The Columbia History of the American Novel

Pakistan — an important loss in terms of his identity. Kureishi recognizes the economics behind migrations: 'thousands of Pakistani families depended on money sent from England.' He also notes the psychological burdens placed on a society that was losing its people to the West and a further burden when these people returned, dissatisfied because 'they had seen more, they wanted more…. Once more the society was being changed by outside forces, not by its own volition.' The two societies, Pakistani and British, were both closely bound and miles apart; for instance, a -662- villager tells him that when his grandchildren visit him from Bradford he has to hire an interpreter in order to talk to them.

Kureishi's recent novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), explores the layered realities of race, class, gender, and geography in the protagonist Karim's search for identity and belonging. The opening of the novel presents his genealogy, an 'Englishman' with a name like Karim Amir:

My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don't care — Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored.

Karim's narrative frames other stories of immigrant lives in contemporary Britain — for example, Anwar and his daughter Jamila, a poignant portrait of a tradition-bound father who insists on his daughter Jamila, who has grown up in Britain, having an arranged marriage. Anwar, in the Gandhian tradition of passive resistance, goes on a hunger fast unto death unless his daughter agrees to abide by his wishes. 'I won't eat. I will die. If Gandhi could shove out the English from India by not eating, I can get my family to obey me by exactly the same.' Karim reflects on the 'similarities between what was happening to Dad, with his discovery of Eastern philosophy [Karim's father is 'the buddha of suburbia'], and Anwar's last stand. Perhaps it was the immigrant condition living itself out through them. For years they were both happy to live like English-men…. Now, as they aged and seemed settled here, Anwar and Dad appeared to be returning internally to India, or at least to be resisting the English here. It was puzzling: neither of them expressed any desire actually to see their origins again.'

When Anwar's self-destructive tactics are revealed to Karim's father he remarks, 'We old Indians come to like this England less and less and we return to an imagined India.' The parents' inner conflicts often embroil their children tragically in a collision between a traditionally sanctioned authoritarianism and an independent life that the children have imbibed in their immigrant-citizen identities. For the parents' generation, British citizenship is merely symbolic and -663- convenient — spiritually and in terms of their values they belong more to India and Pakistan; their Britain-born children are citizens who have imbibed the values and lifestyles of a Western locale. The unfairness of the conflict comes down heavily on Jamila — should she risk losing her father, or should she 'save' his life by marrying a man whom she has never met? Jamila gives in and then forges her own British-Indian path of resistance by refusing to have any sexual life with her husband, Changez. And even as Karim befriends Changez, Karim continues to be Jamila's lover.

When Karim, as part of his budding acting career, is asked to 'create' a portrait of current immigrant life in Britain, he elects to tell the story of Anwar and Jamila, particularly the fact that Anwar's scheme had backfired: Changez, the son-in-law from whom Anwar expected a new 'life-transfusion,' had been a devastating disappointment. Anwar's life, running 'Paradise Stores' in a fascist neighborhood where 'racist graffiti appeared on the walls every time you removed it,' has deteriorated. The ramifications of presenting a narrow-minded, dogmatic father to a predominantly white audience whose racist stereotypes would be validated by such an image are pointed out to Karim by Tracy, a black member of the group:

Anwar's hunger-strike worries me. What you want to say hurts me. It really pains me! And I'm not sure that we should show it!…I'm afraid it shows black people — Black and Asian people — one old Indian man as being irrational, ridiculous, as being hysterical. And as being fanatical…. And that arranged marriage. It worries me…. Your picture is what white people already think of us. That we're funny, with strange habits and weird customs. To the white man we're already people without humanity…. We have to protect our culture at this time.

Karim is attacked as a reactionary. He bristles at this 'censorship' and wants to 'tell the truth.' Although there is a need for genuine criticism of problems within one's own community, positions that are often thwarted by 'race relations' — positions like Tracy's in this case — Karim has rather unselfconsciously stepped beyond the bounds of constructive criticism; he wishes to entertain a white audience at the expense of Anwar's humanity. Karim's self-awareness develops and he withdraws that story from a public vision not ready to cope with the interstices of race, class, and gender as they are played out for an expatriate-colored-citizenry that deals with prejudice in its -664- daily life. The issues of reception and audience bring us into the arena of markets, publishing, and financial resources — the means of production necessary for cultural production.

The above discussion on colonialism and educational policies and of continuing imperialist dominations, economic and cultural, in postcolonial societies traces some of the historicized reasons for writers' expatriation and/or exile into Britain and North America. As writers settle into these new 'homes,' what are the forces that confront them in a literary marketplace? Who publishes their work? Who reads their novels and why is the novel the most highly desired form? Who reviews them? Who is their audience and is it radically different from their constituencies at 'home'? And can writers meet the challenge of making their audience into their constituencies?

In the West, the privileging of the novel as a form is problematic, particularly in terms of the market and publishing houses. This is hard to contest, given the prevalence of publishers and distributors of 'third world' writers in the West. Recall, for instance, Chinua Achebe's most recent novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), hailed as Achebe breaking his silence of nearly thirty years since the publication in 1966 of A Man of the People. Such judgment falsely assumes Achebe's 'silence,' ignoring his work in his own Igbo language. Only by writing a novel, and writing it in English, can Achebe effectively break 'silence.' This demonstrates a Western hegemonic response appropriating the rest of the world into its own vocabulary, its literary forms where the novel and its critical evaluation is privileged.

Postcolonial novels that are published by Western houses get better distribution than the struggles of local publishing can woefully accomplish. Since the 'West' may not even hear of writers published locally, we must not conclude that they do not exist. Hence, in our discussion of the novel we must bear in mind, very crucially, what we leave out — not only the local publications that may not be available in the West, and why that is so, but also the oral forms that do not get into print. These are particularly important for largely nonliterate societies.

A dialectic relationship between cultural and critical productions both creates and responds to economic and political factors control-665- ling a consumer marketplace. Marginality as a concept is useful in this discussion because 'marginal' cultural productions are commodified in today's Western marketplace. The 'marginal' is not a given; there is a complex process that leads to marginalization. Imagine, if you will, the literary marketplace as the many-handed god Shiva (who has both creative and destructive potential in Hindu cosmology). When marginality is commodified as a selling tactic, such modes of production have serious implications for expatriate postcolonial writers and critics — the dangers of a commodification that can change the very terms of what is written, and that can dictate what themes will sell. The marketplace is a key conditioning factor in producing and consolidating marginality. The commodification of 'blackness' or of 'third worldism' as items for sale in the marketplace, which includes affirmative action policies, publishing priorities, and conference topics as well, has serious consequences for the creative artist/worker. Complicitous in this profitable relationship are not only publishing houses but also, closer to our own lives, critics and scholars who enhance or challenge commodification in the types of theoretical production that they engage in.

However, the notion of marginality as a term in critical discourse has served to ghettoize certain literatures and 'minority' fields in the academy. The terms 'margin' and 'center,' along with their conceptual baggage, need to be contested, for they fail to account for the layers of cultural hegemony firmly in place despite challenges to a Western literary canon, as well as factors that shape who and what is 'centered' in literary studies. The advocacy of one 'common Western heritage' in texts like E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy (1987) enshrines a literary canon that is increasingly threatened by powerful non-Western cultural products making inroads, however peripherally, into curricula.

I would like to reclaim the term 'marginal' in a very different sense from the commodification of 'marginal