Articles

Posted by Free Word on 5/11/11

Rachida Lamrabet is the Free Word Centre’s Writer in Residence. She has been corresponding with Neel Mukherjee, who is resident at the International House of Literature in Brussels, ‘Passa Porta’.

Dear Neel,

My God, Neel, how do you manage to write in this city? How do you manage to shut this city out, distance yourself from it and bring your inner world to the fore?

Do Londoners ever sleep?

I suppose one gets used to anything, the noise, the lights, the traffic and the millions of people. As long as you wander round long enough amidst all this commotion.

I don’t have time to get used to it. I go on the bus and the underground. Bus no. 19 goes from Battersea Bridge over the river, straight past an endless succession of glittering shops. One shopping street after the other, the smartest boutiques and the most exclusive labels. You don’t see many ‘ordinary’ shops in this part of town. Small baker’s shops have become extinct and the same fate awaits small bookshops. Like Starbucks and McDonalds, Waterstones, a big chain of bookshops, is on almost every street corner.

The French sociologist Durkheim called it Le mal de l’infini, the destructive and unbounded desire for more and more. Now that I ride past this terrible excess of inaccessible wealth day after day, I’ve become convinced that it’s much too easy to dismiss what happened here several months ago as just blind vandalism and looting. There is something fundamentally wrong in our society and it triggers young people’s fury and lust for destruction.

There are a huge number of stories in this boundless city, and you cannot but listen, watch, and wonder where it continues to derive its energy. For those who know how to surf on this energy, the possibilities are limitless. All the rest are pushed aside.

It is very difficult to close yourself off from this city and I wonder how you cope with it. How do you remain master of your own literary ambition and agenda in a city that forces you to take sides and nail your colours to the mast? In a city that draws you into its swirling stories.

There is a great temptation to be not just an outsider, but a genuine part of the city. Someone who doesn’t just hear the city’s heartbeat, but feels it too.

London gives you this space, so you can pretend you’re not a foreigner, pretend you’re a part of the city, pretend you know perfectly well where you’re going. Colour, ethnicity and religion seem not to matter.

I was convinced that the British were less forced in their attitude to diversity. I have to admit that the policemen in turbans appealed to my imagination. I thought that in London there was no possibility of the one-sided story that the English-speaking Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie warned of.

Or is this just a splendid illusion?

Though the Office of National Statistics is highly proficient in classifying its subjects by colour.

This institution has a colour for each population group. The largest group is still the whites, who are also subdivided into British whites, followed by Irish whites. A small minority is defined as ‘other whites’. It should be clear that you can’t put all whites in one basket. And because the skin colour of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis is so hard to capture in a single description, the institution has the name ‘South Asians’ for this category of people.

It’s not so difficult to classify the people of Sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean, using the categories British, African and Caribbean blacks with, just like the whites, a category for the rest too: ‘other blacks’. There are countless variations on ‘mixed race’. The fact that there is no scientific foundation for dividing the human species by so-called race appears to be no obstacle to this institution.

In British statistics the Chinese simply remain Chinese.

For all other indefinable colours there is the category called ‘other ethnic groups’.

So in your country they count coloured beads.

In our country there are also people who dream of being able to count coloured beads and put them in the right compartments; how much clearer it would make life.

When I asked Kamila Shamsie about how her work is perceived, she says: ‘Here too, as a non-white British writer it’s very difficult to be counted as part of mainstream literature’.

As a British-Pakistani writer she is perceived above all as a female Muslim whose task it is to interpret the political situation in Pakistan.

‘You have to go along with this logic to some extent, but you have to set your limits before it goes too far.’

Neel, how do you set your limits? And how do you make sure that you aren’t just reduced to your ethnicity or your supposed beliefs?

London and the rest of the United Kingdom are of course not immune to the spirit of the age and the wind of fear and distrust that is blowing over Western Europe.

Here too the debate on multiculturalism, nationality and immigration are becoming increasingly acute, especially after the attacks in 2005.

But still, it seems that your country has succeeded to a certain extent in keeping the fear of the other under control. I have the feeling that people talk to each other more here, and no longer about how desirable or otherwise a multicultural society is; I’m afraid that on the European continent we are still stuck in that very twentieth-century way of thinking on multiculturalism where there are only two options: either we consider it a feast or we think it’s a hell and have to look for ways of returning to the pre-multicultural era when everything was so much better.

Here, multiculturalism itself doesn’t seem to be a real issue. It is a fact; it is what British society is like. The debate is more about looking for a balanced way of living. About the question of how you can use this variety to advantage, and what interesting things may occur when you bring these different cultures and languages into contact with each other. This sort of hybrid artistic expression seems to find its way to the surface more easily here. In the sixties there were already mixed theatre companies here that experimented with a non-Western canon, who for example drew on Zulu stories and the epic Indian stories from the Mahabharata.

I get the feeling that as a result of this longer tradition of multiple voices, artists feel much less called upon to represent the community they come from, even though there is still the expectation that theatre-makers and writers are the voice of ‘their’ community.

And according to me this gives artists a great freedom, the freedom to develop one’s own voice and tell one’s own stories. This is priceless, since as an artist one does not after all want to be simply a channel for stories that have already been told; you want to shape your own view of the world.

I’m looking forward to your reply.