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INTRODUCTION
It is now generally accepted that London is one of the most appealing
capitals in the word, standing out for its uniqueness and separateness from the rest
of the United Kingdom. It can be regarded as a kind of magnet attracting thousands
of tourists every year. But where does its alluring power come from? There might be
indeed something special about this place if in 1979 a famous British Punk group
known as The Clash released a song entitled „London Calling‟, which not only gave
name to their third album but more so became the motto of any would-be
Londoner. Even though you have never visited it, you have already a clear picture of
it in your mind thanks to its iconic symbols: the River Thames, the Houses of
Parliament with its worldly-famous Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, its red double-
decker buses and overcrowded underground service more commonly known as the
Tube, its relentless life as well as its entertainments at all hours of the day and night.
Behind the city‟s glittering facade, however, there is another side of the story
which is often left unsaid. It is the story of discrimination as well as exclusion of
minority groups from the English community just because of their darker skin shade
or their inability to speak proper English. The aim of this dissertation is thus to
provide a more factual account of the capital of England and the United Kingdom
by exposing these hidden stories thanks to a postcolonial approach to the city,
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stemming both from my university studies and my personal experience as a
Londoner.
In order to be introduced to the complex and multifaceted problem of
immigration, I have drawn inspiration from some canonic texts such as Imagining
London by John Clement Ball, Gli Studi Postcoloniali edited by Bassi and Sirotti as well
as Roberto Bertinettis‟ Londra: Un viaggio in una metropoli che non si ferma mai, which
have been later combined with my own impressions gathered during my three-
month internship period in the capital city. Particularly important were my
exploratory tours of the city because it was the very act of walking or taking the tube
which enabled me to come into contact with different people, and thereby acquire a
better understanding of London‟s multiethnic society.
As a regard to that, I have carried out some interviews with three second-
generation London newcomers from which I have partially quoted in order to
demonstrate how the highly controversial topic of racism and racial discrimination
has been experienced personally. In order not to violate the interviewees‟ privacy, I
have given them three fictitious pseudonyms, namely Kajal, Alisha and Tamar.
Moreover, I have disclosed only those personal data which have been indispensable
for framing their personal experiences within the phenomenon of large-scale
migrations from the so-called Commonwealth: their original homelands, that is to
say India, West Indies and South Africa respectively, and their average age of forty,
which confirms their belonging to the second-generation.
After a careful reading selection, I have later decided to focus on five novels
written by contemporary postcolonial women writers, namely Atima Srivastava‟s
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Looking for Maya (1999), Zadie Smith‟s White Teeth (2000), Monica Ali‟s Brick Lane
(2003) as well as Andrea Levy‟s Never Far From Nowhere (1996) and Small Island
(2004). The selection of these novels has been made on account of their recent date
of publication and, more importantly, their approach to postcolonial London from a
female point of view.
As far as the division of the chapters is concerned, the first one is an
overview of the historical as well as sociocultural context of London‟s contemporary
society, starting from the post-war period until present day. Such an excursus has
been useful to lay the foundations for framing the novels analysed in the following
chapters, which are all variations on the theme of new postcolonial identities in
London. To be more precise, the second chapter is focused on the generational gap
between immigrants of first, second and third generation. The third chapter is
dedicated to women‟s more deeply marginalized position on the grounds of race
and sex, and the fourth one is meant to be a remapping of London town from a
geographic as well as narrative viewpoint.
Although each novel is set in a different time, there is a common
denominator through which they are all united, that is to say the underlying racism
perpetrated in London‟s society as a whole. This is particularly true if we focus on
the span of time stretching from the post-war Windrush period, witnessed by
Andrea Levy‟s Small Island, and somehow also by Zadie Smith‟s White Teeth, to the
racial tensions between the 1970s and 1980s emphasised in Never Far From Nowhere
as well as Monica Ali‟s Brick Lane. The latter then serves as a bridge to introduce
present-day London along with Atima Srivastava‟s Looking for Maya, especially if we
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think about the 11 September 2001 attacks mentioned in the second part of Brick
Lane.
By combining the interviews together with the close reading of the novels, I
have attempted to provide fragmented visions of London demonstrating how it is
from the collection of these postcolonial fragments which is possible to achieve a
whole sight of the city. Along with that, the very act of giving voice to those colonial
subject who have been too often kept in silence has given the opportunity to reverse
the hierarchical relations between colonizer and colonized and expose how certain
overrated concepts such as multiculturality and tolerance are but hypocritical
facades of a more complex reality.
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CHAPTER ONE
POSTCOLONIAL,
MULTICULTURAL LONDON?
Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to
leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired
of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. (James
Boswell)
Johnson‟s prominent assertion taken from Boswell‟s Life of Samuel Johnson
LL. D. (1791) has become part and parcel of the collective imagination about the
capital city of England and the United Kingdom so that it is not unsurprising to find
it quoted even in city guides and in the plethora of travel web sites which introduce
you to the attractiveness of London city itself. This is particularly true if we think
about the crowds of people that the latter has been attracting from all over the
world, especially since the post-war period with the arrival of the so-called SS Empire
Windrush, the steamship docking at Tilbury on 22 June 1948 which “brought the
first generation of migrant workers from the Caribbean to England, and therefore
played an integral part in the origins of multi-cultural Britain.” (SS Empire
Windrush)
As Carmen Concilio argues in her brief overview entitled “Babylondon”, the
first Commonwealth migrants went ashore with great expectations about the big city
and the Calypsonian Aldwyn Roberts, better known as Lord Kitchener, witnessed it
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in his song “London is the place for me.” (Bassi, Sirotti 165) However, this wave of
optimism was quickly disillusioned as soon as UK migration controls began and
violent outbreaks of racism towards black people or „people of colour‟ - as they
have often been labelled - became more and more frequent, especially during the
government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (1979-1990) By following
Concilio‟s argument, in fact, the overall mood was drastically changed in the 1980s
as the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson versified it in one of his famous political
poems:
Inglan is a bitch
Dere‟s no escapin‟ it
Inglan is a bitch
Dere‟s no runnin‟ whey fram it.
(Johnson)
After all, the seeds of fear and frustration were already sowed in the post-
war years in what has been regarded as the „Windrush generation‟ (The Windrush
Generation), and the British Caribbean novelist Samuel Selvon is a clear example of
that. As it is suggested in Ball‟s Imagining London, in fact, Selvon‟s semi-
autobiographical novel The Lonely Londoners (1956) embodies a kind of ambiguous
“combination of London‟s size and power with dismay at its dehumanizing and
isolating exclusion.” (23) This is reminiscent of Friedrich Engels‟ sense of wonder
before “the marvel of England‟s greatness before [one] sets foot upon English soil”
combined with the consciousness that “Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the
best qualities of their human nature” in order to build up the centre of their Empire.
(Engels quoted in Ball 22)
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Similarly, the main character in The Lonely Londoners, Moses, comes to realize
that “the streets of London paved with gold” (103) naively dreamed by West
Indians are nothing but dirtiness and chaos; but more painful is the realization that:
„This is a lonely miserable city […] Nobody in London does really
accepts you. They tolerate you, yes, but you can‟t go in their house
and eat or sit down and talk.‟ (130)
By giving an historical as well as sociocultural background, my aim here is to
present London as a complex and multifaceted city which has long proposed itself
to the world as the urban model par excellence together with other metropolitan
cities such as Tokyo, Paris, New York, and Toronto as Carmen Concilio reminds us
(Bassi, Sirotti 165), or the „heart of empire‟ as it has been referred to in colonial
terms. It is time now to look at it from a purely postcolonial perspective, as a kind
of “decentred centre” (Ball 13), because every single centre is connected to a
number of countless peripheries which contribute all to shape and reshape the
centre itself. Perhaps this is the first step we can take in order to strive against the
Western imperial mind, which made Britain “administer a wide-flung empire
according to a number of central principles” depending on “the central authority at
home in London” so to recall Edward Said‟s Orientalism. (44)
Starting in the late 15th century, the British Empire was able to impose its
authority by means of colonies and dominions until it reached, on the eve of the
First World War, a peak of “over one fifth of the world‟s entire population”
stretching from Canada to India, from Africa to Australia as it is argued in Timeline:
From Empire to Commonwealth. Arguably, what allowed to rule over such a vast empire
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was the so-called strategy of paternalism for which the old London was portrayed as
a benevolent father taking care of “his colonial children.” (Said, Orientalism 245)
With the decline of the Empire and its consequent decolonisation throughout the
20th century, most of its colonies gradually gained independence and, in parallel,
joined the so-called “Commonwealth” of nations, including Australia, Canada,
South Africa and New Zealand in 1931. (Timeline) As a result of that, large-scale
migrations coming from the New Commonwealth members flooded into the heart
of the empire reversing the former power relations between colonisers and
colonised, centre and peripheries.
As far as the centre-periphery dichotomy is concerned, Malcom Andrews
gives an important contribution in Landscape and Western Art (1999) in that he calls
into question Nicholas Green‟s notion of „codes of looking.‟ With the aim of
proposing a cross confrontation between the city and the countryside, Andrews puts
an emphasis on what Green has referred to as „the individualization of vision‟,
which is to say the fragmentation of urban life. In so doing, the author takes
London as an example explaining how “the sprawling metropolis cannot be
totalized in any one perspective.”(16) It is precisely such a peripheral, let‟s even say
individualised vision of the capital city which I will try to present in this study.
To begin with, it is important to raise the issue of multiculturalism, which
has recently become a highly controversial topic. As it has already been hinted at,
nowadays it is generally agreed that London is “a cosmopolitan, multicultural city.”
(OALD) However, the very notion of „multicultural‟ is much more complex and,
more importantly, it does not necessarily mean openness to all cultures in a society
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as the term would seem to suggest. This is particularly true if we think about the fact
that “the foundations of British multiculturalism were firmly laid as it drafted
legislation ending Commonwealth migration.” (Hansen 20) Just to give an example,
the British Nationality Act 1981 was liable for imposing severe tolerance limits on
British national identity.
This is a crucial issue which will be delved into further on in this chapter,
but what I would like to point out now is that it was the state itself which played a
major role “in the construction of post-war British racism.” (Hansen 11) As a regard
to that, Salman Rushdie himself exposed the government‟s complicity with anti-
immigration hostility in the early 1980s. By talking about the approval of the British
Nationality Act 1981 in Imaginary Homelands (1991), he stated that black and Asian
Britons were suddenly stolen of their ius soli or “the right to citizenship by virtue of
birth” so that from that moment citizenship became “the gift of government.” (136)
In another passage of his critique, the British-Indian novelist and essayist
offers us another illuminating insight into the very issue of multiculturalism, which
helps us unveil its hidden meaning:
At first, we were told, the goal was „integration‟. Now this word
rapidly came to mean „assimilation‟: a black man could only
became integrated when he started behaving like a white one.
After „integration‟ came the concept of „racial harmony‟ […] And
now there‟s a new catchword: „multiculturalism‟. In our schools,
this means little more than teaching the kids a few bongo
rhythms, how to tie a sari and so forth. In the police training
programme, it means telling cadets that black people are so
„culturally different‟ that they can‟t help making troubles.
Multiculturalism is the latest token gesture towards Britain‟s
blacks, and it ought to be exposed, like „integration‟ and „racial
harmony‟, for the sham it is. (137)
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