It had begun to occur to people that immigrants and their children were here for good, and Britain had changed for ever. There was a reluctance to accept this, and, at the same time, a demand, from people who felt disenfranchised and ghettoised, for recognition, as well as for just and equal treatment. Multiculturalism and identity politics were a good idea, a form of self-protection, when social cohesion, under Thatcher, was breaking up, and racism was unchecked. It seemed, for a time, that not only that the idea of Britishness, but Britain itself would disintegrate under these pressures.
Multiculturalism reminded us that there are certain attributes which can’t be subtracted from people without asking them to forfeit their links to the past, and to others in the future. Numerous groups had begun to explore their own history — often a history of persecution — and tried to determine how they were made in relation to it. Where once there had been silence, and the pressure of a majority culture, multiculturalism (or a counter-history), celebrated difference, multiplicity and pluralism within the same place. After all, the wish to wipe out another’s history and culture is a form of genocide, and what is repressed is always more compelling than the sanctioned story.
When culture is only an extension of power, if it is an official culture, if you like, one can see how a joke can expose suppression. It shouldn’t be forgotten that along with the superiority of the white man went the superiority of his culture, which was, for a long time, monolithic. If we can recall how difficult it was for the cinema to be taken seriously as an art form, and then pop, we ought to have an idea of how much that cultural dominance can exclude in other areas, of how people can be dispossessed of knowledge, a particularly cruel form of authority. As Kundera also reminded us, ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
But I can also recall, in the mid-80s, being told by an Afro-Caribbean acquaintance that ideas like socialism, feminism and liberalism were no good for blacks and Asians. They were white people’s ideas, and since the whites hated us and it would be rational for us to hate them back, we had to repudiate all their ideas. According to him, the only way forward was for us to re-connect with our history, as if what was called ‘our history’ had nothing to do with anyone else’s. This is similar to something a cousin of mine — but not an uncle — once said to me: ‘Since we are Muslims, we have to create here in Pakistan, only a Muslim not a Western society,’ with the Koran, of all things, providing the blueprint for the future.
It’s not difficult to see here that once attributes and differences become fetishised — if the subject becomes a series of idiosyncrasies or typical marks, and even begins to believe that this is what he really is — then the possibility of creative collaboration and renewal is cancelled. Marginalisation and alienation become permanent. Among the many good reasons for immigration, at least one is to ensure the free circulation of people, ideas and culture, for that is how, as Rushdie puts it in The Satanic Verses, ‘newness is brought into the world’.
But if multiculturalism becomes the gated-community of the minority, if it becomes another monoculturalism, that which was once protective becomes a prison. Identities become traps, rather than temporary accommodations between selves and the outside world. When it comes to a description of what a human being is, and what she might need to lead a fulfilling life, multiculturalism, while it once opened the door to other narratives, has come to seem inadequate and reductive, and, for its supposed beneficiaries, has closed off the rest of the world.
The finest poetry, novels and plays might be a good place to look when we require new paradigms for both criticising and understanding the world. Works of art, which describe and re-describe experience until we grasp its complexity, can liberate us from the static points of view that multiculturalism seems to generate. Great works of art are different to one another, but they are almost always concerned with the individual and her struggle with the majority view.
Universal values, particularly those of freedom and equality, are the basis of any minority community having a presence at all. If diversity and pluralism are to mean anything, they have to apply to a knowledge of a range of religions as solutions to human helplessness, as well as knowledge of ideas of atheism, secularism and doubt, and their place in a liberal, developing society. For instance, a universal value would be the use of education as a force for emancipation, for critical and objective evaluation, rather than for religious indoctrination.
As we all know, there’s been some hard thinking on these difficult issues, particularly in the period since the fatwa on Salman Rushdie in 1989, which was a turning point for both literature and liberalism. This attack on a book, an author, freedom of expression and a literary culture, has left nothing the same.
But what of the desire to censor and control? What does it really mean? Sigmund Freud insists that although we have a fantasy of maintaining a reign of authority over ourselves, the truth is that each day, and, in particular, each night, our real life passes in a chaos of fumblings, bumblings, bingeings, forgettings, fantastic uprisings, wild dreams and delinquent fantasies, a comedy of errors and idiocies. Our lives are more like a Laurel and Hardy film than they are like a Stalinist state.
A mere joke can remind us, therefore, that the authoritarian regime can never succeed. As with the mischievous postcard in Kundera’s novel, the imp of truth escapes. Kundera’s novel will last longer than the regime it attacked. The forced empire of the self — the imperious ego — is always in danger of being undermined; the creative is never far away, since the disowned and the repressed inevitably return. The system creates dissidents, and the dissident speaks suppressed parts of the authority, parts which eventually have to be returned to him — as a reminder of the human.
Sometimes this is the writer’s work, even if he or she would repudiate the political labelling. Rushdie, Pamuk, Mafouz, Kundera and Pinter himself have all, at times, represented something honest in the State, and have been attacked, on occasions violently, for telling the truth.
A comedian can only make people laugh, whereas a good writer should have a wide palette and be able to intrigue, upset, shock and excite — transporting us from mood to mood in the same piece. Nevertheless, a joke is a marvellous moment of liberation, while being a reminder of constraint. Laughter is a recognition that something has to be freer.
Free speaking and writing are always difficult because they are always under threat. This guarantees their authenticity. In his Paris Review interview, Pinter notes the following, ‘The speech only seems funny. The man in question is actually fighting for his life.’ And if we are not fighting for our own lives, and by extension, others’ lives, what are we doing?
FILMS
Introduction to My Beautiful Laundrette
I wrote the script of My Beautiful Laundrette in my uncle’s house in Karachi, Pakistan, in February 1984, during the night. As I wrote, cocks crowed and the call to prayer reverberated through crackly speakers from a nearby mosque. It was impossible to sleep. One morning as I sat on the verandah having breakfast, I had a phone call from Howard Davies, a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, with whom I’d worked twice before. He wanted to direct Brecht’s Mother Courage, with Judi Dench in the lead role. He wanted me to adapt it.