Books
The longest journey. Post-imperial writing is suffused by a sense of exile and loss. But what the authors have most in common is the pursuit of individual freedom, argues Robert Winder
Published 13 March 2000
Voices of the Crossing
Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan Serpent's Tail, 179pp, £11
ISBN 1852425830
The idea that contemporary English literature finds its liveliest expression in the once-colonised tropics has become one of the busiest cliches of contemporary belles-lettres. Each year, the Booker shortlist is hastily scanned for evidence of foreign bodies; and under headlines such as "The Empire Strikes Back", the funeral rites for that pale and exhausted creature, the Anglo-Saxon author, are read with a gleeful frown. It is a mystery why anyone should be surprised that a country such as India, say, with a population of nearly a billion, should produce the odd brilliant novelist. But for trend-spotters the notion is appealing and resilient. It is probably true that writers such as V S Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Ben Okri, Hanif Kureishi, Anita Desai and Caryl Phillips (to name but a few) have added new dimensions and a new vocabulary to the novel as we know it. But to suggest that it follows that the "periphery" is somehow more dynamic than the "centre" is crude, not to say condescending: even to call such writers "peripheral" implies a continuing reflexive belief in the imperial hierarchy by which remote colonial satellites revolve around the luminous British sun.
In any case, literature tends to be written by individuals, not groups. The editors of Voices of the Crossing, a fine anthology of 14 memoirs by writers from Africa, the Caribbean, India and Pakistan, are keen to emphasise that the writers share a "creative predicament", as if they all found themselves locked up in the same grisly prison cell. And it is true that they have all been obliged to confront the tangled bequest of imperial experience, its dislocations and opportunities (for quite a few of the contributors, the "creative predicament" included a spell at Oxford University). But they represent a wide range of human experience, these men and women from Nigeria, Jamaica, Guyana, Karachi and Bombay; it seems belittling to consider them as a single species. What they seem to share, if anything, is a fierce commitment to individual freedom - in particular, their own. This alone might be enough to explain the success of their novels, given that the novel is a form ideally suited to charting the quest for individual dignity or happiness, tracking the adventures of a loner - an Emma, an Oliver, a Mr Biswas - in a sometimes cruel world.
Not that the immediate slings and arrows of exile can be easily dismissed. The playwright and poet E A Markham, in the first of the book's essays, outlines the central vexation of immigrant life very neatly. "Though there was no particular trauma in leaving home," he writes, "there was, on coming to England, some dismay to find the general assumption was that you had left nothing of value behind." Immigrants have always been made forcibly aware of the icy relationship between the so-called centre and the so-called periphery - this may be a construct of the imperial imagination, but it has teeth - and it bites. And the awful signs that they encountered outside hostels in Paddington ("No Blacks, No Jews, No Dogs") were the surface traces of a profounder incuriosity. One of the more awkward roles that has been thrust upon the writers in this collection is the obligation to protect and retrieve ways of life that risked being erased or forgotten - to be, in effect, travel writers bringing news of the countries they have left.
If many of them write fondly, perhaps even sentimentally, about their childhood, it is partly because an immigrant is, first and foremost, an emigrant. They might have had one eye optimistically fixed on the prospect of a better life in a new land; but the other eye is forever glancing guiltily over their shoulder, back at the land they have abandoned. It is by no means an enviable position to be in; but, as the essays in this book amply demonstrate, it does gives them a good view of a central modern subject: the commotions and ruptures of displacement. The imperial colonisation of language and culture was far-reaching. In Jamaica, B A Gilroy grew up singing the Eton boating song ("though none of us knew who or what Eton was"); in Nigeria, the children at Buchi Emecheta's Methodist Girl's High School were fined a penny if they were caught speaking their own language (Yoruba); in Pakistan, Rukhsana Ahmad was "firmly persuaded" that literature was the preserve of people who lived in London, or perhaps Bath. There are some inspiring models of literature in a second language - Conrad, Nabokov - but nothing can quite assuage the vexed sense of loss in these accounts.
And for what? One of the key moments in the literature of exile comes in Naipaul's The Mimic Men. Naipaul is much mentioned in these despatches - he is a crotchety father figure both to the Caribbean writers and to those from India. They find themselves following, willy-nilly, in the footsteps of his post-imperial odysseys, and retreating his human comedies of doggedness and persistence. In The Mimic Men, he identifies one of the central disillusionments of the colonial experience when it dawns on Rahul Singh that the great stones of London, which he has dreamt of and sanctified in his imagination, had no special or sacred depth - they were just stones. Each of the writers in this collection has to make this discovery afresh - an awkward imposition. The Bombay-born critic Homi Bhabha regards this perplexing revelation as the most important lesson he had to learn in England: "What one expects to find at the very centre of life or literature may only be the dream of the powerless." After a long pursuit, you reach the holy grail and find it . . . empty. The blank page remains blank.
Ironically, then, the memoirs in this book, while not the major works of any of the writers concerned, might be as significant as their more ambitious work. Farrukh Dhondy writes caustically about literature that pleads for sympathy; and David Dabydeen is relaxed enough to have some fun with the idea that he is owed anything ("I really don't mind being a victim of the British appetite for the exotic," he writes. "I'll gladly jostle in the queue for handouts and reparations.") But these works are, in the end, not polemical. They are more direct, eye-opening tributes to the spirited resolve that underpins all literature, not just "colonial" literature.
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