Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

  It just isn’t enough to be black and blue, or even black and angry. The message is plain enough in Angelou’s self-portrait, in Louise Meriwether’s marvellous Daddy Was A Numbers Runner, in Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall; if you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.

  Down at the Metro cinema there’s a new documentary starting a three-week run, Handsworth Songs, made by Black Audio Film Collective. The ‘buzz’ about the picture is good. New Socialist likes it, City Limits likes it, people are calling it multi-layered, original, imaginative; its makers talk of speaking in metaphors, its director John Akomfrah is getting mentioned around town as a talent to watch.

  Unfortunately, it’s no good, and the trouble does seem to be one of language.

  Let me put it this way. If I say ‘Handsworth’, what do you see? Most Britons would see fire, riots, looted shops, young Rastas and helmeted cops by night. A big story; front page. Perhaps a West Side Story: Officer Krupke, armed to the teeth, versus the kids with the social disease.

  There’s a line that Handsworth Songs wants us to learn. ‘There are no stories in the riots,’ it repeats, ‘only the ghosts of other stories.’ The trouble is, we aren’t told the other stories. What we get is what we know from TV. Blacks as trouble; blacks as victims. Here is a Rasta dodging the police; here are the old news-clips of the folks in the fifties getting off the boat, singing calypsos about ‘darling London’. Little did they know, eh? But we don’t hear about their lives, or the lives of their British-born children. We don’t hear Handsworth’s songs.

  Why not? The film’s handouts provide a clue. The film attempts to excavate hidden ruptures/agonies of “Race”.’ It ‘looks at the riots as a political field coloured by the trajectories of industrial decline and structural crisis.’ Oh dear. The sad thing is that while the film-makers are trying to excavate ruptures and work out how trajectories can colour fields, they let us hear so little of the much richer language of their subjects.

  When Home Secretary Hurd visits Handsworth, looking bemused, just after the riots, a black voice is heard to say: ‘The higher monkey climb, the more he will expose.’ If only more of this sort of wit and freshness could have found its way into the film. But the makers are too busy ‘repositioning the convergence of “Race” and “Criminality”,’ describing a living world in the dead language of race-industry professionals.

  I don’t know Handsworth very well, but I do know it’s bursting with tales worth telling. Take a look at John Bishton and Derek Reardon’s 1984 photo-and-text essay, Home Front. There are Vietnamese boat people in Handsworth, where Father Peter Diem, a refugee himself, runs a pastoral centre to which they come for comfort. There’s an Asian businessman in Handsworth who made his pile by employing his fellow-Asians in sweatshops to make, of all things, the Harrington jackets beloved by the skinheads who were also, as it happened, fond of bashing the odd Paki.

  Here are two old British soldiers. One, name of Shri Dalip Singh, sits stiffly in his army tunic, sporting his Africa Star with pride; the other, a certain Jagat Singh, is a broken old gent who has been arrested for drunkenness on these streets over three hundred times. Some nights they catch him trying to direct the traffic.

  It’s a religious place, Handsworth. What was once a Methodist chapel is now one of many Sikh gurdwaras. Here is the Good News Asian Church, and there you can see Rasta groundations, a mosque, Pentecostal halls, and Hindu, Jain and Buddhist places of worship. Many of Handsworth’s songs are hymns of praise. But there’s reggae, too; there are toasters at blues dances, there are Punjabi ghazals and Two Tone bands.

  These days, the kids in Handsworth like to dance the Wobbler. And some of its denizens dream of distant ‘liberations’, nurturing, for example, the dark fantasy of Khalistan.

  It’s important, I believe, to tell such stories; to say, this is England. Look at the bright illuminations and fireworks during the Hindu Festival of Lights, Divali. Listen to the Muslim call to prayer, ‘Allahu Akbar’, wafting down from the minaret of a Birmingham mosque. Visit the Ethiopian World Federation, which helps Handsworth Rastas ‘return’ to the land of Ras Tafari. These are English scenes now, English songs.

  You won’t find them or anything like them, in Handsworth Songs, though for some reason you will see plenty of footage about troubles in Tottenham and Brixton, which is just the sort of blurring you know the Harlem writers would have jumped on, no matter how right-on it looked.

  It isn’t easy for black voices to be heard. It isn’t easy to get it said that the State attacks us, that the police are militarized. It isn’t easy to fight back against media stereotypes. As a result, whenever somebody says what we all know, even if they say it clumsily and in jargon, there’s a strong desire to cheer, just because they managed to get something said, they managed to get through. I don’t think that’s much help, myself. That kind of celebration makes us lazy.

  Next time, let’s start telling those ghost-stories. If we know why the caged bird sings, let’s listen to her song.

  1987

  THE LOCATION OF BRAZIL

  In N. F. Simpson’s play One Way Pendulum, one of the very few competent British contributions to the Theatre of the Absurd, a man receives, by mail order, a full-sized replica of an Old Bailey courtroom in kit form. He assembles it in his living room and shortly afterwards finds himself on trial in it. A clerk announces that on the day in question, the defendant, our hero, ‘was not in this world’. The judge, frowning, inquires, ‘Which world was he in, then?’ And the clerk explains: ‘It seems he has one of his own.’

  It is not easy, you see, to be precise about the location of the world of the imagination. Even the legal system (especially the legal system) is unaware of its whereabouts. The French, these days, would have us believe that this world, which they call ‘the text’, is quite unconnected to the ‘real’ world, which they call ‘the world’. But if I believe (and I do) that the imagined world is, must be, connected to the observable one, then I should be able, should I not, to locate it; to say how you get there from here. And it is not easy, you see, to be precise …

  These reflections have been prompted by Terry Gilliam’s magnificent film of future totalitarianism, Brazil. Because the more highly imagined a piece of work, the more ticklish this problem of location becomes. Let me put it this way: we can all agree, without too much argument, that the climax of North by Northwest takes place on Mount Rushmore, or that All the President’s Men was set in Washington, DC. Progressing beyond such reassuring clarities, we arrive in a murky zone about which we could argue until the small hours: was Apocalypse Now ‘really’ set in Vietnam, or in some ‘fictional’ heart of darkness? Is Amadeus history or bunk? And, still further down this road, the surface turns to yellow brick, white rabbits scurry past, Lemmy Caution chews a Gauloise. My point is: where have we come to? What kind of place is Oz, or Wonderland? By what route, with or without a Ford Galaxy, may one arrive at Alphaville? Specifically—for the purposes of this essay—where is Brazil?

  Where it is not, is in South America. (Although that Brazil, like this one, has in the past been known for attaching high-voltage electrodes to the anatomies of its dissident citizens.) The film takes its title from an old Xavier Cugat melody.

  Brazil, where hearts were entertained in June,

  We stood beneath an amber moon

  And softly murmured: Someday soon.

  So are we to say that this is a film that is somehow located in a song? Well, there’s an ironic sense in which that might be true. The lush innocence of the old tune, when set against Gilliam’s tale of State terror, does indeed embody much of the film’s spirit, a combination, as Gilliam has said, of Franz Kafka and Frank Capra.

  ‘Someday soon,’ softly murmurs the song, and in the light of Gilliam’s story, it sounds like a threat. Which leads us
to a second way of locating the film, that is, in time. George Lucas’s Star Wars cycle begins with a coy paradox, a subtitle informing us that what we are about to see happened not only far away but also long ago. However, Lucas’s ‘past’ looks so much like a conventional space-opera future that we quickly disregard his little opening joke. A much more interesting time-location is to be found in Michael Radford’s recent film of Nineteen Eighty-Four. If Lucas makes the past look like the future, Radford chooses to make his ‘future’ (an odd term to use about a film released in the year after which it was named, and which is already past) look consciously old-fashioned; such a future as might have been envisioned by a designer from 1948, the year in which Orwell wrote his book. It’s an effective, if somewhat literal idea. The future in Brazil is a far more ambiguous and disturbing place.

  Here elements of past and future combine to disorient us. The TV sets look oddly quaint. Messages are sent (as they are in the Radford movie) in those little metal canisters one pops into suction tubes, the kind they used to have in department stores. In other ways, though, the film looks marvellously futuristic, sometimes very comically so, as in the scene set in the restaurant festooned with great intestinal metallic pipework, where the food depicted so lavishly on photographic menus turns out to be coloured mush. The conflation of past and future is unsettling; it creates, instead of Radford’s archaic future, an air of something very like nostalgia. (Once again, the title music is apposite.)

  It feels as though, in these days when, as at the last millennium and with better reason, we fear we may be near the end of time, our dreams of the future—even of such a dark future as this one—must necessarily be tinged with nostalgia and regret. It may not be too fanciful to suggest that the other Star Wars programme, the one that isn’t at all far away or long ago, has turned the future into a fiction, or rather, heightened its fictionality. Nowadays tomorrow is not only a place that hasn’t arrived yet, but one that may never arrive at all. Like the clothes Jonathan Pryce (who plays Sam, the anti-hero of Brazil) wears in the movie, the idea of the future is somewhat out of date. And if this cancelled future is the location of Gilliam’s movie, then we see that that location is an even more elusive place than we previously suspected.

  At the most obvious level, the film is set in Dystopia, Utopia’s dark opposite, the worst of all possible worlds. Unseen terrorist bombers oppose the violence of the police state. Ordinary citizens get killed in large quantities by both parties, but that’s life. Amid the mayhem, two stories intertwine. One is the sad tale of Mr Buttle and Mr Tuttle, which begins deep in the bowels of the State, when a thought-policeman swats a fly, which falls into a computer printer and induces a spelling mistake. In place of the dangerous subversive and freelance air-conditioning engineer, Harry Tuttle (Robert de Niro, dressed like a cigar-smoking version of the old cartoon character The Phantom), the machine fingers the innocent family man Mr Buttle, and the cops accordingly carve a hole in his ceiling and haul him off, to be slowly carved into pieces with blunt scissors, or something like that. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. Meanwhile, as they say, a Winston Smith-ish clerk named Sam dreams of being winged and soaring free above the earth amid fleecy clouds, pursuing a blonde vision wrapped, like Renaissance Virgins, in floating folds of shimmering fabric. This turns out to be Jill (Kim Greist), who drives a monster truck and with whom, eventually, Sam revolts against the State, with predictable and nasty results.

  It might seem, then, that the film can be ‘placed’ as a visually brilliant reworking of Orwellian themes. The ending of the version I saw—when Sam’s escape from the torture chamber, with the help of Harry Tuttle, turns out to have been the wish-fulfilment dream of his maddened brain (he ends up back in the torture chair, gazing inwardly upon green fields, while his tormentors grin ironically: ‘Looks like he’s got away from us’)—emphasized this Orwellian connection, and made me want to raise against Brazil the same criticism I would make of Orwell: that it is too easy, too pat, to create a Dystopia in which resistance is useless; that by offering only token individual resistance to the might of the State one falls into a sort of romantic trap; that there has never in the history of the world been a dictatorship so overpowering that it became impossible to fight, against. But, for a number of reasons, it seems to me that to locate Brazil too close to Orwell’s Airstrip One would not be quite cartographically accurate.

  For one thing, audiences in the United States will see a rather different ending. Sam is still, at the last, in the grip of the torturers; but now, in the last scene, they do not have the last, leering words. Now the torture chamber slowly fills up with clouds, the same fleecy white clouds amongst which, in his winged dreams, he used to fly (and with which the American cut of the film, again unlike the British, also opens). This rather changes the meaning of the ending. It becomes a scene about the triumph of the imagination, the dream, over the shackles of actuality. It becomes clear that this, rather than the political allegory, may in fact be what the film has been about. It seems, at last, that we are getting closer to where, and what, the film is ‘at’.

  Other elements in the film also suggest a vision more complex than the bleak simplicities of Nineteen Eighty-Four, notably the role of Robert de Niro as Tuttle the Phantom-handyman. Sam may be destroyed, but Tuttle swings on, like an urban Tarzan, from skyscraper to skyscraper, munching his cheery cigar. Because he, too, ‘flies’, if only with the aid of ropes, he can be seen as a street-wise version of Sam’s dream of himself as an angel. In Brazil, flight represents the imagining spirit; so it turns out that we are being told something very strange about the world of the imagination—that it is, in fact, at war with the ‘real’ world, the world in which things inevitably get worse and in which centres cannot hold. Angelic Sam and devilish Mr Tuttle represent the power of dream-worlds to oppose this dark reality. In an age in which it seems impossible to create happy endings; in which we seem to make Dystopias the way earlier ages made Utopias; in which we appear to have lost confidence in our ability to improve the world, Gilliam brings heartening news. As N. F. Simpson revealed in One Way Pendulum, the world of the imagination is a place into which the long arm of the law is unable to reach.

  This idea—the opposition of imagination to reality, which is also of course the opposition of art to politics—is of great importance, because it reminds us that we are not helpless; that to dream is to have power. And I suggest that the true location of Brazil is the other great tradition in art, the one in which techniques of comedy, metaphor, heightened imagery, fantasy and so on are used to break down our conventional, habit-dulled certainties about what the world is and has to be. Unreality is the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it may subsequently be reconstructed. (I once worked in an office building in which some troubled anonymous soul took to destroying the lavatories. It seemed like motiveless, insane destruction, until one day, on a wall next to a wrecked water-closet, we read these scribbled words: If the cistern cannot be changed, it must be destroyed. Brazil’s radical repairman, Harry Tuttle, would have been proud of him.)

  Play. Invent the world. The power of the playful imagination to change for ever our perceptions of how things are has been demonstrated by everyone from Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, to a certain Monty Python in his Flying Circus. Our sense of the modern world is as much the creation of Kafka, with his unexplained trials and unapproachable castles and giant bugs, as it is of Freud, Marx or Einstein. But there lies, in this approach, a terrible danger which is not faced by the realist artist. This danger is whimsy. When there are no rules except the ones you make up, don’t things get too easy? When pigs can fly, do they remain pigs, and if not, why should we care about them? Can a work of art grow into anything of value if it has no roots in observable reality?

  One answer to such questions is ‘Lewis Carroll’. (We recall that Terry Gilliam is the director of Jabberwocky.) There are artists whose gift is to put down roots within the world of dreams, the logic of whos
e work is the logic of the dreaming and not the waking mind. James Joyce did it in Finnegans Wake. Terry Gilliam, I believe, does something very like it in Brazil.

  And there is a second answer. It has been said that the basic difference between the American and the British approach to comedy is that American comedy begins with the question, ‘Isn’t it funny that …?’ (that MASH doctors existed to mend soldiers so that the army could damage them again; that New Yorkers, as embodied by Woody Allen, are driven by anxiety and guilt; or that the poor—Chaplin eating his boots—are poor)… whereas British comedy’s starting-point is the question, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if …?’ (if a pet shop sold dead parrots; if brain surgeons were mentally defective; if men in pinstriped suits did silly walks). Terry Gilliam, an American living in Britain and looking back at America—because he says clearly that Brazil is about America, and while we’re trying to locate the film we really ought to pay a little attention to what its maker says—manages to make a synthesis of both approaches.

  One of the keys to his method is Kafka. A story like ‘Metamorphosis’ appears, at first glance, to fall into the ‘British’ camp: wouldn’t it be funny if Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find himself metamorphosed into a giant insect? But in fact it derives its (very black) humour from a rather more serious question: Isn’t it funny that a man’s family reacts with fear, embarrassment, shame, love, boredom and relief when the son of the house becomes something they do not understand, suffers terribly and finally dies? The humour in Brazil is similarly black—isn’t it funny that bourgeois women have face-lifts that go horribly wrong? Isn’t it funny that people about to be killed look so ridiculous with their heads hidden inside bags? And like Kafka, it uses ‘surface’ techniques of the Absurdist/Python type: giant Samurai warriors; typists, writing down a condemned man’s confession while he’s being tortured, and including every aargh and sob. By darkening his humour, Gilliam avoids the trap of whimsy. Monty Python goes to Metropolis and the result is that rarity, a seriously funny movie.