I was also ambivalent about the journalistic process. I was full of material already; I had hardly touched on my own experience as a British Asian kid. Why were we interviewing strangers in order to generate material? Yet as we began to talk with people I found these conversations were not chatter; they were serious — some taking place over a number of days — and always moving. I was fascinated to hear strangers talk. It was something like a crude psychoanalysis, as one only had to a ask a simple question to be drawn into a whirlpool of memories, impressions, fears, terrors. (Max’s father, David Stafford-Clark, had written several interesting books about Freud.) I was shocked by how much people revealed of themselves, and how much they wanted to be known, to be understood. The community was close and supportive, but the cost of this was inhibition and constraint.
Most of the actors who took part in this year’s rehearsed reading of Borderline were younger than ten when the Southall riots took place. One of them, who had appeared in Michael Winterbottom’s ‘Guantanamo Bay’ film, had been arrested and held under the Anti-Terrorism act at Heathrow a few days before, on his way back from the Berlin Film Festival, where the movie won the Silver Bear.
The actors required a quick history lesson. We played The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ and The Jam’s ‘That’s Entertainment’. We mentioned monetarism, Norman Tebbit, the Falklands, the miners’ strike, and rioting in Brixton, Bristol, Liverpool — and Southall, a suburban Asian area in west London, not far from Heathrow airport, where many Asians worked.
When I was approached by Max with the subject for Borderline, Southall had recently become the focus of discontent and violence. Racism was a daily occurrence for most Asians in Britain. But the characters in the play refer often to the possibility of an ‘invasion’, something they were afraid of and disturbed by, as it had already happened. In April 1979 the police allowed the fascist National Front to hold a meeting in Asian Southall. Two weeks earlier the residents met with the Labour Home Secretary Merlyn Rees to ask him to ban the Front’s meeting. On the day before the march, five thousand people went to Ealing Town Hall in support of banning the National Front’s meeting, handing in a petition signed by ten thousand residents. Local factories also agreed to strike in protest. Rees refused to give way. It was a question of free speech, even for fascists.
During the protest which followed the fascist meeting, organised by the Asians themselves along with the Anti-Nazi League — a front for the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party — the police on horses attacked the crowds; vans were driven at them. Blair Peach, a young left-wing teacher, was struck and killed by the notorious SPG (The Special Patrol Group), a shadowy police/army group whose job, it was commonly said, was to beat people up. Many older Asian people, who still respected the police and the British legal system, were shocked and disillusioned by the number of injuries and the unrestrained violence of the police. Meanwhile the media represented the riots as an ‘attack on the police’.
In June 1979, when the lockers of the SPG were searched, one officer was found to be in possession of Nazi regalia, bayonets and leather-covered sticks. But no officer was prosecuted.
This, then, partly explains the atmosphere of paranoia and fear in which the play’s events take place. This is why the arguments the characters have, about how to proceed socially and politically, are so important to them. They are thinking all the time about the kind of Britain in which they are living, and the kind of country the young will inherit and seek to re-make.
To my surprise, looking at the play again after twenty years, I was not startled either by the naivety of the piece, or by the nature of my personal preoccupations then. Obviously it had dated, but in noteworthy ways. What did strike me was how little talk of religion there was among the characters. The unifying ideology of that time and place was socialism, with feminist groups like the Southall Black Sisters, as well as some anarchist and separatist groups, also contributing to the debate. The play itself was written out of the 1970s and at each stage the question would have to be asked: how does this scene, or these lines, further the cause, not only of the play, but of the social movement we are pursuing? What are we saying, about Asians, women, the working class: how do we push the argument along?
By the 1990s political theatre was dead. It had come to seem crude as a device for explaining the world, or for bringing news from unexplored parts of the country. But in this age of mendacity, deception and violence, there is the need, once again, for public debate about contemporary issues. Political theatre can be quick, immediate and adapted to changing circumstances, unlike most films.
Ten years after the Southall riots, in 1989 — the year communism died in Europe — there was another significant demonstration by Asians, this time in Hyde Park, central London. It was not about racial attacks, unemployment or indeed any of the concerns shown in Borderline. It was a demonstration against the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satantic Verses, and Muslims had travelled from all over the country to protest.
In Borderline Amina’s young lover Haroon wants to leave the area to become a lawyer. But why would he want to join the white world which so clearly hates them? He also intends to write a novel. This ambition is met with much scorn. Not only is it considered self-indulgent, there are other concerns. Will he be critical of them? Will it separate him from the community? Will he not only leave his own community — and his childhood — but what will they look like through his eyes? How will they appear? For his part, Haroon criticises the community for its narrowness. Unsurprisingly, the ‘attacks’ and ‘invasions’ have contributed to making them inward looking and over-insular. He accuses them of having a village mentality while they consider him a sell-out.
But why would any novel be considered dangerous? Why would a community, still embattled and with much to fight for — yet making progress in Britain — turn on one of their own, a writer they could be proud of? What ideology entailed such a hatred of artists? What had changed in those ten years?
In Borderline the father Amjad refuses to let his wife Banoo speak. This is not only because he, as a patriarch, is in charge of speaking in the family, but because he is afraid of what she will say, and what it will do to him. Speaking is dangerous; it changes things. To hear her would be an acknowledgement of others’ freedom. It might entail having to hear Amina, his daughter, too. This form of control is recognised by some of the other characters. Susan, the white journalist in the play, befriends the young girl Amina and gives her books to read, encouraging her to hear other voices, consider other positions and points of view. If the community is cut off by racism, it is also beginning to isolate itself from important ideas. Later, when we attempted to take the piece to Southall, the Youth Movement portrayed in the play refused to allow it: they threatened to burn down the hall in which we wanted to perform the piece.
In 1978, Michel Foucault, sponsored by the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, visited Iran for the first time. For him capitalism had failed; totalitarian communism didn’t appeal either. However, the events in Iran ‘offered a new hope’; he began to speak of ‘political spirituality’ as an antidote not only to corruption in most Muslim countries, but to increasing materialism everywhere. Banoo, the isolated and distressed mother in the play, referring to her husband’s efforts — thirty years of work in a bakery — speaks of the ‘emptiness’ of washing machines, televisions, vacuum cleaners. For her something nourishing is missing, though she doesn’t know what it is. At the end of the play, when her husband has died, she returns to Pakistan.