Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

  Now it’s possible that this blindness is incurable. One of the SDP’s better-known candidates told me recently that while he found the idea of working-class racism easy to accept, the parallel notion of widespread prejudice in the middle classes was unconvincing to him. Yet, after many years of voluntary work in this field, I know that the management levels of British industry and business are just as shot through by the threads of prejudice as are many unions. It is believed for instance, that as many as fifty per cent of all telephone calls made by employers to employment agencies specify no blacks. Black unemployment is much, much higher than white; and such anomalies don’t arise by accident.

  Let me illustrate my point by talking about television. I once earned my living by writing commercials, and I found the prejudice of senior executives in British industry quite appalling. I could tell you the name of the chairman of a leading building society who rejected a jingle on the grounds that the off-screen singer sounded as if he had a black voice. The irony was that the singer was actually white, but the previous year’s jingle had been sung by a black man who obviously had the good fortune not to sound like one. I know the marketing director of a leading confectionery firm who turned down all requests to cast a black child—as one of an otherwise white group of children—in his commercial. He said his research showed such casting would be counterproductive. I know an airline advertising manager who refused to permit the use, in his TV ads, of a genuine air stewardess employed by his own airline, because she was black. She was good enough to serve his customers their drinks, but not good enough to be shown doing so on television.

  A language reveals the attitudes of the people who use and shape it. And a whole declension of patronizing terminology can be found in the language in which inter-racial relations have been described inside Britain. At first, we were told, the goal was ‘integration’. Now this word rapidly came to mean ‘assimilation’: a black man could only become integrated when he started behaving like a white one. After ‘integration’ came the concept of ‘racial harmony’. Now once again, this sounded virtuous and desirable, but what it meant in practice was that blacks should be persuaded to live peaceably with whites, in spite of all the injustices done to them every day. The call for ‘racial harmony’ was simply an invitation to shut up and smile while nothing was done about our grievances. And now there’s a new catchword: ‘multiculturalism’. In our schools, this means little more than teaching the kids a few bongo rhythms, how to tie a sari and so forth. In the police training programme, it means telling cadets that black people are so ‘culturally different’ that they can’t help making trouble. Multiculturalism is the latest token gesture towards Britain’s blacks, and it ought to be exposed, like ‘integration’ and ‘racial harmony’, for the sham it is.

  Meanwhile, the stereotyping goes on. Blacks have rhythm, Asians work hard. I’ve been told by Tory politicians that the Conservative Party seriously discusses the idea of wooing the Asians and leaving the Afro-Caribbeans to the Labour Party, because Asians are such good capitalists. In the new Empire, as in the old one, it seems our masters are willing to use the tried and trusted strategies of divide-and-rule.

  But I’ve saved the worst and most insidious stereotype for last. It is the characterization of black people as a Problem. You talk about the Race Problem, the Immigration Problem, all sorts of problems. If you are liberal, you say that black people have problems. If you aren’t, you say they are the problem. But the members of the new colony have only one real problem, and that problem is white people. British racism, of course, is not our problem. It’s yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your problem.

  And until you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multiculturalism, or immigration, but simply the business of facing up to and eradicating the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new, and last, Empire will be obliged to struggle against you. You could say that we are required to embark on a new freedom movement.

  And so it’s interesting to remember that when Mahatma Gandhi, the father of an earlier freedom movement, came to England and was asked what he thought of English civilization, he replied: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’

  1982

  AN UNIMPORTANT FIRE

  There was an unimportant fire in the London Borough of Camden on 20 November. Nothing spectacular; just a cheap bed-and-breakfast establishment going up in flames. The fire was at 46 Gloucester Place, owned by London Lets, whose proprietor is one Mr J. Doniger. When it started, no alarm rang. It had been switched off. The fire extinguishers were empty. The fire exits were blocked. It was night-time, but the stairs were in darkness, because there were no bulbs in the lighting sockets. And in the single, cramped top-floor room, where the cooker was next to the bed and where they had been housed for nine months, Mrs Abdul Karim, a Bangladeshi woman, and her five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter died of suffocation. They had been housed in London Lets by Camden Council, at a cost that one councillor estimated at £280 a week. Death-traps are not always economical, it would appear.

  Those of us who do not live in slum housing get used with remarkable ease to the fact that others do. It is by now reasonably well known that councils all over the country are putting people into substandard B&B accommodation. The councils admit that this accommodation is way below their own standards, and conforms to just about no public health and safety regulations. They will even admit, if pressed, that black and Asian families are far more likely than white ones to be placed in such ‘temporary’ places. (I use the inverted commas because I have met many families who have been in these slums, without hope of a move, for well over a year.) Hard statistics are not easy to come by, but it seems safe to say that between a third and a half of all families put into London Lets-type establishments are black. We know all this; and sighing sympathetically about the problem, we pass by on the other side. This time, however, the maltreated families have decided not to make things so easy for the council, or for us. On 22 November, they came to Camden Town Hall to ask for a public inquiry. When it was refused, they occupied the council chamber. As I write this, they are still there, and intend to remain until kingdom come, if need be, although they would prefer just to be rehoused in safe, decent, permanent accommodation.

  The occupying families are representative of the eighty or so families housed by Camden in London Lets properties. They are demanding a commitment from the council that it cease to use such accommodation. And there are plenty of horror stories, if you want them. One mother told us how her baby died of infections contracted because they were living in a room into which sewage kept pouring. Another told us that she had been stuck in a B&B for three years now. Two pregnant mothers, past their due dates, have been sleeping on the council chamber floor for over a week, thinking it preferable to, and safer than, their appalling homes. And, over and over again, I was told of staircases with rotten floorboards, of toilets that did not flush, of damp and mould, and of infestation by insects. In their single room at 42 Gloucester Place, Mr and Mrs Ali and their son are obliged to share their quarters with large numbers of ‘whitish, crawling insects, like earthworms’.

  It gives me no pleasure to attack a socialist local authority like Camden Council, already high on Nanny’s hit list. But nor do I derive much pleasure from the way I have seen supposed socialists behaving and talking over the last week or so. I asked Councillor Bob Latham, Chair of Camden’s Race Committee, what would happen if the families in the slums took the council to court for being in breach of their statutory duty to house the citizens of the borough according to public standards. He said that many of the B&B places were in fact outside Camden; so he didn’t think Camden could be sued. Councillor Sandy Wynn, Deputy Leader of the council and a woman with an unfortunate, high-handed manner, loudly proclaimed that the homeless families were being ‘manipulated by people with other things in their minds.’ Councillor Richard Sumray has implied in his media interviews that the occupation i
s part of an attempt by Bengali families to jump the housing queue. (It’s worth pointing out that by no means all the families involved are black.) Presumably not enough people have been burned to death yet. Priorities are priorities, after all. How does the old song go? The people’s tape is deepest red …

  On the second night of the occupation, the families formed a ring around a group of councillors who were trying to walk out of a discussion. Camden’s radical response was to send in the police. While a police superintendent was negotiating with the families’ lawyer, his men took matters into their own hands and stormed the council chamber. There are three entrances to this room. Two were completely unguarded and unlocked. By the third, there was a crowd of people. The police came in by the crowded entrance, and they came in roughly. One young man had to go to hospital and returned with his arm in a sling. I asked Sumray what had happened. ‘Somebody grazed an elbow,’ he told me.

  The police are now treating the deaths of Mrs Karim and her children as a murder investigation. There is apparently evidence that the fire was started deliberately. And at once the hints and innuendoes have started flying: the homeless families started the fire themselves, the insinuations say, to force the council to rehouse them. It sounds like the New Cross fire all over again: how much neater life gets when you make the victims responsible for the crime.

  Since the deaths and the beginning of the occupation, there have been numerous stories of an increase in the harassment of slum-housed families by their landlords, and by the police, under the cover of ‘investigating the Karim murders’. There has been an attempt by councillors to divide and rule: they offered to rehouse the families actually in the council chamber, and leave it at that. But solidarity still means something in Britain, even if Labour councillors have forgotten the word: the occupiers refused to negotiate except on the basis that all eighty families should be considered together.

  And there has been one very moving moment. On Wednesday 29 November, the Leader of the council, Phil Turner, came to listen to the families describing the horrors of their lives, and to discuss what the council could do; and he burst into tears, an honourable man driven to weeping by the frustrations of his position. The occupying families believe Turner to be sympathetic to their case. They say his problem is that he is not getting much support either from the housing department’s officers or from the majority Labour Group. So the families have been offered, and rejected, a whole series of vague promises and inadequate new homes, that is, more B&B housing or more ‘temporary’ accommodation.

  This is why the council is so nervous of giving the eighty families the commitment they are asking for: London Lets is by no means the end of the story. I have heard people describing many other B&B establishments which sound even worse. Again, it’s hard to be certain about the figures, but there may be as many as 700 families—about 2,000 human beings—housed by Camden in disease-infested firetraps. No wonder the councillors are nervous. The mice have started biting back.

  Let me say again, at the end, it’s no fun to bash Camden. Many members of the council, and many of its employees, are dedicated folk doing their best. Think how much worse the plight of the homeless must be in less ‘enlightened’ boroughs.

  The trouble is, Camden’s best has been nothing like good enough. It is time people stopped having to die to prove to local authorities that they live in hideously unsatisfactory conditions. If the deaths of Mrs Karim and her children are to be treated as murders, then many of us would say that the murderers are to be found in Camden Town Hall; and no, I am not talking about the families occupying the council chamber to protest non-violently and to demand their long-denied rights.

  1984

  HOME FRONT

  Home Front, by John Bishton and John Reardon, is a book of images; and imagination, the process by which we make pictures of the world, is (along with the idea of the self and the development of the opposable thumb) one of the keys to our humanity. So well-made pictures are of importance to us all; they tell us not only what we have previously seen, but what it is possible to begin seeing. They open our eyes. There are many such pictures to be found in this photographic portrait of everyday reality as it is experienced by Britain’s Asians and blacks—many memorable images of happiness, turbulence, defiance, childhood, death. In a Handsworth gurdwara, or Sikh temple, an old man sits on a white-sheeted floor and clutches at a radiator for warmth. Or in a scrap of urban waste land, a child’s head appears at the peak of a pyramid of rubble, while behind him rises the irony of a brick wall on which is painted a lurid scene of tropical paradise.

  But the significance of such a photographic essay as Home Front is not only aesthetic. For these are images of people who have for centuries been persecuted by images. The imagination can falsify, demean, ridicule, caricature and wound as effectively as it can clarify, intensify and unveil; and from the slaves of old to the British-born black children of the present, there have been many who could testify to the pain of being subjected to white society’s view of them.

  Fortunately, ‘white society’ is no homogeneous mass. After all, we have here the work of two white men, and it is sensitive, knowledgeable work. In The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James wrote: ‘The blacks will know as friends only those whites who are fighting in the ranks beside them. And whites will be there.’ And so they are.

  Let us say, then, that this book should be seen as part of the struggle. Its title implies as much, with its echoes of wartime privations and vigilance, as well as the growing comradeship and solidarity of the people—in this case the black communities. It seeks to set new, truer images against the old falsehoods, so that the world and its attitudes may be enabled to move forward a millimetre or two.

  An honourable enterprise; but what forces are still arrayed against it! The trouble began, one might almost say, at the very Beginning:

  God made the little nigger boys

  He made them in the night

  He made them in a hurry

  And forgot to paint them white.

  Yes, perhaps it started with Creation. Darkness, you recall, preceded light; but ‘God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.’ Then the fear of melanin-darkened skin is really the fear of the primal Dark, of the Ur-Night. It is the instinctual hostility of day-beings for the creatures of night. Maybe so. And maybe all this is connected also to the idea of the Other, the reversed twin in the looking-glass, the double, the negative image, who by his oppositeness tells one what one is. God cannot be defined without the Devil, Jekyll is meaningless without Hyde. Clearly the Other is to be feared. Images of him-her-it often use motifs of night, or of invisibility, which is a night of the watching eye; or of sexual threat (Beauty and the Beast); or of malformation (Frankenstein’s monster). Very frequently the Other is foreign; only very, very rarely is it presented as an object of sympathy. Two notable exceptions are Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and the film King Kong. Kafka shows us elsewhere that the Other can be a Castle, or a nocturnal knock at the door; but it can also be a helpless bug, that is to say Gregor Samsa, that is to say ourselves. And Kong is allowed to love Fay Wray, which earns him a kind of tragedy: “Twas Beauty killed the Beast.’

  However, it will not suffice to blame racism and the creation of lying images of black peoples on some deep-bubbling, universal failing in humanity. Even if prejudice has roots in all societies, each malodorous flowering of the plant occurs in specific historical, political and economic circumstances. So each case is different, and if one wishes to fight against such triffids of bigotry, it is the differences that are important and useful. Interestingly, the universality of racial prejudice is often used to excuse it. (Whereas few people would try to condone—for example—murders on the grounds that aggression and violence are also universal to the species.) And, while it is obviously true that blacks and Asians need to face up to and deal with our own prejudices, it seems equally clear that the most attention must be paid to the most serious problem, and
in Britain, that is white racism. If we were speaking of India or Africa, we would have other forms of racism to fight against. But you fight hardest where you live: on the home front. That’s human nature, too.

  British racism—and by that I mean a fully developed ideology, complete with the trappings of pseudo-science and ‘reason’—first flowered as a means of legitimizing the lucrative slave trade, and was patently economic in origin. It expanded, during the Asian and African colonial experience, into a rationale for world domination. These are the specific circumstances without which the British variation of the disease cannot be understood. But it is often argued that those old days, those old ideas are long dead, and play no significant part in the events of contemporary Britain. If only that were true. If only history worked so cleanly, erasing itself as it went forward.

  If only the ideas of the past did not rot down into the earth and fertilize the ideas of the present. In the nineteenth century, it was the Irish who were criticized for their rabbit-like breeding and their cooking smells; a hundred years later, the same slanders, in just about the same words, were being hurled at the ‘Pakis’. And many of the myths, the false pictures against which blacks still struggle, date from the early days of the slave trade—the myth, for instance, of their insatiable animal desires, of the sexual aggression of black women and the huge, threatening members of black men. In 1626, Francis Bacon wrote in New Atlantis that the ‘Spirit of Fornication’ was ‘a little foul ugly Aethiope’. It was just one of many such remarks.