Multiculturalism and Contemporary British Fiction : Londonstani and The Islamist

Multiculturalism and Contemporary British Fiction: Londonstani and The Islamist  Adriano Elia University of Rome “Roma Tre”  In order to analyse all‐encompassing issues such as ‘Europe’, ‘black’ and ‘white’, at the beginning of the 21st century a reification of post‐colonial and cultural studies theoretical tools is made possible by an ever‐increasing permeability of the boundaries between subjects such as literature, sociology, contemporary history, political science, international relations, anthropology. By pursuing an interdisciplinary and pragmatic approach, one finds it difficult to identify a persuasive idea of ‘Europe’ when even its ‘capital’ Brussels has to face an identity compromise between Flemish and Walloons (AlSayyad, Castells 2002: p. 3); by the same token, it is hard to imagine that, say, Scottish people would define themselves first as Europeans, and then as British and Scottish − the opposite sequential order is much more likely. Traditional categories such as ‘black’ and ‘white’ are also being repeatedly challenged and disrupted, witness the recent publication of novels such as Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) and Ed Husain’s The Islamist (2007). The former displays a religion‐free kind of identity describing the life of apolitical British‐Asian teenage rude‐boys; the latter, instead, is based on a real account of a British Muslim who, after becoming an Islamic fundamentalist, rejected political Islam and returned to normal life. Bearing in mind the diverse colonial histories and the dangers of historical revisionism, my essay aims to investigate the anti‐essentialist condition of the ‘black’ British community, at times erroneously seen as a monolithic entity.1

Racial essentialism involves the attribution of a particular, fixed and immutable character to a group of people: in other words, it is a homogenising mental construction imbued with preconceptions and stereotypes. It is beyond the scope of this paper to contribute to the discussion around the complex and nuanced issue of racial essentialism. A lively debate on this notion was triggered, among others, by scholars such as Paul Gilroy and his critique of racial purism and absolutism; Salman Rushdie's idea of racial essentialism as the consequence of an old-fashioned exoticism that sees any ethnic community as a homogenous whole; or Gayatri Spivak's 'strategic essentialism', a profitable, if provisional, strategy by which an ethnic group deliberately 'forgets' the differences between its members in order to claim its group identity for political purposes. 2 What I would like to offer here instead is some concrete evidence of the multifaceted state of affairs of the 'black' community in Britain. Indeed, contemporary British fiction may reveal the striking mutual differences between people supposedly belonging to the same community, and may thus offer a valuable cultural space to approach the idiosyncracies of Londonstani's 'apolitical rudeboys' and of 'ex radicals' like Ed Husain in The Islamist. Then, on this basis, I will engage in a brief discussion of multiculturalism in the United Kingdom and its alleged death by cultural relativism and political correctness after the July 7 2005 London bombings.
Londonstani is the debut novel by Gautam Malkani, a journalist born in Hounslow, West London, in 1976, educated at Cambridge and director of the Creative Business section of the Financial Times. Londonstani is a coming-of-age novel set in Hounslow. 3 The narrator is Jas, an 18-year old 'Londonstani', a resident of 'Londonistan'. He is trying to fit in with a gang of affluent middle-class teenage 2 Gilroy (1993: pp. 99-103) transcends the binary opposition between racial essentialism and antiessentialism, moving towards an 'anti-anti-essentialism'. See also Rushdie (1991Rushdie ( [1983: p. 67); Spivak (1996 [1985]: p. 214); and <http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Essentialism.html>. 3 The following details on the plot are taken from a range of written and web interviews with Malkani. Further information on the novel is available on the web, notably at the following links: <http://www.gautammalkani.com/about_londonstani.htm> <http://www.myspace.com/londonstani> <http://www.timeout.com/london/books/features/249.html> mummy's boys struggling to be tough men and pretending to be more ghettoed than they actually are. The gang leader is the Sikh bodybuilder Harjit, who likes to spell his name with a 'd', Hardjit, to suggest he is hard (Malkani 2006a, p. 116). He makes sure that his Sikh 'bredrens' do not go out with Muslim girls even though he knows nothing about the historical reasons behind that conflict (i.e., the 1947 partition). The second-in-command is Amit, a Hindu more mature than the others; then we have Ravi, one who is a 'sheep', the typical copycat following the others' behaviour and suppressing his own personality. While retaking their A-levels, these wanna-be rudeboys are obsessed with macho and consumerist symbols like facial hair, designer fashion, mobile phones, hip-hop. They cruise Hounslow streets driving German luxury cars belonging to their parents, and make money out of a mobile phone scam involving reprogramming stolen mobiles. Inspired by novels such as S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967) or Rumble Fish (1975, Londonstani offers an insight into the conflict between desis (South-Asians), goras (whites) and coconuts (those black outside, white inside, that is, black people imitating white people). The language used is a striking, challenging and incessant mixture of slang, texting, Panjabi, Hindu, MTV Base slang and gangsta rap.
The first point I would like to make is about racial profiling and identity. As Jas, the narrator, observes at the beginning of the novel: "People're always trying to stick a label on our scene. […] First we was rudeboys, then we be Indian niggas, then rajamuffins, then raggastanis, Britasians, fuckin Indobrits" (Malkani 2006a, p. 5). In the end the gang is happy to be called 'desi' rudeboys, 'desi' being a 'cooler' and 'stronger' version of Paki. 4 As Malkani (2006b) himself puts it, "The word 'desi' literally means countrymen [...] It is broader than terms such as Indian, Pakistani, Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, and yet narrower than the term Asian or even South Asian.
It acts as a self-determined alternative to […] the offensive word 'Paki' [...] trying to 4 "Desi is a word originally from Sanskrit literally meaning 'from the country' or 'of the country' […] used colloquially to mean South Asian immigrants and their descendants. It is mainly used by those of South Asian origins themselves, rarely by the majority population, and carries a subtext of inclusiveness and unity […] its connotations are positive, alluding to the shared values, bonds and experiences of descendants of the entire region. This self-referential colloquialism was created in the United Kingdom during the early 1960s". See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desi> turn it into a positive the way black kids have done with the word 'nigger'". Even more than goras (whites), the desis despise coconuts, that is, 'poncey', effeminate black guys brown on the outside, white on the inside. Here is a telling description of a coconut: "You could tell from his long hair, grungy clothes, the poncey novel an newspaper on his dashboard and Coldplay album playing in his car that he was a muthafucking coconut. So white he was inside his brown skin, he probably talked like those gorafied desis who read the news on TV". (Malkani 2006a: pp. 20-21).
Such aversion towards coconuts is not provoked by the fact that they act like whites: coconuts were despised because they were affected and effeminate, and rather than listening to 'masculine' hip-hop they campaign against environmental pollution and listen to 'poncey' bands such as U2, R.E.M., Radiohead and Coldplay It is now useful to reflect on the title of the book, that is, Londonstani, and the way its meaning has shifted throughout the years. In the beginning, the novel was a piece of academic research, and in the mid-1990s Malkani interviewed a couple of British-Asian kids who referred to themselves as 'Londonstanis', a kind of 'desi', South-Asian, slang for 'Londoner'. Unlike the term 'Londoner', which in Malkani's opinion sounded 'Victorian and cockney', for Malkani 'Londonstani' was a much more relevant term to a 21 st -century society, and therefore he thought it would make a perfect title for his book. Back in the 1990s this term conveyed a positive connotation: being a 'Londonstani' meant being a proud Londoner of British Asian origin embodying a positive celebration of London's multiculturalism not dissimilar from what Sammy's often quoted words in Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid suggest: "We love our city and we belong to it. Neither of us are English, we're Londoners you see" (Kureishi, 1988: p. 33); that is, a positive, vibrant way of living in the city, generating a strong sense of belonging. 5 Therefore, rather than being stereotypical subservient members of society, or post-7/7 icons of Muslim radical Islamism, the British-Asian apolitical rudeboys in Gautam Malkani's Londonstani reflect a different, religion-free kind of identity ironically embracing the traditionally opposed black hip-hop culture. This novel shows yet another aspect of the multifaceted contemporary black British community as seen in today's 'Londonistan' and a strong anti-essentialist notion of the South-Asian community in London, as these teenage desis are obsessed with macho and consumerist symbols and do not care much about religion: instead, they use racial identity as a proxy for masculine identity and as a way to reaffirm their masculinity.
Since  Suburbia (1990) deserve to be quoted at length: "In bed before I went to sleep I fantasised about London and what I'd do there when the city belonged to me. There was a sound that London had. It was, I'm afraid, people in Hyde Park playing bongos with their hands; there was also the keyboard on the Doors's 'Light My Fire'. There were kids dressed in velvet cloaks who lived free lives; there were thousands of black people everywhere, so I wouldn't feel exposed; there were bookshops with racks of magazines printed without capital letters or the bourgeois disturbance of full stops; there were shops selling all the records you could desire; there were parties where girls and boys you didn't know took you upstairs and fucked you; there were all the drugs you could use. You see, I didn't ask much of life; this was the extent of my longing. But at least my goals were clear and I knew what I wanted. I was twenty. I was ready for anything" (Kureishi 1999(Kureishi [1990, p. 121). 6 Melanie Phillips was voted the most 'Islamophobic' journalist by the Islamic Human Rights Commission in 2003. The neologism 'Eurabia' refers to a Europe which becomes subsumed by the Arab World. This term was publicized (with a negative connotation) by the writer Bat Ye'or in her For younger British-Asians, living in Britain can involve some very different approaches. Radical Muslims -as Ed Husain himself used to be -can react violently against the host society and the fellow 'integrated' members of their community.
They fight against consumerism and the decadence of Western society. The protagonists of Londonstani, instead, crave for the very objects despised by radical Muslims. Hyper-materialism is at the core of their credo. They use violence as a way to reaffirm their masculinity, not as a way to rediscover traditional religious doctrines. They do not care about religion, even though the conflict Sikhs vs Muslims becomes useful for them as an excuse to get into yet another fight, never mind their lack of historical awareness of the reasons behind that conflict. Their racial assertiveness is not aimed at religion or politics, but towards the idea of belonging to a 'desi' subculture redeeming via machismo and hyper-materialism 13 In an article, writer Mohsin Hamid reports the peculiarity of the questions in this test, whose answers are quite unfamiliar even to British people: "I am reading from pages 24 and 26 of the British Citizenship Test Study Guide. This, for those who are unfamiliar with the foundational text of our common culture, is 'A comprehensive study guide containing official material, study advice and sample questions'. So far, each of my [British] colleagues has on average been able to answer only about one in three questions correctly." Here follows one example: