Preliminary Discussion
From which countries are most of the immigrants who live in England today? What about America? Or Poland?
What are the main causes of immigration?
Zadie Smith has written of her experiences of immigrants: “I was around people who had that experience, who felt separated or cut in two, who had moved from one country to another, who had that sense of leading two lives.” Is something similar happening to Polish people who now live abroad?
How important is ethnicity to a person's sense of identity? Or nationality?
Hanif Kureishi has written that “questions of race, identity and culture were the major issues post-colonial Europe had to face, and that inter-generational conflict was where these conflicts were being played out.” What are the connections between these three terms? Or should there be any? What do you think he means by `inter-generational conflict'?
Kureishi has also said that Europe is “going through a huge crisis about identity, race, religion. Their identities have been shattered by immigration. That's the price you pay. If you want a modern economy, you have hundreds of thousands of workers around your country, you give up . . . a certain part of your identity. That's the deal.” Thinking of Poland's recent wave of immigration, do you agree with Kureishi's statement? Is Poland and Polish people experiencing a loss of identity? ” as not a superficial exchange of festivals and food, but a robust and committed exchange of ideas - a conflict that is worth enduring, rather than a war.
Kureishi also defined “effective multiculturalism” as not a superficial exchange of festivals and foodbut a robust and committed exchange of ideas - a conflict that is worth enduring, rather than a war. When it comes to teaching the young, we have the human duty to inform that there is more than one book in the world, and more than one voice, and that is they wish to have their voices heard by others everyone else is entitled to the same thing.”
This is a quote from Boris Johnson, Mayor of London: “Everyone is now banging the drum for Britishness. The Guardian wants more Britishness, and so does Trevor Phillips of the Campaign for Racial Equality, and so does David Davis, and so do I. We've all got to be as British as Carry On films and scotch eggs and falling over on the beach while trying to change into your swimming trunks with a towel on. We should all feel the same mysterious pang at the sight of the Queen. We do indeed need to inculcate this Britishness, especially into young Muslims, and the question is how." Should people who live in a country be “inculcated” into the culture of the country they live in? Or is this just a narrow-minded nationalism?
What are the Polish equivalent national stereotypes of scotch eggs and “Carry On” films? Is there a similarity between this idea of “Britishness” and the recent movement in Poland of “Polska dla Polaków”?
Kureishi has written that “Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a live culture is an exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most significant attribute, our imagination.” Can you think of any examples fundamentalist societies or countries? How are they often characterised? What is the connection between fundamentalism and attitudes towards immigrants?
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
"You'll stay for dinner, won't you?" pleaded Joyce. "Oscar really wants you to stay. Oscar loves having strangers in the house, he finds it really stimulating. Especially brown strangers! Don't you, Oscar?"
"No, I don't," confided Oscar, spitting in Me's ear. "I hate brown strangers."
"He finds brown strangers really stimulating," whispered Joyce. This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Me Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks.
It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best less trouble). Yet, despite all the mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into each other's lives with reasonable comfort (like a man returning to his lover's bed after a midnight walk), despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist.
But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears dissolution, disappearance. Even the unflappable Alsana Iqbal would regularly wake up in a puddle of her own sweat after a night visited by visions of Millat (genetically BB; where B stands for Bengali-ness) marrying someone called Sarah (aa where 'a' stands for Aryan), resulting in a child called Michael (Ba), who in turn marries somebody called Lucy (aa), leaving Alsana with a legacy of unrecognizable great-grandchildren (Aaaaaaa!), their Bengali-ness thoroughly diluted, genotype hidden by phenotype. It is both the most irrational and natural feeling in the world. In Jamaica it is even in the grammar: there is no choice of personal pronoun, no splits between me or you or they, there is only the pure, homogenous I…
…"Millat. He has been missing these three weeks."
"God. Well, have you tried the Chalfens?"
"He is not with them. I know where he is. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. He is on some retreat with these lunatic green-tie people. In a sports centre in Chester."
"Bloody hell."
Me sat down cross-legged and took out a fag. "I hadn't seen him in school, but I didn't realize how long it had been. But if you know where he is .. ." "I didn't come here to find him, I came to ask your advice, Me. What can I do? You know him, how does one get through?"
Me bit her lip, her mother's old habit. "I mean, I don't know…we're not as close as we were .. . but I've always thought that maybe it's the Magid thing .. . missing him ... I mean he'd never admit it ... but Magid's his twin and maybe if he saw him.”
"No, no. No, no, no. I wish that were the solution. Allah knows how I pinned all my hopes on Magid. And now he says he is coming back to study the English law paid for by these Chalfen people. He wants to enforce the laws of man rather than the laws of God. He has learnt none of the lessons of Muhammad peace be upon Him! Of course, his mother is delighted. But he is nothing but a disappointment to me. More English than the English. Believe me, Magid will do Millat no good and Millat will do Magid no good. They have both lost their way. Strayed so far from the life I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave. All I wanted was two good Muslim boys. Oh, Me ..." Samad took her free hand and patted it with sad affection. "I just don't understand where I have gone wrong. You teach them but they do not listen because they have the "Public Enemy" music on at full blast. You show them the road and they take the bloody path to the Inns of Court. You guide them and they run from your grasp to a Chester sports centre. You try to plan everything and nothing happens in the way that you expected…”
But if you could begin again, thought Me, if you could take them back, to the source of the river, to the start of the story, to the homeland
.. . But she didn't say that, because he felt it as she felt it and both knew it was as useless as chasing your own shadow. Instead she took her hand from underneath his and placed it on top, returning the stroke. "Oh, Mr. Iqbal. I don't know what to say
"There are no words. The one I send home comes out a pukka Englishman, white suited, silly wig lawyer. The one I keep here is fully paid-up green bow-tie-wearing fundamentalist terrorist. I sometimes wonder why I bother," said Samad bitterly, betraying the English inflections of twenty years in the country, "I really do. These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started .. . but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil's pact ... it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere." "Oh, that's not true, surely."
"And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?"
As Samad described this dystopia with a look of horror, Me was ashamed
to find that the land of accidents sounded like paradise to her. Sounded like freedom.”
Textual Questions
Zadie Smith said that White Teeth contained “The possibility of a community which involved so many different people and could be workable was a very optimistic idea. My generation, particularly, seemed to have fallen full into it. If you walk down the street in Willesden, you see gangs of kids that are five or six years old; there'll be a black kid, a Chinese kid, a white kid. It's like a Benetton ad.” Do you think that Samad would see this as an “optimistic idea”? What about Samad's wife, Alsana? What exactly is it they fear about such a multicultural society?
According to Smith, “Part of what White Teeth shows, from an entirely comic perspective, is where some of these people come from and how ideology gets so twisted. All the way through that book you're shown people with such extreme positions that they will sacrifice major parts of their own lives and other people's lives for that principle. To me that's an absurdity.” Do you see examples of this in the text here? Who is seen to have an ideology here? How does it twist them?
What exactly is Smith trying to say here about nationalism in any country, with the lines “no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English”? What exactly is `being English' described as here?
Kureishi talked of how inter-generational conflict reveals the issues of race, identity and culture. Do we see an example of this in Smith's text? What are the sources of the conflict between the father and his two sons here? How is culture presented in here, in a positive or negative way?
How does Samad feel as an immigrant in England? Has he been affected at all by the country he now lives in? Can he ever return to his homeland?
Smith believes in the “moral impulse in writing and the idea that most fiction writing is the impulse on how to be good.” Does this extract show you how to be a good person? Is there a good person in this text? What does goodness actually mean here?
Hanif Kureishi - My beautiful Launderette
Omar Hussein is introduced to his aunts and female cousins
“Cherry: He has his family's cheekbones, Bilquis. I know all your gorgeous family in Karachi.
Nasser: You've been there!
Cherry: You stupid! What a stupid! It's my home. How could anyone in their right mind call this silly little island off Europe their home? Every day in Karachi, every day, your other uncles and cousins come to our house for bridge, booze, and VCR.
Bilquis: Cherry, my little nephew knows nothing about that life there.
Cherry: Oh God, I'm sick of hearing about these in-betweens. People should make up their minds where they are.
Omar is then taken into the room where the men are drinking, smoking and talking
Nasser: Now, your father was a good man.
Zaki: Ah, so this is the famous Hussein's son.
Nasser: My blue brother was also a famous journalist in Bombay, and a great drinker. He was to the bottle what Louis Armstrong is to the trumpet.
Salim: And you are to the bookies as Mother Teresa is to the children.
Nasser: Your brother was a clever one. He used to carry his typewriter.
Derek: Isn't he coming? What ever happened to him?
Omar: Papa's lying down.
Derek: I meant his career
Nasser: That's what his career is also. What chance would an Englishman give to a leftist, communist, Pakistani in newspapers?
Omar: Socialist! (pause) Socialist.
Nasser: What chance would an Englishman give to a leftist, communist, socialist?
Zaki: What chance a racist Englishman has given us that we haven't taken it from him, with our hands?....I think have had too much to drink.
Derek: Would you like a drink?
Nasser: He isn't a man yet. Give him a drink.
Salim: Give him a drink. I like him. He is our future….
Johnny gets into a fight with some of his National Front friends.
Genghis: Why are you working for these people? Pakis?
Johnny: Because it's work, that's why. I want to work for a change instead of all this hanging around. What, you jealous?
Genghis: Nah, I'm angry Johnny. I don't like to see one of our blokes grovelling to Pakis. Look, they came over here to work for us. That's why we brough' them over. OK? (Pause) Don't cut yourself off from your own people. There's no-one else who really wants you. Everyone has to belong.
Textual Questions
How are immigrants described by Cherry? Do you agree with her that people should decide about where they come from? If she lives in London, how can she call Karachi home?
In Pakistan, people spend their free time doing what?
Omar's father was a journalist in Bombay. What do you know of the history of this city, and of its country? What about the relationship between Bombay and Karachi? What part did England play in all this?
The politics of Omar's father is mentioned. How much does race and politics coincide?
Johnny was a member of the National Front. What do you know about this movement? Is it unique to England?
In the fight between Johnny and Genghis there are a few reasons offered as to the reasons behind prejudice towards immigrants. What are they?
Do you agree with Genghis that you can only really belong amongst your “own people”. What does this even mean?
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