporic British Asian identities. The tale of their lives becomes the core of the narrative, and the choice falls on two kinds of lives that couldn’t be more different: Nasreen is pious, loyal to her family’s traditions and compliant with Pakistani norms, while Tahira is definitely more rebellious and open to experimentation, and this is the reason why Raisa’s independent and educated status will have a greater impact on her. The novel is set during the 1980s, in a backdrop of racial tension between Asian and white students in the girls’ school:
together with the general political atmosphere, much more racist than anti-Muslim, this makes race and gender, rather than religion, the key issues of this work. It is interesting to notice how Raisa develops a deep bond with the girls, based on their common gender, national and religious background, despite the class difference that makes her feel extremely guilty. As Tahira lucidly points out:
“We might all be girls and we might all be Pakistanis and all that, but we’re different, you know. You’re even more different than me and Nasreen. You ain’t even lived like us. You’ve never worried about half the things we worry about. Where you live, the people you meet, it’s all different.
I bet your mum never had to wear no dupatta or work for no pig. I ain’t being rude, but it’s true, ain’t it?”3.
3 Sheikh (1991), p. 189
4
She did not know how right and yet how wrong she was: at the end of the book, we discover together with Raisa a past of hard work, humiliation and battle for her own mother as well.
Only in London (2001)
Hanan Al-Shaykh4 was born in 1945 in Beirut, Lebanon. She received a traditional and conservative education and she attended the American College for Girls in Cairo. She started writing at a young age, as a way to release her anger and frustration towards a father and a brother that restricted her freedom, and her first essays were published when she was only sixteen. It is therefore not difficult to image the reason why her works deal with women’s role in society, the relationship between the sexes and the institution of marriage. She worked as journalist before dedicating her life to writing fiction, short-stories and plays. Her novels are all written in Arabic and some of them have been translated into several languages. In English, through the translations by Peter Ford but above all by Catherine Cobham, we find The Story of Zahra (1980, translated in 1986), a work that was published at Al-Shaykh’s own expense, since no publisher in Lebanon accepted the novel: it is the story of a young girl who tries to escape oppression and war only to find more of the same. Women of Sand and Myrrh, published and translated in 1988, is named as one of the 50 Best Books of 1992 by Publishers Weekly. It deals with the lives of four women who struggle with the patriarchal order through different paths. A celebration of the resilience of the human spirit in the middle of the Lebanese Civil War is Beirut Blues, a novel of correspondence published in 1992 (and translated in 1995). Only in London, the novel we will focus on, was published in 2000 (and translated in 2001). This book explores the lives of four people who get to know each other on a plane from Dubai in comic light and with hints of compassion. Lamis is a divorced Iraqi woman who was forced into marriage with a rich older man in order to save her family from poverty. She has an affair with Nicholas, an Englishman expert in Oriental antiquities who works for Sotheby’s. Then we have Amira, a prostitute who came to London to work as a maid. She supports her family back home through her earnings, which are systematically purified by her pious mother since they come from a cursed job. She dreams of being a princess and she tries to transform herself into a real (fake) one. She gets close to Samir, a gay Lebanese man who has left a wife and five children at home to bring a capuchin monkey to London. Samir was too naive to imagine that he had been turned into a courier of diamonds. It is a narrative about loneliness, perceived not only by immigrants, deracinated in a completely different world, but also by natives,
4 http://authorscalendar.info/shaykh.htm
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who are too suspicious and in competition to connect. Finally, we have Al-Shaykh’s last work, The occasional Virgin, the first novel to be written in English and published in 2018.
Brick Lane (2003)
Monica Ali’s Brick Lane5 is the first novel of this Anglo-Bangladeshi writer, born in 1967 in Dhaka (Bangladesh). Published in 2003, the book was immediately shortlisted for the 2003 “Man Booker Prize for fiction” and it was made into a film, released in 2007. Most notably, this novel allowed the young writer to be named by Granta magazine as one of the “20 Best of Young British Novelists”. It is the story of the eighteen-year-old Nazneen, an East Pakistani woman, who is married to a Bangladeshi man twice her age who lives in London. The core of the narrative is her evolution from a position of passive victim to one of decision-maker, her personal battle against Fate as a guiding principle. An additional narrative is provided by the story of her less fortunate sister Hasina, who chose to follow her romantic love and to challenge Fate at home, but unfortunately had to face failure, poverty and disappointment. In London, Nazneen is confined to a public housing complex called Tower Hamlets, living a life of housekeeping and motherhood, patiently enduring all that life throws at her, with the deeply rooted conviction that every path in life has already been decided for her. When she starts her sewing job to help with the family budget, she gets to know Karim, a young Muslim activist that crushes all her religious convictions. The moral expectations of both are destroyed by their physical attraction, but the outcome of this adulterous affair is completely unexpected: Nazneen becomes aware of her agency, she realizes that her lover is as helpless as her husband Chanu is and that they are both oppressed by the disappointments in their lives. Therefore, she decides to leave both her lover and her husband, who eventually goes back to Bangladesh alone, to stay in London with her two British-born daughters and to start building her own life from a completely different perspective.
This lucky debut book is followed by three other novels, all well-written and convincing works that seem to have been darkened a bit by her initial success: firstly, we have Alentejo Blue in 2006, a novel of displacement and modernization set in Portugal. Then, it is the turn of In the Kitchen in 2009, a novel which is considered by many critics as a sort of follow-up to Brick Lane:
in a hotel restaurant in central London, Ali steps back to a migrant environment and she presents a microcosm dealing with issues like national identity, family and belonging. Finally, Ali’s last outing in 2011 is The untold Story, a portrait of Lydia’s life, a member of the British royal family
5 http://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/monica-ali
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who stages her death to fly overseas and conduct a quiet life. This portrayal appeared to many a thinly concealed reference to Princess Diana, an allusion that attracted much attention and comment, but that was in some ways counterproductive, since all this publicity “gave away the mystery of the first half of the novel” (The Telegraph, August 2011).
Sweetness in the Belly (2005)
Camilla Gibb is a British-born writer who grew up in Toronto. Born in 1968, she leaves her academic career in 2000 (with a PhD in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies and one in archaeology), in order to completely dedicate herself to writing, even if her formation as a social anthropologist will always inform her fiction. She already gains recognition with her first novel, Mouthing the words, published in 1999, a book that won the City of Toronto Book Award in 2000.
It is the story of Thelma’s emotional exile, of her escape from a painful reality by recreating the world in her imagination. Three imaginary friends help her cope with anorexia, an absent mother and an abusing father. In 2002, The petty details of So-and-So’s life is published, another story about a complex and deprived brood: Emma and Blue are siblings, abandoned by their father and ignored by an alcoholic and depressed mother. Although it is never said clearly, they develop an unhealthy bond. On reaching adulthood, they try, in their own ways, to recreate their identities and to cope with their difficult past. Sweetness in the Belly was published in 2005, and my work will focus on this novel: it is the story of Lilly, the daughter of two nomadic Anglo-Irish parents who die in Morocco when she is only eight. She is entrusted by Muhammad Bruce, a converted English friend of her parents, to an Islamic shrine where she starts studying the Qur’an. At sixteen, she goes on a pilgrimage to Harar, a Muslim stronghold in Ethiopia. Here she boards with a poor family but despite her wearing the veil and praying the Qur’an, she is still considered as a farenji – a foreigner, mostly because of the colour of her skin. In order to find acceptance, she starts teaching the Qur’an to local children, but when her project of integration starts working, she has to leave because of the outburst of the civil war. Back to her parents’ home country, in London, she still feels like a foreigner: despite her British roots, she is considered as an outsider because of her religion. In a council estate of the suburbs, she works as a nurse and she establishes an association for family reunification of Ethiopian refugees with her friend Amina. However, their reasons are not only altruistic: Amina wants to find her husband and Lilly her lover, the idealist young Dr. Aziz. Finally, Lilly finds out about his death and this discovery allows her to close that chapter about her past, settle down, put down roots and start loving again. A film inspired by this book will be released in
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2019. Gibb’s last novel is The Beauty of Humanity Movement (2010), a fascinating intrusion in Vietnamese history through the intertwined lives of Hung, a pho-maker, Tu, a tourist guide, and Maggie, an art curator that comes back to Vietnam to know more about the father she left behind.
The backdrops of the narration are the communist regime, the Vietnam war, poverty, famine and capitalism.
Home Fire (2017)
Kamila Shamsie6 is a prolific novelist who was born in Pakistan in 1973. She belongs to an affluent family with a rich literary tradition: her great-aunt and her mother were both successful writers, so the literature gene seems to run in the family. After a childhood in Pakistan, she completes her studies in the US. Her first novel dates back to 1998: In the city by the sea is set in her hometown Karachi. This location represents a common trait of her first four novels. This work, in particular, dwells on the fragility of life in a turbulent political environment and an oppressive military rule. The protagonist, Hasan, a young boy aged eleven, responds to the turbulent experiences he goes through by making use of imagination and creativity. Salt and Saffron (2000) won her a place on Orange’s list of “21 Writers for the 21st century”. It seems to be autobiographic, since it narrates the story of a girl named Alyna, who returns to her family in Karachi after studying in the US. This allows her to perceive her own culture from a slightly different perspective and leads her to question some of the values with which she has been raised. In 2002, Kartography sets the relationship between soul-mates Karim and Raheen against a backdrop of ethnic violence and civil war. Broken Verses (2005) explores idealist fundamentalism through the inner conflict between personal life and political activity lived by the protagonist Aasmani: whilst she is proud of her mother, a feminist activist who was strong enough to fight for her beliefs, and whose work she wishes to continue, she is also angry with her and hurt for having been neglected and abandoned for the sake of politics. What Aasmani really needs is to free herself from the shadow of this powerful woman. In 2009, Burnt Shadows was shortlisted for the “Orange Prize for Fiction”: it is a wide- ranging novel going from World War II to the 2001 World Trade Center attacks and depicting the stories of two families characterised by individuals of various different nationalities and several cross-cultural relationships. A God in Every stone (2014) is the wartime story of a London archaeologist’s travels to Peshawar and it precedes of three years the novel we will focus on: Home Fire (2017), which was long-listed for “Man Booker Prize for Fiction” and proclaimed winner of
6 https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/kamila-shamsie
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the “Women’s prize for Fiction 2018”. Inspired by the Greek story of Antigone, it deals with issues such as civil disobedience, belonging, law and justice. It is the story of a Pakistani family that lives in London: Isma, the older sister, has raised her two younger twin siblings, Aneeka and Parvaiz, after their mother’s death. The whole family bears a heavy legacy left by their father, a jihadist who was often absent during the childhood of the three, but who still represents a powerful pull, especially for Parvaiz. Isma leaves London to pursue her studies in the States, lengthily referred to fulfil her family duties, after having reported Parvaiz to the police: he has joined the media division of ISIS in Syria. Aneeka pursues a law degree and, furious with her sister, focuses all her efforts and energies in bringing her brother back home, since being in Syria has made him understand the mistake he made. Fortuitous is her love affair with Eamonn, the British Home Secretary’s son: she is of course in love with him, but she is driven by a stronger goal, that of obtaining his father’s help in saving her brother. Unfortunately Parvaiz is killed while trying to reach the British consulate in Istanbul, and since his change of mind was not acknowledged, the repatriation of his body in Britain is denied. Just as Antigone, Aneeka finally flies to Pakistan to keep vigil over the body of her dead brother in a public park, while the huge media coverage allows her to make her speech heard by the Home Secretary:
“In the stories of the wicked tyrants men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families - their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves. All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice. I am here to ask for justice. I appeal to the Prime Minister: let me take my brother home”7.
The final plot twist, with the death of Aneeka and Eamonn together in each other arms, left me speechless.
7 Shamsie (2017), pp. 224-225
9 Muslim presence in British history
“Rushing into the English life will not leave behind all the Asian problem, it will only be an exchange,
an English set of problems for an Asian set”
Ravinder Randhawa, A Wicked Old Woman
In order to trace a history of the Muslim presence in Britain, it is necessary to look at the more general history of immigration in the country. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the economic gloom and the severe labour shortage forced Britain to invite ex-colonial subjects as cheap labour to the Mother Country: they helped boosting the English economy and rebuilding the bombed-out infrastructures8. The needs of reconstruction brought a massive outflow of immigrants especially from South Asia, but also from Africa and the Caribbean, a region with a seriously underdeveloped economy that lived a crisis with high levels of unemployment. Particularly famous, in this context, is the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 carrying Caribbean people from Jamaica and Trinidad to London. The so-called “economic” immigrants shared an additional feature: they intended to go back. They had come to Britain in order to increase the family income, but were always willing to go back home one day. They were not there to stay, but they were just willing to improve the economic lot of the family they left behind.
Many of the immigrants coming from the Indian subcontinent also performed central roles in the British Indian Army and, therefore, they considered the fact of coming to Britain as a natural thing to do9. It is important to remember that, together with these explanations for migration, many others are possible: just to cite a couple of examples, the hope in better education opportunities and the attempt to escape persecution10. On this side, it is impossible not to mention the violent Partition of Pakistan from India in 1947, a situation that caused many to escape and seek a better life in the UK.
It is also important to underline the fact that this phenomenon is not only the natural consequence of the end of the Empire, but it also represents the culmination of a long hidden
8 Santesso (2013), p. 7
9 Sardar (2008), p. 2
10 Ibid, p. 90
10
relationship between the colonies and the Mother country, a persistent connection with the island nation that had been strategically kept hidden from Britain’s history11.
Before the law, all these black and Asian people and workers were technically citizens of the New Commonwealth, but as a matter of fact, they were considered a threat to national coherence and they were systematically othered, because of their race and colour. All those immigrants found it difficult to create their place in British society since they did not conform to the predominant image of “white cultural acceptability”12. They went through both discrimination and racism, together with the more common experiences of displacement and disorientation, which are particularly common in the migrant condition. Ziauddin Sardar (2008) is an immigrant himself, and his words are particularly powerful: his father moved to London in 1959, leaving his family in Karachi, the most populous city of Pakistan. A year later, his family joined him and these are the words Sardar uses to describe his first impressions: “We arrived here full of love for the home of Empire to face rejection and discover that we were less-than-equal citizens. That experience left an indelible mark on my parents’ generation and my own. It is an integral part of our British identity”13. Not less interesting is Chanu’s consideration about his condition in Brick Lane.
Nazneen’s husband is trying to explain to his wife the reason why he is considered to be
“respectable” when compared to other Bengalis living in the same area. His discourse is also deeply intertwined with the concept of class difference, of inner division within the community, but I also consider it to be particularly valuable in this context: “[...] And you see, to a white person, we are all the same: dirty little monkeys all in the same monkey clan”14. This image is far less welcoming than the previous one.
To complicate the situation came the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, whose goal was to limit the number of immigrants coming from the colonies. The collateral effect was unpredictable: those who were working in the UK, and that intended to return to their families in the long-term (the “economic” immigrants I previously mentioned), changed their mind when they realised that they might not be readmitted if they left the UK. As a consequence, they decided to bring their families to join them and settle permanently in the UK. To contain the phenomenon, the Parliament of the United Kingdom amended the previous act with the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which further restricted the access to the country: only those with a father or a grandfather born in the UK were allowed to enter.
11 Nasta (2002), p.2
12 Ibid, p. 3
13 Sardar (2008), p. 95
14 Ali (2003), p. 28
11
1968 is also the year of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham. Many scholars cite this speech (Nasta15 and Santesso16, just to provide two examples), and after reading it, I decided to consecrate a small digression to it, since I am very much convinced it gives an insight into the general climate of the period, and in a very effective way. This speech contributed to the polarisation of the public opinion and to the increase of anti-immigrant views. It did not only criticise the levels of immigration, but it proposed a policy of repatriation, willing to get rid of as many immigrants as possible. The use of a certain lexicon surprised me, since it depicted a catastrophic scenario caused by the insanity of previous choices in the field of immigration policy. Powell came up with the definition of the toleration of immigrants’ customs and traditions, and described them as “insane” and as “madness”.
The idea which was conveyed is that the English citizens were under attack, that they had been deprived of their rights by a foolish government. Discrimination was perceived as a defence mechanism and not as a morally unacceptable behaviour. Before reporting here some passages of Powell’s speech, I would like to underline another crucial point: integration was here described as a process in which all difference is cancelled, where the one willing to integrate is expected to render himself undistinguishable. This is very much the idea that the works I read and I will deal with later are meant to dismantle- that is, the idea of mimicry in order to gain acceptance, the idea of negotiation as a process in which something has necessarily to be lost.
Here Powell’s own words (the emphasis is mine):
“In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. […] Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.
[…] It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now […] ‘How can its dimensions [of this phenomenon] be reduced?’ […] by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. […] We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants […] So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen. […] In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative
15 Nasta (2002), p. 59
16 Santesso (2013), p. 1
12
and administrative measures be taken without delay. […] Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party's policy: the encouragement of re-emigration. […]”17.
What Powell is trying to do here is to present the immigrant from the Commonwealth as someone who has come to deprive the English citizen of his rights. Further on in his speech, Powell also provides a definition of integration which is very confusing, since it shows all the features of what has to be named assimilation. He describes it as the processes in which all differences are removed, in which the individual becomes indistinguishable from the other members of the society:
in his view, immigrants should be prepared to accept what is imposed to them in terms of conditions of employment and housing. According to Powell, English citizens should be provided with the right to discriminate between one fellow-citizen and an immigrant in the management of their own affairs. In addition, immigrants and their descendents should not be labelled as a special class, since this label risks to transform “legitimate” citizens into strangers in their own country.
The last sentence of his speech is particularly momentous: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’”18.
Powell’s speech mentions the Race Relations Acts passed in 1965 and 1968 to prevent racial discrimination and racist hate crimes. The main goal was to promote better community relations, making discrimination illegal in employment and housing in particular. These laws represented a first important attempt to tackle with the problem of upsetting racial anxieties, but as a negative outcome they ended up sharpening those pervasive racial behaviours they intended to undermine.
At any rate, this integration or multicultural phase found it difficult to mitigate the threat produced by ethno-cultural difference.
In this context, it is of pivotal importance for my work to highlight the centrality of race and colour. “Black” was the visible marker of otherness and diversity. Santesso (2013)19, referring to Peach, shows how the British discourse concerning minorities has then mutated: during the 1950s and the 1960s, the focus was on colour, during the 1970s and the 1980s it shifted towards race, and in the 1990s it continued to change, as the focus was ethnicity. The latest evolution refers to current events, as the attention is now on religion. Hasan (2015) confirms Santesso’s statement, reporting Fred Halliday’s words: before the 1990s “people living in and believing in Islam were not in the main referred to as ‘Muslims’ but in terms of ‘ethnicity’”20. Muslims were the major protagonists of
17 Powell (1968), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html
18 Ibid.
19 Santesso (2013), p. 184, nota 8
20 Hasan (2015), p. 95
13
this shift. What happened was the transformation of the identity of the Muslim in religious terms from a private citizen to the object of public debates21.
This evolution brings us closer to the core of my work: in this general climate, Muslims became doubly othered, because of race and religion, and they were transformed into interesting subjects of study. Their communities became more visible in the West and a religious antagonism grew disproportionally, contributing to the caricaturing and ghettoisation of the Muslim22. The 1998 Crime and Disorder Act confirms this hypothesis: its aim was to make harsher punishments for hate crimes based on race and, for the first time, on religion. The 1976 Race Relations Act, which was intended to reinforce the two previous ones mentioned above, had left the Muslim population and any other religious community devoid of protection. Santesso (2013) confirms the point:
“Interestingly, the diversity of the Muslim population makes anti-Muslim acts difficult to categorise in a legal sense: whereas racial discrimination is addressed under the British legislation as the Race Relations Act of 1976, Muslims, because they are not a racial group, remain unprotected by the provisions of the Act”23.
It is at this point that religion becomes a sort of reference point for designing immigration policies and legislation. And one of the major shifts is in literature too, with the emergence of a new category called “Muslim writing”: this kind of writing “takes Islam or Islamic religious belief and culture(s) as its focus”24.
This is the shift I am more interested in and this is the issue I will analyse more closely: the study of what being a Muslim means, what it feels like to be a traditionally faithful devout and, at the same time, to be desirous of fitting in with secular Western life.
Englishness, hybridity and diaspora
The previously described situation makes our analysis focus on three central theoretical concepts: Englishness, hybridity and diaspora. The immigrants from the colonies represented a threat since they challenged the conception of Englishness as a monolithic and immaculate feature.
They put the homogeneous and pure British identity into question: England could no longer be considered as a haven, a colonial motherland characterised by purity, rootedness and cultural
21 Hasan (2015), p. 95
22 Santesso (2013), p. 9
23 Ibid, p. 11
24 Nash (2012), p. 5
14
dominance. The start of the immigration process from the colonies marked the end of the myth of the uniform and white British nation, since it presented these new communities as organic to the body of the nation, no more something far and distant. To reinforce the idea, it is valuable to cite Sardar (2008) again, who confirms that fear is what characterised British reaction, which was translated into the refusal of the concept of “difference” and which, therefore, made it extremely difficult for those people to conceive themselves as belonging to a nation that defines itself in terms of a narrow and exclusive identity25.
Their diaspora, however, marked the beginning of the hybridity of Englishness. Diaspora means dispersal and settlement, within an experience of enforced expulsion, a synonym of expatriation and trauma. The word comes from the Greek and it was originally referred to the dispersion of the Jews in the 6th century BC, when they were expelled from the Promised Land. In its academic use, it represents the dispersion of any people from their homeland, voluntarily or not.
It implies a sense of exile and displacement which can produce two different outcomes: on the one hand, it produces a desire for the lost homeland, while on the other hand it produces a homing desire, which means to reinvent and rewrite the concept of home. As Nasta (2002) suggests,
“Home, it has been said, is not necessarily where one belongs, but the place where one starts from”26 (emphasis in the text). In order words, “home” is much more a feeling and condition where a number of social, economic and political factors contribute heavily to the making of it. In this perspective, we understand that, beside those willing to return home, many of these immigrants shared not only the simple desire to stay, but also the strong wish to make England home. The problem here is that the positioning in a predominantly white hegemonic Britain was difficult: some immigrants remained unassimilated to the dominant white British culture as out of place, while others were systematically silenced from expressing their connections to the dominant British life.
Two types of considerations are here required: first of all, the fact that competing versions of Englishness existed and that they were not always taken into account. The integrity of the notion of Englishness, as a matter of fact, is undermined in its basis, even before the immigrants’ arrival, but this consciousness is rarely acknowledged. The other important aspect we must not underestimate when dealing with diasporic identities is the fact that they tend to be perceived as static and homogeneous rather than fluid and heterogeneous in nature. On the contrary, as any other kind of identity, they are determined by various aspects such as class, ethnic and gender stratification, constraints and historical determinations. This idea is perhaps reinforced by the behaviour of the
25 Sardar (2008), p. 8
26 Nasta (2002), p. 1
15
diasporic groups themselves, as they try to preserve and protect their culture to the extent that the group becomes the central parameter to resolve the problems related to a particular community. To explain it in a different way, they voice the interest of the group, but they control and prescribe order for their own members. In this perspective, what seemed to be a collision between a pure, intact and integrated identity and a remote, fixed and strange one can be perceived as a potentially prolific encounter between multi-faced and complex identities instead. To make the issue clearer, it is useful to remember that we are dealing with the era of post-modern subjects, where identity is no more fixed, essential and permanent, but it is historically defined, where every subject contains contradictory identities that keep pulling in different and contrasting directions. In other words, the process of identification remains open-ended, variable and problematic27, and identity itself is no more a fixed sign, but it is a concept that always requires an Other in mind in order to define what the identity under examination is not.
The other important concept we should consider is the definition of the term “hybrid”. In fact, it can be considered as a space of agency at the interstices of the nation’s borders, a space where formerly antagonistic and polarized versions of cultural identity could be negotiated and realigned. In this perspective, Englishness becomes a hybrid concept, in particular when referring to British born and raised immigrants: with the rise of new mixed cultures and the acknowledgement of the existence of different versions of Englishness, it becomes easier to accept the fluid nature of all identities. The key concept is that heterogeneity is the norm in any community, the British and the Asian ones. In Brick Lane, Razia, Nazneen’s friend, puts it very simply, referring to the white community: “[...] There are good ones, and bad ones. Just like us”28.
The major obstacle is therefore represented by the difficulty of breaking away from previously assigned and stereotypical labels, in order to demonstrate the existence of a range of differently staged identities. Each individual life is defined by the particular histories it lives, along a shifting and wide-ranging spectrum. Sardar (2008) is very clear in articulating this argument:
“What was left behind in the subcontinent is just as much a part of the British Asians’ experience as how they live and who they are in Britain”29. And always using his words, “British Asian experience is a product of real lives lived by real people”30.
27 Hall (1996b), p. 598
28 Ali (2003), p. 73
29 Sardar (2008), p. 7
30 Ibid, p. 8
16 Who is the Muslim?
As I will better explain in the following chapter, the Muslim label has more to do with the cultural side of Islam than with the religious one, it is a “cultural attribute”31. It has to be considered, therefore, as a sort of affiliation that supersedes any other type of affiliation, whether they are class, gender, ethnic or geographic ones. It is a strong tie that does not necessarily imply religious practices. For this reason, the term does not denote a monolithic consciousness, but it refers to a combination of different ethnicities, nationalities and cultural heritage32. What is true is that, in a way or another, religion becomes a key component of Muslim identity and it is no longer subsumed under other categories such as ethnicity or national origins.
What is important to underline is that Islam cannot be perceived as a monolithic entity in its turn. We are dealing with a religious significance, with faith, and even the differences between Sunni, Shiite, Ibadi and Sufi, just to quote a few of all possible examples, make it difficult to define Muslim identity.
Therefore, as a matter of fact, we are not only dealing with a wide range of political, ideological and cultural backgrounds, but also with different religious positions. What unifies them is the sense of belonging to a wider global community of believers, the ummah. Unfortunately, it is exactly this portrait as a unified transnational group based on faith that transforms the Muslim community into a challenge to the significance of nation as a primary marker of identity and culture. My reflection may appear here controversial and contradicting, and it is exactly what it is:
they identify themselves in religion since they feel excluded from British nationhood, but this behaviour makes them appear as anti-West and anti-assimilation and, therefore, as a national threat.
We deal with a frustrating mechanism in which embracing Islam to face solitude and exclusion becomes an action intended to highlight one’s difference from the Christian national sphere. The supplementary paradox is represented by the fact that religion is anything but territorial, and, as a consequence, it cannot represent a real menace for British identity.
What was meant to counter alienation from society ends up becoming a means for further alienation: the Muslim is, by definition, anti-assimilation, anti-liberal and anti-Western. Nash (2014) underlines how the existence of British converts to Islam demonstrates that the Islamic system is perfectly compatible with the European lifestyle. Modernity does not have to be perceived as an element exclusive of the West, but as a component which pervades Islam too: Nash also
31 Sardar (2008), p. 94
32 Santesso (2013), p. 3
17
describes a reformed type of Islam, common-sense based, offering solutions to the problems of the modern world on the basis of a general malleability of God’s revelation, always respecting the essentials of the faith and its forms of worship33. It is also very important to consider that the only fact of being in the West has allowed Islam to reinvent itself: a reinterpretation of the Islamic texts was possible, together with the liberation from culturally enacted practices. Above all, it allowed the recognition of a strong Muslim identity within a non-Muslim majority country, putting an end to the long lasting distinction between what is dar-al-Islam and what is dar-al-harb: the word dar means house, the society in which it is possible to practice Islamic faith. Dar-al-Islam represents the Muslim world, dar-al-harb the non-Muslim one. The line of demarcation between the two becomes extremely weak, since the Muslim community finds itself at the centre of the “outside”
world. What previously was a land of conflict has been transformed into a society that grants them rights to practice their religion. But the dar-al-harb concept is not so unproblematic: the Muslim immigrants living in a European country have to re-evaluate their attachment to Islam in relation to the secular policies of the new environment in which they live, trying to find out ways to carry their beliefs in a society which is perceived as less accommodating to Muslim needs when compared to the one they came from.
West versus Islam: clash of civilisations
“Islam is an easy scapegoat, in short, for cultural practices that have either been in existence for hundreds of years, or have developed over the last half century with the active participation of Europeans, Americans and no doubt Muslims too”34.
The first thing to notice here is that Islam is considered as a scapegoat because of “cultural practices”. I already mentioned this element previously and I will do it again in the next chapter, but it is never enough to highlight it: the general tendency of Western society is to look at the Muslim identity with confusion, mingling together elements that belong to religion (the “Islam” side) and elements that belong to culture (the “Muslim” side).
What is true for sure is that the West has always perceived Islam as a far distant reality, “an alien belief system, set of cultural practices or political ideology in opposition to the West”35. Muslims have become a synonym of cultural backwardness and religious fanaticism, they have
33 Nash (2014), pp. 161-162
34 Ibid, p. 3
35 Ibid, p. 6
18
been stigmatized as deviant from the norms of modern civilization, they have been portrayed as “the barbarians at the gates”36.
As Nash (2012) points out, “Muslims the world over have become objects of suspicion and, more insidiously, a war of words and images has been unleashed against them. Especially where they live as a minority with the status of quondam migrants, they feel themselves vulnerable to what might be called a Kulturkampf – a ‘cultural struggle’ [...]”37. Multiple reasons can be found to illustrate the rationale for this struggle: first of all the general tendency to establish an “us” versus
“them” relation on the side of the West38, but also, more specifically, the foreign policy of the United Kingdom, and historical events such as the Rushdie Affair, the 2001 riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford, the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 bombing. On the other hand, it is not less important to notice this urge to reform Islam on the model of the early Muslim community, a Puritan trend that seems to contradict the frequent description of Islam as a purely peaceful faith.
This is the mirror of what George Weigel defines “the un-secularisation of the world”39.
However, all things considered, the key word is “cultural”. As Huntington (1993) reminds us, the fundamental source of problem and dispute is always a cultural one40. Civilisations are cultural entities defined by objective elements such as language, history, religion, customs and institutions and also by the subjective self-identification of people. These elements constitute
“basic” differences, that regulate every kind of relation in the life of the components of these high cultural grouping of people41. What happens to Islam is that a huge and unacceptable discrepancy is perceived by the West when comparing this civilisation to its secular, liberal and pro-Enlightenment ideology. Since the Muslim’s mind is traditional and religious, the natural outcome drawn by the Westerner is that Muslims are underdeveloped and irrational. But, as I already mentioned before, modernity is not foreign to Muslim culture. In his Clash of Civilisations?, Huntington (1993) is very clear in affirming that the choice to follow modernity simply does not necessarily implies the choice to Westernize42. He points out how Western concepts such as individualism, liberalism, human rights, freedom of expression, but also democracy, equality and separation of church and state differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilisations43.
36 Nash (2012), p. 9
37 Ibid, p. 1
38 Huntington (1993), p. 29
39 Ibid, p. 26
40 Ibid, p. 22
41 Ibid, pp. 24-25
42 Ibid, p. 49
43 Ibid, p. 40
19
Among the vast array of Western values, I became convinced that the place consecrated to religion in Muslim society is a central issue of this battle, together with the concept of freedom. In Muslim society, no difference is perceived in terms of private and public sphere when referring to religion. The religious credo is publicly expressed without any kind of restriction, and religion is perceived as a pervasive but natural element that belongs to every facet of life. The West has followed the road of Secularism traced by the Enlightenment: Christianity has been pulled out of the public arena and relocated into the private space. We are dealing with the general state’s commitment to remain neutral in matters of religion. It was conceived as a means to guarantee equality regardless of one’s religious opinion and it was mostly perceived as a liberating development. What happened on the other side is that the Muslims found themselves faced with the problem to practice their faith in a secularised country, where religious behaviour is demonised and marginalised. As if this scenario was not enough, a particularly recent phenomenon occurred: from a tolerant, humanist and modern management of religious rights, a shift has been registered towards an antireligious condition, a sort of ideology were the absence of religion, or better the hostility towards it, has become a religion itself. It is for these reasons that Muslims are perceived as resistant to modernity and fundamentalism and fanaticism are considered to be inherent in Muslim practice and belief. Secularism and Muslim subjectivity are often perceived as mutually exclusive, since a devout Muslim publicly expresses his faith in terms of dress, actions and habit. This description is not intended to advance the idea that a Muslim cannot exist within a secular environment, but it helps being aware of the challenges lived by this community and to establish an important line of demarcation between fundamentalist and moderate forms of religious attachment44. What is certain is that some kind of re-orientation of identity has occurred on both sides: if the end of the dar-al-Islam/ dar-al-harb dichotomy has forced the Muslim society to accept the Western one as no more extraneous, the Western society has lost his previous enemy, the communist East, according both to Nash (2012)45 and Huntington (1993)46, and has elevated Islam and Muslim belligerency as a new enemy. This has led to the natural consequence of perceiving the presence and growth of Muslim communities within the country as a threat.
The other element that impressed me is the fact that Western interpretation of freedom is pole apart from the Islamic one. According to Chambers (2016), “the notion of liberty in Western thought [...] has meant a freedom from external constraints and the right of individual self- determination. In Muslim thought, on the other hand, freedom, or hurriyya, has typically been
44 Santesso (2013), p. 20-23
45 Nash (2012), p. 10
46 Huntington (1993), p. 23
20
regarded as an inner state of liberty from the tyranny of the senses, or as something that is experienced only as part of the collective group of the faithful”47. The situation here described makes immediately evident how practices such as the veiling are perceived as restricting women’s freedom on one side, while other practices such as sexual freedom are perceived as immoral on the other.
47 Chambers (2016), p. 185
21 Muslim presence in British fiction
“The pleasure of writing as an Asian woman is the pleasure of exploding stereotypes”
Meera Syal
From the Middle Ages to the XIXth century
The Muslim presence in British fiction can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Santesso (2013)48 provides a very good overview of the topic and I would like to sum up her main points here, since I believe that this analysis may contribute to the shaping of a general image of the British Muslim situation, providing an insight into the heavy legacy Muslim immigrants bear. First of all, it is very important to make clear that this history is not a linear one: we are not dealing with an evolution from a hasty and negative description of Muslims to a more accurate and extensive one; it is not a march towards more empathetic and honest depictions of the Muslim. We are going to discover a non linear progression, made of evolutions and regressions that have been very much influenced by the political and historical background.
In the Middle Ages, the figure of the Muslim made its first appearance in English texts: they were called Mohammedans or Mohametists and, as a consequence of the legacy of the crusades and of extremely limited interactions with the Orient, they were portrayed as vicious and deviant.
During the Renaissance, the growth of more direct relationships with the Ottoman Empire contributed to the representation of a more complex image of the Muslim, even if he still remained a sort of “popular villain”.
During the XVIIth century, Islam is no longer a religion that belongs to distant lands, but it becomes a social and intellectual matter at home. The first translation of the Qur’an into English is carried out by Alexander Ross in this period (and then published in London in 1649).
The Enlightenment brings new interest in the East, with the development of travel narratives that seem to scrutinize this region of the world with seriousness and accuracy. Unfortunately, instead of authentic visions of Islam, the results are highly stylized images depicted by writers that considered themselves as agents of a superior civilization, more interested in collecting
48 Santesso (2013), pp. 28-82
