(Jonathan P. A. Sell (Eds.) ) Metaphor and Diaspora

Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing
Metaphor and Diaspora in

Contemporary Writing
Edited by
Jonathan P. A. Sell
University of Alcalá, Spain
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jonathan P. A. Sell 2012
Individual chapters © contributors 2012
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For Fernando Galván
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on Contributors x
Introduction: Metaphor and Diaspora 1

Jonathan P. A. Sell
1 Tropes of Diasporic Life in the Work of Nadeem Aslam 20

Chris Weedon
2 Becoming Foreign: Tropes of Migrant Identity in

Three Novels by Abdulrazak Gurnah 39
Felicity Hand
3 ‘My split self and my split world’: Troping Identity in

Mohsin Hamid’s Fiction 59
Adriano Elia
4 ‘Beige outlaws’: Hanif Kureishi, Miscegenation and

Diasporic Experience 80
Ruth Maxey
5 Metaphors of Belonging in Andrea Levy’s Small Island 99

Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso
6 Ancestry, Uncertainty and Dislocation in

V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life 117
Enrique Galván-Álvarez
7 Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas in the Work of

Caryl Phillips 135
Stef Craps
8 Metaphors of the Secular in the Fiction of

Salman Rushdie 151
Stephen Morton
9 White Teeth’s Embodied Metaphors: The Moribund

and the Living 170
Isabel Carrera Suárez
vii
viii Contents
10 Orpheus in the Alpujarras: Metaphors of Arrival in

Chris Stewart’s Driving Over Lemons 186
Jonathan P. A. Sell
References 205
Index 221
Acknowledgements
This book is the direct outcome of a symposium, ‘Metaphors of

Diaspora in Recent UK Writing’, which was held at the University of
Alcalá on 5 November 2010. I am grateful to the Spanish Ministry of
Science and Innovation for awarding the grant (ref. FFI2010-09306),
to the Department of Modern Philology of the University of Alcalá for
hosting the event, and to the kind assistance of the Rectorate staff in
the practical matters involved in its staging. The symposium itself also
marked the end of a three-year research project, ‘Metaphors of Diaspora
in the UK at the End of the Twentieth Century (1990–2005)’, financed
once again by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref.
HUM2007–63028) which, under the leadership of Professor Fernando
Galván Reula, was engaged with many of the issues and writers dis-
cussed here and may therefore be considered as an intellectual catalyst
of this book as well, more materially, as enabler of the research required
to write the Introduction and Chapters 6 and 10. Thanks are also due
to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to use in Chapter 8 selected mate-
rial from Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity by Stephen
Morton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Finally, I am grateful
to the contributors for always finding time in their busy schedules to
respond to my pestering and to the editorial and production staff at
Palgrave for their patience and professionalism.
ix
Contributors
Isabel Carrera Suárez is Professor in English at the University of

Oviedo, where she lectures on contemporary literatures in English,
postcolonial theory and gender studies. Her many publications on
the intersections of postcolonialism and gender in British, Canadian
and Australian writing include Translating Cultures (1999) and Post/
Imperial Encounters (2005), both of which she co-edited. Her most
recent book titled Generating the Hybrid City is forthcoming. Her cur-
rent research centres on representations of the urban in postcolonial
contexts.
Stef Craps is Lecturer (BOF-ZAP Research Professor) in English literature

at Ghent University, Belgium, where he directs the Centre for Literature
and Trauma. He is the author of Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of
Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (2005) and has served as guest
editor for special issues of Studies in the Novel (2008; with Gert Buelens)
and Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (2011; with Michael
Rothberg) on the topics of, respectively, postcolonial trauma novels
and transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory. At present he is
working on a monograph entitled Postcolonial Witnessing: The Trauma of
Empire, the Empire of Trauma.
Adriano Elia is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of

Rome (Roma Tre), Italy. His publications include essays on contem-
porary British fiction and two books, Ut Pictura Poesis: Word-Image
Interrelationships and the Word-Painting Technique (2002) and The UK:
Learning the Language, Studying the Culture (2005; co-authored with
Richard Ambrosini and Andrew Rutt). His monograph on Hanif
Kureishi’s work is forthcoming.
Enrique Galván-Álvarez is working towards his doctorate at the

University of Alcalá, where he holds a Spanish Ministry of Science and
Innovation scholarship. He has published articles on film, nationalism
and the use of religious narratives in South Asian and post-South Asian
contexts in journals such as Atlantis, British Journal of Australian Studies,
Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, Nerter, Revista Canaria de
Estudios Ingleses and Clepsidra. His main area of research is contempo-
rary Anglo-Tibetan poetry.
x
Notes on Contributors xi
Felicity Hand is Senior Lecturer in the English Department of the

Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, where she teaches postco-
lonial literature and the history and culture of the British Isles. Her pub-
lications include articles on Vikram Seth, Ved Mehta, Salman Rushdie,
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, M. G. Vassanji and Abdulrazak Gurnah,
and a monographic study The Subversion of Class and Gender Roles in
the Novels of Lindsey Collen (1941–), Mauritian Social Activist and Writer
(2010). At present she is leading a research project financed by the
Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation entitled ‘Cartographies of
Indianness in the Literatures of the Indian Ocean’.
Ruth Maxey is Lecturer in Modern American Literature in the School
of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, UK.
She has published articles on postcolonial literature and contempo-
rary British and American fiction, and her work has appeared in such
journals as Textual Practice, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Kenyon
Review, MELUS and Literature/Film Quarterly.
Stephen Morton is Senior Lecturer in English in the Faculty of
Humanities at the University of Southampton, UK. His publications
include Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subjectivity and the Critique of Postcolonial
Reason (2007), Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (2008),
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2003), Terror and the Postcolonial (2009; co-
edited with Elleke Boehmer), Foucault in an Age of Terror (2008; co-ed-
ited with Stephen Bygrave), and articles in Textual Practice, Interventions,
Wasafiri, Public Culture and New Formations. He is currently researching
colonial states of emergency in postcolonial literature and culture.
Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso is Associate Professor in the English
Department at the University of Malaga, Spain. She has published on
film adaptations of English classics and appropriations of Shakespeare
in such journals as Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies, EnterText,
The Journal of European Studies and Obsidian III: Literature in the African
Diaspora. She is interested in the interaction between historical and fic-
tional texts, and her current research focuses on the rewriting of history
in black British fiction.
Jonathan P. A. Sell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern
Philology of the University of Alcalá, Spain. He is the author of Rhetoric
and Wonder in English Renaissance Travel Writing, 1560–1613 (2006),
Allusion, Identity and Community in Recent British Writing (2011) and
Conocer a Shakespeare (2012). His current research interests include non-
literary wit, wonder in Shakespeare and the limits of literary form.
xii Notes on Contributors
Chris Weedon is Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural

Theory at Cardiff University, UK. She has published widely on femi-
nist theory, cultural politics and women’s writing. Her books include
Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1987 and 1996), Cultural
Politics: Class, Gender, Race and the Postmodern World (1994; with Glenn
Jordan), Postwar Women’s Writing in German (1997; editor), Feminism,
Theory and the Politics of Difference (1999), Identity and Culture: Narratives
of Difference and Belonging (2004) and Gender, Feminism and Fiction in
Germany 1840–1914 (2006). She is currently working on cultural and col-
lective memory, cultural diversity and the representations of “Others”
in the UK since World War II.
Introduction: Metaphor and
Diaspora
Jonathan P. A. Sell
The essays collected together in this volume were first presented at an

international symposium held at the University of Alcalá, Spain, on
5 November 2010. Thirty kilometres to the northwest of Madrid, the
city of Alcalá de Henares is today most famous for being the birthplace
of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, creator of one of Western literature’s
great immortals, Don Quijote. It is famous too for its university which,
founded by Cardinal Cisneros in 1499, was the modern era’s first pur-
pose-built campus of schools and residences for students of higher edu-
cation, a fact which has earned the city recognition as a UNESCO world
heritage site. But the city’s history is also marked by its peculiar involve-
ment in historical processes and events coloured by past diasporas or
pregnant with future ones. The house where Cervantes was born in 1547
faced the porticoed street-front of what had been the Jewish Quarter
until 1492, when the expulsion order of the Catholic Kings inflicted
conversion or banishment on those children of Israel who for the best
part of three centuries had rubbed shoulders with the Christians of the
city, making their livings as shoemakers, merchants, weavers, hosiers,
silversmiths, carpenters, shopkeepers, tailors, physicians or, paradoxi-
cally, tax-collectors for the church; side by side, as well, with the mem-
bers of the city’s Muslim community, which was the other victim of the
expulsion order. Indeed, as its name indicates, the city of Alcalá (= forti-
fied settlement) was founded in the eighth century AD by the conquer-
ing Moors who, once conquered themselves four centuries later, were by
and large tolerated to the point where they might own properties and
carry on trade. Thus, for almost 400 years three major ethnic and cul-
tural groups lived together peacefully enough, each group going about
its business, getting on with things in that capably pragmatic, bliss-
fully apolitical fashion which characterizes life in society when people
1
2 Jonathan P. A. Sell
are left to their own devices – until 1492 arrived, bringing with it the
threat of expulsion, which stirred among the Jews dormant memories
of earlier enforced exiles and cast their Muslim neighbours as potential
fellow-travellers in diaspora.
Outside Spain, 1492 is more familiar as the year Columbus ‘discov-
ered’ America. It is well known, too, that Columbus was hectoring the
Catholic Kings for money to finance his transatlantic expedition at the
very time Ferdinand was besieging the Alhambra in Granada and the
Moor was breathing his last sigh. Less well known is that Columbus’s
entreaties had been given an earlier royal hearing in the bishop’s palace
of Alcalá, where Catherine of Aragon was born in 1485. In other words,
Alcalá was a silent witness to a pivotal moment in world history when,
just before the expulsion of Jews and Moors was enacted, a visionary
merchant of uncertain national and ethnic origin was gathering funds
to open up a new world whose exploitation would rest on the practical
extermination of that world’s indigenes, turn the waters of the Atlantic
black beneath the keels of the slavers, and set in train the economic,
political and geopolitical forces that later congealed as colonialism.
Alcalá de Henares, then, as home to future victims of those European
and Mediterranean diasporas which imperialist master narratives of
Western history have so often preferred to overlook and as stage for
one of the interviews between Columbus and the Catholic kings which
forged the first link in the chain of a historical process that would bring
diverse global diasporas in its wake, was a peculiarly appropriate host
for the symposium on metaphors of diaspora which was the origin of
this book.
The two critical terms and theoretical concepts with which the essays
collected here engage are metaphor and diaspora. To take the second
first, ‘diaspora’ is notoriously difficult to define once uprooted from
any straightforwardly historical-geographical significance. Its recruit-
ment into the literary-theoretical lexicon is understandable enough:
though not exactly a replacement for postcolonialism, diaspora became
an attractive complement to the former as processes of social recon-
figuration, the adoption of new models of identity, and the transforma-
tion of global political structures gradually conspired to render obsolete
those postcolonial frameworks and epistemologies which attended to
situations, events and cultural movements in and around the aftermath
of colonialism. When life in the colonies was three or even four gen-
erations away, when cultural co-adaptation and racial or ethnic mis-
cegenation on the one hand and rampant globalization on the other
were making nation- or race-based conceptions of identity increasingly
Introduction 3
irrelevant, so narrowly circumstantial a term as ‘postcolonialism’ stood

at risk of becoming inevitably outmoded as a pertinent tool for intel-
lectual enquiry, although it retains its utility as a term to denote the
contestatory stance of the subaltern before the hegemonic. Many of its
energies were therefore decanted to diaspora, seized upon as a catch-all
concept capacious enough to subsume postcolonialism while simulta-
neously appearing better equipped to define a world admittedly con-
ditioned by flows of populations, collectives and groups but, 50 years
on from Indian independence, increasingly oblivious to colonial his-
tory and its postcolonial wake. ‘Diaspora’ makes it possible to connect
postcolonial histories with postmodern phenomena of migration in the
global society of multinational capitalism, evoking as it does ‘globalized
and transnational forces of world economy, international migrations,
global cities, cosmopolitanism and localism, and deterritorialized social
identities’ (Ponzanesi, 2004: 11). It is a term which is peculiarly capa-
ble of encompassing the ‘multiple subject positionings’ (Bhabha, 1994:
269–72) characteristic of contemporaneity.
In one sense, then, ‘diaspora’ may be understood as a broadening out
of the term ‘postcolonialism’ in acknowledgement both of the inad-
equacy of models which attended only to colonial territories and of the
fact that diaspora actually underwrites the historical process of coloni-
alism itself. At one and the same time diaspora ‘challenge[s] the suprem-
acy of national paradigms’ (Procter, 2007: 151) it can, after all, refer
to intranational as well as to international migration – and becomes
the salient demographic characteristic of colonialism, ‘itself a radically
diasporic movement, involving the temporary or permanent dispersion
and settlement of millions of Europeans over the entire world’ (Ashcroft,
Griffith and Tiffins, 1998: 69; qtd. Procter, 2007: 151). If diaspora is
to refer to movements of peoples from one territory (or territories) to
another (or others), either within or without national boundaries, it
might be wondered why a term so inescapably allusive of traumatic
episodes of Jewish history is preferred when other more analytical, less
emotive alternatives are available such as migrancy, transnationalism,
transculturalism or, simply, mobility, each of which seems perfectly
capable of subsuming its predecessor in the list, much as diaspora itself
subsumes postcolonialism (which in its turn had subsumed ‘common-
wealth’, as in ‘commonwealth literature’ or ‘commonwealth studies’).
Apart from anything else, the meaning of the alternatives is more
or less self-explanatory, whereas diaspora – even considered only in
its historical-geographical sense – resists simple definition and poses
numerous questions: Is diaspora necessarily a collective phenomenon?
Do only enforced migrations count as diasporic? Must diasporic com-

munities necessarily harbour dreams of a utopian return?1 Can those
who migrate for economic reasons or on account of some dissatisfaction
or another with their home culture be regarded as ‘diasporic’ subjects?
Chapter 10 looks at the writing of Chris Stewart, whose disaffection
with British consumerism and misgivings about commercial success
were among the factors which led him to migrate to southern Spain;
on the tropological level, Stewart’s account, which oscillates between
nostalgia and utopia and transcribes the process of cultural adaptation,
is certainly articulated in a voice familiar to us from other less uncer-
tainly diasporic writers.
But these issues concerning the strictly historical-geographical refer-
ence of the term ‘diaspora’ pale almost to insignificance when set beside
its considerable achievements on the epistemological plane where its
deployment as a theoretical concept has facilitated new ways of com-
ing to understand the contemporary world, thanks in large part to its
status as metaphor. According to James Procter, ‘Diaspora’ is ‘a way of
thinking, or of representing the world’ (2007: 151) and as such impinges
on everyone, not just migrant and minority communities. One central
tenet of diasporic sociology is that one of the challenges and benefits
of migrancy is the mutual transformation (see Ghandi, 1998) it entails
on the part of both migrant and indigene – one reason why, as John
McLeod, quoting from Avtar Brah (1996: 209), has written recently,
‘both the material and the imaginative spaces of diaspora demand the
attention and participation of those who “are constructed and repre-
sented as indigenous” ’ (2008: 4). McLeod continues: ‘Such imaginative
possibilities can be fed back into the social and material environments
of community and society as tentative utopian designs for progressive
social transformation in which the border logic of race and illiberal
nationalism is superseded by the common recognition of political and
ethical equality.’ McLeod’s impassioned claims for the transforma-
tive powers of the representations created by or through the diasporic
imagination are implicitly predicated on a view of literature as being
fundamentally metaphorical insofar as it provides the means to both
reconceptualize the world as we thought we knew it and, more radically,
to conceptualize new worlds that we hadn’t even imagined existed.
Those means are themselves, of course, metaphors, which brings us to
the second key term in this collection’s title.
Thirty years ago now, cognitive linguists Gary Lakoff and Mark
Johnson (1980) famously argued, as had Juan Luis Vives 450 years ear-
lier, that all language – whether scientific, historical or literary – is
Introduction 5
by nature metaphorical and cannot give us absolute truths about the

world but only schemes with which to conceptualize it, to form what
Coleridge termed ‘conceptions’ of reality. According to Giambattista
Vico’s principle of verum factum what is true (verum) and what is made
(factum) are the same, insofar as a society’s or culture’s conceptual
framework is derived from man’s experience of reality as expressed
metaphorically: it is those metaphorically constructed conceptual
frameworks which may be ascribed truth, not any autonomous objec-
tive reality, for reality is always experienced and the conceptualization
of that experience is always mediated metaphorically (Hawkes, 1972:
38–9). Thus, absolute, objective truth is simply not an option, and lit-
erature competes on equal terms with history and science – the latter
pair stripped now of any epistemological pretensions – in its aspira-
tion not to furnish us with knowledge, but to assist us in the cognitive
process of conceptualizing the world and, whenever necessary, recon-
ceptualizing it. The concepts we form will only ever be metaphorical,
provisional and cultural, amounting to a series of truths that are good
enough to be getting along with but always open to challenge, which is
why those who police a particular culture’s communal thought-world
are often anxious to censor or silence writers who provide new meta-
phors, new ways of seeing the world.
And not just of seeing, for McLeod’s claims for literature’s powers to
transform society rest on the assumption that metaphors may have a
tangible, political effect on the real world. This is indeed the case, for
much as on the individual level newfound understanding can lead to
personal change, on the collective level, as that individual cognitive
gain gradually multiplies to become common knowledge, it may lead
to social change via the perceptible modification of the public thought-
and life-world. Some such process was instantiated in the ‘Small Island
Read Project’ described by Muñoz-Valdivieso in Chapter 5. As Lakoff and
Johnson put it, metaphor has the ‘power [ ... ] to create a reality rather
than simply to give us a way of conceptualizing a pre-existing real-
ity’ (1980: 144). Indeed, as Elleke Boehmer (2005: 15–7, 49–56), among
others, has pointed out, imperialism’s fictions or ‘organising meta-
phors’ created a delusory world, a fact which accounts for much of the
diasporic subjects disillusionment once relocated in a new land which
does not answer to its self-descriptions. If, as Paul Gilroy (2004; 2005)
argues, a certain melancholy pervades the diasporic subjects presented
to us by writers like Nadeem Aslam, Abdulrazak Gurnah or Andrea Levy
(Chapters 1, 2 and 5, respectively), it is as much due to their disap-
pointed expectations as to their cultural and emotional deracination.
Nevertheless, metaphor’s passage in postcolonial and diasporia theory

and writing has not always been untroubled. If Salman Rushdie’s essay
‘Imaginary Homelands’ (1981) is in many ways seminal in its statement
of the imagined, metaphoric nature of diasporic acts of remembrance
and inscriptions of new realities, much discussion of metaphor in
diasporic theory has been self-referential, often ‘submerged by increas-
ingly fashionable poststructuralist jargon’ (Ponzanesi, 2004: 4). Great
care should be taken when selecting which metaphors – if any – should
be pressed into service as analytical categories or tools of enquiry, a case
in point being the sub-metaphors which have been eagerly picked from
the etymological entrails of ‘diaspora’. Theorists of diaspora from Paul
Gilroy to Stuart Hall, James Clifford and James Procter have made much
of the two meanings – ‘sow’ or ‘scatter’ – of the original Greek verb
diaspeirein, but it is worth noting that these two meanings are only so
when the latter is taken more figuratively to denote ‘disperse’ or ‘spread
abroad’, since ‘scatter’ is actually a literal synonym of ‘sow’, which refers
to the manual dispersal of seed. Now the result of sowing – the germi-
nation of the seed in the ground – may easily be identified with settle-
ment, while scattering, dispersing and spreading abroad are obviously
all related to motion and movement, and thus an analytical dichotomy
is posited between ‘a politics of place’ (Procter, 2003: 14) or ‘rootedness’
and another of journeying or ‘rootlessness’. Yet this dichotomy is only
disingenuously exegeticized from the term ‘diaspora’ itself: the sowing
or scattering of seed may imply the taking of root, but does not neces-
sarily entail it, while, taken literally, ‘sow’ and ‘scatter’ are synonymous
renderings of the Greek verb.
What is more, once deployed outside agricultural contexts ‘diaspora’
is transformed into a metaphor and at once becomes semantically
deeply unstable and therefore endlessly interpretable: accordingly,
one’s own preferred readings of it can hardly be proffered as axiomatic,
definitive or scientifically useful. A case in point is the epistemological
value attached to the omnipresent pun on ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, which
replays the same dubious dichotomy, but only in English, the linguis-
tic exclusivity of the homophony being unfortunate, to say the least,
when the nature and scope of diaspora theory is perforce international.
While ‘roots’ may, at a push, be suggested by the literal meaning of
‘diaspora’, the same cannot be said of its homophone ‘routes’, which
is only a very tenuous cognate of figurative meanings ‘dispersion’ or
‘spreading abroad’. Furthermore, all this wordplay with ‘diaspora’ as an
etymological item only diverts attention away from its usage to denom-
inate the historical Jewish experience of enforced migration, a usage
Introduction 7
which, though prior to the term’s enlistment in postcolonial circles, is

an inheritance often only reluctantly acknowledged (see Chapter 7) and
which some urge be ‘superseded’ (Cohen, 1997: 3). In short, a metaphor
used wisely will assist understanding; if unwisely, scepticism or even
bewilderment may ensue.
There is a not insignificant imbalance between the prolific theoretical
elaborations of metaphorical concepts and the little critical attention
paid to comparative metaphorics in actual literary praxis. One reason for
this is that since Paul de Man (1979), on account of its searching out of
similarities the trope of metaphor has become associated with an impulse
towards homogeneity and totalitarianism on the discursive level which
mirrors and enables the erasure of the very difference on which much
colonial discourse was predicated (see, for example, Ashcroft, Griffiths
and Tiffin, 1989: 51–2). Since the trope of metonymy foregrounds dif-
ference, much postcolonial and diasporic theory has seized on it as the
representational champion of the fragmentary nature of human experi-
ence in general and of the multitude of diverse diasporic localizations
and subject positions in particular. Metaphor, so it goes, posits cultural
identity, metonym cultural specificity. Craps’s study of Caryl Phillips
(Chapter 7) is deeply sensitive to the representational politics of the two
tropes in connection with the black and Jewish diasporas. The antipathy
felt by postcolonial and diaspora theorists towards metaphor may even
be symptomatic of ‘the risk of totalization and homogenization that is
endemic to postcolonial discourse’ (Ponzanesi, 2004: 3), the adoption
of metonymy constituting the intonation of a mea culpa. Thus Revathi
Krishnaswamy has warned of the ‘excessive figurative flexibility [of] the
metaphorization of post-colonial migrancy [which] is becoming so over-
blown, overdetermined, and amorphous as to repudiate any meaningful
specificity of historical location or interpretation’ (1995: 128).
The case against metaphor is at times vitiated by a loose or inconsistent
handling of terms. All too often, metonymy is confused with synecdo-
che, thus undermining confidence in the theoretical postulates made to
rest on it.2 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin see ‘language
variance’ as a metonym insofar as it is ‘a “part” of a wider cultural whole’
(1989: 51); yet it is synecdoche which introduces a part to stand for a
whole. Homi K. Bhabha, whose index to The Location of Culture contains
16 entries for ‘metonymy’, none for ‘metaphor’, elides the two figures in
the baffling definition of metonymy as ‘a figure of contiguity that substi-
tutes a part for a whole (an eye for an I)’ (1994: 54). What is more, while
subscribing to de Man’s view of metaphor as imposing specious iden-
tity and totalizing reality, Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin’s critical practice
reveals a rather different attitude, according to which a metaphor is no

more able to assemble fragments than to ‘ “embody” its tenor and vehi-
cle’ (1989: 71). Again, the case against metaphor might have a difficult
task answering the question, ‘If literature is not metaphorical, what is
it?’3 Or, to put it another way, if literature is to be in any sense politically
instrumental – as, presumably, diaspora critics would wish – it must be
so insofar as it can offer new insights and say new things – and the sine
qua non of that function of literature is metaphor. Metonymy’s is a nar-
rowly circumscribed energy, condemning us at best to an endless oscilla-
tion between two related but different objects, never advancing towards
the knowledge of something new;4 metaphor, in contrast, is dynamic
and procreative, engendering new possibilities, capable of changing the
world. Even were it true that, in its feet-on-the-ground attention to dif-
ference, metonymy were more egalitarian than metaphor, it is the latter’s
panache and emotive strength that incite us to question the status quo
and build new communities on the blueprints of utopia.
More importantly, it is quite simply not the case that metaphor erases
difference out of some despotic zeal to homogenize. The semantic
movement between a metaphor’s vehicle and its topic is much more
bidirectional than generally supposed: to adopt Wendy Zierler’s phrase
(quoted by Craps in Chapter 7) for the relationship between Jewish and
black experience in Caryl Phillips’s fiction, metaphor encapsulates ‘a
dialectic of difference and sameness’ (2004: 50). On this view, rather
than simply foisting similarity on the different in an ideologized proc-
ess of domestication, the two components of a metaphor, its vehicle
and topic, mutually cast each other in a new light, enhancing our cog-
nitive apprehension and conceptual definition of both: as Max Black
(1962: 232) asserted of the metaphor ‘George is a lone wolf’, ‘[i]f to call
a man a wolf is to put him in a special light, we must not forget that
the metaphor makes the wolf seem more humane than he otherwise
would.’ The effect of a metaphor would not then be to create a spurious
similarity which obliterated otherness, but to facilitate knowledge of
the other through familiarizing it, while at the same time questioning
assumptions about the familiar by rendering it somewhat stranger. As
Muñoz-Valdivieso reminds us (Chapter 5), the imperial schoolteachers’
efforts to daffodilize Caribbean flora were met by the equal and oppo-
site efforts of the schoolchildren to hibiscicize the daffodil: once ener-
gized by the ambivalencies of metaphor, neither daffodil nor hibiscus
are ever seen in quite the same way again – and, crucially, they can both
be seen simultaneously in their mutual differences and similarities.
Introduction 9
Most importantly, the opponents of metaphor fail to appreciate how

the diasporic subject is itself deeply metaphorical by nature. In fact,
when Bhabha addresses the question ‘How newness enters the world’,
he inadvertently hits the nail on the head when he states that his inten-
tion is ‘to foreground the “foreignness” of cultural translation’ (1994:
227). Once regarded as agent or channel of ‘cultural translation’, the
diasporic subject is inevitably figured as a metaphor, or translatio, a
vessel of meaning that shuttles back and forth between two differ-
ent realms of significance, its ‘homeland’ and its ‘new home’, just as
the metaphor takes its reader on a journey between origin and target
domains. For Bhabha, ‘[t]ranslation is the performative nature of cul-
tural communication [ ... ] that movement of meaning [ ... ] that, in the
words of de Man [1986: 32], “puts the original in motion to decanonise
it, giving it the movement of fragmentation, a wandering of errance,
a kind of permanent exile” ’ (1994: 228). It is immediately apparent
how this account of translation might be applied to the subaltern or to
the diasporic subject, contesting hegemonic discourses, complement-
ing totalizing fabrications of sameness with narratives of fragmentary
specificity, and permanently adrift between homeland and home, two
different realms of signification between which it exists and because of
which any definitive meaning for it, as for metaphor, is in permanent
deferral. Many of the diasporic characters discussed in the chapters to
follow feel insecure when confronted with the indeterminacy which
results from their uprootedness: Hand (Chapter 2) brings out the sensa-
tion of not fitting in experienced by Gurnah’s characters when return-
ing from Britain to Zanzibar, while, as Maxey (Chapter 4) demonstrates,
the same indeterminacy is registered uneasily by Hanif Kureishi when
he revisits Pakistan. Yet that indeterminacy (only a more acute form
of the indeterminacy experienced by all postmodern subjects) may
not despair of finding a new cultural dispensation in the future which
will confer upon it a more definitive meaning. In the meantime, as
a metaphoric being, the diasporic subject’s attempts to assimilate the
unfamiliar aspects of the new home with the aid of metaphoric refer-
ence to familiar aspects of the old homeland enable it to maintain some
integrity as it struggles to survive; at the same time its metaphorical
representations transport its audience to that same original home, not
only enhancing its cognitive familiarity with the foreign but also its
empathetic identification with the diasporic subject, once translated
into its vital experiences. This is the effect of Nadeem Aslam’s use of
nature imagery, as Weedon suggests in Chapter 1.
As implied above, the focus of this collection is firmly on the meta-

phors of diaspora available in literary praxis.5 The use of metaphor as the
starting point for reading diasporic texts is especially appropriate since
the supplanting of the world as it is with imagined worlds which were or
might be has been signalled as one of the features which distinguishes
diaspora from other concepts applied to experiences of deracination and
migration. In her seminal work, Cartographies of Diaspora, Avtar Brah
sets great store by the imaginary aspect of the concept of diasporic com-
munity. For Brah, it ‘delineates a field of identifications where “imagined
communities” are forged within and out of a confluence of narratives
from annals of collective memory and re-memory’ (1996: 196); diaspora
becomes, then, a state of mind rather than a social or geographical phe-
nomenon like immigration or migrancy. It is a cognitive frame within
which immigrants and migrants may attempt to order their experiences
and from which to express them; as such, diaspora is intrinsically dis-
cursive and susceptible of just the sort of rhetorical analysis carried out
by the essays in this collection. Other key formulations of diaspora share
this emphasis on its imaginative nature. Vijay Mishra, for example,
draws on Jaques Lacan’s and Slavoj Žižek’s uses of the term ‘imaginary’
to define as a ‘diasporic imaginary’ ‘any ethnic enclave in a nation-state
that defines itself, consciously, unconsciously, or because of the political
self-interest of a racialized nation-state, as a group that lives in displace-
ment’, the key point about such ‘enclaves’ or ‘imaginaries’ being their
‘identification with the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves,
with the image representing “what we should like to be” ’ (1996: 423).
Mishra’s idea that the self-images of diasporic subjects are imaginative
exercises in wish-fulfilment is endorsed by Monika Fludernik, according
to whom ‘people who identify themselves as part of a diaspora are creat-
ing an “imaginary”– a landscape of dream and fantasy that answers to
their desires’ (2003: xi).
By studying the metaphors that contribute to the literary transcrip-
tion of such ‘imaginaries’, we may, as suggested above, gain knowledge
of how the diasporic subject conceptualizes the world it lives in and the
experiences it has of it. That is the cognitive yield of metaphor which
can lead to the modification of our own concepts and, ultimately, of
the world we live in. But metaphor has too an emotional yield with an
ethical effect. When being transported between vehicle and tenor, from
the diasporic subject’s thought-world as expressed linguistically to its
life-world as figured metaphorically, the reader is unavoidably relocated
into that life-world. Metaphoric language, therefore, generates empathy.
Once we have been uprooted into the situationality of our interlocutor,
Introduction 11
not only will the contextual disparity that originally obtained between
us diminish, but we will also be able better to identify with the other
in a dialogic process of development akin to that which Charles Taylor
(1994: 32–5) has theorized in respect of the individual’s interaction
with significant others. The study of the metaphors used by diasporic
subjects of the diasporic experience will sensitize us therefore to the
way they feel; by so doing, our sense of community with them will be
enhanced thanks to their inscriptions of equally sentient and human
human beings.
In this sense of facilitating the building of community, metaphor has
a clearly political agenda, a point which should silence those who may
suspect a concern with the uses of metaphor in literary practice as indi-
cating a retreat into the aesthetic. Nothing could be farther from the
truth. Weedon (Chapter 1) and Carrera Suárez (Chapter 9) locate their
readings of Aslam and Zadie Smith, respectively, firmly in the social
and political context of the increased tension that led up to the 2005
London bombings. One of the great strengths of Weedon’s chapter is
its meticulous interrelation of Aslam’s tropes with the genuine need for
Muslim immigrants in England’s northern industrial towns and cities
to find survival strategies, not only to help them preserve a core Muslim
identity but also to counter very real social threats. Carrera Suárez
argues further that Smith’s engagement with blood-related metaphors
is an attempt to dismantle self-serving discourses of national identity
which erected race as the prime criterion of belonging and thus con-
verted blood into one of Boehmer’s ‘organising metaphors’. In similar
spirit, according to Muñoz-Valdivieso (Chapter 5), Andrea Levy’s Small
Island deconstructs what postcolonial critics have termed the filiative
and affiliative tropes of the British Empire. Morton (Chapter 8) and
Galván-Álvarez (Chapter 6) show how, respectively, Salman Rushdie’s
metaphorical praxis in Midnight’s Children and V. S. Naipaul’s in Half a
Life emerge from the very real discourses of Nehruvian secularism and
Ghandian nationalism. Maxey’s reading of miscegenation as a trope in
the works of Hanif Kureishi (Chapter 4) is illuminating among other
reasons for detailing how attitudes to racial hybridity is an issue which
transcends the realm of racial politics and impinges on the politics of
gender and class. For his part, Elia (Chapter 3) suggests that Mohsin
Hamad’s fiction, in addition to interrogating issues of identity in the
aftermath of the 9/11 bombings, draws on the mythical figure of the
janissary to construct an allegory critical of US corporate capitalism
which pursues to ends of colonial imperialism by other means. Finally,
as noted above, Craps’s chapter on Caryl Phillips (Chapter 7) reflects
critically on the political implications of metaphor and metonymy in

the context of comparative diaspora studies.
Recurrent tropes employed by the featured writers to structure their
experiences and narratives include memory, loss, hybridity, home and
fragmentation. On the one hand, these tropes have an evident expe-
riential origin in the life histories of the diasporic subjects involved
and as such contribute to structuring many of the works discussed on
the diegetic level. But the fact that such experience is constitutive of
diasporic identity is brought particularly to the fore when such tropes
also become the structural principles of the narrative on the level of
form. This is the case of the trope of fragmentation in the novels of
Gurnah, Hamid, Levy, Naipaul, Phillips and Rushdie discussed here.
For Hand (Chapter 2), ‘[Gurnah’s] narrator’s story-telling [ ... ] becomes
a metaphor at one and the same time for migrant adaptation to new
surroundings and for the discursive nature of postcolonial identity
itself’; and ‘[his narrators’] tale-telling is [ ... ] not only a metaphor for
their piecemeal, diasporic identity, but is actually constitutive of it.’
Elia (Chapter 3) points out how Hamid’s experiments with form in The
Reluctant Fundamentalist configure what Hamid himself calls ‘a divided
man’s conversation with himself’. In Muñoz-Valdivieso’s account
(Chapter 5), the polyvocality of Levy’s Small Island is a stratagem for
getting diasporic voices and their histories heard, insofar as they are
granted the same airtime, so to speak, as metropolitan ones. The way
Naipaul’s Half a Life dips intertextually, diegetically and formally into
South Asian myth cycles becomes in Galván-Álvarez’s fascinating exe-
gesis (Chapter 6) a metaphor for the constant deferral of fixed identity,
for ‘every step the displaced subject attempts to take towards his or her
origins becomes a step away from any such unstable point of reference’:
like Willie Somerset Chandram’s stories, the diasporic subject’s roots
are ultimately liquid and unstable. The fragmented narratives of Caryl
Phillips are more familiar, but Craps’s reading (Chapter 7) is sensitive to
the way the fragmented structure of The Nature of Blood is an invitation
to the reader to find the connections that join the formally disparate
experiences of Jews and blacks throughout history. Finally, as Morton
(Chapter 8) argues, in Midnight’s Children the proliferation of stories told
by Saleem in his role of Scheherazade ‘is an attempt to articulate the
multiplicity of voices that constitute the nation’.
This imbrication between narrative form and diasporic identity
is analogous on the aesthetic level to the individual’s diegesis of the
self in what such theorists of identity as Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricœur
and Charles Taylor have termed identity narratives (see, for example,
Introduction 13
Ricœur, 1992: 143–5, 246–9; and Taylor, 1989: 50–2). Thus diasporic
subjectivity is consistent with postmodern or non-foundational episte-
mologies of the self. Meanwhile, the compelled, compulsive or compet-
ing tale-telling of Saleem, of Gurnah’s narrators, of Levy’s characters
becomes a further metaphor of identity as performance or ‘performativ-
ity’ (Butler, 1999), a further trope which, since Erving Goffman’s The
Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959), has shaped the postmodern
or non-foundational notion of identity as a presentation or dramatiza-
tion, the ur-case of which for the diasporic subject might well be the
dramatic tale Othello performs to woo Desdemona in Shakespeare’s
tragedy. Indeed, postcolonialism has provided two tropes of its own
which emphasize this performative aspect of identity, ‘passing’ and
‘mimicry’ (Bhabha, 1994: 85–92). Maxey (Chapter 4) shows how in his
fictions Kureishi is perpetually engaged with the performative nature of
‘passing’, an issue of particular complexity to the biracial subject, while
‘mimicry’ is examined by Hand, Muñoz-Valdivieso, Galván-Álvarez and
Morton (Chapters 2, 5, 6 and 8, respectively). This tropological dove-
tailing between postmodern or non-foundational theory and the liter-
ary praxis of diasporic writers naturally raises questions about whether
it is a matter of mere coincidence or whether, rather, postmodernism
was postcolonial first, or vice versa. These questions have already been
addressed (e.g. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1989: 155–80; Bhabha,
1994: 171–97), but not yet given adequate answer.
That many metaphors and tropes recur across our selection of writ-
ers might seem to imply a view of diasporic writing which sees it as
totalizing – paradoxically, just the sort of conclusion that would have
postcolonialist opponents of metaphor rubbing their hands in ironic
glee. For Bhabha, the diasporic subject, or migrant, represents the ‘sig-
nifying position of the minority that resists totalization’ (1994: 162),
and the risk of metaphor is that it induces a false, essentialist belief in a
unitary diasporic condition contrary to Stuart Hall’s conception of ‘[c]
ultural identities [as] the points of identification, the unstable points
of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of
history and culture. Not an essence, but a positioning’ (1993: 395).6 Yet
on the one hand it is only to be expected that, if disparate experiences
are to be communicated at all, there will be some positing of common
ground to ease the hermeneutic passage between the foreign life-world
of the diasporic writer and the life-world of the reader: conventional
metaphors are one means towards this end, one means, pace Bhabha,
of bringing ‘newness’ into the world as is also, after all, the adoption of
standard linguistic conventions by the vast majority of diasporic writers
writing in English. Communication is always a matter of compromise,

and communicators are always bidden to communicate in certain ways:
in this sense, the diasporic subject is, like all other subjects, a ‘communi-
tarian’ subject. This is not, of course, to deprive the subject of any indi-
vidual specificity at all: common paradigms may be uniquely inflected,
so that the subject may be considered a ‘communitarian individual’.7
And indeed, in the essays assembled here, specificity shares the lime-
light with totalization.
Given the numerous points of contact between the essays in this collec-
tion, it seemed that the best and simplest way to arrange the chapters was
in alphabetical order of surnames of the writers treated. Chris Weedon’s
sights in Chapter 1 are firmly trained on the here and now, as depicted in
the fiction of Nadeem Aslam, whose Maps for Lost Lovers on the one hand
presents readers with the grittier realities of the northern English flip side
to Zadie Smith’s metropolitan multiculture, while exploring on the other
the sociocultural origins of the 2001 riots and the 2005 London bomb-
ings. Unusually among many writers of South Asian descent, Aslam pre-
fers a more poetic mode of writing to social realism, and Weedon shows
with great sensitivity how metaphors play their part in Aslam’s treatment
of such issues as place, community and identity, secularism and funda-
mentalism, generational conflict, and loss. Particularly striking is Aslam’s
use of nature imagery which, Weedon suggests, ‘allows both for beauty to
emerge in the context of deprivation and oppression and for the explora-
tion of both differences and continuities between the former lives – now
lost – in Pakistan and life in England.’
If ‘loss’ is a key word in Weedon’s essay, it is no less so in Felicity Hand’s
study in Chapter 2 of the three most recent novels by British-Zanzibari
writer Abdulrazak Gurnah. By building his narratives around the tropes
of fragmentation and silence, Gurnah delves into the experiences of
failed migrants, of those who have migrated for economic, political
or emotional reasons but do not fulfil the expectations they and their
families had harboured of them. All Gurnah’s main characters, from
the nameless narrator in Admiring Silence, through Saleh Omar and Latif
Mahmud in By the Sea, to Rashid in Desertion, are portrayed as displaced
individuals, simultaneously alienated from the host community and
homeland alike. As Hand demonstrates, in their attempts to re-write,
re-invent or re-member their past, whether through nostalgic tales or
scraps from notebooks, Gurnah’s characters are occupied in creating
their own ‘imaginaries’, in piecing together integrated identity narra-
tives of themselves to compensate for the deficient and fragmentary
sense of self they experience as diasporic subjects.
Introduction 15
In Chapter 3, Adriano Elia’s study of the fiction of Mohsin Hamid

returns us to the same subjective ambivalence experienced by Gurnah’s
characters. After explaining how Hamid himself is a successful – and
privileged – player of the transnational game, someone who ‘has to
come to terms with his own ambivalence and in-betweenness’, Elia
considers the crucial role played by metaphor in his fiction to date.
An analysis of the contradictions of late-1990s Pakistan, Moth Smoke
alludes to what remains when the moth is fatally seduced by the candle
flame. According to Elia, this conventional metaphor becomes an alle-
gory of the risks run by the self-destructive young protagonist’s involve-
ment with the Western vices of sex, drugs and easy money. The title of
Hamid’s second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, alludes to a whole
range of analogies – especially the metaphorical and allegorical force of
the ‘janissary’ figure – that the novel explores between religious funda-
mentalism and the Western capitalism’s economic analysis of funda-
mentals in which main character Changez is employed with increasing
reluctance and moral misgivings. As mentioned above, the narrative
form of a ‘divided man’s conversation with himself’ is a further meta-
phor for split diasporic identity.
In Chapter 4, Ruth Maxey analyses miscegenation as both reality
and metaphor in the writing of Hanif Kureishi. As Maxey points out,
this age-old racialist bogeyman is a subject which has received little
attention in scholarship relating to Kureishi – despite his own biracial
identity – which tends to examine the theme of cultural hybridity in
his work, at the expense of ‘physical, ontological, and social realities of
being half-South Asian and half-white: the status of so many of his fic-
tional characters.’ Maxey shows how Kureishi uses the metaphor of mis-
cegenation to interrogate ideas of diasporic identity, contending that his
largely celebratory vision finds expression through a range of linguistic
techniques which raise crucial questions about home and belonging
while at the same time suggesting the sheer normality and importance
of mixed-race status as an emblem of contemporary Britishness. In
addition to the ways miscegenation may be signed in terms of gender
and class, as remarked above, of particular interest is Maxey’s discussion
of how the trope of ‘passing’ needs to be nuanced in regard of biracial
subjects, and how identity’s different hues may be played up in differ-
ent contexts.
In Chapter 5, Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso explores metaphors of identity
and belonging in Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island. Of particular inter-
est is the way the novel subverts many of the metaphors, such as the
‘mother country’, traditionally deployed to formulate the relationship
between the centre of empire and the colonies. More striking, perhaps,
is the way the daffodil comes to be taken as a metaphor for imperial
control in a trope that originated in the use of Wordsworth’s poem
‘Daffodils’ in colonial education. Muñoz-Valdivieso argues that Levy
is more radical than other Caribbean writers in her repudiation of this
trope, which she refracts through the Caribbean voices of her charac-
ters and deconstructs in her descriptions of a far from idyllic England.
Muñoz-Valdivieso concludes by suggesting that the novel’s use of easily
apprehensible metaphors for the complex condition of the postcolonial
and diasporic subject is in large part responsible for its popularity and,
more importantly, for its contribution to discussions of racial forma-
tions in the recent history of the UK.
Enrique Galván-Álvarez’s study of V. S. Naipaul in Chapter 6 inserts
his novel Half a Life into the tradition of much South Asian diasporic
literature of drawing on the epic cycles of the Mahabharata and the Ram
Katha. According to Galván-Álvarez, Naipaul’s novels replicate the nar-
rative forms and techniques of those myth cycles, in particular, their
way of telling stories through other stories by the accumulation of over-
lapping narratives. Thus, Naipaul negotiates his complex relationship
with the narratives of his ancestral background from a perspective that
departs from and challenges Western notions of myth and its post-
modern deconstruction. More importantly, by problematizing his own
positionality with regard to the literary traditions of new home and
homeland, Naipaul’s narrative technique itself stands as a metaphor for
the way identity is discursively constructed through other narratives
and becomes an allegory on the diegetic level of his transcultural condi-
tion as a diasporic subject, caught between overlapping cultures whose
histories are told through each other’s and have no ultimate origin in a
timeless ocean of retellings.
Stef Craps proposes in Chapter 7 that for diaspora to be understood
properly at all, a metaphorical epistemology whose analogical proc-
esses elide difference should be complemented, if not replaced, with
a metonymical one which thrives on it and would facilitate the ‘dis-
mantling [of] these anti-comparativist impulses’ prevalent in Jewish
and black diaspora studies. That in turn would deliver a fuller picture
of the dark underside of modernity and pave the way for alliances and
solidarities that transcend race, ethnicity, nationality, religion and cul-
ture. Through his analysis of Phillips’s deployment of metaphor and
metonymy, understood not only in the strict linguistic sense of particu-
lar figures of speech but also in the extended sense of deep structures
of thought that predetermine the way one looks at history, Craps shows
Introduction 17
how Phillips’s work seeks to foster attunement to multiple histories of

suffering and to move beyond various tribalisms by supplementing
a metaphorical view of history, which, in its insistence on similarity,
threatens to conflate distinct historical experiences, with a metonymi-
cal view, which places them alongside one another and thus preserves
the distance between them.
For Stephen Morton in Chapter 8, ‘the secular is a significant and
unstable trope’ in Salman Rushdie’s fiction. On the one hand, Rushdie’s
use of metaphor may seem to preserve the distinction between the sec-
ular life of the postcolonial nation and the non-secular world evoked in
images of the otherworldly such as his parodies of Bombay cinema or
his engagement with the Arabian Nights. But on the other, it is precisely
through metaphor that Rushdie interrogates the democratic claims of
Nehruvian secularism. In Midnight’s Children, the synecdochical failure
of Saleem Sinai’s body to represent wholly the entire Indian population
mirrors the false universality of Nehru’s nationalist rhetoric, the ideal
India of which is besieged by the hyperbolic forces of communal vio-
lence, neocolonialism, war and class politics. This critique of Nehruvian
secularism is developed further in The Moor’s Last Sigh, where Aurora
Zogoiby’s surreal palimpsest paintings juxtapose the imaginary worlds
of Moorish Spain and those of late-twentieth-century India in order to
disclose the fault lines in postcolonial secularism. Morton concludes by
arguing that when in Shalimar the Clown Rushdie renames the female
protagonist India as Kashmir, the novelist is in fact returning to the
utopian land of lost, secular content that framed his diasporic vision of
India in Midnight’s Children and Imaginary Homelands.
In Chapter 9, Isabel Carrera Suárez offers an innovative reading
of Zadie Smith’s first and most critically acclaimed and controver-
sial novel White Teeth whose dialectical interrogation of embodied
and organic metaphors engenders more complex readings than those
usually acknowledged. After demonstrating the rarely noted- inter-
textual presence and structural influence of Donna Haraway’s Modest_
Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan_Meets_Oncomouse. Feminism and
Technoscience (1997), some characters are shown to ‘live by’ what Carrera
Suárez terms ‘blinding or falsely holistic’ and moribund, overdetermin-
ing tropes such as the essentialist metaphor of blood for kinship, hered-
ity, race or nation. Another, newer metaphor of genetic engineering for
hereditarianism is also shown to be inadequate to the task of explaining
the human condition of multicultural hybridity. In contrast, the more
creative, literary alternatives, such as the ‘white teeth’ of the title, sug-
gest the daily negotiation of life, of a transformative language and of a
desired future not yet built but already imagined, even if at a cost and
not quite guaranteeing a ‘future perfect’, as the London bombings of
2005 were soon to corroborate.
This collection ends with my own essay, Chapter 10, which extends
the reach of diaspora to encompass voluntary migration and offers
a reading of Chris Stewart’s Driving over Lemons that emphasizes its
affinities with diasporic narratives of arrival and cultural adaptation.
Stewart adopts as a metaphor for his cultural immersion the river which
flows through his valley in the Alpujarras; more accurately, incidents
involving Stewart, the river and its waters compose an allegory of his
gradual adaptation to life in Spain and the way his identity is trans-
formed through a process of cultural mimesis. Casting its net wider,
the chapter then demonstrates how the rituals of symbolic rebirth and
baptism associated with riverine passages through the underworld or
immersion in the Jordan of diaspora have had a more than vestigial
presence in arrival narratives from Homer to Rushdie. What is more, in
combination with the trope of musicianship they constitute an Orphic
paradigm for the transcription of subjective alterity – a paradigm in
which Stewart’s guitar-playing enables him to participate. This total-
izing account of structural tropes of generic experiences raises the ques-
tion of whether the category of diasporic identity is valid at all, or, if so,
whether we are not all diasporic subjects, endlessly moving from one
context to another and reshaping our identities in the process.
What all the writers studied in these pages have in common is their
transcription of the diasporic subject’s essential ‘in-betweenness’, an
indeterminate intermediateness between homeland and new home,
past and present, old self and new, dreams shattered or yet to come true.
Characterized by doubts, misgivings, and qualified hopes, the subjects
who protagonize the novels this book discusses are never out-and-out
utopians; nor yet are they dyed-in-the-wool pessimists. For all its imper-
fections, the past is acknowledged as a factor which determines the
present and will continue to shape the future. Like Orpheus, in other
words, the diasporic subject is condemned to retrospection, desirous of
one last glimpse of what lies behind. The story of Orpheus ends with his
dismemberment at the frenzied hands of the women of Thrace: his loss
of Eurydice had transformed him into a misogynist who only felt con-
tempt for the opposite sex. The ultimate moral may be, therefore, that
one’s nostalgia for the past should never jaundice one’s attitude to the
present. History will always be there, but we should be careful not to
live in its thrall. Although Orpheus’ human failing unleashes his trag-
edy, the myth still holds out the possibility of the return of lover and
Introduction 19
beloved from beyond the terrible threshold. But human frailty is a pow-
erful argument against such a perfect conclusion. Perhaps, then, the
diasporic subject should revel in its ‘in-betweenness’ and appoint itself
champion of things, not become or to become, but becoming. In the
transit zone between Zadie Smith’s imperfect pasts and future perfects,
the diasporic subject’s intrinsic condition is transience, a transience
akin to that flicker of significance which offers fleeting illumination
when the passage is made between a metaphor’s tenor and its vehicle.
As suggested earlier, when such subjects traverse their vital paths
from one spatial and temporal ground to another in which their mean-
ing will be different, they are themselves like metaphors, their present
literal world of significance lying an imaginative leap away from their
inevitably figurative because discursive recollections of their past world
of origin. But they are also metaphors because, precisely through those
recollections – however fragmentary, misremembered or mediated they
might be – they can also transport the indigenes of their new home back
to that other home they themselves have abandoned but not forgotten.
As long as there is memory, their past may intervene in their and our
future so that in the greater and future scheme of things the literature
of diaspora they produce may come to be regarded as the opening chap-
ter in the bildungsroman of a new world where metaphors of diaspora
may no longer be necessary.
Notes
1. For definitions of ‘diaspora’ see, for example, Clifford (1994), Cohen (1996)
and Hall (1990).
2. In all fairness, it should be pointed out that some semioticians deny any dif-
ference between metonymy and synecdoche (Eco, 1990: 207-119).
3. A difficulty compounded by the metaphorical nature of language and cogni-
tion we noted above.
4. Leech (1969: 153) quotes G. Esnaut (Imagination Populaire, Metaphores
Occidentales, 1925) for whom ‘Metonymy does not open up new paths like
metaphorical intuition, but, taking too familiar paths in its stride, it shortens
distances so as to facilitate the swift intuition of things already known.’
5. Other tropes will also be discussed, such as allegory, allusion, hyperbole,
metonymy and synecdoche; but it is metaphor which most insistently claims
our attention.
6. See also Andrew Smith’s lucid discussion (2004: 254–7).
7. My ‘communitarian individual’ is a rephrasing of the literary pragmatist’s
concept of ‘social individual’, which rescues the subject from the cramp-
ings of poststructuralist determinism (for the seminal account see R. D. Sell,
2000: 145–58).
1
Tropes of Diasporic Life in the
Work of Nadeem Aslam
Chris Weedon
1 Introduction
In his book Multiculturalism (2007), Tariq Modood argues a strong case

for the accommodation of difference within a positive conception of
multiculturalism. This has been an important strand in the cultural
politics of diversity in the UK since the 1960s, culminating in the
Parekh Report of 2002.1 But it has increasingly come under attack since
2001 in the wake of 9/11, riots in the north of England in 2001 and the
London bombings of 2005. At issue is the place of Muslims and Islam
in British society. Modood suggests that positive conceptions of multi-
culturalism require ‘recognition of difference’ and ‘respect for identities
that are important to people’. He argues that we should ‘begin with the
fact of negative “difference”: with alienness, inferiorization, stigmatiza-
tion, stereotyping, exclusion, discrimination, racism, etc’ but we also
need to understand ‘the sense of identity that groups so perceived have
of themselves’ (p. 37). The collective contribution made by writers of
South Asian, African and the Caribbean descent in the UK since the
1950s can be read as contributing significantly to this agenda through
its attention to migration, settlement and life across generations in the
diaspora.2
Much British black and South Asian writing has used social realism
to evoke the effects of racism, class, gender and cultural difference on
minority individuals and communities. Realism functions as a form
of testimony to experiences which are often invisible to mainstream
white society. Other writers use broadly postmodern literary strategies
to explore hybridity and to imagine modes of living beyond ethno-
centrism and racism. They offer a ‘third space’ in which questions of
belonging are complexified, as identity is shown to be both multiple
20
Tropes of Diasporic Life in the Work of Nadeem Aslam 21
and fluid, yet most often overdetermined by racism. Place is consist-

ently important in these texts, both the location of the narrative and
the imagined homeland to which protagonists look for a sense of
belonging. As Mark Stein so aptly puts it, belonging to a diaspora ‘is not
a place to be circumscribed geographically; it is a relational term, point-
ing elsewhere’ (Stein, 2004: 62).3
Much British South Asian writing is set in the communities that
developed in Britain’s industrial cities since the 1950s (Wilson, 1978;
Brah, 1996). It focuses on the relations between difference, identity and
belonging.4 These themes also figure strongly in films such as East Is
East (1999) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Aslam locates Maps for Lost
Lovers in an unnamed northern English city, the setting for a number of
recent novels and films which, with London, forms the main locations
for British South Asian writing. Racialization is a major theme in these
texts, which evoke the history of race relations and the uneven develop-
ment of multiculturalism in Britain since the Second World War.5 They
focus on the experience of first-generation migrants and of children
growing up in the UK, in and between two or more cultures. Those
who came (and continue to come) to the UK are diverse in terms of
class, religion and place of origin. Much literature and film is informed
by personal and family history and experience and gives persuasive
voice to people whose perspectives would not normally be heard (see
Weedon, 2008a).
As recent scholarship has documented, lack of opportunity, crises of
identity, racism and the competing appeal of drugs and Islamism beset
British Pakistani communities. These themes can be found in recent
novels and films, for example Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995),
M. Y. Alam’s Kilo (2002), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and Kenneth
Glenaan’s film Yasmin (2005). Whereas Yasmin shows small-scale drug
pushing and Islamism as competing modes of escape from a sense of
hopelessness grounded in social exclusion, Kilo focuses on organized
crime around drugs and the sex industry and the violent yet lavish
lifestyles that it supports. Meanwhile, the rise of fundamentalism is a
central concern in Kureishi’s novel The Black Album (1995) and the con-
troversial film version of his short story My Son the Fanatic (1997), which
caused considerable offence among practicing Muslims.6 Since 2001, a
growing body of fictional texts, both literature and film, has explored
the sociocultural reasons behind social unrest and the involvement of
young Muslims from West Yorkshire and London in Islamist terrorism.
Echoing recent sociological texts, this fiction identifies issues of social
deprivation, cultural isolation, identity and belonging, generational
22 Chris Weedon
and gender conflicts, aggravated by racism, unsympathetic or aggres-

sive policing and Islamophobia.7
This essay focuses on the work of Nadeem Aslam, which is variously
concerned with Muslims in Pakistan, the UK and Afghanistan. I explore
how Aslam’s novels might be read as contributing to the ‘politics of
recognition of difference’ and to facilitating understanding of Muslim
minorities in the wider society. I look at configurations of homeland,
diaspora, generation and religion as they relate to questions of iden-
tity, hybridity and imagined spaces of belonging. I argue that Aslam’s
work contributes significantly to recognition of difference and respect
for identities, giving voice to a marginalized form of Pakistani diaspora
experience.
Born in 1966 in Pakistan, Aslam moved to Britain at the age of 14.
He has published three novels to date: Season of the Rainbirds (1993) set
in Pakistan, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) set in England and The Wasted
Vigil (2008) set in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The main focus of this
essay is Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), which addresses life in the diaspora
where first-generation Pakistani migrants seek and largely fail to recre-
ate a new sense of home. It is set in1997, but includes memories from
childhood and life in Britain prior to the 1990s. The novel explores the
effects of isolation, religion and what is commonly referred to as tradi-
tional culture in a working-class, diasporic Pakistani community and
includes issues of domestic violence, child abuse and ‘honour killings’.
Aslam’s other novels, set in Pakistan and Afghanistan, also offer sig-
nificant insights into issues raised in Maps for Lost Lovers, in particular
the formation of subjectivities in Pakistan and the shaping of identi-
ties by fundamentalism and Islamism. Season of the Rainbirds evokes the
homeland to which migrants often look with nostalgic longing. The
text depicts the social and political power relations affecting everyday
life in small town Pakistan in 1982. It lays particular emphasis on the
role of religion in sustaining the oppressive political and social orders.
It offers multiple perspectives on people from different class, religious
and political positions, contextualizing the forms of religion and cul-
ture that first-generation migrants bring with them to the UK and on
which they draw in building diasporic communities. The Wasted Vigil
is set in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan, where many
Afghani refugees and Pakistani and international Islamists gather. Its
context is war and religious fundamentalism and it provides insights
into Pakistani, Afghani and US perspectives on the nature and effects of
recent Afghani history, the involvement of Soviet and Western powers
in the region and the nature of jihadism. It offers a powerful indictment
of the destructive role of inflexible ideologies – Soviet, US and Islamist –

in shaping ordinary lives. Read intertextually, each novel throws new
light on issues that cut across borders, showing the transnational nature
of the issues at stake. All three novels deal in different ways with the
relationship of the religious to the secular and the political. They also
address the role of traditional cultural norms and forms of kinship in
creating communities and reproducing oppressive forms of power.
2 Writing community and identity:

Maps for Lost Lovers
Maps for Lost Lovers focuses on the period up to 1997, before Islamism
gained a firm hold in West Yorkshire. In her article, ‘British Muslim
Identities and Spectres of Terror in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers’,
Lindsay Moore describes Aslam as ‘a writer implicated by virtue of his
cultural affiliations in national and transnational constructions of
Islam’ (Moore, 2009: 1). As Moore suggests, Aslam is subject to what
critics since the 1980s have called the ‘burden of representation’, sig-
nalling the assumed responsibility of ethnic minority writers and film-
makers for how ‘their’ assumed communities are represented (see Julien
and Mercer, 1988). In the current Islamophobic climate, in which Islam
has become a site for moral panics around terrorism, non-integration
and fundamentalism, interventions in the discursive field of represen-
tations of Muslims and Islam in the West often come to bear excessive
meaning. Locating the novel in relation to the ‘War on Terror’, Moore
suggests that Aslam ‘animate[s] and nuance[s] the lived experience of a
particularized Muslim community, thereby challenging multicultural
and war-on-terror-affiliated discourses extant in twenty-first-century
Britain’ (p. 3). David Waterman also argues that Maps for Lost Lovers
complicates ‘the binary “clash” formula of traditional versus progres-
sive’ in relation to the Muslim diaspora (Waterman, 2010: 19). In this
essay, I wish to suggest that Maps for Lost Lovers has an important contri-
bution to make to current debates about (failed) multiculturalism and
Modood’s ‘politics of recognition of difference’.
Maps for Lost Lovers opens with the arrest of two brothers for the
murder of their sister, Chanda, and her unmarried partner, Jugnu, and
ends with their trial. The text looks back over the months preceding
the murders and incorporates flashbacks and memories of early life in
Pakistan and subsequent decades in Britain. The novel is organized into
four parts, which reflect the changing seasons, beginning and ending
with winter and establishing the importance of the natural world as a
24 Chris Weedon
source of metaphor throughout the text. It weaves together the stories

of four different sets of lost lovers who are loosely linked by location
and the effects of diasporic versions of traditional culture and religious
sectarianism on their lives. The main focus is on the murdered Jugnu’s
elder brother Shamas, his wife Kaukab and their children. Shamas,
secular and communist, migrated first to Britain from Pakistan as a
political refugee in the1950s, and directs the Community Relations
Council, where he works on behalf of local South Asians, irrespective
of religion.
Written as a third-person narrative that allows access to thoughts,
feelings and memories, the novel carefully traces the effects of migra-
tion and settlement on individual lives, community and on the next
generation, showing how the attempted freezing of imported socio-
cultural and religious norms, values and practices, together with low
levels of education and an inability to speak English, condemn immi-
grants to lives governed by fear, isolation, loss and disappointment.
The rigid clinging to non-negotiable cultural and religious norms
alienates second-generation children, undermines the realization of
hopes for social betterment and allows for crimes of domestic and
child abuse and ‘honour’ killing to flourish, aided and abetted by
those who see opportunities for financial gain in illegally enforcing
‘traditional’ gender, kinship and religious norms. The major themes of
the text – religion, rigidified cultural norms, gender and generational
conflict – combine to show how first-generation working-class experi-
ence in Britain is shaped by a strong sense of loss of homeland, family
and community, legacies of partition and subsequent inter-communal
conflict, as well as British racism. In the early years of settlement,
ethnic and religious differences are put to one side in the interests
of survival. However, the growth of specific communities and the
perpetuation of religious divisions brought from the subcontinent,
heightened by memory and post-memory of partition, change rela-
tions. Thus the Sikh household where Shamas first lodged was run
by a father and his 13-year-old daughter Kiran, who had lost all other
family members during the massacres that accompanied partition.
Kiran, ‘a child in a house full of lonely migrant workers, [ ... ] was the
focus of everyone’s tenderness’, unrestricted by the religious and cul-
tural divides of which she later becomes a victim when she falls in
love with a Muslim (p. 111).
The specificity of place is an important aspect of Aslam’s writing.
Maps for Lost Lovers is set in a poor area, from which former white
residents and middle-class Asians have moved away. In the words of

one local woman, it is:
[a] rundown neighbourhood of one suicide attempt a year, 29 peo-

ple registered insane, and so many break-ins in a month that the
woman unplugs the video recorder that has cost two-years’ savings
and brings it up to bed every night, and when she isn’t lying awake
waiting for the sound of a window breaking downstairs, she is lying
awake wondering where her two boys are because more and more of
the burglaries are being done by the sons of the immigrants them-
selves, almost all of whom are unemployed. (p. 46)
It is a neighbourhood isolated by class, language, culture, forced to look

to itself for survival and therefore particularly vulnerable to the ten-
dency to reproduce the most repressive forms of religion and culture.
It is illustrative of the type of community that has become the focus of
the backlash against multiculturalism since 2001. Yet, I wish to argue
that the text complexifies the issues in play, suggesting that diasporic
communities necessarily develop hybrid aspects and show much more
adaptation by settlers than is often assumed. The novel also insists on
the importance of class and education and vividly depicts the barri-
ers to engagement with white society. Read in this way, Maps for Lost
Lovers points to the inadequacy of state strategies that seek to impose
an ill-thought-through idea of integration and the shortcomings of easy
dismissals of a politics of multiculturalism.
Maps for Lost Lovers picks up on important aspects of working-class
diasporic life showing how they have profound affects on subjectivities.
It shows how diaspora works to sharpen gender divides and strengthen
fundamentalist understandings of religion among those who have nei-
ther the language skills nor education with which to negotiate the host
society. It reinterprets conflicts that are often assumed to be effects of
a gulf between the generations, showing how relations are overdeter-
mined not so much by generation but by education and degree of con-
tact with the wider society, an approach that paves the way for a better
understanding of fundamentalism and Islamism. The text uses multi-
ple perspectives to draw out the reasons why specific forms of identity,
including traditional forms of culture and religion, are so important in
diasporic communities.
Towards the beginning of Maps for Lost Lovers Aslam describes the
effects of 30 years in the UK on one woman’s life. Kaukab has been
26 Chris Weedon
telephoned by a neighbour and asked to look out for her son who, at
the age of seven, insists on walking unaccompanied to the mosque. His
mother fears a racist or paedophilic attack. The incident reminds her of
her own children:
It has been seven years and a month since she and Shamas heard
from their youngest child, her beloved son Ujala [ ... ]. She presses the
picture to her breast. He was always recalcitrant – everything she did
seemed to disgust him – and he left home as soon as he could. The
daughter Mah-Jabin calls every month or so and visits once or twice
a year. Charag, the eldest child, the painter, came during summer
last year and hasn’t telephoned or visited since. He is divorced from
the white girl – which means that Kaukab hasn’t seen the grandson
for two years and seven months. (p. 30)
The passage continues: ‘Her children were all that she had, but she
herself was only a part of their lives, a very small part, it has become
increasingly clear to her over the past few years’ (p. 30). As the novel
progresses, competing perspectives challenge Kaukab’s narrative about
her life, showing how diasporic life affects ability to face up to chang-
ing realities and develop new and empowering forms of subjectivity
that are both hybrid and in process. For Kaukab, only religion can offer
a means of survival and even this is difficult since ‘she cannot contain
her homesickness and constantly asks for courage to face this lonely
ordeal that He has chosen for her in His wisdom’ (p. 30).
2.1 Religion in the diaspora

James Procter (2010) has described Maps for Lost Lovers as: ‘Caught
between fundamentalism and racism, between religion and secular
modernity.’ While this description captures some of the important
themes of the novel, it constructs too rigid a binary between religion
and the secular, suggesting that only the latter belongs to the modern
world. If we are to understand the sense of identity that groups have
of themselves, we need to move beyond inherited binaries that draw
on colonial modes of representation and present ‘Third World’ cultures
and religions as static, oppressive and outside modernity (Mohanty,
2003; Narayan, 1997). While this understanding of Islam is voiced
in the novel by Kaukab’s son, Ujala, the presentation of religion as a
whole is much more complex, doing justice to what British Asian com-
mentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has described as ‘people’s continuing
need for religion, particularly among members of Muslim groups who
are still finding it hard to find their place in British society’ (Alibhai-
Brown, quoted in Parekh, 2000: 28). Indeed in Maps for Lost Lovers,
some second-generation children hold both to religious orthodoxy and
repressive ideas of tradition, and the text shows how appeals to religion
and tradition mask other motivations rooted in sexual needs and patri-
archal forms of masculinity (Archer, 2001).
The novel identifies religious sectarianism and violence against
women, including ‘honour killing’, as the most problematic areas inter-
nal to the community. It offers graphic illustrations of the ways gen-
der power relations work through traditional culture underpinned by
understandings of Islam to create compliant yet unhappy subjects. Faith
implies a literal reading of the Koran and the novel shows the effects
of transplanting culturally specific forms of religious belief and prac-
tice from rural Pakistan into urban England where believers attempt to
survive by preserving them untransformed rather than adapting them
to their new environment. They also preserve a collective memory of
religion-based communal violence and partition on the subcontinent,
which set Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus against one another. Two pairs of
lost lovers in the novel are prevented from realizing their love because
it cuts across Muslim-Sikh and Muslim-Hindu borders that also devas-
tated the later life of Shamas’s own father in Pakistan who, very much
a victim of colonialism and its legacies, set fire to himself.8 Thus the
young Hindu, who loves a local Muslim woman, becomes ‘unhinged’
by her torture and beating to death over three days in the cellar of her
parents’ house in an attempt to free of her from possession by djinns
(p. 365). It is failure to address internal differences openly that allows
such crimes to happen:
Shamas has been careful to control his rage and grief when talking
[to Kaukab] about her killing because he knows that Islam requires
her to believe in djinns, in witchcraft, in spirits. She, too, has quietly
pre-empted his objections, saying to herself earlier today but within
his hearing ‘This holy man was a charlatan or incompetent, and the
diagnosis that the poor girl was possessed could have been wrong
but this does not mean that there are no djinns. Allah created them
out of fire – it’s stated plainly in the Koran.’ (p. 186)
The novel’s presentation of gender and adult-child relations is far from

positive. The effects of fundamentalist religious beliefs on relations
between men and women are profound. Thus, Kaukab feels that every-
thing to do with sex is unclean and abhors sexual contact of any kind,
28 Chris Weedon
even though she knows that the Koran dictates that she should meet
her husband’s needs. Similarly her fear of contamination by ‘unclean’
white people leads her to shun all contact (Werbner, 2004). Her life is
governed by questions of cleanliness and contamination to the point
where she gets libido suppressing ‘holy salt’ (bromide) from a ‘holy man
at the mosque’, for her youngest son Ujala as he reaches puberty. This
results in him leaving home and refusing all contact with his mother,
who rings his answerphone every few days just to hear his voice, terri-
fied that he will lift the receiver and say something unpleasant to her
(p. 33). When she is finally confronted with the reason why he left
and why her daughter abandoned her arranged marriage in Pakistan,
Kaukab goes against her religion and attempts suicide.
The effects of religion and tradition on women are explored further
through the portrayal of Suraya, locally born and raised, but sent to an
arranged marriage in Pakistan where her hybrid British upbringing leads
to her becoming a victim of Sharia law. She is divorced by her drunken
husband and must now marry and divorce another man before she can
remarry her husband and gain access to her eight-year-old son. Suraya
seduces Shamas in an attempt to regain her child. For her it is a survival
strategy governed by shame and deception (pp. 149, 202). For Shamas it
is reinvigorating love, only curtailed by fear of discovery and the injury
this would cause to both Kaukab and Suraya. An important theme in
the novel, the violent control of women’s sexuality, is shown to look
to both religion and tradition for its justification. As Shamas reflects,
Suraya ‘shouldn’t be seen talking to a stranger [ ... ] a Pakistani man
mounted the footpath and ran over his sister-in-law – repeatedly, in
broad day light because he suspected she was cheating on his brother’
(p. 136). Yet when it comes to the actual ‘honour’ killing of Jugnu and
Chanda, this is shown to be the result of a series of contingent, chance
events and motivations that are subsequently reinscribed as a ques-
tion of family honour. As Narayan (1997) points out, violence towards
women has various motivations in both South Asia and the diaspora,
which range from economic interests to threatened masculinity.
2.2 Fear
Maps for Lost Lovers depicts fear as the main factor inhibiting connec-
tion to mainstream Britain. Fear results from religious orthodoxy, trau-
matic past experiences and all-pervasive British racism. A major source
is the unchallenged, largely unaddressed and untransformed effects of
formative years spent in small towns or villages in Pakistan. For exam-
ple, Kaukab has had no education beyond age 11 and has been kept in
purdah from the age of 12. On arrival in the UK, she is keen to learn
English but despite her secular, communist husband, she has not been
able to access further education of any sort. This leads to a situation
in which forms of religion supported by the local mosque become the
mainstay of subjectivity. As a result, Kaukab cannot see beyond her
own religious interpretations of experience. In contrast, British-born
children are an in-between generation. They grow up between the
imagined spaces of their parents’ ‘homeland’, the cultural isolation
of the immediate diasporic community, and the experience of wider
British society that they obtain through schooling. Despite the best
efforts of conservative parents they develop forms of cultural hybrid-
ity that undermine the fears that that govern their parents’ lives, but
this hybridity also drives a wedge between the generations. Kaukab’s
refusal to engage with anything new makes shared understanding with
her children impossible. Her destructive rejection of difference in her
children prevents her gaining access to what Homi Bhabha calls a ‘third
space’ of possibility and existence (Bhabha, 1990: 211) and forces her
children to move away. They cannot be at home in her diasporic space
which lies in her imagined relation with Pakistan.
If the novel complicates assumptions about the culture of separation
that critics have seen as the legacy of multiculturalism, it supports the
widely held view that the inability to speak English feeds fear of others
and is crucial in preventing connections to the wider world beyond this
Muslim community. The religious and commercial infrastructures that
come to replace early postwar South Asian solidarity allow first-gener-
ation settlers to avoid perceived sources of fear and to function largely
independently of the white world. This is not the case with second-
generation children who, in Kaukab and Shamas’s family, move away
and become integrated into a multiethnic Britain. Inability to speak
English is shown to affect most first-generation settlers and leads to
almost total isolation from mainstream Britain. Thus when her daugh-
ter sends Kaukab flowers for her birthday, we learn that ‘The “thank
you” she murmurs to the flower-delivery man is her third exchange
with a white person this year; there were five last year, none the year
before, if she remembers correctly; three the year before that,’ (p. 69).
The local Community Relations Council, run by Shamas, helps non-
English speakers with problems but does not address the language
question.
In addition to issues of language, cultural and religious difference,
social deprivation and poverty, the other powerful source of fear that
works against participation in mainstream society is racism. It is racist
30 Chris Weedon
encounters that instill a profound fear of white Britain and play a cru-
cial role in shaping a sense of community under siege, preventing inte-
gration and perpetuating the segregated isolation that governs the lives
of the people in the area. As Varun Uberoi’s analysis of the types of
community where the 2001 riots took place suggests:
Years of racism and systematic impoverishment of these communi-

ties made them inward looking and fearful of the majority commu-
nity. In such circumstances little attachment could be developed to
individuals and groups that lay outside of the cultural group. Equally,
little attachment could be developed to the shared political life that
all groups possess because, at least from the perspective of the minor-
ity cultural group, no shared political life exists. (Uberoi, 2007: 141)
Racism in the novel is presented as a part of everyday life that pro-

duces a constant fear among the immigrants of the area, forcing them
to look to each other for support and a sense of community. In the
course of the text, through a series of remembered incidents, readers
are offered insight into the changing face of racism from the 1950s to
the 1990s and the very real ways in which it affects individual lives. For
example, in the 1970s, the legacies of Enoch Powell and the activities
of the National Front keeps people at home in the evenings, fearing for
those forced to work at night, like taxi drivers. The random violence to
which immigrants are subject is compared to lightning which ‘strikes
without caring whose nest it burns’ (p. 28). By 1997 – the multicultural
present of the novel – the violence is ethnically specific. A pig’s head is
left outside the mosque after ‘An English girl had converted to Islam in
December and had been given shelter in the mosque because her family
was hostile towards her decision to change her faith’ (p. 57).
The culture of racism imbues the largely Urdu-speaking commu-
nity with a fear of white people that is constantly reinforced by small
incidents. For example, Kaukab is afraid to use the phone after she is
racially abused for dialling a wrong number. Local children confront
racist abuse on a daily basis and even their play is undermined by racial-
ized behaviour. For example, they discover a human heart by the lake
only to learn that it has been stolen from the hospital by a young white
man who does not want his mother’s heart ‘transplanted into a black
man’s body’ (p. 153), suggesting the deeply felt barriers to interracial
and inter-ethnic love around which the narratives are woven. The novel
tells of the family who sells up and returns to Pakistan ‘after their son
had been beaten to death in a racial attack by the whites’ (p. 160) and
one of the brothers suspected of Jugnu and Chanda’s murder is severely

beaten up in gaol (p. 169). The narrative details the social and emo-
tional effects of racism on individuals, for example, the indignities suf-
fered by a bus driver when young white passengers do not pay enough
fare. There is only one example of anti-racism in the novel when the
local bishop supports the Sikhs’ rights to scatter the ashes of their dead
into the river from a ruined abbey, miles downstream from the town.
2.3 Coping strategies: family and community

The climate of fear, racism and isolation depicted in Maps for Lost Lovers
leads to the development of specific coping strategies. These are of two
main types: those that introduce the imagined possibility of non-ra-
cialized and non-sectarian ways of living and those that drive the con-
servative forces within the community to look inwards and backwards
to an imagined tradition and an unchanging Pakistani homeland. This
reinforces the resistance, based on fear and lack of English, to all forms
of connection and new hybrid identities and ways of living. The mur-
dered Jugnu represents the possibilities of transcending sectarianism
and creating a new and hybrid space in which to live. Arriving from the
US after years as a butterfly specialist, he comes to live next door to his
brother, bringing new hope and life to the family. He rescues the chil-
dren from the negative effects of their lives as the racialized children of
immigrants, in an environment blighted by their mother’s controlling
hand, everyday racism and violent racist attacks. Engaging them in his
study of butterflies, Jugnu ‘soon filled the days and nights of his niece
and two nephews with unexpected wonder’ (p. 11). For Kaukab, Jugnu
means a much longed-for extended family and for Shamas a secular
brother, uncontaminated by life in this community with its extensive
forms of social control.
The possible ways of being Muslim in this community are contained
within one family: Jugnu is both Westernized and secular but not polit-
ical, Shamas is still Pakistani in his identity, and a communist who
longs to return to his home from what is, for him, painful political
exile. Kaukab copes with life via faith and disbelief in things that do
not fit her worldview. Other characters in the novel can be located on a
spectrum between these poles, but tend to share conservative religious
and cultural norms. They consistently define their identities in relation
to constructions of ‘Others’ – Western, white, secular, Sikh, Hindu – and
also in relation to how others define them, for example, in racist or
dismissive class terms. All are located within the confines of a watch-
ing and judging ‘community’ that is constituted via social relations
32 Chris Weedon
materialized in shops and places of worship and via the Pakistani press
and local Pakistani radio, as well as the highly effective but largely
invisible network of radio communication among taxi drivers and talk
among women in this gender segregated society. In this context Shamas
and Jugnu’s secularism has no obvious place but is tolerated because they
are both ‘kind and educated’ (p. 177). Locating Shamas with his com-
mitment to communism in a poor neighbourhood of factory workers,
taxi drivers and restaurant workers, some of them illegal immigrants,
rather than in a middle-class area with better schools and facilities, ena-
bles the narrative to articulate perspectives on the community that are
simultaneously those of insider and outsider adding to the complexity
of the treatment of questions of identity and belonging.
The attempt to make the family a buttress against the outside world
and change is shown to fail because families are themselves divided
in their attitudes to religion and tradition. Shamas’s political secular-
ism and his refusal to move to a middle-class area alienate his devout
wife Kaukab. In addition to seeing him as unclean, she blames him
for spoiling his daughter’s marriage potential. Ironically Shamas also
alienates his children through his passive support for Kaukab’s attempts
to restrict her children’s access to the white world: ‘there were times
when he came in to inform the young teenagers that something they
had asked from their mother earlier – the permission for an after-hours
school disco, for example – was an impossibility, and it was obvious
from the look on his face that he personally had no problem with
what the children wanted’ (p. 111). The consequence for both parents
is estrangement from their children and loss of respect. Apart from to
Jugnu, the children have nowhere to turn, caught as they are between
Kaukab’s insistence that they conform to her idea of what they should
be and by their father’s abandonment of the terrain of child rearing to
his wife, while he takes refuge in his work.
As in many British South Asian novels, the generational tensions
increase as the children grow up and gain greater access to mainstream
British life. The community often takes pre-emptive measures against
relationships with whites. Thus reflecting on her distress after the boy
she loves, who is about to leave school, is married to a cousin in Pakistan
to prevent him meeting and marrying a white girl at university, Mah-
Jabin reflects:
Everyone here was imprisoned in the cage of others’ thoughts.

She and he [the boy she had fallen in love with] were born here in
England, and had grown up witnessing people taking pleasure in
freedom, but that freedom although within reach was of no use to
them as a lamp with a genie was of no use to a person whose tongue

had been cut off. (p. 118)
The novel compares her to a moth pressed to a windowpane, in sharp

contrast to the freedom of her childhood days spent outdoors with
Jugnu chasing butterflies and moths.
The novel raises another coping strategy that recurs frequently in
British South Asian writing, namely the way in which first-generation
migrants deal with racism and downward social mobility by displacing
their hopes for the future onto their children. When these fail to meet
parental expectations, often not for want of trying, further rifts develop
between the generations. Kaukab’s eldest son Charag attempts twice to get
the grades for medical school, starts a degree in chemistry but abandons
it for art college. Yet it is his marriage to a white woman that most upsets
his mother, signalling important themes in the text: disdain for white
people, their values and morality and fear of contamination. ‘[A]lways
accompanied by the sense that the family’s betterment lay on his shoul-
ders’ (p. 122), Charag grows up feeling guilty about enjoying life but suc-
ceeds in becoming a successful artist, producing work that neither parent
understands or values. When Maj-Jabin returns from Pakistan, she hides
the truth about her marriage from her mother. She goes on to university
and Kaukab’s disappointment at her changing values and identity drives
her to violent physical attack (p. 112). While Maj-Jabin sees Kaukab as
dangerous, ‘Trapped within the cage of permitted thinking’, she also feels
compassion. Yet she fails to understand why Kaukab inflicts an oppressive
upbringing on her that she herself had resented. Kaukab’s answer, here as
elsewhere in the novel, is rooted in her understanding of Allah’s law: ‘I did
not have the freedom to give you that freedom, don’t you see?’ (p. 115).
2.4 Loss
Among the innumerable other losses, to come to England was to lose
a season [monsoon], because in the part of Pakistan that he is from,
there are five seasons in a year, not four. (p. 5)
If there is a unifying trope in the depiction of individual lives that

Aslam locates within the complexities of the diasporic community, it is
loss. Most poignantly this is the loss of homeland, extended family and
community, heightened by the loss of second-generation British-born
children who cannot be contained within the limits of their parents’
culture and religion and either move out to join mainstream British
life or turn to radical forms of fundamentalism. There are individual
losses, such as Shamas’s inability to write and publish poetry away from
34 Chris Weedon
his homeland (p. 18), the loss of the only extant text of his first book
of poems when his wife burns her wedding dress on which they were
reproduced (p. 165), the loss of his secular brother, the loss of any mean-
ingful relationship with his devout wife, the loss of his friends from the
Communist Party with the demise of the Soviet Union, and the loss of
his relationship with Suraya, which becomes sullied for him when he
discovers her deception. Yet many of these individual losses and others
like them are connected to losses that result from religious and cultural
divisions among the migrant community and in many cases from the
lack of engagement with the mainstream and inability to communicate
with white authorities. In one tragic case, a woman, desperate for her
own child, loses her womb because she cannot tell the doctors that her
‘sons’ are actually her husband’s nephews and her husband is too afraid
of the immigration authorities to reveal this to the doctors. In an inci-
dent that exemplifies how forms of transnational culture are used to
avoid addressing real social issues affecting women, this same woman
loses her reason after her husband’s death. The local cleric orders an
apple tree to be chopped down because ‘it was the seat of the 360 djinn
whose evil influence was responsible for the widow’s lonely bewilder-
ment’ (p. 15).
Compensation for loss takes many forms. For example, it surfaces in
the power of subconscious memory as Shamas paints an improvised
replica of his remembered home by mixing ground-up chalk and rabbit-
skin glue with the appropriate pigments. The impossibility of healing
painful loss is vividly expressed in the image of:
the vase Shamas had brought from Pakistan in the 1950s – as a

reminder of home – [where it] was on the glass table arranged with
sprays of yolk-coloured mimosa. The fine layer of dust he had picked
the vase out of all those years ago continuing to cry out across the
years with an agonised O for it to be put back exactly where it had
been set by his mother’s hand. (p. 21)
For many first-generation settlers, religion becomes the main way of

compensating for such loss, but it cannot fill the emptiness caused by
children growing away as they become hybrid subjects.
3 Metaphor and perspective
Multiple perspectives are central to the analysis of community in

Maps for Lost Lovers. As the narrator suggests, meaning is a question
of perspective: ‘Perspective tricks the eyes and makes the snow flakes
falling in the far distance appear as though they are falling slower than
those nearby’ (p. 5). The text offers perspectives that are linked to class,
gender, generation, cultural and religious positioning, all governed by
the ever-watchful eye of the ‘community’. The relentlessly bleak nature
of the lives depicted in Maps for Lost Lovers is set against extensive use of
natural imagery. This allows both for beauty to emerge in the context
of deprivation and oppression and for the exploration of differences
and continuities between former lives – now lost – in Pakistan and life
in England. Natural imagery and description are used both to recall
aspects of the lost homeland and to suggest a new sense of place for
second-generation children.
The novel opens and closes with poetic descriptions of the first snow
and the presence of the nearby lake, which is the site of both English
and South Asian folklore. It is said by local children to have been
formed when a towering giant fell out of the sky. It is also the location
for the Hindu temple and the Urdu bookshop, and is surrounded by
haunted woods in which the ghosts of local Muslims, who have been
victims of ‘honour’ killings or murdered because they break religious
and cultural norms of female behaviour, are said to roam. Lindsay
Moore points to Aslam’s richly allusive use of metaphor. For example,
referring to the description of maple leaves frozen underneath the ice
‘as intricate as the gold jewellery from the Subcontinent,’ she suggests,
‘Shamas’s bi-focal cultural perspective reveals a profoundly present but
symbolically frozen South Asian reality’ (Moore, 2009: 7). This South
Asian reality, which is in some respects ‘frozen’ in the diasporic imagi-
nation of the homeland and traditional culture, is repeatedly invoked
via natural imagery that brings together Pakistan and Yorkshire and, as
Moore suggest, renders ‘the depressing urban landscape pastoral, even
exotic’ (p. 7).
Yet metaphor is also used to signify alternatives to a frozen diasporic
imagination. It suggests forms of unlikely co-existence that add col-
our and enriching variety to the dull English city, as in the surprising
appearance of parakeets from the subcontinent in the woods around
the town. It also suggests that in processes of cultural change what is
really essential to life remains. Thus, at the end of the novel:
[Shamas] stretches out an arm to receive the small light snowflakes

on his hand, a habit as old as his arrival in this country, he has
always greeted the season’s first snow in this manner, the flakes los-
ing their whiteness on the palm of his hand to become clear wafers
36 Chris Weedon
of ice before melting to water – crystals of snow transformed into a

monsoon raindrop. (p. 367)
In addition to descriptions and metaphors drawn from the natural

world, the text also employs a central set of metaphors using butterflies
and moths, which are ubiquitous in Hindu culture and in forms of syn-
cretic Sufi Islam that are widespread in Pakistan. They occur in Maps
for Lost Lovers and Season of the Rainbirds, and are part of the culture of
everyday life for this first-generation diasporic community before and
after migration. The study of butterflies and moths are Jugnu’s life, yet
he, like his moths, is drawn by the flame of love to abandon all caution
and is murdered. Moths and butterflies are used in the text to suggest
beauty, together with love and sexual desire, and the inevitability of
self-destruction in the context in which the characters live out their
lives. Crucially: ‘There are no butterflies in the Koran’ (p. 291). Islam
in this community is tightly bound up with specific cultural, gender
and kinship norms brought from Pakistan that for the most part, are
depicted as forms of oppression. It is precisely one of the kinds of Islam
that Islamic feminists in the UK are attempting to challenge by uncou-
pling text-based religious doctrine from cultural practices. If images
from the Koran, such as the Book of Fates, djinns and angels provide
the framework for dominant forms of religious belief, imagery drawn
from nature is used to evoke unseen forms of power (that cause snow to
fall or moths to go to flames) and to suggest how the ostensibly absent
is always there if only hauntingly.
4 Conclusion: Muslims and the politics

of representation
The differences between forms of belief in Islam, in particular between

Sufism, moderate Islam, fundamentalism and Islamism are important
yet often missing dimensions in Western discussions of Muslims and
Islam. All three of Aslam’s novels explore shades of Muslim beliefs,
including fundamentalism, in the locations that generate them. These
carefully located depictions allow for the wider power relations at stake
to surface and demonstrate how questions of belief, fundamentalism
and Islamism need to be understood as having multiple meanings and
motivations. His first novel, Season of the Rainbirds, shows how religion
in small town Pakistan functions both in the formation of individual
subjectivities and in relation to class and state-based political power.
Religious ideology is both a mainstay of how individuals define them-
selves – both as believers and non-believers and a source of individual
strength and group oppression of those who do not belong – be they

Christian, secular or the wrong kind of Muslims. Maps for Lost Lovers
takes up some of these themes in a diasporic context, exploring the
negative effects of ideas, beliefs and values brought from Pakistan on
both the broader South Asian diaspora (where they are used to legiti-
mate religious conflict, domestic violence and ‘honour’ crimes) and on
the possibility of a new and creative life in the UK.
By the time that Aslam published The Wasted Vigil in 2008, not only
fundamentalist Islam, but radical, violent Islamism had become a
highly visible global phenomena with strong transnational dimensions.
Aslam’s move into the theatre of war of Afghanistan places fundamen-
talism and Islamism in the context of decades of foreign intervention,
pointing to the responsibility of the Soviet Union and the Western pow-
ers for the rise of Islamist terrorism. The Wasted Vigil, which covers the
effects of Soviet invasion, the rise of the Taliban and the 2001 invasion
by an alliance of Western powers, stresses the dire consequences of out-
side intervention for Afghani culture, heritage and ordinary people. It
offers detailed portraits of the horrors of the Soviet and Taliban regimes,
it raises questions about Allied tactics in the war and it depicts how one
young man becomes an Islamist suicide bomber.
In their different ways each of Aslam’s novels offers insight into the
fundamental problem that he identifies towards the end of Maps for Lost
Lovers:
A system conditions people into thinking that it is never to blame, is

never to be questioned. We have to beg, say the beggars, the accursed
belly demands food: it is the fault of the belly, not just the unjust world
that does not allow enough sustenance to reach the bellies of every-
one through dignified means. (p. 236)
While this applies most directly to religion in Aslam’s work, both in the
homeland and the diaspora, it also raises a number of other issues for
Western societies. Most centrally it addresses the question of respon-
sibility, whether at the level of the West as a power bloc or of main-
stream society within individual Western countries. Both demonstrate
unwillingness to accept or address co-responsibility for the problems of
the Muslim world, diasporic or otherwise, falling back on deep-rooted
stereotypes. As Tariq Modood argues,
The differences at issue are those perceived both by outsiders or

group members [ ... ] to constitute not just some form of distinct-
ness but a form of alienness or inferiority that diminishes or makes
38 Chris Weedon
difficult equal membership in the wider society or polity. (Modood,

2007: 37)
Recent debates on a positive multiculturalism in Britain stress questions

of shared civic values, which do not require the abandonment of ethni-
cally specific cultural forms or practices or religion. Yet this does not
obviate the pressing need for both minority and majority communi-
ties to address the serious issues of oppressive forms of gender power,
marginalization, social exclusion from the mainstream, fear and lack
of voice outlined in this essay. They are issues on which there are dif-
fering perspectives within minority communities and which cannot be
understood outside of the broader contexts of mainstream attitudes,
racism and Islamophobia. It is here that Aslam’s work has a valuable
cultural-political contribution to make to British society alongside its
place within both the growing corpus of British South Asian writing
and contemporary British literature as a whole.
Notes
1. The Future of Multiethnic Britain covered questions of culture, history, iden-
tity, Britishness, social equality and strategies for change.
2. Other significant themes in novels and poetry by postwar British ethnic
minority writers are historical reimaginings of slavery and colonialism. See
in particular the work of David Dabydeen, Fred A’guiar and Caryl Phillips.
3. For more on place see Procter (2003), Macleod (2004) and Sandhu (2004).
4. See, for example, Asian Women Writers Workshop (1988), Kureishi (1990), Syal
(1996) and Ali (2003).
5. For secondary literature on this see Nasta (2001), Stein (2004), Procter (2003)
and Hussain (2005).
6. My Son the Fanatic (1997) directed by Udayan Prasad, Feature Film Company/
VCI.
7. For more on the background to this see Alam (2006), Lewis (2007) and
Finney and Simpson (2009). Relevant films include Britz (2007) Channel 4,
Love & Hate (2006) Verve Pictures and Bradford Riots (2006) Channel 4 DVD/
Oxford Film and Television Production. The Islamist by Ed Hussain (2007)
gives an insightful first person account of involvement in Islamism. For more
on Islamophobia see Said (1981), Runneymede Trust (1997) and Weedon
(2008b).
8. Born a Hindu, he was injured in a bombing following the 1919 Jallianwala
Bagh massacre, lost his memory and was taken in and raised by Muslims.
2
Becoming Foreign: Tropes of
Migrant Identity in Three Novels
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Felicity Hand
1 Introduction
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s three most recent novels, Admiring Silence (1996),

By the Sea (2001a) and Desertion (2005)1 are all woven with a common
thread, namely the alienation and loneliness that emigration can pro-
duce and the soul-searching questions it gives rise to about fragmented
identities and the very meaning of ‘home’. Although in our postcolo-
nial times these issues seem to have been exhausted beyond reason-
able limits, I believe that Gurnah’s novels still have something new to
say about the migrant and, perhaps more importantly, on behalf of the
migrant. It may be because Gurnah himself is an example of the more
successful African migrants in the Western world, or simply because
he is a very gifted creative writer, that his work draws attention to
those cases that affluent societies would prefer to ignore: the hundreds,
maybe thousands, of failed migrants struggling to survive in hostile
or simply indifferent environments. Gurnah’s work delves into the
experiences of less fortunate migrants, of those who have migrated for
economic, political or emotional reasons but who fail to live up to the
expectations they – and their families – had imagined for themselves.
All his main characters – the nameless narrator in Admiring Silence,
Saleh Omar and Latif Mahmud in By the Sea, and Rashid in Desertion –
are portrayed as displaced individuals, simultaneously alienated from
the host community and the homeland.
The three novels chosen present striking similarities in theme and
tone and, to my mind, illustrate Julia Kristeva’s analysis of the notion
39
40 Felicity Hand
of the foreigner to perfection:
Yet, he is never simply torn between here and elsewhere, now and
before. Those who believe they are crucified in such a fashion forget
that nothing ties them there anymore, and, so far, nothing binds
them here. Always elsewhere, the foreigner belongs nowhere. But
let there be no mistake about it: there are, in the way one lives this
attachment to a lost space, two kinds of foreigners, and this sepa-
rates uprooted people of all countries, occupations, social standing,
sexes ... into two irreconcilable categories. On the one hand, there
are those who waste away in an agonizing struggle between what
no longer is and what will never be - the followers of neutrality, the
advocates of emptiness; they are not necessarily defeatists, they often
become the best of ironists. On the other hand, there are those who
transcend: living neither before nor now but beyond, they are bent
with a passion that, although tenacious, will remain forever unsatis-
fied. It is a passion for another land, always a promised one, that of
an occupation, a love, a child, a glory. They are believers, and they
sometimes ripen into skeptics. (Kristeva, 1991: 10)
All three novels can be read as ‘contrapuntal’ – to adopt Edward Said’s

(1993: 51) term – rewritings of imperial narratives as Gurnah’s African
migrants relate their individual responses to the decolonization and
independence of Zanzibar. Their stories add another vital strand to
the stories of which Empire has been constructed while at the same
time their accounts of hollowness and dislocation serve to highlight
the uprootedness of today’s citizens of the global village, migrant or
native. The multifarious versions of colonial history that overlap and
often belie one another bring to light an ‘awareness both of the met-
ropolitan history that is narrated and of the dominating discourse
acts’ (Said, 1993: 51). The figure of the migrant living in a permanent
diasporic space, neither here nor there, encapsulates these intertwined
histories and perspectives that have only recently started to be unrav-
elled. Gurnah’s migrants are not just unknown Africans, bearers of sto-
ries that are destined never to be told outside fiction; rather, they are
each and every one of us. As Kristeva again points out, ‘we are all in
the process of becoming foreigners in a universe that is being widened
more than ever, that is more than ever heterogeneous beneath its appar-
ent scientific and media-inspired unity’ (1991: 104). In what follows I
shall show how the fragmentation and silences which Gurnah portrays
as being part and parcel of becoming foreigners are figured through a
Becoming Foreign 41
series of tropes like family, home, mimicry and tale-telling, prevalent

enough in diasporic writing but given their own nuances as Gurnah
responds imaginatively to the diasporic condition.
2 Lies and silences
In England the narrator of Admiring Silence (AS) whose name we never

discover, thus erasing this most personal of identity markers, meets and
sets up home with a middle-class, radical English woman with whom
he has a daughter.2 He never tells her the truth about his childhood
or his family, and he never tells his own family in Zanzibar that he is
living with an English woman. He lives in this world of deceit and lies
for 20 years until a letter arrives announcing a general amnesty for all
those citizens of Zanzibar who had left the country illegally over the
years. Although this makes it possible for him to pay a long overdue
visit to his family, he is besieged by doubts. ‘Perhaps it’s just a lot of
emotional waffle ... after all this time. Feeling this attachment out of a
kind of habit’ (p. 94). The new prospects offered by the amnesty turn
out to be fraught with problems for the nameless narrator as his family
know nothing about Emma and Amelia, his 17-year-old daughter. To
make matters worse, his mother, anxious about her son’s lonely state in
the faraway land, has busied herself with arranging a marriage for him
to a young medical student who would happily continue her degree in
England. Not only has the narrator failed to confess the truth of his
family situation to his relatives in Zanzibar, he has not been honest to
Emma, his partner, either. The novel is, then, a multilayered account
of his fabrications about his past and his present life to his partner and
their daughter in England and to his family in Africa. It is only at the
end of the novel that we can in some way tap into the narrator’s own
understanding of himself.
The narrator of Admiring Silence had emigrated to England in the first
place as he believed in the possibility of a better education, still the
magnet that attracts many to the former metropolis. He had been taken
in by the colonial myth migrants such as him would conquer the world
and bring eternal glory to his countrymen: ‘And one of my fantasies in
the early days of England’s cold depressions was that one day I would
return to preside over my knackered land’ (p. 155). Having rather reluc-
tantly completed a degree in education, he is obliged to teach in a sec-
ondary school. Although Gurnah does not dwell too much on them,
his experiences as a teacher have clear echoes of the beginning of the
1966 film To Sir with Love. However, the narrator’s early life in Britain
42 Felicity Hand
does not appear to have been a very traumatic one. He does not directly
recount any blatant racist attacks or threats, although the reader is con-
stantly reminded of the racist rhetoric that made the sixties and sev-
enties a difficult period of adaptation to the changing complexion of
British citizens for the host population at large. Gurnah hurries over all
this as he prefers to explore the narrator’s reencounter with his past.
The narrator has an ambiguous attitude towards his country of origin
and his adopted land, never quite making his mind up about where
he feels at home. To a certain extent, the narrator of Admiring Silence
incarnates the melancholic migrant, in love with a no-longer existing
space. The Zanzibar that he was obliged to forsake has evolved on its
own terms and in no way resembles the country that he has cherished
in his imagination over the years. The childhood memories have been
romanticized and exaggerated to such an extent that the migrant can no
longer distinguish between what really happened and what he was told
had happened. Likewise, home has to respond to that sense of belong-
ing to a place that a person constructs and which forms part of one’s
evolution as an individual. It appears to be influenced not only by the
physical reality of the environment as such, but more significantly by
the nature of one’s emotional attachment with the beings who inhabit
that place. Interestingly, in regard of his ambivalent feelings towards
his parents, and in particular his father, the narrator echoes Daud, the
character in Gurnah’s second novel Pilgrim’s Way, who left his country
to study in England full of hopes of being a ‘pilgrim to the Promised
Land’ (PW: 130). On the one hand the narrator longs for home because
of the climate of racism and hostility, but on the other this longing is
often counteracted by the fear of home because home means recogni-
tion of failed expectations and disappointment in oneself:
I was astonished by the sudden surge of loneliness and terror I felt

when I realized how stranded I was in this hostile place, that I did
not know how to speak to people and win them over to me, that
the bank, the canteen, the supermarket, the dark streets seemed so
intimidating, and that I could not return from where I came - that,
as I then thought, I had lost everything. (AS: 83–4)
Thus a return home is feared by him just as strongly as it is by Daud

because ‘home’ is Zanzibar, their family and friends, and not Britain,
where the expectation that blacks will carry out menial jobs merely
reinforces the imperial stereotype of ethnic inferiority.
Becoming Foreign 43
Scrubbing floors or teaching uncouth youngsters is not what young,

promising boys are sent abroad for, so a strong sense of failure haunts
the narrator whenever he dwells on memories of the homeland.
We need you here. Forgive me for saying this, but they don’t need
you there. They have enough of their own people to do whatever is
necessary, and sooner or later they will say that they have no use for
you. Then you will find yourself in an alien land that is unable to
resist mocking people of our kind. If you come back, you’ll be with
your own people, of your own religion, who can speak your own
language. What you do will have a meaning and a place in the world
you know. You’ll be with your family. You’ll matter, and what you do
will matter. Everything that you have learned there will be of benefit
to us. It will make a difference here, rather than being - once again,
forgive me for saying this - another anonymous contribution to the
petty comfort and well-being of a society that does not care for you.
(p. 154)
With this speech the Permanent Secretary at the Zanzibari Ministry

of Culture tries to reclaim the human resources that were lost to the
imperial centre. The narrator is encouraged to believe that he can eas-
ily slip back into his former position as a citizen of Zanzibar, that the
past can be recuperated at the drop of a hat. His identity as a Zanzibari
is never questioned by anyone except himself and yet Gurnah’s almost
callous refusal to provide him with a name renders this character what
Simon Lewis has termed ‘a non-identity’ (1999: 222). His flight to and
from different homes, none of which can supply the emotional stability
he longs for, serves as a metaphor for the endless rootlessness of many
postcolonial subjects, whose genealogies have been complicated by the
forces of imperialism.3
The concept of home is inevitably tied up with the notion of iden-
tity, the story we tell of ourselves or the one which others tell of us.
Identities are free-floating, unlimited by borders and boundaries. When
migrants cross a boundary there is hostility and exclusion as well as
welcome and inclusion, with both responses often overlapping each
other. Workers are needed for dirty jobs but lack of hygiene is singled
out as an innate quality among certain ethnic groups. Roots, like home,
are in a certain place but places or homes are socially constructed. Place
is often associated with tradition and tradition is fluid as it is always
being reconstituted. In fact tradition is really about change, a constant
44 Felicity Hand
change that is never tacitly acknowledged. Identity is changed by our

life’s journey, forcing our subjectivities to hover around us in constant
flux. The wavering identity of the narrator, his becoming as opposed
to his being, is magnificently portrayed through his own self-imposed
traps:
[ ... ] my alienness was important to all of us [ ... ] It adorned them

with the liberality of their friendly embrace of me, and adorned me
with authority over the whole world south of the Mediterranean and
east of the Atlantic. My word, unless it was utterly implausible, super-
seded all others on these regions. It was from these beginnings that
it became necessary later to invent those stories of orderly affairs and
tragic failure. I was allowed so much room that I could only fill it
with invention. (p. 62)
He finds himself inventing his identity to fit in with the expectations of

his new environment to the extent that he eventually believes the web
of lies he has so masterfully woven. His real past failed to counteract
the ambiguity of the present, leading him to invent a suitable geneal-
ogy comprised of a renovated and selectively appropriated set of memo-
ries and discourses. His individual history leaks all over the place with
past and present conveniently blending into each other. The stories he
tells Emma have more to do with his continuing shoring up of self-
understanding than with historical truths: ‘[t]he calloused and stiff-
ened memories that attached me to my past’ (p. 32) make him desire to
free himself from his unwelcome past. The narrator’s storytelling, then,
becomes a metaphor at one and the same time for migrant adaptation
to new surroundings and for the discursive nature of postcolonial iden-
tity itself.
No consideration of postcolonial subjectivity can disregard the ways
in which colonial experience is interiorized and fragmentation is
imposed by the conditions of migrant marginality. Gurnah endeavours
to present a general understanding of history as a fabricated text. The
past can become, must become, fixed, because disambiguating the past
permits people to make sense of uncertainties in the present (Ganguly,
1992). The narrator’s plea that ‘I had embellished my story to make it
less messy’ (AS: 33) is really an excuse for him to ignore his present cow-
ardice. While the present is by definition uncertain for everyone since it
is always in the process of emerging, it becomes doubly ambivalent for
migrant subjects who also have to deal with difference and marginal-
ity. Thus one set of uncertainties is repressed by rendering the past in
Becoming Foreign 45
coherent, unequivocal and undoubtedly artificial ways. Emigration is

supposed to liberate people although nostalgia about the past reveals
repressed fantasies of identity and belongingness. Immigration is asso-
ciated with an improvement of social status and financial security, but
material freedom is often opposed to experiences of marginality and
alienation. As Gurnah’s narrator seems to intuit, social relations are bol-
stered through the masking of reality, which is just one of the strategies
employed to reconstitute traditions and cultural boundaries even when
it is accomplished through deception and lying:
I did not mean to lie to Emma, dupe her out of contempt or disregard
while I exploited her for her affection. I don’t exactly know why I
began to suppress things, change other things, fabricate to such an
extent. Perhaps it was to straighten out my record to myself, to live
up to her account of me, to construct a history closer to my choice
than the one I have been lumbered with, to cling to her affection, to
tell a story which would not bore her. (pp. 62–3)
His post-amnesty trip back to Zanzibar ends disastrously with bad feel-
ings and resentment in the atmosphere. He has now shown himself in
his true colours to his family who had kept alive the rags-to-riches myth
of the colonial-boy-makes-good in the mother country. His family dis-
cover his cowardice, his duplicity and what they see as his repudiation
of his cultural heritage. The long awaited triumphant journey home
turns into a mockery of itself: ‘I ... wanted to finish with what needed to
be said and done and return to her, return from here that is no longer
home’ (p. 170). When he does return to his English home and discov-
ers that Emma is leaving him for another man, he reflects that ‘I made
up the whole pack of lies which was my life with her because I could. I
don’t even know if that is true, or if there are more complicated reasons
for what I did which I do not have the wit or energy to analyse’ (p. 215).
Ties of blood and culture make his family ask him to return home when
they find out about Emma’s abandonment: ‘[b]ut it wasn’t home any
more, and I had no way of retrieving that seductive idea except through
more lies’ (p. 217).
By the end of Admiring Silence the narrator’s cultural identity has
undergone so many reconstructions that he is left literally floating in a
space beyond either before or now. Contemporary individuals all pass
through several widely divergent social worlds. At any single moment of
a person’s life, she or he inhabits simultaneously several such divergent
worlds. This, according to Gurnah, is the lot of the diasporic subject,
46 Felicity Hand
doomed to be a permanent misfit as she or he never quite feels com-

fortable anywhere, uprooted from each world and not at home in any.
Kristeva argues that the stranger is universal on account of having no
home and no roots and it can be argued that the stranger’s experience is
one most of us now share. Adrift in universal homelessness, individuals
turn to their private lives – and private fabrications – as the only loca-
tion where they may hope to build a home and construct a self; their
tale-telling is thus not only a metaphor for their piecemeal, diasporic
identity, but is actually constitutive of it.
3 Memory and fragmentation
One of Gurnah’s projects in his sixth novel By the Sea is the examina-
tion of how fragments of history and memory intertwine and interfere
with each other. His use of two narrators to unravel the same story
demonstrates how perspective can colour one’s interpretation of events.
Omar and Mahmud, once divided by a long-standing family feud
while in Zanzibar, drift into an unexpected friendship as they come
to terms with their family histories through the mutual unburdening
of their conflicting stories. The story begins in 1960 when Omar, aged
31 and the owner of a prosperous furniture business, is befriended by
an unscrupulous Persian merchant, Hussein. Omar agrees to loan him
a large sum of money, for which he is given a surprising document as
security: the deeds to the house of Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, Hussein’s
landlord. The merchant had himself lent a similar sum of money to his
landlord the previous year and had received the latter’s house as his
security. As Omar suspects, Hussein never returns and in due course he
is obliged to claim repayment of the loan. Rajab Shaaban is enraged by
what he sees as Omar’s double-dealing because he believes that Omar
has also tricked his (Rajab Shaaban’s) aunt into leaving him her house
in her will. Omar’s father had married Rajab Shaaban’s widowed aunt,
who preferred to favour her stepson, Saleh, rather than her nephew,
reduced to a life of drunkenness.
However, public opinion seems to gradually favour Rajab Shaaban,
especially since he turns to religion and becomes an example of pious
humility. Although his wife openly carries on affairs with other men,
she still resents Omar’s conduct towards her husband and through the
help of one of her lovers, the Minister of Development and Resources,
she orchestrates a campaign to discredit Omar and have him put into
prison. He is sent to various detention camps and finally is released
in 1979, 11 years later, following an amnesty. On his return home he
Becoming Foreign 47
learns that his wife and baby daughter died during his first year of
imprisonment. He manages to eke out a living in relative peace until
Rajab Shaaban’s elder son, Hassan, who had run away with Hussein the
merchant 30 years previously, returns determined to claim his father’s
house from Omar. The thought of another prison sentence proves too
much for the latter, who sees flight from Zanzibar as his only hope. He
uses Rajab Shaaban’s birth certificate in order to obtain a passport as
his own had been confiscated. Omar, masquerading as Rajab Shaaban
Mahmud, obtains political asylum in Britain and receives a visit from
Latif Mahmud, curious about the man who has borrowed his father’s
name. The novel ends with the two men, Omar and Mahmud, each
coming to terms with the other’s version of their own family history
and, by extension, with the conflicting narratives of Zanzibar’s post-
revolutionary identity.
By the Sea, then, is driven on one level by a dialectic between history
and memory, which are two sides of the same narrative coin since they
correspond to attitudes to or, inversely, types of knowledge about the
past (Lowenthal, 1986: 213). Perspective can colour one’s interpretation
of events through different ways of expressing notions or feelings about
the past. For David Lowenthal (1986: 207), memory is thus a tool that
reveals the prejudices and biases which we project onto other people’s
as well as on our own histories. In this respect, Omar had been cast
into the role of villain by the family of Rajab Shaaban, who are forced
to abandon their house and all their belongings since years earlier
Shaaban had rashly signed away ownership of the house. At the end of
the novel, when the two men have accepted the presence of the other
and the initial awkwardness has dissipated, Mahmud recalls the day
that his family’s house and all their possessions became the property
of Omar.
‘I have a memory of you picking out some of the pieces and then
sending the rest for auction. I have a picture of that,’ he said. ‘I fol-
lowed the cart from our house, and I have a memory of you walk-
ing among the pieces and selecting things which you wanted.’
I stared at him in astonishment. ‘No, it’s not possible,’ I said ...
‘Let’s say for the moment that I imagined it ... But it seems so strange
to have a picture.’ (BS: 242–3)
Omar’s energetic denial of such an event discloses the bias of the

Shaaban family’s memory of him. Mahmud’s parents had poured all
their hatred and resentment into the boy’s mind to such a degree that
48 Felicity Hand
he could actually visualize the scene of Omar’s ultimate callousness: his

refusal to allow the Shaaban family to keep even the most insignificant
items from their former home.
As well as between history and memory, the characters in By the Sea
are caught between the opposing discourses of the colonial and the
postcolonial. Mahmud left Zanzibar as a young man, full of dreams and
ambition. When we meet him he has spent over half his life in England
and has carved out for himself a comfortable niche in academia. But
though he has settled in Britain, his experiences still carry with them
resonances from a former colonial era. He recounts the day when,
hurrying to his lectures, he is hissed at by a passing man, ‘you grin-
ning blackamoor’ (p. 72). The thorough search for the etymology of
the expression does little to explain the stranger’s uncalled for verbal
abuse.
I had not expected to see so much black black black on a page like
that. Stumbling on it so unprepared was a bigger shock than being
called you gwinning [sic] blackamoor by a man who looked like a
disgruntled, dated movie persona. It made me feel hated, suddenly
weak with a kind of terror at such associations. This is the house I
live in, I thought, a language which barks and scorns at me behind
every third corner. (pp. 72–3)
Despite, or possibly because of his social status and regular contributions

to the nation’s taxes, Mahmud is seen by the host population to be what
Homi K. Bhabha (1994: 85–92) described as a mimic man in relation
to the colonizers/white men – someone who is ‘almost the same but not
quite’ (p. 89. Original emphasis) and for which reason he is regarded as
ultimately threatening. His identity is in constant ambivalence: at one
and the same time he may be a ‘grinning blackamoor’ to the indigenous
white population and what he calls ‘a processed stooge’ (BS: 73) to fel-
low Zanzibaris. In fact he occupies the ‘third space’ that Bhabha has
written about, too English for the Africans, who cannot recognize him
as a compatriot, and too black for sectors of the British population, who
refuse to accommodate him in their midst. As a middle-class academic,
Mahmud ultimately has the choice to become part of what Paul Gilroy
has termed ‘Britain’s spontaneous, convivial culture’ (2004: xi) unlike
the first generation of New Commonwealth migrants or present-day
economic migrants and asylum-seekers, who lack this choice because
of an unwillingness to forget cultural roots or a simple incapacity to
suppress memories of home. Mahmud has the lived experience and the
Becoming Foreign 49
intellectual resources to opt to become a new (Black) Briton. However,

the postcolonial melancholia described by Gilroy seems to have envel-
oped him completely. The anxiety and fear that has gripped contem-
porary British society is projected onto the white majority by ‘the
unwitting bearers of the imperial and colonial past’ (Gilroy, 2004: 110).
Despite the years he has lived in Britain and his modest success in
attempts at sharing the values and way of life of his new homeland,
Mahmud forms part of the army of these ‘unwitting bearers’. Bhabha’s
third space is articulated as a positive contact zone that provides agency
to those who occupy it. However, Mahmud’s position is constraining
and debilitating, and as such reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s experience
of discovering his blackness as a student in Lyon (Fanon, 1991). The
incident with the stranger in the street quoted above underscores the
Fanonian idea that assuming the language of the colonizer as one’s own
is in fact a denial of the self, especially when that language denigrates
blackness to such a degree.4
Omar, likewise, is plunged into an intense and anguishing inward
journey into the events that have led him to abandon his homeland for
an uncertain future by himself in a foreign land. In Zanzibar he had
been a hard worker and is arrested, ostensibly because of his Arabian
ancestry, but in fact as part of Rajab Shaaban’s wife’s revenge thanks to
her relationship with a high-ranking politician.5 On his release, he is
forced to flee the country as Rajab Shaaban’s elder son, fuelled by the
bitterness and hatred he imbibed from his father, exerts his influence to
have his family’s enemy put away for good. Left with little choice, Omar
constructs himself as an asylum-seeker, inventing an identity that will
afford him a convenient escape route. He arrives in Britain in the midst
of the uproar surrounding the apparent proliferation of asylum-seekers
in Britain.6 Omar’s flight from Zanzibar is clearly a one-way trip as he
knows that return would end in a biased trial and renewed imprison-
ment. At the beginning of By the Sea, even his claims to asylum seem
dubious. He is 65 years old, well over the average age of the majority of
people fleeing political persecution and, as he pretends to the authori-
ties, cannot speak any English. He appropriates the name of Rajab
Shaaban in order to obtain a passport and leave his county on ‘this life-
saving trip’ (p. 41), as he calls it.
It is through this seemingly unreliable character that Gurnah builds
up a portrait of what forced emigration actually entails: as with Admiring
Silence, it is once more a matter of deception and tale-telling. Omar
must lie in order to be safe from persecution, he must pretend in order
to achieve something resembling a respectable, peaceful old age. He
50 Felicity Hand
himself admits to being ‘an involuntary instrument of another’s design,

a figure in a story told by someone else’ (pp. 68–9). As an asylum-seeker
he is expected to provide a certain type of narrative, one that may have
little, if any, resemblance to his own personal history and the political
instability of Zanzibar. Omar is indeed a victim, a victim of his own
avarice, his own lack of foresight, and, above all, his vanity. The price
he has to pay is a harsh one: forced emigration to a land that will only
nominally acknowledge the vestige of a colonial debt to a citizen of a
former colony, but that will, in practice, despise him as the immigration
officer, Kevin Edelman, warns him:
People like you come pouring in here without any thought of the
damage they cause. You don’t belong here, you don’t value any of the
things we value, you haven’t paid for them through generations, and
we don’t want you here. We’ll make life hard for you, make you suf-
fer indignities, perhaps even commit violence on you. Mr. Shaaban,
why do you want to do this? (p. 12)
Here and elsewhere, Gurnah’s prose makes Omar sympathetic – we can

even forgive his double-dealing. He comes over as acting in good faith
but swept up by historical forces, in this case the upheaval after the
Zanzibari Revolution (Hand, 2010b: 80–1; Moorthy, 2010: 97–98).
By means of the dual narrative of Omar and Mahmud, Gurnah pro-
vides a chronicle of the recent history of Zanzibar which presents the
internal family feuding as a microcosm – and also an allegory – of the
brutalities that took place amongst Zanzibari citizens in the first years
after independence. Omar and Mahmud’s opening up to each other
represents the opening up of old historical wounds in order to cleanse
them once and for all of recriminations. Unjust imprisonment for 11
years and the loss of his wife and daughter is Omar’s personal trauma,
one of many suffered by Zanzibaris of Arab descent.7 Mahmud’s per-
sonal history is that of the trauma of self-exile, a deliberate and inten-
tional cutting off from family and homeland, motivated by what the
young man saw to be an impossible legacy of inherited disputes and
petty recriminations. He explains to Omar:
It’s all history, anyway. None of it matters, really. I’m not saying that
history does not matter, knowing about what happened so we under-
stand what we are about, and how we came to be as we are, and what
stories we tell about it all. I mean I don’t want recriminations, all this
family business, all this muttering that stretches further back all the
Becoming Foreign 51
time. Have you noticed how the history of Islam is so tied up with
family squabbles? ... Have you noticed the incredible consequences of
family squabbles in the history of Islamic societies? (p. 195. Original
emphasis)
Fate has seen to it that Omar and the son of the man whose identity he
has appropriated in order to leave Zanzibar are brought together again
in England after 35 years. Neither of them cherishes much love for his
homeland, Omar having spent 11 years in jail without ever having been
properly tried and Mahmud voluntarily abandoning his homeland in
the early sixties. He has severed all links with his country of origin and
his family, even adopting a new name. Mahmud’s life in the West has
isolated him from the obligations of rendering an account of his per-
sonal life, a life which has allowed him to rise above the scandals and
family squabbles but which has turned him into a rootless, dissatisfied
wanderer. His meetings with Omar have acted like a balm to put things
into their proper perspective and have enabled him to reflect upon his
severing of ties with his East African origins.
Something in me resisted what you were saying, even though I was

gripped by it. So I’ve been thinking about that and putting the sto-
ries alongside each other, and seeing the gaps that I will never fill,
and the ones we managed to avoid last time. I feel worn out after
all this time, after all these years of thinking about that time and
that place. And living here with all the comings and goings, and
the trooping of my life through hostilities and contempt and super-
ciliousness. I feel worn out and raw, livid with sores. [ ... ] So I was
looking forward to coming here, to hear you talk, for both of us to
find relief. (p. 207)
In short, Gurnah recurs to a common trope when forefronting Zanzibar’s

internal conflicts: that of the family as allegory of the nation. He sug-
gests that the failings and inadequacies of the father, Rajab Shaaban,
run parallel to the shortcomings of the new nation and just falls short
of suggesting that it is the women who will put things straight and
get the nation on its feet again (Hand, 2010b: 77–8, 84). In a similar
way to Somali writer Nuruddin Farah’s depiction of a claustrophobic
Mogadishu (1992), Gurnah’s portrayal of the ‘bickering and pettiness’
of ‘people with their unending grudges and their malice’ (BS: 193)
underlines the stifling closeness of the island and the intensity with
which life is experienced in small places.8
52 Felicity Hand
Home and identity for Gurnah’s protagonists are elusive categories:

despite his economic and social success, Mahmud is as adrift as Omar
and their gradual friendship is born out of the former’s need for relief
from what he calls ‘all the comings and goings, and the trooping of
my life through hostilities and contempt and superciliousness’ (p. 207).
The rift between the two men is gradually being healed and they seem
to be drifting into friendship, despite their turbulent family histories.
Mahmud’s encounter with Omar so many years after he left his home-
land, presumably never to return, has forced him to remember that
abandoned past and this produces unforeseen pangs of pain and even
a tinge of regret:
It’s as if a length of string ties your claw to a post in the ground, and
you scratch and scratch there all the time even as you imagine that
you have flown worlds. (p. 151)
Home is always there to pull one back, to remind one of one’s roots and
one’s past histories, however deeply we think we have buried them.
4 Re-membering the past to voice the present
Colonial history, like its offshoot racial stereotyping, has survived

decolonization to a certain degree. By setting the first of the three stories
that make up Desertion, his seventh novel, at the end of the nineteenth
century, Gurnah allows colonial discourse to dialogue with the stories
of Zanzibari peoples of Arab or mixed descent. As Gurnah (2002) has
himself argued, postcolonial writing often falls into the trap of glossing
over the fragmentations within indigenous cultures, in its concern to
denounce European colonization and extol native resistance. Desertion
spins an intricate tale of fated meetings and histories that leak into one
another.
Part I of Desertion opens with the sensational arrival of the mzungu,
Martin Pearce, in a small East African town in 1899. After being heart-
lessly abandoned by his Somali guides on the way to the coast, fate
has it that he is found by a dukawallah, Hassanali, who takes him in as
Islamic custom requires. Pearce turns out to be an amateur historian
and linguist, who, rescued from the hospitality of the shopkeeper, and
safely installed in the house of the District Officer, Frederick Turner,
can charm the locals with his courtesy and ability to converse in Arabic.
Having recovered from his harrowing experience, Pearce returns to the
shop to thank his benefactors for their kindness and to make amends
Becoming Foreign 53
for the District Officer’s rudeness and haughty behaviour. Over lunch
with Hassanali, the Englishman is captivated by his sister Rehana, and
the first part of the novel ends with a socially frowned upon love affair,
that of a European and a ‘native woman’. Part II leaps forward to the
momentous events leading up to Zanzibar’s independence and is cen-
tred on the ambitions and frustrations of Amin, Rashid and Farida, the
children of two former radical schoolteachers. Rashid, who turns out to
be the narrator of the novel, busily swots for the entrance examination
which will allow him to leave the island and study in a British univer-
sity. Amin, the perfect son who excels in everything, opts to stay in
Zanzibar and train to be a teacher. Fate, in the shape of his dressmaker
sister, Farida, brings him in contact with Jamila, a wordly divorcée. Like
Martin Pearce some 60 years before, Amin throws caution to the winds
and embarks on a torrid love affair that is doomed to be discovered
sooner or later. History repeats itself as Jamila, the granddaughter of
Pearce and Rehana, will also be deserted by her lover. Parental pressure
acts as ruthlessly on Amin as social approval had on Pearce. Part III
focuses on Rashid’s life in England far away from the violence and mass
slaughters following the overthrow of the new government in Zanzibar.
He carves out a new, successful niche for himself, having completed
his studies and settled down to academic life with an English wife. It is
only when Grace, his wife, finally leaves him that he is drawn to con-
fide in his older brother. Amin, in turn, makes Rashid repository of his
most guarded secret, the unravelling of his love affair with Jamila. It is
not until the very last section of the novel, ‘A Continuation’, which acts
as a kind of epilogue, that Rashid is able to piece all the jigsaw pieces
together and confront his own demons on a long overdue return to
Zanzibar.
Among the many voices that Desertion contains, the one in Part II, a
mixture of narrator, homegrown anthropologist and the adult Rashid,
poses searching questions about contemporary Zanzibar that can be
extrapolated to postcolonial African societies at large. ‘What has
changed so much that our times are so unruly now when they weren’t
before? ... The British have gone, that’s what’ (D: 128). The colonial nos-
talgia that seems to be expressed here is less one of genuine regret at
the departure of the foreign rulers than of frustration at the breakdown
of what was perceived as a cohesive, group identity (Bissell, 2005). The
‘glorious’ revolution of 1964 was set up in contrast to the colonial or
even precolonial past, a past which denies not only the shortcomings
and excesses of the revolution but also, more importantly, the plural-
ity of the present, with its constant fragmentariness. Gurnah’s novel
54 Felicity Hand
makes a plea for constructing histories that reconceptualize the now as

containing a multiplicity of presents and the here as implying a plural-
ity of contexts. Whatever else it did – and the jury is still out on whether
the revolution was a defeat or triumph (Sheriff, 1991) – it is undeniable
that the events of 1964 fractured the collective identity, fragile as it may
have been in a society where, according to Gurnah, reputations could
be made or destroyed at the slightest pretext through slander, gossip or
misguided Muslim piety (Sedgwick, 2006,: 163): ‘There was someone
always looking on and adding fragment to someone else’s fragment,
until sooner or later everything was found out’ (D: 189).
Desertion is a complex work that probes into the ways differences are
played out and into the tensions between the desire to fit in and the
need to assert individuality. In this sense, the novel reveals the social
stigma attached to inter-ethnic relations, a common characteristic of
multiethnic societies such as the one the novel depicts where ‘nice-
ties of ancestry and hierarchy play a crucial part in the ever-changing
rewriting of history to explain and validate the present’ (Middleton,
1992: 15). In the Swahili Coast cultural area economic and political
ties with India date back to the first centuries of the Christian era and,
coinciding with the European Middle Ages, both Muslim and Hindu
merchants from India played an active role in the Indian Ocean trade,
although the latter, known as Banyani, were more numerous. Groups of
Muslim Bohra settled in some of the larger towns of the Swahili coast
several centuries ago. Curiously, despite this long history of intercul-
tural contact, while Arab people have gradually been absorbed into
the category of Swahili, the Indians are rarely counted as belonging
(Middleton, 1992:13). In the early part of the novel, Rehana, like her
brother Hassanali, is a chotara, which she soon discovers is ‘an improper
child of an Indian man with an African woman’ (D: 67). Two genera-
tions later, Jamila, her granddaughter, will be branded as an outsider by
Amin’s family. His elder sister Farida, who reluctantly passes on a love
note, warns him, ‘You have to remember that people like her live in a
different world from ours. [ ... ] They’re not our kind of people [ ... ] They
have a different idea about what is required of them and about what
is ... honourable’ (D: 5).
His mother reaffirms Jamila’s undesirability, her very different code
of conduct and insensibility towards the rules of society. Her grand-
mother lived a ‘life of secrets and sin’ and her family, who have ‘always
done as they wished’, are ‘shameless’ (D: 204). Amin, the son who stayed
behind in Zanzibar, breaks a 20 silence and provides Rashid, ‘who never
left us’ (D: 232), with the clues to reconstruct their pasts: his notebooks
Becoming Foreign 55
where he pours out his anguish and fears about his love affair with
Jamila. The long silence has in fact allowed Rashid to come to terms
with his own ‘life of small apathy’ (D: 230) with its ‘tolerable alienness’
(D: 222) as well as providing him with an understanding of the tragedy
of Amin’s life, and the personal sacrifice he had made out of loyalty to
their parents and respect for their cultural traditions: ‘I could not aban-
don them. I could not disobey them’ (D: 252).
Saleh Omar and the narrator of Admiring Silence are possibly Gurnah’s
most accomplished liars as they use deception to bridge the gap between
form and substance, even though it is a false solution to the problem.
The reinvention of the past may downplay the pre-immigrant circum-
stances, or may serve to cover-up present ambivalences. However, in
Desertion, his seventh novel, Gurnah takes the trope of tale-telling or
reinvention one stage further through Rashid’s reconstruction of the
story of Rehana and Martin Pearce’s affair from the few scraps of gossip
and scandal he can gather from his brother’s notebooks. His retelling
of the tale of the two pairs of lovers, Martin and Rehana and Amin and
Jamila, seems to project his own sensations of loss and failure and his
own dubious feelings about Zanzibar: ‘it was time to go home, in a man-
ner of speaking, to visit and to put my fears to rest and to beg pardon
for my neglect’ (D: 261). Home is that elusive category that can never be
neatly defined. Home may be where the heart is and Rashid’s decision
to return to Zanzibar after 22 years’ absence and in the company of
Barbara Turner bears witness to his own reassessment of ‘home’, which
in his youth had been ‘stifling’ with ‘the social obsequiousness, the
medieval religiosity, the historical mendacities’ (D: 155).
5 Conclusion
There are many sorts of migrants, some of whom live on the literal
borderline separating two states, others on a more figurative kind
of borderline between two cultures, two families, two ways of life.
The borderline, always ambivalent, can be both an inherent part of
the inside and of the chaotic wilderness outside. It may be interest-
ing to leave one’s homeland in order to enter the culture of others as
a stranger. Kristeva (1991) points out that the stranger is neither friend
nor enemy, but is one member of the family of undecidables, an unclas-
sifiable. A stranger is someone who refuses to remain confined to the
faraway land or go away from our own. Physically close while remaining
culturally remote, strangers often seem to be suspended in the empty
space between a tradition which they have already left and the mode
56 Felicity Hand
of life which stubbornly denies them the right of entry. The stranger
is an anomaly who blurs boundary lines, bestrides inside and outside,
order and chaos, and is friend and enemy. Latif Mahmud and Rashid, in
many ways ideal migrants in social and economic terms, still remain in
a cultural limbo forever hovering between Britain and Zanzibar, inside
and outside, one of ‘us’ and so distinctly one of ‘them’. For his part, the
narrator in Admiring Silence seems to have opted out of either camp and
has chosen to be an outsider and ‘enemy’ to all.
Although he weaves stories of failed hopes and disappointments,
Gurnah seems to enjoy ending his novels on an optimistic note. Saleh
Omar and Latif Mahmud in By the Sea, and Rashid and Barbara Turner
in Desertion may each consolidate their friendship in a not too distant
future, and even the narrator of Admiring Silence may be given a second
chance with Ira, the East African Indian he sits next to on the plane
back to England. In his most recent works Gurnah weaves more colour-
ful threads in the tapestry of East African history and continues his
probing exploration of the power of memory and the role it plays in the
construction of ourselves and our identities. By the Sea is a tale of two
men whose stories are, in a sense, branches of the same tree, a tree that
has grown so tall and so wide that the common root – a shared cultural
heritage – is too deeply buried to be perceived. The 1964 Zanzibar revo-
lution implemented a drastic ethnic pruning which ruled out any pos-
sibility of hybridization thus enforcing Saleh Omar to become an exile
in order to make his peace with Latif Mahmud, both of whom slowly
merge into the condition of exiles, the ultimate homogenizing category.
Likewise Rashid needed to leave and be left so he could become recon-
ciled with his and his family’s ghosts. The wounds of the revolution are
still tender in Gurnah’s works and for Zanzibar, once the hub of a great
maritime empire, now reduced to a claustrophobic speck in the Indian
Ocean, the current erasure of cultural and political differences signals
an inevitable – one hopes transitory – phase in the process of coming to
terms with a new Zanzibari identity (Hand, 2010a).
Undeniably ‘spiritless hulk[s]’ (AS:169), Gurnah’s rather self-pitying
migrants gently ironize on their situations and their despicable selves.
Gurnah, author and migrant himself, tells stories of despair and fail-
ure, deceit and unfulfilled dreams, but through his narratives and
their rich veins of deep sympathy and sarcastic humour he contrib-
utes to a greater understanding of the situation of the vast battalion
of unsuccessful migrants. The voices of these new Britons – their his-
tories, their personal dramas, their hopes for the future – need to be
known if their experiences are to become part of the common British
Becoming Foreign 57
experience rather than remain alien ones. Gurnah’s novels are not
exactly success stories or optimistic works, but they do transmit posi-
tive messages of friendship and perseverance, and, most importantly,
they break the silence surrounding the experiences of in-between
people, be they immigrants, refugees or asylum-seekers. Gurnah’s
migrants are individuals coming to terms with their new situation and
their often troublesome roots, destined to share a common ground
with their fellow citizens through a reassessment of their past lives,
their troubled histories and their re-membered identities. In his nov-
els, Gurnah shows how that coming to terms, that ‘becoming foreign’,
is a matter of substituting fragmentation and silence with tale-telling,
a process which is simultaneously metaphor for and constitutive of
migrant identity.
Acknowledgements
Research for this paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of
Science and Innovation, project FFI2009-07711.
Notes
1. Where necessary, in references the following abbreviations will be used for
Gurnah’s novels: AS (Admiring Silence), BS (By the Sea), D (Desertion) and PW
(Pilgrim’s Way).
2. This section on Admiring Silence is a partial reworking of Hand (2005).
3. Lewis argues that many of the characters in Gurnah’s novels and in the fic-
tion of M. G. Vassanji are more easily categorized as ‘a non-identity’ rather
than hybrids or people with dual identities, which suggests similarities with
the personal life stories of the writers themselves (1999: 216–18). The national
allegiances of Vassanji’s East African Asians or Gurnah’s uprooted Zanzibaris
have been complicated by the reshuffling of ethnic loyalties that took place
in Kenya and Tanzania respectively. See Twaddle (1990) and Mohammed
(2006).
4. Gurnah himself emigrated to the UK to continue his studies in 1967 and
has written somewhat bitterly about his reception in mid-sixties Britain
(2001b).
5. Zanzibaris of Arab descent were hounded after the 1964 Revolution: ‘[t]heir
crime was the ignoble history of Oman in these parts, and that was not a
connection they were allowed to give up. In other respects they were indi-
genes, citizens, raiiya, and they were sons of indigenes, but after their treat-
ment at the hands of various commanding officers, they were eager to leave,
and spoke as despisingly of their persecutors as their persecutors did of them’
(BS: 225).
6. On the growing hostility towards refugees and asylum-seekers in the UK
from the 1980s onwards see Dummett (2001, ch. 7).
58 Felicity Hand
7. See Othman (1993) on the relations between class and race and the 1964
Revolution.
8. Falk reads By the Sea in terms of new forms of familial networks: the novel
‘extends the exploration of culture to suggest that the fluid and complex
Zanzibari society prevents notions of cultural belonging’ (2007: 47).
3
‘My split self and my split
world’: Troping Identity in
Mohsin Hamid’s Fiction
Adriano Elia
1 Introduction
This chapter aims to reveal the significance of metaphor in Mohsin

Hamid’s fiction as a means to describe the contradictions of the
author’s (and his characters’) diasporic, sociopolitical and economic
condition. To this end, it may be useful to provide some biographical
details that are crucial to the development of Hamid’s life and literary
career. Born in 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan, Hamid spent part of his child-
hood in the United States while his father was doing a PhD at Stanford
University. Then he moved back to Lahore where he lived until the
age of 18, when he returned to the States. In 1993 he graduated summa
cum laude from Princeton University, where he studied creative writ-
ing with Joyce Carol Oates and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, in 1997 he began work-
ing as a management consultant in corporate New York City, while
concurrently completing his first novel, Moth Smoke. In the summer
of 2001 Hamid relocated to London, where five years later he became
a dual citizen (Pakistani and British) after passing the ‘Life in the UK
Test’, introduced after the 7 July 2005 London bombings. Eventually,
in 2009 he returned to Pakistan with his wife Zahra and their daugh-
ter Dina. Therefore, by the age of 30 Hamid had lived for some 15
years in Pakistan and 15 years in the United States (Hamid, 2009: 289).
His, then, is the biography of one who is at the same time an insider
and an outsider; as such, it embodies the postcolonial condition of a
world citizen who has to come to terms with his own ambivalence and
in-betweenness.
59
60 Adriano Elia
Hamid has published two novels so far, Moth Smoke (2000) and The
Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).1 His own remarks on why he writes
state plainly his interest in matters of identity while also pointing to
the contrasting emphases of the two works:
I turned to my writing to help me understand my split self and my

split world. Moth Smoke had for me been a look at Pakistan with a
gaze altered by the many years I had spent in America. The Reluctant
Fundamentalist, I thought, would be a look at America with a gaze
reflecting the part of myself that remained stubbornly Pakistani.
(Hamid, 2007b)
An analysis of class conflict in late-1990s Pakistan, Moth Smoke alludes

to what remains when the moth is fatally seduced by the candle flame:
this is a metaphor for the risks run by the self-destructive young pro-
tagonist in being too involved with love, drugs and easy money. The
Reluctant Fundamentalist is a semi-autobiographical novel in the form of
a dramatic monologue about a young Pakistani man named Changez,
who – like Hamid – studied at Princeton and got a top-class job in finan-
cial business. However, in the aftermath of 9/11 he was treated with
suspicion and became resentful towards the United States. Here, too,
the title of the novel is rich in connotations: as we shall see, the words
‘reluctant’ and ‘fundamentalist’ take on different nuances of metaphor-
ical meaning.
Beyond these evocative titles, both novels are rife with metaphors
and other tropes, such as allegory and allusion, that offer essential
insights into the author’s cultural, sociopolitical and diasporic iden-
tity. For the purposes of my discussion, I shall divide those tropes
into two groups, general tropes and diasporic tropes. General tropes is
my umbrella term for those which refer to issues other than diaspora.
Notable examples in Moth Smoke include the ‘moth/flame’ metaphor
(for love), the ‘air-conditioning’ trope (for class status and social ine-
quality), and the ‘Pajero’ trope (for impunity and non-applicability of
laws), while in The Reluctant Fundamentalist the choice of the name
Erica (symbolizing America) evokes the intertwining of the life of this
character with the historical events involving the United States in
that period. For their part, diasporic tropes highlight the author’s
and his characters’ ambivalence and hybridity. In The Reluctant
Fundamentalist, for example, diasporic tropes such as the beard and
the janissary are connotationally charged indicators of Changez’s
liminal condition.
‘My split self and my split world’ 61
2 Moth Smoke
Widely acclaimed by critics all over the world, Hamid’s debut novel Moth
Smoke was included in The New York Times’ ‘Notable Book of the Year’
list in 2000 and has been translated worldwide into eleven languages.
Counting among its influences Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction,
Dashiell Hammet’s novel The Maltese Falcon and the oral cadence of
writers Toni Morrison and James Baldwin,2 it took Hamid about seven
years to complete the novel, defined by the author as a look at Pakistan
by somebody from Pakistan – like himself – who had spent a long time
in the United States.
The novel presents a social commentary on class discrimination and
criticizes modern Pakistani society and its evils, namely drugs, corrup-
tion and violence. Set in Lahore in the summer of 1998, at the time of
the first experiments with the nuclear bomb and when the country was
suffering from deep political and religious tension and was at perma-
nent risk of a war with India, the novel introduces several characters
and uses a plurality of narrative voices to recount the same incidents
from different points of view and narrative styles. This polyphony of
voices – some more, some less reliable – releases information about the
plot progressively. The most important belong to the protagonist, the
28-year-old Darashikoh (Daru) Shezad, his long-time friend Aurangzeb
(Ozi),and Ozi’s wife Mumtaz. These three come to form a love trian-
gle, as Daru soon has an affair with Mumtaz, who also acts as a secret,
investigative reporter under the pen-name Zulfikar Manto, in a refer-
ence to Saadat Hassan Manto (1912–1955), a Pakistani short-story writer
of Kashmiri heritage and a huge influence on Hamid for his uncompro-
mising take on issues such as sex, obscenity and prostitution.3 Daru’s
first-person narrative, which starts with an account of his days in jail, is
supplemented by contributions from other characters, who either relate
other pieces of the narrative patchwork or describe known events from
a different perspective.
Once fired from his job as a bank clerk for answering a wealthy cus-
tomer rudely, Daru’s economic and existential problems begin. He starts
selling drugs to the younger, Westernized inhabitants of Lahore, whom
Hamid depicts as forming an alcohol-drinking, dope-smoking, party-
going society, very far from the usual cliché of praying, non-drinking
Pakistani Muslims. Ozi, meanwhile, had been an inseparable childhood
friend of Daru, but after secondary school their roads parted with Ozi
going to study in the United States, while Daru remained in Pakistan.
The reader is thus presented with portraits of two grown-up men
62 Adriano Elia
leading totally different lifestyles in what may be taken as an emblem

for contemporary Pakistan’s vast economic divide. Ozi has become a
successful (if corrupted) man who frequents rich people, has a beautiful
wife (Mumtaz) and a nice house. In contrast, Daru is overwhelmed by
alienation and rage: he leads a disappointing life, partly because of his
frustrating love affair with Mumtaz, who will never abandon the cer-
tainties of her marriage for an uncertain life with him.
Hence Daru indulges in the pleasures of drugs (hashish, ecstasy and
later heroin) and is dazzled by Mumtaz just as moths are drawn towards
candlelight only to end up burned by it. On discovering his wife’s
relationship with Daru, Ozi manages to have him imprisoned on the
trumped-up charge of killing a boy – in fact, it was Ozi himself who
had run the boy over with his Pajero in a hit-and-run accident. Daru’s
progressive decline into self-pity, denial, desperation, laziness, drug
abuse, violence and crime acts as an allegory for the whole of Pakistan,
a country whose fate was jeopardized by corruption, injustice and the
problems involved in the race for nuclear weapons (Gordon, 2002).
For Hamid, Daru and Ozi are meant to be modern-day versions of the
liberal Mughal prince Dara Shikoh and his brother Aurangzeb, the two
sons of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666), the builder of the
Taj Mahal. Dara Shikoh (1615–1659), the eldest son and heir apparent of
Shah Jahan and his wife Mumtaz Mahal, was defeated by his younger
brother Aurangzeb (1618–1707) in a battle for the Mughal throne. A trial
ordered by Aurangzeb declared Dara Shikoh an apostate from Islam,
and he was murdered on 30 August 1659. Moth Smoke reconsiders the
story of Dara Shikoh’s trial in contemporary Pakistan, and is structured
as an allegory, an extended metaphor describing the state of affairs in
Pakistan at the time of the 1998 nuclear tests (Hamid, 2000: 3–4, 247).
At the beginning of the novel, a ‘Prologue’ introduces the parallel
between the region in the seventeenth century and today’s Pakistan,
whereby the past functions as a type for the present, thus showing that,
despite the very different sociohistorical circumstances, certain events
seem to recur and persist:
It is said that one evening, in the year his stomach was to fail him,
the Emperor Shah Jahan asked a Sufi saint what would become of
the Mughal Empire.
‘Who will sit on the throne after me?’ asked Shah Jahan.
‘Tell me the names of your sons,’ replied the saint.
‘Dara is my eldest son.’
‘The fate of Dara should be asked from Iskandar.’ [ ... ]
The Emperor closed his eyes. ‘Aurangzeb is my youngest son.’
‘Yes,’ said the saint. ‘He will be Aurangzeb.’ [ ... ]

The truth of the saint’s words became apparent. Aurangzeb was
crowned Emperor, and he obtained from the theologians a fatwa
against his defeated brother, charging Dara Shikoh with apostasy
and sentencing him to death. (pp. 3–4)
As we shall see, something similar happens to the protagonist Daru,

whose downward spiral towards his own destruction takes him to jail
for a murder he has not committed. For Anita Desai, however, Hamid’s
use of the analogy with the war of succession between Aurangzeb and
Dara Shikoh does not prove to be totally convincing.4 In fact, Ozi, the
modern version of Aurangzeb, bears no resemblance to the Emperor
Aurangzeb, who was merciless but, unlike Ozi, also virtuous and aus-
tere. Moreover, Daru shows no interest in the Sufi tradition as Dara
Shikoh did. Finally, the historical Mumtaz was not the lover, but the
mother of the two, and the beloved of their father. Despite the rela-
tive weakness of this analogy and a tendency towards melodrama,
Desai argues that the novel deserves to be praised for different rea-
sons, namely for the ‘clearsightedness of his look at the power struc-
ture of a society that has shifted from the old feudalism, based on
birth, to the new Pakistani feudalism based on wealth’ (Desai, 2000).
This is indeed the main merit of Hamid’s allegorical parallel, as it
ingeniously reveals the persistence of certain phenomena, regardless
of the totally different sociohistorical backgrounds between the past
and the present.
As for what I have called general tropes, in Moth Smoke they appear
in several guises. As Richard Gehr (2000) has noted, the fire metaphor
is used by Hamid in a number of variations, from the play of moth
and flame to the apocalyptic burnout of nuclear war. This is confirmed
by Desai (2000), who also noticed the frequent use of fire as a meta-
phor, ranging from the endless matches struck and cigarettes lighted to
the bomb in the war between India and Pakistan. But most crucial in
the novel is the moth/flame metaphor: it is the dominant image of the
book, whose title, Moth Smoke, metaphorically suggests the allure and,
at the same time, the danger of love.
There are several passages in the novel that elaborate on the meaning
of this metaphor. Oddly enough, it is Manucci, the illiterate servant of
Daru, who first captures the metaphorical appeal of a moth circling a
candle in a passage culminating in the very title of the novel:
The moth takes off again [ ... ] circles lower and lower, spinning
around the candle in tighter revolutions, like a soap sud over an
64 Adriano Elia
open drain. A few times he seems to touch the flame, but dances
off unhurt.
Then he ignites like a ball of hair, curling into an oily puff of fumes
with a hiss. The candle flame flickers and dims for a moment,
then burns as bright as before.
Moth smoke lingers. (pp. 138–9)
Manucci further notes how ‘The poets say that some moths will do any-
thing out of love for a flame.’ Such a powerful metaphor of the personi-
fied (‘he’) moth that eventually lets himself burn is very appropriate for
Daru, who is madly in love with Mumtaz: a love that will eventually
kill him. The metaphor recurs once again later in the book, when Daru
reflects on his feelings towards Mumtaz:
She’s drawn to me just as I’m drawn to her. She can’t keep away. She
circles, forced to keep her distance, afraid of abandoning her hus-
band and, even more, her son for too long. But she keeps coming,
like a moth to my candle, staying longer than she should, leaving
late for dinners and birthday parties, singeing her wings. She’s risk-
ing her marriage for me, her family, her reputation.
And I, the moth circling her candle, realize that she’s not just a
candle. She’s a moth as well, circling me. I look at her and see myself
reflected, my feelings, my desires. And she, looking at me, must see
herself. And which of us is moth and which is candle hardly seems to
matter. We’re both the same. That’s the secret. (pp. 203–4)
In their seminal work Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson (1980: 3–6) departed from the traditional view of metaphor
as being merely an ornamental stylistic device: for them, a ‘conceptual
metaphor’ functions as a cognitive means to comprehend complex and
abstract concepts and to categorize our own experience. Metaphors are
central in our everyday life, not just with regard to language, but also in
thought and actions, as our behaviour is essentially metaphorical. This
transformation of the role of metaphor from a specialized concern of rhet-
oricians and literary critics to a central concept in the understanding of
the human condition is a crucial feature in Hamid’s fiction. In theoretical
terms, the moth/flame metaphor corresponds to what Zoltán Kövecses
has termed the ‘love-as-fire metaphor’ (Sacks, 1979; Kövecses, 1988: 14).
The passage just quoted comments on the intensity of love: the higher the
heat level, the more intense is love, which can become so hot that it can
even burn and consume the lovers. Daru compares himself and Mumtaz
to the moth and the candle: this personification is blurred, as they swap
roles continually. When they reach the climax of their union, each one
of them becomes a praying mantis for the other, but here it is Daru who
sadly realizes that for him this love story is doomed to failure, as is shown
by ‘the smell of something burning’, an effective image of death:
I just say it.

‘I love you.’
And I lose myself in her eyes and we kiss and I feel myself
becoming part of something new, something larger, something I
never knew could be.
Union.
There are no words.
●●●
But after.
‘Don’t say that,’ she says.
And faintly, the smell of something burning. (pp. 204–5)
Surprising though it may seem, so prosaic a convenience as air-con-

ditioning is another trope deployed by Hamid to reveal the economic
contradictions of Pakistani society. Air-conditioning becomes a proxy
for class status, wealth, privilege, but also, by the same token, poverty
and deprivation. Those like Ozi who can afford it are obviously rich and
advantaged, whereas those like Daru who cannot are poor and deprived.5
Social barriers never seem to fall in Pakistan. ‘Air-conditioning’ is even
used in the title of the chapter in which Julius Superb, Daru’s former
economics professor, eloquently unveils Pakistan’s economic disparity
on the grounds of the air-conditioning trope:
There are two social classes in Pakistan [ ... ] The first group, large and
sweaty, contains those referred to as the masses. The second group
is much smaller, but its members exercise vastly greater control over
their immediate environment and are collectively termed the elite.
The distinction between members of these two groups is made on the
basis of control of an important resource: air-conditioning. (p. 102)
Finally, related to the air-conditioning trope is the Pajero trope, which

further emphasizes the privileged condition of high society in Pakistan.
The owners of oversized and air-conditioned SUVs like the Pajero enjoy
significant benefits, even the non-applicability of laws and rules. In
fact, connections are crucial in order to occupy a privileged position
66 Adriano Elia
in Pakistani society, and the elite very often seem to be above the law.
As Humaira Tariq (2007) argues, they indulge in parties at which ille-
gal activities (namely the use of alcohol and drugs) are paradoxically
protected by easily bribed police officers: as Daru notes with irony, ‘a
mobile police unit [is] responsible for protecting tonight’s illegal rev-
elry’ (p. 81). Laws seem to exist only for the lower classes, and Daru once
again meaningfully argues: ‘The police don’t stop us on our drive home.
We are in a Pajero, after all’ (p. 34) Moreover, the size of the Pajero
implies the fact that bigger cars take precedence over smaller and older
ones, another general metaphor for the privileges of the Pakistani elite:
‘Ozi drives by pointing it [the Pajero] in one direction and stepping on
the gas, trusting that everyone will get out of our way’ (p. 24). This atti-
tude finds a dreadful counterpart in the incident of the killing of the
unlucky young boy, the obvious consequence of Ozi’s unsafe driving:
he will get away with this murder, and this is yet more evidence of the
immunity from justice granted by his social and economic position.
3 The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Hamid began to write The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the summer of

2000: like Moth Smoke, it took him a long time to complete and the novel
was eventually published in 2007. The first draft was set before 9/11,
but in the light of George W. Bush’s military operations in Afghanistan
and the strained situation between Pakistan and India, Hamid decided
to rewrite the novel, this time including the 9/11 events. As Hamid has
argued:
My biggest challenge was not having the delicate architecture of the

novel – its plot and characters – be overwhelmed by the enormity of
the political events that occurred as I was writing it. The first draft –
about a Muslim man working in corporate New York who decides to
leave America for Pakistan – was completed in the summer of 2001,
before September 11. The catastrophe that followed swamped my
story; it was years later that I had something salvaged, and more
time passed before it took on its current form. The novel was written
over seven years and in as many drafts. Then again, so was my first
novel, Moth Smoke, so it may be that this is how I write. (Harcourt,
2007; Hamid, 2007b)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist soon became a bestseller and was almost

unanimously praised by critics. It was translated worldwide into 29
languages, shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and won the
2008 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature. In 2008, the
novel was prescribed reading for all new undergraduates as part of the
Tulane University Reading Project. The following year, it was chosen
as required summer reading for all new students at the University of
St Andrews, UK, and a copy was given to all undergraduates ‘in a new
initiative designed to offer students a common topic for discussion and
focus energies on reading and intellectual debate’. In 2010, Washington
University in St. Louis and Georgetown University in Washington
DC also gave the book to the incoming freshmen as required summer
reading.6
Hamid himself has acknowledged the influence of novels such as F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), for its critique of the American
dream; Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (1987) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s
The Remains of the Day (1989) for the structure based on a nostalgic
reminiscence; Antonio Tabucchi’s Sostiene Pereira (Pereira Declares, 1994),
for the compressed, stripped-down style; and especially Albert Camus’s
The Fall (1957) for the dramatic monologue form. Dostoevsky is a fur-
ther acknowledged influence, for in common with Hamid’s novel both
Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) play
with the notion that characters are actually on trial, whether real, as
in Moth Smoke, or metaphorically by means of the judgmental attitude
towards Changez’s behaviour of the novel’s characters and readers in
The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Hamid wanted his readers to ask ques-
tions, to participate and be involved in the story, to become characters
themselves. His ultimate objective was to write a book that would be
at the same time distasteful (in the sense that it deals with unpleasant
issues) and complicated (on account of the complex web of sociocul-
tural influences), and he thought that the only way to do so effectively
was to use a minimal structure and a concise form (Bookclubs, 2007;
Hamid, 2010b).
In a nutshell, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a critical analysis of
America by someone originally from Pakistan who has lived a long
time in the United States. The novel adopts the style of a parable, an
extended metaphor narrated as an anecdote about the exploration
of two different worlds looking at each other with mutual suspicion.
Changez, the young protagonist, has spent many years in the States
and has to come to terms with the Pakistani side of himself. As James
Lasdun (2007) argues, Changez initially embodies those Manhattan
transplants who are ready and happy to be part of New York City cor-
porate finance when he says, ‘I was, in four and a half years, never an
68 Adriano Elia
American; I was immediately a New Yorker’, an attitude analogous to

Sammy’s declaration in Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay for the film Sammy
and Rosie Get Laid (1987): ‘We love our city and we belong to it. Neither
of us are English, we’re Londoners you see’ (Hamid, 2007a: 33 [original
emphasis]; Kureishi, 2002b: 139–40). Changez develops a strong sense
of belonging to the metropolis as a microcosm of the Western financial
world, but soon has to face an inner conflict between his Pakistani self
and an ambivalent feeling towards America, a nation of great opportu-
nities, but founded on ideals that he does not always share.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist reads like a dramatic monologue.
Although formally a dialogue between the protagonist Changez and an
American interlocutor, the latter never speaks back. It is the Pakistani
point of view that is thoroughly explored, the American character
being reduced to the role of a mere listener. However, as Hamid has
argued, this one-sided dialogue could rather be seen as showing the
Pakistani and the American side of the same person: ‘I am still split
between America and Pakistan. [ ... ] People often ask me if I am the
book’s Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his
American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s con-
versation with himself.’7 This ‘divided man’s conversation with himself’
is a powerful symbol of Hamid’s ambivalence and enacts metaphori-
cally his split identity as a diasporic subject. In an interview, the writer
has stressed the significance of this inner conflict: ‘As someone who is
naturally split between two cultures, the fact that the two cultures are
becoming so increasingly hostile to each other makes me much more
unsettled within myself’ (Gross, 2007; Harcourt, 2007; Hamid, 2010a).
As mentioned above, the title of the novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist,
is also metaphorical and allusive. The protagonist is reluctant to be per-
ceived as a fundamentalist by post-9/11 Islamophobes just because he
is from Pakistan and wears a beard – as we shall see, a stereotypical
metonym for Muslim fundamentalism. Changez is not a religious man,
but the novel plays with the idea that a Pakistani in New York City is
immediately identified as a potential extremist simply because he is a
bearded Muslim. Moreover, Hamid also becomes reluctant to do his
job as a financial analyst, valuing companies on the basis of economic
‘fundamentals’. After the 9/11 attacks Changez begins to have serious
doubts regarding the ethics and the quality of the job he is doing, which
involves firing workers, something that for him is no longer morally
right. Therefore, the title The Reluctant Fundamentalist is multiply sig-
nificant and hints at the multilayered texture of his fiction.8 Nor is the
choice of the protagonist’s name casual. Some critics have mistakenly
interpreted the name Changez as ‘changes’, thus implying the charac-

ter’s change of attitude towards America. But the reason behind the
name is in fact typical of Hamid’s allegorical procedure. Changez in
Urdu means Genghis, and by means of this name the author alludes to
Genghis Khan, the warrior who attacked the Muslim Arab world. For
this reason, Changez would be an odd choice of name for a Muslim
fundamentalist: indeed, the protagonist is more of a secular national-
ist than a practising Muslim. By evoking the figure of Genghis Khan,
Hamid also suggests the idea of a parallel between war and the ruth-
lessness of Western corporate finance, which is Changez’s occupation
(Booker, 2007).
The novel starts in the old market of Anarkali in Lahore where
Changez meets an American with a CIA-style short-cropped hairstyle,
and begins telling him his own life experience. His family in Lahore is
no longer rich as it used to be – when he was 18, Changez left Pakistan
and went to study in the United States (just as Hamid himself did). The
American listens to this story without interrupting – Changez’s long
monologue is interspersed with some questions to the American that
only let us guess at the observations the interlocutor may be making.
Changez talks about his being admitted to Princeton University thanks
to his own excellent school results and references, and also describes
the meeting with Erica, a beautiful American girl, on a holiday in
Greece with his university friends. After graduating from Princeton,
Changez is employed by a prestigious company and becomes a brilliant
financial adviser, travelling constantly all over the world in order to
evaluate the development potential of companies in economic crisis.
This is the phase of his life when he uses every resource in a process of
total assimilation to the culture and the values of the host country, the
United States, a situation that is effectively encapsulated in the janis-
sary metaphor that will be discussed below.
Then, one evening in Manila, Changez turns on the television,
and sees what at first sight seems to be a film. It is the collapse of the
twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York City. Changez’s
unexpected and controversial reaction is expressed by Hamid in the
following terms: ‘And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it might sound,
my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.’ (Hamid, 2007a: 72.
Original emphasis). At that moment, the protagonist’s thoughts were
not of the victims; rather Changez ‘was caught up in the symbolism of it
all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees’
(p. 73. Original emphasis). Something was beginning to shake his cer-
tainties: why did a man like Changez – the product of an American
70 Adriano Elia
university who was making money in America and was in love with an
American woman – desire something so terrible for America?
Changez is torn between an ambivalent sense of affection and frustra-
tion for America, and experiences what Amit Chaudhuri (2007: 26) has
aptly defined as ‘the absolute familiarity and foreignness of America’.
This is probably why he watches the twin towers collapse with a mild
sense of satisfaction caused – perhaps unconsciously – by the accumu-
lated disenchantment with and resentment towards the United States.
In the eyes of Islamic people, the United States had previously been
guilty of atrocities against civilians, and such responsibilities sparked
off a sense of rebellion and revenge. Thus Changez begins to ques-
tion his own role in American society, asking himself whether he still
believes in the ‘fundamentals’ of the life that he is living in New York
City. His inner conflict becomes apparent to him and also to the other
characters. Changez’s American dream turns sour and begins to crum-
ble, and he suddenly realizes that he has been serving a country which
is not his own. He resolves to visit his family in Lahore. A sense of rage
and anxiety grows within: how could he possibly forget where he came
from? How could he abandon his country and his family, who were
preparing themselves for a possible war with India?
Changez decides to grow a beard as a form of protest. To the eyes of
many post-9/11 Americans, this beard is interpreted as a metonym for
Muslim fundamentalism, making of every Arab a potential terrorist; for
Changez, in contrast, it is a symbol of a newly found Pakistani identity.
In the underground, the place where he had always mixed with people
of all sorts, more than once he is insulted and verbally abused by per-
fect strangers. Even at work he becomes the target of an Islamophobic
perception expressed through worried gazes and whispers. His produc-
tivity begins to decline, and he no longer seems to be the same brilliant
businessman he once was, focussed exclusively on the ‘fundamentals’ of
finance. One of the novel’s merits is the way it charts how Islamophobic
feelings may grow, a complex issue that is pivotal in both Hamid’s fic-
tion and his life. The following autobiographical account reveals his
own experience in London of racial profiling:
Last June, on a hot day in London − hot enough to remind me of

Lahore − I got on the Tube and found myself in a crowded car-
riage with one empty seat. Nobody moved to take it, which seemed
strange because several people were standing. Then I noticed the
fellow in the next seat over. He was, I guessed, of Pakistani ori-
gin, with intense eyes, a prayer cap, a loose kurta, and the kind
of moustache-less beard that tabloids associate with Muslim fun-

damentalists. He could have been my cousin. Look at this racial
profiling, I thought to myself. Here’s this fellow, perfectly harmless,
and everyone’s staying clear like he’s planning to kill them. And
then they wonder why Muslims in Britain feel ostracised. (Hamid,
2006a)9
When the man suddenly started to behave very strangely, Hamid was
surprised to discover how he himself now identified him as a potential
terrorist. Therefore, over the space of just five minutes the author went
from condemning the racial profiling of the people in the carriage to
contributing personally to it.
The beard metonymy occurs elsewhere in the novel. At the very
beginning we are made aware of the symbolic strength of beards as an
assertive symbol of diasporic identity in the Western world. As Changez
notes: ‘Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard:
I am a lover of America’ (p. 1). In this way, Hamid strikingly represents
the post-9/11 anxiety with which the Western and the Islamic worlds
look at each other. The Reluctant Fundamentalist effectively describes the
reaction of some American people after the terrorist attacks, charac-
terized by Islamophobia and prejudice against the Muslim population.
‘Do not forget to shave before you go’ (p. 128), Changez’s mother tells
him when he leaves Lahore, aware of the impact that a beard worn by
a man with his complexion could have in America. As we have seen,
for the Muslims the beard becomes a powerful symbol of Muslim asser-
tion, while at the same time for the Americans it is a metaphor for radi-
cal Islamism and terrorism. Even in Pakistan, Hamid argues, bearded
Muslims are seen in a different way, as Pakistani people also recognize
the symbolic power of beards and assume that bearded men are more
likely to be Islamic fundamentalists (Gross, 2007; Times, 2007).
Later in the novel, when Changez has to evaluate a publishing house
in economic danger in Valparaiso, Chile, he understands that he is on
the verge of a crucial turning point in his life. Juan-Bautista, the direc-
tor of the publishing house, wonders how Changez feels about making
a living disrupting the lives of others, and then asks him: ‘Have you
heard of the janissaries? [ ... ] They were Christian boys [ ... ] captured by
the Ottomans and trained to be soldiers in a Muslim army, at that time
the greatest army in the world. They were ferocious and utterly loyal:
they had fought to erase their own civilizations, so they had nothing
else to turn to’ (p. 151).10 Janissaries were captured when they were chil-
dren, and it was easy to turn them into devotees of the Muslim adoptive
72 Adriano Elia
empire. In return for their loyalty, they gained economic privileges and
benefits and won a respected social status. Juan-Bautista’s words plunge
Changez into a deep inner crisis that makes him aware of what he has
become: ‘a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at
a time when it was invading a country [Afghanistan] with a kinship to
mine [Pakistan]’ (p. 152).
The following morning Changez leaves his job. After years of experi-
ence it has eventually become clear to him how finance is the instru-
ment through which the United States exerts its power, intervening in
the affairs of foreign countries. For this reason, he no longer wants to
contribute to such a domineering project, and decides to set himself
apart from American imperialistic foreign policy:
[...] I had always resented the manner in which America conducted

itself in the world; your country’s constant interference in the affairs
of others was insufferable. Vietnam, Korea, the straits of Taiwan, the
Middle East, and now Afghanistan: in each of the major conflicts and
standoffs that ringed my mother continent of Asia, America played a
central role. Moreover I knew from my experience as a Pakistani – of
alternating periods of American aid and sanctions – that finance was
a primary means by which the American empire exercised its power.
It was right for me to refuse to participate any longer in facilitating
this project of domination; the only surprise was that I had required
so much time to arrive at my decision. (p. 156)
Changez’s feeling of responsibility towards his own country and dis-

enfranchisement from American society reinforce his own sense of
national identity, and thus he resolves to move back to Lahore, where he
finds a job as a university lecturer and becomes very popular among his
students. He begins to take part in meetings of politicized youths, organ-
izing demonstrations that were labelled as anti-American. The murder
of an American humanitarian operator by one of his students, and the
impact of the interviews that Changez gave to the international televi-
sion networks after this event expose him to the threat of American
reprisals. At the end of the novel, Changez accompanies the American to
his hotel in what is an open ending, confronting readers with an ambi-
guity which, Hamid implies, they should make a hermeneutic effort to
resolve through their own convictions and personal experiences.
As we have seen, a variety of tropes are employed to transcribe
Changez’s split identity. But the focus of the tropes is not solely on
the diasporic subject, but also on the new land, in this case America,
he tries to make his home. The American girl Changez met on holiday
in Greece was called Erica, a name which invites us to read her meta-
phorically as standing for her nation of origin, a reading corroborated
by Hamid’s own remarks on the linkage between the personal and the
political:
I believe that the personal and the political are deeply intertwined
[ ... ] People and countries tend to blur in my fiction; both serve as
symbols of the other. [ ... ] The countries in my fiction are far from
monolithic and are capable of envy, passion, and nostalgia; they are,
in other words, quite like people, and I try to explore them with that
sensibility. (Harcourt, 2007)11
In fact, Hamid borrowed the notion of the intertwining of countries

and people from a Princeton professor, Manfred Halpern, who taught
a course called ‘Personal and Political Transformation’, the key idea of
which was that the transformation of countries depends on how people
change (Obias, 2007). Back from the holiday in Greece, Erica introduces
Changez to Manhattan’s high society: they go to parties and to night-
clubs together, but soon Changez understands that Erica will never be
his own, as she is still in love with Chris, her deceased boyfriend.12 Lost
in her memories, Erica seems to set herself apart from reality, and then
her emotional detachment becomes pathological.
One of the main themes analysed in the novel is the nostalgia that,
according to Hamid, affects both people and countries at the same time.
On the narrative and symbolic planes, Erica, the girl swallowed up by
nothingness, represents post-9/11 America which, lost and in search of
itself, lacking empathy towards foreign countries, embraced militarism
and exhibited a sense of nostalgia for the past golden age. Taking into
account the obvious sociohistorical differences, this stance recalls the
notion of ‘post-colonial melancholia’ introduced by Paul Gilroy (2004)
to refer to postcolonial Britain’s melancholic attachment to the van-
ished splendour of the British Empire. As Gilroy argues:
The colonial settlers and their demanding descendants supplied an

uncomfortable reminder of the history of the empire, which still
returns spectrally in complex forms that haunt the present and
remain as painful and guilt-inducing as they are fascinating. This
arrangement is what I call post-colonial or post-imperial melancho-
lia. [ ... ] Post-imperial melancholia is a neurotic and even a pathologi-
cal development. It blocks the vitality of the culture, diverting it into
74 Adriano Elia
the pleasures of morbid militaria and other dead ends for which her-
itage and identity supply the watchwords. [ ... ] Melancholia’s guilt,
self-loathing and depression are all increased first by knowing and
then by denying what the empire involved. They are intensified by
having to face the extent of national hatred and contempt for immi-
grants. The populist power of xenophobia and racism augments this
complex formation, which leaps into life periodically to defend the
place of Empire’s memory. (2005)
Within this framework, Gilroy goes on to complain about the grow-

ing popularity of revisionist historical works by, among others, Niall
Ferguson, Linda Colley and Saul David, based on the revival of the glo-
ries of Britain’s colonial past.
Something similar has happened to post-9/11 America in regard of
which Hamid highlights the negative connotation of nostalgia, arguing
that an obsession with the past can be a destructive feeling for both
countries and people, as they share psyches and personalities. The sud-
den post-9/11 popularity of flags, uniforms and newspaper headlines
featuring such words as ‘duty’ and ‘honor’ is symptomatic of America’s
narrowing of its sense of identity in order to exclude people like Changez
(Obias, 2007; Hamid, 2007a: 115). After 9/11, Erica’s conditions worsen
significantly. She explains to Changez that the World Trade Center trag-
edy made some obsessive thoughts of the past reappear in her mind.
Like Erica, it seemed that America too was indulging in a dangerous
nostalgia – a nation that had always been forward-looking now seemed
to be determined to look backwards. America had been provoked and
would show its rage by bombing Afghanistan with its twenty-first-cen-
tury weapons. Changez is reminded of the film Terminator in a recurrent
overlapping of fiction and reality. Ultimately, Changez’s relationship
with Erica may be considered as a general metaphor for his relationship
with Am(Erica): he has to be something he is not in order to be accepted
by both the woman and by the country. He even has to pretend to be
her dead boyfriend while they make love, which requires a temporary
suspension of his own personality and cultural roots, the Muslim reli-
gion before all else. Later, Changez learns that Erica has allegedly com-
mitted suicide in the clinic where she was being treated and decides
to return to Lahore, because he would have felt like a traitor if he had
carried on living in the States.
Before concluding, I would like to reconsider the powerful metaphor
of the janissary, because it is probably the one that best illustrates the
sociopolitical and economic condition of migrants in the Western
world like Changez (and possibly Hamid himself). As we have seen, the
janissaries were young Christian boys (between the ages of 10 and 12)
who were forcibly taken from their parents, pressed into training and
indoctrinated in the ways of Islam. The origin of the janissary force can
be traced back to the fourteenth century, at the time of Orhan I and
Murad I, Sultans of the Ottoman Empire. Subject to strict discipline, the
janissaries became the Ottoman Empire’s first standing army, and were
paid salaries and pensions on retirement. The recruitment of janissaries
was abolished by Sultan Mahmud II as late as 1826 with the Auspicious
Incident.
However, there are some significant differences between Changez
and the historical janissaries. First of all, there is an interesting religious
reversal: whereas janissaries were Christians captured by the Ottomans,
here the opposite happens, with the modern-day janissary Changez (a
Muslim by origin) who is captured by the Christian American corporate
world. Most crucially, unlike the janissaries, Changez was neither a child
nor a slave, and for this reason he could not have his former self wiped
down and erased. Ever since the beginning of his American experience,
he deliberately decides to be part of the American financial project and
is aware of its pros and cons. Changez knows and accepts the fact that
he has to be more American than the others in order to succeed, but
after 9/11 he begins to set himself apart from such conformism and
develops an ever-increasing separate group identity. Moreover, he real-
izes that the ruthlessness of corporate finance also finds a counterpart
in the human dimension, which is sacrificed in the name of prejudice
and Islamophobia. This insight further reinforces his refound sense of
Pakistani identity. Changez is not being treated as well as he once was,
his colleagues do not show any solidarity for him but consider him dif-
ferently, suspiciously, almost as a potential threat.
Hamid expresses this sense of disenfranchisement to great effect.
The novel’s feeling of authenticity is heightened by the fact that Hamid
writes from experience, and has all the information he needs to provide
a reliable and effective account. In the middle of an obsessive crisis of
identity, Changez is no longer sure whether he belongs in New York
City, Lahore, in both or in neither. Under those post-9/11 sociopolitical
circumstances, considering his own national identity and responsibility
towards Pakistan, Changez realizes he has become a modern-day janis-
sary, a kind of mercenary who has totally adapted to and accepted the
American way of life and fights against his own homeland. The janis-
sary metaphor manages powerfully to identify the migrant as someone
who lives abroad and embraces completely the lifestyle and economic
76 Adriano Elia
principles of the host country. Attracted by the wealth and the oppor-
tunities provided by the host country, the well-disciplined modern-day
janissary ends up ‘betraying’ his own mother country. For this reason,
Changez decides to go back to his roots, because he feels that, if he had
stayed on in the States, he would have helped America to continue its
attack on Afghanistan. At the beginning of the novel, Changez clearly
explains how this could come about:
Looking back now, I see the power of that system, pragmatic and
effective, like so much else in America. We international students
were sourced from around the globe [ ... ] the best and the brightest
of us had been identified. [ ... ] Students like me were given visas and
scholarships – complete financial aid, mind you – and invited into
the ranks of the meritocracy. In return, we were expected to contrib-
ute our talents to your society, the society we were joining. And for
the most part, we were happy to do so. I certainly was, at least at first.
(p. 4. My emphasis)13
4 Conclusion
I would like to conclude with the following interesting remarks by

Mohsin Hamid about training in the American corporate world. In con-
trast to what one would expect, it is not a toughening, but is rather a
sensitizing experience:
It’s not toughen people up and make them up into machines; it’s sof-
ten them up and sort of sensitize them. You know, they study litera-
ture and poetry and history and religion and anthropology, and they
go and become investment bankers. It’s not that they’ve been study-
ing just economics; the whole point of an American liberal education
is to give you a broader outlook on life, really. And then you go to
a task for which a narrow focus is the objective. It’s cramming that
broad soul into that sort of narrow occupation which is the crisis.
And so I think many of us who work in that world are janissaries
regardless of where we come from. (Obias, 2007)
This problematic narrowing of the focus is a difficult process that a

corporate finance consultant has to carry out. Hamid seems to suggest
that anyone, be it Muslim or not, who realizes he has sacrificed most of
his life interests in the name of financial business, may be regarded as
a modern-day janissary. The janissary metaphor, therefore, refers not
only to a religious and cultural betrayal, but also to the obliteration of

a broader vision on life and to the sacrifice of most of one’s own life
interests for the sake of financial business. In that sense it transcends its
initially diasporic scope to articulate a more general critique of Western,
USA-led economic imperialism.
Thus we have sought to reveal the essential role played by tropes
in Mohsin Hamid’s fiction. Far from being mere stylistic ornaments,
his arsenal of metaphors, metonyms, allusions and allegories aston-
ish his readers, as Jorge Luis Borges thought good metaphors should
(Weinberger, ed., 1999: 24), by effectively categorizing reality and by
providing a wealth of suggestions and pending questions about signifi-
cant moments and crucial episodes in the lives of some Pakistani people
both in their own country and throughout the world.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Chris Weedon and Jonathan Sell for their comments on

an earlier version of this chapter.
Notes
1. Besides writing fiction, Hamid also contributes articles and essays to prestig-
ious international newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian, The New
York Times, The Independent, The Guardian, Time, The Washington Post and many
others, mainly about the political situation in Pakistan and related issues such
as citizenship and identity that are also relevant to his fictional works.
2. Pulp Fiction (1994) was inspirational because it made Hamid realize how that
kind of structure – disjointed, recursive, interweaving – could also function
effectively in his novel. The gritty realism and thrilling atmosphere of film
noir and hard-boiled fiction, notably Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930),
which Hamid had got to know through its film adaptation, also played an
important role in the making of Moth Smoke. Further important influences
were the formal experimentation of postmodern writers such as Italo Calvino
and Borges, as well as the use of oral cadence, a kind of writing based on spo-
ken language, especially noticeable in the fiction of American writers such
as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, whose Another Country (1962) is for
Hamid the best spoken sounding prose he has ever read (see Hamid, 2010b).
In 2002, Moth Smoke was adapted into a telefilm, Daira (‘Circle’ in Urdu),
directed by Pakistani filmmaker Azfar Ali.
3. ‘ “Why Zulfikar Manto?” I [Daru] ask her [Mumtaz]. “Manto was my favorite
short-story writer.” “And?” “And he wrote about prostitutes, alcohol, sex,
Lahore’s underbelly.” “Zulfikar?” “That you should have guessed: Manto’s
pen was his sword. So: Zulfikar” ’ (Hamid, 2000: 129). The sword called
Zulfikar is one of the oldest symbols in Islam and belonged to Ali, the first
Caliph after the death of Muhammad.
78 Adriano Elia
4. In her review of Moth Smoke, Anita Desai (2000) acknowledges the impor-
tance of multilayered, allusive narrative for Hamid, although she deems it
somehow excessive: ‘There is a liberal sprinkling of allusions, literary and
historical: Mumtaz in her clandestine career as an investigative journal-
ist, assumes the pseudonym of Manto, the most famous of modern Urdu
writers, and Daru’s servant boy is called Manucci after an Italian travel-
ler/doctor who served briefly in Dara Shikoh’s army before moving on to
other, more successful patrons and becoming known, through the English
translation of his journals, as “the Pepys of the Mughal Empire.” Too great
a weight, surely, with which to load the fictional characters.’ Niccolao
Manucci (1639–1717) was an Italian writer and traveller who worked in the
Mughal court in the service of Dara Shikoh, and wrote Storia do Mogor, an
account of Mughal history and life, which is considered to be one of the
most detailed accounts of the Mughal court.
5. On the class divisions exposed in Moth Smoke see Tariq (2007) and Gordon
(2002).
6. The book was also included in The New York Times’ ‘Notable Book of the
Year’ list in 2007 and, among other prizes, won the Ambassador Book
Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Asian American Literary Award,
and the South Bank Show Award for Literature. It was shortlisted for the
Arts Council England Decibel Award, the Australia-Asia Literary Award,
the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the T. R. Fyvel Award, the James Tait
Black Memorial Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
A short story entitled ‘Focus on the Fundamentals’ adapted from the novel
was published in 2006, a year prior to the publication of The Reluctant
Fundamentalist. See Wikipedia (2011) and St. Andrews (2011).
7. Regarding authenticity and the role of autobiographical elements in his fic-
tion, Hamid has said: ‘I tend to write about what I know. I have done much
of what Changez has done: I have worked in New York and in Lahore, and
I have spent time in Chile and in the Philippines. His story is not my story,
but I certainly have inhabited the geography of his world. I find knowing a
milieu intimately very useful as a writer: it frees me from having to prove
that I know it and allows me to harness it for the purpose of my story. If
I can believe in my characters and in my plot, if I have seen evidence of
them in the world and in myself, then I feel a certain power comes to my
prose without which it might be insincere’ (Harcourt, 2007; see also Hamid,
2007b).
8. In this connection Hamid has said: ‘Changez [ ... ] is naturally going to be
seen as a possible fundamentalist because of how he looks. Yet he’s not
particularly religious. But during his stay in America, he begins to act in a
way that seems increasingly Muslim-nationalist. So there’s an element of
him being the reluctant fundamentalist in that sense. Changez works for a
valuation firm, where he values companies on the basis of their “economic
fundamentals”. As he begins to identify more and more with the employees
of the companies that he is valuing, who will then be acquired or sold, he
becomes a reluctant fundamentalist in his inability to continue doing that’
(Foreign Policy, 2007).
9. See Elia (2010: 198).
10. See Lasdun (2007).
11. In another interview he has said: ‘I am a strong believer of the intertwined

nature of the personal and the political; I think they move together. In the
case of Changez, his political situation as a Pakistani immigrant fuels his
love for Erica, and his abandonment for Erica fuels his political break for
America. Similarly, I think that countries are like people. Not that coun-
tries are monolithic – even people have fractured identities and conflict-
ing impulses – but notions of pride, passion, nostalgia, and envy shape the
behaviour of countries more than is sometimes acknowledged’ (Hamish
Hamilton, 2007).
12. For Lasdun (2007) the choice of the name Chris is perhaps allegorical, as it
may refer to Columbus: ‘It dawns on you that Erica is America (Am-Erica)
and that Chris’s name has been chosen to represent the nation’s fraught
relationship with its moment of European discovery and conquest [ ... ].’
13. See also Hamid (2006b).
4
‘Beige outlaws’: Hanif Kureishi,
Miscegenation and Diasporic
Experience
Ruth Maxey
1 Introduction
Discussions of miscegenation have often relied on a transnational

framework. Indeed, mixed-race British writers frequently prefer to
write about places outside the UK.1 That biracial people have often led
lives characterized by mobility is underscored in recent diasporic lit-
erature by or about South Asians, where racially mixed protagonists
appear to move through places and situations quite freely, thanks to
the liminality afforded by their racial ambiguity;2 and within an artis-
tic context, critics have frequently read interracial relationships, and
the mixed-race children they produce, as national and international
allegories (Koshy, 2004: 17–20, 23). This in turn makes miscegenation a
particularly pertinent subject in relation to diasporic communities and
may explain why the theme of racial mixing has so often underpinned
British Asian literature. In this chapter, I hope to show how Kureishi
uses the notion of miscegenation as a metaphor to interrogate ideas of
diasporic belonging.
But how exactly does miscegenation fit into models of diaspora?
Scholars have debated what defines ‘diaspora’ for some two decades, yet
they broadly agree on a cluster of paradigmatic features. These include
a sense of ethnic separateness through attachment to certain cultural
traditions and often to a particular homeland, dispersal to more than
one new country, originary ‘victimhood’ and the passage of time neces-
sary to assess whether a community does indeed meet these criteria (e.g.
Clifford, 1994: 310). Although he notes the widespread syncretism and
mixing so characteristic of a globalized age, Robin Cohen nevertheless
80
‘Beige outlaws’ 81
argues that for diasporas to remain intact, they must not ‘creolise’ since
intermarriage signals ‘assimilation’ (Cohen, 1996: 516–17). On the other
hand, Stuart Hall has shown that hybridity is an essential, unavoid-
able component of the African-Caribbean diaspora (Hall, 1990: 235–6).
Enforced miscegenation cannot, of course, be disentangled from the
history of slavery in the Americas, but where does this leave the rela-
tionship between racial mixing and other diasporas? More specifically,
how should miscegenation be situated in relation to British Asians and
their diasporic affiliations?
Beyond the long history of interracial unions in India itself, liter-
ally embodied by the Anglo-Indian presence – now a global diaspora
in its own right3 – several mixed-race writers of South Asian descent
are well established in the UK, and even taken to be representative of
the British Asian literary scene: they include Hari Kunzru, Monica Ali,
Ayub Khan-Din, Helen Walsh and, above all, Kureishi. Artistic works by
and about British Asians reveal an enduring interest in miscegenation,
both in terms of interracial relationships and the racially mixed subject.
Through aesthetic representations, biracial British Asians can even be
seen as an ‘imagined community’, in Benedict Anderson’s well-known
phrase (Anderson, 1991) – albeit a fledgling one without the same linear
history and specific rules of membership as Anglo-Indians4 – or more
precisely, as an imagined diaspora (Werbner, 2002: 17–23; ctd. Kuortti,
2007: 4–5). In Cohen’s words, ‘diasporas can be constituted by acts of
the imagination [ ... ] held together or re-created through the mind,
through cultural artefacts and through a shared imagination’ (Cohen,
1996: 516). Mixed-race British Asians – and the interracial encounters
which produce them – challenge the idea of cultural and racial ‘purity’
which arguably still attends conceptions of diaspora, despite the formu-
lations of such influential theorists as Hall and Paul Gilroy.
Biracial British Asian writers, particularly Kureishi, often react to the
traditionally pathologizing attitudes of Western societies towards inter-
racial relationships and, in particular, people of mixed race. Such his-
torical belief systems have been well documented (Rich, 2004: 73–9),
with Britain proving to be strikingly reliant on colonially inflected,
scientifically racist ‘theories’. Such modes of thought regarded racially
mixed people as a physically and mentally weaker ‘third race’ prone to
laziness, sexual promiscuity, disease, sterility, poverty and homeless-
ness.5 Following the traditionally racist discourse of the ‘tragic’ biracial
or ‘half-caste’ subject – the American stereotype of the ‘tragic mulatto’
being a particularly well-known variant – Kureishi has recalled the
paternalistic, inherently racist terms which characterized his postwar
82 Ruth Maxey
British childhood: ‘caught between two cultures’, ‘Britain’s children

without a home’ and, more damningly, the British politician Duncan
Sandys’s verdict in 1967 that ‘the breeding of millions of half-caste chil-
dren would [ ... ] produce a generation of misfits’ (Kureishi, 2002c: 69,
27–8).
In response he argues that ‘I wasn’t a misfit; I could join the elements
of myself together. It was the others, they wanted misfits; they wanted
you to embody within yourself their ambivalence’ (Kureishi, 2002c:
27–8). Kureishi has also noted that ‘in my childhood ... there was no
identity ... of being mixed-race ... it wasn’t a word, and you were a mon-
grel’ (quoted in Rothschild, 2008: 295). For Kureishi – and, one might
add, Khan-Din in his play, East Is East (1996) – the mixed-race identity
of fictional characters becomes a source of pride, rather than the exis-
tential crisis historically imputed to it by a white mainstream society;
and, in a manner which paradoxically blends the matter-of-fact with
the radical, it becomes a blueprint for new and more desirable forms of
Britishness. Indeed, deploying a transatlantic model, Kureishi recently
stated that ‘we are all mixed-race now – me, Obama, Tiger Woods, Lewis
Hamilton’ (cited in Kidd, 2010, n.p.).6
Despite its importance, the subject of racial mixing within British
Asian writing remains surprisingly under-researched, and existing
critical work on Kureishi – the pre-eminent chronicler of interracial
encounters and mixed-race British Asian identity for the past 25 years –
has neglected the specific implications of this theme in his work. Many
commentators acknowledge his mixed-race background before consider-
ing his treatment of cultural hybridity and identity politics more widely.
Usually focusing on his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), they
rarely offer any extended analysis of Kureishi’s exploration of the physi-
cal, ontological, and social realities of being half-South Asian and half-
white or, as Ruvani Ranasinha has put it, ‘the potentials and ... pitfalls
of mixing and métissage’ (Ranasinha, 2007: 222), which affect so many
of his fictional characters.
Attempting to redress this imbalance, I will ask here how Kureishi
employs the metaphor of miscegenation – both in terms of interracial
relationships and the racially mixed subject – to examine diasporic
identity. After investigating the trope of biracial identity in Kureishi’s
writing, I will consider the importance of place to mixed-race British
Asians through their encounters with a South Asian ‘homeland’.
Kureishi’s vision of racial mixing is ostensibly celebratory and finds
expression through various linguistic techniques, particularly the crea-
tive possibilities of self-naming and a reimagined chromatic spectrum.
It also poses crucial questions about home and belonging, while sug-
gesting, paradoxically, the sheer normality of mixed-race status as an
emblem of contemporary Britishness. But this is challenged, too, by
the violence directed towards his biracial characters and by their desire
to pass as either white or South Asian. Although he has claimed that
racial ‘hybridity [is] ... not something that I think about much myself’
(quoted in Buchanan, 2007: 120), his most recent work calls this into
question through a return to miscegenist themes7 and by suggesting the
unresolved tensions provoked by racial mixing. Exploring Kureishi’s
shifting approach to this subject, my essay will ask just how easily the
metaphor of miscegenation fits into the wider contours of his diasporic
discourse.
2 Interracial relationships in Kureishi’s writing
Interracial relationships – sometimes extramarital but, without excep-

tion, brown-white8 – are common for the first generation within
Kureishi’s diasporic model. Typically taking place between the 1960s
and 1990s, they are – like Kureishi’s intra-Asian sexual relationships –
invariably problematic. In the screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette
(1985), Omar’s white mother is conveniently edited out, having already
killed herself before the start of the screenplay, yet Omar recalls that
his father, Hussein, took his self-hatred ‘out on her. And she couldn’t
bear it’ (Kureishi, 2002b: 53).9 In the same text, the illicit relationship
between Omar’s uncle, Nasser, and Rachel, a white woman, is doomed
to failure, while in the screenplay, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987),
Rafi discovers that it is too late to rekindle his old feelings for Alice,
a white ex-lover. Nina’s father in the short story ‘With Your Tongue
Down My Throat’ (1987) has already abandoned her white mother,
Deborah, before Nina’s birth, returning to his first wife in India before
moving to Pakistan: a similar pattern to Jamal’s father in Kureishi’s
most recent novel, Something to Tell You (2008). In Buddha, Haroon
leaves his white wife, Margaret, for Eva, another white woman; while
Parvez, a struggling taxi driver in the screenplay My Son the Fanatic
(1997), conducts an adulterous relationship with Bettina, a local white
prostitute.
Kureishi’s short story, ‘We’re Not Jews’ (1997), is therefore unusual:
not because it considers an interracial household, but because – unlike
the texts already mentioned – it does so through an ostensibly white
perspective: Yvonne’s; a position further complicated because it is
mediated through her young son, Azhar. Yvonne’s marriage to Azhar’s
84 Ruth Maxey
unnamed South Asian Muslim father illustrates the ways in which

Kureishi unsettles ideas of ethno-national, and diasporic, belonging
through South Asian/white intermarriage. Against the story’s histori-
cally vague, postwar setting – Partition is the only actual historical
marker – he emphasizes Yvonne’s attempts to shore up her own white
Britishness, explicitly racialized because it has been questioned by
white racists hostile to her interracial marriage and by the presence at
her side of Azhar, the mixed-race proof of this union. She responds by
resorting to an older prejudice of mainstream Britain: anti-Semitism.
In this context, Jews are not seen as properly ‘white’ – and thus, by
this definition, not British enough – therefore providing a convenient
scapegoat for Yvonne’s personal, yet very public, discomfort (Gilman,
2003: 129–31; cf. Brodkin, 1998).
These prejudices suggest that marriage to someone from another cul-
ture and religion has taught her little, while showing that her personal
decisions have rendered her vulnerable to attacks against which she has
little psychological or intellectual ammunition. At the same time, and
ironically perhaps, Yvonne reveals a snobbish pride in her unconven-
tional marriage by distancing her own ménage from other branches of
the South Asian diaspora through a linguistic point, when she refuses
‘to allow the word “immigrant” to be used about Father, since in her
eyes it applied only to illiterate tiny men with downcast eyes and mis-
matched clothes’ (Kureishi, 1997: 45). In Buddha, Margaret similarly
defends her marriage to Haroon by invoking his privilege in the ances-
tral homeland.
That Margaret and Yvonne seek to establish a social distance between
their husbands and other South Asian immigrants – marking off a sepa-
rate, individualized, interracial space – may also result from the fact
that, as white outsiders, they threaten their spouses’ sense of diasporic
belonging. In other words, they upset any neat model of a coherent
Pakistani diaspora in Britain, united in cultural and religious values
and conversant in particular languages. Indeed, an ongoing, mutual
ambivalence about the interracial union one has made is exposed in
Kureishi’s family memoir, My Ear at His Heart (2004), where he recalls
that, for his own father, white women remain irredeemably ‘slutty’
(Kureishi, 2004: 101, 115). ‘We’re Not Jews’ problematizes the very idea
of Pakistan (Maxey, 2006: 16), while using miscegenation to expose the
fragility and indeterminacy of the concept of diaspora itself, since any
boundaries marked out by diasporic communities remain potentially
porous, permeable and temporary.
The tensions incumbent on racial mixing in the postwar era do not

necessarily recur a generation later. Sukhdev Sandhu has celebrated the
‘lyrical’ depiction of simultaneous, ‘guiltless’, interracial sexual encoun-
ters in Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie (Sandhu, 2003: 257–8, 265–6),
while Radhika Mohanram, in her reading of the same films, observes
that for younger people, interracial sexual relationships (which are not
based on marriage) question traditional sexual values and emotions
(Mohanram, 1995: 117). At the same time, racial mixing is rejected by
a hyper-religious 1990s second generation in My Son the Fanatic, where
Farid, the eponymous ‘fanatic’, breaks off his interracial engagement to
Madelaine on the grounds that such mixing is irreligious and impure,
rhetorically asking his father, Parvez, if ‘keema’ can be ‘put ... with
strawberries’ (Kureishi, 2002b: 313). This position, which conflates
racial and religious difference and suggests the distinct borders of an
Islamic diaspora, provides a stark contrast to Parvez’s libertarian atti-
tudes towards miscegenation.
In Buddha, the young biracial protagonist, Karim, occupies an ambiv-
alent position in relation to white women, experiencing simultaneous
pride, anger and self-loathing about his need to engage with a 1970s,
white mainstream society:
we pursued English roses as we pursued England; by possessing these

prizes, this kindness and beauty, we stared defiantly in the eye of
the Empire and all its self-regard ... We became part of England ... yet
proudly stood outside it. (Kureishi, 1990; 227)
While Karim’s sexual connections to white men (Charlie) and brown

women (Jamila) remain illicit, his love affair with a white woman
(Eleanor) becomes part of a public statement, recalling the political
implications of Frantz Fanon’s classic formulation of black men’s bid
for acceptance in racist white societies through sexual relationships
with white women (Fanon, 1991: 41–82). The writing of the personal
as the political may also explain Karim’s use of a collective voice here.
This ‘we’ specifically refers to Gene, Eleanor’s black ex-boyfriend, but
by extension it expresses Karim’s communal self-alignment with men
of colour in Britain. The active stance of ‘we pursued ... we stared ... we
became’ finds echoes in Julius Caesar’s triumphalist and much-cited
dictum, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’. Although this self-styled defiance
is somewhat ironic in view of Karim’s political passivity throughout
the novel, it is precisely because sex and sexuality have traditionally
86 Ruth Maxey
become so political in an interracial context that he assumes this posi-

tion (see Benson, 1981: 13).
3 The trope of biracial identity
According to white colonial dynamics, interracial relationships have

generally followed the gender lines of white man/woman of colour;10
and mixed-race people have themselves been subject to a form of gender
stereotyping, particularly in US culture: as female and, most notably, as
the ‘tragic mulatta’ (Moynihan, 2009: 64, 66). Kureishi challenges these
assumptions within the British context by depicting first-generation
men of colour whose reverse colonization of white Britain is enacted
through interracial encounters and the fathering of biracial British
Asian sons, with Nina in ‘With Your Tongue’ and Miriam in Something
notable exceptions to this rule. Besides Karim, Nina, Jamal, Miriam
and Azhar in ‘We’re Not Jews’, Kureishi’s cast of mixed-race characters
includes Omar in Laundrette and Ali in the short story, ‘Touched’, from
The Body and Seven Stories (2002). Like Kureishi himself, each is the child
of a South Asian father and a white mother and in each case Kureishi
suggests that biracial status explicitly undermines any stable sense of
acceptance by either side of one’s family. Thus in Laundrette, Salim tells
Omar, ‘you’ve got too much white blood. It’s made you weak like those
pale-faced adolescents that call us wog’ (Kureishi, 2002b: 31).
This complex dynamic is simplified in Stephen Frears’s film version
of Laundrette (1985), where Omar does not appear to be racially mixed,
as though audiences might struggle with this concept.11 In Frears’s film,
Salim instead opines that ‘you’ve become like those white arseholes that
call us wog’ (Frears, 1985; emphasis added).12 But in Kureishi’s original
text, Omar is under constant attack from the first generation for what
they interpret as the divided loyalties connected with his mixed blood.
When his father, Hussein, attacks him, it is because he believes Omar
identifies too much with Britain, while Zaki, a family friend, criticizes
the fact that Omar cannot speak Urdu. But when Omar does attempt
a better understanding of his South Asian heritage, his uncle, Nasser,
dismisses this interest. Omar’s racial hybridity puts him in a precarious
position culturally: he is never allowed to identify wholly with Pakistan,
because his links with it are seen as suspect, or with Britain, where the
National Front–supporting former friends of his white lover, Johnny, do
indeed call him ‘wog boy’ (Kureishi, 2002b: 31).
Of the dilemmas facing Kureishi’s biracial characters, it is Karim’s
in Buddha which are the most fully examined. ‘Part of England ... yet
proudly [standing] outside it’ (Kureishi, 1990: 227), his protean iden-
tity anticipates Jonathan’s in Hari Kunzru’s novel, The Impressionist
(2002); and Kureishi has directly related Karim’s perceived racial and
cultural indeterminacy to his own mixed background (Kureishi, 2004:
163). Karim’s movement between roles – which neatly connects to his
chosen profession of actor – is also about the crossing of sexual lines,
as Kureishi challenges fixed orthodoxies through Karim’s multiple ‘bi-‘
status (biracial, bisexual, bicultural). Karim’s understanding of his own
racial hybridity takes place against the competing claims of his white
mother, Margaret, and various Caucasian colleagues, and those of his
South Asian father, Haroon, and assorted Indian friends. Both commu-
nities seek to define Karim’s national and ethnic status, while detach-
ing themselves from him when necessary. For Margaret, he is ‘English’:
‘You’re not an Indian ... You’re an Englishman, I’m glad to say’ (Kureishi,
1990: 232). This confidence in Karim’s unshakeable Englishness relates,
on an obvious level, to his birth and upbringing, but bears little rela-
tion to his – and his close friend, Jamila’s – experiences among certain
white people in 1970s Britain: ‘we were supposed to be English, but to
the English we were always wogs and nigs and Pakis’ (Kureishi, 1990:
53). For all that he has a white ‘half’, Karim is marked by a traditionally
non-British name and non-white skin. Although colour itself is actu-
ally a rather ambiguous point in Kureishi’s work, as I will argue shortly,
Karim nonetheless aligns himself with non-white communities. It is
clear, however, that this is imposed upon him by the white, working-
class, racist abuse that Jamila and he face.
For Karim, prejudice also comes from another quarter: the supposedly
liberal world of the theatre, where Shadwell, a white middle-class direc-
tor, tells him that he is ‘a half-caste in England ... belonging nowhere,
wanted nowhere’ (Kureishi, 1990: 141). This recalls the language of
‘With Your Tongue’, where Nina experiences aggressive reactions
to her racial and cultural identity. During a ‘roots’ visit to Pakistan,
which I discuss below, her father tells her, in an extraordinary tirade
of vituperative neologisms, that she is ‘a half-caste wastrel, a belong-
nowhere ... wandering around the face of the earth with no home like
a stupid-mistake-mongrel dog that no one wants’ (Kureishi, 1997: 100).
The twist here is that Nina’s story is actually being narrated, without
her consent, by the white writer, Howard Coleman, who only reveals
this narrative sleight-of-hand at the end of the story. The violence of her
Pakistani father’s reaction to his racially mixed daughter is really an act
of ventriloquism (Thomas, 2007: 9) or ‘speaking in tongues’ (Kureishi,
1997: 102), as Howard reimagines what Nina’s father might have said
88 Ruth Maxey
by placing a white anti-miscegenist language or ‘tongue’, in all its hate-

fulness, in a South Asian ‘throat’. This particular form of racism, with
which Kureishi himself grew up, can be situated within an intertextual
continuum since Howard’s choice of words is later echoed by Shadwell.
In Buddha, South Asians also seem unsure about where to place Karim.
Changez, a new Indian immigrant, exhorts him not to ‘leave your own
people behind’, but also brands him, in a moment of anger, as ‘a little
English, with a yellowish face like the devil’ (Kureishi, 1990: 136, 184).
The word ‘yellowish’ implies that Karim is cowardly or jaundiced, in
the sense of both illness and cynicism, while suggesting that he looks
fundamentally unnatural. It also recalls the historically racialized use
of ‘yellow’, to refer both to East Asians and, of more relevance here
perhaps, to light-skinned, racially mixed African Americans. ‘Devil’
only compounds Changez’s intended insult: he repudiates this rival (for
the affections of his wife, Jamila) as an aberration to a ‘natural’ racial
order, just as Omar’s relatives do in Laundrette, while drawing on a tradi-
tional ethical code which associates mixed-race people with moral tur-
pitude. In Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil (1726), ‘Satan
[is] ... confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition’ (quoted
in Rushdie, 1998, n.p.). In an intriguing slippage, Kureishi’s ‘devil’
imagery relates to this notion through his idea that Nina and Karim
are – rather like such nomadic peoples as the Roma – vengefully con-
signed, by South Asian and white people alike, to ‘wandering around
the face of the earth’ (Kureishi, 1997: 100).13 Such associations reappear
in Kureishi’s science fiction novella, ‘The Body’ (2002), where the age-
ing white playwright, Adam, has a brain transplant into a young man’s
body which is ‘neither white nor dark but lightly toasted’, but finds
himself trapped in this new, racially mixed incarnation, condemned to
the final punishment of being ‘a stranger on the earth, a nobody with
nothing, belonging nowhere, a body alone ... in the nightmare of eternal
life’ (Kureishi, 2002a: 24–5, 126; emphasis added). What is problematic
here is that the narrative itself – rather than a cruel and bigoted charac-
ter within it – implicitly reinscribes the myth of biracial rootlessness. I
will return in my conclusion to the ambivalence towards miscegenation
that this reveals.
Karim’s streetwise narration in Buddha picks up on the humorous,
satirical possibilities of his ambiguous racial status, particularly as this
pertains to the idea of colour itself. Regarded as ‘black’ by Pyke, another
white theatre director, and ‘yellowish’ by Changez, he points out to the
reader that he is ‘more beige than anything’ and gently lampoons the
political term ‘black’ – used for coalitional purposes by people of colour
in 1970s and ‘80s Britain – when he realizes that he does not ‘know
anyone black, though I’d been at school with a Nigerian’ (Kureishi,
1990: 167, 170). ‘Beige’ is in fact an important signifier of biracial iden-
tity for Kureishi, as Gilbert Adair observes when he notes the ‘beige-y
spectrum’ of Buddha (cited in Kaleta, 1998: 36). While it is not unique
to Kureishi (see Younge, 1997: 29–30; Senna, 1998: 12–3), beigeness is
portrayed here as a mark of both distinctiveness and distinction. In
‘With Your Tongue’, it even becomes a badge of pride when Nina styles
Billy, a Canadian of Pakistani and white parentage, and herself ‘beige
outlaws’ (Kureishi, 1997: 95), suggesting a sort of Bonnie and Clyde
pairing. ‘Beige’ actually becomes its own transnational diasporic sub-
category here, yoking people together not on the basis of nationality,
but of mixed descent. Through its comically mundane ring, ‘beige’
also provides a necessary injection of litotes into the subject of racial
mixing and – as with Kureishi’s self-description as a ‘skinny little light-
brown kid’ in My Ear (Kureishi, 2004: 7), or his positioning of Ali as
an ‘English Indian boy’ in the short story, ‘Touched’ (Kureishi, 1999:
263) – ‘beige’ individualizes the person so described. This is because,
despite its connotations of ordinariness (as a shade of clothing or wall-
paper), the word calls attention to itself as a racial marker. One notes
the absence of ‘mixed-race’ or ‘biracial’, with their more socioscientific
tenor, in Kureishi’s personalized arsenal of words, formed in any case at
a time predating this more neutral and official miscegenist vocabulary
(see Rothschild, 2008: 295).
Colour is all about autonomy here because it becomes a means of
self-naming and therefore of alternatively emphasizing, playing
down and finding humour in the experience of being racially mixed.
Kureishi’s need to engage with a chromatic spectrum, and to give it an
original spin, belongs to a wider cultural pattern for writers in Britain
and America, who simultaneously reclaim and critique particular col-
ours for wider political purposes.14 For authors of mixed race, colour
arguably takes on an even greater definitional significance because it
offers an important means of asserting and naturalizing a tradition-
ally liminal sense of national belonging. In her novel, Trumpet (1998),
Jackie Kay, the biracial black/white Scottish writer, likens the brown
skin of her mixed-race protagonist, Joss, to ‘Highland toffee’ and his
hair to ‘bracken’ (Kay, 1998: 11). Kureishi’s use of ‘beige’ may not draw
on quintessentially English imagery in the manner that Kay deploys
Scottish confectionery and landscape, but his insistence on a colour-
coded word similarly claims and normalizes a space for his characters
and for mixed-race British Asians as a whole.
90 Ruth Maxey
Kureishi’s negotiation of biracial identity also creates a notable ten-

sion between the donning and discarding of Indianness. In Buddha,
Karim believes that in possibly dangerous situations, he can disguise
any marks of his South Asian background. When watching football at
Millwall, he recalls that he ‘forced Changez to wear a bobble-hat over
his face in case the lads saw he was a Paki and imagined I was one too’
(Kureishi, 1990: 98; emphasis added). He behaves as though Changez’s
Indianness is there for all to detect, whereas his own South Asian origins –
readily discernible to white racists elsewhere and the reason for his
assumption of a non-white collective voice – somehow belong within
the realms of imagination. As Susheila Nasta has argued, ‘Karim ... wears
his difference like a costume which he can take on and off whenever
it suits him’ (Nasta, 2001: 204); and in the Millwall episode, he clearly
attempts to pass as white. Such switching forms a marked contrast to Ali
in ‘Touched’, who is able to conceal his identity from only one person
in his casually racist neighbourhood: a blind woman who mistakenly
calls him ‘Alan’ (Kureishi, 2002a: 261). In a different context, in Buddha,
Karim assumes that he can adopt a South Asian identity: another prag-
matic bid to pass. Most notably, he colludes with white notions of Indian
Otherness through caricatured theatrical roles in order to advance his
career, literally agreeing to ‘brown up’ for the part of Mowgli in The
Jungle Book, presumably because his ‘beige’ skin is considered inauthen-
tic (Kureishi, 1990: 146–7).
4 Mixed-race claims to ancestral space
Negotiations of place are crucial to Kureishi’s biracial characters and find

expression through two sites, which become themes in their own right:
Pakistan and London. The pre-eminence of London in Kureishi’s work
is in many ways a critical commonplace (Ball, 1996: 7–27). Celebrated
as a source of creative energy, a locus of personal reinvention, and an
emblem of British cultural and racial syncretism, the capital is a key
topos for a mixed-race second generation. In this way, biracial identity
and the metropolis become indivisible for Kureishi (see Ifekwunigwe,
2002: 333–5, 339). Less commonly discussed, however, are his exami-
nations of ‘ethnic return’: the ancestral homeland as encountered
by a foreign-born generation. Academic accounts of ethnic return in
such varied settings as East Asia, the Caribbean and the South Pacific
(although not South Asia) have reached remarkably similar conclu-
sions about the paradoxes and problems of such visits, contending, for
instance, that ethnic returnees’ romanticized visions of the motherland
are often challenged by the tough realities they discover there, for
instance, poverty and social inequality (see Kibria, 2002: 311; Potter
and Phillips, 2009: 83, 87–95; Macpherson and Macpherson, 2009: 25,
27, 33–5). In this section, I will consider how Pakistan is experienced by
biracial British Asians in three texts: ‘With Your Tongue’, Something and
the autobiographical essay, ‘The Rainbow Sign’ (1986). More precisely,
I will ask how the diasporic subject’s already complex negotiation of
ancestral space is further complicated when he or she comes from a
racially mixed background. The need to go to Pakistan conforms with
one of diaspora’s defining features – psychological dependence on the
idea of an alternative homeland – and such reliance is made more pow-
erful because Kureishi’s dual-heritage characters are racially marked,
and thus not easily assimilable, within the pre-1990s Britain he depicts
here.
Through a series of sharply written, semi-cinematic scenes, ‘Rainbow
Sign’ recounts Kureishi’s own youthful trip to Pakistan in the early
1980s and the difficulties over his national and cultural identity it pro-
voked. Having grown up negotiating his own interracial family, while
being told ‘Hanif comes from India’, and mostly trying ‘to deny my
Pakistani self’, Kureishi wonders – once in Pakistan – ‘if I were not bet-
ter off here than there’ (Kureishi, 2002c: 33, 25). Excited by the glam-
our and privilege of his illustrious Pakistani family and the access this
allows to ‘powerful people ... [whom] I wouldn’t have been able to get
hold of in England and ... wanted to write about’ (Kureishi, 2002c: 32),
he also relishes the close homosocial bonds of Pakistani society and the
country’s sheer vibrancy. These reactions lead him to refer, somewhat
wryly, to a ‘little identity crisis’, not helped by Pakistani relatives and
acquaintances, who laugh when Kureishi tells them ‘with a little unno-
ticed irony, that I was an Englishman’, assuring him that he is not ‘a
foreigner’ (Kureishi, 2002c: 33, 40). They omit to mention his racially
mixed background, seeing him simply as someone ‘with a brown face,
Muslim name and large well-known family in Pakistan’ (Kureishi,
2002c: 33). At the same time, he is told that ‘we are Pakistanis, but
you ... will always be a Paki – emphasising ... that I couldn’t rightfully lay
claim to either place’ (Kureishi, 2002c: 34). In this early example of the
fraught relationship between South Asia and its diaspora (see Paranjape,
2000: 225–45), it is Kureishi’s Britishness which is ultimately affirmed,
as he rejects the ‘falsity’ and ‘sentimentality’ of believing he can truly
belong in Pakistan (Kureishi, 2002c: 34). Yet he holds on to the South
Asian homeland as an emotional and artistic anchor and his account of
Pakistan is in many ways a positive one (Maxey, 2006: 15–6). His British
92 Ruth Maxey
homecoming is deeply ambivalent, moreover, as he observes people’s

‘profound insularity and indifference’ (Kureishi, 2002c: 50): an anti-
intellectualism born, ironically, from a climate of intellectual freedom.
‘Rainbow Sign’ becomes a kind of Ur-text within Kureishi’s œuvre, its
tropes and imagery being consistently recycled over a 20-year period.
Thus, although ‘With Your Tongue’ is Nina’s 1980s roots journey to
Pakistan as imagined by Howard, his observation that over there, ‘the
light is different: you can really see things’ (Kureishi, 1997: 85) directly
recalls Kureishi’s own memory of ‘the unbelievable brightness of the
light’ in ‘Rainbow Sign’ (Kureishi, 2002c: 51). Similarly, Kureishi’s
‘uncle’s house, in fashionable Clifton ... [populated by] politicians and
diplomats in LA-style white bungalows with sprinklers on the lawn, a
Mercedes in the drive and dogs and watchmen at the gates’ (Kureishi,
2002c: 37) reappears in ‘With Your Tongue’ as the estate on which Nina’s
father lives and as uncle Yasir’s house in the 1980s urban Pakistan of
Something. The ‘powerful people’ Kureishi meets in ‘Rainbow Sign’ reap-
pear as ‘journalists, landowners and a newspaper tycoon’ in ‘With Your
Tongue’ (Kureishi, 1997: 93), while ‘the family scrutiny and criticism’
and the decaying ancestral ‘library ... rotten with worms’ from ‘Rainbow
Sign’ (Kureishi, 1997: 39, 51) reemerge intact in Something (Kureishi,
2008: 133).
We saw earlier how this kind of inter-referentiality was revealed
through the striking similarities between Howard’s anti-miscegenist
language and that of Shadwell in Buddha. But the semi-autobiograph-
ical debt later ‘roots’ texts owe to ‘Rainbow Sign’ is more problematic.
This is especially the case in ‘With Your Tongue’ because Howard has
written Nina’s story ‘without leaving the country’ and because, while
Nina may have told him ‘everything’ about the trip he financed, she
is also (according to Howard anyway) incapable of coming up with
the particular ‘phrases’ he uses to frame it (Kureishi, 1997: 102–3). He
even confesses that his account is ‘an attempt on the truth through
lies’ (Kureishi, 1997: 102), yet it relies on exactly the same details – and
sometimes the same wording – as Kureishi’s experiential account of
Pakistan.
Where ‘With Your Tongue’ and Something differ markedly from
‘Rainbow Sign’ is in their thematic emphasis on the paternal aban-
donment of a biracial – and, in Nina’s case, illegitimate – daughter
which drives ethnic return to Pakistan, a pattern recently examined
in Kay’s memoir of Nigerian ‘return’, Red Dust Road (2010). Nina and
Miriam are enfants terribles who have idolized their uncaring, absent
fathers, perhaps because it is too painful to accept the reality of their
rejection. Before Nina’s final confrontation with her father, he deems

her ‘an Englisher born and bred’, while claiming that ‘you belong with
us’ (Kureishi, 1997: 93). Such belonging can only be provisional, how-
ever, since her illegitimate status means that ‘he can’t bring himself to
say ... “daughter” ’ (Kureishi, 1997: 90). One might almost conclude from
this – and from Kureishi’s own experiences in ‘Rainbow Sign’ – that
the biracial subject’s white ‘half’ is invisible or, at any rate, unimpor-
tant in Pakistan. Yet, when Nina finds love with her biracial boyfriend,
Billy, her father dismisses him as ‘ugly like you ... a big pain in the arse’
(Kureishi, 1997: 100), implying that mixed-race diasporics have no place
within Pakistan’s racial homogeneity. And when Nina’s and Miriam’s
public displays of Westernized behaviour go beyond what is deemed
permissible for women in Pakistan, they are unceremoniously rejected
again. In both cases, the Pakistani father, and by extension fatherland,
is dethroned: Nina ‘has no illusions about her father’ after her return to
Britain (Kureishi, 1997: 105), while Miriam and the protagonist, Jamal,
realize that their father ‘couldn’t save us ... he couldn’t be the father
we wanted him to be’ (Kureishi, 2008: 139) and promptly fly back to
London.
This notion that ethnic return for the mixed-race British Asian is
inevitably temporary is challenged by the real-life episode of Molly
Campbell/Misbah Rana, a young Scottish Pakistani teenager of mixed
race, whose two ‘halves’ were literally embodied in her two names.
Molly/Misbah chose her South Asian heritage by emigrating to Pakistan
to join her father in 2006, although the voluntary nature of this deci-
sion was obscured by a media narrative of alleged kidnap (Scott-Clark
and Levy, 2007). Her story nevertheless marks the permanent rehous-
ing of the biracial British Asian subject in the ancestral nation. Why
does Kureishi reject this possibility? Perhaps for the same reasons that
he continues to write ethnic return and operates within a particular
imaginative landscape to do so. Since his own experiences of the father-
land were powerfully formative, he remains interested in the ontologi-
cal questions they raised and sees it as necessary to pursue them in
fictional form. But because he relies so heavily on his own memories of
a visit in which his gender and distinguished Pakistani name gave him
privileged access to this traditional, patriarchal country, biracial iden-
tity only becomes an issue when a young British Asian woman ‘returns’
to Pakistan.
In My Ear, Kureishi has recalled that, after emigrating to Britain, his
own father ‘never went to Pakistan, not even for a holiday’ and felt ‘furi-
ous ... betrayed, abandoned, humiliated by his envy’ when, instead of
94 Ruth Maxey
him, Kureishi fils went to Karachi: ‘my father’s absence burned. Where
was he? What was he doing? Why couldn’t he get here?’ (Kureishi, 2004:
49). This paternal absence is displaced by paternal rejection in Pakistan
which, as distinct from the real-life example of Molly/Misbah’s success-
ful reunion with her father, becomes a dramatic device allowing return
to Britain for Nina and Miriam and, to a lesser extent, Jamal.15 Although
Something remains a rather poor rehash of ‘Rainbow Sign’ – reworking
its ideas but lacking its rhetorical clarity or emotional force, as though
the original impact of Kureishi’s trip is now only hazily remembered –
this later text suggests, like its precursor, that for the biracial male sub-
ject, ethnic return is about a respite, although only a temporary one,
from the problems of being racially mixed. Therefore, as opposed to
Nina’s or Miriam’s experiences, Pakistan becomes a home from home
for both Kureishi and Jamal: a place where their South Asian ‘half’ is
validated. In Something it is Miriam’s apparently outrageous behaviour
and her final confrontation with their father that force the siblings to
leave Pakistan. In this sense, Kureishi suggests that mixed-race ‘return’
to Pakistan is distinctly gendered; and through Nina and Miriam, he
reinscribes the problematic notion of ‘ “mixed race” women ... as flighty,
exotic, erotic, dangerous, tormented’ (Mahtani, 2002: 470), an arche-
type which finds its most famous expression, perhaps, in the figure
of the tragic mulatta. These difficult negotiations of ancestral space
remain, at any rate, an important way to explore the manner in which
mixed-race experience is dependent upon place (see Mahtani, 2002:
480); and for biracial British Asians, they reveal the tenuousness of
imagined diasporic belonging.
5 Conclusion
It is striking that, even when Kureishi has apparently moved away from
themes of race, he is still drawing on the possibilities and complexi-
ties of mixed-race identity. His vision of the normality of being racially
mixed – implicit in the sheer number of biracial characters in his work –
makes it an emblem of contemporary Britishness.16 And his negotiation
of racial hybridity is ostensibly positive, especially as it relates to the
South Asian side of the equation. Thus he claims in My Ear that his
‘quarter Indian’ sons ‘like to declare their Indianness to the other chil-
dren at school’ (Kureishi, 2004: 21). A racially mixed appearance even
becomes the physical ideal in ‘The Body’ when Adam decides against a
‘fair, blue-eyed blond’ appearance for fear that ‘people might consider
me a beautiful fool’, instead favouring an implicitly more intelligent
body which is ‘neither white nor dark but lightly toasted’ and avers that
‘hybrids were hip’ (Kureishi, 2002a: 24–5, 39).
Kureishi’s tendency in interviews to minimize any negative impact
which might result from being mixed-race is questioned, however, by
the violence some of his biracial characters face, by their need to pass
as either South Asian or white in certain situations, and by his intermit-
tent reliance on some age-old miscegenist stereotypes (rootlessness and
wandering, the crazy/’tragic’ mixed-race woman). ‘Celebration of mix-
ture’ can be ‘a smoke screen ... obscuring the fundamental issue of rac-
ism, and ... class divisions’ (Senna, 1998: 20); and Kureishi’s treatment
of racial mixing is arguably haunted by his own early memories of the
pathologization of the racially mixed subject.17 In this sense, contempo-
rary as his focus so often is, the attitudes to miscegenation he exposes
reflect the era in which he grew up.
Following a succession of texts about white characters, thus mark-
ing the other side of his heritage, Kureishi’s thematic return to misce-
genation shows that these tensions in his writing have not been, and
perhaps cannot be, resolved. Thus in Something, an interesting ambi-
guity surrounds the appearance of Jamal. He recalls that ‘when I was
with my [white] grandfather I more or less passed for white’, yet he later
refers to himself as ‘the only dark-skinned student’ in his university
class in 1970s London and remembers that his girlfriend, Ajita, and he
were ‘dark-skinned enough to be regularly insulted around the [South
London] neighbourhood’ (Kureishi, 2008: 36, 48). When he plays the
race card in order to move into a communal house of white social-
ists, they allow him entry ‘despite my pale skin’, but later Jamal’s ‘dark
hands’ move over his white lover’s ‘fair skin’ (Kureishi, 2008: 56, 276).
Beyond this confusion between pale and dark18 – which suggests that,
for all parties, perceptions of biracial status are subjective and context-
driven and that, in such instances, ‘race appears to be in the eye of the
beholder’ (Harrison-Kahan, 2005: 35; compare Mahtani and Moreno,
2001: 66)19 – Something demonstrates Kureishi’s ongoing need to explore
biracial identity. Like Buddha, it charts the trajectory of a white/South
Asian man whose changing, multiple identities, which compel forms
of voluntary and involuntary racial passing, afford him both pain and
opportunity as he moves into a privileged, white middle-class world.
And rather as Kunzru shows in Impressionist, the possibilities for rein-
vention available to mixed-race people can last a lifetime.
I would argue that Kureishi remains both proud of his mixed origins
and equivocal towards them. This may explain why he deploys them
in his work, while publicly playing them down. The racially mixed
96 Ruth Maxey
Dutch writer, Alfred Birney, has argued that ‘if you have a mixed-race
background, then you must have a problem. If not, you’re not playing
the game. So a familiar dilemma arises: do you represent your father’s
group, your mother’s, or both?’ (Birney, 2005: 96). Although Birney goes
on to claim that it makes most sense to ‘represent both groups, as long
as I remain true to myself’ (Birney, 2005: 96), Kureishi tends to identify,
overtly at least, with his South Asian patrilineal heritage rather than
his white maternal ancestry. Despite the ease with which he depicts
entirely white milieux, it is his Pakistani ‘half’ to which he returns in
interviews and non-fictional works and his father who remains key to
his self-fashioning (Yousaf, 2002: 12).
One might argue that Kureishi’s privileging of his paternal back-
ground simply repeats the masculine familial dynamics examined by
many male writers, but he appears to be genuinely, and perhaps unsur-
prisingly, more proud of his glamorous and distinguished South Asian
origins than his mother’s lower-middle-class, white British background.
South Asian fathers, rather than white mothers, are viewed with greater
interest and a kind of father-son love affair recurs throughout Kureishi’s
work. By contrast, the drab white mothers who inhabit his writing20 are
perhaps reflective not only of Kureishi’s childhood ambivalence about
interracial relationships and being racially mixed, but also of his youth-
ful experiences of racism: being half-white was no protection against
white racist abuse in the 1960s (Kureishi, 2002c: 25–9, 53; Kureishi, 2004:
105) and his racial experiences were probably closer to those of his father
than his mother. The homogeneously white environment embodied by
the white mothers in his work is not only a reminder of such times but
of a particular place: the insular, depressing Bromley world in which he
grew up and from which he escaped at the first opportunity.
In a British context, ethnic ‘otherness’ has always surrounded Kureishi,
thanks to his name and ‘beige’ skin. He is also conscious, no doubt, that
ethnicity sells, recently telling an interviewer, perhaps only half-jok-
ingly, that ‘nowadays all the [British] writers are Indian. You have to be
Indian to be a writer at all’ (quoted in Manzoor, 2010). Critics and cul-
tural commentators have been keen to read him as British Asian, rather
than biracial, and – despite its emphasis on miscegenation – much of
his own work has encouraged this. Yet it is precisely the mixed descent
of Kureishi and his characters which calls into question their belonging
to the Pakistani diaspora. The very precariousness of their connections
to a religiously observant, Urdu-speaking, endogamous community
may also account for the ambiguities which underpin Kureishi’s han-
dling of racial mixing. Diasporic identity – itself a concept open to
interpretation – has been imposed upon Kureishi as much as it has been

voluntarily adopted, mirroring his own shifting position: like Jamal or
Karim, he is simultaneously white and dark, depending on the context.
That this protean movement spells liberation and escape at the same
time as rootlessness, summed up by Adam’s final dilemma in The Body,
neatly encapsulates the complexities of miscegenation as a metaphor
for diaspora in Kureishi’s work.
Notes
1. King (2004, passim); compare Moynihan (2009: 65). I will generally deploy
the terms ‘mixed-race’ and ‘biracial’ here to refer to people with parents
from different racial groups, even though such terms are inevitably prob-
lematic, since they foreground race, and rely on the notion of racial catego-
ries and the possibility of so-called racial ‘purity’; see Mahtani (2002: 478)
and Sollors (1997: 3).
2. Such examples include Jonathan in Hari Kunzru’s novel, The Impressionist
(2002), and Raj in Naeem Murr’s novel, The Perfect Man (2006).
3. See Blunt (2005), who traces Anglo-Indians’ particular history of migration
since Indian independence in 1947. Despite its challenge to any putative
racial ‘purity’, the Anglo-Indian diaspora conforms to its own specific cul-
tural conventions as a Christian, Anglophone community.
4. To be officially Anglo-Indian, one’s patrilineal descent must be white
British: a reversal of the background of most biracial British Asian writers;
see Blunt (2005: 1, 220).
5. Paradoxically, miscegenation has also long been viewed in utopian terms;
see Bost (2003: 191-4).
6. It is intriguing, however, that Kureishi fails to mention any high-profile
British Asians of mixed descent in this interview: for example, the former
sportsmen, Sebastian Coe and Mark Ramprakash; and a host of actors, most
notably Ben Kingsley (born Krishna Bhanji).
7. After a series of works about white British characters including the novel,
Gabriel’s Gift (2001); and the screenplay, Venus (2006), the racially mixed
protagonist in the novel, Something to Tell You (2008), represents a notewor-
thy move on Kureishi’s part.
8. For a critique of this version of interracial relationships, see Hooks (1990:
161).
9. Some critics have read Omar’s mother as South Asian, rather than white; see
Gairola (2009: 49). Gairola’s essay concerns Stephen Frears’s film version of
Laundrette, rather than Kureishi’s original screenplay where Omar’s ‘white
blood’ is specifically referenced; see Kureishi (2002b: 31).
10. Consider the clichéd paradigm of the ill-fated interracial romance between
the white man and East Asian woman – a thinly veiled metaphor for the
imperial conquest of feminized foreign land – whereby the woman and
her equally ‘tragic’ biracial progeny are abandoned in their Asian home-
land. The most famous example remains Giacomo Puccini’s opera, Madame
Butterfly (1904); see Koshy (2004: 13, 29–49).
98 Ruth Maxey
11. By contrast, Karim’s racial hybridity remained intact in Roger Michell’s

television version of Buddha (1993), although the character was played by
Naveen Andrews, who is not of mixed race.
12. Compare note 9.
13. ‘Gypsies’ have themselves sometimes been read as figures of miscegena-
tion; see Alibhai-Brown (2001: 34). For more on popular links between mis-
cegenation and the devil, see Benson (1981: 10); while the Biblical figure
of Cain, condemned by God to be ‘a homeless wanderer of the earth’ in
Genesis 4:12 embodies the ancient notion that to be itinerant is to be cast
out and ungodly; see American Bible Society (1976: 7).
14. Thus ‘yellow’ has been reclaimed by Asian American writers like Lee (2001)
and Wu (2003).
15. See also Moynihan (2009: 73), who notes ‘a general obsession with pater-
nity and paternal abandonment in the wider context of tragic mulatto
narratives’.
16. The UK claims an increasingly large number of well-known biracial celebri-
ties, most strikingly, perhaps, the high proportion of the English football
team from a black/white background.
17. D’Cruz (2006: 164) argues that for Anglo-Indians, ‘the colonial past contin-
ues to haunt the postcolonial “present”’.
18. This shift also takes place in ‘The Body’ where Adam’s new body is ‘neither
white nor dark’, yet he still refers to ‘us dark-skinners’ (Kureishi, 2002c: 25,
53; compare Buchanan, 2007: 94, 101).
19. Although for Kureishi it is clearly a political point to militate against any
fixed categories, he has also noted that ‘you can’t just pick up any identity’
(quoted in Fildes, 2010).
20. See Thomas (2007: 11), where Kureishi candidly discusses the often negative
portrayal of white mothers in his work. On the erasure by mixed-race art-
ists of their white history, compare Weedon (2004: 89) and Mannur (2010:
164–71).
5
Metaphors of Belonging in
Andrea Levy’s Small Island
Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso
1 Introduction
This chapter explores the role of metaphor in Andrea Levy’s Small Island
(2004) and particularly the way it transcribes the diasporic subject’s emer-
gence from the metaphorical shackles of imperialist discourse and entrance
into the official history of postcolonial Britain. Metaphor has traditionally
articulated the interaction between the metropolis and the colonies, and
Small Island engages with the conventional filial metaphor of the centre of
empire as the ‘mother country’ and the colonies as her children. Levy also
interrogates other conventional metaphors of the colonial and postcolo-
nial condition, such as the house to represent the nation or the individual
and, particularly, daffodils as a metaphor for imperial control, a trope that
originated, as we shall see, in the use of Wordsworth’s poem ‘I Wandered
Lonely as a Cloud’ in colonial education. Undoubtedly, Levy’s use of easily
apprehensible metaphors for the complex condition of the postcolonial
and diasporic subject has played a role in the success of her novel which
has become a popular text and has opened up broad discussions about
ethnic and cultural formations in the recent history of Britain.
Since its publication in 2004, the novel has become a bestseller and
achieved notoriety both nationally and internationally on account
of the number of literary awards it has received, including the 2004
Whitbread Novel Award and the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, as well as
the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Best of the Best Orange
Prize. In Britain, it has become a key site for reflecting on the recent
past of the country, and on the place of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in
contemporary British identity, thanks to its deployment as the focus of
a large three-month reading project and its adaptation for television in
a 2009 BBC1 two-episode miniseries.
99
100 Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso
Sponsored by, among others, Arts Council England and the Heritage
Lottery Fund, the 2007 Small Island Read project – the largest mass-read-
ing project ever to take place in Britain – offers interesting insights into
the novel’s capacity to enhance reader’s awareness through metaphor.
Celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the
British Empire, this initiative brought together readers from Liverpool,
Bristol, Glasgow and Hull, cities involved in the slave trade and the
campaign for its abolition. Fifty thousand free copies of the book were
distributed throughout northwest and southwest England, while thou-
sands of loan copies were made available in over 500 local libraries. In
all, the project ‘generated 100 separate events (including library talks,
book group discussions, competitions, exhibitions), and 60 school
workshops’ (Fuller and Procter, 2009: 30). One of the project’s aims was
‘to bring diverse communities together through the act of reading and
thereby foster a sense of shared identity’ (‘Small Island Read: Evaluation
Report’).1
The organizers expected readers to link the past of Britain, includ-
ing immigration in the forties, to the present multicultural diversity
of British society; and they were not disappointed for many readers
were able to forge connections between past and present, relating, for
example, ‘the discrimination suffered by Gilbert and Hortense to the
[2005] introduction of citizenship tests’ (Fuller and Procter, 2009: 34).
The analysis of readers’ responses through related discussion activi-
ties and internet questionnaires shows that average non-academic
readers of the novel typically understood the issues of race, inequal-
ity and national narrative presented in the novel, so that the Small
Island Read project can be seen, overall, as ‘performing an important
function in putting ethnicity and racism on the table for discussion’
(Lang, 2009: 328). 2
In their analysis of the project Fuller and Procter mention the response
of an elderly white woman who had been given a copy of the novel by
her daughter – concerned by the increasing bigotry and prejudice she
had noticed in both her parents. The report of the older woman’s reac-
tion is highly significant:
It really hit home to my mum that when [Gilbert] came to this coun-
try ... he thought that he was coming home to the motherland in a
way to a ... a country that would really look after him. That’s what
struck home to my mum and she talked about that a lot on the phone
to me, and that’s why she gave the book to her friends. (quoted in
Fuller and Procter, 2009: 37)
Metaphors of Belonging 101
The impact of the novel on this aged lady speaks of its ability to reach
readers, make them aware of prejudice and touch them in significant
ways. She was struck by the realization that the motherland was indeed
behaving as a bad mother towards newly arrived Jamaican workers like
Gilbert and Hortense. Indeed the trope at the centre of Small Island is
the commonly accepted perception of the metropolis as the mother
country. The novel was chosen for the reading project according
to the organizers because it was entertaining and enjoyable but also
because it offered ‘an insight into the initial post-war contact between
Jamaican migrants, descendants of enslaved Africans, and the white
“Mother Country” ’ (quoted in Lang, 2009: 319). As we shall see, Andrea
Levy highlights the conception of the centre of empire as a mother in
Gilbert’s explicit references to Britain as the disappointing mother who
refuses to take care of her children and even fails to acknowledge that
they exist.
The centrality in Small Island of the common filial metaphor of the
metropolis as a mother for the colonized people is also enacted in the
2009 BBC1 adaptation of the novel, which begins with Hortense just off
the ship and waiting at the train station for her husband to welcome her.
The TV version opens with a brief pre-credit sequence in which a voice-
over speech by Gilbert states: ‘Put the word “mother” in front of the
word “country”, you’ll think of somewhere safe, where your potential
will be nurtured and your faults excused’. As in the novel, this statement
seems to resonate in the production every time that the newly arrived
immigrants find rejection and coldness where they were hoping to find
empathy and acceptance. Because, then, of its extraordinarily high pub-
lic profile and influence on the formation of popular conceptions of
race, immigration and postcolonialism, the way Small Island uses meta-
phor to engage with the diasporic condition is of particular interest.
Before gaining general recognition with Small Island, Andrea Levy
had published three novels about characters of Caribbean ancestry in
contemporary Britain: Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), Never Far
from Nowhere (1996) and Fruit of the Lemon (1999). These novels show
how, for some of the children and grandchildren of the first generation
of post-war immigrants who are no longer rooted in the old country of
their ancestors, but still on the edges of mainstream society, belonging
in Britain remains an issue. Like her characters, Levy belongs to a gen-
eration that ‘finds itself troubled and conflicted as it attempts to create
identities that defy the borders of the modern construct of the Western
nation/state’ (Williams, 1999). Her previous fiction thus articulates the
difficult inscription of members of the Caribbean diaspora in a nation
where they do not find themselves reflected in the mirror of public

representations, an issue that appears repeatedly in the recent fiction of
other black and Asian British authors.3 After exploring in these novels
issues of identity for characters of Afro-Caribbean origins in contempo-
rary Britain, in Small Island she looks at how these communities func-
tioned in the country around the time of the Second World War.4
2 A more inclusive history
Small Island is a polyvocal novel which presents through the perspective

of two Jamaican and two English characters a story about the postwar
reconstruction of Britain in the 1940s, while shifting in time between
London in 1948, on the one hand, and the pre-war and war years in
Jamaica and Britain on the other. The participation of immigrants from
the colonies in the postwar reconstruction of Britain has been reason-
ably well documented in history books. Indeed, the arrival of the SS
Empire Windrush in 1948 is usually seen as the starting point of the
history of the Caribbean communities in Britain. Their presence in the
country during the war and their contribution to the war effort, how-
ever, has tended to elude the official narratives of the war experience. In
his study of the black population in Britain during WWII significantly
entitled Mother Country: Britain’s Black Communities on the Home Front
1939–45, Stephen Bourne indicates:
While recording my aunt’s memories, I began searching for other sto-

ries of black people in wartime Britain and I discovered many who have
been ignored by historians in the hundreds of books and documenta-
ries produced about Britain in the Second World War. (2010: 10)
Images associated with the Second World War have been frequently
used in the British collective memory to construct a sense of national
identity, but they have traditionally excluded the contribution of black
people to the war effort. This is the trend that Small Island sets out to
counteract by showing their involvement and offering more inclusive
concepts of the British nation. Levy’s text joins thus other recent novels
in Britain such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) in their effort to
represent black and Asian participation in the war, a re-inscription that
‘indicates the new sense of significance that the black and Asian com-
munities have developed [ ... ] in contemporary Britain, a society whose
construction of collective identities they have undoubtedly affected’
(Korte, 2007: 36). As Chris Weedon indicates, this ‘inclusive portrayal’
of the war is a relatively new approach to the narratives of World War

II, since ‘[e]ven as recently as the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the
Second World War in 1995, Black and Asian veterans had to campaign
for recognition of their part in the fight’ (Weedon, 2004: 40).
Small Island has indeed served to bring the experiences of Caribbean
members of the African diaspora in Britain to the forefront of public
awareness. The need to integrate people of Afro-Caribbean origins into
the historical narrative of the country is an important driving force
behind all of Andrea Levy’s fiction. She has repeatedly stated that one
of the aims of her writing is to make the past of the Caribbean diaspora
in this country more visible and to show that the story of Caribbean
immigrants is an important part of British history. Andrea Levy, who
sees herself as an English writer with a double heritage, insists on the
revision of notions of the country that exclude those who do not con-
form to racist narratives of an all-white nation. In her 2000 essay ‘This
is my England’ she describes herself as fully English, ‘[b]orn and bred, as
the saying goes’, even if her inclusion forces a change of conceptions:
As far as I can remember, it is born and bred and not born-and-bred-

with-a-very-long-line-of-white-ancestors-directly-descended-from-
Anglo-Saxons. England is the only society that I truly know and
sometimes understand. I don’t look as the English did in the England
of the 1930s or before, but being English is my birthright. England is
my home. An eccentric place where sometimes I love being English.
(Levy, 2000)
In presenting the development of a crucible of peoples in postwar Britain

the novel argues for ‘the possibility of experiencing Englishness as a meet-
ing point of the global histories that its strategies of expansion had initi-
ated’ (Featherstone, 2009: 180) through its representation of the crossing
of the lives of the Jamaicans Hortense and Gilbert with the British cou-
ple Queenie and Bernard. The novel traverses geographical and gender
boundaries as it interweaves Bernard’s stories from the battlefront abroad
and Queenie’s experiences from the home front, as well as Hortense’s
account of the situation in Jamaica before the war and then in postwar
Britain and Gilbert’s of the wartime experience of Caribbean volunteers.
Small Island attempts to gather up the stories of distant characters which
are ‘as central to the history of Britain and British literature as anything
we are more familiar with’ (Allardice, 2005). Born in London in 1956 to
Afro-Caribbean parents who had migrated from Jamaica in the late for-
ties, Andrea Levy wants her novel to serve as a necessary reminder of the
Caribbean participation in the war effort, when thousands of men and

women from the West Indies were recruited to serve in the armed forces,
mobilized by their allegiance to the ‘mother country’.5
3 Mother countries and rundown houses
The novel’s ambition to inscribe Afro-Caribbean experience into British

history means contesting predominant metropolitan discourse. One
such discourse was that of the British Empire, which was itself con-
structed through a number of metaphors that allowed the colonial
power to present itself not only as superior to the colonized people as
actually bringing education and light to them. Metaphors ‘played a sig-
nificant role in sustaining the colonial vision’ (Sanga, 2001: 2), and, in
fact, the empire was ‘maintained and circulated through a system of
metaphors that saw the colonizer as superior, powerful and beneficial,
and the native as deviant and primitive’ (Sanga, 2001: 2). Part of the task
of postcolonial writers has been to deconstruct such metaphors to show
they are not a reflection of the natural order of things. Andrea Levy
chooses to bring into the open, in a very explicit and simple manner,
the assumptions that lie behind the omnipresent metaphor of Britain
as the ‘mother country’ for colonials, a concept that naturalizes the way
they are perceived as permanent children.
Levy’s Gilbert Joseph has been in Britain for some time when he
explicitly takes issue with the concept of the country as mother. As on
many other occasions, his voice addresses the reader in an attempt to
come to terms with the rejection he is experiencing:
Let me ask you to imagine this. Living far from you is a beloved rela-
tion whom you have never met. Yet this dear relation is so dear a
kin that she is known as Mother. Your own mummy talks of Mother
all the time. ‘Oh, Mother is a beautiful woman – refined, mannerly
and cultured.’ Your daddy tells you, ‘Mother thinks of you as her
children; like the Lord above she takes care of you from afar.’ There
are many valorous stories told of her, which enthral grown men as
well as children. Her photographs are cherished, pinned in your own
family album to be admired over and over. Your finer, your best,
everything you have that is worthy is sent to mother as gifts. And on
her birthday you sing-song and party. (p. 139)
As Gilbert explains, Britain has been described to Jamaicans by their own

families as a beautiful woman who is ‘refined, mannerly and cultured’
(p. 39). However, as the experiences of Hortense and Gilbert once set-
tled in Britain demonstrate, the virtues that the Jamaican protagonists
have come to expect of the ‘mother country’ are nowhere to be found.
Hortense had spent her adolescent years in Jamaica trying to make
English ways, from Henry V’s speeches to fairy cakes with their spongy
wings, of relevance to her. There lay, she had felt, her road to social
advancement. But her education in the ways of the motherland are of
little use to her when she comes to Britain in 1948. Like Gilbert, who was
taught to admire the mother figure in the distance, she realizes that the
so-called ‘mother country’ does not acknowledge her and that the quali-
ties she had been taught to associate with Britain, ‘manners, politeness,
rounded vowels from well-spoken people’, were ‘not in evidence’ (Levy,
2000). The characters’ alienation upon arriving in what they think is
their ‘mother country’ is the same that Levy’s parents experienced in
1948 upon realizing that very same year that they were indeed foreign-
ers: their instruction in the ways of the motherland could not make up
for their ethnic differences from the people in Britain. The immigrants’
astonished reaction at their rejection by the country they had been led
to expect would nurture them is captured in Hortense’s shock on being
most impolitely dismissed for a teaching job. Gilbert’s terminology
when narrating this incident is telling as he speaks of ‘Hortense reeling
wounded after a sharp slap from the Mother Country’s hand’ (p. 458).
As a result of the British Naturalization Act of 1948, Caribbean work-
ers of the time were citizens of the country with a legal British pass-
port. Andrea Levy’s father had himself been on-board Empire Windrush
and he shared with other immigrants his sense of belonging in Britain:
‘[H]e knew himself to be a British citizen. He travelled on a British pass-
port ... [H]e was travelling to the centre of his country ... Jamaica, he
thought, was just Britain in the sun’ (Levy, 2000). Hortense and Gilbert
also sense that they belong in a country whose geography and history
they have been assimilating for years. Hortense’s narrative describes in
detail her experience in school as she learns her way into the mother
country – or so she thinks. Gilbert has clear memories of himself as a
little boy in a blue uniform standing up in his classroom to recite the
list of canals of England, just as he might have listed the railways, the
roadways, the ports and the docks, since he knew the mother country
better than the country where he lived. In the novel, Gilbert remembers
his pride as a schoolboy:
My chest is puffed up like a major on parade, chin high, arms low.

Hear me now – a loud clear voice that pronounces every p and q and
all the letters in between. I begin to recite the canals in England ... I
could have been telling you of the railways, the roadways, the ports
or the docks. I might have exclaimed on the Mother of Parliaments
at Westminster ... If I was given a date I could stand even taller to tell
you some of the greatest laws that were debated and passed there.
(p. 141)
This was the common experience of the West Indian schoolchildren at

the time, and Andrea Levy was inspired by the significant testimonies
of ex-service personnel from the Caribbean that Robert N. Murray gath-
ered in the volume Lest We Forget (1996).6
Gilbert’s assimilation of the filial metaphor of the empire as con-
structing family bonding between its members, with Britain as the
mother that takes care of her children, the colonies, is made explicit
when he describes his impressions after arriving in the country as a
volunteer during the war:
Then one day you hear Mother calling – she is troubled, she need your
help. Your mummy, your daddy say go. Leave home, leave familiar,
leave love. Travel seas with waves that swell about you as substantial
as concrete buildings. Shiver, tire, hunger – for no sacrifice is too
much to see you at Mother’s needy side. This surely is an adventure.
After all you have heard, can you imagine, can you believe, soon,
soon you will meet Mother?
The filthy tramp that eventually greets you is she. Ragged, old and
dusty as the long dead. Mother has a blackened eye, bad breath and
one lone tooth that waves in her head when she speaks. Can this be
the fabled relation you heard so much of? This twisted-crooked weary
woman. This stinking cantankerous hag. She offers you no comfort
after your journey. No smile. No welcome. Yet she looks down at you
through lordly eyes and says ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’ (p. 139)
Gilbert’s extensive elaboration of the metaphor brings three key

aspects to the reader’s attention. Firstly, the so-called children of the
empire have rushed to her aid when the mother country has requested
help, abandoning real families and home and proving their allegiance
beyond all doubt. Secondly, the appearance of the mother country that
they meet has nothing to do with the images that they had imbibed of
‘the fabled relation’: she is not the beautiful, nurturing woman of good
manners they had envisioned but a decayed old woman, tired and
dirty – a powerful image of war-ravaged Britain. Thirdly, the mother is
unsmiling and provides no warm welcome; in fact, she does not even
recognize that the immigrants are her children. In short, the coloni-
als arrive to work for their motherland out of filial duty, but Britain
acknowledges no maternal bond towards them in return.
The metaphor of the metropolis as the nurturing mother of the colo-
nies shapes Gilbert’s relation to Britain both before and after his immer-
sion in British society. There is something to be said for Queenie as a
counter-image to this decrepit hostile vision of Britain. With her royal
name Victoria-Queenie and her willingness to open her home, she is a
beautiful, welcoming figure for people who need lodging regardless of
their race.7 As for her big, bombed-out house which will take in Gilbert
and Hortense, its derelict grandiosity cannot but suggest the postwar
deterioration of the British Empire and the decay of its metropolis. As
Susan Alice Fischer puts it,
[t]he house signifies England and the promise of home that comes
with England’s request for migrant workers to take up the jobs that
white workers have not filled [ ... ] Queenie’s house is dilapidated, as
it would have logically been at the end of the war, and also because
it represents the end of Empire. (Fischer, 2007: 43)
London’s rundown houses are metaphors of the declining Empire;

Queenie’s is one of the very few that breaks the predominant prejudice
of the time that was so poignantly expressed on signboards reading
‘Room to let. No dogs. No blacks’. Indeed, as James Procter indicates,
in a period when the country was open to immigration from colonies
and former colonies, ‘[i]t was at this domestic frontier that the spec-
tacle and trauma of a black/white encounter was most sensationally
staged’ (Procter, 2003: 22).8 When the Jamaican characters at the end
of the novel establish themselves in their own house, a building they
will have to repair and adapt to their needs, their improved living con-
ditions represent an advance in terms of independence and chances
of survival, what Procter calls a ‘cultural investment in making home
and domesticating space’ (30). (Re)constructing a house, however, also
stands metaphorically for the building of identities in much postco-
lonial and diasporic fiction, from the uprooting and displacement of
the bedsits and basements in Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956) to
the houses Karim Amir helps refurbish as he develops his own sense
of identity in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), or the
aspiration to the ownership of a home as an act of self-assertion in V.S.
Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961).
The lack of opportunities and prosperity that they found in the

mother country caused the disillusionment of thousands of postwar
immigrants like Hortense and Gilbert, who had been led to believe
that ‘opportunity ripened in England as abundant as fruit on Jamaican
trees’ (Levy, 2004: 98). This is a disillusionment that the novel embod-
ies in an emblematic scene of Gilbert’s narrative, in which the recently
arrived former RAF volunteer spies a beautiful jewelled brooch lying
on the pavement, ‘shimmer[ing] the radiant iridescent green of a hum-
ming-bird caught by the sun’ (p. 213). He bends down to pick it up,
thinking of giving it to his wife as a present, but as he tries to touch
it the brooch literally flies away, for the jewel he has spotted on the
ground is in fact ‘no more than a cluster of flies caught by the light, the
radiant iridescent green the movement of their squabbling backs [ ... ]
after the flies flew they left me with just the small piece of brown dog’s
shit they had all gathered on’ (p. 213). This is an evocative deconstruc-
tion of the common trope of London’s streets paved with gold, a hyper-
bolic image of British prosperity which captured the imagination of
the first Caribbean migrants before their arrival. Hortense and Gilbert
have come to the country, like many other immigrants, in response to
what Rushdie described as ‘extraordinary advertisements full of hope
and optimism which made Britain out to be a land of plenty, a golden
opportunity not to be missed’ (1991: 133). The transformation of the
jewel into excrement before Gilbert’s very eyes is an accessible meta-
phor for the disenchantment felt by immigrants when encountering
the dreary reality of a land where they had expected to find wealth and
opportunity.
On the whole, Andrea Levy does not resort to metaphors frequently
in Small Island; when she does, they tend to be easily comprehensible
ones that are part of our shared language. Even when she presents a
scene with metaphorical value, its meaning is typically made explicit
for the reader. This is the case, for instance, of Gilbert’s encounter with
a middle-aged English woman at the end of a working day that has
brought racial abuse from his co-workers and a confrontation with
Hortense. It is a cold London night and she approaches him to offer
him cough sweets precisely when ‘regret had its hand clasped to my
throat as I walked that London street, my desire smothered and choked’
(p. 326). His thoughts develop and openly explain the personification
of desperation choking him and the lady providing a relief:
[the sweet] was salvation to me – not for the sugar but for the act of
kindness. The human tenderness with which it was given to me. I
had become hungry for the good in people. Beholden to any tender
heart. All we boys were in this thankless place. When we find it, we
keep it. A simple gesture, a friendly word, a touch, a sticky sweet res-
cued me as sure as if that Englishwoman had pulled me from drown-
ing in the sea. (p. 328)
This kind woman and her sweet are made to stand for the emotional
support that Caribbean immigrants received from some individuals in
the face of the predominant social rejection that their presence in the
country provoked: ‘a sticky sweet rescued me’ (p. 327). The metaphoric
value of the English lady is made explicit for the reader, as it would have
been conceived in Gilbert’s mind. Again, when Gilbert first returns to
Jamaica after the war effort his dream that the island is ‘sweet with
promise’ (p. 203) is expressed in the common tree metaphor of rooting
and growing: ‘I stuck my fingers into the soft earth that yielded under
them. If I held them there long enough, surely this abundant country
could make me grow’ (p. 203). When after a time in Jamaica his hopes
have been dashed, he again thinks of this failure in the same meta-
phor: ‘the ground was now parched and dry – too hard for me to push
my fingers down into the earth’ (pp. 210–11). At other times, the sig-
nificance of metaphors is broken down in the character’s thought. Thus
for instance when Queenie’s narrative describes her father-in-law as ‘a
human apostrophe’ (p. 288), she reflects that in school she had been
taught that an apostrophe was ‘a mark to show us where something is
missing’, and so Arthur ‘was there but only to show us that something
precious had gone astray’.
4 Daffodils
More sophisticated is Levy’s interrogation of the metaphorical value

in colonial discourse of Wordsworth’s poem ‘Daffodils’. In postcolo-
nial criticism, the teaching of this lyric has come to embody the con-
strictions of the imperial system of education in the colonies, a system
which created a problematic sense of identity by producing ‘mimic’
men and women (see Bhabha, 1994: 85–92) who replicated the values
of the metropolis and lacked a viable concept of identity as, in the
case of Small Island’s characters, Jamaicans, in isolation of the ‘mother
country’. Because of Wordsworth’s poem, daffodils have become a
trope for a certain kind or aspect of Englishness; because of its use
in colonial education, it has become in Caribbean writing a meta-
phor of colonial power and imperial oppression, chiefly through the
intellectual shaping of colonial subjects so that they blindly absorbed

British cultural traditions and value systems: ‘Taught and studied in
every corner of the English-speaking world, [‘Daffodils’] has been
much reviled as a quintessential imposition upon the sensitivities of
people suffering under the yoke of a colonial cultural inheritance’
(Niven, 1996: 152).9
From a postcolonial perspective, ‘Daffodils’ has come to be seen as
presenting ‘an idyllic, pre-industrial picture of England which a depart-
ment of propaganda would be hard-pressed to supersede’ (Welberry,
1997: 37). In the writing of postcolonial and diasporic writers from differ-
ent countries of the former empire, there is evidence that Wordsworth’s
poem was perceived to embody the sort of Englishness they were encour-
aged to assimilate and reproduce. Meenakshi Mukherjee, for instance,
remembers her adolescent desire to become ‘daffodilized’ (Mukherjee,
1993: 112), that is, to be educated in the English system to the point
where she could possess ‘the casual elegance and fluency in spoken
English’ of the girls ‘who knew English better than they knew an Indian
language’ (Mukherjee, 1993: 112). In the Caribbean, the eponymous
heroine of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990) remembers her days at school
when ‘I had been made to memorize it [‘Daffodils’], verse after verse,
and then had recited the whole poem to an auditorium full of parents,
teachers and my fellow pupils’ (Kincaid, 1990: 18). She was congrat-
ulated on performing beautifully and told that the poet would have
been proud to hear his words in her mouth. Later on, when as a young
woman she spends her first spring as a worker in the US, her employer
is delighted to take her to a garden for her first experience of daffodils;
yet she feels nothing but bitterness since she relates the flowers to an
oppressive education system:
As soon as I said this I felt sorry that I had cast her beloved daffodils
in a scene she had never considered, a scene of conquered and con-
quests [ ... ] It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t my fault. But nothing could
change the fact that where she saw beautiful flowers I saw sorrow
and bitterness. (Kincaid, 1990: 30)
Wordsworth’s poem also has a metaphorical value in Small Island,

where it is recited by Hortense and taught by her to her grandmother
in an attempt to educate her and improve her English. Separated from
her biological mother and growing up with her paternal uncle’s family
(lighter-skinned and better off than her maternal family), Hortense is
obsessed with achieving social advancement through a colonial educa-

tion. Her maternal grandmother lives in the family as a servant, always
addressed as Miss Jewel, and Hortense wishes to instruct her to speak
properly as the king does, and ‘not in this rough country way’ (p. 43).
To this end she asks Miss Jewel to memorize the poem by ‘Mr William
Wordsworth’ that she has studied in school. After understanding that
daffodils are a kind of flower, the old woman attentively repeats every
word, carefully observing her granddaughter’s lips in order to form the
same shapes, while simultaneously committing the text to memory. But
Hortense’s efforts to transmit her highly prized English education to her
Jamaican grandmother achieves little. She sees how ‘soon [Miss Jewel]
was rehearsing her own version as she went about her day: “Ah walk
under a cloud and den me float over de ill. An’ me see Miss Hortense
a look pon de daffodil dem?” ’ (p. 44). The resentment Kincaid’s Lucy
felt at the imposition of foreign values becomes in Levy’s novel a more
subtle rejection of the assumed value of the English classic as a means
to improvement as this canonical poem, refracted through the grand-
mother’s Jamaican tongue, is transformed into something of relevance
for the old woman.
This is a moment that brings to mind one of the Jamaican charac-
ters in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984), a woman who remembers ‘that
silly poem “Daffodils”, about a flower she had never seen’ (Cliff, 1995:
129), which the teacher had made them learn by heart, following the
instructions in the official manual for teaching literature sent from
the metropolis. The manual indicated that the poem should be ‘spo-
ken with as little accent as possible’ (Cliff, 1995: 85), and it included
‘a pullout drawing of a daffodil, which the pupils were “encouraged to
examine” as they recited the verse’ (Cliff, 1995: 85). The teaching of the
same English literary texts throughout the empire meant that at the
time ‘[p]robably there were a million children who actually could recite
“Daffodils”, and a million who had never actually seen the flower, only
the drawing, and so did not know why the poet had been stunned’
(Cliff, 1995: 85). This drawing of the daffodils is their only image of the
distant flower, and at one point ‘one of the children had coloured [it]
a deep red – like a hibiscus’ (Cliff, 1995: 129). That child’s adaptation
of the unknown daffodils to their Jamaican hibiscus is similar to the
transformation that Hortense’s grandmother performs on the poem by
adapting it to the reality she knows, and is consistent with the experi-
ence of other colonial students as remembered by Jaina C. Sanga, who
was also made to memorize the poem in her seventh-grade literature
class in Bombay. When asked by pupils what a daffodil looked like, the
Indian teacher attempted to draw one on the chalkboard:
Probably, the teacher had never seen a daffodil either, hence was
unable to come up with a successful rendition of one. Exasperated,
she turned to the class and said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Change it. Change
“daffodils” to “jasmines”. It makes no difference. And you all know
what a jasmine looks like. (Sanga, 2001: 10)
The change of Wordsworth’s poem into something that Hortense’s

grandmother can make sense of is similar to this translation of daffodils
into jasmines. In both cases there is an attempt to come to terms with
the reality of the literary text, but in both cases too the change ‘not only
alters the meaning of the text, but more important [ ... ] authorizes a dis-
tinct disruption, a dislocation of perspective which calls for a necessary
reordering of reality’ (Sanga, 2001: 10).
In keeping, then, with the tradition of Caribbean writers like Jamaica
Kincaid and Michelle Cliff, in Small Island ‘Daffodils’ serves as a meta-
phor for colonial control through education. Kincaid and Cliff reject
the poem and daffodils themselves on account of their metaphoric
value as tools of empire domination; they do not seem to be interested
in ‘any analogy that could be drawn between exploitation of the local
inhabitants and landscape of the Lake District and the West Indies, but
only in the historical assertion of their difference’ (Welberry, 1997: 42).
However, Andrea Levy goes beyond merely rejecting the cultural valid-
ity of ‘Daffodils’ for the colonized by presenting its refraction in the
Caribbean voice of an elderly woman, who changes the words in the
poem to make out of it something she can relate to – just as the school
children in Abeng painted daffodils red like the hibiscus they knew or
Sanga’s teacher replaced daffodils with jasmines.
Furthermore, Levy questions the validity of using the rural landscape
evoked by the poem as a metaphor for Englishness. She undermines
the common identification of Englishness with the pastoral beauty of
Wordsworth’s idyll through the description of Queenie’s childhood
on an English farm. In the opening section of Queenie’s narrative life
in the country on a farm near a mining community is presented as
one of hard graft, not leisurely daydreaming. The novel points a sharp
contrast between the image of the ‘mother country’ that Hortense
grows up believing in and the reality of English life as experienced
by the young Queenie. Her mother, Lillie, is introduced as ‘an English
rose’, a beautiful lass who ‘had once won a village country maid con-
test’ (p. 236). Her beauty is conventional – ‘[f]laxen hair, a complexion
like milk with a faint pink flush at her cheeks and a nose that tipped
at the end to present the two perfect triangles of her nostrils’ – yet,
unlike the middle-class English ladies that Hortense has encountered
in Jamaica, Lillian is a farmer’s daughter with ‘hands that could clasp
like a vice’ and ‘arms as strong as a bear’s’. Indeed, Queenie’s mother
devotes her life to making pork pies, while her daughter’s laughter
is described by Gilbert on their first encounter as having ‘a honk-
ing laugh, the noise of which could make a pig sit up and look for its
mummy’ (p. 171).
The English education that Wordsworth’s poem stands for gives the
young Hortense in Jamaica a sense of Englishness which she believes
she can absorb and reproduce in herself so that, once in the mother
country, she will be able to blend with the English people. This is a feel-
ing she shares with Gilbert and with many Jamaicans similarly taught
to mimic the culture, values and the manners of the metropolis. Their
sense of identity stems both from the filiative metaphors of colonial
discourse we discussed in the previous section (they are the children
of Empire, Britain is their mother) and from the affiliative methods of
colonial education which taught colonial subjects that if they resem-
bled British people in their values, behaviour and background they
would belong with them and be welcomed by them. But, as we have
seen, their experience proves otherwise. It is not enough to be able to
recite Wordsworth’s poem: no matter how hard the Jamaican characters
in Small Island try to mimic and be like the British, the mother country
only has to take one look at them to decide that they are alien and to
turn to them and ‘through lordly eyes [she] says “Who the bloody hell
are you?” ’ (p. 139).
It is within this framework of filiation and affiliation that John
McLeod analyses the giving away of Queenie’s child at the end of Small
Island. The biracial child has been read metaphorically by some critics
as representing ‘England’s multicultural future’ (Fischer, 2007: 42), but
the end of the novel ‘reminds us of the ways in which filiative famil-
ial structures are never far from public discourses of belonging and
legitimacy in the postwar years in Britain, and remain so to this day’
(McLeod, 2006: 50). The reasons why Queenie gives her mixed-race
baby to be raised by black parents fall in line with McLeod’s contention
that a white couple with a black baby ‘may be regarded as one which
disrupts received notions of Englishness as it is not seen to reproduce
the racial norms of the national imagined community’ (McLeod, 2006:

48). As McLeod indicates, the child’s adoption by the Jamaican couple
paradoxically supports the filiative model of belonging by suggest-

ing that – in this country in 1948 – the best place for a child who
looks black is with a black family [ ... ] the conclusion to the novel is
both extremely moving and remarkably bleak – adoption figures as
an act of love and compassion (putting the child’s interests first), but
is also, ultimately, in collusion with the dominant discourse of racial
difference which installs unbridgeable distances in the small island
of 1948 Britain. (McLeod, 2006: 50)
The ‘small island’ of the title stands for much more than the real islands
that are present in the novel: Jamaica, on the one hand, the big island
in the Caribbean, which is perceived as small by the returning volun-
teers after the war; and Britain, on the other hand, which is also seen as
having shrunk when Bernard returns from the war: ‘It was smaller than
the place I’d left. Streets, shops, houses bore down like crowds, stifling
even the feeble light that got through. I had to stare out at the sea just
to catch a breath’ (p. 424). As most readers appreciate, that same ‘small
island’ is also the metropolis of a formerly great empire, now shrivelled
and isolated in its rejection of peoples from other locations. As Fischer
puts it, the novel explores identity and belonging at a crucial time,
‘when the “Small Island” is no longer Jamaica and the smaller islands
in the Caribbean but also the shrinking British Empire which calls for a
redefinition of Englishness’ (41).10 Levy’s novel itself has an important
part to play in that redefinition.
5 Conclusion
It is generally agreed that ‘[t]he essence of metaphor is understanding

and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980: 5), and so the elusive concept of belonging in a coun-
try can shape itself by way of metaphors, typically filiative/affiliative
models of family or imagined communities. It is the validity of such
metaphors that Small Island questions, particularly the metaphor that is
pervasive in the popular imagination and according to which the cen-
tre of the empire is figured as a mother to her colonies, and the meta-
phor that has developed in postcolonial writings around Wordsworth’s
‘Daffodils’, a poem which is seen to embody the colonial education
that made of Jamaicans (and other colonials) mimic men and women
with no sense of an identity separate from that of the ‘mother country’.

The former metaphor posits a filiative model of belonging, whereby
the colonials are born the children of empire, the latter an affiliative
one whereby colonials may become British subjects in the metropolis
through acquiring a British education. Small Island shows that neither
way of belonging in Britain is available for Hortense and Gilbert: despite
what their passports say and despite their effort to speak and behave the
British way, they are not allowed to feel that they belong in Britain.
The novel shows that belonging is a complex state that Hortense
and Gilbert do not quite achieve by simply having been born sub-
jects of the British Empire, children of the ‘mother country’, or even
by striving to assimilate the daffodils of the Empire, its metropolitan
values and ways of life. On the one hand, neither is allowed to par-
ticipate fully in the life of the country, both are constantly victims of
racial prejudice. On the other hand, by granting the same importance
to the voices and experiences of the four characters, two Jamaican
and two English (two males and two females), Levy’s text subverts the
perception of the subordination of colonials to the metropolis implicit
both in the mother-children metaphor and in the discourse of mim-
icry which Levy interrogates around Wordsworth’s poem. Small Island
juxtaposes Jamaican and British experiences to tell a story about the
WWII and postwar reconstruction. As Weedon indicates, at present
‘[t]he history of Black contributions to the development of Britain is
being rewritten through the media of history, fiction and television
documentaries’ (Weedon, 2004: 67). Fictions like Small Island indeed
help to ensure that the past of black people finds a place in the narra-
tives of the British nation. Levy’s novel has a clear agenda of integrat-
ing into British society the lives of the Afro-Caribbean communities
that more than 50 years after the initial settlements in the country
may still sense that they do not really belong. The novel is an attempt
to grant them a voice with which to tell their story, so that they can
construct a sense of identity and belonging that goes beyond their
condition as children of the empire and empowers them as agents in
their personal lives and in their contribution to the reconstruction of
postwar Britain.
Notes
1. The pedagogical use of the text as a tool to bring together different people is
highlighted on the project website, where ‘dozens of photographs depicting
assembled readers serve to perform and stage the act of reading the novel’
(Fuller and Procter, 2009: 31).
2. For assessments of the ‘Small Island Read’ project see Lang (2007), Fuller and
Procter (2009) and Lang (2009).
3. This is a feeling explicitly voiced in the character of Irie Jones in Zadie
Smith’s White Teeth, who feels, ‘There was England, a gigantic mirror, and
there was Irie, without reflection’ (Smith, 2000: 230), and in Bernardine
Evaristo’s novel-in-verse Lara (1997), whose protagonist also senses there are
no public representations of her people in the country: ‘I searched but could
not find myself, / Not on the screen, billboards, books, magazines’ (Evaristo,
1997: 69).
4. In her most recent work, The Long Song (2010), shortlisted for the Booker
Prize, Levy moves back to the very origins of these Afro-Caribbean com-
munities: slavery and plantation life in the West Indies.
5. For an analysis of Small Island in the context of other black British fiction
that attempts to inscribe the traditionally erased experience of the African
diaspora into the historical narrative of Britain see Muñoz-Valdivieso
(2010).
6. Gilbert’s memories seem to echo the reminiscences of some of the interview-
ees in this volume: ‘I knew almost everything about England, every coalfield
and every steel-work, their size and disposition. All our geography in school
was based entirely on England. Whilst one knew very little about Westindian
history, one’s brain was full of knowledge where English history was con-
cerned. We were always told – and we always had this thing at the back of our
minds – that England was the mother country’ (Murray, 1996: 19).
7. In a sense, her letting go of her mixed-race child can be seen as another,
very different, aspect of this metaphoric value: she appears to be open to the
immigrants but is unable to face the actual crossing of their lives with hers,
and too scared to keep a child born to a Caribbean father. (My thanks go to
Stef Craps for bringing this to my attention.)
8. Before this encounter brings out the internal borders that separate the
British from the (im)migrant, the novel shows how other borders exist
within society in the form of class separation. Because of the bombings the
authorities relocate East End families into Bernard’s neighbourhood, and
this causes the complaints of neighbours like Mr Todd (‘Is every waif and
stray to end up here?’ p. 270) and others (‘I want to make a complaint. I’m
not happy that these people are living here. This is a respectable street’, p.
286).
9. On the postcolonial implications of Wordsworth’s poem see Chamberlin
(2001), Niven (1996) and Welberry (1997).
10. The title was read this way by many of the participants in the Small Island
Read project: ‘A common element of reader response is a consideration of
what, if anything has changed about race relations and racist attitudes in
the UK. For a reading group in Chepstow, discussion about the title and its
possible reference to ‘small-mindedness’ prompted this type of response’
(Fuller and Procter, 2009: 34).
6
Ancestry, Uncertainty and
Dislocation in V. S. Naipaul’s
Half a Life
Enrique Galván-Álvarez
1 Introduction
The discourse of roots and routes is now all pervasive in diaspora litera-
ture and beyond. First used by Paul Gilroy (1993: 19) in his discussion of
the Black Atlantic, the pun-cum-metaphor has been re-engaged and re-
phrased in a number of ways. Thus, Jonathan Friedman (2002: 21–36)
explains how critical studies have journeyed ‘From Roots to Routes’,
James Clifford (1997: 3) elaborates on the various implications of both
terms, and there is even a Jewish travel agency, ‘Routes’, that offers you
‘routes to your roots’ in Eastern Europe (‘Routes’, 2010). Meanwhile,
Stuart Hall discusses roots as routes as some sort of opposition: ‘instead
of asking what are people’s roots, we ought to think about what are their
routes, the different points by which they have come to be now; they are
in a sense, the sum of those differences’ (1999). However anecdotal it
all might sound, the fact remains that the narratives of roots vs. routes,
roots to routes, or roots as routes is increasingly popular among not
only scholars of diaspora literature but also Christian charities, music
projects or performance festivals. Therefore, it seems difficult, if not
impossible, to use the pun in a way that has not been used before.
Nevertheless, the phrase ‘roots as routes’ could be given a further spin
of potentially great relevance to V. S. Naipaul’s work. In this chapter
I shall use a slightly different definition of roots, not as an essential
and given sense of identity but as access to and interaction with what
A. K. Ramanujan (1991: 46) has termed certain pools of signifiers). One
such pool of signifiers, in the case of Naipaul, along with many other
authors of South Asian origin, is the Ram Katha or story of Ram. In fact,
Ramanujan develops his concept of pool of signifiers in order to explain
the dynamic and dialogic interaction between the many tellings of
117
118 Enrique Galván-Álvarez
Ram’s story, or to use Paula Richman’s phrase the ‘many Ramayanas’

(1991: 1). So, if we imagine roots to be this living pool with its basic and
common patterns, we can see routes as its many ripples: the virtually
infinite myriad of tellings, borrowings and refutations it produces.
Blending the roots-routes metaphor with Ramanujan’s pool of signi-
fiers provides an interesting framework for exploring issues of ancestry,
uncertainty and dislocation. The many rebirths or routes that a certain
signifier might experience entwine it with the many journeys, both
literal and literary, that make up the diasporic subject. Also, in the rhi-
zomatic and ever-dynamic pool of signifiers it is impossible to find a
central or original telling of any given story, all tellings being irrevoca-
bly peripheral, constantly bouncing off against each other. In a sense,
they could be said to be versions of each other, without any central or
axial point of reference. Such a seemingly endless network of routes or
links thus precludes any definite sense of origin. Moreover, the lack
of an original or central narrative resembles the way in which stable
stories about ancestry or identity are difficult or impossible to reach in
much diasporic literature. Since stories are constantly re-appropriated
and retold through one another the endeavour to enshrine one as a still
centre is a signally hard one.
Furthermore, in the case of a writer like Naipaul we need not only
consider the naturally dynamic routes of the pools of signifiers he
engages but also the fact that he is a diasporic and significantly mobile
subject. As Gillian Dooley puts it:
Nobody would claim that V. S. Naipaul is not a diasporic writer.

His grandparents were part of a huge dispersal of Indians to pro-
vide indentured labour for the British Empire after the abolition of
slavery, and he himself is in self-imposed exile from his Trinidad
birthplace; living in England but claiming never to feel at home
anywhere. (2003: 118)
Thus, Naipaul’s writing can be seen as the product of various proc-

esses of displacement and dislocation: in terms of narrative there is
the natural displacement of retelling and re-engaging signifiers from
the common pool; in terms of cultural sitedness there is the fact that
such re-appropriation takes place beyond the physical place where the
pool originated and developed (South Asia); and in biographical terms,
there is the fact that the re-teller and re-engager (Naipaul) lives in exile,
literal or metaphorical, from a number of centres or points of origin.
From this perspective, it is interesting to consider how Naipaul’s roots
Ancestry, Uncertainty and Dislocation 119
are embodied and manifested in his routes. How does a complex and
diasporic subject like Naipaul interact with the various pools of signi-
fiers that make up his ancestral background?
The aim of this paper is to explore that interaction in Naipaul’s novel,
Half a Life. Given that Half a Life has travelling and dislocation as run-
ning tropes it is worth looking at how the many journeys, both literal
and literary, of Willie Somerset Chandran are mediated through nar-
rative patterns that belong to Naipaul’s Indian heritage. Where some
of Naipaul’s novels engage South Asian narratives in a more evident,
allusive fashion (e.g. the Ram Katha in A House for Mr. Biswas or the
Bhagavad Gita in The Mystic Masseur), the South Asian narrative input in
Half a Life is not to be found in the stories themselves, that is, in their
plots, but in the way the various storylines are woven together and told
through one another. It is precisely this narrative texture which most
resembles the Ram Katha and Mahabharata cycles and thus allows us to
read Half a Life in terms of Ramanujan’s pool of signifiers. Not only that,
but Willie’s constant concern about ancestry and the various attempts
to rewrite the story of his origins through other stories mirror the ever-
deferring patterns and routes of the pool of signifiers. A hermeneutic
model predicated on the impossibility of ascertaining any fundamental
origin therefore seems most appropriate for looking at a character who
is engaged in a constant retelling of his story.
Such a process of reinvention and mediation can be further analysed
in a two-fold manner: (a) as a structure that is relevant in itself because
it is at once a metaphor for other analogous routes of dislocation and a
way of engaging the South Asian ancestral heritage by using its char-
acteristic encapsulated narratives and (b) as a means to contest certain
narratives by retelling them through other narratives, thus hybridizing
and displacing them. Consequently, the fact that the many journeys
and movements of William Somerset Chandran are mediated in the
same way – though not (necessarily or exclusively) through the same
stories – as the narratives of Ram and the great war of Bharat enables
us to analyse the former in dialogical interaction with the latter. This
dialogic interaction might be regarded, on the one hand, as a way of
articulating a sense of literary lineage or ancestry and, on the other,
as a way of dramatizing the instability of any point of origin. The
ambivalence, offering both constructive and deconstructive possibili-
ties, inherent in this technique provides in turn an interesting prism
through which to explore how Half a Life deals with issues of ancestry,
in its widest sense, in a dislocated context where uncertainty plays a
most important role.
Nevertheless, before looking at how Naipaul’s penultimate novel

engages and modifies the narrative strategies of older Indian texts the
modus operandi needs to be elucidated against a backdrop of the various
theoretical approaches employed in interpreting their contemporary re-
appropriations and rebirths. It is no news that postcolonial scholars (e.g.
Cudjoe, 1988; Azfal-Khan, 1993; Dasenbrock, 2005; Mohan, 2006) have
noticed the use of premodern narratives in contemporary diasporic
writers (e.g. Rushdie, Tharoor, Naipaul), but it is also true that, almost
invariably, the interaction of the premodern/precolonial and the post-
modern/postcolonial is read in terms of conflict and Western notions of
myth. The next section offers an exploration of theoretical possibilities
that lie beyond those conceptual boundaries.
2 Seeing through a glass, clearly
The particular aspect of South Asian narrative traditions through which

we can interpret Half a Life is their focus on what may be termed ‘libera-
tion stories’. These can primarily be identified as soteriological narra-
tives that not only describe the path to liberation trodden by someone
in the past, but also map the path of a current aspirant to such libera-
tion. In order to illustrate how such narratives are used, let me look at a
couple of instances from two Indian systems of thought that enshrine
liberation, and therefore the narratives that enable it, as their central
aim: Samkara’s (eighth c. AD) Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism
(broadly second c. BC- thirteenth c. AD).1 Both systems, not by chance,
imagine the ground of non-liberation as a fictional or delusional world
that traps and causes suffering to those beings who, through confusion,
construct it.2 Thus, these narratives become prison-worlds, which igno-
rant or confused narrators have constructed for themselves through
mistaken perception.3 Nevertheless, the above-mentioned narratives or
prapanca, to use the Advaitan term (it also means plot or theatrical dis-
play), is by no means irreversible; if rightly interpreted through an exe-
getical narrative, or liberation story, the walls of the prison are seen to
be non-existent, thus offering immediate release to its creator. The story
that offers liberation is not infrequently the story of how a confused
narrator (e.g. the Buddha, Samkara) realized his or her self-deception
and freed him or herself from the oppressive narrative of samsara or
namarupa. Thus, such liberatory narrative works as a reversal of the first
narrative of entanglement: in fact, it can be said to work metafictively,
since its very aim is to reflect upon and deconstruct the nature of the
diegesis into which it is embedded.4 This process is construed in both
traditions as a homecoming journey.5 However, the primordial home

to which the traveller returns is by no means a conventionally stable
or still point of reference, but a state beyond all conceptualizations,
described in both traditions only through riddles and paradoxes. What
is most relevant to my analysis is the fact that both the journey of dislo-
cation from the primordial and uncertain home and the return to such
a centre are presented as narrative processes.
The fact that the processes of entanglement and liberation are seen
as narratives in both Advaita and Mahayana systems, points to the
very fact that the world we inhabit is a construction and can, there-
fore, be deconstructed. Furthermore, the way in which the liberatory
and entangling narratives relate to each other offers a model for inter-
preting other analogous instances of encapsulated/encapsulating sto-
ries. The peculiar relation between nirvana/moksa (that is, liberation)
and samsara/namarupa (entanglement) should not be regarded as one
of radical opposition for it is the very interrelationship between both
narratives which allows the confused teller to be confused no more.
The non-liberated world is constructed in both systems as the neces-
sary stepping stone that enables liberation, the prison that makes the
notion of freedom meaningful and even possible. Thus, the fact that
the narratives of liberation and entanglement mirror each other struc-
turally explains how one enables the other. From this perspective it
could be said that the oppressive diegesis of samsara/namarupa offers a
basis for the deconstructive exegesis that the liberation narratives aim
to accomplish.
Viewed as a whole, the oppressive diegesis seems to carry within it
the seed of its own de(con)struction: a narrative that reflects on its very
nature and dismantles it. The fact that one narrative is contained within
another, not as a mere literary device, but as a way of making a point
about their interrelationship, is of great relevance to Naipaul’s Half a
Life and its many encapsulated narratives. However, it should not be
assumed that all the stories that follow said pattern (in South Asian pre-
modern contexts) were strictly or necessarily soteriological. The thrust
of these liberation stories is precisely the fact that they can be reap-
plied, used as an exegetical means for a myriad of different situations.
Naturally enough, in their many rebirths such narratives will often
transcend their soteriological origins. It is therefore better to ‘think of
the [soteriological] situation as psychological and existential, and as
invoking secondary and derivative metaphysical postulations – emer-
gent properties, as it were, of a human social predicament’ (Brodbeck,
2007:144). In other words, the pattern of the liberating stories, stories
that can be used as a transformative and often deconstructive means of

exegesis, can be found in many non-soteriological or not strictly soteri-
ological contexts.
Whereas the soteriological narratives outline the life of a spiritual
hero, thus providing a potential aspirant with a means to interpret his
or her life story, many of the encapsulated narratives of the Mahabharata
seem to address particular problems or puzzling situations. The famous
dilemmas of the Mahabharata are frequently used as triggers for the tell-
ing of a story that if applied as an exegetical filter might offer some kind
of metaphorical liberation, a dissolution if not a resolution.6
It is not necessary to point out that these stories are applied not only
intranarratively but also beyond their encapsulating narrative frame-
works. As Ramanujan (1991: 46) explains, the great narrative cycles are
pools of signifiers, stories being constantly told through, in interac-
tion with and against each other. This means that the stories from the
Mahabharata or the Ram Katha are ready to be used as exegetical nar-
ratives for interpreting or mapping other narratives. Many are the con-
temporary, and not so contemporary, instances of this ‘mining of the
Mahabharata’ (Tharoor, 2005: 16) or the Ram Katha for that purpose. In
fact, Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel is a retelling of the histori-
cal events that led to Indian independence through the playful filter of
the Mahabharata. Salman Rushdie also has engaged many of these nar-
ratives as exegetical filters in novels like Midnight’s Children, The Satanic
Verses or The Moor’s Last Sigh. Not surprisingly, Naipaul’s A House for
Mr. Biswas applies various narratives from the Ram Katha to the Indian
diasporic setting of Trinidad.
The use of a story as lenses through which to look at some other story
or situation, that is, the telling of a story through another, implies a
process of metaphorical miscegenation whereby the story applied and
the situation to which it is applied are modified and affected by each
another. In a sense, both stories can also be said to have uncertain
ancestry, being, as they are, the product of an old and vast series of
narrative journeys and hybridizations. The paradox underlying Willie
Somerset Chandran’s use of overlapping narratives as a means to
ascertain a link with a certain background, which in turn betrays the
fundamental uncertainty that signals his origins, is also true of the
stories that are continuously engaged and re-engaged for interpret-
ing new situations. By being applied to, and therefore affected by, a
new storyline or situation, the interpretive narrative moves ever fur-
ther from its imagined original form. On the other hand, the very
raison d’être of using certain stories as exegetical filters is to invest the
situation to which it is applied with the authority and power asso-

ciated with the source. This is evident in the case of the liberating
stories since liberation is brought about not only by accomplishing
the deconstructive analysis, mediated through the interpretive narra-
tive, but also by engaging with the liberated source (e.g. the Buddha,
Samkara, the Vedas).
However, when re-appropriating the Mahabharata or the Ram Katha in
contemporary contexts what is generally sought is not liberation from
the world but a sense of alignment with a set of stories that have come to
be seen as paradigmatic Indian/South Asian values. The inherent con-
tradiction of looking for validation and alignment with an imaginary
point of origin that becomes further deferred by the process of seeking
it pervades many of the contemporary re-appropriations of the stories
in South Asian or post-South Asian fiction. In this sense, contemporary
retellings assert at one and the same time displacement from and align-
ment with the pools of signifiers that precede them.
There is a well-established tendency among postcolonial critics to read
contemporary re-applications of the old stories exclusively as decon-
structive postmodern rewritings of ‘myth’. Such readings are based on
three assumptions: (a) that European notions of ‘myth’ are applicable to
and exchangeable with South Asian ones; (b) that the so-called South
Asian mythical stories are contained in monolithic written centres; and
(c) that contemporary authors always seek to undermine or mock the
old stories. By complicating these three assumptions I wish to show
how we can regard contemporary South Asian or post-South Asian writ-
ing in general and Naipaul’s Half a Life in particular as part of the pool
or, to go back to Gilroy’s analogy, as roots en route.
A clear instance of the first assumption, the idea that myth is cross-
cultural, can be found in Selwyn J. Cudjoe’s V.S. Naipaul: A Materialist
Reading, when he views the interaction between the Ramayana (Ram Katha)
and A House for Mr. Biswas as the play between Tragödie and Trauerspiel.
Borrowing from George Steiner, Cudjoe imagines ‘myth’ and ‘history’ as
two separate categories, one relating to ‘the earlier epoch of mankind’
and the other to ‘to the contemporary epoch, and its hero is a product of
history’ (1988: 65). This classically modern dichotomy is deeply problem-
atic when applied to premodern and precolonial South Asian contexts, as
Suthren Hirst (1994) has pointed out. Thus, although Naipaul’s writing
can be seen through the lenses of the myth/history dichotomy such a
model cannot be applied to Naipaul’s precolonial sources.7
As for the second assumption – that these Indian myths are all set
in unchangeable and unchallenged written canons, although it is
true that certain tellings of certain stories (e.g. Valmiki’s Ramayana,

Tulsidas’s Ramacharitmanas) have been given a privileged position over
the centuries, to consider them to be originals and all the other tellings
versions is to be duped by their self-privileging narratives. However,
many critics (for example, Dasenbrock, 2005; Merivirta-Chakrabarti,
2007) use the language of rewriting and versions when referring to con-
temporary works of fiction that engage these so-called mythical narra-
tives. It seems, however, that if we assume the rhizomatic metaphor of
the pool of signifiers there is little room for the hierarchy implied by
the language of rewriting, originals and versions. In fact, Richman’s
work on the Ram Katha (1991; 2001) shows how some tellings question,
challenge and modify other tellings, thus presenting a highly dialectic
and dynamic picture that has nothing to do with static centres. Also,
the fact that many of those tellings were not necessarily set in writing
but were memorized and altered through generations, compels us to
rethink the modern language of readers and writers and move towards
the, by now common in South Asian studies, rhetoric of readers, hearers
and/or reciters.
If we deconstruct the centrality of certain stories and imagine the
narrative universe of a particular cycle as a rhizomatic whole, the third
assumption that the writer engaging and modifying a particular story is
committing blasphemy or ‘the debunking of Myth’ (Azfal-Khan, 1993:
143) suddenly looks less convincing. Rather the reciter may be seen as
part of a whole tradition that uses stories in a number of ways, many of
them pervaded by irony, playfulness and scepticism well before post-
modern era!
By exploring how Naipaul’s Half a Life reproduces the pattern of the
interpreting narratives described above, or, in other words, how it tells
stories through other stories, I wish to show how they can be seen as part
of larger and older pools of signifiers. This focus on similarity should
not preclude an acknowledgement of difference, that is, of the unique
way in which Naipaul engages older narrative motifs in his texts. To the
discussion of how the narrative framing of Half a Life reproduces the
pattern of exegetical narratives I turn now.
3 Half the story
As Larissa Rhode rightly points out, both Half a Life and Magic Seeds
‘consist of tales within tales in witch [sic] the protagonist – mostly in
the third person – tells the reader of stories other people told him or
which he told other people. These stories often have other embedded
stories within them’ (2005: 29) For Rhode, what is most interesting
about this encapsulating or embedding technique is not simply the fact
that it ‘allows the voices of many characters to be heard’ but also that
some of those stories, in a Mahabharata or Ram katha fashion, are told
through each other. Instances of such encapsulation in Half a Life could
be called, in an etymological sense, metafictive in so far as an exegeti-
cal narrative used for interpreting, cutting or seeing through a certain
diegesis is going beyond the fiction and reflecting on its very nature
as narrative. Interestingly enough, many such encapsulated metafictive
narratives appear in the first two chapters of Half a Life as way of medi-
ating Willie’s ancestral tales. Thus, the first chapter, entitled ‘A Visit
from Somerset Maugham’ (1–36), contains Willie’s father’s account of
his own ancestry leading up to Willie’s birth and naming, while the
second chapter, ironically entitled ‘The First Chapter’ (37–113), contains
Willie’s contestation of his father’s narratives through his own re-ap-
propriated and re-interpreted stories. It is Willie’s stories which will be
the main focus of this discussion since they reproduce the pattern of
exegetical narratives most explicitly.
The beginning of Half a Life bears many resemblances to the begin-
ning of the Mahabharata, a work which narrates King Janamejaya’s
ancestry, providing the young monarch with an exegetical story to
help interpret and shape his own life and actions. In fact the story of
Willie’s father can be seen as a mini Mahabharata in itself, since the
great story of Bharat is fundamentally ‘the education of the Dharma
King’ (Hiltebeitel, 2001: 1). Furthermore, the ancestry of Willie is simi-
lar to that of Ved Vyas, narrator of the Mahabharata, offspring of an
inter-caste union and possessor of great literary skill. However, in the
case of Willie’s parents, the inter-caste union was not a passionate lapse
of social norms, but an act of self-sacrifice inspired by Gandhian ideals.
Ironically enough, the Mahabharata narrative is subverted by Willie’s
father’s efforts to interpret and direct his life in terms of a more modern
narrative: the Mahatma’s reformulation of tradition. Willie’s father’s
marriage to the low-caste girl resembles more Ved Vyas’s dutiful fecun-
dation of Ambika and Ambalika, both wives of a deceased king, than
the passionate encounter between Vyas’s father, Paraharsa, and the fish-
erwoman Satyavati. Thus, hybrid Willie, like Ved Vyas, is somewhat
‘Dvaipayana’, that is, born-in-an-island. The hybrid and the insular
conditions seem to go hand-in-hand in Willie’s Vyas’s cases since what
makes them insular is the fact that they are hybrid. Such a sense of insu-
larity stems not only from a social context in which inter-caste unions
are not the norm but also from Willie’s own Brahmin father, who seems
troubled by the consequences of miscegenation and cannot help but see

his son as an-other(’s):
‘Little Willie, little Willie, what have I done to you? Why have I forced
this taint on you?’ And then I would think, ‘But that is nonsense. He
is not you or yours. His face makes that plain. You have forced no
taint on him. Whatever you gave him has disappeared in his wider
inheritance’. (Naipaul, 2004: 34)
The sense of hybridity and insularity woven into Willie’s ancestral tale
or main life-hermeneutics will shape Willie’s later feeling of not belong-
ing in a myriad of contexts. Thus, even though the ancestral tale differs
in a number of ways from previous ancestral tales, like those in the
Mahabharata or the Ram Katha, it still seems to fulfil the function of
shaping the character’s life story by furnishing it with its own exegesis.
Furthermore, this ancestral tale makes explicit the precariousness of
Willie’s origins, along with the basic uncertainty that marks them. Not
unlike the narratives themselves, Willie’s father provides his son with
an account of his origin but in almost the same breath disowns him;
in so doing, he becomes unreliable both as living link with Willie’s
ancestry and as narrator. Unreliability and uncertainty will accompany
Willie throughout his life, pervading his many attempts to retell and
reshape his-story.
What triggers Willie’s request for his ancestral tale, is the obscure
English inheritance of his middle name, Somerset. The story of its ori-
gin serves to introduce Willie’s father and his English literary education.
As well as adding a further layer to Willie’s hybrid condition by antici-
pating his eventual transformation into an English-language writer and
‘pioneer of Indian postcolonial writing’ (p. 188), the ancestral tale can
be used to look at Willie’s unfolding life story even though the links
between both narratives are always presented as accidental. The first
part of the tale gravitates around the encounter between Willie’s father
and Somerset Maugham, a meeting, or its narration, which offers no
certainty or firm ground to Willie. In fact, Willie’s father himself is
uncertain of the story’s relevance. When his son asks about his alleged
admiration for the English writer all he can say is, ‘I’m not sure. Listen
and make up your mind’ (p. 1). Despite the overwhelming uncertainty
about origins and their meaning brought forth by the ancestral tale –
Willie asks, ‘What is there for me in what you have said? You offer me
nothing’ (p. 35) – this first story seems to map Willie’s development
in a number of ways. The encounter between Somerset Maugham and
Willie’s father is compared to that between ‘Alexander and the brah-

min’ (p. 31), the paradigmatic and, allegedly, foundational encounter
between India and Europe8 – an encounter which, not unlike its twen-
tieth century counterpart, was punctuated by an ironic form of mis-
comprehension. At the time, Willie’s father was maintaining a vow of
silence and had therefore to reply to Maugham’s questions, formulated
through an interpreter, by writing in a pad. This form of intercultural
(mis)communication, as puzzling and unreliable as it seems, seems to
shape Willie’s life story, his ever deferring and deferred stories evok-
ing various processes of miscommunication in a variety of cultural
contexts.
While the narrative about his middle name leaves Willie little the
wiser, by bringing up issues of non-belonging, uncertainty and writing
it offers readers a pattern of interpretation for their exegesis of Willie’s
subsequent experiences. This pattern of using one story to interpret
another is reproduced again when Willie starts writing his own tales.
Far from being innocent children’s stories, they aim at a sometimes rad-
ical, reinterpretation of the diegesis in which he feels himself caught.
Thus, his three stories, the fantasy about Canadian holidays (pp.
39–40), ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar-maid’ (pp. 42–43) and ‘A Life of
Sacrifice’ (pp. 44–47) are tools of exegetical analysis that interpret and
deconstruct the world Willie lives in. All three can be seen as narratives
of contestation, three ways of telling his ancestral tale back by rereading
and rewriting narratives of origin and belonging.
Willie’s reversal is playfully included in ‘The First Chapter’, in which
the voice of the young protagonist starts to be heard through the uncer-
tain cracks of his father’s story: it is as if those very uncertainties become
interstitial spaces in which Willie can rethink and re-articulate his iden-
tity. Ironically enough, Willie’s early literary vocation is acknowledged,
in radically different ways, by his mother and father as a fulfilment
of the ancestral tale. Thus, his ‘pleased and proud’ mother encourages
Willie to show his stories to his father since ‘Literature was his subject’
(p. 40); his father, in contrast, shocked and disgusted by the stories,
walks again the fine line of accepting responsibility and, therefore, guilt
and denying any sense of connection with his son: ‘Little Willie, what
have I done to you? [ ... ] But I have done him nothing. He is not me.
He is his mother’s son’ (pp. 40–41). The fact that Willie’s father ‘felt the
boy, true son of his mother, was challenging him, with all the slyness
of a backward’ (p. 41) helps him to see him as an other, the product of
two parallel, and equally repulsive, processes of hybridization: the first
is the act of self-sacrifice from which Willie is born (i.e. his parents’
inter-caste marriage) and the second is Willie’s Christian education at

a mission school.
These two parallel processes of miscegenation are entwined in the
imagination of Willie’s father since low-caste and Christian identity
went, not infrequently, together in India. As the lowest castes consti-
tuted the most destitute layer of Hindu society, Christian missionaries
tended to target them more as potential converts, thus allowing low-
caste people to access European-style education. Thanks to an educa-
tion of that sort, Willie learns a different set of stories that allow him to
contest his father’s narrative while at the same time becoming, in his
father’s eyes, an even more polluted subject: ‘His mind is diseased. He
hates me and he hates his mother, and now he’s turned against himself.
This is what the missionaries have done to him’ (p. 47). Worth noting
is Willie’s ability to appropriate the colonial narratives taught to him as
part of his Christian/Western indoctrination in order to construct an
alternative ancestral narrative out of resistance to his father. This does
not mean that the price of such resistance is Willie’s conversion into
a colonized subject for the fact that he engages and modifies the nar-
ratives he learns at school, that, in other words, he subjects them to a
further process of metaphorical miscegenation by trying to apply them
to his own situation militates against any simplistic reading of Willie as
a colonial mimic man.
In fact, the first of these stories is a good example of the subversive
implications of colonial mimicry.9 Willie, ‘when he was asked to write
an English “composition” about his holidays he pretended he was a
Canadian, with parents who were called “Mom” and “Pop” ’ (p. 39).
Discontent with his surroundings Willie reimagines himself as a com-
plete other in an exotic setting. However, his radical reinterpretation of
who he and his family are is not a mere instance of escapism. The story
he adopts in order to reimagine himself is regarded as normative in the
mission school where he is studying. Perhaps not realising the implicit, if
not deliberate, irony of the tale, the missionaries awarded it ‘full marks,
ten out of ten, and Willie was asked to read it out to the class’ (p. 40).
Again, it is interesting to notice how Willie’s parents relate differently
to this radical narrative transformation. Whereas Willie’s mother seems
quietly approving, his father resorts to an unprecedented, brahmini-
cally normative attitude in order to explain and dismiss his son’s story.
Willie’s mimicry of the metropolitan exotica is seen by his father, caste
pride suddenly resurfacing, as inevitable for reasons of karma and caste:
He is his mother’s son. All this Mom-and-Pop business comes from

her. She can’t help it. It’s her background. She has these mission-
school ambitions. Perhaps after a few hundred rebirths she will be

more evolved. But she can’t wait like other decent folk. Like so many
backwards nowadays she wants to jump the gun. (p. 41)
What is interesting about this dismissal is that Willie’s interpretive

filter is not seen as foreign or colonial propaganda, but, much worse,
as a means of empowerment for backward castes, an attempt to jump
the ‘natural’ progression through a process of rebirths. Even though
Gandhi’s take on the caste system is not straight forward and remains a
highly debated issue10 it seems that the caste pride exhibited by Willie’s
father would sit at odds with the Mahatma’s – at least theoretical –
egalitarianism. Ironically, Willie’s father asks himself ‘What would the
mahatma do?’ (p. 41), immediately after his outburst of brahminical
chauvinism.
Willie’s father eventually decides to ignore his son by confirming
that he is an exclusive product of his mother. Such lack of acknowledge-
ment becomes, however, another interstitial space where Willie can
articulate another retelling of his ancestral tale. In this case, the reinter-
pretation is more radical, containing not only a rereading of Willie’s
origins but also an outline path of future fulfilment. ‘King Cophetua
and the Beggar-maid’ has much in common with the liberation stories
of Buddhist and Advaita sampradayas in the sense that it charts a nar-
rative journey of fulfilment. By first imagining them, the teller of such
stories can eventually walk into the narrative footsteps and tread the
path him or herself. Thus, the more static and descriptive account of
the Canadian holidays gives way to a narrative that is directional and
purposeful, thus offering a means of reconstructing shaky origins and
also mapping the future.
Originally an English ballad about a romantic inter-caste union, ‘King
Cophetua and the Beggar-maid’ (pp. 42–43) is transformed by Willie
into a painful narration of the tragic consequences of such unions. In
the process both Willie’s life story or ancestral story and the chosen
interpretive filter undergo substantial translations. In order to be able
to identify himself and his parents with the story of Cophetua and the
Beggar-maid, Willie has to alter the thrust of the story. Whereas the bal-
lad seems to celebrate love outside social conventions, Willie appropri-
ates the story to speak about hybridity and its social implications, while
the original’s social context is certainly Indianized. By bringing into
the picture the in-laws, who cause havoc on both sides, clear expression
is given to the idea that marriage is not just the union between two
individuals but between two social groups, not a mere act of romantic
attachment but a political choice that has drastic social repercussions.
Moreover, if Willie’s story is aiming to mirror that of his parents’ mar-

riage, his substantial revisionist effort needs to be acknowledged. If we
are to trust Willie’s father at all in his own narration, there is never a hint
of him falling in love with Willie’s mother. The image of the Brahmin
youth who chooses a lower caste girl in order to accomplish his self-
sacrifice since he cannot find enough courage to follow the Mahatma’s
example by leaving college and burning his books is certainly a long
way from the king who is entranced by the beautiful beggar. Willie’s
father’s description of Willie’s mother is far from complimentary and
the fact that he keeps on producing children while wrestling with his
vow of brahmacharya suggests again a very different situation from that
of Willie’s story. However, it seems that these changes aim to legitimize
the role of the hybrid son, who in an Oedipal or Hamletian fashion
makes ‘a vow to get even with them all [troublesome relatives], and
when he became a man he carried out his vow: he killed Cophetua’ (p.
43).The hybrid son’s legitimacy rests in his mother’s suffering, which
seems to empower him to avenge her. While caused directly by the
king’s family, her suffering is enabled by the king’s lack of awareness
and forcefulness.
It is not impossible to imagine the Canadian missionaries introducing
this story to (mostly lower caste) Indian children in order to cut through
their social conditioning. However, Willie’s appropriation of the story
to make sense of his own family is probably not what the missionaries
expected, yet ‘the missionary teacher had ticked and ticked in approval’
(p. 43). It needs to be noted that unlike many of his classmates, Willie
is actually the son of an upper-caste man and a lower-caste woman and
it might therefore seem more difficult for him not to relate to the story
as somewhat personal, as all too familiar. Yet the Cophetua narrative
comes from a non-South Asian context and is set in an exotic location –
in the English ballad, a Greek colony in North Africa. In harmony with
the narrative tradition Willie also sets his story in ‘a far off time, when
there was famine and general distress in the land’ (p. 42), the precise
location remaining unspecified. Thus Willie’s story is conferred a kind
of universality despite its implicit relevance to Willie’s own life story.
In this way, Willie mimics the narrative tradition while forging a sense
of distance from his own situation that, in turn, enables him to accom-
plish and legitimize his retelling.
Willie’s third exegetical story, ‘A Life of Sacrifice’, not only engages
South Asian lore in a much more evident fashion, but also makes
more obvious still the connection to his own life story. Once more the
events of the story unfold ‘in an undefined place, at an undated time’
(p. 44), yet the protagonist is now a Brahmin, like his father. In fact
the first personality trait we are shown of the Brahmin could also well
fit Willie’s father: ‘A starving Brahmin, all skins and bones, decides to
leave his community and go elsewhere, into the hot rocky wilderness,
to die alone, with dignity’. However, the peaceful and dignified death
of the Brahmin is postponed when he is tempted by a spirit who offers
him boundless treasures in return for human sacrifice. The Brahmin
hesitates before accepting and thereby facilitating the first twist of
cosmic irony in the story. Next, the Brahmin needs suitable victims
in order to keep his promise to the spirit and his own social status.
Through deceit and ‘in the name of charity and religion’ (p. 46), the
Brahmin appears to dupe a tribal leader, offering to buy from him some
hungry tribal children as slaves. Funnily enough, the Brahmin legiti-
mizes his acts to himself by resorting to the rhetoric of ritual pollution
and impurity associated with tribal people, who, like Willie’s mother,
are at the bottom of the caste system. Eventually the tribal leader sees
through the Brahmin’s deceit and in a final act of revenge provides him
with two children for his sacrifice, the two victims happening to be the
Brahmin’s own sons.
The relevance of the tale to Willie’s and his father’s story seems self-
evident. Willie’s irony in twisting not only the Brahmin’s fate but also
his father’s phrase ‘A Life of Sacrifice’, used as a self-legitimizing man-
tra, exposes the Brahmin’s weakness and self-deception. The Brahmin’s
initial drive for self-sacrifice turns into sacrificing others for his own
sake. This irony of fate is a sharp criticism of the Brahmin’s project, and
by extension of his father’s, that goes all the way from self-surrender
to self-preservation through deceit and cruelty. By reinterpreting his
ancestry in terms of the story of the Brahmin, Willie places himself as a
victim of his father’s irresponsible and ultimately selfish attitude. At the
same time, this reinterpretation comes to subvert the ancestral tale told
to Willie by his father at the beginning, in which the latter explained
his own life in terms of continuous self-sacrifice.
In this way, Willie resorts to a South Asian narrative to contest
his father’s story and create his own exegetical-narrative framework
to make sense of his uncertain feelings of ancestry and belonging.
However, although these three stories contest his father’s ancestral tale
they do not manage to translate Willie to any stable sense of origins.
He imagines himself in turn as mimic (the middle-class Canadian boy),
as avenger (the son of Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid), and as victim
(the Brahmin’s sons), but none of those narratives seem to offer a stable
point of reference. In fact, the paradoxical dynamics of all interpretive
narratives are again instantiated here; every step taken in an attempt

to reach a sense of origin becomes a step away from an ever-deferred
source. By reproducing this pattern, Willie engages the modus operandi
of South Asian pools of signifiers while introducing stories that come
from non-South Asian backgrounds. This further instance of hybridity
confirms Willie as a complex narrative subject, product of and caught at
the intersection of various multisided narratives, British colonialism in
India, inter-caste unions and Christian missionary education in a non-
Christian context, among others.
However, Willie’s retelling of stories through other stories does not
stop in his childhood, nor does the sense that his origins are ever-de-
ferred lessen as he grows up. It is worth noting that as an adult Willie
publishes some works of fiction thanks to which his wife-to-be falls in
love with him. In fact, Ana seems to reinterpret herself through Willie’s
stories since, in her own words, ‘in your stories for the first time I find
moments that are like moments in my own life, though the background
and material are so different’ (p. 124). Even though it is Ana who first
interprets her life story in terms of Willie’s fiction, it will later be Willie
who follows her to her country and translates himself to her world story.
Willie’s attempt to see himself through Ana’s narrative is developed in
the chapter entitled appropriately ‘A Second Translation’. Nevertheless,
this interpretative project collapses when Willie realizes he has been
living an-other’s life story, one that, as Ana puts it at the very end of the
novel, ‘Perhaps it wasn’t really my life either’ (p. 227).
4 Conclusions
To sum up, regardless of whether the stories chosen for making sense
of other stories come from a South Asian context or not, the way they
are used as means of exegesis and analysis entwines Half a Life and
the great South Asian narrative cycles such as the Mahabharata or
the Ram Katha. Thus, and not unlike Willie, by using the old device
of stories told within and through other stories, Naipaul also seems
to negotiate his own sense of uncertain ancestry and belonging. The
mere use of this device places Half a Life within a certain pool of
signifiers: that of narratives engaged as means of exegesis. By enter-
ing this contested and dynamic pool, Naipaul does not necessarily
attempt a (post-)modern mockery of tradition but does, by using new
stories and motifs, what everyone else has done before him: to tell a
story through another. Furthermore, to use a metaphor frequently
employed by Rushdie (1984: 91), Naipaul’s narrative strategy could
also be seen as a palimpsest. Like the pool of signifiers, the palimps-

est seems a suitable analogy for looking at how Naipaul negotiates
diasporic identity as an unavoidably fragmentary and discourse-me-
diated product. In this sense, the palimpsest of diaspora thinking is a
highly contended and contested space in which competing discourses
(e.g. reverse exoticism, Gandhian nationalism, low-caste anti-Brah-
manism, Mahabharata mining) feed off, mediate and bounce against
each other, not unlike the many narratives that conform Naipaul’s
narrative identities. In other words, the narrative technique of telling
stories through other stories also mirrors, is in fact a metaphor for, the
ever-deferred diasporic subject, whose story is always told through
an-other. This is clearly the case in Willie’s childhood stories, which
address the issue of origins and ancestry through various borrowed
and appropriated narratives (e.g. King Cophetua, the child-sacrificing
Brahmin, Canadian holiday), thus pointing at their uncertain and
unreliable nature.
By reproducing the dynamics of the pools of signifiers that encapsu-
lated narratives are said to represent, every step the displaced subject
attempts to take towards his or her origins becomes a step away from
any such unstable point of reference. And if Naipaul’s narrative tech-
nique in Half a Life is rooted in the South Asian literary traditions of
encapsulated narratives and exegetical life stories, the endless shiftings
and deferrals that characterize that tradition should advise us against
taking the novel’s literary roots as routes to any definitive statement
about identity or belonging, whether in regard of Willie Somerset
Chandram, V. S. Naipaul, or the diasporic subject in general. Whatever
routes may emerge from the centreless and bottomless pool of signi-
fiers from which Naipaul’s novel draws, they will only ever be ripples,
constantly deferring fixity, always on the move but never actually lead-
ing anywhere. In the last analysis, Naipaul’s engagement with the pool
of signifiers suggest that, like the ripples across its surface, the routes
of diaspora may be no more than illusory, while its roots will always
remain unstable and inaccessible, except through the ceaseless exegesis
of narratives which circle ever further away from their ultimate source.
Acknowledgements
The research and writing of this paper was funded by the Spanish
Ministry of Education Research Project ‘Metáforas de la diáspora
postcolonial en la Gran Bretaña de finales de siglo, 1990–2005’ (Ref.
HUM2007–63028).
Notes
1. Since Mahayana Buddhism, or any other kind of Buddhism for that purpose,
disappeared from India after the Muslim arrival in the eleventh-thirteenth
centuries, when speaking of Mahayana Buddhism I generally look, as many
Sanskritists have done before, at Tibet. Indian Buddhism was transmitted to
Tibet in two waves (first in the eighth c. and then in the eleventh c. AD) and
through its hybrid appropriation of the Mahayana we can infer how certain
aspects of Indian Buddhism were like.
2. As King explains at length in Early Advaita and Buddhism, both traditions
develop in dialectical dispute and debate against each other, thus borrowing
each other’s arguments constantly for the purpose of refutation. Ironically,
they ended up resembling each other substantially.
3. For an account of this process and its reversal in an Advaita context see
Suthren Hirst (2005: 83–85). For the Buddhist explanation see Freemantle
(2003: 141–72) and Trungpa (2002: 121–48).
4. For a discussion of how these liberative narratives work in a Mahayana
Buddhist context see Kapstein.
5. For an instance of how the Advaita path to liberation is mediated through
a homecoming narrative see Suthren Hirst (2005: 81). A similar analogy to
one’s own nature (i.e. Dharma as such, or phenomena as they are) as a true
home beyond the endless wandering through illusory homelands can be
found in the following verse by Milarepa (eleventh c AD): ‘Sometimes long-
ing for your homeland may arise / When longing for your homeland arises
hold the permanent place of Dharma-as-such as your home. / Understand
your motherland as illusion. / Experience whatever arises as Dharmakaya’
(Gampopa, 1998: 316).
6. Frequently in the Mahabharata a dilemma experienced by one of the char-
acters is used as a way of introducing a store that might offer some way of
resolving or dissolving such ambivalence. For a thorough exploration of
many such dilemmas see Matilal (ed.) (1989).
7. In fact the historicity of certain tellings of the Ram Katha remains a highly
contended political issue, as the 2007 Ram Setu controversy instantiates. For
a Hindu nationalist account of the Ram Setu incident see Hindu (2007).
8. As any encounter constructed as foundational, the story has been told and
retold on numerous occasions. Two interesting instances from the colonial
period are ‘Zamor’ and ‘Alexander the Great and the Brahmin Sanyasins’
(Anonymous [1828] and Bhonsle [1926], respectively).
9. Bhabha’s definition of mimicry seems to fit Willie’s project, since it con-
structs ‘the signifier of colonial mimicry as the affect of hybridity – at once
a mode of appropriation and of resistance, from the disciplined to the desir-
ing. [ ... ] Then, as discrimination turns into the assertion of the hybrid, the
insignia of authority becomes a mask, a mockery’ (1994: 172).
10. For a brief discussion of some of these debates, especially about the differ-
ences between Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s approach to the caste issue see
Ghose (2003).
7
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas in
the Work of Caryl Phillips
Stef Craps
1 Jewish/postcolonial diasporas
In this chapter I consider Caryl Phillips’s representation of diasporic

subjectivity from the perspective of the metaphor-metonymy debate
and in the context of the gaping disciplinary divide between Jewish
and postcolonial studies, a divide that comes as something of a sur-
prise in light of the host of shared concerns that might seem to unite
them. Bryan Cheyette (2000; 2009), Paul Gilroy (1993; 2004) and
Michael Rothberg (2009) have recently remarked on the conspicuous
lack of interaction between the two fields, both of which grapple with
the legacies of histories of violence perpetrated in the name of rac-
ist ideologies and imperialist political projects. In the introduction
to a recent special issue of Wasafiri devoted to ‘Jewish/Postcolonial
Diasporas,’ Cheyette notes that histories of victimization such as
the Holocaust and colonial oppression, and the literatures dealing
with these respective histories, are being thought of in isolation as
a result of ‘the narrowness and exclusions of the academy’ (2009: 2).
Histories and literatures are limited to ‘separate spheres’ by ‘our profes-
sional guilds,’ as ‘[n]ew disciplinary formations – postcolonial studies,
diaspora studies, ethnic studies, Jewish studies and Holocaust studies –
tend to define themselves in relation to what they exclude’ (2009:
2). In his book Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race,
which extends the argument first made in the last chapter of The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) about the need to
make connections across black and Jewish diasporic histories, Gilroy
asks: ‘Why does it remain so difficult for so many people to accept the
knotted intersection of histories produced by this fusion of horizons?’
(2004: 78).
135
136 Stef Craps
Cheyette addresses just this question in an earlier article, in which

he explores theoretical impediments that prevent postcolonial studies
from incorporating Jewish history into a broader understanding of a
colonizing Western modernity (2000: 53). Continuities and overlaps
between Jewish and colonial experience have remained underexplored,
Cheyette points out, because of the reluctance or inability of many
postcolonial theorists to perceive Jews as anything other than as part of
a supposedly homogeneous white, ‘Judeo-Christian’ majoritarian tra-
dition (2000: 54). Such a stance ‘flattens out the ambivalent position
of Jews,’ who, while historically at the heart of European metropoli-
tan culture, were at the same time banished from its privileged sphere
(2000: 55). By talking about a dominant Western ‘Judeo-Christian’ tra-
dition, postcolonial theory denies Jews minority status and dismisses
them as simple beneficiaries if not enablers or perpetrators of European
oppression.
Cheyette gives three reasons to explain postcolonial theory’s resist-
ance to breaking down the separate spheres between Jews and other
ethnicities. The first of these is the past complicity of many individual
Jews with the colonial enterprise. The most famous example of this phe-
nomenon is the Jewish-born British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli,
who ‘successfully promoted English Jingoism along with the Victorian
cult of Empire’ (2000: 55). Secondly, there is the history of Zionism,
which points to Jewish collusion with colonial practices that continues
to this day. Thirdly, tensions in contemporary black-Jewish relations in
the US, both within and outside the academy, have reinforced the com-
partmentalization of black and Jewish histories and literatures. At the
heart of the problem is the perceived appropriation of black experience
by the Jewish community. The Holocaust has achieved mainstream rec-
ognition in the US, making it ‘a convenient filter through which other
more immediate American histories of oppression – such as the history
of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans – can be under-played’
(2000: 58). The Americanization of the Holocaust, Cheyette goes on,
‘allows the United States to forget or play down its policies of genocide
and racial oppression on its own back door,’ which explains why black-
Jewish relations in the US have become increasingly strained since the
late 1960s (2000: 58).1
While Cheyette’s focus is on the diffidence shown by postcolo-
nial studies towards Jewish studies, it is fair to say that the feeling is
mutual. Indeed, further complicating the dialogue between Jewish and
postcolonial studies is a strongly held belief in the uniqueness of the
Holocaust among many Jewish studies scholars. As Rothberg points
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas 137
out, the proponents of uniqueness typically refuse to consider the

Holocaust and other catastrophic histories in a common frame: they
‘assiduously search out and refute all attempts to compare or analogize
the Holocaust in order to preserve memory of the Shoah from its dilu-
tion or relativization’ (2009: 9). Critics of uniqueness or of the politics
of Holocaust memory, on the other hand, ‘often argue [ ... ] that the
ever-increasing interest in the Nazi genocide distracts from the consid-
eration of other historical tragedies’ (2009: 9) – this is, of course, the
third reason adduced by Cheyette to explain postcolonial theory’s cold-
shouldering of Jewish history.
Though, generally speaking, there has been little interaction between
Jewish and postcolonial studies, a number of theorists and historians
have long recognized continuities between the history of the European
Jews and the history of European colonialism. In the early 1950s,
Hannah Arendt identified an inextricable interrelationship between
the phenomena of anti-Semitism, imperialism and totalitarianism,
which, in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, she named ‘[t]
he subterranean stream of Western history’ (2004: xxvii). Around the
same time Aimé Césaire argued, in Discourse on Colonialism (2000),
that Nazism should be viewed as the continuation of Europe’s treat-
ment of various non-European peoples in the previous centuries.
Hitler, he suggested, ‘applied to Europe colonialist procedures which
until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the
coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa’ (2000: 14). This understand-
ing of Nazism as colonialism revisited on Europe also informs more
recent research in the fledgling field of comparative genocide studies
by scholars such as A. Dirk Moses (2002), Mark Mazower (2008), David
Moshman (2001), Dan Stone (2004) and Jürgen Zimmerer (2005). These
and other scholars have sought to remove the ‘conceptual blockages’
(Moses, 2002) in comparing modern atrocities, to move beyond notions
of the Holocaust’s uniqueness that might inscribe a hierarchy of suf-
fering across modernity, and to elicit the structural continuities and
discontinuities between atrocious events.
There has so far been little parallel work by literary and cultural
critics; however, notable exceptions include Michael Rothberg (2009),
Bryan Cheyette (2000; 2009), Max Silverman (2008), Paul Gilroy
(1993; 2000b), Robert Eaglestone (2008) and Aamir Mufti (2007). A
particularly noteworthy intervention is Rothberg’s recent monograph
titled Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization (2009), which illuminates what he calls the ‘multidirec-
tional’ orientation of collective memory. Rothberg offers an alternative
138 Stef Craps
to the ‘competitive memory’ model – shared, as he points out, by many

proponents and critics of uniqueness – according to which the capacity
to remember historical tragedies is limited and any attention to one trag-
edy inevitably diminishes our capacity to remember another. Against
this framework, which understands collective memory as ‘a zero-sum
struggle over scarce resources’, he suggests that we consider memory
as multidirectional, that is, ‘as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-
referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative’ (2009:
3). Rothberg disputes the idea that comparisons between atrocities
inevitably erase the differences between them and imply a false equiva-
lence. In focusing on the Holocaust, he seeks to avoid the twin pitfalls
of sacralization and trivialization: the tendency, on the one hand, to
emphasize the distinctness of the Holocaust to such an extent that it
cannot be compared to anything else; and that, on the other, to relativ-
ize or dilute its memory by homogenizing very different histories. In
his book, Rothberg engages with an important but largely overlooked
archive of literary as well as theoretical and cinematic texts at the inter-
section of Jewish and postcolonial studies, in which Holocaust memory
and memory of slavery or colonial memory come together again and
again, not in competition but resonating deeply and profoundly with
and through each other.
One master of this genre of what Rebecca Walkowitz has called ‘com-
parison literature’ (2006; 2009) is no doubt the black British Caribbean
writer Caryl Phillips, to whose work Rothberg devotes half a chapter
of his book.2 The other half of the chapter deals with the work of the
French Jewish author André Schwarz-Bart. ‘I can think of no other
two authors,’ Rothberg writes, ‘whose projects turn so definitively on
interrogating the links between European Jewish and African, African
diaspora, and Caribbean history’ (2009: 153). Taking my cue from
Rothberg, I will investigate how and to what effect memories of black
and Jewish suffering are brought together in Phillips’s fiction and non-
fiction. In his novels Higher Ground (1989) and The Nature of Blood (1997),
as well as in his travel book The European Tribe (1987c), Phillips inter-
weaves stories of anti-Semitic and racist violence set in many different
times and places.3 I will illuminate the connections between different
histories established in these texts by recourse to rhetorical tropes such
as metaphor and metonymy, understood not only as poetic devices but
also in the extended sense of deep structures of thought that determine
the way one looks at history (cf. White, 1973). Phillips’s work, I argue,
seeks to foster attunement to multiple histories of suffering and to
move beyond various tribalisms by supplementing a metaphorical view

of history, which, in its insistence on similarity, threatens to conflate
distinct historical experiences, with a metonymical view, which places
them alongside one another and thus preserves the distance between
them. Dismantling anti-comparativist impulses, his work can be seen
to present a fuller picture of the dark underside of modernity and to
pave the way for alliances and solidarities that transcend race, ethnic-
ity, nationality, religion and culture.
2 Caryl Phillips and the Jewish experience
Phillips’s interest in Jewishness is not due to family connections, though

he is in fact partly Jewish. As he reveals in his collection of essays and
reviews A New World Order, his maternal grandfather, Emmanuel de
Fraites, was ‘a Jewish trader with Portuguese roots that reached back
to the island of Madeira’ (2001: 130). However, Phillips did not learn
about this Jewish ancestor until the 1980s; his fascination with the
Holocaust started much earlier. In his essay ‘In the Ghetto,’ included
in The European Tribe, he notes that his interest in the Nazi genocide
can be traced back to his experience of growing up black in Britain at a
time when there was little informed public discussion of his own situa-
tion: ‘As a child, in what seemed to me a hostile country, the Jews were
the only minority group discussed with reference to exploitation and
racialism, and for that reason, I naturally identified with them’ (1987d:
54). Having no access to any representations of slavery, colonialism or
their legacies, Phillips tried to make sense of his experience and history
through the prism of Jewish suffering: ‘The bloody excesses of coloni-
alism, the pillage and rape of modern Africa, the transportation of 11
million black people to the Americas, and their subsequent bondage
were not on the curriculum, and certainly not on the television screen.
As a result I vicariously channelled a part of my hurt and frustration
through the Jewish experience’ (1987d: 54). Phillips’s earliest response
to the Holocaust, then, was one of substitution: there being no public
reference points for the black experience in Britain, the Holocaust was
made to fill that void.4
The metaphorical logic underlying Phillips’s relationship to Jewish
history at this point in his youth also informs his earliest literary pro-
duction. As he reveals elsewhere in The European Tribe, in an essay titled
‘Anne Frank’s Amsterdam,’ the first piece of fiction he ever wrote, as
a teenager, was ‘[a] short story about a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy in
140 Stef Craps
Amsterdam’ (1987a: 67) who manages to escape transportation to a con-

centration camp and is saved by a farmer. He wrote this story, which
obviously has an element of wish-fulfilment about it, after seeing a pro-
gramme on television: an episode of the World at War series about the
Nazi occupation of Holland and the subsequent rounding up of the
Jews had made a deep impression on him, summoning up feelings of
‘outrage and fear’ (1987a: 66). Watching library footage of Bergen-Belsen
and Auschwitz, he realized not only ‘the enormity of the crime that was
being committed’ but also ‘the precariousness of my own position in
Europe’ (1987a: 66). After all, ‘If white people could do that to white
people, what the hell would they do to me?’ (1987a: 67). As Phillips
has since remarked of the story he went on to write, ‘The Dutch boy
was, of course, me. A fourteen year old black boy [ ... ] in working-class
Yorkshire in the North of England’ (1998: 6).
It is clear, then, that Phillips has drawn inspiration from Jewish expe-
rience right from the start of his career as a writer. However, when he
later revisits the Holocaust in his ‘Jewish’ novels Higher Ground and The
Nature of Blood, he implicitly criticizes and checks his initial impulse
to analogize black with Jewish suffering. As Wendy Zierler points out,
Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood are ‘an outgrowth of this early
impulse,’ but ‘instead of presenting his black experience as equal or
directly analogous to Jewish experience, Phillips’s novels argue for con-
tiguity, not sameness’ (2004: 58). More precisely, they are marked by
a ‘dialectic of difference and sameness’ (2004: 58), as Phillips plants
within his narratives ‘thematic seeds of connection and mutual engage-
ment’ but ‘preserves distance and difference by telling discrete stories
that take place at different times and places, using markedly different
narrative points of view, which he then interweaves to explore the
larger themes of exile, memory, and alienation’ (2004: 58). It should
be noted, though, that this metonymical logic is not entirely absent
in The European Tribe either, as the young writer’s identification with
Jewishness does not take the form of a ‘full-scale metaphoric substi-
tution of one identity or history for another’ (Rothberg, 2009: 156).
As Rothberg points out, ‘Phillip’s childhood vicarious experience [ ... ]
represents an alternative to notions of competitive memory: the other’s
history does not screen out one’s own past, but rather serves as a screen
for multidirectional projections in which solidarity and self-construc-
tion merge’ (2009: 156). In what follows, I will discuss how the meta-
phorical and metonymical logics at work in the two ‘Jewish’ novels that
emerged out of The European Tribe operate.5
3 Parallel histories in Higher Ground

and The Nature of Blood
Both Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood are obvious examples of
what Walkowitz calls ‘the anthological novel’ (2009: 571), by which she
means novels that borrow the structure and strategies of the anthol-
ogy, sampling and collating stories of – in Phillips’s case – racism and
anti-Semitism. The anthology is a useful model for Phillips in that ‘it
articulates at the level of form the problems of order, inclusion, and
comparison that migration narratives articulate at the level of content’
(Walkowitz, 2006: 537). Aptly described on the book’s dust jacket as ‘a
haunting triptych of the dispossessed and the abandoned – of those
whose very humanity is being stripped away’, Higher Ground features
the story of an unnamed African who works as an agent and interpreter
in a British slave-trading fort on the west coast of Africa in the late
eighteenth century (‘Heartland’); the story of Rudy Williams, a young
black American detained in a high-security prison for armed robbery
during the 1960s (‘The Cargo Rap’); and the story of Irina, a Jewish
refugee from Poland who escaped the Nazis on a children’s transport to
England, and Louis, a West Indian man Irina meets hours before he is to
return from London to the Caribbean, disillusioned with British society
(‘Higher Ground’). The Nature of Blood follows an even more winding
path through space and time, exploring the Nazi persecution of the Jews
of Europe through the story of Eva Stern, a young German Holocaust
survivor; retelling the story of Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moorish gen-
eral brought to Venice to wage war against the Turks; recounting the
story of a blood libel and the ensuing public execution of three Jews in
a town near Venice in the late fifteenth century; and following the life
of Stephan Stern, Eva’s uncle, who left Germany in the 1930s to help
found the state of Israel, where in his old age he has a brief encounter
with Malka, an Ethiopian Jew suffering racism at the hands of her white
co-religionists.
Both novels invite the reader to detect thematic connections between
the discrete narratives about disparate characters in different times and
places which they juxtapose. In the case of Higher Ground, which con-
sists of three clearly demarcated, ostensibly self-contained novellas, the
book’s subtitle, A Novel in Three Parts, encourages the reader to read
the three sections together and to uncover parallels between the lives
of the individual protagonists. The title of The Nature of Blood simi-
larly suggests a basic continuity between the narratives which it places
142 Stef Craps
alongside one another. As Rothberg notes, it gestures at ‘a commonality

that links the different stories as essentially the same. A transhistorical
racist imaginary obsessed with purity of blood seems to unite the vari-
ous Jewish and black victims across time’ (2009: 164). The extremely
fragmented structure of the text also prompts the reader to look for con-
nections. The narrative strands that make up the novel are not divided
into clearly marked sections or chapters, as in Higher Ground, but merge
and mingle at an ever-accelerating pace. In the process of disentangling
these closely interwoven storylines, the reader cannot help but reflect
on what it is that unites them.
The numerous words, phrases, motifs and themes that echo from one
narrative to another in both Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood have
been discussed at length by other critics. Rather than rehearsing them
here, I will give just a few examples of links between black and Jewish
experience from the two novels. In Higher Ground, one of the themes
connecting the enslavement of Africans recounted in the first section,
the plight of black convicts in 1960s America explored in the second
section, and the Holocaust and its aftermath examined in the third
section, is that of physical and/or psychological captivity. The connec-
tion is made explicit by the protagonist of the second section, who,
in letters to his relatives and would-be legal representatives, constantly
filters his own situation through the prisms of both the Holocaust and
African American slavery. Rudy repeatedly uses Holocaust terminology
to describe his own experience of incarceration, calling the prison in
which he is kept ‘Belsen’ (1989: 69; 1989: 84; 1989: 145); referring to
the wardens as ‘the Gestapo Police’ (1989: 127); and wondering, while
being held in solitary confinement with 24-hour light, whether ‘in
Nazi Germany they used to keep the lights on as a form of torture’
(1989: 72). He also employs images of slavery to depict his detention,
and black US citizenship in general, as similar states of imprisonment.
For example, he regards the US as a ‘plantation society’ (1989: 67; 1989:
90) in which emancipation has yet to happen. Having been released
from the maximum-security wing into the main prison population, he
writes: ‘Restrictions still apply, but to me they are as welcome and as lib-
eral as the emancipation proclamation that we have yet to hear’ (1989:
147). Rudy’s current predicament and the past experience of slavery are
linked most memorably in the deranged letter to his dead mother with
which this section ends, which brings prison life and plantation atroci-
ties together in a hallucinatory fusion.
In The Nature of Blood, the parallels suggested between different
characters are even more numerous and conspicuous. For example,
the experience of the black Ethiopian Jew Malka in the 1980s is subtly
connected with that of the white German Jew Eva in the 1930s. Their
departure from their respective homelands is described in strikingly
similar terms. Malka speaks of being ‘herded [ ... ] on to buses’ and being
‘stored like thinning cattle’ on the Israeli embassy compound, where
she and the other Ethiopian Jews were left to ‘graz[e] on concrete’ before
being airlifted to Israel (1997: 200). This image of people treated like cat-
tle uncannily recalls Eva’s description of the crowded boxcar trains in
which she and her parents had been forced to travel, like animals, to the
concentration camp. Moreover, Malka and Eva both meet with prejudice
and suspicion in the foreign country – Israel in the case of the former,
England in the case of the latter – in which they try to rebuild their lives
after their respective ordeals. Two other characters whose lives closely
parallel each other are Stephan Stern and the African general whom we
recognize as Othello, though he is not actually named as such in the
text. Both characters leave behind their homeland, a wife and a child
to start a new life in a different country. Each passes through the island
of Cyprus, on the border between the East and the West, and forms a
romantic attachment across the colour line. Moreover, each is deluded
by a naive idealism: Stephan is disappointed to find that the new home-
land for which he had fought as a young man and which he had imag-
ined as a haven for ‘the displaced and the dispossessed’ (1997: 5) is not
free from exclusionary practices, and Othello similarly underestimates
the forces of nationalism and racism militating against his dream of
being accepted into Venetian society and beginning ‘a new life of peace’
(1997: 174), although he, unlike Stephan, does not quite seem to have
realized this yet when his narrative suddenly breaks off.
4 Difference and distance in Higher Ground
In establishing such links among the narratives, Higher Ground and

The Nature of Blood appear to invite the reader to recognize a common
human essence that persists across space and time: differences between
people which may seem profound are revealed to be only skin-deep.
The equation between distinct historical experiences which Phillips’s
juxtaposition of stories of black and Jewish suffering thus appears to
effect has led to accusations that he is appropriating or usurping his-
tories that are foreign to him to articulate his own (people’s) distress.6
What is often overlooked, though, is the extent to which the novels
themselves criticize or problematize such an approach. For example, in
Higher Ground, the metaphorical conception of history implicit in Rudy
144 Stef Craps
Williams’s account does not go unchallenged. As we have seen, Rudy

understands his own situation in terms of the historical experiences of
Holocaust victims and African American slaves. He regards history as
a hall of mirrors, a walk through which affords one endless possibili-
ties for self-recognition. Rudy is far less interested in entering into an
ethical relationship with historical others than in appropriating their
experience to bolster his own claim to victimhood. His epistolary inter-
actions with his relatives and sympathizers, all of whom he manages to
alienate by self-righteously castigating them for their failure to live up
to the radical political ideals that he himself has espoused, also betray a
measure of ruthlessness. In a rare moment of self-criticism and humil-
ity, Rudy admits lacking the strength to love and to be kind, which,
as he points out, involves ‘giving up not acquiring, opening doors not
closing them, reaching out not holding back’ (1989: 168–9). Through
his life-long endeavour to shape both the past and the present in his
own image, he has closed himself off from encounters with modes of
existence and experience different from and irreducible to his own. The
fact that Phillips follows his story with one of Jewish suffering – that
of a Polish Jewish refugee who is haunted by memories of her family
members who died in the Holocaust – can be seen as a rebuke of Rudy’s
self-serving and exploitative analogizing.
Also worth noting is the hesitant, indirect manner in which Phillips
tackles the subject of the Holocaust in Higher Ground. The first two sto-
ries, which are written in the first person and use simultaneous or episto-
lary narration, are characterized by a sense of intimacy and immediacy
that is absent in the third story, which uses third-person retrospective
narration. Moreover, as Zierler has observed, the Jewish narrative stands
out in that ‘it demonstrates a marked reticence about its very subject.
Throughout Higher Ground, Phillips shies away from directly depicting
the Holocaust, enshrouding Irene’s story in so much hazy description
that one never really gets the same sense of her character and realness
as one does for the protagonists of the first two parts’ (2004: 61). While
Zierler calls Irina’s story ‘the weakest’ of the three pieces on account
of its oblique and circumspect treatment of the Holocaust (2004: 61), I
subscribe to a more generous reading which regards its not being fully
imagined not as proof of writerly failure but as an implicit acknowl-
edgement on the part of the writer of his own distance from the expe-
rience he describes. The remarkable restraint which the author shows
in dealing with the Holocaust stands in stark contrast – and serves as a
corrective – to Rudy’s arrogation of imaginative control over this trau-
matic history.
Moreover, while Higher Ground encourages the reader to search for

connections between the different histories it recounts, the novel
actually stages ‘a series of missed encounters’ between those histo-
ries (Rothberg, 2009: 159). Rudy’s overidentification with slaves and
Holocaust victims, which traps him in ‘a rhetoric of absolute victimiza-
tion that ultimately eliminates all agency’ (Rothberg, 2009: 161), can
be regarded as one such missed encounter; the most obvious example,
though, is the missed encounter between Irene and Lewis. Though
attracted to Irene, Lewis decides to return home to the Caribbean,
thus refusing Irene’s offer of contact and solidarity. As Rothberg puts
it, in Higher Ground, ‘black and Jewish histories do not actually inter-
sect, but approach each other and then veer away asymptotically’
(2009: 162).
5 Complex relations in The Nature of Blood
Black-Jewish relations remain a complex matter in The Nature of Blood,

as is apparent from the stories of Othello and Stephan Stern. Othello, as
represented in Phillips’s novel, tragically lacks insight into his own situ-
ation, failing to see the similarities between his own precarious position
and that of the ghettoized Jews in Venice.7 In an essay in The European
Tribe ironically titled ‘A Black European Success,’ in which he sketches
his interpretation of Othello, Phillips points out that behind the impe-
rial glory of Venice lay a pervasive racism and xenophobia: ‘Sixteenth-
century Venetian society both enslaved the black and ridiculed the Jew’
(1987b: 45). Phillips’s Othello visits the Jewish ghetto and is depressed
by the squalid conditions in which the Jews are forced to live, but he
makes no connection to his own situation. Though a Jewish scholar
acts as an intermediary between Othello and Desdemona, suggesting
the potential for connections between blacks and Jews as victims of
European modernity, Othello fails to acknowledge the correspondences
between their respective predicaments and learns very little from the
Jews’ experience of racism and ghettoization. Stephan Stern’s brief affair
with the black Ethiopian Jew Malka, which concludes the novel, also
appears to offer a glimmer of hope, but is marred by incomprehension
and prejudice. Few words are exchanged between them, and Stephan
never learns the story of Malka’s journey to Israel and the racism she
and her family have experienced, a story which is offered to the reader
in a series of interior monologues that are italicized and enclosed in
parentheses. Stephan’s and Malka’s essential isolation and loneliness,
a feature shared by all characters in The Nature of Blood (Ledent, 2002:
146 Stef Craps
137), is ultimately unrelieved. It even turns out that Stephan, for all
his youthful idealism, is not free from xenophobic impulses himself
(Nowak, 2003: 124; Nowak, 2003: 132). Lying in bed with Malka, an
immigrant just like him, he reflects: ‘she belonged to another land. She
might be happier there. Dragging these people from their primitive
world into this one, and in such a fashion, was not a policy with which
he had agreed. They belonged to another place’ (1997: 211–2). The
Zionist vision of togetherness and mutuality meets its limit, it seems, in
the figure of the racial other.
These missed encounters indicate that The Nature of Blood does not
assume an uncomplicated relationship between black and Jewish iden-
tities and histories. The fact that the differences – both formal and the-
matic – among the narratives that Phillips juxtaposes are at least as
pronounced as the similarities further suggests that the novel rejects
simple equations and straightforward analogies. As Stephen Clingman
writes, ‘the echoes between the stories are suggestive rather than sym-
metrical, [ ... ] there are waves of connection but also of refraction,
interference and shift. We might say therefore that there is a kind of
oscillation and vibration among these stories, a displacement back and
forth between the metonymic and metaphoric, in which the princi-
ple of recognition is at work, but not of simple reproduction or rep-
etition’ (2004: 160). In bringing together black and Jewish history,
Zierler observes, Phillips ‘maintain[s] a pattern of asymmetry,’ thereby
‘safeguard[ing] their respective integrity and specificity’: ‘He creates
contiguity without direct correspondence, effecting comparison with-
out displacement’ (2004: 62–3).
The indirect approach to the Holocaust that characterizes Higher
Ground is absent, however, in The Nature of Blood – or so it seems at first
sight. While Phillips’s treatment of Jewish history in the former novel
is marked by respectful reticence, The Nature of Blood broaches the sub-
ject of the Holocaust head-on, ostensibly abandoning all restraint. The
central consciousness through which Phillips represents the Nazi per-
secution of the Jews in The Nature of Blood is not that of a refugee who
has escaped the worst atrocities and hence has no first-hand experi-
ence of them, but that of a concentration camp inmate who turns out
to have been a member of the Sonderkommando and thus an eyewit-
ness to the horror. The Nature of Blood draws a psychologically con-
vincing and deeply moving portrait of a Holocaust survivor, of which
no less a writer than J. M. Coetzee has remarked: ‘pages of Eva’s story
seem to come straight from hell, striking one with appalling power’
(1997: 39). This power derives at least in part from the experimental
modes of representation which Phillips employs in these sections of

the novel, which register the shocking and unassimilable nature of the
traumatic historical events they portray in formal terms. Yet, while
the novel appears to put the reader in close contact with the reality
of the Holocaust, it continually reminds him or her of his or her, and
the author’s, own distance from Eva’s experience through the use of
intertextuality. The representation of the Holocaust that we are offered
is filtered through a number of well-known literary and testimonial
texts, most prominently Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl (2000),
allowing Phillips to self-consciously signal his historical and cultural
remove from, and his inevitably mediated mode of access to, the reality
he represents.8
Moreover, the author thwarts easy identification with the Anne
Frank story which he echoes by departing very markedly from his
source text, thus estranging and unsettling the reader. In his version
of the story, the protagonist does not die of typhus in Bergen-Belsen
but survives the Holocaust, only to commit suicide in an English hos-
pital a short time later. Eva’s older sister, who, like Anne’s, is called
Margot, turns out to resemble the Anne we know from the diary much
more closely than Eva herself. However, sent into hiding by her par-
ents, Phillips’s Margot is raped by the man who is sheltering her –
clearly a very different character from the individuals who assisted
the Frank family while they were in hiding – is arrested, and dies ‘on
a cold grey morning in a country that was not her own’ (1997: 174).
As Anne Whitehead points out, the alternative versions of the Anne
Frank story that the author provides in Eva and Margot are ‘both
aimed at revising and challenging popular myths and misconcep-
tions of Anne Frank’s story which highlight a consistently optimistic
voice’ (2004: 107). If Eva’s fate shows that ‘survival is not necessarily a
happy ending,’ Margot’s fate demonstrates that ‘not all of those who
sheltered Jews were as selfless in their motivations as the helpers of
the Secret Annexe’ (2004: 107). Phillips also undermines redemptive,
‘feel-good’ readings of the diary by radically revising its much-abused
most famous line: ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people
are truly good at heart’ (Frank, 2000: 329–30). He recasts Anne Frank’s
hopeful words to convey a message of utter despair which leaves no
room for recuperation: ‘You see, Eva, in spite of everything that we
have lost, they still hate us, and they will always hate us’ (1997: 87).
Such conspicuous departures from the original story puncture the
reader’s complacency and invite him or her to confront his or her own
appropriative tendencies.
148 Stef Craps
6 Trauma, diaspora and incomparability
The Holocaust narrative in The Nature of Blood hardly stands alone in

Phillips’s oeuvre in using intertextuality to signal distance or differ-
ence. One could also point, in The Nature of Blood, to the Othello nar-
rative, which rewrites Shakespeare’s play, and to the story of the Jews
of Portobuffole, which is based on historical accounts explicitly men-
tioned in the acknowledgements. In Higher Ground, ‘Heartland’ echoes
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2006), J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the
Barbarians (1982) and Wilson Harris’s Heartland (1964); ‘The Cargo Rap’
has its roots in George Jackson’s prison memoir Soledad Brother (1970);
and ‘Higher Ground’ appears to be indebted to Jean Rhys’s Voyage in
the Dark (1969) (Ledent, 2002: 76–7). The indirectness of Phillips’s
approach to both Jewish and black history can be connected to the
traumatic nature of the diasporic condition shared by the two groups.
As Rothberg points out, ‘at the limit, diaspora frustrates all forms of
metaphoric identification because it is rooted in, or – better – uprooted
by traumatic history’ (2009: 169).
Cathy Caruth, one of the founding figures of trauma theory, argues
that there is no point in comparing different traumas in the sense of
equating them with one another, as trauma is a fundamentally unknow-
able experience and therefore escapes the logic of analogy or metaphor.
Different traumatic experiences can only be linked together in a pro-
ductive and responsible manner, Caruth writes, if one is prepared to
abandon analogical or metaphorical modes of thinking which inevita-
bly erase difference:
in the case of traumatic experience – experiences not of wholly pos-

sessed, fully grasped, or completely remembered events but, more
complexly, of partially unassimilated or ‘missed’ experiences – one
cannot truly speak of comparison in any simple sense. How, indeed,
can one compare what is not fully mastered or grasped in experi-
ence, or what is missed, in two separate situations? Such a linking of
experiences is not exactly an analogy or metaphor, which would sug-
gest the identification or equation of experiences, since analogy and
metaphor are traditionally understood in terms of what has been or
can be phenomenally perceived or made available to cognition; the
linking of traumas, or the possibility of communication or encoun-
ter through them, demands a different model or a different way of
thinking that may not guarantee communication or acceptance but
may also allow for an encounter that retains, or does not fully erase,
difference. (1996: 124, n.14)
If metaphorical connections always involve a measure of violence in

that they elide the specificity of distinct traumatic experiences, meto-
nymical links temper or counteract this violence, enabling less-appro-
priative encounters between different traumatic experiences. Phillips’s
‘indirect, metonymic form of reference to unrepresentable extreme vio-
lence,’ then, not only is ‘a mark of the contingencies of diasporic geogra-
phies,’ but also signals ‘the disruptions of traumatic history’ (Rothberg,
2009: 170). His work seeks to move beyond the isolation imposed by
trauma by letting multiple histories of suffering address one another
without collapsing one into the other. Bearing out Caruth’s claim that
‘trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures’ (1995: 11),
it offers a compelling reflection on how such mnemonic connections
are to be made for visions of cross-cultural solidarity and justice rather
than discord and violence to arise from them.
Notes
1. The idea that the Holocaust serves as a convenient distraction from other
instances of historical oppression which are more immediate and closer to
home, particularly the genocide of the Native Americans and the history
of American slavery and segregation, can be found in the work of Miriam
Hansen (1996), Andreas Huyssen (2003), Edward Linenthal (1995), Peter
Novick (1999), Lilian Friedberg (2000) and Ward Churchill (1997), some
of whom use the Freudian term ‘screen memory’ in this connection. See
Rothberg (2009: 12–6) and Neil Levi (2007) for useful overviews and discus-
sions of the Holocaust-as-screen-memory debate.
2. According to Walkowitz, ‘Phillips’s novels, anthologies, and essays offer com-
pelling examples of the new world literature and of what I call “comparison
literature,” an emerging genre of world literature for which global compari-
son is a formal as well as a thematic preoccupation’ (2006: 536).
3. This is also the case, though less obviously, in his novels Crossing the River
(1993) and A Distant Shore (2003) as well as in his travel book The Atlantic
Sound (2000). Gordon Collier has argued that Joyce, one of the main char-
acters in Crossing the River, might be Jewish, though he admits that this is
‘unprovable’ as ‘almost all of the traces have been scuffled over’ (2000: 195).
Even so, he makes a fairly strong case for regarding Joyce as ‘a revenant of Irene
[from Higher Ground], an exemplar of the Jewish culture so often pondered in
Phillips’s essays, a precursor of Eva Stern [from The Nature of Blood] – and an
echo of the Jew “somewhere in [Phillips’s] family” ’ (2000: 195). (I would like
to thank Bénédicte Ledent for drawing my attention to, and furnishing me
with a copy of, Collier’s article.) There is also a minor (presumably) Jewish
150 Stef Craps
character in A Distant Shore: Dr Epstein, who tried to establish herself in an

English village but, according to the barman in the local pub, did not ‘blend
in’ (2003: 9). Finally, references to Jewish history and anti-Semitism can be
found throughout The Atlantic Sound.
4. In the same essay, Phillips mentions how, ‘as a black man living in Europe,’
he always remembers the words of Frantz Fanon, who in 1952 wrote of his
philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, warning him: ‘Whenever you
hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you’
(1987d: 54).
5. The analysis that follows reframes and expands the reading developed in
my 2008 article ‘Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-
Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood,’
which argues that the novels enact a kind of empathy that combines affect
and critical awareness, thus opening up a space for cross-cultural encounters
in which differences are not effaced but respected.
6. See, for example, Mantel (1997).
7. See also Dawson (2004: 95–6), Thomas (2006: 57) and Whitehead (2004:
102). Zierler, by contrast, misreads Othello’s visit to the ghetto as an exam-
ple of ‘Jews and blacks recogniz[ing] themselves in each other’ (2004: 64).
Another overly affirmative reading of this episode is offered by Nowak, who
claims that ‘Caryl Phillips is at pains to establish a bond of mutual sympathy
between the Moor and the Jews of Venice in the narration of Othello’s visits
to the ghetto and of his meeting with a Jewish scholar’ (2003: 131).
8. Other intertexts include famous literary and testimonial accounts of the
Holocaust by Primo Levi (1959), Cynthia Ozick (1990), André Schwarz-Bart
(1961) and Elie Wiesel (1956).
8
Metaphors of the Secular in the
Fiction of Salman Rushdie
Stephen Morton
1 Introduction
The secular is a significant and unstable trope in Salman Rushdie’s fic-

tion. Rushdie’s use of metaphor may seem to preserve the distinction
between the secular life of the postcolonial nation and the non-secu-
lar world evoked in Rushdie’s images of the otherworldly such as his
parodies of Bombay cinema and in his engagement with The Arabian
Nights. Yet it is precisely through metaphor that Rushdie interrogates
the democratic claims of Nehruvian secularism. Beginning with a dis-
cussion of Rushdie’s figuration of Saleem Sinai’s body as a synecdoche
for the Indian body politic in Midnight’s Children, this essay considers
how the secular idea of India is placed under pressure by communal
violence, neocolonialism, war and class politics. Saleem’s failure to
represent the entire Indian population mirrors the false universality
of Nehru’s nationalist rhetoric. And by staging this false universality,
Rushdie imagines the possibility of a future secular nation to come.
Such a critique of Nehruvian secularism is developed further in his
novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, wherein Aurora Zogoiby’s surreal palimps-
est paintings juxtapose the imaginary worlds of Moorish Spain and
late-twentieth-century India to disclose the fault lines in postcolonial
secularism, as I go on to argue. If the secular idea of India is lampooned
in The Moor’s Last Sigh through the image of Nehru as a taxidermied
dog, in Shalimar the Clown Rushdie suggests that secularism is bound
up with the idea of an imaginary homeland. In the renaming of the
female protagonist India as Kashmir in Shalimar, the essay concludes
by suggesting that Rushdie returns to the utopian land of lost con-
tent that framed his diasporic vision of India in Midnight’s Children and
Imaginary Homelands.
151
152 Stephen Morton
2 Saleem Sinai’s body politic and the multitude

in Midnight’s Children
By representing Saleem Sinai’s body as a metaphor for the body poli-

tic in his second novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie transforms
Saleem’s body into a site of violent antagonism. Saleem elaborates on the
significance of the metaphor of the body politic in ‘The Kolynos Kid’, a
chapter in which he provides his audience with a scientific lesson in the
modes of historical writing, and proceeds to outline a taxonomy to dis-
tinguish between the different ‘modes of connection’ linking himself
to the history of the nation (Rushdie, 1981: 238). If these modes of con-
nection between Saleem’s autobiography and the history of the nation
seem hyperbolic, this is not to suggest that Saleem’s self-fashioning as
one of the most articulate and important of the midnight’s children is
simply a sign of Saleem’s hubris. Rather, Saleem’s use of hyperbole is
significant because it suggests a link between Saleem’s narrative and the
terror of postcolonial modernity. As Alex Houen has argued in Terrorism
and Modern Literature, one of the predominant tropes in the rhetoric of
terrorism is hyperbole: a trope which ‘oversteps itself as a term’ (2002:
5–6). In Houen’s account, hyperbole is an exemplary metaphor for ter-
rorism because it describes the ways in which terrorism can produce
material events and discursive practices that exceed a particular event
of political violence. Houen’s observation is instructive for reading
Midnight’s Children as a novel concerned with the terror of postcolo-
nial modernity because it provides a critical framework through which
to read Rushdie’s use of hyperbole. Yet this is not to say that Saleem’s
hyperbole is exactly the same as the hyperbole that Houen attributes to
terrorism. For if hyberbole is used in the rhetoric of terrorism to sensa-
tionalize and exaggerate the significance of acts of political violence in
order to increase television ratings or newspaper sales, or to garner pub-
lic support for politicians to introduce authoritarian security measures
and launch counterterrorism offensives, in Midnight’s Children Rushdie
uses hyperbole to register how the excessive forces of history and the
power of the emergent secular postcolonial state terrorize Saleem’s
body. For Saleem’s hyperbolic role, as a messianic figure who represents
the secular nation, is unsustainable and ultimately leads to his physical
destruction: ‘my body is screaming, it cannot take this kind of treat-
ment anymore [ ... ] I am the bomb in Bombay, watch me explode, bones
splitting beneath the awful pressure of the crowd’ (pp. 462–3).
If Saleem’s body is a metaphorical bomb, however, it is a passive-meta-
phorical bomb rather than an active-metaphorical bomb. That is to say,
Metaphors of the Secular 153
Saleem’s body is more terrorized by the forces of history than actively

terrorizing the nation that his body purports to represent. Indeed, it is
Saleem’s blatant failure to represent the entire Indian population that
mirrors the false universality of national independence and the ter-
ror that the postcolonial state unleashed on the people in the form of
India’s partition and the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi.
Furthermore, it is significant that Saleem’s hyperbolic and messianic
claims to represent the nation lead to his bodily disintegration. For
if Saleem’s bodily life is read as a passive metaphor for the formation
of India, his disintegration could be seen to literalize this metaphor
and, in so doing, to expose the false universality of nationalist rheto-
ric and its propensity to terrorize the population at the very moment
that nationalist rhetoric claims to unify the nation. The terror of such
nationalist rhetoric is perfectly exemplified in Rushdie’s representation
of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Emergency suspension of civil law in
1975, about which this chapter will say more below.
For some of Rushdie’s critics, Saleem’s apparent indifference to par-
tition and the violence in Bengal, as well as his satirical presentation
of the communist characters in the novel as magicians, clearly dem-
onstrate Rushdie’s bourgeois, anti-communist sensibility (Brennan,
1990; M. K. Booker, 1999). Yet in foregrounding the mistakes and
omissions in Saleem’s version of India’s national narrative, Rushdie
clearly encourages readers to question the credibility of Saleem’s his-
torical narrative. What is more, Saleem’s bodily disintegration mirrors
the fracturing of the nation by the multiple voices of the population.
Indeed, Rushdie links Saleem’s bodily disintegration as a figure of the
nation to his failure to unify the ‘many-headed multitudes’ (p. 462)
who constitute the Indian nation: ‘it is the privilege and the curse of
midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times,
to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of
the multitudes’ (pp. 462–3). Saleem’s bodily disintegration is thus
linked to the fragmentation of the postcolonial body politic. As Neil
ten Kortenaar argues, the ‘collective that Saleem imagines in his own
image and in whose image he imagines himself resembles the figure
of the sovereign in the original frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan: a
giant towering over his dominions, his body composed of the lillipu-
tian figures of his subjects’ (2004: 131). Rushdie’s choice of the word
multitude rather than people to describe the national population in
Midnight’s Children is significant, however, because it is opposed to
Hobbes’s idea of state control, epitomized in the image of the body
politic described above by Kortenaar.
154 Stephen Morton
The term multitude derives from the Latin multitudo, meaning ‘the
character, quality, or condition of being many’ (OED). As a category in
political philosophy, the multitude was first elaborated by the philoso-
phers Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century
to denote a heterogeneous social group that could not be reduced to
a singular political category such as the People or the One. As Paolo
Virno explains in A Grammar of the Multitude, Baruch Spinoza defined
the multitudo as ‘a plurality which persists as such in the public scene,
in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without con-
verging into a One’ (2004: 21). In Spinoza’s account, the multitude had
a positive connotation, which was associated with freedom and civil
liberties (Virno, 2004: 21). For Hobbes, however, the multitude was a
hated concept because it was opposed to state authority and the ‘state
monopoly of political decision making’ (Virno, 2004: 23). Hobbes
attacked the multitude because he believed that it posed a threat to the
political authority of the nation state in seventeenth-century Europe.
In a discussion that echoes Thomas Hobbes, Jawaharlal Nehru in The
Discovery of India describes India’s population of ‘four hundred million
separate individual men and women’ as ‘multitudinous’, and suggests at
the same time that India is ‘a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle
of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads’ (1946:
578). In contrast to Hobbes, Nehru’s comments on the ‘multitudinous’
property of India’s population seem to embrace the diversity of the pop-
ulation. Yet by insisting that the ‘diversity’ of India’s population is ‘held
together by strong but invisible threads’, Nehru invokes the political
authority of the state.
Saleem’s assertion that it is the multitude that terrorizes his body and
brings about its disintegration might indicate that Rushdie, like Hobbes
and Nehru, is opposed to the multitude and the political threat that it
poses to the authority of the state. Indeed, Deepika Bahri (2003: 164–9)
has suggested that Rushdie figures the multitude as a terrifying mob
that threatens the coherence of the nation-state. In a similar vein, Neil
ten Kortenaar (2004: 84–5) has noted how Rushdie compares the mul-
titudes to insects, a simile that would seem to reinforce the argument
made by Deepika Bahri, M. Keith Booker and Timothy Brennan that
Midnight’s Children is a bourgeois novel that marginalizes the working-
class, subaltern characters it represents. Yet in his physical disintegra-
tion, Saleem allows for the structural possibility of a plural, heteroglot
nation that is open to the ‘inner monologues of all the so-called teem-
ing millions, of masses and classes alike [who] jostled for space within
[Saleem’s] head’ (p. 168). Such an open vision of the nation is opposed
to the Nehruvian model of ‘unity in diversity’, which seeks to contain

and subordinate the voices of the multitude to the political will of the
secular state. Saleem’s inability to contain the voices of the multitude
within his head can be read as a mirror of Rushdie’s failure to represent
the nation as a totality in the novel. Moreover, by staging the disinte-
gration of Saleem’s body, and by implication the novel that he struggles
to compose before his bodily disintegration, Midnight’s Children satirizes
the very idea of a realistic national narrative that could accommodate
all the voices, histories and languages of the Indian subcontinent. In so
doing, Midnight’s Children creates a rhetorical space for the multitude to
contest the false universality of national independence. As one of the
novel’s characters Joseph D’Costa puts it, ‘this independence is for the
rich only’ (p. 104).
For Rushdie in Midnight’s Children, this false universality of national
independence is nowhere more pronounced than in Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi’s Emergency suspension of civil law in 1975. The so-
called Indian Emergency of 1975 can be seen to exemplify the sovereign
power of the state and its techniques of biopolitical control. As Michel
Foucault argues in Society Must Be Defended, biopolitics, or the politi-
cal control and regulation of human life, emerged in the nineteenth
century as a strategy for controlling the multiplicity of the population:
‘Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a politi-
cal problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a
biological problem and as power’s problem’ (2003: 245). In the case of
India’s emergency from 1975 to 1977, the sovereign power of the state
was exercised in and through the biopolitical control of Delhi’s urban
poor, which enforced the sterilization of slum dwellers who had been
displaced by the Emergency’s slum clearances scheme in exchange for
plots of land in Delhi’s resettlement colonies. As a consequence, sterili-
zation became ‘a medium through which people could negotiate their
housing rights with officials of the DDA [Delhi Development Authority]’
(Tarlo, 2003: 188).
In book three of Midnight’s Children, the biopolitical power of the state
during India’s state of emergency is foregrounded in Sanjay Gandhi’s
population control programme, the slum clearances in Delhi and in
the forced sterilization of the midnight’s children. By giving voice
to the state’s violent repression of the people from the perspective of
the people, Rushdie raises questions about the limitations of India’s
democracy in a way that echoes the rising tide of political opposition
to Indira Gandhi’s emergency government, during and after the Indian
emergency. In Rushdie’s fictional representation of the Emergency, the
156 Stephen Morton
forced sterilization of Saleem Sinai takes place against the background of

slum clearances and the incarceration of Indira Gandhi’s political oppo-
nents. Moreover, in an imaginary conversation with the Widow’s Hand,
a synecdochical figure for Indira Gandhi, Saleem uses a demographic
argument to question the detention and sterilization of the midnight’s
children: ‘There are four hundred and twenty of us; a mere 0.00007 per
cent of the six-hundred million strong population of India. Statistically
insignificant; even if we were considered as a percentage of the arrested
thirty (or two hundred and fifty) thousand, we formed a mere 1.4 (or
0.168) percent!’ (p. 438). In response to this argument, Saleem learns
from the Widow’s Hand that the incarceration and sterilization of the
midnight’s children is not only an attempt to control the population,
but also part of a struggle between gods: ‘those who would be gods fear
no one so much as other potential deities; and that only, is why we,
the magical children of midnight, were hated feared destroyed by the
Widow, who was not only Prime Minister of India but also aspired to be
Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible aspect’ (p. 438).
Rushdie’s characterization of India’s prime minister as the destructive
Mother-goddess Devi in this passage reiterates the co-existence of the
secular and the theological in postcolonial India. But this characteri-
zation also foregrounds the sovereign power of India’s political leader
during the Indian emergency: that she acts like a God. In this respect,
Midnight’s Children suggests that the biopolitical control of the popula-
tion through Sanjay Gandhi’s forced sterilization programme was also
an expression of his mother, Indira Gandhi’s, sovereign power. Indeed,
the political significance of Saleem’s sterilization is further borne out
by his observation that Sanjay Gandhi’s sterilization programme leads
to the midnight’s children loss of faith or hope in the nation, and their
position within it (p. 439). In Saleem’s account, the state’s forcible exci-
sion of the midnight’s children’s reproductive organs and vital fluids
simultaneously leads to a metaphysical draining away of hope, which
Rushdie calls ‘sperectomy’ (p. 437), a neologism derived from the Latin
verb sperare, meaning ‘to hope’.
Saleem’s loss of hope in the nation signifies his demise as a mes-
sianic figure in Nehru’s modern, secular nation-state. This draining
away of hope also signals a clear split between the multitude, signified
by Saleem and the midnight’s children, and the increasingly authori-
tarian state that claims to represent the people. Yet this loss of hope
or faith in the democratic promise of Nehru’s modern, secular nation-
state is not a loss of hope in India’s political future per se. For it is
Saleem’s storytelling that ultimately articulates the voice of the nation.
In an interview with Alistair Niven, for example, Rushdie speaks of sto-

rytelling as a way of organizing the multitude (Chahan, ed., 2001: 34).
For Saleem in his role of Scheherazade, the storyteller in The Arabian
Nights, the proliferation of stories in Midnight’s Children is an attempt
to articulate the multiplicity of voices that constitute the nation rather
than an attempt to subordinate those voices to the authority of a single
narrative voice.
By exploding the myth of the body politic, Rushdie thus develops a
more open and democratic narrative structure for articulating the mul-
tiple voices of the nation: a structure which Ken Hirschkop (1999) has
termed, in a study of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, an
aesthetic for democracy. In Hirschkop’s argument, Bakhtin’s criticism
was a product of his sociopolitical milieu in post-revolutionary Russia.
What is more, Hirschkop argues that for Bakhtin, political concepts
such as democracy and equal rights are constituted by linguistic dia-
logue; a dialogue which finds its apotheosis in the vernacular codes
of the European novel: ‘In the concept of novelistic style one finds an
intersubjectivity which depends on a historical sense, irony, a literate
print culture, an eye and ear for social differentiation, and much else
characteristic of modern social life’ (1999: 48). For Rushdie the explo-
sion of Saleem’s body at the end of Midnight’s Children is not simply a
sign of Rushdie’s opposition to the multiple voices of the nation, which
threaten to destroy him. Rather, Saleem’s body, like Rushdie’s novel, is a
site of dialogue and debate. It is in this sense that Midnight’s Children is
an appropriate aesthetic form for India’s democracy.
3 Cosmopolitanism and fundamentalism

in The Moor’s Last Sigh
If Saleem Sinai’s narrative in Midnight’s Children mirrors Nehru’s cos-

mopolitan vision of a secular Indian nation, the narrator of Rushdie’s
sixth novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) is much less optimistic about
this cosmopolitan, secular vision of India’s postcolonial future. Written
from the first-person perspective of Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby, the novel
traces the downfall of the Zogoiby family, as well as the rise of right-
wing Hindu politics in Bombay during the 1990s. As was Saleem Sinai,
Moraes is likened to Scheherazade, the narrator of The Arabian Nights,
and is under pressure to complete the narrative of his family’s history.
This recurrent narrative motif in Rushdie’s fiction may well situate his
writing in relation to a literary tradition that has its roots in eighth-
century Baghdad, but it also serves to establish Rushdie’s concern with
158 Stephen Morton
the precarious position of the writer’s relationship to political power

and authority in the twentieth century.
The narrative starts at the end of the story, with Moraes recounting his
escape from incarceration by his mother’s former lover and rival, Vasco
Miranda, and Vasco’s demand that the Moor write a story about his life, or
face death. In this respect, as some critics have suggested, The Moor’s Last
Sigh could be read as an allegory of Rushdie’s own position as a writer liv-
ing in exile and under house arrest after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death
sentence. Yet such a reductive biographical reading would be to ignore
the multiple histories of diaspora, hybridity, modernity and violence
that inform and inflect The Moor’s Last Sigh. Like Midnight’s Children,
The Moor’s Last Sigh is concerned with the position of the minority in a
postcolonial nation-state that promises to respect the rights of minority
groups through its secular principles. But whereas Midnight’s Children is
concerned with the position of the Indian Muslim before and after inde-
pendence and partition, The Moor’s Last Sigh traces the crisis of Prime
Minister Nehru’s secular ideology from the Emergency period (1975–77)
to the riots that followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid, a major
Muslim mosque in Ayodhya, in December 1992. And where Saleem
Sinai is born into an Indian Muslim family, with a Christian ancestry,
Moraes Zogoiby is the son of Christian and Jewish parents. Moraes is, as
he explains at the end of the novel using a compound noun that recalls
James Joyce’s description of the protagonist Leopold Bloom as a jewgreek
in Ulysses, a ‘cathjew’ (Rushdie, 1996: 428).
Rushdie’s choice of an Indian protagonist with both a Jewish and
Catholic background is significant, then, because that protagonist
symbolizes the experience of the minority in a postcolonial nation-
state that claims to tolerate cultural difference. As Jawaharlal Nehru
argued in The Discovery of India, ‘ideas of cultural and religious tolera-
tion were inherent in Indian life’ (1946: 387). Just as Jewish experience
of anti-Semitism in Europe reveals the limitations of European moder-
nity vis-à-vis its claims to human freedom, so the experience of com-
munal violence in India for minority groups such as Muslims reveals
the limitations of India’s secular modernity, and its claim to recognize
the rights of minority groups. If the holocaust signifies the failure of
European modernity, and its liberal principles of freedom, equality and
tolerance, Rushdie in The Moor’s Last Sigh suggests that events such as
the Emergency and the destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu groups
signals the failure of Nehru’s liberal vision of postcolonial modernity,
particularly his promise to recognize the equal rights of all religious
communities within India.
As well as being the son of the Zogoiby family, a family that descends
from the fifteenth-century Portuguese colonist Vasco da Gama, Moraes
Zogoiby is an Indian Jew, and as such he represents a minority within
Indian society. By invoking the history of the Jewish diaspora to India,
Rushdie also draws a parallel between the experience of other minor-
ity groups in India, such as Muslims, and the experience of the Jews in
twentieth-century Europe. Moraes’s father Abraham Zogoiby is a ‘family
employee’ (p. 69), and a descendent of what his mother calls the ‘White
Jews of India, Sephardim from Palestine [who] arrived in numbers (ten
thousand approx.) in Year 72 of the Christian Era, fleeing from Roman
persecution’ (pp. 70–1). Indeed, it is Abraham’s identity as a Cochin Jew
that prompts his mother’s resistance to his marriage to Aurora da Gama.
For while the Jewish population of Cochin have historically coexisted
with other ethnic groups in India, such as the majority Hindu popula-
tion, they have also defined their ethnic identity as separate. One of
the ways in which Cochin Jews attempted to define their identity as
separate, as Nathan Katz (2000: 60) explains, is to become accepted as
a caste within mainstream Indian society. This attempt has involved
the observation of strict moral and social codes, regarding diet and the
use of a sacred language, but also compulsory endogamy (Katz, 2000:
72). Such strict moral codes would certainly account for Flory Zogoiby’s
resistance to her son’s marriage to Aurora da Gama. Yet, as Abraham
subsequently discovers from reading an old Spanish manuscript, the
Zogoiby family is itself the product of an exogamous relationship
between the exiled Sultan of Boabdil and an ejected Spanish Jew (82).
This act of miscegenation, as Abraham describes it, might seem to valor-
ize hybridity and cosmopolitanism. But, as suggested below, Rushdie’s
use of the history of the Cochin Jews also reveals something about the
limitations of Nehru’s secular, cosmopolitan vision of India’s postcolo-
nial modernity.
In a speech delivered at the Cochin synagogue at the celebration of
its quarter centenary on 15 December, 1968, the then prime minister of
India, Indira Gandhi, is quoted as saying that ‘Secularism in India does
not mean animosity towards religion [ ... ] It implies equal respect for all
religions [ ... ] It is a matter of pride for us in India that all the great reli-
gions in the world are respected in our country’. It is precisely this liberal
ideology of secularism and tolerance that Rushdie subjects to scrutiny
in The Moor’s Last Sigh, a novel that was written in the aftermath of
the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6 December, 1992,
and the subsequent riots and bombings that happened in January 1993.
Rushdie locates the origins of the crisis in India’s secularist discourse
160 Stephen Morton
in the Indian Emergency. Following Indira Gandhi’s emergency sus-

pension of civil law in 1975, Moraes declares ‘Before the Emergency
we were Indians. After it we were Christian Jews’ (p. 235). Moreover,
by tracing India’s history through the genealogy of the Zogoiby family
and Aurora Zogoiby’s paintings, Rushdie draws a parallel between the
disintegration of Moorish Spain, and the expulsion of Jews and Moors
by the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand in the fifteenth cen-
tury, and the sweeping away of Nehru’s secular pluralist vision of India
by the right-wing ideology of Hinduvata. As Aamir Mufti puts it, ‘The
political rise of violent Hindu nationalism in Bombay and Maharashtra
in the form of the Shiv Sena, which reappears here as “Mumbai’s Axis”
or the M.A., is thus figured as a sort of Reconquista, with the “mongrel”
Bombay of the Nehruvian decades consumed by the violent religious,
ethnic, and linguistic rigidities of “Maharashtra for Mahrashtrans” ’
(2007: 246).
Against this Reconquista in postcolonial South Asia, it is Aurora
Zogoiby’s paintings that continue to idealize Bombay as a cosmopoli-
tan space (Mufti, 2007: 246–7). Of all Aurora Zogoiby’s paintings, it
is perhaps her paintings of Mooristan and Palimpstine that evoke the
Nehruvian ideal of India as a secular, cosmopolitan nation. In these
paintings, Moraes asserts that Aurora was ‘seeking to paint a golden
age’ in which ‘Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains’
coexisted (p. 227). The paintings are described as ‘polemical’ in the
attempt to ‘create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation’ and the
use of ‘Arab Spain to re-imagine India’ (p. 227). And yet this didacticism
is offset by the paintings’ aesthetic quality. By establishing a connec-
tion between the surreal aesthetics of Aurora Zogoiby’s paintings and
the hybrid politics of a postcolonial nation-state based on the liberal
principles of secularism and tolerance, Rushdie thus implies that The
Moor’s Last Sigh – like Aurora’s art – is a mirror of India’s postcolonial
future.
If Aurora Zogoiby’s paintings stand as a mirror image of Nehru’s secu-
lar vision of postcolonial India, they also reflect the elitism of his nation-
alist project. During the naval strike in Bombay of 1946, for example,
Aurora directs the driver of her imported American motor car to ‘the
heart of the action [ ... ] venturing alone into the slum-city of Dharavi,
the rum-dens of Dhobi Talao and the neon fleshpots of Falkland Road,
armed only with a folding wooden stool and sketchbook’ (p. 129).
Aurora is able to efface her class position as an independently wealthy,
upper-middle-class visual artist during the industrial action. However,
once the Congress Party leadership calls off the strike – a decision that
prompts the anger of the sailors – Aurora realizes that her position as an
artist is untenable: ‘Aurora was not a sailor [ ... ] and knew that to those
angry boys she would look like a rich bitch in a fancy car – as, perhaps,
the enemy’ (p. 133).
Like Aurora Zogoiby’s early paintings, The Moor’s Last Sigh may at
times seem nostalgic for a golden age of secularism, which never really
existed. Indeed, the end of secularism that Rushdie in both Midnight’s
Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh attributes to the 1975 state of emer-
gency declared by Indira Gandhi overlooks the way in which secular-
ism conceals a structure of intolerance towards populations deemed to
be minorities from the foundation of the Indian nation-state. For the
principle of toleration, as the South Asian historian Partha Chatterjee
points out ‘is the willing acceptance of something of which one dis-
approves’ (1997: 256). Tolerance on this definition conceals a power
relationship between the dominant and the subaltern, or the major-
ity and the minority. This discourse of tolerance was also implicit in
Nehru’s attempt to separate religion and the state in the foundation
of the Indian nation-state. One of the problems with this discourse of
secularism, as Ashis Nandy contends, is that ‘the modern nation state
has no means of ensuring that the ideologies of secularism, develop-
ment, and nationalism themselves do not begin to act as faiths intoler-
ant of others’ (1998: 333). Nandy is right to emphasize that secularism
offers no guarantee of protection against intolerance towards minority
groups. For in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid,
the Supreme Court of India ‘not only failed to recognize the profound
threat that the Hindu Right presents to Indian secularism, but actually
endorsed their vision of Hinduvata as secular’ (Cossman and Kapur,
1999: xvi). Yet the problem is not exactly one of secularism, develop-
ment or nationalism per se (as Ashis Nandy suggests), but the histori-
cal context in which the discourses of secularism and tolerance came
into being during the partition of India. As Aamir Mufti puts it, ‘The
abstract, “secular” citizen has its Enstellung, its moment of emergence,
in a violent redistribution of religious identities and populations’ (1998:
119). Historians estimate that up to a million people were killed, and
millions displaced, in acts of communal violence that were commit-
ted by both the Hindu and Muslim populations during the partition
of India and Pakistan in 1947. What the event of South Asian parti-
tion revealed was that the apparently universalist notion of secularism
underpinning India’s constitution was based on a tacit assumption that
the majority Hindu population were natural citizens of India, whereas
the minority Muslim population had to demonstrate their loyalty to
162 Stephen Morton
the Indian nation (Pandey, 2006: 132–3). As a result, it was the Muslim
population who were marked as a minority group that should be toler-
ated in Nehru’s secular nationalist discourse.
The vulnerable position of minorities such as Muslims, Jews and
Christians is prophesied in Vasco Miranda’s drunken diatribe on the
eve of India’s independence. Against Nehru’s promises of secular social-
ism, Miranda roundly criticizes the Zogoiby family for being ‘Minority
group members’ and ‘Macaulay’s minutemen’, whom Nehru duped into
buying the idea of secular socialism ‘like a cheap watch salesman’ (p.
166). This metaphor of the cheap watch salesman is significant because
it suggests that secular socialism is an inferior imitation of a concept
imported from Europe; a concept that is belated, out of joint, and there-
fore has no relevance in post-independence India. As such it is also an
apt counterpoint to the temporal motif of the countdown to independ-
ence signified by Mountbatten’s ‘ticktock’ in Midnight’s Children. What
is more, Vasco’s reference to ‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ alludes to Lord
Macaulay’s 1835 ‘Minute on Indian Education’, in which Macaulay
argued that it was necessary to educate an elite class in Indian society
who could act as interpreters between the English and the non-Eng-
lish speaking Indian population: ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood
and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in dialect’
(1935: 359). By describing the Zogoiby family as ‘Macaulay’s minute-
men’ because of their gullible belief in Nehru’s promises of equality to
migrants, Vasco Miranda implies that Nehru’s ideology of secularism,
and its blind adherents, signify a continuation of European colonial
rule in a different guise.
In this respect, Vasco’s critique of secularism resembles Ashis Nandy’s
argument that Indian secularism is a discourse of the middle-class
political elite, who regard religion as ‘an ideology in opposition to the
ideology of modern statecraft’ and a ‘hurdle to nation building and
state formation’ (1998: 324, 341). The problem with this criticism of
secularism is that it assumes that secularism is part of the dominant
discourse of the state, rather than a discourse that can be shaped and
determined by minority groups. By doing so, Nandy runs the risk of
playing into the hands of right-wing Hindu movements, such as the
Shri Ram Janmabhumi Liberation movement, who attacked the ‘par-
tisanship of the secularism professed by the Indian state and by the
national and provincial governments’ on the grounds that this secu-
larism constituted a ‘pseudosecularist pacification of the Muslims and
other minorities’ (Pandey, 2006: 83). Against this pseudosecularism,
movements such as the Shri Ram Janmabhumi Liberation movement
called upon Hindus to take back their country through actions of com-
munal violence such as the destruction of the Babri Masjid.
Rushdie’s representation of communal violence in The Moor’s Last
Sigh also interrogates the moral logic that was used to justify the vio-
lent Muslim response to the Hindu destruction of the Babri Masjid in
Ayodhya: ‘Violence was violence, murder was murder, two wrongs did
not make a right [ ... ] There comes a point in the unfurling of commu-
nal violence in which it becomes irrelevant to ask, “Who started it?”
The lethal justifications of death part company with any possibility of
justification, let alone justice’ (p. 365). In Moraes’s analysis, communal
violence exceeds any moral explanation precisely because this violence
is embedded in the political foundations of the Indian postcolonial
nation-state. Moraes’s self-reflective account of the communal violence
in which he also participates squarely locates the source of communal
violence in Bombay within the nation rather than attributing it to an
external, foreign enemy: ‘the barbarians were not only at our gates but
within our skins [ ... ] the explosions burst out of our very own bod-
ies. We were both the bombers and the bombs. The explosions were
our own evil – no need to look for foreign explanations’ (p. 372). The
grotesque metaphor of explosions bursting ‘out of our very own bodies’
registers the responsibility of Moraes Zogoiby and his cadres for the
violence that follows the razing of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Moraes’s
refusal to adopt a partisan or communalist explanation for the violence
may seem surprising given his implication in it. Yet in refusing to jus-
tify the use of violence by blaming Bal Thackeray’s group the Shiv Sena,
Moraes suggests that violence is inherent to the social body of postcolo-
nial India rather than an exception or an aberration.
Furthermore, Moraes’s denial of Vasco Miranda’s accusation that he
and his family are Macaulay’s minutemen – or elite foreigners, who
have no stake in the nation – rejects the majoritarian rhetoric of Hindu
nationalism that underpins Vasco’s drunken diatribe: ‘Vasco was wrong.
We were not, had never been, that class’ (p. 376). Moraes’s rejection of
Vasco’s derisory label is predicated on his identity as both an Indian
and a hybrid minority. Indeed, at one point in the novel, Moraes claims
his Jewish identity in order to refuse his father’s demands to help him
build technology to support a nuclear weapons programme. In response
to his father’s request, Moraes asserts, ‘I guess you must know who-all
this bomb is meant to blow into more bits than poor Rajiv and where?’
(p. 336). Although the interrogatives ‘who-all’ and ‘where’ in this state-
ment are not tethered to a determinate referent, the historical con-
text of Abraham’s illegal arms technology dealing in 1990s Bombay/
164 Stephen Morton
Mumbai suggest that this episode can be linked to the Indian military’s
proliferation of nuclear weapons in its ongoing war with Pakistan. In
this reading, the ‘who-all’ and the ‘where’ Abraham Zogoiby refers to
in his conversation with Moraes implicitly denotes the population of
Pakistan, and suggests that Abraham’s statement is a caution that the
weapons technology he wishes his son to help build will be utilized by
the Indian nation-state in its ongoing war with Pakistan. If Abraham’s
corrupt business practices and his involvement in nuclear arms dealing
epitomize everything that is wrong with the dominant values of liberal
secularism in late-twentieth-century India, Moraes’s identification as a
Jew can be read as a gesture of solidarity with other minorities, such as
Indian Muslims, even though Moraes also describes this ethnic identi-
fication as ‘involuntary’ and ‘unconscious’ (p. 335).
By aligning himself with a minority group in postcolonial India,
Moraes challenges the dominant political discourse of secularism for
two principle reasons: firstly, because the Nehruvian discourse of state
secularism is increasingly regarded by both Moraes and Vasco as an
outdated legacy of the ruling liberal ideology of British colonialism,
which as mentioned above, was adopted by Nehru to recognize the cul-
tural rights of Muslims and other minorities during the transition to
independence and the framing of India’s constitution; and secondly,
because the rhetoric of secularism masks the corrupt business prac-
tices of Bombay’s criminal underworld, of which Abraham Zogoiby is
both a principle agent and beneficiary. Yet rather than simply rejecting
secularism as a progressive social and political principle, Moraes’s self-
identification as a minority – his declaration to his father that he finds
himself to be a Jew – redefines the secular as a minority position from
which to contest the spurious use of secularism by the criminal under-
world (represented in the novel by his father), as well as its discredit-
ing by the Hindu right (represented in the novel by Raman Fielding).
In this respect, Moraes’s identification as a Jew corresponds with the
postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s plea in his essay ‘Unpacking my
Library ... Again’ for a ‘subaltern secularism that emerges from the limi-
tations of “liberal” secularism and keeps faith with those communities
and individuals who have been denied, and excluded, from the egalitar-
ian and tolerant values of liberal individualism’ (1996: 209). For when
Moraes asserts that he is a Jew, he is not only making a statement about
the singularity of his hybrid ethnic identity as a ‘cathjew’ (p. 428); he is
also claiming affinity with the different subaltern and minority groups
that have been excluded from participation in India’s state discourse of
‘ “liberal” secularism’, to adopt Bhabha’s term. In this respect Moraes
Zogoiby, like Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, adopts the rhetorical

stance of the minority in order to question whether liberal political
concepts such as secularism, which are overdetermined by the histories
of British colonialism and communal violence, can be reinvented in
such a way that they might transform the democratic grounds of the
modern postcolonial nation-state.
4 Kashmir and the lost content of diaspora
Rushdie’s concern with the promise and disappointment of Nehruvian

secularism is also figured in his representation of Kashmir; his anxiety
regarding its partition is made manifest in the first section of Midnight’s
Children. As Patrick Colm Hogan argues, the character of Aadam Aziz in
Midnight’s Children represents the ‘beginning of modernity in Kashmir’
(2001: 531). For Colm Hogan, Aadam Aziz’s exile from Kashmir in
1915 is significant because it marks the year when a second major road
was built linking Srinagar with Jammu, as well as the period during
which telephone lines were introduced to the region. In a similar vein,
Ananya Kabir observes how Rushdie’s pre-lapsarian representation of
Kashmir in Book 1 of Midnight’s Children is marked by ‘the politics-rid-
den present’ of a divided and militarized Kashmir (2002: 252). More
recently, Rushdie’s concern with Kashmir was reflected in an article
he wrote for the Washington Post on 28 August 2002. In this article,
Rushdie criticizes the Bush administration’s foreign policy in South
Asia for ignoring the Kashmir crisis. As Rushdie puts it, ‘In the heat
of the dispute over Iraq strategy, South Asia has become a side show’
and ‘Pakistani-backed terrorism in Kashmir will be winked at because
of Pakistan’s support for the “war against terror” on its frontier’ (2002:
A23). It is against this political backdrop of the sidelining of the crisis in
Kashmir by the Bush administration that Rushdie makes the ‘politics-
ridden present’ of Kashmir the central focus of his later novel Shalimar
the Clown (2005).
The partition of India and the escalation of violence from the
deployment of Indian troops in the Kashmir valley in October 1947 to
Pakistan’s cooperation with the Bush administration during the 2001
war in Afghanistan form part of the historical backdrop to Shalimar the
Clown. This historical and geopolitical backdrop is significant because
it marks a failure in US foreign policy to either comprehend or influ-
ence the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. This ‘failure of the United States
to translate its power into influence in the subcontinent’ was partly
a consequence of a tendency within successive US administrations to
166 Stephen Morton
approach the ‘interests, priorities and needs’ of Third World nations

‘with a Cold War yardstick that distorted far more than it illuminated’
(McMahon, 1994: 345). Such a tendency was particularly evident in
the Truman administration’s embracing of Pakistan as a strategic ally
against the Soviet Union in the Middle East rather than South Asia
during the early 1950s (McMahon, 1994: 153). In response to this U.S.
alliance with Pakistan, the Indian Prime Minister Nehru expressed a
genuine fear ‘that an influx of American armaments might embolden
Pakistani leaders to seek a military solution in Kashmir’ (McMahon,
1994: 150). By setting his novel in twentieth-century Kashmir, Rushdie
thus draws attention to the competing narratives of cold war geopoli-
tics, Western imperialism and religious fundamentalism that circum-
scribe the region.
By representing Kashmir from the perspective of the people of
Pachigam, a fictional Kashmiri village, Rushdie tries to avoid taking
sides with either Indian or Pakistani versions of Kashmir’s history and
the origins of the conflict. In the section of the novel entitled ‘Boonyi’,
for instance, the narrator focuses on the cosmopolitanism of the vil-
lagers, and the way that a dispute between the villagers of Pachigam
and Shirmal is settled at the insistence of the maharaja: ‘After the pot
war, contact between the two village headmen came to an acrimoni-
ous end, until messengers from the maharaja himself arrived in both
Pachigam and Shirmal, demanding that to augment the staff of the
palace kitchen they set aside their quarrels and pool their resources to
provide food (and theatrical entertainment) at a grand Dassehra festi-
val banquet in the Shalimar garden’ (p. 71). This festival and banquet
involved a celebration of Kashmir’s hybrid cultural heritage (p. 71).
The villagers’ performance of hybridity and the confusion of commu-
nal identities might seem to construct an idealized image of Kashmir
as more cosmopolitan under the semi-autonomous rule of the Hindu
maharaja than after India’s independence and partition. Yet, this
ignores the influence of the British colonial administration in dividing
the Kashmiri population along ethnic lines by identifying Kashmiri
people either as Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist. Through bureaucratic
techniques of power such as the census, the British colonial adminis-
tration ‘fundamentally changed the conceptualization of an identity
in that it inculcated a strong sense of self versus other among individu-
als as well as communities’ (Behera, 2000: 40). It is perhaps for this rea-
son that Firdaus Noman reads the maharaja’s demand that the people
of Pachigam perform their hybrid cultural heritage as a sign that ‘bad
trouble is on the way’ (p. 71).
The prophetic and proleptic powers that the narrator attributes to

Firdaus serve to place the history of India’s partition and the subsequent
conflict in Kashmir within the non-secular, oral historical world view
of the villagers. Such a world view is further registered in the narra-
tor’s account of the rumours, which ‘seemed like a new species of living
thing’ and asserted that ‘an army of kabailis from Pakistan has crossed
the border, looting, raping, killing [ ... ] and it is nearing the outskirts of
the city’ (p. 85). By representing the historical experience of communal
violence in the form of a rumour, the narrator powerfully evokes the
villagers’ understanding of political events and their rising panic in the
face of what she describes as ‘the most persistent’ and ‘most puissant
rumours’ (p. 85). By placing the rumours of India and Pakistan’s ter-
ritorial claims on the valley of Kashmir in apposition, Rushdie evokes
the perspective of the Kashmiri people, who are caught in the middle
of these contending rumours. Moreover, by representing the violent
repression of the Kashmiri people by both the Indian military and the
Pakistani militias, the narrator conveys the way in which the conflict
in Kashmir is overdetermined by multiple historical narratives. Yet in
so doing, the narrator also appears to support the secular nationalism
of the Kashmiri separatist movement against both the influence of the
Indian military and the iron mullahs from Pakistan.
Such support is implied in Rushdie’s characterization of the Indian
General Kachhwaha as a Hindu fundamentalist, who regards the idea
of ‘Kashmir for the Kashmiris’ as ‘moronic’ (p. 101); who believes that
‘Every Muslim in Kashmir should be considered a militant’ (p. 291. Original
emphasis); and who orders the Indian military to ethnically cleanse
the village of Pachigam. While General Kachhwaha ‘despised the
fundamentalists, the jihadis [and] the Hizb’ he ‘despised the secular
nationalists more’ (p. 299) on the grounds that they have no God. As
Kachhwaha expostulates, ‘What sort of God was secular nationalism?’
(p. 299). By invoking the idea of ‘secular nationalism’ in the context of
the conflict over Kashmir, the narrator suggests that the secular strug-
gle for Kashmiri liberation from both India and Pakistan corresponds
with the Nehruvian rhetoric of secular nationalism that promoted the
co-existence of Muslims and Hindus in India and Pakistan.
Yet if General Kachhwaha’s military campaign of terror against
Kashmiri Muslims in the Valley of Kashmir gives the lie to Nehru’s
legacy of secularism and tolerance by exposing the hegemonic and
military power of India’s Hindu majority, Rushdie’s account of the secu-
lar nationalism of the Jammu Kashmir liberation front in Shalimar the
Clown seems to embody what Bhabha calls subaltern secularism. For
168 Stephen Morton
the secular nationalism of the JKLF is precisely subaltern in the sense

that it reflects the view of the Kashmiri people rather than the elite, a
people ‘of no more than five million souls, landlocked, preindustrial,
resource rich but cash poor, perched thousands of feet up in the moun-
tains’ (p. 253). As Rushdie’s narrator explains, ‘the liberation front was
reasonably popular and azadi was the universal cry!’ (p. 253). What is
more, the JKLF’s call for azadi (the Urdu word for freedom) refers to the
‘Freedom to be meat-eating Brahmins to saint-worshipping Muslims, to
make pilgrimages to the ice-lingam high in lakeside mosque, to listen
to the santoor and drink salty tea [ ... ] to make honey and carve walnut
into animal and boat shapes and to watch the mountains push their
way, inch by inch, century by century, further up into the sky’ (p. 253).
Such a spirit of freedom is reinforced by the way in which the peo-
ple of Kashmir treat the ‘de facto line of partition [between India and
Pakistan] with contempt’ by walking ‘across the mountains whenever
they so chose’ (p. 97).
In the aftermath of the attacks on America of September 11th, 2001,
the identification of Shalimar as ‘a known associate of more than one
terrorist group’ (p. 371) collapses the distinction between an act of
political violence and private revenge, and constructs Shalimar as a ter-
rorist because of his Muslim identity: ‘After the bombing of the World
Trade Centre in New York [ ... ] it was a dangerous time in prison for a
Muslim man accused of being a professional terrorist’ (p. 377). Such a
representation not only foregrounds the way in which the discourse of
terrorism post-September 11th, 2001 collapses the obvious differences
between Muslims, migrants and terrorists, but also ignores the histori-
cal singularity of the conflict in Kashmir. And it is precisely this histori-
cal singularity that the narrator foregrounds in Kashmira’s observation
that this was not ‘an American story. It was a Kashmiri story’ (p. 372).
Against Shalimar’s ‘disappearance beneath the alien cadences of
American speech’ (372) – a phrase which itself evokes the power and
authority of America’s legal and political discourses – Rushdie centres
Kashmir in the imaginative global political geography of Shalimar the
Clown. This centring is achieved through the narrator’s self-conscious
reflection on an appropriate literary mode to mourn the loss of human
life associated with the conflict in Kashmir. Such literary self-conscious-
ness is exemplified in Kashmira’s reference to A. E. Housman’s pastoral
poem about rural Shropshire, A Shropshire Lad (1896): ‘There were col-
lisions and explosions. The world was no longer calm. She thought of
Housman in Shropshire. That is the land of lost content. For the poet,
happiness was the past. It was that other country where they did things
differently’ (p. 37). Writing in the global historical context of the sec-
ond Boer war, Housman framed idyllic life in the local context of rural
Shropshire as a ‘land of lost content’. By invoking this poem in the
global political context of a discussion of the ongoing conflict between
India and Pakistan over the local territory of Kashmir, Rushdie suggests
that the diasporic metaphor of Kashmir as a land of paradise is a belated
fantasy.
Moreover, by framing Kashmira’s grief over the death of her father,
and the loss of the homeland she never lived in with the biological
mother she never knew in terms of a pastoral elegy, Rushdie draws
attention to the political dimension of mourning that the social theo-
rist Judith Butler has recently described in Precarious Life (2006). Against
President George W. Bush’s assertion on 21 September 2001, that ‘we
have finished grieving and that now it is time for resolute action to take
the place of grief’ (cited Butler, 2006: 29), Butler argues that grief can be
a ‘resource of politics’ if it leads to ‘a consideration of the vulnerability
of others’ and a questioning of the political norms that determine why
the lives of Americans are grievable and the lives of Iraqis, Palestinians
and Afghanis are not (Butler, 2006: 30, 34). Further, by arguing that
‘the world itself as a sovereign entitlement of the United States must
be given up, lost and mourned’ (Butler, 2006: 40), Butler offers a radi-
cal democratic vision of global political relations in the twenty-first
century.
Against the history of American foreign policy in South Asia, Rushdie
offers a similar vision of the global political future in Shalimar the
Clown. By framing Shalimar’s murder of Max Ophuls as a ‘Kashmir
story’ rather than an ‘American story’, Kashmira grieves for Kashmir
against the political norms and ‘alien cadences of American speech’
(p. 372) which define Shalimar’s murder of Ophuls as a terrorist action
against America’s global political sovereignty. In so doing, Rushdie
offers a political elegy for Kashmir that highlights the limitations of
American foreign policy in postcolonial South Asia from the Truman
administration to the Bush administration, and mourns the lives of
many Kashmiris, whose deaths have been overshadowed by the Cold
War and the US-led war on terrorism.
9
White Teeth’s Embodied Metaphors:
The Moribund and the Living
Isabel Carrera Suárez
1 Introduction
Early reception of White Teeth, as has often been emphasized (Tew,

2010), tended to celebrate the novel as the expression of a relatively
unproblematic ‘diverse’ London, where the iconic figure of Zadie Smith
and her irreverent writing could thrive and become representative of
the ‘New Britain’, a privileged space of conviviality and transformative
interaction.1 Beyond such millenium optimism, in the political mood
caused by the events of 9/11, the 2005 London bombings and the global
economic crisis, and also after some distancing from the initial market-
ing of the book and the writer, closer readings of the text have provided
more nuanced interpretations of the book’s politics. These acknowl-
edge Smith’s ambiguous use of irony and her critique of what she labels
‘Happy Multicultural Land’ (McLeod, 2005; Jakubiak, 2008), and assign
greater complexity to her urban representations, even while conceding
that the light comic tone sits uncomfortably with the genuine fears that
appeared in the new millennium.
White Teeth remains the most densely metaphorical of Zadie Smith’s
texts, although critical comment has focused primarily on the extended
metaphor of its title. Paradoxically, while one of the recurrent criticisms
of the novel, at times endorsed by the author herself, has been the
alleged ‘disembodiedness’ of its characters (authorial-narratorial dis-
tance enhanced by comic tone), the crucial metaphors in the text use
the body as their source, as anticipated in the title. Specific corporeal
metaphors are deployed to different effects, their forms ranging from
the idiomatic expression, the ‘dead’ or ‘linguistic’ metaphor, to the crea-
tive, literary use that produces more ambivalent meaning and requires
active and complex decoding. This range is in itself metaphorical of the
170
White Teeth’s Embodied Metaphors 171
conceptualization of issues engaged with in the text, and is a crucial

literary instrument in characterization and in the discussion of multi-
ethnic London, its transcultural living, diasporas and hybridity. Smith’s
multiple and ambivalent use of body metaphors, and specifically that
of blood, relates to the text’s critique of accepted views on multicultur-
alism, and this metaphoric strategy, in a cognitive understanding of
metaphor and its effects on perception, may serve to alter or reorganize
our conceptualization of multicultural London. By tracing White Teeth’s
use of the metaphor of blood and its contemporary avatar, the meta-
phor of genes, we may also trace the book’s ambivalent engagement
with London’s multicultural world at one particular historical point,
the perceived beginning of a new millennium.
2 Blood
In White Teeth, the metaphor of blood is second only to the structural

metaphor of the title, and is employed with higher frequency, although
its reference does not extend so directly to all main characters or issues
in the novel. As is the case with all corporeal metaphors, its source
(blood) is readily available to all readers, who themselves inhabit a
human body, but the commonly held knowledge regarding blood and
its functions has historically been more slippery than is the case with
more obviously functional body parts. While sharing the abstraction of
its cultural meanings with the heart and the brain, it has borne huge
significance in Western cultures: aside from specific Christian asso-
ciations (with the blood of Christ, martyrdom, communion, among
others – not so central to White Teeth, although not entirely absent),
metaphors of blood are generally associated with the target domains of
death (violence, aggression), life (vitality, passion) and kinship (hered-
ity, ancestry, reproduction, origin). In this latter guise, they have been
particularly linked to ‘race’, gender, difference and nation. A number of
recent linguistic studies have mapped the prevalence or hidden use of
the blood metaphor in twentieth-century texts (Charteris-Black, 2001;
Linke, 1999; Musolff, 2007; Simó, n.d.; Quiroga, 2007), Nazi propaganda,
European formulations of nationhood or popular scientific beliefs.
The evolution of the metaphoricity of blood and genes in scien-
tific literature throughout the twentieth Century was discussed very
pertinently in Donna Haraway’s Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.
FemaleMan©_ Meets_Oncomouse™ (1997), a wide-ranging and creative
analysis of the cultural uses of biology and genetics in the past cen-
tury, which is also a surprisingly under-analysed intertextual referent
172 Isabel Carrera Suárez
for White Teeth. Dominic Head, who observes ‘the apparent extended
reference to Donna Haraway in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’ (Head, 2002:
4), and Fred Botting (2005) are among the few who have commented
on this crucial source text in relation to the novel. Modest_Witness was
published in 1997, the year in which Smith graduated from Cambridge
and received an advance contract for her first novel. By then Haraway,
whose doctoral thesis had focused on scientific metaphors, was well
established and widely read as a philosopher of science and an innova-
tive voice in feminist theory, so it is more than likely that Smith may
have come across her work directly or indirectly. Modest_Witness relates
feminism and technoscience through the figurations of FemaleMan©
and Oncomouse™, the former taking its copyrighted reference from
Joanna Russ’s novel The Female Man (1975), the second being the first
patented animal (by DuPont) created for research into breast can-
cer. In Haraway’s critique of the political economy of science, which
acknowledges reproductive and kinship politics as crucial for social
structures and for freedom, the biological essentialism of blood and
genes is rejected in favour of a search for anti-essentialist categories
based on affinity, a search aided by technoscience. Mutations such
as FemaleMan© and Oncomouse™ are seen as potentially liberatory,
as opposed to more dubious creations of god-like scientists. In White
Teeth, the transgenic mouse is one of the key actors, appearing with
the slightly modified name of Futuremouse; FemaleMan© may argu-
ably be a subtext of characterization and referred to indirectly in the
Fukuyama-inspired concept of ‘the last man’, which features in the title
to Chapter 18 of the novel.
Haraway’s text discusses genetic engineering and reproduction at
length, and particularly in relation to difference and ‘race’. One of
the most suggestive sections, included in Chapter 6 (tellingly entitled
‘Race. Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture: It’s All in the Family.
Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States’)
is the extended table (6.1) which takes us through the cultural history
of biology in the twentieth century. Eleven pages in length, it charts
‘biological kinship categories [ ... ] critical in racial discourse in the US
professional middle classes’ (218), and maps the passage from the con-
cept of race (1900–1930s) to that of population (1940–1970s) and finally
to genome (1975–1990s); it also compiles the shifts in patterns of power
and authority, the main changes in practices, ideas and institutions
that are associated with this shift. Although in keeping with Haraway’s
situated, historicized method, the context being that of ‘U.S. views of
the world linked to elite scientific culture’, the categories exceed this
context, and can be seen to record the historical transformations that

‘reshaped biological discourse about human unity and diversity’ (p.
230) in a more global Western sphere. The author invites readers to
engage with the ‘related discontinuities’ (p. 218) of this mapping (whose
items are not linked by cause and effect, but not by simply random asso-
ciations either), to engage through this hypertext in scientific culture
on ‘the charged topics of race, sex and nature’, and finally to connect
meaningful sections and narrate their own stories.
While it cannot be inferred that Smith began from this chart or this
book to create her own narrative line in White Teeth, the strong textual
evidence of familiarity with its concepts, wording and icons prompts a
productive intertextual reading of the novel’s historicized metaphors
of blood and genes. Two full pages of Haraway’s chart are dedicated to
the ‘symbolic and technical status of blood’ (pp. 222–3) in the periods
concerned. They describe the move from the direct equation ‘blood =
kinship = race/family/culture’ (1900–1930s) to the breaking of the
gene/blood and culture tie, so politically charged after World War II
(1940–1970s), and finally to the recent consideration of blood as ‘merely
a tissue for getting easy DNA samples’ (1975–1990s). Associated trans-
formations in these three periods occur in crucial areas such as the
perception and treatment of diseases (‘bad blood’ and syphilis in the
first, hemoglobinopathies and sickle-cell in the second, communica-
tion diseases and AIDS in the third) or family practices and politics
(miscegenation as biological pathology / approved intermarriage / New
Reproductive Technologies and the destabilizing of heterosexuality).
The table lists legal and political documents, popular images, scientific
developments, models and practices, with particular emphasis on dis-
courses related to human unity/diversity and genetic developments. A
number of these items are directly relevant to White Teeth’s subject mat-
ter and metaphoricity.
While the obsession with blood and its overdetermined signifi-
cance is associated mainly with one particular character, Samad
Iqbal, White Teeth makes liberal use of the trope of blood. The novel
in fact opens with a scene of ‘almost death’, in which middle-aged
Archie is saved from his suicide attempt by Mo Hussein-Ishmael, a
halal butcher who not only is ‘in the business of bleeding’ (draining
blood from chickens, cow, sheep) but has just performed his ‘daily
massacre’ of pigeons, killing six birds in one strike with a ‘bloodied
cleaver’, an act described as an immigrant adaptation of cricket (p. 5).
This unusually coded metaphor is reinforced by the bloodied palms of
Mo’s son, busy in the sacrifice of poultry, and Mo’s angry warning to
Archie: ‘If you’re going to die around here [ ... ] you’ve got to be thor-
oughly bled first’ (p. 7), all of which add density to the semantic field
of blood in the passage. Moreover, Mo kills the pigeons because, in
his words, ‘you have to get to the root of the problem: not the excre-
tions but the pigeon itself’ (p. 5). Mo is a minor character, but he will
reappear in the final episode of the novel, having joined the Muslim
fundamentalist group KEVIN persuaded by the repeated violence
that he himself has suffered at the hands of white ‘youths’. Archie’s
unlikely saviour is thus politicized by violence into fundamentalism
while Archie himself, also an unlikely saviour of young Clara and
(twice) of the scientist and Nazi collaborator Dr Perret, evades such
pressures as an ‘ordinary’ white citizen. While this early scene may
seem merely comic in effect, there are a number of elements which
cannot be random in the context of White Teeth’s themes: Mo’s refer-
ence to the root of the problem, a metaphor he later employs in his
enquiry about the origin of white violence; the justification of his
‘daily massacre’ as the need to eliminate ‘vermin’ from the city, with
its echoes of the dehumanizing metaphors used in the Holocaust,
for example, diseases infecting the human body or lower animals in
the great chain of being (Musolff, 2007; Gilroy, 2000a). The descrip-
tion is an early example of the novel’s reiterated use of uncomfortable
humour in violence-related episodes: other such passages include the
depiction of the continued racist violence that Mo suffers in his shop,
accompanied with cartoonish sounds for his physical pain, which do
not, however, mitigate the brutality. 2
Elsewhere, political metaphors of blood and violence are almost casu-
ally weaved into the text, as in the early quotation of the infamous
Rivers of Blood speech3 delivered by Enoch Powell in 1968, also recalled
in disturbing humorous tones, through Alsana’s dismissal of ‘madman
E-knock someoneoranother’ and his ‘silly-billy nonsense’ (pp. 62–3),
even though it has forced her family into hiding. These rivers of blood
had already appeared in their biblical context, and obviously with a
different apocalyptic meaning, in Hortense’s long awaited end of the
world as predicted by Jehova’s Witnesses (p. 32); and the expression
reappears with yet a different reading, in the red tears shed by Nazi
collaborator Dr Perret (p. 119), whose diabetic retinopathy makes him
‘excrete blood’ (p. 116) in an involuntary and corporealized metaphor
whereby his body appears to betray him by exuding the blood of his
crimes. These tears of blood will betray him again in the final scene,
alerting both Archie and Samad to the concealed identity of Marcus’s
mentor in the FutureMouse genetic experiment.
Samad Iqbal, a ‘first generation’ Bangladeshi migrant to Britain, is

the character who buys into the traditional metaphorical mappings of
blood, partly conditioned by a personal and colonial history of bat-
tle and frustrated social expectations. His role in World War II was
thwarted by a wounded hand, now ‘dead in every way bar the blood’
(p. 12), which relegated him to sharing a cramped tank with other ‘war
rejects’, the young Englishman Archie among them. Archie observes
Samad’s patriotic wish to ‘revenge the killing of men who would not
have acknowledged him in a civilian street’ (p. 95), an attitude which
sums up his future displacement in London, and makes the Englishman
feel ‘cold-blooded’ by comparison. This usually negative idiomatic
expression, however, acquires a positive value by contrast with its appli-
cation to Samad, who shortly after, in the more usual meaning of the
metaphor, considers killing the doctor ‘in cold blood’ (p. 116).4 Such
shifts in the meaning of identical metaphorical expressions are part of
the contrastive characterizations of a number of White Teeth’s actors.
Unable to prove that ‘the Muslim men of Bengal can fight like any Sikh
[ ... ] and are the best educated and those with the good blood [ ... ] truly
Officer Material’ (p. 88), Samad bullies his English fellow-soldier Archie
into the unnecessary killing of a French scientist and Nazi collaborator
arguing that they need ‘blood on [their] hands [ ... ] as an atonement’
(p. 118). Samad, for whom ‘nothing was closer or meant more to him
than his blood’ (p. 98) had already confided that he would marry into
a family of ‘extremely good blood’ (p. 97), and was descended from a
heroic great-grandfather who began the Indian Mutiny: a ‘real, blood
grandfather’, ‘a bit of history in your blood’ (p. 99) in Archie’s apprecia-
tive idiomatic translations. This heroic ancestor is the star of his recur-
ring narrative of origins, his source of pride against the demeaning life
as waiter in London which prompts him, in a moment of desperation,
to write his name in blood (dripping from a restaurant wound) on a
bench by the wall in the all-imperial Trafalgar Square.
Samad’s investment in blood, and the entangled metaphorical map-
pings of blood as war/nation/history and as kinship/genealogy plague
his life actions. He leans on genealogy because ‘when a man has noth-
ing but his blood to commend him, each drop matters terribly’ (p. 255)
and searches for resemblance (nose, features, character) in the counte-
nance of the hero ancestor Mangal Pande, whose portrait he parades in
his social space, O’Connell’s Pool House. Living in the past and preach-
ing the past, he is mocked by family and acquaintances, but finally per-
versely succeeds in seeing his righteous anger reflected in his rebel son,
Millat. For despite his apparently deterministic faith in blood, Samad
takes the nurture side of the debate in sending one of the twins, Magid,
‘back home’ to acquire appropriate values, only to find him turned into
an Englishman; meanwhile the London twin, finding himself faceless
and excluded from representation in Britain,5 follows in the wake of
his father’s Muslim faith, albeit in a modified, second-generation and
situated, activist version. As Millat marches towards the final denoue-
ment scene, with ‘an imperative secreted in the genes’ and a gun in his
pocket, he is finally ‘a Pandy deep down. And there’s mutiny in his blood’
(emphasis added, p. 526). The linguistic conflation of genes and blood
inscribes and underlines the determined heritage of Samad’s mutiny/
violence/masculinity.
Ironically a former student of biology, Samad holds an essential-
ist notion of blood derived from its biological equation with heredity
and ‘race’, corresponding to the first period of the twentieth Century
described in Haraway’s chart. This residue of traditional discourses of
masculinity and purity, so closely allied to nation and colonialism, is
destabilized more fundamentally by other characters. Although part of
the same generation, his war friend Archie shares little of his investment
in blood. As a working-class man whose name (Jones) only indicates that
he comes ‘of good honest English stock’ (p. 99), he makes no attempt
to join the ranks of warring, colonial Englishmen, the domain of his
upper-class war captain, who descends from a line of men ‘insatiable in
their desire to see Dickinson-Smith blood spilled on foreign soil’ (p. 90),
significantly by ‘the Hun, the Wogs, the Chinks, the Kaffirs, the Frogs,
the Scots, the Spics, the Zulus, the Indians (South, East and Red)’ (p. 89),
a genealogy only broken by this Dickinson-Smith through his (histori-
cally premature) departure from heteronormativity, which has demoted
him to leader of war rejects. In contrast to Samad and Dickinson-Smith,
Archie accepts his apparently demeaning war role of bridge building as
appropriate enough, ‘creating routes where routes had been destroyed’
(p. 86). His own take on blood and roots/routes is explored in the open-
ing of Chapter 5, ‘The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad
Miah Iqbal’, which begins with the suggestion of an ‘unflinching and
honest stare’ at roots: ‘What do you want, blood? Most probably more
than blood is required’ (p. 83; original emphasis). It is Archie’s literal
‘unflinching and honest’ (though disconcerting) staring at Samad that
eventually erodes the latter’s resistance, bridges distances and initiates
the friendship between the two men, arguably the strongest in the
novel although devoid of ‘blood’ connections. And (again in contrast to
Samad) it is his disregard for blood and his colour blindness that makes
marriage to Jamaican Clara possible, to his fellow-workers’ amazement:
‘always talking to Pakistanis and Caribbeans like he didn’t even notice

and now he’d gone and married one and hadn’t even thought it worth
mentioning what colour she was’ (p. 69). As Taryn Beukema (2008) has
observed, Archie is a ‘failed’ masculine identity (a comic FemaleMan),
particularly in terms of the culture of male heroes, exacerbated in times
of war. In terms of fixed identities, his alliances defy convention, cross
the borders of ‘colour’ candidly (though often blindly unaware of the
consequences),6 and are the generating power of most relationships
described in the book.
Smith’s treatment of Archie suggests, then, that ‘more than blood is
required’ to explain the past and the present, to define subjectivities
and historical connections; accordingly, alternatives to blood relations
play a significant role in the novel. In O’Connell’s Pool House, men
like Archie and Samad seek ‘a different kind of family. Unlike blood
relations, it is necessary [ ... ] to earn one’s position in the community’
(p. 183); also, in this haven of masculinity, ‘real flesh and blood [ ... ]
women’ do not enter. Similarly, for the younger characters school acts
as a place of encounter, although inherited tensions are also staged.
Unresolved interactions from the adult world push teenagers into
fixed identities: Millat looks for ‘godfathers, pacinodeniros’ or ‘broth-
ers’ in the leaders of Muslim groups (brothers Hifan and Tyrone, sister
Aeyisha); Irie and Magid look for mentoring in the idealized, middle-
class Marcus; Joshua takes refuge from the very family Marcus presides
in the animal rights group FATE. These chosen relations are not con-
flict-free, and in fact often compensate emotional needs and constitute
surrogate families rather than disrupt the established social structure.
Yet friendships cement the plot of the novel and two crucial pairs,
Archie and Samad, and Irie and Millat, often describe themselves as
going ‘way back’, to justify their reciprocal fidelity, a kinship beyond
blood ties. The struggle persists, however, to counteract the sense that
no social space is free of past or present traces of blood. When the
estranged twins search for a neutral location to meet, the quest is next
to impossible, no neutral places are to be found: ‘Chances are slim
[ ... ] race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more Blood. And
more’ (p. 457). Even the final scientific presentation of FutureMouse
meets a similar problem in choosing its stage: ‘Spaces are too crowded
and bloody’ (p. 518).
As women’s positioning within the classic blood metaphor tends to
be precarious, usually as carriers of ‘pure’ or ‘polluted’ blood, as ves-
sels for the ‘blood of the nation,’ it is hardly surprising that the female
characters of the novel rarely associate themselves voluntarily with the
trope. The references are scarce compared to those related to men. In

one very different idiomatic metaphor, Alsana speaks of her efforts to
educate Millat as ‘sweating blood’; the indefatigable Joyce is described
parodically as descended from ‘bloody-minded women’ who ventured
into the swamps of Africa, a Hollywood fantasy genealogy; only Clara
approaches the term in its old biological meaning, but subverts the
colonial order of the conventional tree metaphor by trying to erase a
trace of ‘bad blood’ from her family line: that of a white Englishman.
It is left to second- generation Irie, the cross-boundary daughter of
Archie Jones, untraced ‘chaff’, and Clara Bowden, of the erratic fam-
ily tree, to meditate on genealogy from a different perspective, which
she can only achieve after overcoming the external readings imposed
on her body (‘blacky-white,’ overweight, big teeth, black hair). Her
period of desiring ‘pure Englishness’ or a ‘sneaking into England’
through the apparently English Chalfens and their long ancestry fails
to identify the Chalfen family’s own troubled history, marked by a
rejection of Jewishness. Irie’s Bowden roots will finally be a crucial
part of the route to her self-designation, when she follows her female
genealogy and puts all the women ‘back inside each other like Russian
dolls, Irie back into Clara, Clara back into Hortense, Hortense back
into Ambrosia’ (p. 256), the ancestor whose name means the giver of
life. This retracing of carriers, ‘vessels’ of life, through a different and
original metaphor, describes a matrilineal descent in which ‘blood’ is
not a crucial term.
The abundant presence of the blood metaphor in White Teeth (rein-
forced by the frequency of the very British expletive ‘bloody’), is there-
fore mostly constructed as a ‘dead metaphor,’ as a mapping of the
traditional, obsolete conceptualizations that Donna Haraway charted
for that first period of the twentieth century (1900–1930s), a reduc-
tionist equation of blood=kinship=race/family/culture, presented in
the novel as backward-looking and unproductive. As Paul Gilroy has
observed, fixed identities linked to racializing discourses are ‘structures
of feeling and doing [ ... ] that produce “races” ’ through the agency of
violence and blood itself (Gilroy, 2000a: 301). This production of ‘races’
where there are none is most obvious in the anonymous ‘white youths’
who attack Mo, and in Millat and in the minor characters who, like Mo
himself, join the fundamentalist group KEVIN through the experience
of violence or invisibility. Gilroy also observes, like Haraway, that the
‘poetics of blood’ has been ‘recast contemporarily in terms of genes and
information’ (p. 300).
3 Genes
In her study of fertility technology in the United States, Seline Szupinski

Quiroga corroborates this recasting of artificially created categories in
scientific practices. Analysing the use of reproductive technologies, she
finds that the ideology of genetic essentialism leads to the reproduction
of white kinship patterns, and that ‘Twenty-first-century hereditarian-
ism substitutes the idea of blood for genes: now, genes rather than blood
will tell. [ ... ] In this update of nineteenth-century theories of racial
inheritance, genes have replaced blood but underlying assumptions of
racial purity remain’ (Quiroga, 2007: 146). This new ‘total body’ meta-
phor is linked in White Teeth to the time of the present, and is far more
alluring to the second-generation characters, as is evident in Magid
and Irie, both dazzled by Marcus’s experiments. It is ironical yet fitting
that the shift from blood to genetic concepts (DNA mapping, genetic
engineering) totally escapes the past-oriented Samad, who, on receiv-
ing indirect praise from his sons’ teacher, Poppy, complicitly alluding
to the ‘good genes’ of the twins, can only ask himself ‘What did she
mean good genes?’ (p. 135). In contrast, Joyce Chalfen, married to the
forward-looking Marcus, conductor of the FutureMouse experiment,
is fully persuaded that her husband has ‘good genes’, that brains are
genetic, and like her husband (though using different means, such as
‘cross-pollination’) believes in the ‘perfectibility of all life’. This ‘moder-
nity’ will be partly responsible for the attraction experienced by Irie
and Magid, both unused to parents who live in the present.
While the linguistic recurrence of genes in the book does not parallel
that of blood (perhaps in part because it is not such an established lin-
guistic metaphor) a number of characters do discuss genes in folk terms.
Archie, always accepting of what comes his way, is naïvely fascinated
that his yet unborn daughter might have blue eyes (‘couldn’t imagine
any piece of him slugging it out in the gene pool with a piece of Clara
and winning’, p. 67); teenage Irie will be ‘intent on fighting genes’ (p.
273) by straightening her hair and losing weight; and in a passage that
dismisses nationalist fears of ‘infection, penetration, miscegenation’ as
‘peanuts’ compared with the immigrant’s fears of disappearance, we are
told of Hortense’s disapproval of Clara’s marriage into the wrong (white)
genes, and of Alsana’s genetic nightmares about her son Millat,
(genetically BB; where B stands for Bengali-ness) marrying someone

called Sarah (aa, where ‘a’ stands for Aryan), resulting in a child called
Michael (Ba), who in turn marries someone called Lucy (aa) leaving
Alsana with a legacy of unrecognizable grandchildren (Aaaaaaa!),
their Bengali-ness thoroughly diluted, genotype hidden by pheno-
type. (p. 327)
Irie and Millat also imagine their mixed children should they procreate
together, and discuss whether the madness of their respective families
is genetic (p. 229). But it is the Chalfens who can be said to embody
the modern debates of nature and nurture, with Marcus relentlessly
advancing his genetically modified FutureMouse, whose ostensible aim
is to aid in curing cancer, but the ulterior motive for which is to ‘elimi-
nate random’; while his wife, a professional gardener and writer, applies
the plant metaphor of growing and nurturing to human beings just
as relentlessly. The apparently perfect, middle-class Chalfen home is
the space where the three second-generation characters, Samad’s twin
sons and Irie, eventually converge, and where experiments are carried
out on more than the FutureMouse. Joyce persistently tries to nurture
Millat out of his rebelliousness, Marcus mentors Irie, although, true to
the scientific male-line descent tradition, soon relegates her in favour of
Magid. And frequent discussions are held on the nature of genetics: the
difference between the twins (Magid and Millat, one ‘good’, one ‘bad’)
and genetic engineering (cloning is only ‘delayed twinning’), among
the recurrent subjects.
Marcus’s view of science (the Chalfen way, handed down by genera-
tions) is that of absolute truths and of culture-free, universal knowledge.
Suggestions that ‘truth is a function of language, or that history is inter-
pretive and science metaphorical’ (p. 312), we are told, would be met
with derision. ‘Truth was truth to a Chalfen. And Genius was genius.
Marcus created beings’ (p. 312).7 In the same vein in which deterministic
theories of race were, after Nazism, disowned as ‘bad science’ by the dis-
cipline that created them, biology (Haraway, 1997: 217), Marcus treats
diseases as ‘bad logic’ on the part of the genome, which he has the power
to amend by creating modified beings. While he denies accusations of
genetic determinism and eugenics (most explicitly in conversation with
a young student of politics, pp. 417–19), his perspective on science and
life and his compulsive desire to eliminate randomness seem to encour-
age the genetic essentialism that ‘reduces the self to a molecular entity,
equating human beings, in all their social, historical and moral com-
plexities, with their genes’ (Nelkin and Lindee, 1995: 2; qtd in Haraway,
1997: 148). Ironically, as Haraway pointed out, DNA science is based
on the spatial metaphor of mapping, with genetic engineering further
drawing on the metaphor of banking. Marcus, blind to the metaphoric-

ity of science, and going beyond mapping into the creation of beings,
nevertheless depends on metaphor for the ethical justification of his
work: speaking to a young Asian reader of his book, he is dejected by her
inability (the general public’s inability) to ‘think of the animal as a site,
a biological site for experimentation into heredity, into disease, into
mortality. The mouseness of the mouse seemed inescapable’ (p. 419).
This ‘inescapability of the mouse,’ its corporeal reality, will be crucial
to the end of the novel, and has a powerful symbolic – if not fully meta-
phoric – function. It joins the body tropes of the novel, presided by that
of (white) teeth, the broad extended metaphor for the variety and indi-
viduality of human beings. While the also embodied metaphor of the
twins, an ambivalent source for irresolvable sameness and difference, is
used throughout the book to destabilize deterministic certainties (even
Marcus is fascinated by the same genetic map producing such different
human beings), it is the bodies of Irie and FutureMouse who finally
defy most directly the power of technologies and cultures, as they both
materialize their escape. When Irie decides to have sexual intercourse
in succession with identical twins Millat and Magid, she conceives a
child whose father cannot be determined, and therefore escapes the
control of the all-powerful DNA tests, breaking the patriarchal man-
date of paternity: ‘Irie’s child can never be mapped or spoken of with
any certainty’ (p. 527). Equally, the climactic escape of the genetically
engineered mouse from its display box defies Marcus’s god-like control,
and confirms Irie and Archie’s insight into its ‘cunning’ face. ‘Quite
a plain mouse, brown, and not with any other mice, but [ ... ] very
active’ (p. 521), as Archie observes, this ‘cunning-looking little blinder’
seems to appeal to the solidarity of Irie and her father, who recognize
its individuality, its corporeal ‘mouseness’ and its parallels with Irie:
brown, alone and alert. Archie’s closing line to the book ‘Go on my son!’
(p. 542; original emphasis) finds an added meaning in this reading. This
idiomatic expression of paternal encouragement, comic but polysemic,
brings Archie’s everyday survival philosophy to the fore, presenting
him as a quiet liberating agent (of Irie/FutureMouse), whose alternative
masculinity and unheroic, unenlightened compassion may bring ech-
oes of the transgendered FemaleMan.
In the end, it can be argued that it is Irie and Archie who have most
clearly ‘become’ themselves, have emerged more autonomous from the
routes and metaphors encountered in their lives. The final scene of
the book, in true comic tradition, brings all the actors together for the
spectacular launch of Marcus’s FutureMouse. Most arrive armed with
their truth-seeking certainties, whether religious (Hortense’s Jehova’s

Witnesses, Samad’s Muslim faith), political (Millat’s KEVIN brothers,
Joshua’s environmentalist FATE) or scientific (Marcus and Magid’s
genetic engineering). In this space where outlandish plots of violence
are about to converge, only a chosen few sit questioning fundamental
truths: Joshua Chalfen, Marcus’s estranged son, doubts the motives of
his leaders in FATE; Irie, pregnant with her unmappable child, looks to a
future where roots will be irrelevant; and Archie, whose awe of ‘Science’
does not preclude him from instinctive intervention, chooses to save,
for a second time, the genetic killer Dr Perret, opting for the poetics
of life over death, and enabling the escape of the ‘small brown rebel
mouse’ (p. 451), whom he silently cheers into freedom.
4 Conclusion
There is an extended metaphor of life and death in the sum of tropes

that characters in White Teeth live by, and specifically in metaphors
of blood and genes. The traditional target domains of blood by which
Samad lives are historically moribund, have been refuted by science,
denied by history and by contemporary culture and politics, but can
be brought back to life by exclusion and violence, as Paul Gilroy argues
and White Teeth portrays. Such theoretically deceased metaphors can
also be reborn in a contemporary avatar, such as the metaphor of genes,
whose deterministic interpretations adopt the guise of scientific truth.
Marcus Chalfen, in his distancing from the ‘mouseness’ of the mouse,
his attachment of value to genes per se, approaches what Donna Haraway
(pp. 143 ff) describes as ‘gene fetishism’, and demonstrates a blindness
to corporeality which is reflected in his blindness to his children and
his protégés’ true lives.
The use of the blood metaphor in White Teeth is thus part of a range
of bodily metaphors which share the narrative space of the novel and
interact contrapuntally with each other. While the widely analysed
title metaphor is writerly, literary, an example of an undercoded body
source intelligently extended to provoke conscious decodings of mean-
ing, the overdetermined metaphor of blood, traditionally and power-
fully encoded, is shown in its moribund or resuscitated subsistence,
while its validity is questioned explicitly and implicitly in the narrative.
In line with this logic, the persistent engagement of characters with a
deadly or dead metaphor such as blood signals the survival of a racial-
ized world, disowned by science and multicultural politics, but alive
in popular beliefs and reconfigured in the scientific world. London’s
utopian conviviality is marred by the survival and reinforcement of

these ‘races’ and discrete identities whose boundaries are policed by
violence, and the pervasive textual presence of the metaphor of blood
underlines such structures.
Meanwhile, the embodied, writerly metaphor of teeth enables a dif-
ferent approach to looking at roots/routes: Irie, finally and significantly
turned a dentist, pursues her Jamaican origins through her matrilineal
past (Hortense) without acceptance of previous generations’ fundamen-
talisms, and refusing, for her daughter, the mandates of genetic tax-
onomy and knowledge. Her unassuming father, the king of idiomatic
clichés, seems able to choose the appropriate ones to live by, and impor-
tantly, to get on with it and to live and let live. In his quiet way a modest
witness to the century, by breaking with the mandates of masculine and
genetic metaphors he goes with his daughter (and with Judith Butler
and Paul Gilroy) beyond gender and beyond the colour line. His candid
colour blindness, while not providing a solution to structural differ-
ences, allows those everyday negotiations of hybridity that Ien Ang has
described as a ‘crucial, life-sustaining tactic of everyday survival and
practice in a world overwhelmingly dominated by large-scale historical
forces whose effects are beyond the control of those affected by them
[ ... ] it is widely practised by the people / masses – against the grain
of imposed fixed identities’ (Ang, 2001: 73–74). All characters, in their
own generational and individual ways, are engaged in such negotia-
tions in White Teeth, and it is perhaps Irie, who starts from the most
disadvantaged position, who negotiates most effectively against the
grain of her own hybrid identity. Despite the significance of dates in the
book, one crucial year hardly discussed by critics is that of Irie’s (and
Smith’s) birth, 1975, proclaimed International Women’s Year by the
United Nations. In the playful ‘endgame’ of the novel, on the threshold
of the new millennium, on 31 December 1999, O’Connell’s Pool House
finally opens its doors to women, so Alsana and Clara can trespass and
take part in a blackjack game.
Seen from the perspective of its metaphoric strategies, the multi-
cultural world presented by White Teeth is more troubled than the
book’s witty tone and classic comedy ending may have suggested to
pre-9/11 readers. Much of the characterization responds to the sur-
vival tactics of hybridity defined by Ien Ang, that everyday negotia-
tion of identities which are shown to be contingent and shifting, but
also embodied and material. This is not the equivalent of an idealized
multicultural/hybrid conviviality, which would erase the bloody deal-
ings of racialized existence in London, here foregrounded by the text’s
blood metaphors. While the novel does assign special value to border
crossings and, particularly in second-generation characters, depicts a
degree of transcultural living, a close reading of tropes such as that of
blood brings out a more reticent subtext. In fact, despite its clear inter-
textual indebtedness to Donna Haraway’s Modest_Witness, White Teeth
does not seem to share Haraway’s views of the liberating possibilities
of technoscience (transcending imposed interpretations of ‘nature’)
but rather exposes its potential for the reproduction of sameness and
the policing of randomness/difference. Irie’s unmapped ancestry and
her electedly unmappable offspring challenge rules of cultural filia-
tion and kinship; her foregrounding by the text is anti-essentialist,
though not uncomplicatedly ‘liberal’. Much as Irie may hope for a
time ‘when roots don’t matter’ (p. 526), the present, stubbornly mate-
rial, prompts her to seek her ‘origins’. As Laila Amine (2007) has
observed, White Teeth deals with a London peopled by the diasporas
which still converge in the history of British colonization, subjects
whose migrancies relate to its (revisited) history, not to the global
migrancy of transnational jobs, illegal border crossings and under-
ground living (as portrayed in Stephen Frear’s film Dirty Pretty Things).
The prevalence of the blood metaphor in its relation to heritage and
nation reinforces readings of the novel which see it as a gesture of
self-definition in national terms, a redrawing of London as capital of
a nation with a warily accepted multicultural identity. The ambiguous
message conveyed by the extended usage of blood metaphors in White
Teeth shows the distance between the theory and the practices of this
new nation, even at the innocent, optimistic moment of the dawn of
the new millennium.
Notes
1. The extent of published critical work and reviewing of White Teeth does not
allow a detailed description here. For a wide-ranging, recent summary, see
Tew (2010); for a revision of early reception Jakubiak (2008).
2. In the passage where we learn of Mo’s ‘conversion’ to KEVIN through vio-
lence, (and significantly through violence that draws blood) we read that
he ‘had been knifed a total of five times (Ah) lost the tips of three fingers
(Eeeesh), had both legs and arms broken (Oaooow), his feet set on fire (jiii),
his teeth kicked out (ka-toof ) and an air-gun bullet (ping) embedded in his
thankfully fleshy posterior. Boof” (p. 472). Jakubiak relates these sounds to
computer games, cartoons or sitcoms, arguing that their use serves the pur-
pose of making the characters and events part of an unreal, virtual world
that elicits no sympathy (2000: 207–8).
3. This iconic speech also reinforces the ‘millenium’ theme of the book, as it
contains a cataclysmic (and never materialized) prediction of the number of
immigrants to enter the UK by the year 2000.
4. Simó notes that the English language seems to code this expression in nega-
tive terms, while Hungarian does not.
5. In one of the often-quoted passages of White Teeth, Millat’s reasons for burn-
ing The Satanic Verses (unread) are explained: ‘He knew that he, Millat, was a
Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual
identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state;
or gave all jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or shop owner or
curry shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back
to his country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshipped
elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like
Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been
murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in this
country until the week before last [ ... ].’
6. The theme of colour blindness is treated more symbolically and more criti-
cally in Smith’s later story ‘Hanwell in Hell’, where a literally colour-blind
man is pathetically unaware of the inadequate choice of paint for a room he
hopes will see the return of his estranged family. For a discussion of this story
in relation to Smith’s work, see Stuckey (2008).
7. In a later passage, there is also a reference to Donna Haraway’s argument that
science today is not so far from science fiction: ‘As far as Marcus could see,
science and science fiction were like ships in the night, passing each other in
the fog’ (p. 417).
10
Orpheus in the Alpujarras:
Metaphors of Arrival in Chris
Stewart’s Driving Over Lemons
Jonathan P. A. Sell
1 Fluid mechanics
At some point in their narratives of migration, diasporic subjects will

cross some physical Rubicon, some natural or political boundary mark-
ing off or separating one territory from another. Sooner or later they
will also traverse some psychological Rubicon as their hitherto mark-
edly monocultural identity transforms into a transcultural one (‘a being
in becoming’ [M. Parry, 2003: 102]. Original emphasis), then perhaps a
bicultural or culturally hybrid one and even, though far less frequently
(if at all) into a fully fledged cultural convert, an originally alien subject
turned well and truly native. It is this second Rubicon which interests
me here. The migrant’s arrival in the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, 1992: 6) also
marks his or her entry into an uncertain and ambivalent psychological
hinterland where in the public sphere – at the level of interpersonal rela-
tions and administrative transactions – his or her deracinated identity
is all at once up in the air, bandied around like a shuttlecock between
competing versions of self-image and counter-image, while privately,
with more or less resistance, reluctance or relief, the migrant subject’s
self gradually adapts to the new land or community through a proc-
ess of ‘cultural mimesis’ (Whitehead, 1997: 38) or doing in Rome as
the Romans.1 According to Robert J. C. Young, this ‘uncertain crossing
and invasion of identities’ – be it in terms of class, gender, culture or
race – could be claimed as ‘the dominant motif of much English fiction’
(1995: 2–3. Original emphasis). At this second Rubicon, or in this ‘con-
tact zone’, the migrant subject’s ‘idioculture’, to adopt Derek Attridge’s
(2004: 21) useful term,2 comes into confrontation with those of each of
the natives; it is the mutual paring down of disparities between those
‘idiocultures’ that smooth the way to co-adaptation and an extension
186
Orpheus in the Alpujarras 187
of community thanks to what anthropologists call ‘the symbiotic

nature of cultural construction and [its] two way mutualistic characters’
(Whitehead, 1997: 38. Original emphasis).
How the crossing of that second Rubicon is transcribed in what Caryl
Phillips terms ‘arrival narratives’ is what I find fascinating and have
analysed elsewhere in connection with the transcultural subject’s prac-
tice of alluding to the cultural frameworks of the new land (e.g. J. P.
A. Sell, 2011). Yet it is an aspect of what Young calls ‘the mechanics of
the intricate process of cultural contact, intrusion, fusion and disjunc-
tion’ (1995: 5) which, despite Young’s own remarks a decade and a half
ago, is still relatively neglected, at least as far as its rhetorical engineer-
ing in the construction of narratives of identity is concerned. In order
to enhance knowledge of that mechanics, the focus of the preceding
chapters has been firmly set on the role of metaphor in fictional tran-
scriptions of diasporic subjectivity. In contrast, this essay will largely be
occupied with fluid mechanics or, more precisely, an analysis of aquatic
or riverine metaphors of identity in arrival narratives – the metaphorics,
that is, of taking the culture plunge.
Unlike the other chapters too, the work considered here is not a piece
of fiction, but a crafted, autobiographical narrative, Chris Stewart’s
highly successful Driving Over Lemons (1999).3 In this case the diasporic
subject is part of the growing phenomenon of unforced, voluntary
intra-European migration. Whether in fact Stewart may legitimately
be considered a diasporic subject is a moot point, and will depend on
one’s preferred formulation of the concept: certainly, Stewart in Spain
experiences a sense of cultural separateness, but he does not land up
there on account of any sort of originary victimhood, does not harbour
any dreams of a utopian return, and is not – as an individual subject –
dispersed to different new countries.4 Nonetheless, a ‘central trope’ of
postcolonial literary studies is migrancy (A. Smith, 2004: 244), a phe-
nomenon within which Stewart has been situated, as well as other
bordering categories such as tourism, migration, circulation and mobil-
ity (Williams and Hall, 2002: 1), while his narratives have been styled
‘intercultural’ or ‘settler narratives’ (Beaven, 2007).
What is more, by settling in Andalusia Stewart is merely a further con-
temporary instance of that multicultural mestizaje which since ancient
times has flourished on both shores of the Mediterranean basin where
frontiers have historically been fluid and cultural identity porous. As
Iain Chambers (2008) has argued the cultural and ethnic overlappings
and interminglings enabled and engendered by the Mediterranean’s
creolized essence intimates the possibility of another measure of the
world that runs counter to the monolithic, post-enlightenment formu-

lations of the North, whose emphasis on progress, nationalism and indi-
vidualism shored up much of the discourse of colonialism, conditioned
the postcolonial response, and required the silencing of the South’s
plural history and promise, most particularly perhaps of the Muslim
contribution to Western civilization and culture. The European South
becomes, in short, another victim of the hegemonic North’s colonial-
ism by the latter’s excision of the former’s history of cultural miscege-
nation. Stewart writes, then, from a geo-cultural context whose history
demands that such concepts as colonialism and diaspora be amplified
or adjusted to take full stock of what was happening on the southern
doorsteps of the great European metropoles. A consideration of some of
Stewart’s tropes will, I hope, provide new insights into the metaphorics
of what is more conventionally regarded as diasporic literature; it might
also raise doubts about the validity of the diasporic subject as a self-
standing, discreet analytical category in a world where, as Julia Kristeva
puts it, ‘we are all in the process of becoming foreigners’ (1991: 104)
and where for much of its history the Mediterranean has been a beacon
of diasporic conviviality which hegemonic master narratives have con-
trived to extinguish.
2 The sacrament of cultural immersion
As its title suggests, Driving over Lemons is very much about cultural
adaptation and co-adaptation. We have only turned the first page
when Stewart, at the wheel of a car on an initial reconnoîtring mis-
sion to Andalusia, comes across a lemon on the road, stops and then
manoeuvres to avoid it. Georgina, the English property agent who has
been living in the region for ten years and is showing him farms and
small-holdings, orders him to ‘Drive over lemons’ (1999: 2). Although,
as Stewart admits, there were ‘a hell of a lot of lemons’, we are not told
whether he actually drives over any of them; indeed, he confesses that,
together with the dogs and cats and the flowers, the lemons ‘warmed
[his] heart a little’, an observation which would sit ill with his actually
mashing them up beneath his tyres. The key point is that this incident
is significant enough in some way for Stewart to serve as the title for his
book. If the lemon is taken as an icon of the Andalusian exotic, of the
strange and unfamiliar, straightforwardly to have driven over it would
have been to do as the natives do, and would have indicated that the
strange was already becoming familiarized, that Stewart was already
beginning to feel at home, that his idioculture was already altering.
But at this early stage in his arrival narrative Stewart seeks refuge in
the ambivalence of silence, leaving the reader to intuit the fate of the
lemon and to expect the pages that follow to chart the author’s gradual
acclimatization to life in southern Spain.
Later into the work, there is a moment where Stewart does try his
hand at demonstrating prowess in one element of the Andalusian idi-
oculture, flamenco guitar playing. While being shown how to eat goat
in a mountain-top village, Stewart is betrayed to the assembled com-
pany as someone who plays the guitar. Guitars are duly brought out and
father and son, Eduardo and Manuel, perform with the utmost incom-
petence some Alpujarran folk tune; the effect, Stewart remarks, is not
a patch on Orpheus (p. 87). It is then Stewart’s turn and he starts to
play some flamenco. Typically of his self-deprecating character, Stewart
points out that the flamenco was ‘very basic’, that he played ‘very badly’,
‘wincing at the wrong notes and bodged fingerings’ (p. 89). Fortunately,
‘nobody was listening anyway’, and Stewart’s idiocultural debacle went
unnoticed.
Neither the lemon nor the flamenco episode serve, then, to mark
Stewart’s adaptation to the Alpujarras; and in fact, nowhere on the
diegetic level of his work do we find the transcription of any single inci-
dent which definitively indicates his crossing of the Rubicon. Rather,
that transcultural passage is inscribed on a more metaphorical level, in
the reiterated references to water and the river that flows through his
valley which, taken together, constitute an allegory of his cultural adap-
tation coherent enough to practically become the organizing principle
of the book; and this is one sense in which it is a structural metaphor.
Crucially, to the narrative and to the working out of the allegory,
the farm which Stewart eventually buys is on the other side of a river
to which no road leads and which no serviceable bridge crosses. Pedro
Romero, the owner of the farm, is introduced to Stewart as ‘the owner
of the place across the river’ and addressed by Georgina as ‘he who
owns the farm across the river’ (p. 5). In a trope typical of arrival nar-
ratives since Columbus, that place across the river is called and figured
as paradise. Romero himself does so explicitly, casting himself as an
Alpujarran Adam in the process: ‘it gets lonely up here, though of course
I have the beasts – and there’s always God. And then we have the rivers
and the mountains – hah, this is indeed paradise’ (p. 26). A little later
he replicates the abundance trope of early modern colonialist literature:
‘Here there’s the best of everything in the world. There’s rich soil – it’ll
give you the best vegetables you’ll ever eat; there’s fruit drooping on the
trees, sweet water from the spring, and all this glorious fresh air’ (28).
And once, true to his name (Pedro = Peter), he has actually handed over
the keys to his farm, he grudgingly congratulates Stewart on his having
‘bought Paradise [ ... ] for nothing’ (p. 43).
In a figurative sense, the key to that paradise consists in mastering the
river and much of the narrative will be occupied with arranging run-
ning water in the farmhouse – ‘Proper civilized people like you should
not be without running water’, Romero proclaims (p. 65),5 building a
sound bridge across the river, and learning how to ‘walk with the water’,
in other words how to keep it clean and how to cut channels in order to
ensure regular and reliable irrigation for the vegetables and fruit trees.
It soon becomes apparent that the locals are perfectly at home in the
river: they wash their hair in it (p. 9), ride through it on their horses
until they ‘disappear’ (p. 12), and even sleep in it, ‘lashed to a root’ (p.
45). In contrast, at the beginning neither Stewart nor his wife are so
adept: far from riding on horseback, their first nocturnal approach to
what is to be their new home soon loses all hint of romance as they find
themselves ‘thrashing about in a bramble patch up to our ankles in wet
black mud’ (p. 17); while they prefer to clean their teeth in the ‘poison-
ous’ spring water piped into an oil-drum (pp. 9, 22). Yet Stewart is quick
to discover the pleasures of al fresco ablutions in a waterfall just below
the house (p. 29), and after a night on the town chills out ‘flat on [his]
back on a warm stone in the middle of the river’ (p. 33) – if not quite
sleeping in the water, the process of cultural mimesis is nevertheless in
progress. But that progress is faltering. When running water (of a sort)
is finally plumbed in, Stewart’s spiritual delight engenders a vision of
his small-holding which refurbishes the paradise trope as a heaven of
lavatorial mod. cons:
I turned the tap on lovingly, and roiled and moiled my hands in the
glorious jet of clear water. Rarely had I taken so much pleasure in
that simple ritual. I stepped outside the dimly lit bathroom into the
dazzling daylight, and there on the way down to lunch I enjoyed
a vision of El Valero with shooting fountains and chuckling rills,
silver-tapped sinks spurting sweet water, and gently bubbling bidets.
(p. 69)
More or less halfway through the book comes the pivotal chapter
‘Walking with the water’ which describes Stewart’s gradual taming of
the acequias, the ‘ancient system of irrigation channels that carry the
rainwater and snowmelt from the high peaks to the valley farms’ (p.
111). Once the art of cleaning the watercourse, digging the channels and
regulating the flow has been mastered, Stewart comments that ‘While
other tasks sink into drudgery with constant repetition, I never fail to
delight in walking with the water’ (p. 118). Thanks to its preposition,
the expression is eloquent of the way the river and its waters, which
were once a barrier to paradise, now accompany rather than confront
Stewart in a new relationship of, to use a Spanish word, convivencia, or
living together. More importantly, that relationship represents a major
advance in Stewart’s cultural adaptation for, in the local idioculture:
Watering is a measure of manhood [ ... ] A man who knows not the

watering no sirve – he’s useless. Domingo [Stewart’s best friend] said
to me one day in a fit of pique: ‘You, Cristóbal, do not know the
watering. You do not understand the water.’ These were the harsh-
est words he could have chosen, a vicious accusation impugning my
worth. [ ... ] At the time of this attack I had been running the farm for
only three years or so – no time to know the watering. (p. 119)
Adaptation does not happen overnight: in Stewart’s case, it took at least

three years. Or it took him at least three years to reach the stage of walk-
ing with the water. For, in combination with substantive ‘water’ the verb
‘walk’ may appear with a range of different prepositions; and if paradise
was at the outset ‘across’ the river, as yet Stewart is only ‘with’ the river,
proximate, but not immersed: in other words, the cultural plunge has
not been completed. What is more, the river is resistant to Stewart’s
attempts to build a bridge that will afford him permanent ease of access
to his Alpujarran Eden. The bridge Stewart eventually constructs with
Domingo two-thirds of the way through the book is washed away by
the river in the cataclysm related in his narrative’s final chapter.
That chapter is anticipated in two episodes marked once more by
significant fluvial metaphorics. The first concerns the unlikely friend-
ship that strikes up between simple goatherd Rodrigo and frail Dutch
sculptress Antonia, who spends her summer in the neighbourhood.
The episode, a bare four pages long, offers a third-party cameo of the
same arrival-immersion narrative which at greater length and in the
first person Stewart offers the reader of himself. It commences with a
sparse sentence about the goatherd, ‘Rodrigo gets lonely in the river’ (p.
193), before introducing Antonia to the reader: Stewart first came across
her modelling one of his rams in wax. One summer, ‘[a]ll of a sudden
[ ... ] La Antonia, as [Rodrigo] called her, took to walking with him in
the river’ (p. 194). If Rodrigo’s affixation of the feminine form of the
Spanish definite article is a minor appropriation of Antonia into his
idiolect, her walking with him in the river symbolizes her own immer-
sion in that same idiolect – an immersion Stewart himself has yet to
achieve. Antonia then spends much of her time tending Rodrigo’s sick
wife, and the episode comes to a close with Stewart remarking of her
that ‘She’s the only foreigner I know who simply by being true to herself
has become a part of the Alpujarra’ (p. 196). Whether ‘being true to her-
self’ – an extremely question-begging cliché – is the best explanation
for her adaptation to the Alpujarras is debatable; what is clear is that
her walking in the river signals that adaptation and confirms the fluid
mechanics of arrival that control the book’s guiding metaphors. The
book ends with Antonia riding on Domingo’s donkey, ‘her arms around
his waist and her head sleepy on his shoulder’ (p. 247): all the signs
are that the metaphorical seal on the Dutch sculptress’s adaptation will
soon be followed by the sociosacramental seal of intercultural marriage
and all that implies for coadaptation.
The other episode involves Stewart’s own daughter, Chloë, who is
born on the farm in the course of the book. ‘Having a daughter who was
a native Granadina6 and fluent in Spanish helped to contribute to our
sense of being finally settled’, writes Stewart, before recording what Old
Man Domingo had said on the matter: ‘You’ve sown your seed here –
you’re one of us now’ (p. 198). Old Man Domingo needs no instruction
in diaspora theory to avail himself of the procreative connotations of
the ‘diaspora’ metaphor in order to point the fact that having children
multiplies and strengthens the ties – school, health service, friends’
families – that unite migrants to a host community. But more interest-
ing in connection with Chloë’s birth is the confluence of concepts and
metaphors that emerge around it, all of them with a direct bearing on
the issues that concern us. For instance, Stewart writes, ‘When Chloë
was born we planned a party to celebrate her arrival and thought we
might combine it with a christening’ (p. 226). Birth here is associated
with arrival, arrival with christening. Later on I will discuss the meta-
phorical configuration of arrival as baptism in more detail; for now we
should note how the allied motifs of walking with the water and walk-
ing in the water are each only a preposition away from Christ’s miracu-
lous walking on the water; and how, when Chloë is born, Stewart is still
awaiting his own baptism as a genuine member of the Alpujarran com-
munity – a baptism that we already know is figured through the meta-
phor of immersion, of walking in the river, a river which is now the
Jordan of any migrant, the symbolic riverway to rebirth and the prom-
ised land which lies, like Stewart’s Edenic farm to which Pedro-St Peter
held the keys, on the other side. For a variety of reasons the christening
has to wait until Chloë is three and a Church of England parson on a

botanical tour of the region is available to perform the rite. The service
concludes with the ‘communal’ singing of the hymn ‘All things bright
and beautiful’, a singing which is ‘swelled by the rushing of the rivers’
(p. 236) anxious to contribute to or ratify this sacramental celebration
of arrival.
That ‘rushing of the rivers’ also anticipates the tremendous flood of
the final chapter. More importantly, the actual christening of Chloë
prepares us for the climactic, metaphorical baptism of Stewart which
confirms his own idiocultural adaptation. The summer following
Chloë’s christening was one of extreme drought: the vegetation with-
ered and the river dried. Short spells of intermittent rain punctuated
September and October, until ‘in November the downfall began’ (p.
240). By the morning of the second day, Stewart’s bridge had been
swept away; as days of rain turned to weeks, the ‘roof started to leak,
the solar power died, and all the firewood was so soaked it was useless.’
Although Stewart notes that the rains began with a ‘steady downpour’,
‘not with a deluge’, his account attains almost apocalyptic proportions:
‘The water was black and evil-smelling’, its noise ‘monstrous’; ‘the hills
began to crumble into the valleys. [ ... ] the mountains were literally
being swept into the sea’ (pp. 240–41). Once the rains had stopped and
the waters receded, Stewart’s Eden is gradually restored as the house is
dried out and a new bridge is built, while in celebration the paradise
trope is dusted down once more and indulged with renewed energy and
conviction:
The summer that followed the rains was a rather more auspicious
season. The sheep thrived on the lush grasses that now covered the
hill, giving us a fine yield of lambs. The holiday cottage that we
called El Duque [ ... ] was occupied week after week by guests who
were delighted with the beauty of the exuberantly blooming coun-
tryside. [ ... ] and the plants [Stewart grew for their seeds] responded
to the mood of optimism by flowering in spectacular fashion. We
felt ready for anything. (pp. 245–46)
What had started as a not-quite biblical ‘deluge’ seems to conclude with

a sort of covenant between the valley and Stewart himself in a replay
of the aftermath to the biblical flood; his account of it ends with him
and his wife waving Chloë off as she takes the bus to her first day at
school, excited at the prospect of ‘becoming a proper Spanish school-
girl’ (p. 246). Now the flood has abated, Chloë’s cultural adaptation is
on the point of consummation; and the reader does not have to wait
long for confirmation that Stewart’s symbolic immersion in the rains
that flooded his farm and valley has resulted in his own definitive
adaptation. For the chapter, and the book, ends with Stewart recol-
lecting ‘one spectacularly sultry night’ (p. 246) when he, his wife and
Chloë go down to the river for a midnight bathe in a pool they had
made by building a dam between some rocks. They swim and drift,
watching the moonlight. Chloë sits on a rock ‘Like a mermaid’ (p.
246). They watch Antonia and Domingo pass by on Domingo’s don-
key. Then, last sentence: ‘We slid like alligators back into the river and
grinned at one another as they passed’ (p. 247). The end of the book
leaves them ‘in’ the river at last. If not actually sleeping in it, the prep-
ositional paradigm has been given its final idiocultural inflection as
Smith and his family prove to be totally at home in the water – totally
at home, that is, as transculturated subjects whose adapted identi-
ties enable them to live on both sides of the cultural Rubicon; and
this transformation is emphasized by the significantly hybrid beasts
to which Stewart chooses to liken himself and his family. They have
arrived; their cultural immersion is complete.
3 Structural metaphors of arrival
The metaphors associated with water and river are structural in Driving
Over Lemons insofar as they organize Stewart’s narrative into a virtual
allegory of the way his identity adapts to the Alpujarras through a proc-
ess of cultural baptism by immersion. But I would further suggest that
these same metaphors are structural, not just of Stewart’s particular
narrative of arrival, but of intercultural, indeed of alien, arrivals in gen-
eral. From Montaigne’s observation that trying to capture the essence
of human subjectivity is like ‘grasp[ing] water’ (qtd in Taylor, 1989: 179)
to Bruce Lee’s widely advertised advice to ‘be water’, the liquid element
has served as an obvious and convenient metaphor for that Protean flu-
idity of identity which ‘social chameleon[s]’ (Z. Smith, 2000: 269) like
Zadie Smith’s Millat exploit with enviable mimetic skill. As far as post-
colonial literature is concerned, water, like Paul Gilroy’s chosen trope
of the ship in The Black Atlantic (1993), has geographical, historical and
metaphorical significances. From the ‘Golden Triangle’ to the Empire
Windrush, the Atlantic has, for example, been a geographical and his-
torical site of colonial oppression and its postcolonial aftermaths, while
in writers like Gilroy and Phillips it has also been invested with mani-
fold metaphorical significances in relation to diasporic pasts, presents
and futures. Again, first sight of the new home from home was often
gained from ships approaching port along the Thames, Mersey or Clyde.
The metropolis itself, Mark Atkins and Iain Sinclair’s (1999) ‘liquid city’,
straddling the Thames, divides itself up into north and south as if mim-
icking more recent geoeconomic partitionings of the world.
Particularly suggestive of the metaphoric potency of immersion to
transcribe the sacrament of arrival in the existential ambivalence of the
contact zone is Salman Rushdie’s treatment of Gibreel and Chamcha’s
landing in England. From its very first sentence, The Satanic Verses
introduces the pattern of symbolic death and rebirth which baptism
enacts in the religious ceremony and which the migrant replicates in
his passage from homeland to new home and reincarnation as cultur-
ally hybrid subject: ‘ “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling
from the heavens, “first you have to die” ’ (Rushdie, 1988: 3). Gibreel
and Chamcha’s fall is accompanied by
a succession of cloudforms, ceaselessly metamorphising, gods into

bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures
pressed in upon them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dan-
gling from fleshy stalks, winged cats, centaurs, and Chamcha in
his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion that he, too, had
acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid
[ ... ]. (pp. 6–7)
And it is a fall from ‘heavenlight to hellfire’ (p. 133) which issues in

‘newness’, a quality the narrator associates with ‘fusions, translations,
conjoining’ (p. 8). Newness incarnate, Gibreel and Chamcha are reborn
as literally hybrid beings: not quite fallen angels, but uncertain con-
joinings of angelic halos with satyrical bumps at the temples. And that
metamorphic rebirth is realized in the markedly ambivalent psycho-
geography which Gibreel struggles to configure as ‘some wrongness,
some other place, not England or perhaps not-England, some counter-
feit zone, rotten borough, altered state. Maybe, he considered briefly:
Hell?’ – a possibility he discards before settling for ‘a transit lounge’
(p. 132), a denomination which is a perfect alternative to ‘contact zone’
for that space where the arriving migrant’s identity commences its
idiocultural transition, that process for which Rushdie’s figures, like
Stewart’s mermaid7 and alligator, are drawn from a bestiary of hybrids.
Tracts of water like Stewart’s river or, in Rushdie’s case, the English
Channel and the metaphorical significances of baptismal rebirth they
bear are elements of the collective Western and, one would dare to say,
universal imagination; as such, they are also key elements in the cogni-
tive process of coming to understand experience through finding anal-
ogies for it. From their literary source in the descents to the underworld
of Ulysses and Aeneas, the Styx and the Acheron have flowed unabated
through rebirth or initiation narratives from Dante’s Divina Commedia
to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where Marlow’s navigation of the Congo
may be read as his ‘descent into hell’ (Feder, 1955), and to The Satanic
Verses. Of course, the precise nature of the change that comes over those
who travel the ultramundane waters is open to all sorts of interpreta-
tions. Conrad’s Marlow, for example, has been read as a rewriting of
Aeneas, Dante, Faust and Grail hero, his journey as the superego’s search
for its id, or an Oedipal return to the maternal breast from which he has
been displaced – and the very exegetical openness or inscrutability of
the novel is probably much of it point. Yet it is clear that the trope of
riverine immersion or navigation is a signal that some sort of subjective
transformation is in progress.
Turning from fiction to fact, the riverine navigation and abortive
mission related by Walter Ralegh in The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and
Bewtfiul Empyre of Guiana (1596) – a perplexing but fascinating text and
direct inspiration for two of V. S. Naipaul’s novels (The Loss of El Dorado:
A History [1969] and A Way in the World [1994]) – is uncannily prescient
of Heart of Darkness. When Ralegh returned home after his profitless
paddling up and down and around the affluents of the Orinoco, he
was accused of turning native, a charge corroborated by his tobacco-
smoking, ‘experimentation with biotropic drugs [ ... ] the presence of
freely captive indigenes with him in the Tower or his possible role as
the shaman (“conjuror”) in [the School of Night]’ (Whitehead, 1997:
100); as anthropologist Neil Whitehead has observed, ‘this is certainly
the profile of a man who would be “King of the Indians” ’. Whether the
charges were empirically founded or simply trumped up is less impor-
tant than the fact that his navigation of the Orinoco could be used
by his detractors to expose him to allegations of advanced cultural
mimesis. In parallel with this public conception of the river as an agent
of change, a transformer of Ralegh’s identity, in his own relation of
the Guyanan expedition Ralegh transmutes the Orinoco into another,
markedly Virgilian, underworld river, thus converting his public narra-
tive into a private allegory of his political and spiritual salvation (J. P.
A. Sell, 2006: 118–29). To adopt some of Joseph Campbell’s (1972: 101)
terms, Ralegh’s descent into his own ‘spiritual labyrinth’ finds him, pre-
dictably enough, adrift in ‘a landscape of symbolic figures’, chief among
them the river which, in its Guyanan incarnation and in collaboration
with tropical drenchings, constantly keeps Ralegh half-submerged; and,

in its capacity of structural metaphor, joins him with Gibreel, Chamcha
and Chris Stewart in a brotherhood of transcultural baptisands.
Had Stewart not become a surprisingly successful writer, the sali-
ent datum on his curriculum vitae would be his career as first drum-
mer of rock group Genesis, a career truncated by the prospect of fame.
Not only a drummer, Stewart also plays the guitar, as we saw in the
episode where he plays flamenco to the utter indifference of his audi-
ence. But music and musicianship together act as a further structural
metaphor of arrival in the sense that concerns us here; what is more,
this metaphor often goes hand-in-hand with those of water and river I
have just discussed. In Western literature one of the ur-texts of arrival
is Shakespeare’s Othello. The speech through which he dramatizes his
own identity narrative is one of the most familiar in the canon and
mentions the cannibals and acephali which remained just over the
empirical horizon in Ralegh’s Discoverie. However, we are not told how
Othello actually arrived in Venice; an approach from the sea is certainly
the most likely possibility, but there is no explicit statement of it. In
contrast, when writing his version of the Othello story, Caryl Phillips
is at pains to emphasize his Othello-figure’s seaborne arrival, which is
recollected as follows:
Above me, the sails and flags snapped in the damp Venetian wind,
and then, to our side, I spied a boatman hurrying back to the city
ahead of the oncoming storm, with swallows flying low and skim-
ming the water to either side of his unsteady vessel. As we neared the
city, the air became warm and moist, and its smell somewhat like the
breath of an animal. Then the water began to lap less vigorously, and
bells began to sound, and I suddenly found myself to be surrounded
by the raised voices of gondoliers; and then, as though following
strange music, I discovered myself being sucked into the heart of
Venice. (Phillips, 1998: 107)
If music in relation to Othello is usually associated with his orotund ver-

bosity, his capacity in this extract to find music in the environment that
surrounds him is matched exactly by that of Caliban, who can discern
among the noises of the island ‘Sounds and sweet airs that give delight
and hurt not’ and ‘a thousand twangling instruments’ that ‘hum about
[his] ears’ (Shakespeare, 1999: 3.2.136–38). The musicality of the savage
was, together with his poetry, a quality that confounded protocolonial
notions of European cultural and racial supremacy and which, together
with the existence of ‘vulgar poesy’ threatened to undermine George

Puttenham’s courtly poetics and the very social order it was meant to
support. Puttenham informs us that merchants and travellers vouch
to the ability of ‘the American, the Perusine, & the very Canniball [to]
sing, and also say, their highest and holiest matters in certain riming
versicles and not in prose’ (1936: 10). Ralegh’s half-brother Sir Humphrey
Gilbert equipped his ill-fated Newfoundland expedition of 1583 with
‘for solace of our people, and allurement of the Savages [ ... ] musike in
good variety’ (Hayes, 1979: 29), a stratagem which presupposes a sen-
sitivity to harmony in non-European indigenous peoples which had
already surfaced in Thomas More’s account of the Utopians’ excellent
musicianship (the ‘one thing [in which] doubtless they go exceeding far
beyond us’ [1997: 124]).
The danger inherent in savage musicianship was its potential to blur
the civilized/savage dichotomy, to substitute difference with similarity,
and to suggest the existence of alternative social orders; put another
way, it betokened the intrusion of the semiotic in the patriarchal regime
of the symbolic. As always, whether the savages actually were musicians
or whether musicianship was an attribute conventionally attributed in
the European imagination to the ethnic other are difficult points to
decide. However, Darwin’s thoughts on the origins of language postu-
late not only savage but also simian musicality:
language owes its origin to the imitation and modification of various

natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinc-
tive cries, aided by signs and gestures. [ ... ] primeval man, or rather
some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in pro-
ducing true musical cadences, that is in singing, as do some gibbon-
apes at the present day; and we may conclude from a widely-spread
analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during
the courtship of the sexes [ ... ] (Darwin, 2004: 298–99)
Writing 50 years earlier, Thomas Love Peacock had drawn on the proto-
evolutionary ideas of James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, regarding man’s
relations with orang-utans in order to lampoon contemporary British
society in his novel Melincourt (1817). He also figured his ape-protago-
nist as an instinctive melomane:
Mr. Oran had long before shown a taste for music, and, with some
little instruction from a marine officer in the Tornado, had become
proficient on the flute and French horn. He could never be brought

to understand the notes; but from hearing any simple tune played
or sung two or three times, he never failed to perform it with great
exactness and brilliance of execution. I shall merely observe, en
passant, that music appears, from this and several similar circum-
stances, to be more natural to man than speech. The old Captain
was fond of his bottle of wine after dinner, and his glass of grog at
night. Mr. Oran was easily brought to sympathize in this taste; and
they have many times sat up together half the night over a flowing
bowl, the old Captain singing Rule Britannia, True Courage, or Tom
Tough, and Sir Oran accompanying him on the French horn. (Qtd in
Chapple, 1986: 75–7)
Though cast as a satire, the rise of Peacock’s musical orang-utan

through society, becoming first a member of parliament and then Sir
Oran Hautton, draws on the same structural metaphor of the musical
outsider who arrives in a new land bringing alien harmonies with him
which threaten to disrupt existing sociopolitical harmonies; and it is
this metaphor, diminished almost to a pianissimo, which surfaces in
Chris Stewart’s playing of flamenco guitar and promises, not now dis-
ruption but cultural coadaptation.
In its association of animal musicality with courtship rituals, the pas-
sage quoted above from Darwin highlights one particular way in which
the musical stranger can untune society’s string, to borrow the terms
from Ulysses’ speech on social harmony in Troilus and Cressida (1.3),
namely, miscegenation. As Linda Boose (1994) has shown, in early mod-
ern Europe the key anxiety regarding the racial other was that blood
should be mixed and identities confused as a result of interracial procre-
ation. Thomas Hardy’s short story, ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, amounts
to a simple inscription on the level of the family of this nexus of struc-
tural metaphor and social neurosis, the most celebrated instantiation
of which is probably Shakespeare’s Othello. The fiddler of the title, Mop
Ollamoor, is of uncertain origin but indubitable magnetism:
Many a worthy villager envied him his power over unsophisticated

maidenhood – a power which seemed sometimes to have a touch
of the weird and wizardly in it. Personally, he was not ill-favoured,
though rather un-English, his complexion being a rich olive, his
rank hair dark and rather clammy – made still clammier by secret
ointments [ ... ] (Hardy, 1979: 287)
One of the unsophisticated maidens is Car’line Aspent, beloved of Ned

Hipcroft, who eventually bears Mop’s child, then seeks protection for
herself and her daughter through marriage to Ned when Mop slips from
the scene, and is finally left childless and with a broken marriage when
Mop abducts the girl. Returning to the present, as we have seen in Ruth
Maxey’s essay, the issue of miscegenation has become something of a
bone of contention among diaspora theorists with Robin Cohen (1996:
516–17) claiming that for diasporas to remain intact, they must not ‘cre-
olise’ since intermarriage signals ‘assimilation’ while Stuart Hall argues
that hybridity is an essential, unavoidable component of the African-
Caribbean diaspora (1990: 235–36). However that might be, the lurking
menace of miscegenation is one ramification of the musical stranger
trope.
Once indelibly altered by Mop’s trespassing of it, Hardy is forced to
resort to one of his cult-terms to describe the Wessex landscape: the
woods and the coppices were ‘a place of Dantesque gloom’ (Hardy, 1979:
302), a description which evokes for us the infernal connotations of the
river of arrival discussed earlier and makes explicit the devilish under-
current of the musical stranger trope. Early modern discourse was quick
to twin the racial other with the devil, as any reader of Othello will
be aware; and Hardy’s talk of wizardry reactivates the slur directed at
Othello of having won Desdemona by ‘spells and medicines [ ... ] Sans
witchcraft could not’ (Shakespeare, 2002: 1.3.60–65). Othello looks in
vain to discover Iago’s cloven feet (5.2.283–284), but the foot of the
devil leaves its imprint in the passage from Defoe’s history of the devil
which Rushdie places as epigraph to The Satanic Verses:
Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled con-

dition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in conse-
quence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or
air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is ... without
any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot
upon. (1988: ix)
Rushdie’s description of his own angels falling from ‘heavenlight to

hellfire’ is replete with references to infernal music which, in connec-
tion with their passage through the English channel, invites us to treat
the two structural metaphors of water and music as integrating a larger
bipartite whole: as he falls Gibreel sings, his ‘infernal noises’ prompting
Chamcha to cry, ‘To the devil with your tunes’ (p. 3); Chamcha even
identifies Hell as Gibreel’s place of origin (p. 8); and immediately after
speculating that he has landed in Hell, Gibreel holds a hallucinatory

conversation with Death himself (p. 132). Chris Stewart’s arrival nar-
rative includes no such explicit invocations of hell and the devil, but,
as I suggested above, his river is figured as an Andalusian analogue of
underworld waterways of initiation while the apocalyptic picture he
draws of his valley, submerged beneath ‘black and evil-smelling’ water,
has a Dantesque ring to it. Furthermore, Stewart’s reference to Orpheus
in his narration of the guitar-playing episode offers further confirma-
tion that some structural metaphor combining water and music provides
a means of conceptualizing and textualizing the migrant or diasporic
experience of arrival in a new country and the corollary process of cul-
tural coadaptation.
4 The Orphic paradigm of arrival
Orpheus is the paradigmatic figure of the revenant from the under-

world: Ulysses, Aeneas and the rest only retread the path originally
trodden by him. Well-known is Orpheus’ bewitching lyre-playing
which tamed the beasts in what was taken by some classical myths of
the foundation of civilized society as an allegory ‘implying thereby,
how by his discreete and wholesome lessons vttered in harmonie and
with melodious instruments he brought the rude and sauage peo-
ple to a more ciuill and orderly life’ (Puttenham, 1936: 6). Less well-
known is the possibility that ‘Orpheus’ is a corruption of the ancient
Greek name for the alder, which meant ‘growing on the river-bank’
or the fact that ‘the concentrated essence’ of Orphic Greek philoso-
phy was ‘ “Panta Rhei”, “All things flow” ’ (Graves, 1960: 172, 140).
In combination with his traversal of the underworld, these watery
attributes qualify Orpheus supremely to act as the tutelary spirit of
cultural immersion and adaptation, while his musical power to make
not only the beasts, but also the trees and rocks of Olympus, provide a
serviceable metaphor for the transforming effect of the stranger from
another land on the society and culture of his new home. Stewart’s
slightly academic allusion to Orpheus is not only noticeable for its
sudden disturbance of the generally unaffected, reader-friendly reg-
ister of his narrative, but also for the extremely cumbersome manner
of its expression:
Now, much as I would like to write of how Orpheus himself never

plucked a string as exquisitely as those work-hardened fingers of old
Eduardo, and of how I was spellbound by the earthy players’ mastery
of their instruments and by the simple loveliness of the song, I can-

not deny the truth, the music was a foul dirge [ ... ] (1999: 87–8)
It is as if the allusion is an uninvited guest at Stewart’s feast, a presence

so strongly imposed by the strength of the underlying structural meta-
phorics that it cannot be turned away: like some genetic fingerprint
indicating archetypal origin, Orpheus and witchery (‘spellbound’) must
somehow be worked into Stewart’s arrival narrative, even if only in a
kind of rhetorical occupatio. And of course, this passage makes it inevita-
ble that when Stewart subsequently picks up the guitar, we read him as
Orpheus, even if his modesty counsels against any such interpretation.
It was in his essay ‘Black Orpheus’ (‘Orphée Noir’, 1948) that Jean-Paul
Sartre first coined the term ‘negritude’ in connection with the collec-
tive vision of black history, present and future which emerged from his
reading of Senghor’s anthology of black poets writing in French. Sartre
explains that he saw the negro poet as an Orpheus because in his efforts
to define himself he is forced into a retrospective introspection with
the aim of recovering some part of his essential being: ‘this untiring
descent of the negro into himself causes me to think of Orpheus going
to reclaim Eurydice from Pluto.’ Sartre’s reading of the poetry of negri-
tude fixes on its negative or ‘weak’ phase of a dialectical progress which
will ultimately subsume the antitheses of white supremacy and black
resistance in ‘the dawn of the universal.’ In other words, his emphasis
is on the Orphic descent; he has little to say about the Orphic emer-
gence, although overall his essay reveals him to be a diasporic utopian.
Certainly, his application of the Orpheus paradigm to the recovery on
the collective level of a core black identity as a necessary first step to
regeneration within a supra-racial humanity is a metahistorical parallel
to our readings of the paradigm as instantiated in literary microhisto-
ries – including Stewart’s Driving Over Lemons. But of course, the big
question my postulation of such a paradigm raises is whether it and its
structural metaphors are of application to the conceptualization and
textualization of diasporic or migrant experiences of arrival and cul-
tural adaptation alone, or whether, as Stewart’s questionable classifica-
tion as a diasporic author suggests, they are pertinent to even broader
categories of the human subject, even to the human subject tout court.
Among the poems Senghor included in his collection is Aimé Césaire’s
‘Vampire liminaire’ (‘The Liminal Vampire’). The vampire is, of course,
a type of Orpheus, some revenant from another world who makes the
crossing to this one. As well as being a conscientious student of English,
the ‘monster of the nether-world’ is an eldritch melomane who, in
Stoker’s novel, cannot only hear ‘music’ in the howling of wolves, but
in true Orpheus fashion can summon it from them ‘at the raising of
his hand, just as the music of a great orchestra seems to leap under the
baton of the conductor’ (Stoker, 1994: 303, 30, 65); he can even pass
it on to his victims, so that when Lucy calls Harker by his name, just
before sinking her teeth in, ‘the word sounded like music on her lips’
(367). As for the structural metaphor of water, the novel’s ninth chapter
is a gripping account of Dracula’s storm-tossed arrival at Scarborough
harbour after crossing the North Sea. According to one old salt, the
Count’s schooner ‘must fetch up somewhere, if it was only in hell’ (98),
while in his note that brings the novel to a close, Harker recalls how
‘Seven years ago we all went through the flames; and the happiness of
some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured’
(p. 449), alluding in the process to some Orphic regeneration after
traversing the other world. Frankenstein’s monster was another melo-
mane, responding with tears to the ‘divine sounds’ of the old cottager’s
music which, like the nightingale’s song, he prizes far higher than the
‘monotonous’ sounds of the youth reading (Mary Shelley, 1994: 86), the
antithesis between music and reading facilitating the identification of
the alien with the semiotic, the familiar with the symbolic. As is well
known, Shelley’s story reaches its climax as Walton and Frankenstein
sail through the frozen waters of the Arctic regions, and comes to an
end with the monster jumping onto a piece of floating ice and being
‘borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance’ (p. 191),
the notoriously open ending leaving infinite scope for the monster’s
future emergence in fulfilment of the Orphic paradigm.
The fact that Dracula and Frankenstein have been subjected to post-
colonial readings which find inscriptions of the disenfranchised Irish
in the former (e.g. Arata, 1990; Moses, 1997) and, thanks in part to
its numerous echoes of The Tempest, of the black and/or the oppressed
working class in the latter (e.g. Malchow, 1993; O’Flynn, 1983) suggests
that ultimately, textualized others, far from enjoying racially, ethni-
cally or class-signed representations founded on differentiating rhetor-
ics are actually engendered in obedience to a mono-rhetoric of alterity
in which structural metaphors of the kind discussed in this chapter
play a not insignificant role. In the last analysis, this conclusion should
not come as any great surprise. For all their differences, Othello, Gibreel
and Chamcha, Dracula, Frankenstein and Chris Stewart are subjects
in transit, crossing thresholds, passing from one world to another.
Such a universal condition, of passage from one milieu to another,
requires tropes that transcend, or descend beneath, the particularities
of collective-specific metaphors and consequently avails itself of the

serviceable structural metaphors of the Orpheus paradigm – a paradigm
which, even in so slight a work as Stewart’s, asserts its ongoing validity
as one element in the mechanics of conceiving and textualizing emer-
gence on the other side of the transcultural Rubicon.
Notes
1. Of course, the migrant is actually involved in a process of ‘co-adaptation’, for
the new community will also inevitably have to adapt to him or her, to effect
an accommodating transformation. Leela Ghandi speaks of ‘mutual trans-
formations’ (1998: 129–35). A fair impression of what this means, and what
would be lost if it didn’t happen, is conveyed by Michael Cronin’s remarks
on translations which, like migration, ‘bring[s] foreign elements, extraneous
ideas, fresh images into cultures without which the kick start of otherness
remains stalled in an eternity of mediocrity’ (2000: 94).
2. For Attridge ‘idioculture’ denotes cultural norms and modes of behaviour as
manifested in a particular individual. As he observes, ‘[a]lthough a large part
of an individual’s idioculture may remain stable for some length of time, the
complex as a whole is necessarily unstable and subject to constant change;
and although one is likely to share much of one’s idioculture with other
groups (one’s neighbours, one’s family, one’s age peers, those of the same
gender, race, class, and so on), it is always a unique configuration’ (Attridge,
2004: 21).
3. Driving Over Lemons was followed by A Parrot in the Pepper Tree (2002), The
Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (2006) and Three ways to Capsize a Boat
(2009).
4. For pertinent discussions of what ‘diaspora’ actually means, see, for example,
Clifford (1994), Cohen (1996) and Hall (1990).
5. To Expira and Old Man Domingo, running water ‘tastes disgusting’ (p. 138).
6. ‘Granadina’ because the Alpujarras, where she was born, are in the province
of Granada.
7. Gibreel wonders whether he has been escorted through the waters by ‘the
mermaids’ (Rushdie, 1988: 132).
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Index
Titles of works are listed under name of author
Advaita Vedanta, 120–1, 129, 134n5 Calvino, Italo, 77n2

Aeneas, 196, 201 Campbell, Joseph, 196
Alam, M. Y., 21 Camus, Albert
Ali, Monica, 21, 81 The Fall, 67
Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, 26–7 Caruth, Cathy, 148–9
Amine, Laila, 184 Césaire, Aimé
Anderson, Benedict, 81 Discourse on Colonialism, 137
Ang, Ien, 183 ‘Vampire liminaire’, 202
The Arabian Nights, 17, 151, 157 Chambers, Iain, 187–8
Arendt, Hannah, 12–13 Chatterjee, Partha, 161
The Origins of Totalitarianism, 137 Chaudhuri, Amit, 70
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Cheyette, Brian, 135–7
Helen Tiffin, 7–8 Cliff, Michelle
Aslam, Nadeem, 5, 9, 11, 21–3, 33–8 Abeng, 111, 112
Maps for Lost Lovers, 14, 21–38 Clifford, James, 6, 117
Season of the Rainbirds, 22, 36–7 Clingman, Stephen, 146
The Wasted Vigil, 22–3, 37 Coetzee, J. M., 146
Atkins, Mark and Iain Sinclair Waiting for the Barbarians, 148
Liquid City, 195 Cohen, Robin, 80–1, 200
Attridge, Derek, 186, 204n2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 5
Colm Hogan, Patrick, 165
Bahri, Deepika, 154 colonial education, 105, 109–12, 113,
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 157 128–9, 132
Baldwin, James, 61, 77n2 colonialism, 3, 137, 139, 164–5, 176, 188
belonging, 11, 15, 20–2, 42, 45, 80, communal violence, 17, 27, 151, 158,
84, 87–9, 93–6, 101, 105, 113–15, 161–3, 165, 167
126–7, 131–3 Conrad, Joseph
Beukema, Taryn, 177 Heart of Darkness, 148, 196
Bhabha, Homi K., 7, 9, 13, 29, 48–9, cosmopolitanism, 3, 157–65, 166
164, 167 Cudjoe, Selwyn J., 123
Birney, Alfred, 96 cultural adaptation, 186–7, 188–94,
Black, Max, 8 199, 201, 202
Boehmer, Elleke, 5, 11 cultural mimesis, 18, 186–7, 190, 196
Booker, M. Keith, 154 See also mimicry and ‘passing’
Boose, Linda, 199
Borges, Jorge Luis, 77 Dante, Alighieri
Botting, Fred, 172 La Divina Commedia, 196
Brah, Avtar, 4, 10 Darwin, Charles, 198–9
Brennan, Timothy, 154 Defoe, Daniel
Bush, George W., 66, 165, 169 The Political History of the Devil,
Butler, Judith, 169, 183 88, 200
221
222 Index
Desai, Anita, 63, 78n4 Gandhi, Indira, 153, 155–6, 160

diaspora, 2–4, 6–7, 9–12, 21, 25, 84, Gandhi, Mahatma, 125, 129, 133,
91, 188 134n10
African-Caribbean, 81, 99, 101, 103 Gandhi, Sanjay, 155–6
and colonialism, 3 Gehr, Richard, 63
definition, 21, 80–1, 96–7 genetic engineering, 172–3, 180–1
and imagination, 10 Ghandi, Leela, 204n1
imagined, 81 Gilbert, Humphrey, 198
Jewish, 135–9, 159 Gilroy, Paul, 5, 6, 48–9, 73–4, 81, 117,
and miscegenation, 80–1, 200 123, 135, 137, 178, 182, 183, 194
Muslim, 23 The Black Atlantic, 194
Pakistani, 22, 84, 96–7 Glenaan, Kenneth, 21
postcolonial, 135–9 grief, 169
and postcolonialism, 2–3 Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 5, 9, 12, 13,
and religion, 26–8 39–41, 52, 57
South Asian, 37, 84, 91 Admiring Silence, 14, 39–46, 49, 55, 56
and trauma, 148–9 By the Sea, 14, 39–40, 46–52, 56
diaspora theory and metaphor, see Desertion, 14, 39–40, 52–5, 56
metaphor and diaspora theory Pilgrim’s Way, 42
diasporic identity, 12–15, 18, 60, 68,
71–2, 82, 96–7, 133, 183 Hall, Stuart, 6, 13, 117, 200
diasporic subject, 12, 13–14, 16, Hamid, Mohsin, 15, 59–60, 67–8, 73,
18–19, 25–6, 68, 91–4, 99, 118, 76–7, 78n7, 78n8, 78n11
133, 186–7, 188 Moth Smoke, 15, 59–66
Disraeli, Benjamin, 136 The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 12,
Dooley, Gillian, 118 15, 60, 66–76
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Hammett, Dashiell
The Brothers Karamazov, 67 The Maltese Falcon, 61, 77n2
Crime and Punishment, 67 Haraway, Donna
Modest_Witness, 17, 171–8, 180, 182,
‘ethnic return’, 90–4 184, 185n7
exegetical narrative, see liberation Hardy, Thomas
stories ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, 199–200
Harris, Wilson
Fanon, Frantz, 85, 150n4 Heartland, 148
fear, 28–31 Head, Dominic, 172
Fisher, Susan Alice, 107 Hirschkop, Ken, 157
Fludernik, Monika, 10 history, 18, 44–8, 50, 52, 98–9, 102–4,
Foucault, Michel, 155 115–16, 123, 136–40, 143–50,
fragmentation, 9, 12, 14, 39–40, 44, 175, 180, 184, 188
46, 52–4, 57, 133, 147 Hobbes, Thomas, 153–4
Frank, Anne holocaust, 135–49, 158, 174
Diary of a Young Girl, 147 home, 12, 15, 16, 18–19, 22, 31,
Frears, Stephen 39–46, 52, 55, 82–3, 94, 107,
Dirty Pretty Things (film), 184 120–1, 201
My Beautiful Laundrette (film), 86 Houen, Alex, 152
Friedman, Jonathan, 117 Houseman, A. E., 168–9
fundamentalism, 14, 15, 21, 22, 23, hybridity, 17, 21–2, 29, 60, 81–3,
25–6, 33, 36–7, 68, 70, 166, 174 86–9, 94–6, 126, 129, 132, 158–9,
See also Islamism 166, 171, 183, 186, 194, 195, 200
Index 223
hybridity – continued Katz, Nathan, 159

See also interracial relationships and Kay, Jackie
miscegenation Red Dust Road, 92
hyperbole, 17, 108, 152–3 Trumpet, 89
Khan-Din, Ayub, 81
identity, 2, 7, 11, 14, 20–2, 32, 36 East is East, 82
Asian, 82 Kincaid, Jamaica
biracial, 15, 82, 86–90, 93, 95–6 Lucy, 110, 112
black, 202 Kortenaar, Neil ten, 153, 154
British, 89 Kövecses, Zoltán, 64
colonial, 166 Krishnaswamy, Revathi, 7
and colour, 86–90 Kristeva, Julia, 39–40, 46, 55–6, 188
cultural, 7, 87, 91, 157 Kunzru, Hari, 81
ethnic, 164 The Impressionist, 87, 95, 97n2
fragmentary, 133 Kureishi, Hanif, 9, 11, 15, 21, 81–3,
hybrid, 163, 183 86, 87, 94–7
Jewish, 163 ‘The Body’, 94, 97
migrant, 39–57, 195 The Body and Seven Stories, 88
multicultural, 184 The Buddha of Suburbia, 82, 83, 84,
Muslim, 168 85, 86–90, 95, 107
and narrative, 12–14, 16, 43, 74, My Beautiful Laundrette, 83, 86, 88
187, 197 My Ear at His Heart, 84, 89, 93–4
national, 72, 75 My Son the Fanatic, 85
Pakistani, 70, 75 The Rainbow Sign, 91–3
and performance, 13, 183 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 68,
politics, 82 83, 85
postcolonial, 12, 109, 113–15 ‘Something to Tell You’, 83, 86, 91,
transcultural, 186, 194 92, 94, 95
See also diasporic identity ‘Touched’, 88–9
idioculture, 186, 188–9, 191, 204n2 ‘We’re not Jews’, 83–4
‘imagined community’, 81, 113–14 ‘With Your Tongue Down My
in-betweenness, 15, 18–19, 29, 59 Throat’, 83, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92
See also liminality
interracial relationships, 30–1, 83–6 Lacan, Jaques, 10
See also hybridity and Lakoff, Gary and Mark Johnson 4–5,
miscegenation 64, 114
intertextuality, 12, 17, 88, 147, 148, Lasdun, James, 67, 79n12
171–2, 173 Lewis, Simon, 43
Ishiguro, Kazuo Levy, Andrea, 5, 13, 101–2, 103, 105
The Remains of the Day, 67 Every Light in the House Burnin’, 101
Islamism, 21–2, 23, 25, 36–7, 71 Fruit of the Lemon, 101
Islamophobia, 22, 38, 71 The Long Song, 116n4
Never Far from Nowhere, 101
Jackson, George Small Island, 11, 12, 15–16, 99, 101,
Soledad Brother, 148 102–15
Johnson, Mark, see Lakoff, Gary and liberation stories, 120–3
Mark Johnson liminality, 60, 80, 89
Joyce, James, 158 See also in-betweenness
loss, 12, 14, 24, 33–4, 55, 156, 169
Kabir, Ananya, 165 Lowenthal, David, 47
224 Index
‘Macaulay’s minutemen’, 162–3 More, Thomas, 198

Mahabharata, 16, 119, 122–3, 125–6, Morrison, Toni, 59, 61, 77n2
132–3, 134n6 Mufti, Aamir, 160, 161, 162
Mahayana Buddhism, 120–1, 134n1 Mukherjee, Meenakshi, 110
Man, Paul de, 7, 9 multiculturalism, 20, 21, 23, 25, 29,
McLeod, John, 4, 5, 113–14 38, 170–1, 183–4
memory, 10, 12, 19, 24, 27, 46–8, 56, Murakami, Haruki
74, 137–40 Norwegian Wood, 67
metaphor, 4–19, 35–6, 114, 138 myth criticism (postcolonial), 123–4
affiliative, 113, 114–15
‘baptism’, 192–4, 195–7 Naipaul, V. S., 118–19
‘blood’, 171–8, 182 Half a Life, 11, 12, 16, 119, 121, 123,
‘body politic’, 152–3, 157 124–33
and cognition, 4–5, 171 A House for Mr Biswas, 107, 119, 122
and colonialism, 99, 104, 109 The Loss of El Dorado: A History, 196
dead, 170, 178, 182 Magic Seeds, 124
and diaspora theory, 6–11 The Mystic Masseur, 119
and diasporic subject, 9, 18–19 A Way in the World, 196
and empathy, 10–11 Nandy, Ashis, 160, 162
filiative, 113–15 Narayan, Uma, 28
‘fire’, 63–5 Nasta, Susheila, 90
‘genes’, 171, 179–82 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 154–5, 156
‘house’, 99, 107 Nehruvian secularism, 11, 17, 151–67
‘janissary’, 69, 71–2, 74–7 Niven, Alistair, 157
‘moth’, 15, 33, 36, 60, 62–5
‘mother country’, 99, 101, Orpheus, 18–19, 189, 201–4
104–7, 115 Orphic paradigm, 18, 203–4
music, 197–201
political, 11–12 paradise trope, 169, 189–93
and postcolonial theory, 6–7 ‘passing’, 13, 15, 95
structural, 189, 194–201, 202–4 See also cultural mimesis and
‘water’, 188–94, 195–9, 201 mimicry
See also tropes of diaspora Peacock, Thomas Love
metonymy, 7–8, 12, 16–17, 19, 71, Melincourt, 198–9
138–40, 146, 149 Phillips, Caryl, 7, 8, 11–12, 138–40,
migrancy, 187 149, 187, 194–5
mimicry, 13, 41, 48, 109, 113, 114–15, ‘Anne Frank’s Amsterdam’, 139–40
128, 131, 134n9 ‘A Black European Success’, 145
See also cultural mimesis and The European Tribe, 138, 140
‘passing’ Higher Ground, 138, 140, 141–2,
miscegenation, 15, 80–3, 84, 94–6, 143–5, 148
122, 127–8, 159, 200 ‘In the Ghetto’, 139
See also hybridity and interracial The Nature of Blood, 12, 138, 140,
relationships 141–3, 145–7, 148, 197
Mishra, Vijay, 10 A New World Order, 139
Modood, Tariq, 20, 23, 37–8 ‘pool of signifiers’, 117–19, 124, 132–3
Montaigne, Michel de, 194 ‘postcolonial melancholia’, 5, 49,
Moore, Lindsey, 35 73–4
Index 225
postcolonial studies and Jewish secularism, 14, 32, 151

studies, 135–9 See also Nehruvian secularism
postcolonial theory and metaphor, Selvon, Sam
see metaphor and postcolonial Lonely Londoners, 107
theory Shakespeare, William
postcolonialism, 2–3, 13, 101 Othello, 13, 141, 148, 197, 199, 200
Powell, Enoch, 30, 174 The Tempest, 197, 203
Procter, James, 4, 6, 26, 100, 107 Troilus and Cressida, 199
Puttenham, George, 198, 201 Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein, 203
Quiroga, Seline Szupinski, 179 Sinclair, Iain, see Atkins, Mark and
Iain Sinclair
Ralegh, Walter ‘Small Island Read’ project, 5,
The Discoverie, 196–7 100–1
Ram Katha, 16, 117, 119, 122–4, 125, Smith, Zadie, 11, 19, 170,
126, 132, 134n7 172–3
Ramanujan, A. K., 117–18, 122 White Teeth, 17–18, 102,
Ranasinha, Ruvani, 81 170–85, 194
religion, 21–9, 32–8, 43, 46, 74, 84, Spinoza, Baruch, 154
159, 161–2 Stein, Mark, 21
Rhode, Larissa, 124–5 Steiner, George, 123
Rhys, Jean Stewart, Chris, 4, 187–8, 197,
Voyage in the Dark, 148 203–4
Richman, Paula, 118 Driving over Lemons, 187–94, 195–6,
Ricœur, Paul, 12–13 199, 201–2
roots/routes, 6, 117, 123, 133, 176, Stoker, Bram
183–4 Dracula, 202–3
Rothberg, Michael, 135, 136–9, 142, Sukhdev, Sandhu, 85
145, 148 synecdoche, 7, 19n2, 151, 156
Rushdie, Salman, 17, 122, 153, 158,
165 Tabucchi, Antonio
‘Imaginary Homelands’, 6 Pereira Declares, 67
Imaginary Homelands, 17, 151 tale-telling, 12–13, 41–9, 55–7
Midnight’s Children, 11, 12, 13, 17, Tarantino, Quentin
151–7, 158, 161, 162 Pulp Fiction, 61, 77n2
The Moor’s Last Sigh, 17, 151, 157–65 Tariq, Humaira, 66
The Satanic Verses, 122, 185n5, Taylor, Charles, 11, 12–13
195–6, 200 terrorism, 21, 23, 37, 71, 152–4, 165,
Shalimar the Clown, 17, 151, 165–9 168–9
Russ, Joanna Tharoor, Shashi
The Female Man, 172 The Great Indian Novel, 122
‘third space’, 20–1, 29, 48–9
Said, Edward, 40 trauma, see under diaspora
Sanja, Jaina F., 111–12 tropes of diaspora, 12
Sartre, Jean-Paul See also ‘ethnic return’,
‘Orphée Noir’, 202 fragmentation, home, hybridity,
Scott Fitzgerald, F. in-betweenness, loss, memory,
The Great Gatsby, 67 roots/routes
226 Index
Uberoi, Varun, 30 Weedon, Chris, 102–3, 115

Ulysses, 196, 201 Whitehead, Anne, 147
Whitehead, Neil, 196
Vico, Giambattista, 5 Wordsworth, William
Virno, Paolo, 154 ‘Daffodils’, 109–14
Vives, Juan Luis, 4
Young, Robert J. C., 186–7
Walkowitz, Rebecca, 138, 141
Walsh, Helen, 81 Zierler, Wendy, 8, 140, 144, 146, 150n7
Waterman, David, 23 Žižeck, Slavoj, 10

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Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing

Metaphor and Diaspora in

ISBN 978-1-349-33956-3 ISBN 978-0-230-35845-4 (eBook)

Introduction: Metaphor and Diaspora 1

1 Tropes of Diasporic Life in the Work of Nadeem Aslam 20

2 Becoming Foreign: Tropes of Migrant Identity in

3 ‘My split self and my split world’: Troping Identity in

4 ‘Beige outlaws’: Hanif Kureishi, Miscegenation and

5 Metaphors of Belonging in Andrea Levy’s Small Island 99

6 Ancestry, Uncertainty and Dislocation in

7 Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas in the Work of

8 Metaphors of the Secular in the Fiction of

9 White Teeth’s Embodied Metaphors: The Moribund

10 Orpheus in the Alpujarras: Metaphors of Arrival in

This book is the direct outcome of a symposium, ‘Metaphors of

Isabel Carrera Suárez is Professor in English at the University of

Stef Craps is Lecturer (BOF-ZAP Research Professor) in English literature

Adriano Elia is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of

Enrique Galván-Álvarez is working towards his doctorate at the

Felicity Hand is Senior Lecturer in the English Department of the

Chris Weedon is Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural

The essays collected together in this volume were first presented at an

irrelevant, so narrowly circumstantial a term as ‘postcolonialism’ stood

Do only enforced migrations count as diasporic? Must diasporic com-

by nature metaphorical and cannot give us absolute truths about the

Nevertheless, metaphor’s passage in postcolonial and diasporia theory

which, though prior to the term’s enlistment in postcolonial circles, is

reveals a rather different attitude, according to which a metaphor is no

Most importantly, the opponents of metaphor fail to appreciate how

As implied above, the focus of this collection is firmly on the meta-

critically on the political implications of metaphor and metonymy in

writing in English. Communication is always a matter of compromise,

In Chapter 3, Adriano Elia’s study of the fiction of Mohsin Hamid

how Phillips’s work seeks to foster attunement to multiple histories of

In his book Multiculturalism (2007), Tariq Modood argues a strong case

and fluid, yet most often overdetermined by racism. Place is consist-

and gender conflicts, aggravated by racism, unsympathetic or aggres-

of the destructive role of inflexible ideologies – Soviet, US and Islamist –

2 Writing community and identity:

source of metaphor throughout the text. It weaves together the stories

residents and middle-class Asians have moved away. In the words of

[a] rundown neighbourhood of one suicide attempt a year, 29 peo-

It is a neighbourhood isolated by class, language, culture, forced to look

2.1 Religion in the diaspora

The novel’s presentation of gender and adult-child relations is far from

Years of racism and systematic impoverishment of these communi-

Racism in the novel is presented as a part of everyday life that pro-

one of the brothers suspected of Jugnu and Chanda’s murder is severely

2.3 Coping strategies: family and community

Everyone here was imprisoned in the cage of others’ thoughts.

them as a lamp with a genie was of no use to a person whose tongue

The novel compares her to a moth pressed to a windowpane, in sharp

If there is a unifying trope in the depiction of individual lives that

the vase Shamas had brought from Pakistan in the 1950s – as a

For many first-generation settlers, religion becomes the main way of

3 Metaphor and perspective

Multiple perspectives are central to the analysis of community in

[Shamas] stretches out an arm to receive the small light snowflakes

of ice before melting to water – crystals of snow transformed into a

In addition to descriptions and metaphors drawn from the natural

4 Conclusion: Muslims and the politics

The differences between forms of belief in Islam, in particular between

strength and group oppression of those who do not belong – be they