New Postcolonial British Genres

Shifting the Boundaries

Sarah Ilott

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137505224
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This study analyses four new genres of literature and film that have evolved to accommodate and negotiate the changing face of postcolonial Britain since 1990: British Muslim Bildungsromane, gothic tales of postcolonial England, the subcultural urban novel and multicultural British comedy.

1

British Muslim Bildungsromane

At the time of writing, members of parliament have recently felt justified in asking British Muslims to ‘explain and demonstrate how faith in Islam can be part of British identity’ in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings (January 2015), in terms that imply their inherent opposition.¹ I argue, therefore, that it is more important than ever to consider the nuanced accounts of Muslim faith and identity provided in fiction and to evaluate critically the relationship between Britishness and Islam enacted therein. This relationship is foregrounded through the identity crises experienced by the protagonists of these Bildungsromane. The chapter title deliberately evokes the plural form of ‘Bildungsroman’ to indicate that the genre – as with the spectrum of ‘belief attitudes’² displayed by authors and protagonists – cannot be considered as monolithic. The chapter examines Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995), Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) and Minaret (2005) and Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus (2008).

Religious identity has been brought to the fore in western media following the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks, in ways that often seek (overtly or covertly) to distinguish between ‘us’ (secular, western, benign) and ‘them’ (Muslim, non-western, threatening). For Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, what we see in the western media today ‘is the distortion of particular features of Muslim life and custom, reducing the diversity of Muslims and their existence as individuals to a fixed object – a caricature in fact’.³ They argue that this ‘distortion’ is brought about through ‘framing structures’ that ‘rather than being descriptive and neutral […] are defined by questions of belonging, “Otherness,” and “threat”’.⁴ This in itself highlights the importance of critically evaluating the representation of religious discourses in literature and the media. The critic Amin Malak goes one step further to highlight why the reintroduction of religion as a postcolonial topic is of paramount importance, arguing that the ‘resistance to engage with religion as a key category pertinent to the debate about contemporary neo-colonial reality’ effectively ‘privilege[es] a secular, Euro-American stance that seems to shape the parameters of postcolonial discourses’ (emphasis in original).⁵ As he postulates, excluding religion from postcolonial studies is itself a prejudice of a Euro-American project that should be remedied.

The birth of the Bildungsroman is often dated back to the publication of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in 1795⁶ and the form was popularised in Europe over the course of the following century, with a host of authors – including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Alessandro Manzoni, Stendhal, and Ivan Turgenev – adopting it to great effect. The Bildungsroman (from the German for a novel of education or transformation) is a novel form predisposed towards discussions of identity in crisis, as youthful protagonists consider various ontologies that they will either accept or reject in their paths to maturity, self-awareness and autonomy. In his work on the significance of the Bildungsroman in European culture, Franco Moretti highlights a number of points that I read as indicating the particular suitability of the form for the purpose of representing and negotiating British Muslim identities. Primarily, Moretti terms it the ‘most contradictory of modern symbolic forms’ in which ‘we realize that in our world socialization itself consists first of all in the interiorization of contradiction’ (emphasis in original). Accordingly, the form is fitting for negotiating perceived binaries, such as culturally constructed oppositions between Britishness and Islam, or between national and religious modes of affiliation. The Bildungsroman, for Moretti, enables not the resolution to the contradiction, but the ability to live with it.⁷ This is particularly pertinent for the novels considered below, as rather than rejecting one identity in favour of another, protagonists often eschew the construction of different modes of affiliation as mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the Bildungsroman has traditionally been concerned with the construction of normality ‘from within rather than from the stance of its exceptions’⁸ (emphasis in original), which I suggest makes it particularly apt for the consideration of an identity group that, as Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin suggest, is often ‘narrowed to mean all that is threatening and foreign’.⁹ British Muslim Bildungsromane engage the quotidian construction of British Muslim identity from within, which serves in part to remedy the hyperbolised construction of the Muslim as nightmare Other, in the form of the terrorist or suicide bomber.

The subgenre that I identify here has parallels with what Mark Stein has termed the ‘black British novel of transformation’, in which the reworked Bildungsroman genre allows for the ‘formation of its protagonists’ alongside the ‘transformation of British society and cultural institutions’ (emphases in original).¹⁰ Stein suggests that British society and culture is transformed through these novels as they enable the conception of a wider range of subject positions with which one might identify. British Muslim Bildungsromane similarly make available a broader range of subject positions that are crucial in challenging the representation of Islam as monolithic and in perpetual opposition to notions of Britishness. Yet while in Stein’s remapping of the Bildungsroman genre the focus of affiliation and the site of transformation is resolutely national, I suggest that British Muslim Bildungsromane demonstrate that national affiliation is only one of many ways of identifying. Rather than transforming national identities through the transgression of space enabled through patterns of migration that Stein posits as ‘eroding national borders’,¹¹ religious affiliations coexist with and overlay national ones, as the Muslim ummah offers an alternative affiliative space and means of communal identification. In the texts I consider here, ‘British’ and ‘Muslim’ are not constructed as mutually exclusive, but rather represent two modes of affiliation that are negotiated and variously adopted by protagonists.

As well as being a genre well suited to the negotiation of identity, critic Feroza Jussawalla suggests that the postcolonial Bildungsroman also has an ideological function, as protagonists inevitably refuse a hybrid identity. Jussawalla denies the common equation of postcoloniality and postmodernity ‘as a hybrid flux and merging, or the problematizing of cultures at various interstices,’ arguing instead that ‘postcoloniality constitutes a rejection of hybridity and a turn toward nationhood’. In support of this, she notes as a common trait that the ‘postcolonial hero/heroine/protagonist seems to refuse to inhabit a “border” liminal space and finds such a space uncomfortable’.¹² The Bildungsroman functions as a quest for identity, a means of finding an authoritative meaning in the protagonist’s life, and as Stein and Jussawala have both recognised, it also serves to comment on society. But it is the additional concern for refusing hybrid identities as identified by Jussawalla that is the key conceptual turning point for all of the novels that I analyse in this chapter. Unlike the celebration of newness, hybridity and transformation exercised in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the novels considered here have an affinity with the postcolonial Bildungsroman as defined by Jussawalla, insomuch as they similarly engage with the discomfort of a hybrid identity by seeking stable modes of affiliation and identification, or struggling with their absence.

Following the work of Esra Mirze Santesso in Disorientation, I argue that hybridity is a problematically celebrated term for the negotiation of affiliations and identities, particularly in the case of religious identities. Santesso highlights the inherently problematic manner in which hybridity is constructed in opposition to ‘the pure or the traditional or the nationalist’, effectively ‘participating in the validation of binaries rather than circumventing the essentialist rhetoric associated with it’.¹³ This tendency is outlined in my discussion of The Satanic Verses in the Introduction, in which ‘the Pure’ is the straw man against which flux, change, transformation and hybridity are pitted. Furthermore, in the process of opening up postcolonial criticism to the discussion of religious identities (often elided in the favour of national, ethnic or cultural ones) it is necessary to adopt an appropriate vocabulary, and hybridity is ill-suited to the topic. As Santesso rightly states, ‘while hybridity can act as a productive site of self-fashioning in terms of race, nation and even sexuality, it ceases to function when it comes to organised faith. Simply put, given its monologic structure, religious identity resists any form of hybridisation’.¹⁴ This chapter accordingly refers to the negotiation of affiliations in which the purported desirability of transformation is subordinated to desires for stability and the preservation of religious identities in an otherwise shifting world.

This (re)turn to religious identities countermands an emerging literary trend identified by Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate in The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11, in which the critics suggest that the absence of God is no longer experienced as a trauma:

Whereas Matthew Arnold and the other giants of nineteenth century literary scepticism famously experienced the death of the Judaeo-Christian God as a terrifying, even bewildering, loss, Amis, McEwan, Pullman and Rushdie depict it as a natural, inevitable and entirely welcome phenomenon that is no more traumatic than disbelief in Zeus, Thor or Father Xmas.¹⁵

The authors considered in this chapter write against the trend that Bradley and Tate have identified among ‘new atheists’. In their works, even if the idea of a God is not wholeheartedly embraced, the absence or ‘God-Shaped Hole’ is painfully experienced by the various protagonists, recapturing the sense of loss for the death of God and the desire to reformulate a basis for meaning.

British Muslim Bildungsromane explore networks of affiliations, representing the desire for a fixed mode of identifying by engaging with the trauma of its absence. The disorientation engendered by a collapse of meaning is explored via the trope of the absent father and through a return to realist modes of writing. Moving away from overly sanguine or optimistic accounts of hybrid identities, this chapter foregrounds readings of painful processes of transformation or conversion that bespeak the desire for a stable identity and belief system that will reinvest the world with meaning and the possibility of communal identification. The recentralisation of religion in the novels is marked via the use of metaphors of rebirth and conversion to understand processes of identification as well as the prioritisation of a religious identity that can transcend national borders. I argue throughout that the foregrounding of religious discourse in the novels is linked to a quest for new narratives of Britishness that are open to alternative ways of identifying.

‘Mustafa’s official version’: fatherhood and authority¹⁶

Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus and Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album explore the loss of a sense of meaning and a desire for grand narratives to fill this void. In The Road from Damascus, the attraction of grand narratives is primarily enacted through the long and troubled soul-searching of British–Syrian protagonist, Sami Traifi, as he struggles to find a fitting identity. His spiritual journey takes him down a number of routes, as he dabbles with mind-altering drugs, contests his wife’s decision to adopt the hijab, attempts an academic lifestyle and returns to his parents’ homeland in Syria, all the while struggling with questions of belief and choices that affect both him and his loved ones.

The Black Album traces the story of Shahid as he moves from his parents’ house in the suburbs into central London and begins college. As he tries to make friends in his new surroundings, he is caught between Riaz and his group of Muslim ‘brothers’ and his lecturer, Deedee Osgood, who lives and preaches a life of freedom, hedonism and pop-cultural mélange. The novel operates around a binary whereby these lifestyles are mutually exclusive and Shahid – caught in the middle (at times physically as well as figuratively) – must decide where he wants to locate his own sense of identity. The physical trauma that he feels as a result of these warring selves is expressed as the numbing sensation of being lost in ‘a room of broken mirrors, with jagged reflections backing into eternity’ (147).

Both Kureishi and Yassin-Kassab draw on the motif of the absent father to signify the end of a certain form of authority. For Sigmund Freud, dreams of killing the father mark a normal stage of (male) childhood development.¹⁷ But when the father-figure is (always) already dead – as is the case for Kureishi’s and Yassin-Kassab’s protagonists whose fathers died during their childhoods – there is a developmental gap and they are unable to seize the authority of the father, their fathers having been taken from them too early and against their will. Using Peter Brooks’s formulation for aligning psychoanalytic and textual functioning, it is possible to understand how readers’ desires might be manipulated into reflecting those of the protagonist. Brooks asserts that ‘psychoanalysis promises and requires, that in addition to such usual narratological preoccupations as function, sequence, and paradigm, we engage the dynamic of memory and the history of desire as they work to reshape the recovery of meaning within time’.¹⁸ By rendering the novels’ patriarchs present in their absence, the authors ensure that their narratives structurally reflect the psychological absence in the characters’ lives, creating desire in the reader for the ‘recovery of meaning’ as symbolised by the absent fathers. What is more, the fathers of the novels considered here are also symbolic of God, meaning that the moment of death simultaneously signifies the death of grand narratives and meaning.

Sami suffers a long period of estrangement from his mother, due largely to a (perhaps misplaced) idolisation of his father (Mustafa) who died during his childhood. As a hangover from this childhood admiration and subsequent loss, he frequently refers to ‘Mustafa’s official version’ – the world according to the unquestioned authority of the boy’s father (334). It is only later in the novel that his father is brought down to an earthly level through his mother’s accusations, meaning that Sami is liberated from a one-dimensional view of the world and no longer has to live under his father’s shadow. However, Sami’s liberation from the idealised version of his father comes at a price and he feels the loss acutely: ‘Of course his father wasn’t up there. His father was far too small, like any of us. Sami felt fear and trembling. Felt the emptiness of a burning heart’ (348). The physical pain manipulating Sami’s body demonstrates the significance of the loss and reveals the role that his father formerly occupied. The language employed also situates his father as G...