In Milan Kundera’s 1967 masterpiece, The Joke, set in the 1950s, the young Czech protagonist is arrested and imprisoned for sending a postcard to his girlfriend. ‘Optimism is the opium of the people!’ it says — a relatively mild joke but one that becomes a suicide note, and a kind of self-sacrifice. ‘A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!’
In 1980, Milan Kundera told Philip Roth, ‘I learned the value of humour during the time of Stalinist terror. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humour was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humour.’
It is a stretch to think of a great writer who isn’t also comic: Gogol, Dostoevsky Proust, Kafka, Beckett and so on are, at times, what Roth calls sit-down comedians. Jokes undo knots and undermine dictators. The powerful may have many attributes, but a sense of humour is never one of them.
Writing, then, is playful, a form of loose collaborative excitement, creating, with the reader, a shared experience of pleasure. Writers are, from one point of view, as I like to explain to my writing students, in show business. They must entertain, and give good value, otherwise there is nothing going on between reader and writer. From another point of view writers are scrupulous critics. Comedy and wit, which combine both, are ways of seeing into, and seeing through.
It’s a serious and necessary business, amusement, and you can tell how serious it is by the number of journalists and writers who are in prison around the world, as well as by the attempts there are, as PEN would confirm, to shut writers up, to censor and impede them, always a sure sign that a writer, somewhere, is doing her job and that she has some authority in a cynical world.
Let’s remind ourselves: words are very dangerous, they are dynamite. Jokes can’t start a revolution, but they can loosen the bricks in the wall. A joke introduces a little anarchy into the world, a bit of disruption. It tests the limits; it pushes them.
In Pakistan, when Zulfikar Bhutto first began to compromise with the Islamists, my father, his brothers and other liberal friends referred to this as ‘the great leap backwards’. They liked to say the country was being ‘sodomised’ by religion, a line I later used in My Beautiful Laundrette. Their political impotence and sense of helplessness led them to make jokes continuously, even as the situation worsened. At least humour represents love, a promiscuous combining of elements, which will help form solidarity among dissenters.
Behind this idea is partly the modernist notion of the writer as devil, as dangerous, as a rebel. But I have come to think that it is insufficient; more is required. It is almost adolescent as a view: humour as the revenge and refuge of the powerless, the last stand of the already defeated, giggling as they go down.
My father was born and brought up in India under British rule. There was some equality there, he liked to say. As a child he was beaten by Catholic nuns as well as by the Maulvis who instructed children on the Koran.
The racial ideas my father faced, in India, under colonialism, and in Britain, when he first came here in the early 50s, were of a kind which have mostly been driven out now, as Britain’s aggressively self-important sense of itself has declined. However, it might be useful to remind ourselves of these notions.
As an Indian my father was always uncomfortably aware that he was considered inferior; that he was less of a man than the other men who ruled. It was part of the general attitude of the time, and not only in Britain. Whites were superior as human beings to what were known as ‘the coloured races’. My father and his family despised and mocked their British masters, while wanting to be like them. The English gentleman was their ideal. This class of Indian also wanted to be recognised as an equal by the master who despised them. It was an impossibly ambivalent position to be in, and no one was satisfied.
As the son of an Indian father and English mother, I didn’t want to be like the English, I was already English, almost. But I became aware that I represented some sort of problem for the English, because they kept asking me who I was, where I fitted in, where I belonged and how long I’d be staying, not difficulties which my father, an Indian, had had. I was asked these questions so often I began to lose my bearings. What was I doing to the neighbours to make them so philosophical?
And so, as a teenager, I began to write. I wrote for my life. The idea of having an identity by calling myself ‘a writer’ suddenly seemed both consolidating and liberating, like a Cartesian assertion of existence. Critics sometimes like to characterise me as an autobiographical writer, and I like to reply that all writing is as autobiographical as a dream, in which every element both does and doesn’t belong to the dreamer, and is somehow beyond them. ‘Who’s there?’, the first line of Hamlet, is the question writers ask themselves when they sit down to write, perhaps in the hope, one day, of finding out. But there are multitudes there.
I was aware that I did want to speak of the experience of my family and myself. This seemed necessary and important for my survival. It was something of an epiphany as I sat at my typewriter every day, after school, and found I had my own words, however clumsy and derivative. Those of us like me were not, then, merely subject to the denigrations and descriptions of others. We could talk back. Writing would be a message to the world outside my family, and outside the suburbs. I would inform people what was going on, what life in the new Britain — a Britain unknowingly transforming itself for ever — was like for us. This was not writing as a form of defence, but, for me, as a way of situating myself fully in the alien world, an attempt to work out a place in it — writing as an attempted solution to various internal and external conflicts.
Through my Indian family, I became aware, as a young man, of this very full form of speaking, the novel. The British writers I admired, Forster, Orwell, Greene, Waugh, had all put colonialism, and what dominion does to people, at the centre of their work. Indeed, Forster regrets, at the end of Passage to India, that certain kinds of free and equal relationships will not be possible while one consciousness dominates another. And J. G. Farrell wrote, ‘The loss of the British Empire is the only interesting thing that happened in my adult life.’
Not that some of these attitudes don’t remain. A friend said to me recently, ‘Surely you have to acknowledge that people like your father only wanted to come here because of the peace, prosperity and high level of civilisation we have made.’ It should go without saying, of course, that the economic prosperity and creativity of the West has always been partly based on colonialism and immigration. If there has been a failure to acknowledge this — and even to despise and attack those whose labour made, and continues to make, this prosperity and freedom possible — it is the hatred of the Master for those he depends on; hatred for the necessary subaltern without whom nothing good happens. This is partly because the subaltern is hardly noticed; he is only a quarter present, almost invisible, glimpsed from the corner of the eye.
But how then might he or she be seen? First there would have to be a political presence, of course. Margaret Thatcher, as we know, revived nationalist sentiment by attempting to resuscitate war-time versions of English patriotism. She was an exclusionist who didn’t want too much ‘difference’ or ‘otherness’. The early-to-mid 1980s in Britain, when I was working in the theatre and had begun to write films, were a rough time for minorities. The defining struggle of the less deferential Second Generation against prejudice and police discrimination and brutality, was at its height. Out of this came civil unrest, and riots in Brixton, Bristol and Birmingham.