Domestic Intersections in Contemporary Migration Fiction: Homing the Metropole 9781138308114, 9781315142838

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“In this politically sensitive and timely book, Lucinda Newns challenges critical orthodoxies in order to revise the correlation of domestic space with insularity, normativity, and stasis. By showing how migrant fiction evokes alternative practices of homemaking, her intersectional readings offer a multifaceted contribution to the study of belonging in postcolonial, feminist, and queer studies.” —David James, University of Birmingham “In this era of homelessness and displacement, home is not automatically a safe space. Lucinda Newns shows that for migrants, LGBTQI people, women, and refugees, home is a process striated by violence and enforced uprooting. Her important new book updates postcolonial discussions of home for this complex and fraught twenty-first century era.” —Claire Chambers, University of York

Domestic Intersections in Contemporary Migration Fiction

Domestic Intersections in Contemporary Migration Fiction responds to the need for a more materialist perspective on migration by reorienting the focus on domesticity and the everyday practices of homemaking and away from a celebratory and aestheticized reading of displacement. Centering on Britain as the location of arrival, its readings of canonical and underexplored works of diasporic fiction emanating from Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean foreground the significance of discourses of domesticity in supporting as well as resisting colonialism, racism and xenophobia. Applying an intersectional feminist approach, this book challenges the tendency to view the private sphere as a static, apolitical and uncreative space. Rather, Newns argues, we should regard the domestic home as a key site for contesting the terms of belonging within larger spaces and collectivities, such as the city and the nation. Ultimately, by demonstrating the material importance of homely spaces for non-privileged migrants like women, refugees and LGBTQ+ people, ­Domestic Intersections problematizes the critical suspicion towards home and placement in feminist, postcolonial and queer theory. Lucinda Newns is a lecturer in World Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her work has previously appeared in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and she is coeditor of New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches (2018).

Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures Series editors: Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney

Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. 66 A Century of Encounters Writing the Other in Arab North Africa Tanja Stampfl 67 Rethinking the Victim Gendered Violence in Australian Women’s Literature Anne Brewster and Sue Kossew 68 Politicising World Literature Egypt, Between Pedagogy and the Public May Hawas 69 Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature Edited by David Attwell, Annalisa Pes and Susanna Zinato 70 Postcolonial Animalities Edited by Amit Baishya and Suvadip Sinha 71 Domestic Intersections in Contemporary Migration Fiction Homing the Metropole Edited by Lucinda Newns Related Titles: Postcolonial Life-Writing Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation Bart Moore-Gilbert For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Domestic Intersections in Contemporary Migration Fiction Homing the Metropole Lucinda Newns

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Lucinda Newns The right of Lucinda Newns to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952891 ISBN: 978-1-138-30811-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14283-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For My Parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

1 Introduction: Homing in on Migration 1 PART I

Rereading Black Domesticity

23

2 Mothering in the Diaspora: Creative (Re)Production in Buchi Emecheta’s Early London Novels 25 3 Clean Bodies, Clean Homes: Decolonizing Domesticity in Andrea Levy’s Small Island 51 PART II

Islam at Home

73

4 “The Real Thing”: Performing Home in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane 75 5 Domestic Fiction and the Islamic Female Subject: Leila Aboulela’s The Translator 97 PART III

Precarious Domesticities

117

6 Homelessness and the Refugee: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea 119

x Contents

7 Reorienting Home: Queer Domesticity in Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman 137 8 Conclusion: Homing the Metropole 158 Bibliography Index

165 177

Acknowledgments

For spurring me on in challenging times, I am very grateful to a number of supportive colleagues and friends, especially Rehana Ahmed, Claire Chambers, Rachael Gilmore, David James, Shital Pravinchandra and Kiera Vaclavik. I thank you for giving so generously of your time to read and comment on drafts, impart advice and share ideas. A huge thanks also goes to my PhD supervisor, Irene Gedalof, and to the Gender Forum at London Metropolitan University for helping me to develop my early thinking about home, the domestic and intersectional feminism from which this book has emerged. As always, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my parents for their ongoing support and encouragement. Finally, I am very thankful to my partner Doug (and frequent devil’s advocate) for his continued patience, love and humor, and to his family, whose first generation migrated to the UK from the Caribbean in the 1960s, for welcoming me into their homes.

1 Introduction Homing in on Migration

What is there worth saving and holding on to between the extremes of exile on the one hand, and the often bloody-minded affirmations of nationalism on the other? Edward Said1 Begin with the material. Pick up again the long struggle against lofty and privileged abstraction. Adrienne Rich 2 Down terrace after terrace, hundreds of bay windows glow. These were once desirable suburban addresses: on Henley, Windsor and Hampton Road. But today these are where you find the immigrant share rooms. The ones they advertise on Polish websites, or in little cards stuck in grubby windows of the Pakistani newsagents. This is where England begins. And today the white British population of these dingy streets south of Ilford station is around 10 per cent. Ben Judah, This is London3

In recent years, our televisions and computer screens have been filled with images of people whose lives are marked by transience – those whose sense of home has been destroyed by mortar bombs, hazardous crossings, the permanent impermanence of desert camps and the bureaucratic tedium of asylum legislation. If, as Edward Said contends in an essay written decades before the recent “refugee crisis”, “our age […] is the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration” (2001, ­137–138), then “home” seems to be ever more tenuous and fleeting, though certainly for some more than others. Many of those who make it through such barriers to arrive on Britain’s shores and the many more who come via legal channels of EU free movement from countries in Eastern Europe (though with Brexit looming as I write, such pathways may soon be closed) will find themselves in one of these “immigrant share rooms” in a neighborhood like the one described in This is London, Ben Judah’s 2016 foray into the underbelly of the global

2  Introduction: Homing in on Migration metropolis. As he rightly says, for those who come without money or connections, “this is where England begins”. These terraces in East London, he goes on to say, carry the sad names of the other, richer London – Richmond, Kingston or Eton Road. And they turn and turn, mutating between Pakistani homes and Eastern European tenements. But those net curtains, they are always the giveaways. These were left up when landlords turned this pebbledash house into a tenement, as the English pulled out or died. You can always tell a slum house, where four Polish builders crash in bunk beds behind that chipped bay window, by those very same old and floral singed curtains. (2016, 360) In this description, once familiar spaces are marked out and othered through their association with immigrant arrivals. Desirable neighborhoods are turned into “dingy streets” and terraced homes become “tenements” and “slum houses”. Here, Judah seems to lament, is where the aspirations of white middle-class domesticity have all but disappeared, save for the remnants of faded net curtains hanging in the windows. This book is about these immigrant home spaces and their representation in fiction. It is driven by the seemingly contradictory task of foregrounding processes of settling, of staying put, in literary narratives that are so explicitly about movement and journeying. In speaking about “home”, however, this book is concerned with material, domestic spaces and the everyday activities that go on there. It is about resisting the tendency to collapse the material into the figurative, in which “home” must always stand for something grander – often, the nation – in order to be considered interesting. Indeed, the domestic home and its attendant activities are not typically seen as warranting critical attention. Henri Lefebvre, in his Critique of Everyday Life (1991/1947), expressed frustration at scholars’ readiness to dismiss everyday culture as banal and unworthy of enquiry, describing it as the “residue” left over once specialist, structured activities have been singled out by academic analysts. The domestic space has been further devalued through its association with women in the enduring logic of separation between public/masculine and private/feminine “spheres”. Even “home” itself has come to be divided between these two domains in which the domestic remains subordinate. As Rosemary Marangoly George articulates, While the issue of “homelands” or “home-countries” is raised primarily in the discourse on nationalism and other so-called masculine, public, arenas, the issue of “home” and the private sphere is usually embedded in discourses on women. […] The association of

Introduction: Homing in on Migration  3 home and the female has served to present them as mutual handicaps, mutually disempowering. (1996, 19) Due to their association with the “banal”, the “residual” and the feminized, domestic spaces are also not readily thought about in relation to creativity or writing. In her Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed presents the image of a writing table which she encounters in the opening of the work of phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl. She notes that the writing table is one of the objects “that gather around the writer”, whereas “the family home provides […] the background against which an object (the writing table) appears in the present” (2006, 29, 30): [B]eing orientated toward the writing table might ensure that you inhabit certain rooms and not others, and that you do some things rather than others. […] Being orientated toward the writing table not only relegates other rooms in the house to the background, but also might depend on the work done to keep the desk clear. The desk that is clear is one that is ready for writing. One might even consider the domestic work that must have taken place for Husserl to turn to the writing table, and to be writing on the table, and to keep that table as the object of his attention. (2006, 30) In other words, “[w]hat is behind Husserl’s back, what he does not face, might be the back of the house—the feminine space dedicated to the work of care, cleaning, and reproduction” (2006, 31). Here, as Ahmed demonstrates, the space of the writer is typically seen as antithetical to that of the home – to be orientated towards writing is to eschew the domestic activities that would otherwise be a distraction, holding the mind back into a world of “ordinariness” that is not conducive to creative thought. However, as suggested by the pioneering Kitchen Table Press,4 feminist writing, particularly by women of color, has had a long tradition of resisting such easy separations. The texts discussed in this book are precisely those that do not relegate the domestic to the background of their works. Rather, home spaces and the activities that take place there – such as cleaning, cooking, eating, dressing, decorating and caring – are central to their representations of migration and settling and their interventions into wider colonial, racist and xenophobic discourses. Again, the domestic is not the obvious place to look for such political resistance. The model of separate spheres has earmarked the public space as the world of politics, leaving the private as an apolitical realm. However, as suggested by the descriptions of migrant homes in This is London above, such spaces are as much bound

4  Introduction: Homing in on Migration up with the processes of othering that go on in the public sphere. Such representations form part of a long history of racist and gendered tropes, frequently operating together, that paint certain bodies as illegitimate or inadequate homemakers. There is a continuing tendency for the homes of migrant and diasporic communities to be seen as sources of social dysfunction and neighborhood degeneration (as seen above) or as breeding grounds for oppressive traditions and radical beliefs, without regard for the material and psychic support that such spaces might provide in the face of a potentially hostile world outside. At the same time, this book is not about returning to an idealized version of the private sphere and women’s place within it, but is interested in how domesticity might function as a form of resistance against “the perpetual construction of economic and social structures that deprive many folks of the means to make homeplace” (hooks 1991, 46). As Sara Ahmed elsewhere contends, we tend to associate home with stasis, boundaries, identity and fixity. Home is implicitly constructed as a purified space of belonging in which the subject is too comfortable to question the limits or borders of her or his experience, indeed, where the subject is so at ease that she or he does not think. (2000, 87) When such ideas come to rest on the lives of immigrants or their descendants, any attachment to home spaces can be figured as embracing insularity and segregation and a resistance to integration or cultural syncretism. The works considered in this book engage with and disrupt such readings of the homes of racial others as pathological or regressive spaces that must be policed or escaped from in order for their inhabitants to properly integrate into the metropolitan nation. In doing so, these texts complicate narratives of home that assume a space that is “pure, which is uncontaminated by movement, desire or difference” (Ahmed 2000, 88). Instead, they offer complex interior geographies that remap the metropolitan domestic space, reframing the home as an important carrier of meaning but one that is undergoing the same processes of hybridity and transculturation that we more readily associate with the public sphere. Indeed, important work has been done on how migrant and diasporic writers and artists have transformed narratives of British national5 and city spaces6 so it seems only appropriate to consider how such literary texts intervene at the domestic scale as well. In my readings of these literary narratives of migration, I am interested in how making a home can be construed as a political act. We can start by thinking of that now official term “home-maker”, put forward as a more neutral replacement for the gendered label housewife. Although still largely associated with women, it makes an attempt to transform the spatial stasis of that older label into one of productive

Introduction: Homing in on Migration  5 action. This book therefore begins with the question of what it means to “make” a home when that home is in a foreign country and culture, with different codes and kinds of spaces within which to carry out this work? Also, to what extent can we think of homemaking as meaningful work, in spite of its frequently gendered associations with the banal and the everyday? In what contexts can the practices of homemaking become subversive and when are they hegemonic? Finally, how are processes that take place within the domestic space entangled with discourses regarding integration, assimilation, segregation, nationalism, national security and multiculturalism that are more readily associated with the public sphere? In reactionary discourses to migration, for example, the house frequently comes to stand as a metaphor for the nation, with its accompanying binaries of resident/guest (or more often resident/intruder), family/stranger and its tropes of open doors and bolted locks.7 At the same time, material homes are also frequently brought into such debates through territorial contestations over the “character” of residential neighborhoods, the allocation of government housing and access to social care.

Domestic Intersections In orienting this project around home and, in particular, domestic spaces, I come up against a persistent suspicion of home/placement and corresponding celebration of movement/dislocation in postcolonial, feminist and queer studies – bodies of work that are otherwise central to framing my textual readings in the chapters that follow. The dynamics of placement and displacement have been central issues for postcolonial studies since its inception, as seen in the work of founding postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha (2004/1994). His groundbreaking ideas on hybridity, ambivalence and mimicry recast conditions of unfixity and in-betweeness as positions resistant to the essentializing work of colonial discourse and nationalist rhetoric. Equally, investments in home/placement have come to be associated with homogenization and exclusion. As Partha Chatterjee puts it, “[Home is] not a complementary but rather the original site on which the hegemonic project of nationalism was launched” (1993, 147). In its most extreme guise, the question of who is and is not at home in a particular geographic space has fostered a violent reactionary politics, as seen in the partition of India after independence, the expulsion of Asians from Idi Amin’s Uganda, the rise in racist attacks in the wake of Enoch Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech or, more recently, the vote on Brexit. As crucial as it has been to critique such positions as part of the decolonial project, this has left some enduring blind spots when it comes to postcolonial readings of material experiences of migration, which have tended toward the celebratory. In Salman Rushdie’s highly influential

6  Introduction: Homing in on Migration essay, “Imaginary Homelands”, we see the mark of this positive reading of displacement. Speaking of the Indian writer in the West, he says, Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. (1992, 15) While acknowledging that migration produces a break from the past that can never be fully recovered in its entirety, he mobilizes the migrant position as one that transcends the parochialism of ethnic and national boundaries, arguing that “falling between two stools” is not a limitation but rather a source of creativity for the writer. While not disputing that this may often be the case, the problem occurs when the migrant, the displaced person, is detached from historical circumstances and made to stand as the resistant figure par excellence. We see this slippage in Rushdie’s contention that migrants are “the only species of human being free of the shackles of nationalism”, who “root themselves in ideas rather than places” (1992, 124). The notion of rooting oneself in ideas rather than places, though seemingly progressive and liberatory, has the effect of eliding material differences between migrants. In expressing the drive to shirk off place, this theoretical move first assumes a stable material position from which do so. As Sara Ahmed expresses, The subject who has chosen to be homeless, rather than is homeless due to the contingency of “external” circumstances, is certainly a subject who is privileged, and for whom having or not having a home does not affect its ability to occupy a given space. Is the subject who chooses homelessness and a nomadic lifestyle, or a nomadic way of thinking, one that can do so, because the world is already constituted as its home? (2000, 83, emphasis in original) In other words, to be able to “root oneself in ideas rather than places” is actually to articulate a position of relative privilege. Indeed, Benita Parry has called postcolonial critics out for drawing on their own experiences of elite migration in constructing this intellectual paradigm: [A]s if extrapolating from their own situations [that of the “third world” intellectual elite], advocates of the unhomely condition have proleptically proposed a multitudionus category of the dispossessed who will/must come to desire and attain deliverance from the shackles of nation and place. (2004, 10)

Introduction: Homing in on Migration  7 Hardt and Negri (2000) have argued that imperial power in an age of supra-states and multinational corporations now frequently operates through the very discursive tools of hybridity, fragmentation and deterritorialization that postcolonial studies has relied upon to combat colonial hierarchies (144–145). Likewise, in a time of global economic exploitation, environmental destruction and forced migration of various degrees, an uncritical investment in tropes of homelessness can serve to bolster these new ills rather than resist them. We can see the discursive violence of a gesture in which “the experiences of migration, which can involve trauma and violence, become exoticized and idealized as the basis of an ethics of transgression” (Ahmed 2000, 82). As Revathi Krishnaswamy (1995) has urged, we must confront this “mythology of migrancy” and undergo a “systematic examination of the material conditions and ideological contexts within which migrancy has emerged as the privileged paradigmatic trope of postcolonialism in the metropolis” (130). Like the idea of home, we need to resist the impulse to abstract migrancy into a figure and address the material differences between a variety of migratory experiences that are separated by class, gender, sexuality and circumstances of departure. Otherwise, we subsume, and therefore erase, less privileged forms of migration into a celebratory paradigm. In a variety of ways, the works considered in this book trouble the notion of “homelessness” as a liberatory position. Rather, Domestic Intersections rereads the domestic home as a potential unsung site of anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance. In doing so, it contributes to a re-centring of locatedness in postcolonial studies as a whole.8 While underpinned by postcolonial preoccupations with colonialism and its enduring hierarchies of race, religion and culture, the book is concerned with exploring texts that engage with multiple and intersecting axes of power. It is built around works that depict the kinds of migrant subjects that trouble the postcolonial celebration of displacement: they are variously female, working-class, non-secular, non-heteronormative and involuntary. When class and circumstances of departure are considered alongside race, for example, the call to reject attachments to home become less tenable. Paraphrasing Iris Marion Young, it is precisely because home is a privilege that it should be democratized rather than rejected (1997, 157). The book is driven by a concern with the way deterritorialized tropes can serve to liberate the centered “at home” subject at the expense of those who are materially displaced. This is not about returning to exclusionary narratives of home, but instead argues for the importance of material practices of homemaking as modes of belonging that do not reinscribe nationalist or other essentialist claims to place. Advocating for the value of domestic homes and practices, however, also necessitates grappling with the misgivings about place/home in feminist and queer scholarship. As mentioned above, women’s association

8  Introduction: Homing in on Migration with the domestic sphere has cast them as “mutually disempowering”. For second-wave feminism, the solution to this mutual disempowerment was to get women out of the home and into the world of paid labor. In key works inspiring the feminist movement such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), the home is a constraining space for women, associated with the “immanent” work of biological reproduction and domestic housework, a prime location for the operations of patriarchy (1997, 470). For de Beauvoir, the reproductive, cyclical activity of the private sphere is to be rejected so that women may gain access to the productive possibilities afforded to men in the public sphere. She further argues that it is precisely women’s unpaid labor to “make home” that acts as a stabilizing factor that enables the male subject to face the uncertain world outside. As a result, she contends, the woman inside will never be able to “transcend” above this repetitive work to become a full subject-in-the-world herself. Extending de Beauvoir’s critique, the feminist geographer Gillian Rose (1993) calls attention to the gendered nature of idealizing home in her readings of work by male humanist geographers like Edward Relph (2008) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1977, 1979), as well as philosophers like Gaston Bachelard (1992). Their works begin from the premise that the pleasure stemming from feelings of familiarity and belonging to home is a universal human condition. However, within their analysis there is no acknowledgment of how women, whose labor has traditionally made such feelings possible, might experience this space differently. Rose argues that because such generalized readings actually rely on this male-­ centered notion of home, they essentially leave “no place for women” (1993, 41). She concludes, therefore, that “the (hu)manistic desire for place/belonging/home” is in itself a masculinist one (1993, 53). While there is much value in these critiques (and indeed Rose’s argument is important for my reading of Brick Lane in Chapter 4), women of color have often contested negative readings of home in feminist discourse, charging that they extrapolate from the experiences of white, middle-class women to all women. The African-American feminist bell hooks (1991), for example, has argued for the importance of what she calls “homeplace” as a site of resistance for black Americans faced with the violence of white society during slavery and after. She asserts that [H]omeplace, however fragile and tenuous (the slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical political dimension. Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects. (1991, 42)

Introduction: Homing in on Migration  9 Her argument not only contests feminist readings by asserting that black home spaces have served as important sites for community solidarity among black women globally, but her insistence that the home has a “radical political dimension” resists masculinist “separate spheres” models (which have also been embraced by black men) that devalue women’s domestic work and render invisible their contributions to the struggle for racial equality. In other words, for hooks, it is the depoliticization of the home space, rather than home itself, that is the barrier to black women’s liberation. In Britain, Hazel Carby (1997) has also challenged (white) feminism for its neglect of black women’s experiences when it comes to home and the domestic sphere by confronting its application of key feminist ideas like “patriarchy”, “the family” and “reproduction”, also pointing to the black family as a potential source of resistance to racist structures. In keeping with the concept of “political blackness” in circulation in Britain at the time, “black” in Carby’s essay includes women of Asian as well as African descent. Her critique therefore extends bell hooks’ argument to address how the universalist deployment of feminist principles has at times aligned the movement with colonizing discourses that claim to “save” the Eastern/“Third World”/Muslim woman from oppressive traditions.9 In this imperialist brand of feminism, home and family can become synonymous with forced marriage, “honor killings”, imposed veiling and purdah from which women must be emancipated through intervention by the liberal West. Like postcolonial studies, queer theory has embraced unfixed subject positions in its aim to problematize essentialist categories of gender and sexual identity. As a result, it too finds critical affinity with deterritorializing concepts like diaspora and globalization, and movement is frequently celebrated as an important catalyst for the reinvention and renegotiation of sexualities. The domestic home is also a contested space for the queer subject, as it serves as a fundamental mechanism for reinforcing compulsory heterosexuality, such that queer narratives frequently follow a trajectory in which “coming out” entails “moving out” into the public spaces of queer subcultures (Fortier 2001, 2003). However, in queer diasporic narratives, such trajectories can also reinforce colonialist binaries that recast the home culture/country as a backward space from which the queer subject must be liberated in favor of a sexually progressive West. Such discourses put forward “an implied invitation to ‘come out’ and embrace a ‘common’ (remarkably Western) gay brotherhood and lesbian sisterhood that cuts across any nice cultural distinctions” (Hawley 2001, 7). This can also lead to a fetishization of the “sexile” who – in a ramping up of the mythology of migrancy described above – now becomes the ideal deterritorialized figure (Wesling 2008, 31). Such examples – which are explored further in the chapters that ­follow – once again point to the necessity of considering the entanglements of multiple positions and asking whose version of home is really

10  Introduction: Homing in on Migration being rejected in such critiques. Postcolonial readings of home are problematized through consideration of class (as well as gender and sexuality) and feminist and queer readings of home become complicated through the introduction of racial and cultural differences. In recent years, the term “intersectionality” has come into current usage to express a more general attention to how individuals are simultaneously positioned vis-à-vis gender, race, class, sexuality and other forms of difference (Crenshaw 1991; Lewis 2009; McCall 2005; Yuval-Davis 2006).10 A critical practice rather than a theory as such, intersectionality emerged as an improvement upon additive approaches that designate women of color as “doubly” (race + gender) or “triply” (race + gender + class) oppressed, which had the effect of essentializing conditions like “blackness”, “womanhood” or “working classness” and conflating narratives of identity with descriptions of positionality (Yuval-Davis 2006, 195).11 Instead, the notion of a road intersection, “with its imagery of a meeting point of conjoining but nevertheless separate pathways to a particular location”, was proposed as a metaphor for conceptualizing the complex coming together of multiple forms of oppression and privilege and their contingency upon specific social, historical and political contexts (Lewis 2009, 205). This book works to be intersectional in two ways. First, its textual readings are underpinned by feminist scholarship that takes an intersectional approach to thinking about the domestic sphere. This includes work, like that of bell hooks, Hazel Carby or Chandra Mohanty referred to above, that predates the term or does not use it explicitly, but nevertheless engages in the same critical practice. In particular, the value that this intersectional feminist work places upon the home space and domestic practices as a way of combatting various forms of marginalization serves as a theoretical counterbalance to the rejection of home and accompanying celebration of displacement found in postcolonial studies. It is therefore by bringing these two bodies of scholarship (intersectional feminist work on the domestic sphere and postcolonial readings of migration) into direct conversation that this book will generate new ways of reading literary narratives about migration and displacement. The second way I employ intersectionality in this book is as an overall methodology for reading, through an attention to how texts articulate resistance across these multiple axes of oppression. As I will show, this is as much about formal strategies as it is thematic content. As Rosemary Marangoly George alludes to in the quote used in the opening section of this book, nationalist, anti-colonial and, I would add, anti-racist discourses are frequently associated with the so-called masculine realm of the public sphere, while the private sphere is connected with discourses on women, gender and sexuality. Therefore, it is by traversing these narrative spaces dialogically that an intersectional reading can be achieved. This is not to advocate for any intrinsic link

Introduction: Homing in on Migration  11 between the private and female or the public and male but rather to contend that writers are working within a discursive field in which such divisions are understood as common sense. As feminist geographers Liz Bondi (1998), Linda McDowell (1999) and Kim England (1991) have suggested, while the public/private binary does not represent reality, it nevertheless reflects an ideology of power relations that is then superimposed on the spatial. My interest is in how various applications of setting, narrative structure, language and character construct public and private spaces and how these can be used to articulate resistance across multiple forms of oppression. As suggested at the start of this introduction, my aim is to read more than the metaphorical or allegorical into representations of domestic spaces in literature, in the Jamesonian (1986) sense where the private/ personal merely stands for the public/national. Rather, this book is about showing how the material space of the home articulates a politics unto itself. I will elaborate on Jameson’s reading of the domestic in the next chapter as a way of setting out my methodology for reading the texts that follow, but, in short, by shifting the theoretical weight away from national space and onto the intimate space of the home and its seemingly “banal” domestic activities, the readings contained here provide an important counter-narrative to Jameson’s reading and to subsequent studies of postcolonial and diasporic fiction in which “resistance” registers only when it is articulated via the public sphere. At the same time, representations of the domestic sphere are not “merely” personal, but rather show how conflicts and practices often seen as embedded in the private realm are constitutive of larger contestations. For the body that is othered within local and national communities, engaging in practices of homemaking “with a difference”, to appropriate James Clifford’s (1997) phrase, can be a powerful assertion of the right to permanence in the face of physical insecurity and systematic opposition to one’s right to belong. I am therefore interested in how the works discussed herein mobilize the domestic home as an important site for contesting the terms of belonging in larger spaces and collectivities, including the city and nation.

Homes in the Colonies, Homes in the Metropole The history of domesticity is deeply bound up with the imperial enterprise, as it frequently served as a boundary marker between “us” (Europeans) and “them” (the natives). While colonialism is most often associated with the conquering of public space, physically through the acquisition of territory and discursively through practices such as mapmaking, travel writing and natural science (see Ashcroft 2001; Pratt 1992), the domestic home also played an important role in reinforcing colonial ideology. Indeed, the notion of colonialism as a project to

12  Introduction: Homing in on Migration “domesticate” the natives highlights an important historical resonance in the term that gestures at the complex nexus of racist and gendered ideologies used to support the colonial mission. There has been much work done on how domestic practices and household organization functioned as arms of colonial power, especially in colonies like South Africa and India where contact between colonized and colonizer was highly regulated and often limited to master/domestic servant interactions.12 In her work on gender in colonial spaces, Sara Mills (2003) maps the ideology of colonial power relations onto the design of the colonial city itself, pointing to how its layout, with distinct areas for Europeans separate from those for natives, correlated to prescribed ideals of race relations within the colony at large. In such a system, the house functioned as one of the few sanctioned “contact zones”.13 For Anne McClintock (1995) and Rosemary Marangoly George (1996), this contact zone of the domestic space as a “unit of civilization” was central to maintaining European cultural superiority through its dissemination of European domestic norms and values. As a result, what was seen on home soil as valueless women’s work took on a new significance in empire, where the home became one of its most closely guarded frontiers. As George articulates, “The English woman in the Indian empire […] was not merely decorating house and self but managing ‘base camp’” (1996, 41). In Midnight’s Children (1981), which is often held up as the postcolonial novel par excellence, Salman Rushdie depicts the effectiveness of this colonizing domesticity in the terms of sale between the Sinai family and the colonial administrator William Methwold on the eve of independence. As the family members are forbidden from removing any of the house’s contents until the transfer of power, they begin to adopt the habits and lifestyle of their departing masters. While the painted images of memsahibs watch over the Sinai household, we see how their power as bearers of British domestic values extends long after independence. This history of domestic relations in the colonies has had a profound effect on the discourses circulating about once-colonized populations in the metropole and, as I will show in the ensuing chapters, serves as a discursive field from which new narratives of homemaking are forged. As with the construction of the colonial home as “base camp” in the empire, the homes of racial others in the metropole serve as mythological spaces that can be mobilized to denote unbridgeable difference. Although by no means an exact equivalence, we can see the echoes of colonizing spatiality in the organization of metropolitan cities like Paris, where the banlieue, home to a large percentage of the city’s non-white population, acts as a “liminal space associated with social marginality, uncontrolled movement and spatialized poverty” (Ossman and Terrio 2006, 7). This mapping of power differentials is similarly embodied in the British council estate, which sets up islands of racialized marginality within otherwise wealthy British city centers like London (discussed in

Introduction: Homing in on Migration  13 more detail in Chapter 4). Such associations extend to the intimate space of the home via colonial tropes that render the non-white domestic space as one of pollution, miscegenation and moral decay. The power of such images to evoke racism and xenophobia relies on a slippage between representations of non-white homes and conceptions about the bodies that reside within their walls. At the same time, the processes involved in making a home in such spaces in spite of spatial and structural marginalization can serve as a form of resistance to such rhetoric and to efforts that work to “unhome” migrants (and their descendants) in other ways. In his Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau gestures at the subversive possibilities of banal domestic activities which tend to “slip through the extensive power and surveillance networks in contemporary culture” (1988, 30). He gives the example of a North African immigrant in a Paris suburb who creates for himself [sic] a space in which he can find ways of using the constraining order of the place or of the language. Without leaving the place where he has no choice but to live and which lays down its law for him, he establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity. (1988, 30) It is this relationship between homemaking and a resistant creativity that is of particular relevance for the critical readings to follow. If colonial “contact zones” are sites where European and native cultures mingle, and where marginalized groups “select and invent” from materials transmitted to them from the dominant culture (Pratt 1992, 6), homes in the metropole also act as important sites of transculturation, where the values and practices of the metropolitan culture are reinterpreted and repositioned alongside alternative ways of inhabiting the space. Ultimately, the works considered challenge the image of migrant homemaking as a choice between productive assimilation and a recalcitrant and potentially threatening reproduction of the home culture. Instead, they frame the home as an important site for enacting new forms of belonging from a position of marginality and exclusion. In the title of this book, I use the term “migration” to describe the body of fiction that I will be addressing, which I find preferable to the more general term “diasporic”. Diasporic fiction has come to refer to a relatively recent body of works published in European languages and produced by writers who are in some way marked by migration, either personally or ancestrally, and who are usually residents in Europe or North America. This kind of writing has experienced an explosion in the past thirty years or so, due in large part to a greater presence of well-established diasporic communities in the wealthier publishing centers of the world combined with an ever-increasing thirst by the

14  Introduction: Homing in on Migration readership in these countries for literature that straddles geographic and cultural spaces, mixing the familiar with the “exotic”.14 While there is significant overlap in texts between diasporic fiction/literature and what I am calling migration fiction,15 I deploy my term as a kind of genre or subgenre within the larger body of diasporic literature, which includes only those works of fiction that make the experience of migration central to the narrative. This is because of my interest in the tension produced when rendering processes of settling and placement in the midst of a wider narrative of displacement. Another reason for wanting to find an alternative to “diasporic” is that using this term would already locate the study within a presumed theoretical matrix, whereas I desire the flexibility to work with and against diaspora as a critical concept. Diaspora theory has been vitally important for providing an alternative to limiting constructions like “ethnic minority” and making histories of movement central to how we conceive of group identity. It also draws attention to forms of solidarity that bridge communities in different geographic locations. As James Clifford defines it, Diaspora discourse articulates, or blends together, both roots and routes to construct […] alternative public spheres, forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference. (1997, 251, emphasis in original) Work like Clifford’s and other key diaspora theorists like Paul Gilroy (1993, 2002) and Stuart Hall (1994) has been instrumental for moving us away from essentialist categories of culture and race. However, by foregrounding movement and mobility, it has at times led to a privileging of the transnational over the local and obscured the ways that “staying put” has also been central to histories of migration and community organizing. Although there is a strong preoccupation with the concept of “home” within diaspora theories, this more often than not refers to a geographically and temporally (and often genealogically) removed place of origin, rather than the location of settlement. As James Procter articulates, Travelling rhetorics tend to underplay the extent to which diaspora is also an issue of settlement and a constant battle over territories: over housing and accommodation, over the right to occupy a neighbourhood, over the right to “stay put”. […] A deconstruction of the concept “diaspora” provides a means of returning to the politics of place, location and territory within diaspora literature – a politics that too often gets endlessly deferred. (2003, 14, emphasis in original)

Introduction: Homing in on Migration  15 Indeed, in spite of Clifford’s assertion that “Diaspora involves dwelling, maintaining communities, having collective homes away from home”, his conception of diaspora as a blend of “roots” and “routes” actually does not leave room for these “homes away from home”. Because “routes” refers to travel and “roots” to the point of origin, the only form of dwelling in Clifford’s concept is the one left behind, separated by time and space. Put another way, the roots/routes construction requires a third term to indicate the process of re-rooting, which is a necessary part of dispersal. It is by focusing on this process that I hope to add another dimension to how we think about diaspora. Avtar Brah (1996) gestures at the possibilities of this rethinking in her concept of “diaspora space”, which draws attention to the material conditions that diasporic subjects face when settling in a new place and moves away from the more common reading of home in diaspora theory as purely a “mythic place of desire”: home is also the lived experience of a locality. Its sounds, smells, its heat and dust, balmy summer evenings, or the excitement of the first snowfall, shivering winter evenings, sombre grey skies in the middle of the day…all this, as mediated by the historically specific everyday of social relations. (192) “The question of home”, she goes on to say, “is centrally about our political and personal struggles over the social regulation of ‘belonging’” (192). In making the link here between belonging and everyday experiences, Brah provides a rationale for considering the “small” things of life as constitutive of creating a sense of home in the larger spaces of city and nation. I therefore take my cue from Brah, but focus in on the domestic home as a perhaps hitherto unlikely “diaspora space”. Because the scope of geographic “origins” in this book is large – encompassing South Asia, the Caribbean and North, East and West ­A frica – Britain serves as a unifying location of settlement. Therefore, most of my analysis is rooted in the particularities of British colonial history, though brief comparisons are made to the histories of other imperial powers, such as France and the United States. While London-­ centric works figure large in migration fiction, I have also included works that engage with other areas, such as Scotland (Chapter 5), and coastal regions (Chapter 6). Because of the focus on domesticity and homemaking, there is, unsurprisingly, a dominance of works by women (with the exception of Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work I discuss in Chapter 6). However, even female-authored texts do not preclude an engagement with male experience, as in the case of Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr ­Loverman, which is the focus of Chapter 7. The book is divided into three parts, with two chapters apiece that each revolve around a central novel (or two, in the case of Chapter 2).

16  Introduction: Homing in on Migration The chapters within each part are designed to speak to one another, as well as build on points raised in previous sections. The first two parts focus on communities, black and Muslim, respectively, that have long and pronounced histories of spatial exclusion as well as structural marginalization in Britain. To group works in this way is not to suggest internal homogeneity – indeed, the novels discussed engage with migration from very different regions: West Africa and the Caribbean in Part I and South Asia and North Africa in Part II – but rather that they respond to and work to contest a similar set of tropes and discourses around domesticity and homemaking. Part III, by contrast, pulls together works from very different cultural and geographic backgrounds to consider domestic precarity, one of the book’s main through-lines. Part I, “Rereading Black Domesticity”, focuses on the early period of postwar black migration from Britain’s colonies. Known as the “Windrush generation” in reference to the Empire Windrush that docked at Tilbury harbor in Essex in 1948 carrying 492 new arrivals from the West Indies, those who came to Britain during this time heralded a new era of mass “colored” immigration.16 Migrants arriving in the decades following Windrush faced the brunt of backlash against the new visibility of racial others within, including widespread discrimination in employment and housing. The so-called color bar made it acceptable for landlords to refuse tenants based on race so that the primarily black immigrants from the West Indies and, later, West Africa had to settle in less desirable areas, often in shared lodging houses. One account of these areas remarks on the physical dilapidation of such houses, which are “structurally similar to those of the south [of Kensington], [but] are badly in need of repair: the woodwork is unpainted; window frames are rotten; plaster has fallen away from the outside walls” (Glass 1960, 50). In another, homes are described as ugly, dilapidated, Victorian structures, with neglected and rubbish-­ strewn gardens […] The exteriors are for the most part dingy, unpainted, and crumbling. Front steps and windows are grimy and most windows are hung with sleazy, unlined rayon curtains that are drawn across day or night. (Patterson 1963, 183) There is a marked repetition in these descriptions of images of “dilapidated”, “neglected” and “crumbling” domestic façades, which serve as the site at which to “diagnose” those who reside within their walls (Procter 2003, 21–22). In this way, such accounts worked to pathologize black homes as barometers of impending wider social decay resulting from the presence of these new immigrant communities. Such representations were implicitly set against an idealized image of postwar British domesticity, itself fed by racialized tropes of “dirt” and “cleanliness”, in

Introduction: Homing in on Migration  17 which “a regime of domestic hygiene […] could restore the threatened potency of the imperial body politic and the race” (McClintock 1995, 211). These representations of immigrant houses from the 1960s are depressingly similar to those we find, more than fifty years later, in This is London, pointing to the durability of such tropes. The resemblance extends even to the focus on window dressings, which are highlighted for both what they reveal (that this is an immigrant house) and what they are feared to hide (moral degeneracy). Early descriptions such as these also played into anxieties about miscegenation and the “over-­fecundity” of black women. James Procter notes the frequent references to the presence of prams and permissive cohabitation that reinforce notions about black hypersexuality. These outward signs of “failed” domesticity would then serve as justifications for crossing the threshold of the black living space. The material generated by social workers and other representatives of the state who intervene into “problem families” or police black women’s reproduction and childcare practices have further contributed to a sociological discourse of black home life as in need of repair. And we see such ideas continue today in the fingers pointed at lapses in parenting or other forms of family “dysfunction” in racially charged debates about gangs, urban knife crime and antisocial behavior among teenagers. The chapters in this section engage with this early moment of black settlement, and the works discussed provide alternative narratives of black domesticity to the negative representations circulating in these outside accounts. Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of this book’s methodology for reading, which approaches the private sphere not as a mere allegory for the public but as an independent source of meaning and political resistance in itself. Buchi Emecheta’s early London novels stand as a productive point of departure for thinking through this approach in the context of diaspora, as they foreground the domestic space and the everyday practices of homemaking that go on there. In this way, Emecheta’s novels provide an important female-centered account of postwar migration to Britain and a comparison to much more canonical male-centered works like Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners. They are also highly significant because they represent a counter-narrative of black domesticity to those produced by white social workers and welfare officers. I focus in particular on representations of mothering, reading sociological accounts of the practice of private fostering among West African immigrants in conversation with Emecheta’s representation of this practice in Second-Class Citizen. I argue that such accounts engage with a wider politics of mothering in which black and white women were called upon to take on different roles. The chapter then moves to a discussion of alternative, resistant models for mothering in the diaspora found in Second-Class Citizen and In the Ditch that challenge the reduction of black womanhood to a status defined only by wage labor and that are

18  Introduction: Homing in on Migration important for helping Emecheta’s protagonist to establish a sense of belonging in Britain. These resistant forms of mothering ultimately work to disrupt the gendered and racialized geography of the metropolitan space, thereby asserting homemaking as political work. I begin Chapter 3 by exploring how Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island mobilizes the domestic space as a potent allegory for the nation through its portrayal of the narrative entanglements of Caribbean migrant and white British characters in a London lodging house in the postwar period. However, when considered in the context of Levy’s other works and a longer tradition of Afro-Caribbean women’s writing, domesticity itself emerges as an important site of critique in the novel. The novel’s complex intersections of class, race and gender are uncovered through an exploration of its engagement with the cult of domesticity as practiced in both the colony and the metropole. Tropes of dirt and cleanliness and the proper ordering domestic space take on significance in the demarcation and transgression of social boundaries by the novel’s female protagonists, Hortense and Queenie. The two modes through which domesticity is thematized in the novel, the allegorical and literal, then come together in the return of Queenie’s husband Bernard. Through a dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s concept of the “strange body”, we can see how tropes of dirt and cleanliness are here deployed to render the racial other in the white home/nation as a “body out of place”. Ultimately, Levy’s novel suggests the impossibility of any unproblematic “return” to architectural and bodily separation, reminding us that such entanglements have already been prefigured in the colonial encounter itself. Part II, “Islam at Home”, moves to the more recent past in considering the increased suspicion directed towards Muslims, especially following the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks in New York and London, respectively. The heightened securitization of Britain in the wake of these events has generated a climate of surveillance and distrust that has primarily fallen on those who practice Islam. Government initiatives like the “Prevent” program have been deployed as a way of infiltrating those spaces of Muslim life that are inaccessible to the scopic lens of the state: places like mosques, community centers and the private spaces of the home. At the same time, this increased scrutiny is part of a longer history in which Asian/Muslim communities in Britain have been painted as “insular” and self-segregating. The more recent securityscape has built on such tropes, rendering Muslim homes and neighborhoods as threatening spaces of alterity within the British nation, where religious extremism, female oppression and other practices contrary to “British values” are feared to go on unchecked. In addition, media coverage of veiling, forced marriages and “honor killings” often recycles Orientalist tropes that portray Muslim households as constraining and potentially dangerous spaces for girls and women, from which the only option is to escape to the liberal public sphere of Western life. The works considered in this

Introduction: Homing in on Migration  19 section both engage with and contest (with varying degrees of success) the various ways that Muslim domestic spaces have been rendered “unhomely”, problematizing representations that cast them as terra incognita within the British nation or fetishize them as sources of exotic/erotic fascination. Against a backdrop of post-9/11 anxieties, Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane has been celebrated for opening up a “hidden” world of the British Bangladeshi community in London. Indeed, most of the novel’s action takes place within the intimate spaces of the home of its protagonist Nazneen, her husband Chanu and their two daughters, giving the reader a sensation of trespassing into spaces not normally accessible to the mainstream British public. On one level, Brick Lane seems to confirm suspicions about the toxic nature of Muslim home life, as it follows a well-worn trajectory of female submission to patriarchal regulation towards increased liberation through contact with British public spaces where you can do “whatever you want”. However, on closer inspection, Ali’s novel also includes elements that work against this reading. Through its narratorial strategies and detailed descriptions of domestic spaces and activities, the novel exposes the performance involved in Nazneen’s maintenance of the home as a static space of cultural reproduction. Given the association between woman and place/home in human geography, Nazneen’s performative qualities work to unsettle the male characters’ investment in home as a space of comfort and familiarity. Second, through its attention to the mundane activities of everyday life set against the performative image maintenance of “Banglatown”, Brick Lane works to frustrate readers’ desire to uncover an exotic or sensational world to consume within the private spaces of Muslim life. Rather, its portrayal of the family’s home life suggests a hybridized domesticity marked by complex negotiations and improvisations. Alongside the increased securitization of Muslims, the post-9/11 era has seen a recycling of Orientalist tropes that mobilize the image of the “oppressed Muslim woman” as a boundary marker between “us” and “them” in the global war on terror and as a convenient justification of its interventionist policies, both foreign and domestic. The wide circulation of this trope has also contributed to a restrictive reception landscape for Muslim women’s writing. Their voices are expected to conform to the figure of the “oppressed Muslim woman” in need of saving or to the liberated figure who has rejected her faith and embraced the freedom and possibilities of the West. Leila Aboulela is nevertheless a writer who has charted a way through this difficult readerly terrain and found success while publishing fiction that maintains an Islamic worldview. In particular, her novel The Translator, which I consider in Chapter 5, has had critical and commercial success while also being deemed “halal fiction”. This chapter argues that one of the ways this is accomplished is through Aboulela’s appropriation of the domestic novel genre. Setting her story

20  Introduction: Homing in on Migration of courtship and marriage between a Sudanese Muslim woman and a Scottish man within the familiar world of the domestic novel facilitates a “translation” between a narrative driven by Islamic religious principles and a largely secular readership. In addition, through its manipulation of the genre’s rhetorical machinery, The Translator recasts the historic opposition between the European “home”, where women exert moral power, and the unhomely space of the Muslim “harem”, where women have no power at all. Significantly, it is by employing a narrative that appears to be wholly embedded in the private sphere that the novel makes a discursive intervention into the politics of the encounter between East and West, Islamic and secular, in a challenging mediascape with a particular horizon of expectations for Muslim women’s voices. As the title of Part III, “Precarious Domesticities”, suggests, this section focuses on homes that are insecure, unstable and transitory. While all the works covered in this book could be said to represent homemaking under conditions of precarity, the chapters in this part consider those whose legal status and sexuality preclude the kind of community solidarity that might ordinarily work to counteract the material instability that migrants face. Once again, an intersectional approach that considers differences in class, race, sexuality and circumstances of departure reveals the complexities around home and domesticity for figures who do not fit readily into diasporic models, namely, refugees/asylum seekers and queer migrants of color. In such situations, material homemaking can function as a resistant practice in the face of other forms of marginalization, including alienation from people who might ordinarily be sources of support. Through their investment in houses and the objects they contain, the works considered in this section pose direct challenges to the celebration of displacement in postcolonial and queer theory, respectively. Involuntary migration, the subject of Chapter 6, particularly complicates readings that cast displacement as an inherently progressive and creative force. This is due to the material homelessness that such journeys entail and the political and legal structures of contemporary asylum regimes that maintain people in an unsettled state of temporariness. As a result of such state-imposed precarity, refugees and asylum seekers are not able to participate in disrupting exclusionary narratives of the nation in the same way as migrants and diasporic communities more generally. Rather, their narratives must conform to the state’s idea of a bona fide “asylum story” in order to be perceived as having a legitimate claim to its protection. Given their spatial precarity, practices of domesticity and homemaking can be understood as resistant to the political and legal structures that maintain refugees and asylum seekers in a state of temporariness. Such practices have the further potential of creating much-needed material stability and also serve a narrative purpose that creates continuity between past and present. This connection

Introduction: Homing in on Migration  21 between homemaking and narrative is evident in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea, which centers on the experiences of Zanzibari asylum seeker, Saleh Omar. Through the novel’s narrative investment in houses and domestic objects, it draws attention to the importance of material homes as spaces where the depersonalizing work of forced displacement and the asylum system can be resisted by the restorative work of storytelling. Lastly, Chapter 7 broadens the intersectional scope of the book beyond heterosexual narratives of migration and settling, which contain a number of assumptions about how domestic homes are arranged and what they signify that are contested when we consider the experiences of queer migrants. As mentioned above, homes are frequently seen as negative spaces in queer narratives, such that the process of “coming out” is typically preceded by “moving out”. In the case of queer diasporic narratives, this trajectory can become transposed into one in which the home nation/culture is disavowed in favor of the openness afforded by the Western metropolis, reproducing imperialist narratives of “progress” that render the West as more enlightened than “backward” cultures where there is less sexual freedom. However, Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr Loverman rejects this logic by placing a story of sexual liberation in the context of a longer history of black struggle to achieve economic and ontological security in Britain. Such narrative choices complicate any straightforward reading of the novel as a critique of homophobia in Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic culture. Against a backdrop of other queer diasporic texts and early “Windrush novels”, I demonstrate that Mr Loverman is a novel directed at queering home rather than any simple rejection of it. In doing so, the chapter explores broader theoretical questions about the fractures and intersections between “queer” and “diaspora”, especially with regard to issues of placement and mobility, arguing that we need to leave space for the terms to be mutually interrogative rather than additive. Furthermore, as Mr Loverman is a novel that rewrites the first generation of arrivals to the UK, this final chapter also allows for a reflection on where this book began, and thus sets up its concluding remarks.

Notes 1 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile” (2001, 177). 2 Adrienne Rich, “Notes Towards a Politics of Location” (2003, 31). 3 Ben Judah, This is London (2016, 358). 4 See Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press” (1989). 5 See, for example, Lee (1995), Seyhan (2000), Gilroy (2002), Bentley (2007) and Dawson (2007). 6 I am thinking especially of John McLeod’s Postcolonial London (2004). See also Ball (2004), Sandhu (2004) and Varma (2012).

22  Introduction: Homing in on Migration 7 See Procter (2003) for a thorough exploration of these tropes in anti-­ immigration discourse. 8 This book therefore works in concert with other recent scholarship in the field that aims to revisit the local as a key source of meaning and postcolonial critique. See, for example, Wilson, Sandru and Lawson Welsh (2010), Goebel and Schabio (2006), Quayson (2014) and Varma (2012). In all of these books, however, exterior space (the city in particular) remains the primary object of inquiry. 9 For important accounts of this tendency within feminism, see Lila AbuLughod (2013), Trinh T. Minh-Ha (2009) and Chandra Mohanty (2003). 10 The notion of intersecting forms of oppression stems from the 1977 statement of the Combahee River Collective (1982), a foundational text of Black feminism, but the term is most often attributed to Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991). 11 We also find a similar idea in postcolonial literary criticism with Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford’s notion of “double-colonisation” (1986). 12 See, for example, Sara Mills (2003), Alison Blunt (2005), Anne McClintock (1995) and Rosemary Marangoly George (1996). 13 Mills borrows this term from Marie Louis Pratt (1992), who in turn borrows it from the field of ethnography. 14 See Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) for a brilliant exploration of this phenomenon. 15 As far as I am aware, no one else uses this particular formulation, at least not as an organizing principle for selecting and analyzing works in a comparative study. The term “immigrant fiction” has been used in some places, such as in the title of a special issue put out by the Journal of Contemporary Literature (Walkowitz 2006), within which it is interpreted quite broadly (including, for example, the migration of books through transnational publishing networks), and in Chapter 6 of Rosemary Marangoly George’s The Politics of Home (2003). 16 See Phillips and Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (2009), for a detailed exploration of this history.

Part I

Rereading Black Domesticity

2 Mothering in the Diaspora Creative (Re)Production in Buchi Emecheta’s Early London Novels

In Lonely Londoners, Sam Selvon’s iconic exploration of immigrant life in Britain during the postwar years, the narrator famously muses that It have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up into little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones […].1 (2006/1956, 60) Indeed, the novel’s opening up of the “little world” inhabited by its Caribbean characters is in many ways as important as its lauded rewriting of London itself.2 As James Procter has argued, Lonely Londoners is as concerned with exploring the interior geographies of the basements and bedsits where most new arrivals settled as it is the public spaces of Bayswater, Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park. He notes, for example, how Moses’s basement serves as “an important repository for a group consciousness”, where “the boys elaborate upon and establish communal memory” (2003, 46). Procter’s insights emphasize that early migration fictions like Selvon’s were deeply invested in the struggle for home and housing “that was heightened rather than displaced by the fear of homelessness” (31). A memorable moment early in the novel is the arrival of the family of Tolroy, headed by its formidable matriarch Tanty, who is also the only significant black female character in the novel. When asked why she has come to Britain, she replies, “I come to look after the family. […] Who will cook and wash the clothes and clean the house?” (11), which paints her as a kind of mother figure for the Caribbean “boys” in London. The group’s appearance at the train station serves as the occasion for a news photo, appearing with the accompanying headline “Now, Jamaican Families Come to Britain” (12). In this way, the arrival of Tolroy’s family stands for a watershed moment in which the primarily single, male migration of the immediate postwar years expands to family migration involving women and children. The headline warns, in other

26  Rereading Black Domesticity words, that black people are here to stay. Tanty and the family’s sudden appearance in London also marks a dramatic change for Tolroy, as he loses the relative freedom afforded to him as one of the “boys” and must leave the communal male living space of the boarding house to support a family household. We get only a few glimpses of this world, however, as it is marginal to the novel’s emphasis on collective male experience. For Procter, the “stifling interiority” of earlier novels like George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) is replaced by a “less claustrophobic and housebound” vision in Lonely Londoners, suggesting that ultimately the home is a constraining space that is to be exchanged for a more “optimistic engagement with the built environment beyond the domestic interior” (46). While it is important to highlight how such works draw attention to the negative effects of living in such inhospitable conditions, it is also essential to consider how domestic spaces might also serve as nurturing or restorative. In other words, we need to remain attentive to the labor of black women like Tanty who endeavor to render such spaces livable, to make them homely. This kind of homemaking, however, is not the concern of Lonely Londoners, so we need to look elsewhere, largely to the work of women writers who can provide an alternative vision to the male-centered world of Selvon’s novel. Aside from the clandestine presence of figures like Tanty, such a perspective has been largely absent from early fictional accounts of commonwealth migration, and its particular entanglements need to be recuperated in order to get a fuller picture of the stakes of homemaking in Britain. Important examples of this vision can be found in the early and largely autobiographical novels of the Nigerian-born writer Buchi Emecheta. Emecheta came to Britain in the 1960s to join her student husband, and her experiences of arrival and settling in ­London went into the formation of her first two novels In the Ditch (1972) and Second-­Class Citizen (1974). Second-Class Citizen, though published after In the Ditch, is actually its prequel. It tells the story of Adah’s childhood in Nigeria and eventual migration to Britain and ends with her leaving her abusive husband Francis, taking her children with her. In the Ditch (though published first) essentially picks up from this moment and recounts Adah’s time as a single mother at the Pussy Cat Mansions council estate. The two works were later published together, in narrative order, as Adah’s Story in 1983. While Lonely Londoners has come to stand as a founding text of black British literature, 3 Emecheta’s works have had considerably less attention in both scholarship and pedagogy in this arena.4 This is in part the result of criticism the works have received on various fronts. Second-Class Citizen in particular has been charged with participating in the othering of Africans, particularly men, which is most evident in descriptions of Adah’s husband Francis, whose “Africanness” is frequently cited as the reason for his “uncivilized’ attitudes towards

Mothering in the Diaspora  27 women (24, 173, 175) (though in other moments African ways are celebrated as superior to English). Others have dismissed the novels on artistic grounds, citing their limited “stylistic achievement” (Sougou 2002, 511). Critics frequently describe the works as “sociological” or “documentary” in style (Brown 1981; Kenyon 1991; Sougou 2002), with one suggesting that Emecheta is “more interested in bearing witness than in creating rich discourse” (Kenyon 1991, 113). John McLeod has defended Emecheta’s fiction against such assessments, arguing that “such critical comments problematically equate documentary fiction with aesthetic poverty and cancel the consideration of the imaginative aspects of Emecheta’s writing which are not simply issues of style” (McLeod 2004, 101). However, given the significance of the period in which Emecheta was writing to the communal memory of black Britain and the country’s history of migration more broadly, we should also consider how bearing witness might be an important enterprise in itself. The writer Joan Riley, for example, reminds us that in this early period, “the black experience in Britain was usually interpreted by ‘white’ usually sociological parameters” (1994, 547). Such interpretations were largely produced via the observations of social workers who would have been some of the few white people to enter black living spaces. As Riley acknowledges, Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and In the Ditch are some of the few texts conveying the daily realities for black people at the time from an insider position. In particular, Emecheta’s novels provide an alternative discourse of the black domestic space to that of social workers and other representatives of the welfare state, perspectives that fall under direct criticism within the works themselves. For this reason, the works offer a valuable contribution to the story of postwar migration to Britain. In this chapter, I read Adah’s Story, and Second-Class Citizen in particular, as a complementary foundational migration narrative and point of departure for a critical study of black British and diasporic fiction more broadly. Though Emecheta’s novels were published nearly two decades after Selvon’s, they contain many of the same concerns as this earlier work, such as the struggle for decent housing and accompanying experiences of racism. However, while Lonely Londoners explores these problems from the perspective of a single male migrant living in the company of other single male migrants, Emecheta provides a female perspective that centers family life and the everyday labor that goes into making home in such an inhospitable environment. Unlike in Selvon’s account, the disillusionment caused by these experiences is not counterbalanced by the male camaraderie that makes up the bulk of the earlier novel’s episodic narrative. On the whole, Emecheta’s works are much more ambivalent about racial or diasporic solidarity as the means to a secure existence in Britain and draw attention to the limited terms of belonging available for women within such movements. This is perhaps another

28  Rereading Black Domesticity explanation for why Emecheta’s works have not maintained a prominent position within the black British literary canon. As John McLeod argues, Emecheta’s representations of London life in the early 1970s “unsettle the dominant metanarrative of black British women’s resistance” by presenting racial identity as a less useful emancipatory strategy than the dominant history of postwar social and political movements would like to assert and call into question “the effectiveness of London’s diaspora community as a source of support and survival” (2004, 95, 105). However, as I will go on to demonstrate, this does not mean that her works do not participate in a wider anti-racist politics, but that this “politics” needs to be differently conceived.

Reframing Resistance Because of the attention to the everyday struggles of African women in her fiction, Emecheta has been viewed by some at home as a writer “who has let the questions of male domination blind them to the necessary solidarity between man and woman” (Sougou 2002, 51). Such assessments stem from a current of belief that feminism is an inherently Western idea that is ultimately damaging to the decolonization of African nations. Much of the resistance to feminist ideas stems from the perception that it diverts from the “main issues” of national and racial uplift (James 1990, 25). 5 In a poem entitled “Letter to a Feminist Friend” by the Malawian writer Felix Mnthali, the speaker asks, “Why should they [feminists] be allowed to come between us?”, and finishes by declaring that “When Africa at home and across the seas is truly free…there will be time for you to share the cooking and change the nappies – till then, first things first!” (quoted in Petersen 2006, 236–237). The speaker’s criticism of his “feminist friend” here explicitly associates women’s issues with domestic and mothering duties. While this is in itself a limited understanding of feminist goals, it nevertheless suggests that such concerns have nothing to do with the work of postcolonial nation-building. This question of what constitutes the “main issues” is directly related to women’s position with respect to nationalist projects. As Deniz Kandiyoti’s asserts, “the integration of women into modern ‘nationhood’, epitomized by citizenship in a sovereign nation-state, somehow follows a different trajectory from that of men” (1994, 377). Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) has expanded on this idea, arguing that even though women are often the symbol or justification for national projects, they are frequently excluded from the “we” of the body politic, occupying an object rather than subject position within the nation. Though women are often made to stand for the nation in such formulations as “Mother Africa” or “Mother India”, they are simultaneously placed outside its political will precisely by situating their concerns as secondary to the work of national and racial liberation.

Mothering in the Diaspora  29 Susan Andrade registers the effects of such attitudes in narratives of African literary history. In her revisionist account The Nation Write Small (2011), she argues that there is a tendency to read the older generation of African women writers (those prior to the recent rise of explicitly politically engaged female African novelists like Chimamanda Adichie), of which Emecheta is a part, as antagonistic or at least indifferent to the political aims of anti-colonial nationalism. As a result, such writers, she contends, were marginalized or excluded from early narrativizations of African literary inheritance. She points out, for example, that neither Gerald Moore’s “canon-shaping” book of African criticism Seven African Writers (1962) nor his expanded version Twelve African Writers (1980) includes any female authors (2011, 7). Such disregard, Andrade argues, is down to the particular rubric that critics used to measure the worthiness of African fiction, which was based on the magnitude of its political intervention. What constituted “political intervention,” however, was associated with a particular kind of anti-colonial nationalism exhibited in the work of early celebrated writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.6 Andrade’s contention is that contemporaneous women writers were indeed weighing into political debates, but that their interventions went unnoticed due to a limited conception of what constitutes the “political” in literature emanating from the once-­ colonized world. Andrade examines the specific terms of the “resistance model of cultural nationalism” (2011, 6) with reference to Frederic Jameson’s controversial essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986). In this work, Jameson presents allegory as the primary mode through which the fiction from once-colonized nations operates. He argues that Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic – necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society. (68) Although acknowledging that there are many problems with the oversimplified nature of Jameson’s assessment, problems that have been well voiced by postcolonial scholars,7 Andrade argues for the continued relevance of an allegorical reading of the relationship between the “private” and “public” concerns in the work of early female African writers. However, she proposes a reassessment of allegorical reading practices themselves to enable a full appreciation of the nuances of their work. In the quotation above, Jameson presents the private as merely the vehicle through which the national is revealed. The personal and domestic in

30  Rereading Black Domesticity this reading therefore become subservient to the real “purpose” of the narrative. As Andrade articulates, [B]ecause of his desire for an uncontaminated space of resistance, the libidinal that Jameson describes can only serve as a vehicle of illumination, in other words, metaphor of the public […]. It can therefore never narrate a politics of its own. (27) Andrade argues for a different kind of allegorical reading practice when approaching fiction by African women. African women’s novels, she argues, expose the “critical blindness” of Jameson’s model, because their political practices are simply unintelligible to its mechanisms (36). Contra Jameson’s version in which the private narrative disappears in service to the public, Andrade argues that “the political meaning [of African women’s writing] does not reside exclusively in either tenor or vehicle but in a conversation between the two” (35). She asserts that the private should not be read as in merely “synechdochal” relation to the public sphere as it is in Jameson’s version, but that meaning is produced through a “productive interchange between different levels [of the narrative]” (38). In such fictions, she goes on to explain: [F]amily doesn’t disappear so that the glory or pathos of nation might be revealed. Instead, family retains its literalness, its banality, as well as its real material and social significance, thereby troubling the tendency of the national allegory to soar into the realm of the transcendent. The allegory produced under these circumstances is characterized by a quality of productive interchange between the figural and the literal. Family rarely dissolves into a symbol. (38–39) For Andrade, readers need to develop “new forms of literacy” in order to perceive the mode of political resistance found in these women’s novels (36). This “corrective reading” of Jameson’s essay, Andrade suggests, serves to illuminate what she calls the “progressive feminist politics of decolonization” found in such fictions by African women (29). Using Emecheta’s novel The Joys of Motherhood (1988b) to illustrate how this reading practice is put to use, she explains that this work does not merely metaphorize one form of domination in terms of another. By illustrating the overlapping public and private realms and narrating them simultaneously, it comments on domination within the family and within the colony and points out how colonial and

Mothering in the Diaspora  31 patriarchal relations structure not only the public realm of politics, war and employment, but also the private one of food procurement and children. (35) With this novel, Andrade argues, Emecheta exposes the interaction between marital power and colonial power, and that meaning is made precisely from the readers having to “traverse [the allegory] dialectically,” rather than substituting one meaning for another (27). Seen through this lens, Emecheta’s work does not deploy the private merely as a stand-in for the public but articulates how the politics and structures of colonialism enter the domestic space and alter it. The form of her work then reflects such an interdependence of the two “spheres” as we are made to read across the “threshold” dividing public and private, productive and reproductive narrative spaces. Andrade’s alternative model for reading the political articulates one of the central drivers of this book, which is to foreground how narratives of homemaking and domesticity accomplish political work. To speak of “political work”, however, is categorically not to suggest that the domestic works for the political. Following Andrade, the private does not merely stand in synechdochal or metaphorical relationship (i.e., a relationship of substitution) with the public in the literary works I explore but articulates a “politics of its own” that can be discerned when considered in relation to discourses surrounding the domestic sphere itself. Focusing on Emecheta’s earlier London-based novels Second-Class Citizen and In the Ditch, this chapter shifts from the anti-colonial nationalist context of Andrade’s analysis to the diasporic context with which this book is concerned. I demonstrate how this reading method can also help us to apprehend the complex entanglements of private and public concerns found in these works. We see similar tensions between the struggles for racial and gender equality in the diaspora space, and these conflicts are brought to the foreground in Emecheta’s British-based works. As with her fiction set on the African continent, Emecheta’s London novels still participate in the work of anti-racist resistance, but in a way that does not typically register as part of a movement, which also tends to define what constitutes the “main issues” in masculinist terms. Emecheta’s intervention is less concerned with public articulations of racial solidarity than it is with the effects of racialized thinking on family life and the position of women. By situating her novels in relation to attitudes towards black mothering both inside and outside the diasporic community in Britain and more widely in relation to the structural inequality expressed through its welfare state apparatus, these works refuse to leave the work of resistance outside the threshold of the family home. Rather than overtly political interventions in the public sphere,

32  Rereading Black Domesticity Emecheta’s novels offer creative and collective homemaking as an alternative means of enacting resistance and asserting belonging in otherwise hostile living spaces.

The Politics of Mothering Like Selvon’s iconic work, in Emecheta’s migration story the struggle for home is a central preoccupation of the narrative. From her early life in Nigeria, Adah is displaced from a sense of home. As a child, the death of her father leaves her as a dependent in her uncle’s house; then, as a woman, she is unable to secure a space to study in Lagos without getting married. However, once she is married and moves into her husband’s family house, her daily life is controlled by the whims of her in-laws. These experiences of homelessness, which are tied to her gender, underscore the importance of home across the two novels. Though Adah’s migration is intended to be an escape from this series of events which have kept her from achieving control over her own space, she quickly learns that a home is also something not easily attained as a black immigrant in 1970s London, as “[e]very door seemed barred against them; nobody would consider accommodating them, even when they were willing to pay double the normal rent” (1994a, 71).8 When accommodation is found, it is far from the homely space Adah dreams of, and instead serves as a visible marker of her new status as a “second-class citizen” in Britain: Mr Noble’s humble abode was situated in the middle of the gloomy part. There was a mighty building curving right into the middle of the street, shutting away the cheerful side from the gloomy one, as if it were determined to divide the poor from the rich; the houses from the ghetto, the whites from the blacks. (1994a, 90) This kind of spatial marginalization echoes the concerns of works like Selvon’s, in which the novel’s “lonely” arrivals seem to live in an entirely different city from the one occupied by native Londoners. However, where Emecheta’s narrative diverges greatly from Selvon’s is that Adah does not experience any sense of community or mutual support from her fellow sufferers. If Moses’s basement room is for “the boys” a space of diasporic community building, the various boardinghouses where Adah finds herself are spaces of community fracture and betrayal. Such internal fissures are foreshadowed in the distinction Adah draws regarding her class position, lamenting how she must now live in the same house with “such Nigerians who called her madam at home” (36). Further cracks come to the fore when Adah gets a job at the North Finchley library; rather than lauding her success, her compatriots resent

Mothering in the Diaspora  33 her for doing a “white man’s job” (Emecheta 1994a, 69). While obtaining a “white man’s job” is of course the ultimate goal of the male African students like Adah’s husband Francis who come to study in Britain in the years following independence, the negative reaction to Adah’s achievement suggests that there is a different set of terms in operation for African women. Such attitudes resonate with those identified by bell hooks among African-American families in the United States in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. In Ain’t I a Woman (1982), she describes how black women who were not willing to take on menial jobs were cast as “uppity”, while their male counterparts were not subject to the same criticism. Here, Adah’s refusal to conform to accepted black female behavior places her at odds with the prioritized goals of the diasporic community: black men must be lifted up, and if necessary at the expense of black women. Adah’s harsh treatment at the hands of her compatriots signifies a break with the African diasporic community as a source of support and identity formation. Such a move has undoubtedly contributed to the ambivalent position this work occupies within the black British literary tradition. However, like the predicament detailed by hooks, the rancor directed at Adah needs to be understood as a symptom of a wider climate of racism and inequality experienced by black immigrants, and points to the cascading effects of intersecting forms of oppression. These complex entanglements of race, class and gender can be illuminated through an exploration of the portrayal of mothering across the two novels. I use the term “mothering” intentionally here to refer to the everyday practices that go into caring for children, or what Adrienne Rich (1996) has called “motherhood as experience”. This is to be distinguished from the institution of motherhood, which has a particular history and has, according to context, produced varying degrees of regulation over women’s bodies. Even more contentious to Adah’s compatriots than her “first-class job” (43) is the fact that she insists on keeping her children with her rather than fostering them out to a British family. Private fostering was a common practice particularly among West ­A frican families around this time. It involved newly expectant mothers placing an advertisement for an English woman who would look after her children for a fee. Often, the foster mother would live outside the city, making maintaining an ongoing connection with the child difficult. Such arrangements were nevertheless meant to be temporary, with the African parents expecting to reunite with the child after a few years. However, as this foster system took place without any official oversight, it was vulnerable to abuse and misunderstanding on the part of foster parents who sometimes believed they were adopting the child. This practice is explored in detail in a nonfiction work published a few years after Second Class Citizen entitled West African Families in Britain: A Meeting of Two Cultures (Ellis, Stapleton, and Biggs 1978). The book is ostensibly a guide for social workers and is largely devoted

34  Rereading Black Domesticity to explaining differences between West African and British culture in order to better inform professionals who might come in contact with this group of immigrants. The biographies of the authors indicate that they have each spent time living and working in West Africa, conferring a sense of authority upon the cultural knowledge asserted within the text itself. However, despite this background and well-intentioned aims, it tends to deal in essentialisms, where “West African” and “British” are stable categories of analysis, and “traditional society” (a term only applied to the West African context, never the British) is crystallized into a static referent that can be transparently transmitted to readers. To substantiate their claims, the authors often draw on African literature as a source of ethnographic information, as in the following statement about the relationship between the individual and the community: Anyone who wishes to appreciate traditional African society and culture can in fact do no better than start to read the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe […]. In this book, […] Achebe portrays the strengths and rhythms of the collective life with dignity, its sense of harmony and its traditional mechanisms for dealing with disputes. […] Clearly this is a society in which the ideas [about individual autonomy] that have been suggested as important in British society have little place and indeed are counter-valued. (1978, 7) There is no acknowledgment in this section that Achebe’s representation of “traditional African society” is a fictional imagining of one particular ethnic group, and is instead presented as a credible source of knowledge about Africans as whole. There is also no reference to the historical moment in which the work is set (before the onset of colonialism), such that “traditional society” appears as an unchanging form moving through empty time. Using a similar framing, the authors also supply a list of further reading at the end of the book, which is described as a selection “based not primarily on literary merit but on the insight the writer gives into West African family life and traditional society” (132). Here, Emecheta’s novels are also cited and described as “essential reading for all social workers” (133). While emphasizing the significance of West African traditions in determining familial practices, West African Families in Britain noticeably downplays the role that institutional racism might play in the relationship between West African families and the British welfare state, as any failures of the system are put down to misunderstandings and a lack of “cultural awareness” on the part of social workers. At points, there is an almost dismissive tone to the possibility that racism might be a factor. Alluding to the charge that the scarcity of available day care places

Mothering in the Diaspora  35 might be ideologically motivated, the authors retort that “it is not easy [for West African mothers] to appreciate the complexity of legislation relating to the care of children and not to regard it as yet another conspiracy of white society to make life more difficult for blacks” (65). On the whole, the study avoids any consideration of the huge social changes that had occurred in Britain in the postwar period or the impact of immigration politics at the time. Given that Emecheta was studying sociology around the time of writing, it is likely that she would have been aware of some of these debates taking place among practitioners. We might therefore consider a work like West African Families in Britain as a kind of intertext for Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen, especially given its attention to private fostering (and the fact that the authors also explicitly place their work in dialogue with Emecheta’s fiction). Second-Class Citizen also provides a detailed description of the practice, which comes as an aside from the chronology of the narrative. Here, the largely personal Adah-­focalized voice of the narrator shifts into an almost pedagogical register and seems to address readers directly: Most Nigerian wives would say that they had to send their children away because they lacked suitable accommodation for them, and there was a great deal of truth in this. But what they would not admit was that most of them were brought up in situations, far, far, different from the ones in which they found themselves in England. At home in Nigeria, all a mother had to do for a baby was wash and feed him and, if he was fidgety, strap him on to her back and carry on with her work while that baby slept. But in England she had to wash piles and piles of nappies, wheel the child round for sunshine during the day, attend to his feeds regularly as if one was serving a master, talk to the child, even if he was only a day old! Oh, yes, in England, looking after babies was itself a full-time job. This was difficult for a Nigerian wife to cope with, especially when she realized that she could no longer count on the help the extended family usually gave in such situations. (44–45) Like the authors of West African Families in Britain, the narrator seems to attribute the practice to the shift in culture and the different approaches towards mothering in each. However, as with many moments in Emecheta’s works, this section contains a degree of ambivalence, shifting between an explanatory “outsider’s” voice (perhaps resembling that of an informed social worker) and a more conspiratorial “insider’s” voice suggested by the use of exclamatory punctuation and the distancing mechanism “Oh, yes”, which seems to point to the absurdity of such mothering expectations. The passage just before

36  Rereading Black Domesticity this, however, takes on a much more judgmental tone towards African women who are described as “tasting the real freedom of being a wife” for the first time: She was free from the hindering influences of her kith and kin, she was free to work and earn money. Any type of work would do: cleaning, packing goods in a factory, being a bus conductor; all sorts of things. The money she thus earned went partly to the foster-mother, and the rest was blown on colourful outfits from some big department store. (44) This gives the impression that fostering is driven by selfishness on the part of the women who do not want children interfering with their newfound “freedom” and frivolous shopping habits. Even in the first, more sympathetic passage, the narrator suggests the women are being in some sense duplicitous, using bad housing conditions as an excuse to cover up other reasons of varying legitimacy. We can therefore draw parallels between the narratorial explanations given in this section and the sociological discourse of West ­African ­Families in Britain. However, because situated in the context of Adah’s story, Emecheta’s version creates opportunities to interrogate its interpretations of the phenomenon. Even looking more closely at the explanation itself, the language already betrays ironies. To what extent “cleaning, packing goods in a factory, [and] being a bus conductor” can be equated to “tasting real freedom” is questionable. Rather, it is male students like Adah’s husband Francis who seem to largely reap the benefits of the new “freedom” in Britain. These tensions between the perspectives of the narrator and Adah’s everyday experiences of mothering in Britain suggest interpretive gaps or silences in the sociological record. Through the interplay between these different accounts, the sociological and the personal, Second-Class Citizen points to a racialized system with far-reaching impacts on the daily lives of black mothers. The historian Wendy Webster (1998) provides insight that helps to situate the practice of private fostering within a wider racial politics of mothering. She describes a postwar shift in attitudes that fused together the two major moral panics of the time: the fear of national moral decay brought about by the influx of dark-skinned immigrants and by challenges to the status quo of gender relations. Such panics led to an investment in “domesticated versions of national identity” that developed into an increasingly classless idea of home as the imagery of two nations. Rich and poor, employed and unemployed, North and South were reworked into a distinction between a common Englishness of wellkept homes and families in opposition to the “blacks next door.” (xiii)

Mothering in the Diaspora  37 This narrative of “common Englishness” served to translate fears of the decline of the male-headed nuclear family into racial terms: white women were mobilized as guardians of the domestic sphere, placing upon them the burden of maintaining the boundary between “us” (white Britons) and “them” (non-white immigrants). Because these “well-kept homes and families” depended a great deal on nonworking mothers, a further distinction was created between the good (white) mother and the neglectful (black) mother who would “rather” work than look after her children properly. However, as Webster points out, there is an inherent catch at the heart of this “two nations” logic. She describes how black women at the time were positioned as workers rather than as wives and mothers, stemming from fears about miscegenation and overpopulation. In essence, black women were recruited to the UK for their productive value in the economy but not for their reproductive value as mothers. The result of this imagery of two nations was that a racial hierarchy was constructed in which the domestic and reproductive practices of white mothers were perceived as vital to maintaining their membership within the nation of Englishness, while black mothers’ right to belong in the nation became conditional upon their concealment of these same practices. We see allusions to this policing of black motherhood in Adah’s various interactions with the welfare state in the form of social workers and National Health Service staff. These representations of the state consistently construe Adah’s reproductive capabilities as a problem that must be kept out of sight or contained by technological means such as birth control. When the “Japanese or Chinese” midwife examining a pregnant Adah exclaims “Rook, rook, she’s breeding” (1994a, 109–119), the play on the word “breeding” (for “bleeding”) inscribes the birth into racist discourses about the over-fecundity of black women and national fears of being “out-bred” by immigrants. We see such discourses rear up again in In the Ditch, as Adah is lectured by a housing officer who tells her that “large families” are no longer “trendy” in “civilized societies” (1994b, 119).9 The hostility of Adah’s African neighbors also centers on the hyper-­ visibility of her reproductive capabilities, as the practice of fostering serves to remove the visual signifier of this “breeding” from urban centers. As Adah often points out, children are highly valued back home in Nigeria, suggesting an explanation beyond the purely “cultural”. Her compatriots insist that “only first-class citizens lived with their children, not the blacks” (46). The racial hierarchy implied here is evocative of Webster’s imagery of “two nations”, where “citizenship” refers to the mode of belonging afforded to each group. The pressure placed upon Adah to foster out her children from within the diasporic community suggests they have become complicit in the racist agenda at the heart of staging belonging in domestic terms. In the imagery of two nations described by Webster, black women are presented as more “naturally”

38  Rereading Black Domesticity suited to menial labor, while white women are rendered more capable in the domestic realm. As Hazel Carby has similarly argued, Rather than a concern to protect or preserve the black family in Britain, the state reproduced common-sense notions of its inherent pathology: black women were seen to fail as mothers precisely because of their position as workers. (1997, 49) We can see the effect of the lesser value placed on black mothering in one case of private fostering described in West African Families in Britain. When one West African mother sent word she would be collecting her daughter, the authors recount how the foster parents rallied to “save” the child from the “barbaric existence that clearly awaited her if she went back to her mother in London, let alone Nigeria” (Ellis, Stapleton, and Biggs 1978, 128). The narrator of Second-Class Citizen suggests that this logic also came to influence the practices of the Nigerian community. As the narrator explains, No one cared whether a woman was suitable or not, no one wanted to know whether the house was clean or not; all they wanted to be sure of was that the foster-mother was white. The concept of “whiteness” could cover a multitude of sins. (44) As this passage suggests, private fostering was seen to have the additional benefits of socializing children into white English norms; Francis, for example, argues that not fostering the children out will mean they will not speak good English (45). In this way, the practice not only obscured the biological reproduction of black women but deprived them of the work of cultural reproduction as well. This also suits a racist agenda in which fears of a rising black population could in part be allayed through assimilation into “our ways”. Adah, in choosing not to foster her children out, contests the terms offered by both the “host” society and the developing (gendered) norms of the Nigerian diasporic community, claiming her full reproductive role. The suggestion that whiteness “could cover a multitude of sins” also points to another paradox at the heart of the racial politics of domesticity: that not all white women are good mothers with good homes, but that “whiteness” actually compensates for the potential lack of these qualities. In Second-Class Citizen, we see this mythology of white mothering undercut through the character of Trudy, the daily childminder who looks after the children while Adah is at work. This becomes necessary due to the unavailability of nursery school places for the children, which points to the practical problem of finding

Mothering in the Diaspora  39 childcare, rather than the change in cultural norms, as the source of Adah’s struggles. She finds Trudy through a Nigerian neighbor, who seems to follow the custom described above in recommending her without any sort of checks. Her house, as Adah eventually finds out, is in a “slum” with a backyard “filled with rubbish, broken furniture […] smelly and damp” (49–50). Trudy herself is “plump” “with too much makeup. Her lips were scarlet and so were her nails. The color of her hair was too black to be real” (50). This description of Trudy’s house and Trudy herself paints a picture of an environment that is completely unsuitable for children and a woman who is much more akin to the image of a prostitute than that of a mother. However, when her son Vicky gets sick with meningitis and Adah goes to confront Trudy about her neglect, Trudy accuses her of causing the illness herself from “the water you drank at home, you know, before you brought him here [to England]” (65). Here, Trudy uses Adah’s appointed status as a “neglectful black mother” to divert attention from her own failings as a childminder and reaffirm her own precarious citizenship in the nation of English domestic respectability. Adah reacts to such an accusation with incredulity, recalling how she had Vicky in “the best hospital in Nigeria, in the best ward, under the most efficient Swiss gynaecologist” (65). In this episode, Trudy is cast as a “bad mother” in spite of her whiteness while Adah is repositioned as the “good mother” in spite of her blackness. Adah’s mothering credentials are further bolstered by her almost superhuman abilities to “know” when her child is sick: Yes, how had she known? How could a mother tell another woman who had never given birth to a baby that sometimes she lived in her children? […] [H]ow could Adah tell Cynthia that when she was looking at a fishcake, she had seen Vicky’s wet face, twisting in pain, reflected in the window? (57–58) Emecheta’s depictions of white English women as childless (Cynthia) or prostitutes (Trudy) – both perversions of woman’s role as a loving mother – serve to emphasize Adah’s good qualities and undermine the racist logic that defines whiteness as the basis for good mothering practices. By asserting that her mothering credentials are equal to, if not better than, her white counterparts, Adah claims membership in the nation of Englishness defined by particular norms of domesticity. However, this discursive turn is accomplished by redeploying essentialist categories of womanhood, such that Adah is produced as the “Madonna” to Trudy’s “whore”. This does little to interrogate the gendered terms through which this membership is determined, as it still articulates “good” mothering as women’s only legitimate path to belonging in the nation.

40  Rereading Black Domesticity Emecheta’s depiction of private fostering nevertheless demonstrates the political stakes of mothering for both black and white women during this period, which were formed at the intersection of national anxieties about gender and race. This shows how a concern ostensibly rooted in the “private” gets deployed as a measure of belonging and unbelonging within larger collectivities. While the authors of West African Families in Britain and the narrator of Second-Class Citizen interpret fostering as a consequence of the clash of two cultures, Adah’s experiences undercut such explanations. The perceived essential difference in the “values” attributed to mothering in each culture is used to obscure the possibility of institutionalized inequality, and it is through the tension produced between Adah’s personal struggle to look after her children and the narrated sociological discourse which attempts to explain away those experiences that the novel’s anti-racist critique emerges. The next section will consider alternative, resistant models for mothering in the diaspora found in Second-Class Citizen and In the Ditch. Such models not only challenge the racialized logic underpinning the practice of fostering but also complicate the commonsense division between public and private spheres upon which the “two nations” system rests.

Resistant Domesticities In his reading of Second-Class Citizen, John McLeod argues that Adah rejects the “filial” obligations put upon her by family and the surrounding ethnic/diasporic community in London in favor of the “affiliative” relationships she builds at such public spaces as the Chalk Farm Library.10 In his assessment, “Filial relationships are rarely enabling in [Emecheta’s] writing”, “families are rarely happy places […], and the achievements of her heroines are often judged on the extent to which they leave the restricted enclaves of their families, which often means their home” (2004, 103). Indeed, as we have seen, Adah’s narrative is not filled with particularly happy homes. After her various displacements in Nigeria, poor housing conditions in London are compounded by the physical and emotional abuse she endures at the hands of her husband Francis. Emecheta leaves this home towards the end of Second-Class Citizen to start a new life as a single mother supported by the state, which is the focus of In the Ditch. On the one hand, as McLeod’s reading suggests, this trajectory could signify Adah’s rejection of home and family in favor of the freedom offered by metropolitan public spaces and institutions. However, this does account for the important role children play in Emecheta’s fiction and in the conditions of its production. We should not forget that what Adah creates when she leaves her husband Francis with her five children also constitutes a “family”, albeit in a different form. In addition to the public, “affilitative”, space of the Chalk Farm library, we can find other more positive models for Adah’s

Mothering in the Diaspora  41 self-actualization within the domestic space, however fragile and contingent these may be. These alternative domesticities challenge both the patriarchal structures enforced through Francis’s abuse and the institutional structures that seek to conceal or pathologize black motherhood. Such models also problematize the gendered division between “public” and “private” spheres, which, as several feminist geographers have argued, stems from an urban, privileged, middle-class and white worldview (Bondi 1998; England 1991; McDowell 1999). We can see parallels between Adah’s experiences in her home with Francis and the position she occupies in wider London society. The abuse she receives from her husband is accompanied by the pressure for Adah to be the breadwinner for the household, even while she is afforded little in the way of rights within its walls. As one critic puts it, Adah’s position in the household resembles that of a female “slave” who must toil to feed her “master” as well as satisfy his sexual urges (Oha 1996, 298). In line with the neighbors, there is a pronounced shift in Francis’s attitude towards his own children between Lagos and London. While Emecheta’s childbearing capabilities are highly valued at home in Nigeria, in London, the children become an “inconvenience” that prevents his wife from earning money (76). He resents the time she must spend away from work during her pregnancies and expects her to return shortly after giving birth. Adah’s role in the home therefore comes to resemble her appointed position within the British nation, as a worker rather than a mother, in which productive work in the public sphere is prioritized over the reproductive. By reading across the two spheres, we see how gender inequality within the family home is intertwined with racial inequality outside of it. Practices of mothering then become a form of resistance against the reduction of black womanhood to a status defined only in relation to wage labor within both spaces. In Second-Class Citizen and In the Ditch, mothering is also mobilized as an important part of Adah’s development and path to establishing a sense of home for herself in Britain. After the birth of her fourth child, Adah is insistent that she will not go back to work straight after and is delighted to have this time at home with her children: [F]or the first time in her life she was a real housewife. It only lasted five months but how she wished that her life pattern could have continued that way. […] All Adah had to do every day was to take Titi to school, do her shopping at the Crescent, take the three babies to the park for an hour or two, come home, give them their lunch, tuck them up to rest, and write The Bride Price. (173) Moments such as this have led some critics to describe the work as a “flawed” feminist novel, given that it appears to endorse the idea that

42  Rereading Black Domesticity women’s place should be in the home (Porter 1996, 268). However, such statements should be viewed in the context of the politics of mothering explored in the previous section. They also need to be considered as part of a critique of mainstream feminism in Emecheta’s work, which resonates with black feminist activism that was beginning to form around the time of the novel’s publication.11 These critiques focused on the women’s movement’s limited capacity to appreciate and incorporate the experiences of black women, and they take particular issue with its assessment of home and the family as an inherent source of female oppression.12 As I discuss in this book’s introduction, one of the central aims of second-wave feminism was to get women out of the home and into paid labor in the public sphere. However, one of the consequences of this approach was that it led to a reification of the division between the spheres while also devaluing the labor that is done in the home. As previously discussed with reference to Simone de Beauvoir (1997), the case for women’s emancipation from the private space was often made on the basis that we are unable to become full subjects in the world without engaging in productive work, seen to exist only in the public sphere. Emecheta seems to directly address this position in Second-Class Citizen when she writes that [Adah] had been reading a number of women’s magazines, and was surprised to read of mothers saying that they were bored just being housewives. She was not that type of woman. There were so many things she planned to do, and she did them. (173) Such statements suggest a rebuttal of the limited awareness of middle-­ class British women who have no appreciation of the experiences of someone like Adah, who up to this point has not had the luxury of staying home and spending time with her children. Furthermore, the abuse Adah experiences at the hands of her husband in spite of the work she does outside the home is testament that having a job is not necessarily a guarantee of agency within (see also hooks 1982, 82–83). Although it is Adah’s salary that pays the rent for their flat, Francis still positions himself as its rightful owner. When Adah tells him about the completion of her first novel, for example, he reacts mockingly saying, “Whatever was he going to hear next? A woman writer in his own house, in a white man’s country” (178, emphasis added). As Oha puts it, “Adah is perceived not as house-owner or as co-house-owner, but as a squatter” (1996, 298). The paid work that Adah engages in does not have the effect of liberating her from patriarchal subordination in the way feminists might expect, but instead reinforces her position as servant in the “master’s” house where she resides but does not belong in any real sense. We therefore need to

Mothering in the Diaspora  43 read Adah’s delight at being a “real housewife” within this wider racial and gender politics. Like her refusal to foster her children out, Adah’s embrace of domesticity here can be interpreted as a form of resistance against commodification by her husband as well as the British state. Adah’s domestic labor is also explicitly linked to the time that she now has to write her novel. This entangling of the domestic and the creative is a key element of Emecheta’s writing, both inside and outside the text. Importantly, the writing Adah does is not immediately aimed at earning money, but is instead framed as something she does only for her own personal development: The more she wrote, the more she knew she could write and the more she enjoyed writing. She was feeling this urge: Write; go on and do it, you can write. […] During the time she was writing it, she was oblivious of everything except her children. […] It mattered little to her whether it was published or not, all that mattered was that she had written a book. (174–175, emphasis in original) It is through writing that Adah is able to develop as a fully-fledged subject and exert her agency, as it is only when Francis’s long-time abuse of Adah culminates in the burning of her completed manuscript that she resolves to finally leave him. The fact that Adah uses her time as a housewife to engage in creative production also challenges the separate spheres model through its blending of productive and reproductive space. In her essay “Feminism with a Small ‘f’”(1988a), Emecheta describes an encounter which indicates how such mixing was seen as incompatible with feminist principles: I had my photograph taken once in my office where I do my writing. The photo-journalist was a staunch feminist, and she was so angry that my office was in my kitchen and a package of cereal was in the background. I was letting the woman’s movement down by allowing such a photograph to be taken, she cried. But that was where I worked. (1988a, 179–180) This journalist’s objection to taking a photo of a renowned female writer in such a domestic setting implies that an image of success in the realm of “the public” should have no trace (in this case, a box of cereal) of the domestic work that continues to go on in the background. Adah’s statement above that she was oblivious of everything except her children while writing gestures at this mingling of the productive and creative with the reproductive and domestic. It also seems to refer back to the dedication at the beginning of Second-Class Citizen, which reads,

44  Rereading Black Domesticity “To my dear children […] without whose sweet background noises this book would not have been written”. In her autobiography, Emecheta comments on the disbelief that surrounded such an inscription when the book was first published: Critics have since doubted the sincerity of this dedication, saying “How could the noises of five young children be sweet?” But they forget many things. They forget that when I was that age, I did not have a place I could call my home. […] My own children had a home, a proper breakfast, clean clothes on their backs, and by God’s grace they didn’t have to worry if they were having any lunch – they knew they would. Thus I found the mischievous noises of my contented children sweet. (60–61) Here, Emecheta forces a recognition that the creative work of writing cannot go on without the kind of material stability she has been able to achieve for her children. Alice Walker (1983) discusses Emecheta’s dedication in her treatise on “womanism” (which she proffers as an alternative to “feminism”), asserting that “Emecheta is a writer and a mother, and it is because she is both that she writes at all” (67). In Second-Class Citizen, this mingling of the maternal and the creative is expressed through a bodily metaphor – Adah describes the completed manuscript of The Bride Price as her “brainchild”, saying, “I felt so fulfilled when I finished it, just as if I made another baby” (176). This explicit framing of the “productive” work of writing with the “reproductive” work of mothering poses a challenge to the gendered and racialized structures that position Adah, a black female immigrant, as a worker rather than a mother. Though short-lived, Adah transforms a traumatic domestic space into a productive, creative space where she can achieve a kind of self-actualization that is never fully possible via wage labor because it is inscribed within this wider ideological system. Emecheta’s insistence that her domestic role is part and parcel of the process of creative production also challenges feminist models that only perceive the domestic and reproductive as inhibitors of women’s creativity and subjectivity. In this way, Emecheta provides an alternative to a familiar trope of women’s writing in the home which has been so often embraced by feminist critics, that of Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own” (1989). Where Woolf’s “room” is a separate space, cut off from the reproductive functions of the private sphere, Emecheta’s is best represented by her kitchen-office, where the creative and the domestic, productive and reproductive intertwine in a positive way. The image of the kitchen-office thus provides an alternative domesticity that resists a separate spheres model that cannot account for the experiences of black and working-class women.

Mothering in the Diaspora  45 Emecheta further disrupts this model as Adah’s story continues with In the Ditch. As Adah settles into her new life as a single mother, she once again encounters the impossibility of balancing work and childcare. She no longer struggles against a demanding and abusive husband, but must now battle for the begrudging help offered by the welfare state. The novel largely takes place in the “Pussy Cat Mansions” where Adah and her five children are housed. The flats of the Mansions are arranged around a courtyard, which Adah refers to as “the compound”, transposing the traditional West African domestic architecture of the extended family onto this bleak council estate in North London (1994b, 16). However, at the center of this compound is not the “Juju man’s house” (16) but the office of Carole, the social worker whose job is to minister to the estate’s “problem families”: The Mansions were a unique place, a separate place individualised for “problem families.” Problem families with real problems were placed in a problem place. So even if one lived at the Mansions and had no problems the set-up would create problems – in plenty. (17) Such “problems”, as suggested by the narrator here, are seen as emanating from the estate itself, rather than intrinsic to the families housed there. Carole acts as the well-meaning, though frequently patronizing, conduit between the residents of the Mansions, largely single mothers, and the benefits provided by the state. Adah views her as “one of a race of women whom one was never sure whether to treat as friends or as members of the social police” (25). Carole’s office also functions as a collective space where the women meet and share their daily woes. While Adah is initially thankful for the assistance she receives (which she must give up her job in order to obtain), she and the other women ultimately come to see the dehumanizing effects of their dependent position: “People like Carol were employed to let them know their rights, but the trouble was that Carol handed them their rights, as if she was giving out charity” (98). In the midst of terrible housing conditions and constant financial strain, Adah forms a fragile bond with the other women of the Mansions. Though separated by race and, in Adah’s case, class, they come to find commonality in the daily activities of mothering under these difficult circumstances. We see this in one afternoon discussion in Carole’s office: “What time is it?” asked Mrs O’Brien. “Three-thirty,” announced Carol. The announcement made the chit-chat flag. Thoughts of kids at school needing to be brought home intervened.

46  Rereading Black Domesticity Mrs O’Brien waddled towards the exit, strapped her baby to one of Carol’s baby chairs and announced, “Keep an eye on him for me,” to no one in particular. Whoopey walked about with hip-swaying strides, collecting cups and saucers, and Adah cooeed to Mrs O’Brien to wait for her. She must collect “her two” from school. Here, the women find fellowship in the rhythm of the school day and strengthen their bonds through the casual sharing of childcare duties. Through this collective mothering, they plug the holes in the state assistance they receive or fill in where biological mothers are absent, such as in the case of Mr Jaja, whose young wife frequently leaves him for long periods at a time (101). As a result of these ad hoc arrangements, the Pussy Cat Mansions is turned into an expanded domestic space akin to the African “compound” from which it gets its name, where children are raised by an extended family of women. In this case, however, the home extends across familial and racial lines, further blurring divisions between private and public spheres, or between “filial” and “affiliative” relationships, to use McLeod’s terminology. Such communal childcare functions as a more positive solution than the private fostering seen in Second-Class Citizen, in which children are removed from sight and the cultural direction of their parents. This sharing of domestic responsibilities also stands in opposition to the “charity” of the state for which the women must play the victim: [O]ne was encouraged to complain and whine, otherwise one would never be noticed. At the Pussy, the greatest whiner got the greatest attention. Many women in [Adah’s] position did not know what their entitlements were, so they felt they must beg. (97–98) Despite being presented to them as charity, the women come to realize that this “humiliation of seeing their pride as human beings constantly questioned” is the required currency for the meager state benefits they receive (93). By contrast, the kind of help provided by the other women in the Mansions circulates in a very different economy, as suggested in the description of Mrs Cox: Mrs Cox became the “Mum” for everybody. […] Mrs Cox also reminded Adah of most African matrons---you don’t ask them to help you, they just do it. They, like Mrs Cox, have that sense of mutual help that is ingrained in people who have known a communal rather than an individualistic way of life. (65)

Mothering in the Diaspora  47 Because the women are experiencing the same economic hardships, this communal style of living is the opposite of the unequal power relationship they enter into with the state. It is also a female-centric community that stands outside of its patriarchal structures, as represented by the male gatekeepers the women encounter in housing and dole offices where “One clerk from the Ministry might recommend five pounds for new curtains, another nineteen. Women of the ditch had to live at the discretion of such men” (98). Significantly, the community built through this shared mothering begins to give Adah a sense of feeling at home in Britain for the first time: The little group talked, gossiped and laughed; all were happy. They found joy in communal sorrow. Children ran between their legs, happy at the knowledge of the nearness of their mothers. Adah stopped being homesick. She was beginning to feel like a human being again with a definite role to perform – even though the role was in no other place but the ditch. (61) Like the process of writing in Second-Class Citizen, this collective domestic space provides Adah with meaning and a purpose, as well as a sense of belonging. The fact that she “stopped being homesick” alludes to this shift, but also to the parallels between this space and domestic form back in Nigeria. Even though she is eventually rehoused to a much nicer home in a better area, she feels the loss of this communal world: “sometimes you got the feeling that you were a Robinson Crusoe, all by yourself. The walls were dead, completely sound-proof so that the flats were peaceful and private but with this came the isolation which is the debit side of privacy” (126). Just as the compound-like architecture of the Pussy Cat Mansions facilitates a shared form of living, the layout of the new “City Match-Boxes” (112) accentuates her loneliness: “a narrow corridor all white, like a hospital, lined with white gleaming Flashwashed doors. Each door panel had its own number plate” (126). Such moments suggest that domestic form produces different experiences of home, which is something I continue to explore in subsequent chapters in this book. Though the sense of community Adah experiences at the Pussy Cat Mansions is fragile and ultimately temporary, its shared domesticity becomes the basis for a kind of proto-activism. In the protest the women organize against their housing conditions and humiliation at the hands of state representatives, the bonds established through the daily activities of domestic life are put to work in the service of collective action. Through such developments, we see once again how Emecheta’s fiction calls into question the “immanence” associated

48  Rereading Black Domesticity with the private sphere (de Beauvoir 1997, 470). Whereas Second-Class Citizen establishes a place for creative production within the domestic space, In the Ditch expands domestic work beyond the walls of the nuclear family home, establishing relationships upon which political resistance can be built.

Conclusion Though not without their flaws, Emecheta’s early novels function as a productive point of departure for exploring the importance of the domestic space and its attendant activities in diasporic fiction. Unlike earlier male-centered works, and Selvon’s Lonely Londoners in particular, Emecheta supplies a much-needed female vision of London life for black immigrants in the postwar years. This vision is accompanied by a different set of struggles and preoccupations, but nevertheless also participates in the wider discourse of resistance against racial inequality. Through an exploration of the practice of private fostering in Second-Class Citizen, we see how domestic and reproductive practices are implicated in exclusionary nationalist narratives as much as “public” concerns like housing and work. With this novel, Emecheta genders the anti-racist politics of the period by portraying London’s West African community as complicit in a racialized system that devalues and delegitimizes black mothering. At the same time, Adah’s experiences also provide a counter-discourse to sociological accounts of black family life produced by white social workers and welfare officers. Though both novels cast doubt on racial solidarity as the ultimate answer to combatting the “second-class citizen” status of black women, both Second-Class Citizen and In the Ditch also produce a critical reading of the mainstream women’s movement, which means they also sit uncomfortably within the feminist politics of the time. Instead, they participate in an emerging black British feminist discourse that (re)asserts the value of domestic and reproductive labor for those who have been denied it. While the reproductive and domestic labor of white, British women was held up as the ultimate mark of belonging in the nationalist narrative, that of black women came to be represented as a “problem” needing to be contained or obscured from view. In turn, Emecheta’s works mobilize home, family and mothering as potential sources of resistance and solidarity rather than simply the root of women’s oppression. At the same time, her works do not advocate for an idealized “return” to the domestic space, but rather for a reassessment of the socalled separate spheres. Through the intermingling of the domestic and the creative in Second-Class Citizen and the activist potential of the extended domestic space in In the Ditch, Emecheta’s novels sketch out alternative models of homemaking that disrupt the gendered and racialized geography of metropolitan space.

Mothering in the Diaspora  49 In both novels, the private sphere does not come to stand in for the public but responds in its own voice to the structural and racial inequalities of 1960s and 1970s Britain. Adah’s refusal to foster her children out in Second-Class Citizen resists the delegitimizing of black motherhood within the racialized politics of the time. In the Ditch then mobilizes the seemingly banal everyday activities of feeding, clothing and looking after children as a source of collective organizing. Where walking through London’s city streets becomes an expression of creativity and resistance for Sam Selvon’s “lonely” migrants through the renaming and remapping of its iconic spaces, Emecheta’s female protagonist draws creative and political energy from the maternal labor she carries out in the domestic realm. Put another way, these works assert that homemaking in the metropole is political work. Chapter 3 continues the theme of black domesticity, but where Emecheta’s novels portray domestic practices as resistant in the face of the intersecting hierarchies of race and gender, Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island highlights the negative impact of British domestic norms that have been filtered through colonial power structures. Though published much more recently than Emecheta’s works, Levy provides us with a much longer historical lens through which to further interrogate the limited terms of belonging afforded to black women, in both the colonial space and the metropole. Like Emecheta’s novels, Levy’s mobilizes the domestic as a means for critiquing the nation, but the everyday material practices of homemaking remain central to its political intervention and do not merely function as metaphors of national tensions.

Notes 1 Subsequent references are to this edition. 2 See, for example, in John McLeod’s Postcolonial London (2004). 3 It is frequently used as the point of departure in university courses on black and diasporic British literature and in scholarly studies on these topics. See, for example, George (1996) (in the chapter on “Immigrant Fiction”), Nasta (2002), Procter (2003) and McLeod (2004). 4 Although Emecheta won the Best Black Writer in Britain Award and the Award for the Best Young British Writer in 1980 and 1983, respectively, she seems to have dropped out of the more recent boom in popular and academic interest in diasporic fiction. 5 It is nevertheless important to reiterate that this suspicion towards the mainstream feminist movement, including Emecheta’s own, also stems from a history of feminism’s complicity with imperialist ideas about the backwardness of African societies and its inability to recognize cultural difference in its theorization of gender relations. This is something I discuss in the later part of this chapter. 6 Andrade also notes that such terms did not only affect African women writers, pointing to the initial neglect of Amos Tutuola’s magical realist writing. 7 See, most notably, Ahmad (1987). In addition to the issue of oversimplification, Jameson’s essay problematically positions the “Third World” as the

50  Rereading Black Domesticity space where the true “cultural condition” of postmodernity exists. In such a move, we see the tendency of postmodernist theorists to present marginalized spaces and peoples as a container for the ideals of (European) postmodernism. As Andrade points out, this essay was described by Jameson as a “pendant” or supplement to his book on postmodernism (1991), presenting the ex-colonial world as an afterthought or addendum to his explorations of the central spaces of postmodernity, even as it is made to stand for the postmodern condition itself. 8 Subsequent references to Second-Class Citizen will be to this edition. 9 Subsequent references to In the Ditch will be to this edition. 10 McLeod borrows these terms from Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic in which “filial” forms of belonging are associated with the natural, biological and reproductive, whereas “affiliative” modes are “provided by institutions, associations, and communities whose social existence was not in fact guaranteed by biology” (1991, 17). “Affiliative” encounters are presented as more productive and valuable in Said’s reading. In many ways, this hierarchical binary problematically reproduces the division between private and public spheres, and even that of the genders themselves, in which women are typically perceived as closer to nature while men are associated with culture and society. 11 A significant development in this regard was the formation of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in London in 1978. 12 See, most notably, Hull, Bell-Scott and Smith (1982), Carby (1997/1982), hooks (1982/1981, 1991/1990), Walker (1983), Lord (2003/1984) and Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe (1985). Emecheta outlines a similar position in her essay “Feminism with a Small ‘f’” (Emecheta 1988a).

3 Clean Bodies, Clean Homes Decolonizing Domesticity in Andrea Levy’s Small Island

Like Buchi Emecheta’s early works, Andrea Levy’s critically acclaimed novel Small Island (2004)1 provides a portrait of postwar Commonwealth migration to Britain. However, it focuses on an earlier moment in this period and foregrounds the role of the war itself in reshaping Britain’s relationship with its colonial subjects. The story pivots around the year 1948, when the Empire Windrush first docked at Tilbury harbor, and this time stamp explicitly frames the novel as a reflection on this crucial period in Britain’s multicultural history. The historical setting also places Levy’s work in direct conversation with that of key male writers of the period like Sam Selvon, and, like Emecheta’s work, Small Island provides a female perspective on this migrant experience (Courtman 2012). However, as a work of historical fiction, Levy’s novel presents a very different kind of engagement with the experiences of these postwar arrivals from the autobiographical immediacy of Emecheta’s novels; it is one distanced by time and mediated by research. Though Levy’s first work of historical fiction, this novel forms part of a larger trajectory in her oeuvre of looking backward in time to understand the complicated matrix of belongings and exclusions in the present (Knepper 2012; Lima 2005). Levy’s increasing interest in the historical can be understood as a consequence of the liminality of her position as a second-generation Briton of Caribbean descent. Levy articulates the generational divide in the voice of the protagonist of her first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin’, who asserts I knew this society better than my parents. My parents’ strategy was to keep as quiet as possible in the hope that no one would know that they had sneaked into this country. They wanted to be no bother at all. But I had grown up in its English ways. I could confront it, rail against it, fight it, because it was mine – a birthright. (1994, 88) One way Levy has attempted to confront the silences of her parents’ generation of Caribbean immigrants has been to trace her own genealogy

52  Rereading Black Domesticity back through her family in Jamaica, a process which she dramatizes in her third novel Fruit of the Lemon (1999). However, Levy’s turn to history is also aimed at problematizing the national identity of the country she calls her own. As she recalls, “I was educated to be English. Alongside me – learning, watching, eating and playing – were white children. But those white children would never have to grow up to question whether they were English or not” (2000). With Small Island, Levy challenges not only the mechanisms that had caused her to question her own sense of belonging but also those which made it possible for her white counterparts to be so sure of theirs. As is often the case with Levy’s writing, there is an attention to the private sphere as an important site of cultural negotiation and identity formation. Through its staging of the fraught encounters between white British and Afro-Caribbean immigrant characters in a single living space, Small Island functions as a “literary intervention” into an era of British history which has been key to defining the boundaries and limits of the nation (Levy and Morrison 2009).2 On one level, therefore, we can read the novel’s deployment of the domestic space of a London lodging house as an allegory for the tensions and contradictions of an emerging multicultural British nation. However, domesticity as a particular set of values and practices is also central to how the novel conveys the predicament of black colonial subjects who arrive at Britain’s shores expecting to be welcomed home. While ­Chapter 2 explored how domesticity can be resistant in the face of discourses that construct black women as workers rather than mothers, Small Island portrays domestic norms and standards as a primarily oppressive force for its Caribbean characters. In particular, the novel points to entanglements between the colonial enterprise and the cult of domesticity, especially with regard to notions of “dirt” and “cleanliness” and a rationalized separation of domestic functions. Through the intersections it stages between class and race, Small Island works to de-mythologize domesticity as a signifier of Britishness and undercuts its application as the boundary marker of civilization. It then suggests routes to establishing a resistant black domesticity that is not beholden to exclusionary models of homemaking.

Domestic Analogies: House and Nation Small Island has been particularly celebrated for the way it shoots at the heart of British national identity through its retelling of World War II (WWII), a key rallying point of British national pride and imperial nostalgia, from the perspective of its colonial others (Benwell 2009; Brophy 2010; Courtman 2012). As Sarah Brophy argues, Levy’s representation of the “entangled genealogies” between native and migrant, English and Caribbean, serves to unsettle “postwar white nostalgia for what is imagined as a coherent ethnic-national past” (2010, 116). Levy’s choice

Clean Bodies, Clean Homes  53 to provide a retelling of the WWII period in particular is perhaps a response to a recent re-romanticizing of this period in British contemporary culture, a turn which Paul Gilroy interprets as evidence of what he calls “postimperial melancholia” (2004, 98).3 As he writes, An uncertain generation for whom all knowledge of the conflict arrives on very long loops, usually via Hollywood, is still required to use an expensively manufactured surrogate memory of WWII as the favored means to find and even to restore an ebbing sense of what it is to be English. (96) Gilroy goes on to argue that the recent turning back to this historical moment is a way of turning away from the perceived dangers of pluralism and from “the irreversible fact of multiculture”, reminding us that no other war since has been able to command “a comparable ideological and mythological space” (96–97). With Small Island, Levy provides an alternative view of this period of supposed cultural and ethnic homogeneity that exposes the inherent fictionality of the way we have come to remember the era and its legacy. Through its multivoiced re-remembering of this crucial moment in British history, Levy’s novel is in large part interested in complicating the seemingly straightforward question of who is and who is not at home in the British nation. In particular, its staging of the narrative within the fraught space of a London lodging house encourages allegorical readings in which the house stands as a potent signifier for the nation. As James Procter has argued, lodging houses functioned as “fraught contact zone[s]” in which the racial tensions of the nation were played out on a domestic scale (2003, 22). Indeed, there are telling parallels between the experiences of the novel’s Caribbean characters, Hortense and Gilbert, when they arrive on Britain’s shores and the tensions and negotiations that take place in the interior space of Queenie Bligh’s terraced house. Furthermore, these two contested spaces, house and nation, are already discursively linked due to the linguistic ambiguity between the two terms and their analogous features. As Rosemary Marangoly George articulates, the term “home-country expresses a complex yoking of ideological apparatuses considered necessary for the existence of subjects: the notion of belonging, of having a home, and a place of one’s own” (1996, 2). As another critic puts it, the nation, like a house, is limited by its borders; those thresholds/ frontiers that must be crossed in order to enter (or leave) the homely space. […] The door is a metaphorical gateway into the nation (airports, ports). The door is the link between inside and outside. (Gibson 2003, 375)

54  Rereading Black Domesticity Such analogous qualities result in a slippage between house and nation that has proved fruitful for anti-immigration discourse. In this rhetoric, the qualities of the house (familiarity, safety, belonging) are transferred onto the nation in order to generate an emotive response to immigration. We have seen this put to use in the speeches of notorious anti-­immigration campaigner Enoch Powell, who frequently included anecdotes about elderly women who felt unsafe in their own homes due to the influx of “negroes” in their neighborhoods.4 The semantic overlap between home as domestic space and home as national space, which also comes through in constructions like “guest-worker” and “host-country”, allows the substitution of terms to go unnoticed so that we conceive of the nation as a private space where guests can be invited but where they can also overstay their welcome. This parallelism generates a further conceit of hospitality on the part of the indigenous “hosts” and ingratitude on the part of those no longer wanted “guests”. Small Island highlights the tensions generated by conflicting interpretations of the British nation as home. While Gilbert and Hortense understand their move to London in terms of a return “home”, the British people they encounter consistently remind them of their position as strangers/guests. Though Gilbert insists that he joined the war effort to “fight for my country” (138, emphasis added), his right to this possessive pronoun is repeatedly disputed. He describes the experience as follows: Living far from you is a beloved relation whom you have never met. Yet this relation is so dear a kin she is known as Mother. Your own mummy talks of Mother all the time. “Oh, Mother is a beautiful woman – refined, mannerly and cultured.” Your daddy tells you “Mother thinks of you as her children; like the Lord above she takes care of you from afar.” […] Then one day you hear Mother c­ alling – she is troubled, she need your help. Your mummy, your daddy say go. Leave home, leave familiar, leave love. […] Yet [when you arrive] she looks down at you through lordly eyes and says, “Who the bloody hell are you?” (139) The association between mother and country further ties the nation to the realm of the domestic, albeit positioning its colonial subjects as “children”, with all the infantilizing overtones that come with such a designation. However, even this limited form of ownership is thrown into question when Britain’s displaced colonial progeny are confronted with its “legitimate” (racially compatible) sons and daughters. Such images of mothers and illegitimate colonial children also foreshadow the adoption that occurs at the end of the novel, in which Queenie rejects her mixed-race child as a way of restoring a semblance of (racial) order to her unsettled home.

Clean Bodies, Clean Homes  55 Extending this analogy of the nation as home, Levy’s novel deploys Queenie’s lodging house in Earls Court as a space to play out the racial and xenophobic anxieties of the nation. We can draw similarities between Gilbert’s experience of revoked claim to the British nation and Hortense’s moment of arrival at Queenie’s door to join him in 1948. As she approaches the threshold, she recalls a memory of a school-time friend: It brought it back to me. Celia Langley. Celia Langley standing in front of me, her hands on her hips and her head in the cloud. And she is saying: […] “when I am older, Hortense, I will be leaving Jamaica and I will be going to live in England. […] Hortense, in England I will have a big house with a bell at the front door and I will ring the bell.” And she made the sound, ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling. (11) However, on reaching the door, Hortense is only greeted by silence: “But when I pressed this doorbell I did not hear a ring. No ding-a-ling” (12). When Queenie arrives, Hortense quickly comes to the realization that Gilbert does not own the house but is only renting from a landlady. She is then horrified to learn that they do not even have the whole house to live in, but only one small room at the very top. Like Gilbert’s account of misrecognition from a “Mother” he knows so well, Hortense’s bell-­ ringing moment functions as a metaphor for the arrival of the colonial immigrant at the metropolitan center thinking they have arrived home, only to find themselves regarded, at best, as a guest, and at worst, as an unwanted intruder in a formerly happy home. The analogous relationship between house and nation is further elucidated through the spatial tensions evoked when Queenie comes to knock at the door of Hortense and Gilbert’s rented room. While it is “politeness and good breeding” which compels Hortense to open the door, she quickly learns that these good manners are not returned: I opened the door wider for her before she thought me impolite. I  merely meant for us to talk through a larger opening. But she walked straight through, even though I had not formally invited her in! […] She perused the place as if this was her home. Pushing her nose into corners, she walked the room as if inspecting some task she had asked of me. (226–227) After a few more exchanges fraught with misunderstanding, Queenie sits down on a chair in the room and invites her to come and sit with her. Taken aback, Hortense resolves, “But this was my home, it was for me to tell her when to sit, when to come in, when to warm her hands” (229).

56  Rereading Black Domesticity In this scene, contradictory understandings of Commonwealth migration to the national space of Britain are mapped onto the domestic space of Hortense and Gilbert’s room. From Queenie’s perspective, she is the master of her home and it is only through her “kindness” that Hortense and Gilbert have come to live there. This is a literal reference to the racial prohibitions of most landlords at the time, but also evokes the language of guest/host that accompanies rhetoric about immigration. By contrast, as a paying tenant, Hortense believes she reserves the right of privacy and power over her allocated space, however small it may be. The threshold then becomes the site of negotiation between these conflicting claims to interior space – while Hortense exercises “politeness” by allowing Queenie limited access to what she sees as her home, Queenie does not even recognize the existence of a spatial boundary. Of course, such spatial negotiations also evoke the double standard by which European colonists viewed much of the world as available for conquest and appropriation, while the inverse emphatically does not apply. Through reading these key moments in the novel, we can see how Small Island makes productive use of the semantic slippage and analogous features of house and nation in order to draw attention to the contradictory signals received by those inside the so-called Mother Country relative to those inhabiting its colonial peripheries. We see the negative effects of this conflict for the novel’s Caribbean characters, whose expectations of being welcomed home by a motherly figure are dashed on arrival. By exposing such contradictions and spatial negotiations, Levy’s novel re-presents a British national home that is not stable and homogenous but permeated with the tensions generated by the fallout from events happening “out there” in the Empire. As Sarah Brophy (2010) has argued, Queenie’s lodging house can be viewed as a model for reconceiving the postwar British nation as a “diaspora space” with multiple racial and cultural entanglements, rather than one of stability and homogeneity.5 However, the domestic home does not only function in Levy’s novel as a stand-in for the nation but needs to be understood as a source of meaning in itself. If we consider Small Island alongside some of Andrea Levy’s earlier works, and in relation to diasporic Caribbean women’s writing more broadly, we can see a continuing preoccupation with domesticity as a potent site of exploration and critique of the impact of colonial culture in the Caribbean and its implications for the experiences of Caribbean immigrants in the diaspora.

Domestic Genealogies: Home and Empire From the beginning, Andrea Levy’s work has been significantly invested in the domestic sphere as a meaning-making space.6 In her debut novel, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), for example, Levy portrays her young protagonist-narrator Angela Jacobs’s sense of belonging in Britain

Clean Bodies, Clean Homes  57 as contingent upon certain value-laden aspects of domestic life. In several moments in the novel, cooking and eating play an integral part in demarcating belonging and unbelonging through affects of desire and disgust. For instance, when Angela’s friend Sonia is faced with unfamiliar Caribbean food when she comes to dinner at the Jacobs family home, her evident disgust forms a barrier of difference between herself and Angela that threatens to dissolve their budding friendship. As Njeri Githire points out, “Sonia’s hesitation is based less on the actual criteria of the meal itself than it is on pre-existing—albeit vague—notions of what might be eaten at Angela’s home” (2010, 863), as such a culinary encounter is already inscribed within colonialist and nationalist discourses of pollution, miscegenation and racial inferiority. Another consequence of this discourse is that Angela locates her own culinary desire in the quintessentially British dishes she gets at school, lamenting, “But my mum cooked different things […]. Everything she made tasted different” (Levy 1994, 45). Mirroring Sonia, Angela manifests the same signs of disgust at Caribbean food as a way of laying claim to a British identity. Food is also central to Angela’s mother’s attempts to manage how the family is perceived by others. Coaching Angela before a visit to a neighbor, she makes her promise she will not reveal the true content of their Sunday meal: I don’t wan’ that woman thinking we had sausages on a Sunday – you hear? I mean, before you know, everyone will think that we have sausages on Sunday, that we can’t afford to eat a proper Sunday meal. Don’t say sausages – say chicken. (133) While, for Angela, food is a marker of national and cultural belonging, here Angela’s mother demonstrates anxiety about food as sign of class position. As I discuss below, this takes on greater significance when placed in the context of Caribbean social mores. Such boundaries of difference are also brought to the fore in this early novel through representations of the domestic space itself. The yearly trip to the Ideal Home Exhibition provides the Jacobs family with aspirational material, which Angela sets against the “red brick” and “grey, concrete yard” of the family’s council flat (41). On a visit to her teacher’s house, however, Angela comes to the sobering realization that the curated domestic space of the Ideal Home Exhibition is actually “someone’s real world, not make-believe” (184). She nevertheless understands that this “someone” is not her or anyone like her, which “securely places her within her own category as she becomes even more firmly inscribed in her marginalized position” within this unfamiliar space (Pready 2012, 24). Such moments of aspiration and exclusion, rendered through the space of the home, introduce domesticity as a central mechanism through which belonging is articulated in Levy’s fiction. With Small

58  Rereading Black Domesticity Island, Levy places such domestic norms and practices into historical relief, exposing their place within exclusionary narratives of Britishness. Put another way, Small Island can be read as an archaeological mining of the history which produces Sophie’s predetermined disgust of Caribbean food, as well as Angela’s disavowal of her own mother’s cooking. It also traces the aspirational pull of the Ideal Home Exhibition and the “proper” Sunday dinner back to the subtle power dynamics of empire. Scholars like Anne McClintock (1995), Sara Mills (2003, 2005) and Rosemary Marangoly George (1996) have done extensive work on how the exportation of “proper” domesticity to colonial spaces played a fundamental role in the work of empire building. As George articulates, [I]t is the daily construction of the home-country as the location of the colonizer’s racial and moral identity and as the legitimization of the colonizer’s national subjecthood that made possible the carrying out of the work of empire. And […] it was on the home, this “unit of civilization”, that the reputation of the entire civilizing project (as imperialism was often perceived to be) rested. (1996, 49) As George’s point here indicates, in the colonial encounter, there is a dialogic relationship between the discursive construction of the home country (in this case Britain) and the construction and management of the material home in the colonies. Here George explores how the home’s role as a unit of civilization became a way for English women to elevate their status in the colonies, but this exported domesticity also had lasting effects on the way many colonized societies structured themselves thereafter.7 This is particularly true in the British Caribbean, where the institution of slavery produced a majority population that had been discursively rendered less than human. In the post-emancipation era and later during the transition to independence, at least a section of this population needed to be discursively recuperated in order to be deemed fit to join the political process and, eventually, for self-government. In her influential essay “Not Just Any(body) Can Be a Citizen”, M. Jacqui Alexander argues that such a discursive turn was accomplished through adherence to a code of practice known as “respectability”. As she explains, It would indeed require a complicated set of cognitive and ideological reversals for the British to turn the savage into the civilized, to turn those believed incapable of rule into reliable rulers. Herein lies the significance of socialization into British norms, British manners, British parliamentary modes of governance; into conjugal marriage and the “science” of domesticity. This would operate in effect as socialization into respectability. (1994, 12)

Clean Bodies, Clean Homes  59 Although the deployment of such principles was in the service of emancipation and eventual decolonization, “Britishness” became the mark of “respectability” and ultimately of social status, in large part due to the systematic destruction of any indigenous or African alternatives. Such a dependence on the social norms of erstwhile colonizers is evidently problematic because it reinforces the very notions of cultural superiority used to justify the colonial project in the first place. As another Caribbean scholar puts it, “respectability is based on Eurocentric norms and values, embedded in class-color systems of stratification and promoted by white churches, European marriage and a colonial educational system” (Green 2006, 9). This “socialization into respectability” had particular implications for black women, who were marked out by colonial discourse as possessing an amoral and lascivious form of female sexuality. Where black women in the Caribbean had previously been excluded from the institution of marriage because of their perceived incompatibility with Victorian codes of gender conduct, now their reputation and ultimate marriageability depended upon their success or failure to implement these same codes. In this way, the discourse of “respectability” functioned as a mechanism to contain the supposed “sexual permissiveness” of black women through a “disciplinary regime [that] indoctrinated women in domesticity and obedience through gendered schooling and domestic-service apprenticeships in bourgeois households” (Green 2006, 14). This gendered regime was also deeply tied to a color hierarchy in which lighter skinned women were given privileged access. The Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid produces a vehement critique of this process in many of her works of fiction. In Annie John (1985), for example, the young narrator of the same name deplores her mother’s attempts to turn her into a “lady” through a series of lessons in domestic conduct. This “young lady business”, as Annie refers to it, becomes synonymous with colonial endeavors to “domesticate” the colonized (27). As Carole Boyce-Davies has argued (1994), the figure of the mother-imperialist who imposes Victorian norms of domesticity and femininity on an unwilling black girlchild is a recurring trope, such that the home is often a contested, if not traumatic space in Afro-Caribbean women’s writing. Migration then becomes a form of escape from the “tyranny of home”, inverting the paradigm of the domestic space as a realm of comfort and security. In Small Island, Levy reimagines this “lady” figure in the character of Hortense, who is in many ways a caricature of the kind of woman Annie’s mother is trying to turn her into. In contrast to Annie, however, Hortense represents the “successful” implementation of such codes “respectability”. The proliferation of such domestic norms in the colonies was also an effect of changes “at home” in British society. Nancy Armstrong (1987) and Anne McClintock (1995, 2003) both link the rise of the cult of domesticity in the nineteenth century to the emergence of the British middle class. Armstrong points to the role of fiction in solidifying

60  Rereading Black Domesticity and disseminating “middle-class” domestic norms even before a true middle class existed (1987, 23). Then, drawing on Armstrong’s work, ­McClintock argues that the appearance of female idleness became central to these new norms and how, for the many women who aspired to middle-class status but could not afford enough servants, all evidence of their domestic labor needed to be rendered invisible to the eyes of husbands, fathers and visitors (2003, 651). The important point that both arguments highlight is the inherent fictionality of the cult of domesticity, thus throwing into question its usefulness as a marker of social difference. Like the discourse of “respectability” which served to regulate social structures in the colonies, its metropolitan equivalent, “middle-­ classness”, is also shown to be a predominantly discursive construct. In Small Island, the character of Queenie stands as the embodiment of the appropriation of these middle-class norms and the counterpart to Hortense’s appropriation of the marks of respectability. It is through the interaction between these two aspirational positions that Levy lays bare the mythic nature of British domesticity and, by extension, “Britishness” itself. By juxtaposing Hortense and Queenie’s separate but related upbringings against a backdrop of the fraught domestic setting of the lodging house, Levy exposes the hypocrisies of the cult of domesticity and its role in producing and maintaining social hierarchies.

Domestic Intersections: Race, Class and Gender We are introduced to the young Hortense as the illegitimate child of a well-known Jamaican “government man” (2004, 37). Because her light complexion (“the colour of warm honey”) promises a chance at a “golden life”, Hortense is quickly removed from the care of her mother (a “bitter chocolate hue”) and placed into the family of her father’s cousins (38). It is there, she says, that she “could become a lady worthy of my father, wherever he might be” (38). This culture of shadeism gives Hortense access to a higher social status, despite the precarious circumstances of her birth. Immediately, however, the transition in class is linked to gendered socialization into respectability – the process of becoming a “lady”. As part of this process, Hortense recalls the shift from playing alongside her cousin Michael to being restricted by a list of things that girls “did not do”: For one, I was not supposed to climb trees. Mr Philip told me it was not godly for girls to lift themselves into branches as a monkey would. Or come home wet from the stream […]. I was not supposed to hunt for scorpions, tipping them from their hiding place, tormenting them with a stick. Or dress a goat in a bonnet and attempt to ride her like a horse. (40)

Clean Bodies, Clean Homes  61 This restriction on playing is also accompanied by a schedule of domestic chores, distinctly coded as female: “I had washing to do in the outhouse sink, cleaning of the shades on the kerosene lamps. I was responsible for keeping the area under the tamarind tree free from dirt and a pleasure to sit in” (40). These new responsibilities are set against the comparative leisure of her male peer, Michael, whose attempts to distract Hortense from her chores are regarded as devilish trickery aimed at preventing her from carrying out her godly (female) duty (41). Hortense’s path to becoming a “lady” continues at a teacher training college reserved for girls “from good homes” from across the island (62). Alongside her occupational studies is a course in “domestic science” during which Hortense learns to bake fairy cakes which are “the best outside the tea-shops of southern England” (68) and to “cook an egg like the English do” (322). This egg instruction is accompanied by a lesson in proper consumption; as she recalls, “on no account were we to tap an egg with a spoon to remove the shell, and only the uncouth could be found dipping a slice of bread into the yoke” (323). This kind of training establishes food and practices of consumption as markers of social boundaries and explicitly positions English foodways as the standard against which to calibrate one’s position in the hierarchy (as we saw in Levy’s earlier work). For Hortense, this kind of gendered schooling secures her position as “rightful” reproducer (both biological and cultural) of the “respectable” colored middle class (Green 2006, 13), while also ensuring that this respectability is conferred upon the profession she is about to enter.8 However, upon Hortense’s arrival in Britain and subsequent encounter with actually existing habits in the postwar period, this backdrop of lessons in domestic practices becomes a source of irony and, often, outright comedy. As we are shown Britain through Hortense’s eyes, there is a sense of betrayal, as we realize the version that has been sold to her is not only inaccessible to a black Caribbean immigrant but may not actually exist at all. With this backdrop in mind, we might return to Hortense’s bell-­ ringing fantasy at the moment of arrival at Queenie’s lodging house in 1948. The fantasy of ringing the doorbell on one’s own house in England, immediately followed by the denial of this experience not only serves as a potent metaphor for her exclusion from the national home but also evokes the ideals of British domesticity sold to the Caribbean colonies as the essence of “respectability”. Tied to the mythical image of the Mother Country – “refined, mannerly, cultured” (Levy 2004, 139) – an aspirational site of desire and social mobility, is the figure of the Caribbean mother-imperialist who imposes domestic norms upon her female children. Hortense’s dejection upon arriving at this unwelcoming door in London might then be read as a consequence of the convergence of these two treacherous mothers. Along with her vision of the ringing

62  Rereading Black Domesticity bell, Hortense brings an idealized image of English homes, which stand for her as the only route to belonging in Britain: A dining-table in a dining room set with four chairs. A starched tablecloth embroidered with bows. Armchairs in the sitting room paced around a small wood fire. The house is modest – nothing fancy, no show – the kitchen small but with everything I need to prepare meals. We eat rice and peas on Sunday with chicken and corn, but in my English kitchen roast meat with two vegetables and even fish and chips bubble on the stove. (100–101) Here, the swapping of a Caribbean-style Sunday dinner for a British one once again situates food as integral to modes of identification and belonging. Also central to Hortense’s expectations are ideas about the proper spatial division of domestic activities, with each room fitted out according to its appointed use. Such an image sits in stark contrast with the reality of living as a black immigrant in postwar London. As mentioned above, when Gilbert shows Hortense where they will be living, she is particularly appalled to find that her use of the house is restricted to one room, reflected in the repeated phrase “just this?”: Three steps would take me to one side of this room. Four steps could take me to another. There was a sink in the corner, a rusty tap stuck out from the wall above it. There was a table with two chairs – one with its back broken – pushed up against the bed. The armchair held a shopping bag, a pyjama top, and a teapot. In the fireplace the gas hissed with a blue flame. (21) In keeping with the Victorian preoccupation with rational order and the clear demarcation of boundaries, the household too was to be arranged according to what McClintock refers to as a “geometry of extreme separation and specialization” (1995, 168). This classification of space came to be a marker of ascendancy beyond a perceived lower-class mixing of activities, objects and smells, so that “domestic space was mapped as a hierarchy of specialized and distinct boundaries that needed constant and scrupulous policing” (168). In the two passages cited above, we can see the contrast between a rationalized separation of domestic activities and the one-room living space in which kitchen, dining room and bedroom overlap and blur into one another, forcing an improper mingling of cooking, eating and sleeping. Such mappings of the social onto the spatial also recall Sara Mills’ suggestion that “architectural space […] attempt[s] to set out parameters within which certain types of relations may be negotiated” and that there

Clean Bodies, Clean Homes  63 is an association between the “‘model’ or typical house and a notion of the model family” (2003, 705, 706). In her work on colonial town planning, Mills outlines a relationship between the architectural separation between colonists and “natives” and fears about the “pollution” of the sanctity of European women (and the race itself) by “lascivious” Indian or African men. Though we cannot make an exact equivalence between the policing of racial contact in the colonial space and in the metropole, there are useful parallels to be drawn. James Procter (2003), for example, makes a related point about the principles of domestic separation, drawing attention to the moral panic around the perceived “convergence and disturbance of the boundaries between private, domestic space and the public/political realm beyond them” in the dwelling places of Caribbean migrants, especially in the morally questionable space of the shebeen9 (29). As with Mills’ example, such anxieties about spatial mixing evoke fears of other forms of mixing that might occur there, namely, miscegenation, adding a racialized element to the class associations McClintock highlights. Here, however, Levy turns such discourses on their head by aligning her female Caribbean character with the moralizing disgust at such unholy mixings while Queenie, her British counterpart, consistently comes up short: when Hortense specifies to Queenie that she needs three basins – “one to wash the vegetables, one for the cups and plates and one for washing”, Queenie retorts that “One will do – just rinse it out” (333). Horrified at this suggestion, Hortense is left wondering, “How can an Englishwoman expect me to wash myself in the same place where I must clean up the vegetables? It was disgusting to me. Surely it was distasteful to this Englishwoman” (333). Based on her Caribbean training, the mere fact that Queenie is an “Englishwoman” establishes her domestic credentials and Hortense is dumbfounded that she seems to be lacking in this regard. Hortense’s bewilderment continues in the grocery shop, where she encounters yet another violation of her rules of hygiene as she goes to buy bread: The man enclose his big hand over the loaf, his freckled fingers spreading across it. I stared at him. Was I to eat this bread now this man had touch it up? With his other hand he wiped his nose as he held out the bread for me to take. I did not take it, for I was waiting on him to place the bread into a bag to wrap it. “There you are,” he said to me, pushing the loaf forward enough for me to see a thin black line of dirt arching under each fingernail. (332) Hortense’s disgust in this scene can once again be linked to the preoccupation with classification and separation. Primarily, there is the contamination of domestic food items with “dirt”, which also has a

64  Rereading Black Domesticity specific classed and raced history. McClintock argues that “Nothing is inherently dirty; dirt expresses a relation to social value and social disorder. Dirt […] is that which transgresses a social boundary. A broom in a kitchen closet is not dirty, whereas lying on a bed it is” (1995, ­152–153).10 Drawing on McClintock’s reasoning, it is not only a case of dirt touching Hortense’s food but the crossing of a social boundary which is at stake: it is not just any dirt that is touching her bread but a distinctly low-class kind of dirt carried on the body of a shopkeeper, suggesting a deeper form of contamination. But again, this crossing of boundaries also bears the traces of a racialized history. As McClintock goes onto argue, “dirt was the memory trace of working class and female labor, unseemly evidence that the fundamental production of industrial and imperial wealth lay in the hands and bodies of the working class, women and the colonized” (1995, 154). She later expands this argument about the mutual disavowal of dirt and colonized bodies in her analysis of the social history of soap: Both the cult of domesticity and the new imperialism found in soap an exemplary mediating form. The emergent middle class values – monogamy (“clean” sex, which has value), industrial capital (“clean” money, which has value), Christianity (“being washed in the blood of the lamb”), class control (“cleansing the great unwashed”) and the imperial civilizing mission (“washing and clothing the savage”) – could all be marvelously embodied in a single household commodity. (1995, 208) Advertising campaigns for Pears soap in particular stand as potent signifiers of soap’s role in the “civilizing mission” of British colonialism, while simultaneously connecting it to class ascendency. As in one ad, a black and implicitly racialized coalsweeper holds in his hands a glowing, occult object. Luminous with its own inner radiance, the simple soap bar glows like a fetish, pulsating magically with spiritual enlightenment and imperial grandeur, promising to warm the hands and hearts of working people across the globe. (McClintock 1995, 211) Given the suggestiveness of this iconography, it is difficult to read Hortense’s obsession with cleanliness and separation without this accompanying colonial baggage. Indeed, the fact that it is Hortense, a black Caribbean immigrant, who stands as the enforcer of such boundaries is a source of irony in the novel. Following the logic that yokes civilization and respectability with particular kinds of domestic practice, Hortense views herself as

Clean Bodies, Clean Homes  65 superior, not only in relation to the shopkeeper but also when compared to this domestically incompetent kind of “Englishwoman”, Mrs Bligh (Queenie’s married name). For Queenie, however, the social relationship between the two women is clear from the outset, as she automatically reads Hortense as inferior due to her race and colonial origins. As a result, encounters between Hortense and Queenie are often fraught with miscommunication and prejudice on both parts in a kind of “double-­ crossing” of social boundaries. When in one instance, Queenie confidently declares that “It doesn’t worry me to be seen out with darkies”, Hortense is left confused wondering “Now, why should this woman worry to be seen in the street with me? After all, I was a teacher and she was only a woman whose living was obtained through the letting of rooms” (231). When Queenie takes great pride in teaching Hortense the names of the shops, Hortense’s narration points to the ignorance with which this knowledge is given: “‘This shop is called a grocer’s,’ Mrs Bligh told me. I nodded. It had groceries in the window, what else could it be?” (331). Such moments involve “double-crossing” in the sense that each woman is perceived by the other to be acting above her station (in a complex intersection between race and class), and that both are to a certain extent “double-crossed” (betrayed) by the aspirational discourses that produce their charged domestic encounters. The ironic distance in such moments between Queenie’s perception of Hortense, as an uncivilized black immigrant and how we as readers are meant to understand her, as a haughty member of the Caribbean colored middle class (as her husband Gilbert does), upends the image of the uncivilized racial other as produced in colonial discourse. By presenting Hortense as more “English” through her approach to domesticity than the genuine Englishwoman, the novel also confronts xenophobic discourses that recycle “composite images” of dilapidated and dirty houses as representative of the black dwelling place (Procter 2003, 23). However, like the policy of socialization into respectability described above, such a move simultaneously serves to reinforce imperial power relations which establish British middle-class domesticity as the mark of civilization. It is only when placed in conversation with Queenie’s childhood narrative that the value system itself can be fully undermined. We can trace many parallels between Hortense’s and Queenie’s childhood narratives, such as the division of labor between girls and boys in the same household and the deployment of “lady” as an aspirational identification. The daughter of a butcher, Queenie describes herself as “a cut above” the miners’ children “who ate scrag end and pigs’ heads”, but her family is below “the fancy ones who bought the topsides on Sundays then ham and turkey at Christmas” (241, 239, emphasis in original), once again linking social position to differences in food consumption. Though christened “Victoria” because “Queenie” is deemed to be too

66  Rereading Black Domesticity common a name, Queenie’s domestic life hardly lives up to the ideals solidified during her namesake’s reign: I was maid-of-all-poultry – scruffy apron, tatty headscarf with a scraper and bucket. While other girls were waving their hair and admiring their Cupid’s-bow mouths in mirrors I took my bucket and scraper round poultry pens. […] And while other girls read love stories and dreamed of having a best boy, I had to find the eggs – ­perfect, delicate, oval white forms sitting in the middle of all that filth. (243–244) Like Hortense, Queenie narrates here the moment when her gender comes into play in the divvying up of household responsibilities, and the dialectics of dirt and cleanliness are again evoked as indicators of social boundaries. Queenie’s brand of gender socialization is set against the imagined lives of “other girls” who are not subjected to the “scruffy” and “tatty” life she must endure. There are also undertones of race in the “perfect, delicate, oval white forms” that are sought among the “filth” in a contrast reminiscent of the “glowing” and “luminous” fetish object of the soap bar set against the coal black of the sweep in the Pears ad. Here, the image of the pure, white egg among the dirt stands as a symbol of Queenie’s desire to rise above her low-class life. She has a clear idea of the norms of girl/womanhood that she should be aspiring to, but, unlike her Caribbean counterpart, Queenie feels she is being denied access to the appropriate socialization. She laments, “I should have been a lady” (246), echoing Hortense’s deployment of this term. However, when Queenie has a fainting episode at the sight of her father butchering a pig (a “dirty” activity that should be kept out of sight), she is deemed too “soft” for life on the farm and is subsequently sent to live with her mother’s “posh sister” in London (247). It is here that Queenie begins the elocution and deportment lessons that are to help her “get on in polite society” and improve her marriage prospects (248). Still, despite her aunt’s attempts to call her by the more “elegant” name “Victoria”, she maintains that, upon looking into her angled bedroom mirrors, “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Queenies would appear, all smiling smugly at their good fortune. But not one Victoria was waving at me among that crowd” (250), alluding to the precariousness of this new middle-class identity. Queenie’s unglamorous upbringing works to demythologize the cult of domesticity and the idea that all British girls are imbued with the qualities that get exported to the colonies as constitutive of civilization. Even though Queenie and Hortense come from very different backgrounds, we see that both women are positioned (and position themselves) by the same gendered discourse and that they are both striving beyond the circumstances of their birth. While Hortense’s light skin (rendering her

Clean Bodies, Clean Homes  67 closer to the “clean” bodies of the Pears ads) entitles her to “become a lady” as a way of ensuring her social mobility, Queenie’s move to London represents her attempt to ascend to a new middle-class identity, obtained by affecting the same gendered attributes. Though both women are on a path of upward mobility (Brophy 2010, 6), Hortense inhabits her class position much more seamlessly than Queenie. It is only in her encounter with Britain and the racism that accompanies it that her sense of social standing starts to fall apart. Like the multilayered signification system of the Pears soap ad, it is the intersection of gendered, classed and raced discourses and boundaries that produces the tension between the two women when they find themselves sharing the same domestic space. We can see the importance of Queenie’s narrative in Small Island when we compare it to Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen. While Adah experiences a similar downward class trajectory on arrival, the only British woman who is described with any detail is the character of Trudy, who serves to harden essentialist categories of class and gender in order to shore up Adah’s moral superiority and class position. In juxtaposing the characters of Hortense and Queenie, who are both marked by various forms of boundary-crossing, Levy guards against a reading of class or race (or indeed gender) as stable categories in her novel. Rather, she presents belonging within such categories as context-specific and “mediated by the historically specific everyday of social relations” (Brah 1996, 192).

“Each to Their Own” We can see a convergence of the two modes through which domesticity is thematized in Small Island, the allegorical and the literal, in the return of Queenie’s husband Bernard. As someone who has come back from fighting on the frontier of the empire, Bernard’s presence connects national anxieties about black immigration in the postwar period with uncertainties emanating from developments “out there” in the colonies. He expresses the growing ambivalence among the British populace about the value of the colonial mission, concluding that “the recipe for a quiet life is each to their own”: Look at India. The British knew fair play. Leave India to the Indians. That’s what we did. […] Everyone was trying to get home after the war to be with kith and kin. Except these blasted coloured colonials. I’ve nothing against them in their place. But their place isn’t here. (469) Wendy Webster argues that the demise of empire and its associations of male adventure and power over territory required a change of discursive tactics so that “the symbols of Englishness in race discourse became the quiet street and privet hedge” (1998, xiv), signifying a retreat into an

68  Rereading Black Domesticity idealized middle-class English domesticity as the “cure” for imperial ambivalence and the violence of war. In Small Island, this retreat into the domestic is perhaps best demonstrated in the character of Bernard’s shell-shocked father, Arthur, who is consistently associated with a feminized domestic sphere, as he grows vegetables, cooks and stands in the ration queue alongside “lines and lines and lines of women” (289). Similarly, Bernard’s view of the war shifts from one of “derring-do” (403) to being primarily about “protect[ing] home and hearth” (470): “now I’m back we intend to live respectably again. It’s what I fought a war for” (471). Instead of a glorified homecoming, however, Bernard returns to find that his house no longer provides the sense of stability required to sustain his male subjectivity.11 Echoing the indigenous Britons cited in Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech who complain of being made strangers in their own country (Powell and Collings 1991), Bernard returns to his family home to find it irreparably changed. He notices the presence of “unfamiliar objects” and an “odd smell” (467), which signal a strangeness in what is meant to be a familiar and comforting space. This strangeness, which is immediately ascertained by the senses (sight and smell), is linked to the existence of “strange bodies” in his home. For Sara Ahmed (2000), “strangeness” is not an inherent quality of certain bodies, but is experienced as a confluence of historical and spatial factors. Some bodies are marked as strange through the colonial encounter, but this strangeness is only felt/feared when that body is brought into close proximity with the familiar, such that strange bodies are “bodies out of place”. Such “strange encounters” call up “the threat of invasion and contamination in the dirty bodies of strangers” (39), returning us to the dialectics of dirt and cleanliness that link the cult of domesticity to the politics of race. Like the broom that only becomes “dirty” when it is outside of its appointed space in the kitchen closet, strange bodies are those that transgress social boundaries and “threaten to traverse the border that establishes the ‘clean body’ of the white subject”, in this case, through the contamination of that which is closest to the body, the home (Ahmed 2000, 52). We can explore these tensions further through an encounter between Gilbert and Bernard shortly after he returns home. In a scene reminiscent of Hortense and Queenie’s spatial negotiations discussed above, Bernard barges into the couple’s room unannounced because he does not recognize that they have any legitimate claim on the space: “Cheeky blighter tells me that this room – at the top of my house – does in fact belong to him” (469). However, Gilbert continually frustrates Bernard’s attempts to reinstate his authority over the space. Bernard makes several attempts to assert his bodily dominance: “I showed him the keys. Left him in no doubt who had the upper hand. […] Straightened myself up – I was taller than him, you see” (470, 471). These displays are then met with Gilbert’s

Clean Bodies, Clean Homes  69 increasing proximity – “He came towards me then. Eyes bulging like a savage’s” (470) – which unsettles Bernard’s sense of control: Four times he asked me why [they needed to leave]. Standing so close I was having to breathe his air. Nothing for it. Notified him in the end, “I’m selling the house.” And, funny thing, he announced to me that Queenie had never told him this. As if she would. Queenie, he called her. “This is my house not my wife’s,” I said, “Not for her to tell you anything.” (471, emphasis added) Bernard, who has come back from fighting the colonial cause in India and Burma, has been in contact with various kinds of strange bodies, but in this encounter with the “strange body” of Gilbert, he is “moved from [his] place”. In Bernard’s affective withdrawal from Gilbert’s close proximity here, he reduces his body to “dirt”, to “matter out of place” (Ahmed 2000, 39) as a mechanism that re-exerts his dominance in the space. Though, by insisting that he only answers to Queenie, Gilbert further undermines Bernard’s male territorial role. Not only does this thwart Bernard’s efforts to return to the middle-class domestic stasis of the “quiet street and privet hedge”, but the fact that it is his own wife standing in the way of such a move displaces him as protector of “home and hearth”. As Queenie now generates her own income by letting rooms, his role as the male breadwinner is no longer needed. In Bernard’s words, “I felt I’d stumbled into someone else’s existence by mistake and was now busy trying to find my part” (507). This uncanny sensation that plagues Bernard’s homecoming is emblematic of a generation of white male returnees who expect to resume their rightful place at the head of the postwar “family” (with its connotations of domesticity, security and familiarity) but are greeted instead with a society in which the privileged white male body is losing its place. As Ahmed explains, Th[e] subject [that constitutes itself] is precisely the subject who determines the formation of home – the space one inhabits as ­liveable – and whose access to subjectivity is determined through being at home – the centre from which other beings are expelled. The subject who can act and move in the world with ease – the white, masculine, heterosexual, subject – does so through expelling those other beings from this zone of the living (although the expulsion always leaves its trace). (Ahmed 2000, 52) In this sense, Bernard’s inability to expel that which is “abject” (here the bodies of black immigrants) away from his body/home disrupts his white

70  Rereading Black Domesticity male power at both the domestic and national levels. As Ahmed goes on, it is the “economy of xenophobia” to produce the stranger’s body as “an impossible and phobic object”, involving “not just reading the stranger’s body as dirt and filth, but the re-forming of the contours of the body-athome, through the very affective gestures which enable the withdrawal from co-habitation with strangers in a given social space” (54). This conceit of bodily and domestic contamination by the “strange bodies” of racial others comes to a head in the birth of Queenie’s child by the black Royal Air Force pilot Michael. This represents a most heinous violation of the rational order of the British middle-class domestic space, transgressing the rules of “clean sex” in that the affair is both extramarital and with a racial other. Queenie’s final decision to give up her child to Hortense and Gilbert is another form of withdrawal from the “strange body”, despite the fact that Michael Jr is Queenie’s biological child. As others have argued, this move signifies a (re)solidifying of racial boundaries after a brief moment of exchange and contact in the lodging house (though this is far from convivial12) (Brophy 2010; McLeod 2006). Michael Jr’s adoption also coincides with Hortense and Gilbert’s departure from the house, suggesting a reestablishment of the rational order and territorial boundaries of the British middle-class domestic space. Furthermore, Bernard’s plan to move away from the city suggests a deeper retreat into an idealized image of British domesticity rooted in a racially and culturally “pure” countryside. However, this rupture is more than a simple matter of “each to their own”. As Ahmed suggests above, such attempts to expel the other from home always leave a “trace”. We see this in the photo Queenie leaves of herself among the baby’s things; though the adoption contains the problem of racial miscegenation in the eyes of society, the evidence of this bodily transgression (here interracial sex) is left waiting to be uncovered. Such a move also suggests the larger “trace” left by the presence of black immigrants in the house/nation, as one that cannot ever be fully expelled, not least because it is prefigured in the original colonial encounter itself. The “strange encounter” in the lodging house also leaves a lasting effect on the novel’s migrant characters, especially Hortense. Through her contact with Queenie, she is forced to confront the misplaced nature of her own ideals of home. When faced with a British nation that will never admit her no matter how accurate her reproduction of its norms and practices, Hortense begins to adopt a new identity as a member of the black diaspora in Britain. This new identity is reflected in the way she comes to embrace the new home Gilbert has found for them. By the end of the novel, Hortense no longer attempts to inhabit a mythic version of Britain concocted out of images of ideal homes which, though they may offer temporary lodging, will never admit her as a fully-fledged resident. In place of this mythologized domesticity, Hortense and Gilbert begin to establish a black domestic space that reverses the trajectory of the

Clean Bodies, Clean Homes  71 dilapidation and decay typically attributed to the influx of black bodies, framed instead as a project of restoration and beautification. This redeploys black domesticity as an enabling space and creates possibilities for escaping the discursive trap of the colonial politics of “respectability” laid out above.

Conclusion With Small Island Levy mobilizes contestations over British domestic space as a metaphor for the contestations over the right to belong in the space of the British nation. By deploying the space of the home to stage a conflict over national identity and belonging, Levy establishes an allegorical relationship between house and nation, where the significance of the novel’s domestic setting could be said to be subordinate to its more “public” concerns. However, Levy also makes codes of domestic conduct central to articulations of belonging and unbelonging in the novel, so that it is not a question of a mere substitution of the public for the private. We see, as with her other novels, the importance of food as a marker of social position, but also how cleanliness and the rationalization of domestic space, both principles of Victorian middle-class domesticity, are reunited with their colonial baggage. Notions of dirt and the mixing of spaces and activities recall colonial fears of miscegenation and other forms of transgression by “strange bodies” into the intimate spaces of white Europeans. Through its staging of the fraught intersections between race, class and gender, Small Island works to demythologize and decolonize British domesticity and disrupt its role in establishing social boundaries in both the colonies and the metropole. With Small Island Levy asks us to consider the role of such codes in producing contemporary attitudes towards immigrant populations and the pull of a nostalgic return to an ethnically and culturally homogenous idea of “home” articulated through particular ways of organizing domestic life. In the next section, I shift from thinking about the homemaking of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the metropole to consider the experiences of Muslim immigrants settling in Britain. Where black domesticity has been branded with tropes of dilapidation and family dysfunction, the homes of Muslims have been associated with insularity, religious extremism and the oppression of women. Where black family life has been interpreted through the patronizing gaze of the social worker, Islamic homes have been subjected to the scopic lens of the state’s securityscape. Chapter 4 explores how Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane exposes the limitations of outsider’s attempts to know what goes on behind the closed doors of Muslim homespaces at the same time that it frustrates readers’ expectations that the novel itself will provide a more satisfying entrée. Then, in Chapter 5, I demonstrate how Leila

72  Rereading Black Domesticity Aboulela’s novel The Translator disrupts assumptions about Muslim women’s oppression within the home through its appropriation of the nineteenth-century domestic novel form.

Notes 1 Subsequent references are to this edition. 2 A project entitled “Small Island Read 2007” seems to testify to this transformative function of Levy’s novel. As part of a larger national initiative to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, residents of four cities across the UK were encouraged to read Small Island and share their reactions. This project is described as having an “explicitly ideological purpose, that of generating understanding around multiculturalism and the historical roots of racism in modern Britain” (Lang 2009b, 319) and has been credited with changing British readers’ perceptions of their own history (Lang 2009a). For more information about the novel’s reception in the context of this and other public reading projects, see Benwell (2009) and Fuller and Procter (2009). 3 Although Gilroy and Levy both published in 2004, we can still see evidence of this nostalgic turn to the WWII period in British cultural life in the years following their publication. This was particularly evident in the summer of 2012 when celebrations surrounding the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics were dotted with 1940s iconography, fashion and a resurgence of wartime dances like the Lindy hop. Furthermore, wartime slogans such as “Keep Calm and Carry On” were recuperated into rallying cries during the 2008–2010 economic recession. 4 See James Procter’s discussion of this motif in Powell’s speeches (2003, 378). 5 Avtar Brah, who coined the term, explains that “the concept of diaspora space (as opposed to diaspora) includes the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’” (1996, 181). Small Island also models this process through its form, deploying multiple narrative perspectives to bring the stories of its migrant characters, Gilbert and Hortense, into tension with those of Queenie and Bernard. 6 Jo Pready (2012), for example, analyzes the space of the home and Njeri Githire (2010) looks at practices of cooking and eating, both in relation to Levy’s first three novels Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), Never Far from Nowhere (1996) and Fruit of the Lemon (1999). 7 See, for example, Salman Rushdie’s play on this process in Midnight’s Children discussed in the book’s introduction. 8 In the Anglophone Caribbean, the term “colored” or “high-colored” is used to refer to Afro-Caribbeans with visible European heritage (i.e., lighter skin) and is typically associated with higher social status. 9 These were unauthorized places for drinking, dancing and gambling in residential areas. 10 McClintock’s comments here also call to mind another moment in Small Island in which Hortense is turned away when she attempts to apply to be a teacher in Britain and inadvertently walks into a broom closet (455). This misstep seems to direct her to the more appropriate vocation for her social standing in Britain. 11 As per de Beauvoir’s (1997) critique of home, discussed in the book’s introduction. 12 As in Paul Gilroy’s (2004) notion of “convivial culture”.

Part II

Islam at Home

4 “The Real Thing” Performing Home in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

The post-9/11 landscape has seen ever-increasing scrutiny of Muslims in Britain, a community that has come to be viewed as a “problematic presence” within the nation, troubling its values of individualism and freedom (Morey and Yaqin 2011, 2). From the so-called Trojan horse plot to Islamize Birmingham schools (Shackle 2017) to reports of voter fraud among South Asian communities in East London (BBC News 2015) to the routine suspicion of veiling as a practice, much of the British public’s unease with regard to Muslim communities has clustered around fears of what is hidden from view. Since the 9/11 and 7/7 bombings, there has been a resurgence of anxieties about the perceived “self-segregation” of British Muslims who allegedly confine themselves to “ethnic enclaves” rather than integrating into mainstream society (Phillips 2006).1 Such enclaves are feared to be hotbeds of terrorist activity, crime and other socially unacceptable practices like forced marriages, associations that mark their residents as not only outside the norms of British society but a threat to its laws and safety. Such accounts then become reified through repetition, as in the way deaths of Muslim women or girls, often under complex circumstances, are instantly branded as “honor killings”. As Morey and Yaqin remind us, Patriarchal brutality, intimidation, domestic violence: all are endemic to our society and most others too. However, it is only those whose domestic life seems alien, organized according to creeds spawned thousands of miles away and hundreds of years ago, who carry the mark of honor in this way. (2011, 76–77) In her analysis of the Cantle Report produced in response to a series of disturbances between Muslim and white British communities in several northern English towns in 2001, Deborah Phillips observes that the Muslim areas covered in the report were cast solely in negative terms, with “little acknowledgement of their positive attributes; of inner city ethnic spaces as vibrant social spaces, as lived spaces, and as ‘home’” (2006, 28). Much of the government’s “Prevent” anti-terrorism strategy

76  Islam at Home has focused on intervening into such “segregated” areas, relying on the reporting of teachers and community workers, those who interface most directly with the private world of Muslim family life that is inaccessible to the otherwise near omnipresent eye of the state (Home Office 2018). Even some Muslim political leaders have begun to assent that the fight against Islamic terrorism “starts at home”. In one example, the current mayor of London’s Lambeth council Saleha Jaffer has stated: We gave birth to those people – don’t blame others. It starts at home and how you communicate with your children. Talk to them and become their friends so that if anything happens in their life they can come and tell you as they have that trust. (Davis 2017) The result of such discourses is that the Islamic home space has come to represent the ultimate locus of concealment, where beliefs and practices seen as alien and threatening to the status quo of British society are allowed to continue unchecked. Published a few years after the 9/11 attacks, Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2003) entered the scene at the height of such anxieties. The 2001 event itself is referenced within its pages, but remains marginal to the main story of one family’s experiences as they navigate the challenges and disappointments of immigrant life in Britain. The novel follows Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi woman who is brought to London following her marriage to an older man named Chanu. The couple make their home on a council estate in the East End borough of Tower Hamlets, and their life is narrated chronologically over a sixteen-year period. Despite the title’s explicit reference to a well-known public place, the majority of the novel’s action unfolds within the intimate spaces of the home. Much of Nazneen’s experience of the outside world is confined to the “shapes and shadows” she can see from her window and the fragments of public life that come through her front door (Ali 2004/2003, 17). 2 While Nazneen’s view of life outside her flat is limited, the novel’s focus on the domestic sphere gives the reader the sensation of trespassing into spaces not easily accessed by the mainstream British public, revealing the “hidden” lives of the Bangladeshi community in London. This has no doubt contributed to the high praise the novel received from critics for having “mapped out a new, invisible London” (Sandhu 2003). In the words of one reviewer, Brick Lane “opened up a world whose contours I could recognize, but which I needed Monica Ali to make me understand” (Bedell 2003). However, Ali’s disclosure also garnered much anger from the community being depicted; the novel and, in particular, the production of the film based on it were met with a series of local protests (Lea and Lewis 2006; Taylor 2003). In a letter signed by local

Performing Home  77 community leaders and sent to Ali and The Guardian newspaper shortly after the book’s publication, the signatories asserted that the novel was “a completely stereotypical view of Bangladeshis living in Brick Lane and one we simply do not recognize” (Taylor 2003). In other words, they felt Brick Lane to be a misrepresentation of the private world it purports to reveal. Chapters 2 and 3 explored how insiders’ accounts of the private lives of Britain’s minority ethnic communities can provide an important counter-­discourse to white-authored representations that pathologize black domestic life. However, the negative reaction to Ali’s novel is a testament that such public exposure is not always felt as humanizing or resistant by those it names. Several critics have pointed to the fact that Ali, as a middle-class, Oxford-educated, mixed-race British Bangladeshi, has a tenuous claim to “insider” status among the primarily working-class Bengali population surrounding Brick Lane (Brouillette 2009; Greer 2004). Indeed, the issue of who gets to speak for a particular community is a continually thorny one, as is the question of whether accuracy of representation should necessarily be the goal of literary production (Mercer 1990). While I am not going to resolve such complex questions here, 3 as critics it is nevertheless important to remain conscious of the discourses and tropes such works might be playing into, however unintentionally. As suggested above, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Brick Lane’s attention to the private world of its Bangladeshi Muslim characters is in danger of playing into the public’s suspicion of (and accompanying fascination with) what goes on behind the closed doors of Muslim homes. As Jane Hiddleston argues, the very notion of the “shapes and shadows” draws attention to the haziness of the figures sketched by Ali. The image of the net curtains plays on the notion of revelation or viewing, since they precisely allow the inhabitant to see without being seen, and to frustrate the viewer’s desire to see. All we are offered are murky silhouettes, and this partial veiling both provokes and eludes our quest for knowledge. (2005, 59) This explanation, though highly evocative, is somewhat misleading, since it is Nazneen who looks out to glimpse the “murky silhouettes” behind the net curtains of other flats on the estate, while readers are given complete access to her private space, as we are to her private thoughts. And this view, far from a “partial veiling”, is frequently offered in meticulous detail. Nevertheless, Hiddleston makes an important connection here to the desire to “unveil”, which has been a central feature of the West’s engagement with the Muslim world. The Orientalist fascination with uncovering what is veiled has a long history, evident in the

78  Islam at Home nineteenth-century harem scenes of painters like Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme. In such paintings, the penetration of the interior space of the women’s quarters by the gaze of the male artist4 served as a metaphor for European access to the hidden mysteries of the East. Such longstanding fascination with uncovering the “exotic” woman behind the screen of the harem has taken on another form in the heightened securitization of this post-9/11 era. As Morey and Yaqin argue, such tropes are not new, but the scale of the attacks has “thrust them back onto our cinema and TV screens, into our news media and into the mouths of politicians” (2011, 3). It is important, therefore, to explore how these older tropes about the Muslim domestic space are made anew when filtered through the lens of contemporary fears and anxieties. On one level, Brick Lane seems to confirm outsiders’ suspicions of what goes on in this space. A traditional South Asian woman is brought to Britain through an arranged (forced?) marriage and sequestered at home, but grows more assertive and eventually escapes her unhappy domestic arrangement to British public spaces where you can do “whatever you like” (Ali 2004, 492). This narrative trajectory at once suggests the liberalizing influence of Western culture and feeds into perceptions about the toxic nature of Muslim home life. However, on closer inspection, we can find elements that work against this well-worn narrative. First, through its narratorial strategies and detailed descriptions of domestic spaces and activities, the novel takes a critical stance towards the notion that Muslim homes function only as static spaces of cultural reproduction (as Morey and Yaqin put it in the quote above) “organized according to creeds spawned thousands of miles away and hundreds of years ago”. An investment in this version of home is exhibited by Brick Lane’s male characters, who rely on the continuity and familiarity provided by the domestic space to sustain their connection to Bangladesh and cope with the challenges of life in Britain. Nazneen and the other women on the estate are called upon not only to maintain this simulacrum through their domestic labor but also to serve as an embodiment of this notion of home themselves. By exposing the performative practices involved in producing home as a figure of stasis, the novel unsettles its role as a comforting space to which male figures can retreat. We also see a similar perception of this space in mainstream discourses surrounding Muslims in Britain. While the male Bangladeshi characters of the novel experience this domestic continuity as a comforting connection to a geographically distant place, for outsiders it is a space of complete alterity. Whether the threatening image of the “ethnic enclave” or the enticing image of the “exotic” Eastern woman, Muslim home spaces are marked out as alien territory within the “home” of the British nation. However, through the novel’s attention to the interior of the home and its mundane, everyday activities, Brick Lane works against readers’ desire to uncover an exotic or sensational world to consume within the private

Performing Home  79 spaces of Muslim life. Through both processes, the text problematizes the image of British Muslim domestic spaces as comforting (for some) or alien (for others) reproductions of the home culture. Rather, they are revealed as contested spaces involving complex negotiations and improvisations between different modes of domestic life.

Nazneen and the Performance of Home In her work on the relationship between gender and national identity, Nira Yuval-Davis argues that in the notion of culture, The construction of “home” is of particular importance including relations between adults and between adults and children in the family, ways of cooking and eating, domestic labor, play and bedtime stories, out of which a whole world view, ethical and aesthetic can become naturalized and reproduced. (1997, 43) If, as Yuval-Davis suggests here, the everyday activities of the domestic sphere are central to what we understand as “culture”, then the “homing desire” (Brah 1996, 163) that accompanies diasporic movements might be understood on two levels. It is the desire to return to a geographically distant place and culture, but also evokes the notion of “homing” as the impulse to establish familiar territory from which to depart and return to at the end of one’s daily travails (“homing instinct”). Sara Ahmed argues that The experiences of migration – of not being in a place one lived as home – are felt at the level of embodiment, the lived experience of inhabiting a particular space, a space that is neither within nor outside bodily space. […] Migrant bodies stretch and contract, as they move across the borders that mark out familiar and strange places. (2000, 92) The domestic space, then, might serve as a mobile form of “familiar territory” in which the reproduction of culture can continue irrespective of the strange and frequently hostile world outside its walls. While mobilizing the domestic space as a stable territory against an unfamiliar and potentially antagonistic public space might be a useful coping mechanism for the shock of settling in a new place, there is also a danger in mythologizing the home as a space of sameness. As Ahmed articulates, In such a narrative, home and away are divided, not only as different spaces, but as different ways of being in the world. Home

80  Islam at Home is constructed as a way of being by the very reduction of home to being, as if being could be without desire for something other. Such a narrative of home assumes the possibility of a space that is pure, which is uncontaminated by movement, desire or difference […]. (2000, 88) For Ahmed, such a binary opposition between home (as stasis, familiarity) and not home (as movement, difference) is ultimately impossible because homes “always involve encounters between those who stay, those who arrive, and those who leave” and therefore are never entirely “fixed”, “pure” or “uncontaminated” by the not home (2000, 88). There is also the question of who is served by such an investment in the home as a space of familiarity and stasis. The feminist geographer Gillian Rose asks this question with regard to the treatment of home in male-authored humanist geography, in which it serves as a universal signifier for the “ultimate sense of belonging to place” (1993, 47). She says, Humanistic work […] idealizes place as home. Its home/place is not one that many feminists would recognize, though: it is conflict-free, caring, nurturing and almost mystically venerated by humanists. It seems that the humanistic notion of place has little to do with women: its masculinism marginalizes alternative accounts of place. […] Place is represented as Woman, in order that humanists can define their own masculinist rationality. (1993, 56) Rose here is critical of universalist readings of home that appear oblivious to the labor, largely conducted by women, that is undertaken to render such spaces as “conflict-free”, “caring” and “nurturing”. She concludes that because the burden falls to them to make/be home for others, there is essentially “no place for women” to feel at home themselves (1993, 41). If we apply Rose’s ideas to the context of migration, where the home can be mobilized as a fixed container of a culture left behind, then female migrants do not necessarily benefit in the same way from the feelings of security such a space might provide. If, as in Rose’s reading of humanist geography, woman is rendered as place, in migration that place is a fixed image of the home country. In a similar vein, Yuval-­ Davis makes the point that women are often mobilized as “the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity” and, through their “proper” behavior and dress, “embody ‘the line’ which signifies the collectivity’s boundaries” (1997, 45, 46). She also notes that this pressure on women tends to intensify when men feel under threat, such as when experiencing racism and other forms of marginalization.5 In the face of such conditions, woman and home come to stand as interchangeable signifiers of familiarity and continuity.

Performing Home  81 In Brick Lane, the character of Dr Azad diagnoses the local Bangladeshi community with what he calls “Going Home Syndrome”. As Chanu summarizes, “They don’t ever really leave home. Their bodies are here but their hearts are back there. And anyway, look at how they live: just recreating the villages here” (32). This “Going Home Syndrome” encapsulates the two meanings of “homing desire” described above. It is both a longing for another place (“Their bodies are here but their hearts are back there”) and an attempt to reproduce in the newly settled space a simulacrum of the one left behind (“recreating villages here”). While Chanu here is projecting this syndrome onto others in the community that he views as less worldly than himself, we quickly realize that he too has fallen victim to the condition. For Chanu, “Going Home Syndrome” eventually manifests as a literal return to Bangladesh, but others, especially Nazneen’s lover Karim, indulge their condition by creating a version of home in London. Indeed, it is the novel’s male characters who suffer most acutely from this affliction. The women, especially Nazneen, are then mobilized as conduits through which the men play out their figurative returns. Chanu frequently boasts that his wife is an “unspoilt girl from the village” (45, 22). Similarly, Karim’s infatuation with Nazneen is based on her being what he describes as the “real thing”: “A Bengali wife. A Bengali mother. An idea of home. An idea of home that he found in her” (454). In this way, Nazneen is not only called upon to maintain the domestic space as a familiar territory of return, but she must also be home herself. Both Chanu and Karim have reason to invest in such an image of home as familiar and unchanging. The community they inhabit is marginal to mainstream British society in spite of its close proximity to the nation’s most prosperous center; the City skyscrapers serve as a mocking backdrop against which the characters’ endure their daily struggles. Chanu’s story is by and large that of the failed immigrant. Though educated, his lofty ambitions are stifled at every turn as he is continually passed over for promotion and eventually settles for the life of a taxi driver. Karim, as an agent for his uncle’s garment business, is on the whole more successful than Chanu, but feels the sense of dislocated identity that comes with being a member of the second generation who has lost his cultural connection to home (we learn, for example, that he stammers when he speaks in Bengali but not in English), yet continues to feel excluded from British society. His participation in the Bengal Tigers, a local Islamist group, is born from this desire for return to a stable sense of “being-athome” (Ahmed 2000, 88). However, it is Nazneen, wearing a sari that reminds him of his mother, who provides the most potent connection to a mythologized idea of home. We encounter various mechanisms through which the men on the estate attempt to fix women in/as home. Although Chanu tells Nazneen that “coming [to London] you are not missing anything, only

82  Islam at Home broadening your horizons” (45), these words strike with irony because we know Nazneen does not have much opportunity for such “broadening” as any attempt to develop beyond her appointed role, such as by taking English lessons, is denied: “Why should you go out”, Chanu asks, “If you go out, ten people will say, ‘I saw her walking on the street.’ And I will look like a fool” (45). He goes on to chide her that if she were living in Bangladesh, it would be the same. However, from the letters Nazneen receives from her sister Hasina, we know the Bangladesh they left behind has since been transformed by its new place in the global textile trade and that she leads a much more outward-facing life working in a garment factory. The interjection of Hasina’s story demonstrates that the restrictions placed on Nazneen cannot simply be explained as the effect of enduring “tradition” but are rather a symptom of a diasporic community afflicted with Going Home Syndrome. We are also given several examples of what happens when women destabilize the image of cultural stasis they are called on to represent. There is Mrs Azad, whose assimilation into British culture is perceived as a shameful secret that makes Dr Azad reluctant to return Chanu’s hospitality. When they do come for dinner, the woman at the door, with “purple lacquered nails” and hair “streaked with some kind of rust-­ colored paint”, is so far from his realm of experience that it leads Chanu to assume they are at the wrong house (106–107). While Mrs Azad’s elevated class status and physical separation from the world of the estate allows her more freedom to transgress social norms, others’ attempts to change the status quo threaten their position in community and kinship structures. We hear that Jorina has been “shamed” for taking a job at a garment factory and that her husband has begun to sleep with other women as a result (97). There is also Hanufa, whose decision to take a massage class has caused the women, including Nazneen, to freeze her out of their social group. Such examples are suggestive of Judith Butler’s (2004) point that in order for us to exist as socially viable beings, we must perform ourselves in a way that makes us recognizable to the sociocultural and historical world in which we live. This desire to be recognized, she acknowledges, often runs counter to the desire to undo the norms that prevent us from accessing a “liveable life”, turning recognition itself into a site of power (2). The actions of characters like Jorina and Hanufa, though aimed at bettering their lives, result in their exclusion from the community. By contrast, Nazneen conducts herself as the perfect embodiment of a Bengali housewife, maintaining the home as a comforting space in which both Chanu and Karim recuperate their bruised sense of self. When posing for a family photo, for example, we are told how she “moved over, so that her shoulder brushed against Chanu [so that] the photograph would

Performing Home  83 show a dutiful and modest wife in a cotton-print sari” (296). However, such moments also demonstrate the extent to which Nazneen is performing this role. Following Butler (2006/1990), to acknowledge that gender is performed is to undermine its basis in nature. Drag is subversive because it calls attention to the artifice involved in producing bodies that are read as “male” or “female”: “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency” (187). In other words, by exposing gender as a performance, drag functions as a resistant form of bodily practice that unsettles the correlation between anatomy and gender. In a similar manner, through its various narrative techniques, Brick Lane exposes Nazneen’s identity as “the unspoilt girl from the village” to be a work of performance, which ultimately unsettles the familiarity and stasis that she represents for the novel’s male characters. Although, on the surface, Nazneen remains within the confines of recognizable norms, we are frequently made aware of another Nazneen that lives inside the character that speaks and acts. It is through the tension between this speaking, acting Nazneen and the narrative voice which renders her thoughts that the performance is revealed. In an article about the effects of realism in Brick Lane, Alistair Cormack (2007) argues that the novel’s third person narrative voice is a form of mediation that prevents us from fully accessing Nazneen’s consciousness. His reasoning is first that the narrative is a translation, knowing as we do that Nazneen can only think and speak in Bengali for most of the novel. Second, he notes that much of the descriptive narration is in a linguistic register that Nazneen would not possess. However, we might also consider the narrative effects of these different registers. Because the narration is in a very different voice from that which Nazneen would speak out loud, it distances Nazneen’s thoughts from her words and actions and therefore does more than simply translating her uneducated Bengali into English literary prose. It gives the impression that the Nazneen that acts and speaks for most of the novel is a form of performance. This performative aspect of Nazneen’s character is made explicit in an early scene in the novel, in which the glimpse of an African bus driver launches Chanu into a history lesson on the Transatlantic slave trade, to which Nazneen simply replies, “If you say so, husband”. However, this line is followed by a narrative explanation: She had begun to answer him like this. She meant to say something else by it: sometimes that she disagreed, sometimes that she didn’t understand or that he was talking rubbish, sometimes that he was mad. But he heard it only as, “If you say so.” (99)

84  Islam at Home Here, we are made aware that the phrase “if you say so” is a container that can hold many different meanings, while Chanu has no knowledge of its hidden content. In fact, nowhere is the sense of Nazneen’s doubleness more striking than in dialogic encounters with her husband, such as this moment when Chanu wonders why Dr Azad has not asked him to dinner: “Maybe he never thinks of it,” Chanu continued. “He just needs a little prod. Or it could be that he doesn’t consider me part of his circle. A doctor is a cut above. But what is a doctor, really, when you think about it? He memorizes everything from books: broken legs, colds and viruses, […]. It’s learning by rote. Symptom and cure. Hardly an intellectual pursuit. No. He’s just a finger blown up to the size of a banana tree. Let him guard his house, and put some barbed wire around it too. I am not interested.” Nazneen put the baby on the floor while she hunted for the spoon. Beneath the table, the files and papers had been breeding, intermarrying with balls of string, boxes of staples, rolls of labels, chains of clips. A pair of pants lay exhausted on the heap; a sock sat fossilized in dust. The spoon was nowhere to be seen. The baby crawled under the table with her and pulled her hair. […] “Hello,” she told him, “I’m looking for your spoon.” “Maybe if I get the promotion,” Chanu went on, “then he will be more inclined to extend his hospitality. That’s probably the kind of man he is.” Nazneen came up. She scooped the baby under one arm. She checked Chanu’s face to see if he required a response from her. He was mulling over his words, scrunching them this way and that, into a wrinkled brow, a taut cheek. His eyes looked somewhere far off. She was not needed. (89–90) The simultaneity of this passage, with Chanu thinking out loud about whether Dr Azad is snubbing him while Nazneen’s mind is focused on her new baby, adds to the sense of performance. Nazneen’s body goes through the motions of listening (“She checked Chanu’s face to see if he required a response from her”), but the narrative voice is engaged in expressing Nazneen’s observations in highly wrought imagery (the “breeding” files and papers, the “fossilized” sock). The contrast between Chanu’s rambling speech and Nazneen’s thoughts is employed as a way of adding humor, but it also produces a feeling of disjointedness, where the extensive narrative commentary in scenes like the one above creates distance between the realm of Chanu’s speech and the mind of the protagonist. Nazneen goes through the motions – performs – but is not really present.

Performing Home  85 We can contrast the scene above with one in which Nazneen and Razia discuss Jorina a few pages later: “I talked to Jorina. There are jobs going in the factory.” “Oh,” said Nazneen. “Mrs Islam says Jorina has been shamed. […]” Razia snorted. “Is that what Mrs Islam says? Let her say what she likes, it will not stop me.” “What about the community? She will not be the only one.” “Will the community feed me? Will it buy footballs for my son? Let the community say what it will. I say this to the community.” And she flicked her fingers. “What does your husband say?” Razia narrowed her eyes. She looked down her long, straight nose at the baby. “Mrs Islam is one to talk. She’s a fine one to talk.” “Mrs Islam?” “She of the thousand hankies.” Razia smiled for the first time. Nazneen laughed. “What is it all about? All those handkerchiefs.” (97) In this passage, we get much more quoted speech from Nazneem and almost no narrative commentary to serve as a replacement for Nazneen’s side of the dialogue. Unlike in her discussions with Chanu, Nazneen says exactly what she thinks (even if this may not be particularly palatable to her interlocutor) without need for qualification to the reader. Furthermore, we get a genuine bodily response to the conversation – she laughs. The shift from narrative commentary to quoted speech in these two passages signals a narrowing of the distance between the interior Nazneen and the one who acts and speaks, implying that the purely female spaces and moments in the novel may offer greater freedom from the pressure to perform. In addition to dialogic moments in which Nazneen’s performativity is implicitly present, we also find it evident in her actions. Directly after Chanu denies Nazneen English lessons, we get a description of her nighttime eating habits involving a secret meal of yogurt and sugar. This ritual is framed as a side effect of her tendency to perform in Chanu’s presence: “‘Eat! Eat!’ her husband told her at mealtimes. But for him, she would not. She showed her self-restraint like this. Her self-denial. She wanted to make it visible” (77). Nazneen’s “restraint” at normal mealtimes is portrayed as a conscious affectation. It is partly a way of proving her capacity for self-sacrifice, a desirable quality in a good Bengali wife and mother, though it is also presented as a form of resistance. The yogurt eating ritual is cast as an illicit activity: “It became a habit,

86  Islam at Home then a pleasure, taking solace in these midnight meals” (77). It becomes a kind of game for Nazneen, the performance of self-denial, followed by the secret indulgence. As suggested by this ritual of illicit eating, Nazneen’s persona is something she actively cultivates. There are also suggestions that it functions as a strategy for negotiating the everyday challenges of marital life, as in the following exchange: If she wanted something, she asked her husband. But she deferred to him. Like this: “The bed is so soft. Does it make your back ache?” “No.” “Good.” “I am making a sketch.” “Let me see. What is it?” “A plan for the house I will build in Dhaka. What do you think of it?” “What shall I say? I am only a girl from the village and I know nothing of big houses.” “Do you think it is too grand?” “I don’t know anything about houses, or beds.” “What about the bed? Is it too soft for you?” (51) Here, by affirming to Chanu that she is “only a girl from the village”, Nazneen is able to disarm her husband so that he eventually bends to her wishes. Her line is delivered as if part of a script, fulfilling Chanu’s interpretation of her. Here, by actively performing this role, Nazneen turns it to her own advantage, thereby undermining its very meaning: a simple “girl from the village” would surely not possess such skills of manipulation. The distance between Nazneen as portrayed through the narrative voice and the Nazneen that speaks and acts is most striking in the first half of the novel, where her dialogic silences are compensated by narrative commentary. The lack of narrative movement combined with the domestic setting has led some critics to characterize the atmosphere in this part of the novel as “claustrophobic” (Cormack 2007, 714; Lauret 2011, 208), emphasizing the restrictive nature of Nazneen’s daily life (Lauret calls attention to the imagery of tombs and boxes, for example). On the one hand, Nazneen’s silences are a representation of her position as observer rather than agent in the social world she now finds herself in. At the same time, the observations of the narrative voice, focalized through Nazneen, invite us to see beyond the role with limited capacity to act and speak. The tension built up between the two registers creates a sense of disjointedness and multilocality that expands

Performing Home  87 and counterbalances the restrictive setting and undermines Nazneen’s linguistic subordination within it. As the novel develops, we begin to see a change in the relationship between the character Nazneen and the one portrayed through narration. Just before the novel’s second chronological gap following the death of her first child, Nazneen engages in a different kind of performance, one that actively transgresses the role she has inhabited thus far. Seeing a pair of Chanu’s trousers draped over a chair, she decides to try them on. She then opts to put her underskirt back on but to hitch it up to the knees: She imagined herself swinging a handbag like the white girls. She pulled the skirt higher, and examined her legs in the mirror. She walked toward the headboard, turning her trunk to catch the rear view, a flash of pants. Close to the wall, eyes to the mirror, she raised one leg as high as she could. She closed her eyes and skated off. (141) Here, Nazneen engages in several forms of “cross-dressing”, transforming from a sari-clad “girl from the village” into a man (signified by the trousers), then a “white girl” and finally an ice dancer, drawing attention to the performative nature of all identities. The fact that becoming a “white girl” is accomplished by modifying Nazneen’s sari into a short skirt also implies a fluidity between these different personas. Here, the bodily emancipation accorded to the “white girl” is as much a performance of particular recognizable codes and within particular structures as the sari is for Nazneen’s role as the “unspoilt girl from the village”. Nazneen seems to concur with this way of thinking as, in another moment, she is gripped by the idea that if she changed her clothes her entire life would change as well. If she wore a skirt and a jacket and a pair of high heels then what else would she do but walk around the glass palaces on Bishopsgate, and talk into a slim phone and eat lunch out of a paper bag? (277) Dressing takes on a similar performative role in the case of Nazeen’s daughters, whose clothes are made to stand as visual signifiers of Chanu’s shifting position during the dispute between the Islamist Bengal Tigers and white nationalist Lion Hearts. Unable to decide between these two opposing sides, Chanu begins to determine his daughters’ clothing choices based on the point of view he receives on the day – covering them up in defiance of a Lion Hearts leaflet and sending them to school in their skirts upon seeing a group of burkha-clad women.

88  Islam at Home Poignantly, the episode of Nazeneen’s “cross-dressing” is bound up with her realization that by bringing her son Raqib to the hospital, she has challenged fate in a way her mother would not have done. While she attempts to articulate this to Hasina in a letter, she muses, “I fought for him. […] Not accepting. Fighting. […] Fate! Fate business. […] I move my pen. […] Nobody else here. Nobody else moving this pen” (142). Here, for the first time an “I” crops up, not as a direct quote, but as part of the narration. These short lines are also presented in a register closer to the one we might expect the character Nazneen to speak in. In this way, the disjointed linguistic realms are brought together and the subject appears, albeit tentatively, for the first time. However, Nazneen makes her final break with her role in the decisive choices she takes as regards the men in her life. Her refusal to return to Bangladesh with Chanu and her decision to end things with Karim mark her ultimate rejection of the gendered logic of the Going Home Syndrome. Nazneen’s final break with Karim is an acknowledgment that a relationship sustained only by the performance of an ideal is not a viable one. She tells him, “I wasn’t me, and you weren’t you. From the very beginning to the very end, we didn’t see things. What we did – we made each other up” (455). Nazneen is a way for Karim to access a lost (or never experienced) homeland, and for Nazneen, Karim represents all that her husband is not – a man with “a place in the world” (264). However, she realizes that marrying Karim would not be an improvement as she would still be fixed in the role he needs her to inhabit. It is also significant that this break with Karim comes alongside her decision to remain in London despite her husband’s return to Bangladesh: at the same time that Nazneen rejects a literal return home, she also refuses to be home for those who remain. In Brick Lane, the desire for the familiarity of home in the face of discrimination and limited economic opportunities outside of it is a potent driver of the Going Home Syndrome that afflicts the novel’s Bangladeshi community, and its male residents in particular. Nazneen’s persona as the “real thing” works to maintain the male characters’ connection to a (mythical) home they have left behind in Bangladesh and renders the domestic home a stable and familiar space that helps them to cope with their marginalized position in British society. However, through various narrative techniques, the novel exposes Nazneen’s role as the authentic “unspoilt girl from the village” to be a work of performance. By doing so, it destabilizes the illusion of Nazneen and home as figures of stasis. In the next section, I will explore parallels between the novel’s domestic setting and its wider setting of the Brick Lane neighborhood in London’s East End. Both the home and Brick Lane are mobilized as spaces in which outsiders can consume an exotic or sensational form of otherness. Like Nazneen’s role as the “unspoilt girl from the village”, Brick Lane exposes the performative practices that produce the area as an easily

Performing Home  89 accessible way to “taste” South Asian culture. Such outward-facing image maintenance is set against the novel’s representation of the mundane details of the family’s everyday life. Lengthy descriptions of domestic interiors, cooking and eating work against readerly expectations of what they will encounter within the walls of this South Asian Muslim home. Furthermore, such seemingly banal accounts reveal a diasporic domesticity that, far from the image of static cultural reproduction, is marked by complex negotiations and improvisations.

Exotic Consumption, Everyday Living London’s Brick Lane area has cultivated a very different image from the feared “ethnic enclaves” described at the start of this chapter. Rather than associated with a segregationist and potentially threatening form of difference, it is a place where non-Muslim Britons and tourists are beckoned to “come hungry, leave edgy” (Sandhu 2003). It has more in common with the “Indo-chic” (Huggan 2001, 59, 67) image of Bollywood films or the “Asian Cool” of Hanif Kureishi’s oeuvre, and this has been reinforced through the re-branding of the area as “Banglatown” in 2002. While in part an attempt by local community leaders to resist the influx of middle-class professionals felt to threaten the “authenticity” of the area, it has done so through the production of a “commercially visible, viable, and essentialized image of Bangladeshi identity” (Brouillette 2009, 435). There are clearly positive effects of this kind of re-branding, as it becomes a way to “sell” a minority ethnic area with none of the unhomely associations that mark others as segregationist and potentially dangerous. Instead, it can be mobilized by politicians as an emblem of the success of British multiculturalism. Also, because it is easily accessible to and consumable by outsiders, increased tourism has brought an influx of wealth into the community. In this way, the Banglatown branding project functions to sustain the community’s presence politically and economically. All the same, there is a danger of playing into exoticist tropes that encourage a superficial cultural appropriation over more genuine attempts at cross-cultural dialogue or mutual understanding. Brick Lane the novel sits in relation to these two milieus of Muslims in Britain: on the one hand, the threatening “ethnic enclave” that is a no-go area for non-Muslims, and, on the other, the image of “Banglatown” that invites visitors to consume the exotic delights contained inside. Both are mediated by media images that encourage the outsider to project an idea of what they will find upon entering. Whether negative or positive, such mediated projections suggest a world that is outside the norm of British everyday life (Procter 2006). The colorful patterns filling in the letters of the title of the Black Swan edition of the novel seem to beckon its readers to enter in the same way as the “bright green and red pendants that fluttered from lamp-posts” and the waiters standing outside

90  Islam at Home curry houses (Ali 2004, 252). At the same time, as a work published shortly after 9/11 and making direct reference to the attacks, it has also benefited from the increased attention to “Muslim texts” driven by the public’s desire for insider knowledge that might provide easy cultural or religious explanations for such events.6 Though the commercial success of Brick Lane can in part be attributed to this nexus of projected images, the novel also engages with them self-consciously and therefore goes at least some way to dispel them. As with Nazeen’s persona discussed in the previous section, it exposes the performative processes through which the community sustains its outward-facing image. Chanu points to these practices in his response to Nazneen’s confusion at seeing statues of Hindu gods in a local restaurant window: “‘Not Hindus. Marketing. Biggest god of all.’ The white people liked to see the gods. ‘For authenticity,’ said Chanu” (446). In this instance, “authenticity” is about presenting a set of cultural symbols that can be easily read by those passing through, a goal that is valued over and above any concern for accuracy. This usage therefore has more in common with the medieval application of the term in which “an object remained ‘authentic’ for as long as it performed the task it was supposed to and lost its ‘authenticity’ as soon as it stopped functioning in an expected way” (Sánchez-Arce 2007, 139).7 Like the Banglatown branding (and to a certain extent that of the novel itself), such practices might be interpreted as a form of “strategic exoticism” in which those typically subject to exoticist readings redeploy these tropes for their own ends (Huggan 2001, 32). Indeed, we are made aware of the commercial success of such strategies, as Chanu exclaims while walking through Brick Lane, “All this money, money everywhere. Ten years ago there was no money here” (253). We also see the high level of sophistication employed in the production of this accessible, consumable form of otherness: There were smart places with starched white tablecloths and multitudes of shining silver cutlery. In these places the newspaper clippings were framed. The tables were far apart and there was an absence of decoration that Nazneen knew to be a style. In the other restaurants the greeters and waiters wore white, oil-marked shirts. But in the smart ones they wore black. A very large potted fern or blue and white mosaic at the entrance indicated ultra-smart. (252) Here the cultural products (in this case food) of the Bangladeshi community are mediated and performed through an elaborate symbolic system that appeals to different types of consumers. Even Nazneen comes to form part of this highly wrought tableau as she is photographed by passing tourists (254). Like the cultural symbols in the restaurants, she too functions as a predetermined image, a “familiar

Performing Home  91 object” and a “known quantity”: one of the “brown women in saris who cooked rice and raised children and obeyed their husbands” (391). In the same way that Nazneen’s role as the “unspoilt girl from the village” sustains the male characters’ connection to a home, the image of a brown sari-clad body confirms to outsiders the area’s “authentic” cultural credentials. By drawing attention to the fact that the “authenticity” of the area is performed to outsiders through a system of inauthentic cultural symbols (Nazneen, as we already saw, is also performing a role), Brick Lane undercuts the illusion of its namesake’s consumable Banglatown image. In doing so, it also works to deflate the expectations of readers who may be looking to experience a packaged version of Britain’s Bangladeshi community within Ali’s novel. Indeed, through its depiction of radicalization, drug use and gang violence, Brick Lane could be said to reinscribe the alternative image of the dangerous ethnic enclave.8 However, like its mechanisms for undermining notions of cultural authenticity, Brick Lane also preempts voyeuristic reading practices that seek to find within the novel confirmation of the negative images of Muslims already circulating in the media. After a riot sparked by an encounter between the Lion Hearts and Islamist Bengal Tigers, reporters and camera crews arrive on the estate in search of stories about its criminal underbelly, but are quickly disappointed: There was nothing to film, so they filmed each other. They returned after dark and filmed the boys riding around in cars. They found the disused flats where the addicts gathered to socialize with their addictions, and filmed the grotty mattresses and the bits of silver foil. It was a sensation. (485) Here, the journalists impose their own expectations on the area and continue searching until they are confirmed. When there is “nothing to film”, they film one another, suggesting that the uncovering of such “sensations” is little more than a reflection of one’s own fears and anxieties. Even what they do eventually find is distinctly mundane – boys riding in cars as a stand-in for gang violence and the residue left behind by drug use rather than the drugs or addicts themselves. This substitution of the sensational with the mundane is a recurring motif in Brick Lane. In another example of outsiders entering the otherwise closed spaces of the community, Nazneen receives a visit from a local councilor (with reporter and photographer in tow) as a result of the increased media attention: A councilor […] came to Nazneen’s flat and looked at the hallway where the plaster had come off. […] The

92  Islam at Home photographer took a picture of the councilor with his hand against the bricks. “How long has it been like this?” said the councilor, dispensing his words one by one. “Seven, eight years,” said Nazneen. “Are you finding it hard to cope? asked the councilor. “No,” said Nazneen. “How many children do you have?” “Two,” said Nazneen. The councilor looked disappointed. He went away. (484–485) Nazneen’s responses “disappoint” the councilor as she refuses to confirm her position as victim within the wider narrative of community oppression and social decay. Again, a potential “sensation” (Nazneen as a downtrodden Muslim woman burdened with too many children) is substituted, in this case with the unspectacular image of peeling plaster that has already gone unnoticed for several years. This attention to the mundane and everyday can also be seen in the long and detailed descriptions we get of the family’s domestic interior, such as in the following example: There were three rugs: red and orange, green and purple, brown and blue. The carpet was yellow with a green leaf design. One hundred per cent nylon and, Chanu said, very hard-wearing. The sofa and chairs were the color of dried cow dung, which was a practical color. They had little sheaths of plastic on the headrests to protect them from Chanu’s hair oil. There was a lot of furniture, more than Nazneen had seen in one room before. Even if you took all the furniture in the compound, from every auntie and uncle’s ghar, it would not match up to this one room. There was a low table with a glass center and orange plastic legs, three little wooden tables that stacked together, the big table they used for the evening meal, a bookcase, a corner cupboard, a rack for newspapers, a trolley filled with files and folders, the sofa and armchairs, two footstools, six dining chairs and a showcase. The walls were papered in yellow with brown squares and circles lining neatly up and down. (20) Passages such as this one have contributed to criticism of Ali’s style as “flatly compendious” and “pointlessly accretive” (Sandhu 2003). Following James Procter, however, the “habitual, the mundane and the taken-­for-granted are all performing, or capable of performing, important cultural tasks after empire” (2006, 64). Like the peeling plaster

Performing Home  93 that serves as the councilor’s only story upon entering Nazneen’s private space, such banal descriptions serve a deflationary function for readers. An attention to the ordinary signals a departure from exotic themes and resists the sensationalizing impulses of a post-9/11 period “in which everyday discourse has been stripped from Muslim and by extension, South Asian, representation” (Procter 2006, 66). While we are shown that the area’s “branding” relies on the display of incongruous cultural commodities in order to attract visitors, the banality of the objects on show in this passage (the “nylon” carpet which is “very hard wearing”; the “practical” sofa; the table with “orange plastic legs”) completely resists any possibility of exotic reading. The sheer accumulation of household goods here gestures more toward the influence of Western consumerist impulses than any adherence to “tradition” (we are told that the amount of furniture far exceeds that of “every auntie and uncle’s ghar” combined). If, as Iris Marion Young (1997) has argued, domestic interiors serve a narrative function,9 this one appears almost obstinate in its refusal to convey any cultural specificity on the part of the people who inhabit this space. Procter notes that such detailed attention to tangible domestic objects works against “the nomadic rhetoric of postcolonial diaspora studies that unwittingly repeats the commonsense view of the migrant subject as always elsewhere” and grounds them “in relation to concrete scenarios and settings from which he/she conventionally appears detached” (2006, 76). In other words, passages like the above further contest the image of diasporic domesticity as a regressive process of “going home”. Even where cultural practices are reproduced in the new place, this is not the same as fixity, as we see in this passage describing the contents of the family’s picnic in St James Park: Chicken wings spread in a paste of yoghurt and spices and baked in the oven, onions sliced to the thickness of a fingernail, mixed with chilies, dipped in gram flour and egg and fried in bubbling oil, a dry concoction of chickpeas and tomatoes stewed with cumin and ginger, misshapen chapattis wrapped while still hot in tinfoil and sprinkled now with condensation, golden hard-boiled eggs glazed in a curry seal, Dairylea triangles in their cardboard box, bright orange packets containing shamelessly orange crisps, a cake with a list of ingredients too long to be printed in legible type. She arranged them all on paper plates and stacked up the plastic tubs inside the carrier bags. (297) Roland Barthes has argued that “substances, techniques of [food] preparation, habits, all become part of a system of differences in signification” and that “to eat is a behavior that develops beyond

94  Islam at Home its own ends, replacing, summing up, and signalizing other behaviors” (Barthes 2012/1961, 30, 33). Therefore, such descriptions of food should not be seen as incidental to the text’s meaning but as another form of communication that signals how characters relate to the world around them. Through its evocation of chilies and spices, this passage appears to fit more readily into an exotic discourse and could be seen to play into Brick Lane’s projected image as a space of consumption and “culinary voyeurism” (Panayi 2010, 36). However, even here the language of the ordinary and the mundane work to counteract such a reading. The onions are sliced to the thickness of a “fingernail”, and the chickpeas and tomatoes are a “concoction”. The chapattis are “misshapen” and “sprinkled with condensation” because of being wrapped in tinfoil. Here, “exotic” South Asian foods are packaged in the soon-to-be waste of modern convenience (plastic tubs, paper plates, carrier bags). These are set alongside some of Britain’s most common, everyday (junk) foods including hard-boiled eggs (though glazed in a “curry seal”), processed cheese, packets of crisps and shop-bought cakes. The occasion for this food is also that of a picnic, a quintessentially British activity. If, as Barthes argues, “food serves as a sign not only for themes but for situations” (the snack bar lunch signals busyness; coffee a break), then the consumption of South Asian food within this setting suggests a fluidity between different modes of living (Barthes 2012/1961, 33): it is not only South Asian food that is changed by the interjection of British staples, but the British food is itself made anew through its reinterpretation through South Asian culinary practice. Like Nazneen’s substitution of the “thick and sweet yogurt” her mother used to make with the “plastic” convenience of individual yogurt pots (77), this hybrid diet suggests a domesticity that is a work of negotiation between continuity and difference rather than a straightforward reproduction of the home culture. To return to Sara Ahmed, “there is movement and dislocation within the very forming of homes as complex and contingent spaces of inhabitance” (2000, 88). In this sense, this passage presents a very different image from the staged “authenticity” of the restaurants on the Lane. Rather than aimed at attracting the voyeuristic eye of the consumer, such culinary synthesis is an expression of the everyday improvisations of diasporic subjects. This portrayal of a mundane and hybridized form of domesticity serves to undermine both the threatening image of the self-segregating “ethnic enclave” and the exoticist branding of Banglatown by showing that the everyday life of the novel’s migrant characters defies simple binaries of East and West, traditional and modern. In this way, Brick Lane conveys Muslim homes not as alien territory within but as ordinary, unspectacular spaces that participate in the practices of British everyday life.

Performing Home  95

Conclusion While the overall narrative trajectory of Brick Lane provides fodder for the negative discourses circulating about Muslims in a post-9/11 landscape, on close inspection we can find currents that work against its seemingly uncomplicated endorsement of the liberalizing effects of British civil society. Both the male characters within the novel’s Bangladeshi community and the British public mythologize the Muslim/South Asian home as a static space of cultural reproduction. Though functioning as a space of familiarity and continuity for characters like Karim and Chanu, we see how the comfort it provides comes at the expense of the female members of the community. While the male characters are free to explore the potential opportunities and risks of public life in London, women like Nazneen are called upon remain fixed in/as home. However, by exposing this sense of fixity as a work of performance, and thus an illusion, Brick Lane unsettles the sense of security provided by an investment in woman and home as figures of stasis. Brick Lane the place and the novel both benefit from exoticist imagery that plays up to the public’s desire for an accessible and consumable version of South Asian culture. While this depiction is more positive than that of the dangerous Muslim “ethnic enclave”, it perpetuates an image of Muslim and South Asian spaces as containers of alterity, alien territory within the “home” of the British nation. Through its representations of the mundane details of everyday domestic life, Brick Lane nevertheless frustrates readerly expectations as regards the exotic and sensational truths they hope to encounter inside. Through its representations of domestic interiors and ways of cooking and eating, the novel reveals this space as ultimately ordinary and unspectacular. Rather than a container of fixed alterity, domesticity in diaspora is presented as a complex set of negotiations between sameness and difference. Ultimately, this vision problematizes the binary between home, as a figure of stasis and familiarity, and not home, as the space of movement and difference. Not only does it convey diasporic home spaces as engaging with British ways of living, but suggests that British everyday life is also transformed as a result of this process. Chapter 5 explores a novel that is framed by the same tropes of the exotic or threatening Muslim other but offers a more radical intervention into these discourses. While Brick Lane provides an account of Muslim lives that is largely from a “native informant” position, Leila Aboulela’s The Translator presents a more explicit critique of British secular culture. As I will go on to show, through her redeployment of a familiar British literary form, the domestic novel, Aboulela carves out space for a resistant Islamic female voice in the face of a particularly challenging politics of reception for Muslim women writers in Britain.

96  Islam at Home

Notes 1 In a recent example of this rhetoric, spurred by an upcoming visit by U.S. President Donald Trump, a Fox News “terrorism expert” designated Birmingham a “totally Muslim” city and a “no-go” area for non-Muslims. 2 All subsequent references are to this edition. 3 Others have already explored these questions in depth with regard to Brick Lane. See, for example, Hiddleston (2005) and Brouillette (2009). 4 It is important to note that this gaze itself was largely imaginary, since male access to such spaces (especially by Europeans) would have been extremely rare. Instead, such scenes were primarily staged in studios back in Europe. 5 This is not to say that it is only men that participate in this process. Yuval-­ Davis cites many examples in which women police one another (female morality police in postrevolutionary Iran, for example), and this is something we also see a great deal of in Brick Lane. 6 See Chapter 5 for a more extensive discussion of the post-9/11 circulation of literature by and about Muslims. 7 Sánchez-Arce draws on the term’s application to religious relics, which retained their “authenticity” only as long as they continued to be effective in performing miracles. 8 Some critics have suggested that such depictions are partly to blame for the negative reactions to the novel from inside the community, as they disrupt the carefully crafted “Banglatown” brand (Brouillette 2009, 442). 9 See Chapter 6 for a detailed exploration of this idea.

5 Domestic Fiction and the Islamic Female Subject Leila Aboulela’s The Translator

Although published in a pre-9/11 world, Leila Aboulela’s 1999 novel The Translator shares many of the same contextual concerns as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, namely, the East/West cultural encounter, fears about the rise of Islamic extremism and the accompanying increase of Islamophobia in Europe. Both novels also center on female protagonists who migrate to Britain from Muslim-majority spaces – B ­ angladesh in the case of Nazneen and Sudan in the case of Aboulela’s protagonist Sammar. However, the novels present a very different answer to the so-called “clash of civilizations” between East and West, Islamic and secular. As suggested in Chapter 4, the question of gender equality in Islam has become one of its most contested terrains. Images of “oppressed” and “downtrodden” Muslim women have been mobilized as boundary markers between “us” and “them” in the global “War on Terror” and used as a convenient justification of its policies, both foreign and domestic (Abu-Lughod 2013; Morey and Yaqin 2011; Whitlock 2010). This kind of rhetoric functions through its use of embodied gender identity as the ground on which modernity is tested, where practices such as veiling become loaded signifiers for Islam’s failure to measure up. As Morey and Yaqin articulate it, “Time and again, behavior, the body and dress are treated not as cultural markers but as a kind of moral index, confirming non-Muslim viewers in their sense of superiority and cementing the threatening strangeness of the Muslim Other” (2011, 3). Within the logic of this index, it is not education or political agency but revealing clothes and uncovered hair that denote Muslim women’s level of freedom and emancipation, as well as their (and their community’s) commitment to “our” values. This binary logic has created a challenging politics of reception for Muslim women’s voices, as they are called upon to conform to one side or the other: either the oppressed woman in need of rescuing, or the liberated and ostensibly unveiled secular woman. As previously suggested, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane broadly adheres to the narrative trajectory of female liberation from oppressive “Eastern” traditions. Against this difficult backdrop, there are nevertheless a growing number of

98  Islam at Home British Muslim women writers whose works actively destabilize this perceived dichotomy between adherence to Islam and female agency, reasserting faith as integral to gender equality rather than its obstacle. Leila Aboulela’s The Translator is one such work, which harnesses readerly expectations to open up new ways of thinking about Muslim womanhood. In Brick Lane, tropes of veiling and unveiling, oppression and liberation, are played out through the novel’s mobilization of private and public spaces. Its narrative focus on the interior of the home gives readers the impression of trespassing into spaces they would not normally be able to access, recalling Orientalist fantasies about mysterious Eastern women sequestered within the walls of the zenana or harem. By extension, Nazneen’s tentative forays into the public world of London’s streets come to represent a gradual pulling away from her traditional role as the dutiful Bengali housewife and realization of the other possibilities available to her in Britain. The Translator also mobilizes home and the private sphere but to very different ends. In particular, through its manipulation of what Nancy Armstrong (1987) refers to as the domestic novel, Aboulela’s novel works to deconstruct the binary perceptions of Muslim womanhood described above. Deploying a similar structure to the canonical domestic novel Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë, The Translator employs a plotline that appears to be wholly embedded in the private sphere to make a discursive intervention into the politics of the encounter between East and West, Islamic and secular, in a challenging publishing market with a particular “horizon of expectations” (Jauss 1970) for female Muslim writers. The domestic novel emerged in the mid-eighteenth century as a genre of women’s fiction that centered on a plot of courtship and marriage. Likewise, The Translator tells the story of Sammar, a young translator from Sudan who falls in love with Rae, a notable Scottish Islamic scholar. Despite their mutual affection, they are unable to marry because Rae is not Muslim. Rather than Sammar compromising her religious beliefs for personal desire, it is Rae’s conversion to Islam, which eventually resolves the love plot, keeping the story in line with Islamic principles. One of the ways Aboulela is able to convey this religious worldview to her largely secular readership is by inscribing this narrative within the domestic novel’s recognizable structures. Central to the genre is the space of the European middle-class “home”, where women exert moral control over the domestic realm. However, as this space came to be codified in discourse, so too did its opposite, the Eastern “harem”, a profoundly unhomely space where women are believed to exert no power at all. Through its recasting of Muslim courtship and domestic space within the world of the domestic novel, Aboulela’s work problematizes this homely/unhomely opposition and, in doing so, clears discursive space for alternative forms of female Muslim subjectivity.

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Writing Islam Leila Aboulela’s work forms part of a recently emerged body of literature broadly conceived as “British Muslim writing”. This designation points to a wider shift in the cultural and political landscape away from the use of secular ethnic identifiers like “Asian” toward more religious identifications (Modood 2005). Indeed, if scholarly publications are anything to go by, the last few years alone have seen at least ten monographs covering the subject of Muslim writing in Britain (Abbas 2014; Ahmed 2015; Chambers 2015, 2019; Clements 2015; Majed 2015; Morey 2018; Morey and Yaqin 2011; Nash 2012; Santesso 2013), a collection of interviews with contemporary British Muslim writers (Chambers 2011) and two edited collections on Muslim writing in the diaspora, with a largely British focus (Ahmed, Morey, and Yaqin 2012; Chambers and Herbert 2014). Geoffrey Nash has linked this shift to the rise of what has been referred to as “universal” or “deterritorialized” Islam (2012, 18), a symptom of globalization in which Islam is “delinked from the specificities of local cultures” and “universalized for all” (Olivier Roy quoted in Nash 2012, 19). The increase in interest is also deeply bound up with the heightened suspicion of Muslims in a post-9/11 world, leading to a need to combat such rising Islamophobia with alternative, self-generated representations. While Claire Chambers notes that some commentators are uncomfortable with the idea of using religious identity to categorize literature (2010, 389), one could argue that it is no less problematic a signifier than race for mapping a literary field. What they have in common, as Chambers argues, is that both are political categories formulated in response to a term “that has largely been foisted on [its members] from outside” (Chambers 2010, 390). Still, Nash makes a distinction between what he describes as writing by “native informants” and those that write from within a Muslim mind-set. “Native-informant” writers are those who “possess ­connections – usually through race – with peoples of Muslim culture, but they construct Islam and Muslims […] by employing recycled Orientalist tropes cast in the insider’s voice” (2012, 26). He includes in this category novels like Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, and argues that these works of fiction ultimately endorse “a Western secular agenda” (12). By contrast, Nash describes Aboulela’s work as “neo-Muslim” writing, suggesting that she acts as a “foil” to other Muslim migrant writers because she has become successful while writing fiction with a sympathetic insider’s voice (44). Some critics have been surprised by the critical and commercial success of such ideology-laden fiction within Britain’s highly secularized publishing market (Phillips 2012), while another has argued that, due to their monologism, Aboulela’s works do not actually qualify as novels and should not be read as such (Santesso 2016). Others still

100  Islam at Home point to the fact that “Muslims are expected to be the fastest-growing sector of the book-buying public in the coming years” (Chambers 2010, 389), implying that shifting demographics may, to a certain extent, be opening up space for different fictional worldviews. The work’s gender politics have also attracted significant debate. Waïl S. Hassan has argued, for example, that The version of Islam propagated in Aboulela’s fiction […] involves a complete disavowal of personal liberty as incompatible with Islam, of feminism as a secular and godless ideology, of individual agency in favor of an all-encompassing notion of predetermination and of political agency as well. (2008, 313) Sadia Abbas similarly argues that Aboulela’s works offer up an “apologetics” for Islam’s subjection of women and work to represent a “consensually self-subordinated womanhood” (2014, 85). Hassan’s appraisal of Aboulela’s “anti-feminist” stance is mainly due to the tendency of her female characters to strive for what he describes as “traditional patriarchal gender roles” (314), such that he calls her work “reactive and in some ways regressive” (316). As Abbas puts it, “Aboulela’s answer to the question, What do women want?, is ‘marriage’” (2014, 81). Indeed, in The Translator, we are told that Sammar longs to “cook for [Rae], to be settled, to be someone’s wife” (Aboulela 2005, 175) and she by and large constructs her identity in relation to her domestic function. As a result of such investments, Hassan concludes that “while Muslim writers and activists have developed various forms of feminism, Aboulela’s version of Islam reinscribes male supremacy” (314). In an accompanying footnote, Hassan cites Leila Ahmed, Fatima Mernissi, Asma Barlas and others as examples of writers who do contribute to Islamic feminism. But, importantly, all of those he cites are scholars (anthropologists, sociologists, literary critics) rather than other novelists. This is a somewhat problematic comparison from the start, as it implies that Aboulela’s fiction should be doing the same kind of critical work as that of academic scholarship.1 This is not to say that fiction does not engage in political or social critique, but rather that its discursive mechanisms are different from those of nonfiction. Interestingly, other critics take a very different view of gender in Aboulela’s fiction, and The Translator in particular. According to Christina Phillips (2012), the novel is about undermining imperialist-feminist assumptions about women in Islam. Speaking of the novel’s female protagonist, she says, Sammar’s spiritual strength, self-control and uncompromising position challenge the notion of Muslim women as oppressed or submissive. In particular, her energy next to Rae’s physical weakness,

Domestic Fiction  101 and the fact that it is Sammar who forces the issue of marriage and therefore drives the plot, represents a reversal of traditional gender roles which see women as the weaker party. (70) Phillips’s appraisal here draws on a similar argument made by John Stotesbury (2004), in which he notes that Sammar deviates significantly from the Orientalist stereotype of the Muslim widow and “assumes the role of the active wooer” in the love plot between her and Rae (76). He comes to this conclusion as part of a larger analysis of recent romantic fiction by Muslim women. This is significant in that Stotesbury (and also Phillips in a different way) is examining Aboulela’s representation of gender within a literary frame of reference, the genre of romance. Both Phillips’s and Stotesbury’s analyses also demonstrate an awareness of the way in which Muslim women have been read in the non-Muslim world and take this into account in their readings. We can get a sense of this challenging reception landscape through a cursory look at popular auto/biographical texts by and about Muslim women as they are filtered through the lens of Western publishing houses. What Gillian Whitlock (2010) refers to as the “veiled bestseller” is characterized by the enduring image of a Muslim woman fully or semiveiled, eyes downcast or looking blankly past the camera. Books like Jean Sasson’s Princess trilogy (2002/2000, 2001b/1994, 2001a/1992), Latifa’s My Forbidden Face (2002/1985) and Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (2004/1987) recount harrowing tales of women kidnapped, forced to marry or imprisoned in the name of Islam. The increased circulation2 of such works in the post-9/11 years has further reinforced a perception of a homogeneous world of veiled and oppressed Muslim women in need of saving (Abu-Lughod 2002), so that they may come out the other side conforming to a narrow set of visual signifiers we have come to associate with female emancipation. As Whitlock articulates, The exotic display of dozens of copies of Muslim life narrative together […] is haunting. How can the reader resist interpellation as a liberal Western consumer who desires to liberate and recognise Latifa by lifting the burka and bringing her alongside us, barefaced, in the West? (2010, 47) Underpinning this narrative is an either/or proposition in which recognition of agency is only granted to those who give up the visible signs of their religious belief, especially any form of veiling or hijab. Such binary logic rehearses a notion of Islam as inherently oppressive to women, to the extent that the only option is to reject it in favor of secular consumer-­ driven gender regimes.

102  Islam at Home The discrepancy between the very different interpretations of gender in Aboulela’s fiction (Hassan’s and Abbas’s versus Phillips’s and Stotesbury’s) provides a useful point of departure for the discussion of domesticity in this chapter. On the one hand, Sammar’s enthusiastic embrace of traditional domestic female roles of housewife and mother seems to support Hassan’s conclusion that Aboulela’s fiction is essentially anti-­ feminist. But on the other, given the challenging politics of reception for Muslim women’s writing just outlined, we need to consider the discursive strategies required to “translate” an Islamic worldview to a largely secular readership. As Anglo-Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif came to realize, Orientalist tropes are not necessarily produced in the authorship of a literary text but in its reception: although Soueif believed herself to be writing in one tradition (modern Arabic fiction), by composing her works in English, she was being read within another, namely, Orientalist literature (Hassan 2011, 161). We therefore need to move beyond a traditional view of translation as transferring a text from one language to another. Instead, it needs to be understood as a bringing over of “patterns, elements, […] fragments of dissimilar cultures” (Guillen 1993, 280) and producing a new text that is aimed at a different audience and has a different set of goals. In the case of The Translator, which, like Soueif’s works, has no “original” text, we can think of translation as an integral part of the novel’s composition. The challenge is to convey a narrative driven by Islamic principles in a form that is comprehensible to its secular audience but without recourse to the logic that encloses Muslim women’s voices within recognizable Orientalist binaries. As has been said of more conventional translation, “either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him [sic]; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him [sic]” (Schleiermacher 1982, 9–10). This control over who is doing the movement, of distancing and familiarizing methods of translation, is also effected here but through discursive manipulation of the narrative structure of the domestic novel. In the next section, I draw on Armstrong’s reading of domestic fiction, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in particular, as a frame for understanding Leila Aboulela’s mobilization of the domestic in The ­Translator. Like the works Armstrong explores, Aboulela employs a plotline that appears to be wholly embedded in the private sphere as a way of narrating an encounter between “East” and “West”, Islamic and secular, to a readership with limited methods of consuming representations of Muslim women. By comparing Aboulela’s works to these earlier women’s texts, I am not, however, implying that Aboulela is advocating a regression to the gender norms they espouse, but that her work employs the same rhetorical operation they deploy and, as a result, clears discursive space for alternative forms of female Muslim subjectivity in the face of a complex matrix of readerly expectations within contemporary Britain.

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Rereading Romantic Genres In Genres in Discourse (1990), Tzvetan Todorov describes literature as having functional and structural properties, both of which contribute to how we understand and categorize literary texts. While function refers to what a literary text does in the world (to imitate, to please, to instruct), structure comes down to an internal matter of form, marked by particular applications of character, plot and style. Both functional and structural considerations, he argues, feed into our notions of bounded literary genres. Todorov goes on to state that In a given society, the recurrence of certain discursive properties is institutionalized, and individual texts are produced and perceived in relation to the norm constituted by that codification. A genre, whether literary or not, is nothing other than the codification of discursive properties. (1990: 17−18, emphasis added) Literary genres, along with all classification systems, are therefore political constructs that represent as well as impose a particular view of the world in a particular context. Todorov later adds that “it is because genres exist as an institution that they function as ‘horizons of expectations’ for readers and as ‘models of writing’ for authors” (18). For structuralist critics like Todorov, genre is a kind of implied contract between writer and reader (Abrams 1999, 109). However, this also means that the contract can be broken, or at least renegotiated, as a way of problematizing the terms of the institution itself. In a precursor to Todorov’s definition, René Wellek and Austin Warren assert that The literary kind [by which they mean genre] is an “institution” – as Church, University, or State is an institution. It exists, not as an animal exists or even as a building, chapel, library, or capitol, but as an institution exists. One can work through, express himself [sic] through, existing institutions, create new ones, or get on, so far as possible, without sharing in polities or rituals; one can also join, but then reshape, institutions. (1949, 235) If genre works to give the reader a particular “horizon of expectations” when approaching a given text, then these expectations can be harnessed in order to push the boundaries of the genre and its place within broader societal structures. In this way, Aboulela’s The Translator harnesses the rhetorical machinery of the domestic novel and redirects it to a new purpose. Romantic genres like the domestic novel provide particularly fertile ground for challenging dominant ideas about Muslim women, as stories

104  Islam at Home of love and courtship have been central arenas within which the gender norms of any given society are represented and challenged. Such novels have nevertheless occupied a troubled position within literary history. As much as many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century woman writers of this genre have now entered the British literary canon (Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, the Brontës), “romance” as a genre, especially when it is written by women, is likely to be seen as “popular” or “low brow”. 3 This kind of women’s fiction is typically viewed as superficial and/or escapist, and the centrality of love and marriage places it within the realm of emotions and thus the private sphere, codifying the genre as ultimately apolitical in orientation. Nancy Armstrong’s account of the emergence of this particular genre in her influential work Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), however, tells a very different story that links it to the rise of the middle class in Britain. Her primary argument is that representations of “middle-class” norms, particularly those associated with the administration of the household, found in conduct manuals and novels beginning around the middle of the eighteenth century, actually preceded the advent of the middle class itself. Furthermore, that it is due to their representation in primarily female-authored fiction that such norms came to be solidified into fact, thereby ushering in a new social group with a clear sense of its own character. Central to this new middle-class discourse was a rhetorical operation, the “sexual contract”,4 which genders social difference (in this case, class conflict) and contains it within a feminized discourse. Armstrong draws a parallel with Rousseau’s “social contract” in which, through education, the desires of the individual are directed towards the rule of law and the common good. Because this manipulation of desire is so subtle, it appears natural, so that the “contract” is understood as a mutually beneficial exchange. The sexual contract, therefore, involves an analogous form of exchange whereby a woman relinquishes political control to a man (her husband) in return for “exclusive authority over domestic life, emotions, taste and morality” (Armstrong 1987, 41). As in the case of the social contract, Armstrong argues, this exchange was represented in discourse, namely, fiction, before it actually existed in fact. While acknowledging that women have been handicapped by the social application of the sexual contract, Armstrong maintains that the idea of separate gendered domains brought about specifically female forms of subjectivity and authorship that did not exist before. It is through these domestic novels – “narratives which seem to be concerned solely with matters of courtship and marriage” – she argues, that women “seized authority to say what was female” (Armstrong 1987, 5). While previous works of women’s writing, mainly novels and romances published before the end of the eighteenth century, were considered “a rather unsavory lot” and in most cases were not even counted as

Domestic Fiction  105 literature (37, fn. 9), female-authored fiction produced after this period began to be understood as respectable literary works. This respectability, Armstrong suggests, stems from their complete disavowal of politics in favor of a discourse “rooted in the values of the heart and the home” (41). This kind of discourse, though not necessarily linked to the gender of the author, was seen as distinctly feminine in character: feminine discourse is that which is “personal and subjective” in comparison to men’s which is “political or philosophical in character” (Armstrong, 41). What is emphasized in this conceptualization of gender difference is not inferiority but complementarity: “Man rules the mind of the world; woman its heart” (40). Of course, in a discursive-social context where the mind is prioritized over the heart, this “complementarity” still exists as a form of hierarchy. As Armstrong acknowledges, this was “the cultural sleight of hand that granted women the authority to write and denied them the power to make political statements” (40). However, it is precisely because this form of writing appeared to be completely divorced from politics that it exerted its discursive power: “A critique of the state could prove all that more effective when the political nature of that critique was concealed” (39). In this way, she concludes (somewhat controversially) that the sexual contract, despite its resulting social limitations for women, produced the necessary discursive space for the female voice to be heard in a way that was not possible before due to the constraints of a politics of reception which had silenced women’s attempts at authorship.

Home and Harem: Recasting Tropes of Domesticity The central figure that emerges from this new “respectable” female-­ authored (or at least discursively female) novel is the heroine who serves as the plot’s moral and emotional force. For Armstrong, the paradigmatic figure is that of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, the servant girl whose moral fortitude is so great that it ultimately convinces her unscrupulous master to preserve her honor, transforming his baser desires into love and a proposition of marriage. In this conduct book-cum-novel, Pamela exerts a uniquely female kind of power, a moral authority that rouses the emotions of her aristocratic male aggressor and acts as a civilizing force. However, a more apt comparison to Aboulela’s novel is Charlotte Brontë’s canonical novel Jane Eyre, a connection Aboulela herself has made, drawing similarities between the dilemmas of her protagonist Sammar and Jane (quoted in Stotesbury 2004, 81). The plot structures of the two novels are also relatively similar, leading one critic to declare The Translator “an updated Jane Eyre scenario” (Nash 2002, 30). They both revolve around female protagonists whose object of affection is unobtainable, not because of unrequited affection but because obtaining what they desire (Rochester in the case of Jane, Rae in the

106  Islam at Home case of Sammar) would violate religious principles. Both protagonists go through a period of separation from their respective love objects, during which the central problem is resolved through a deus ex machina, which makes possible the hitherto unlikely resolution of a happy marriage. In Jane Eyre, this comes in the form of the sudden death of Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason, as well as Jane’s unexpected inheritance, while in The Translator, it comes about through Rae’s narratively abrupt conversion to Islam. Both novels also require their protagonists to cross lines of social difference as part of their narrative development. While Brontë’s novel is preoccupied with traversing class boundaries, Aboulela’s is concerned with movement between cultures. This is achieved through Sammar’s multiple migrations between Scotland and Sudan, which in turn get encoded as the crossing between “West” and “East,” secular and Islamic. This sense of crossing also applies to their respective audiences. While Brontë must compel her middle-class readership to identify with the trials faced by an orphan with no money and no connections, Aboulela’s primarily secular British audience is challenging ground for a narrative driven by Islamic religious principles. In both novels, this crossing of boundaries both inside and outside the text is partly accomplished by shoring up the moral credentials of their female protagonists. The works therefore have a pedagogic quality that is transmitted through the virtuous choices of their heroines. The progression from conduct book to domestic novel, as seen with Richardson’s Pamela, gave the form a purpose beyond mere entertainment value; it became a guide to bourgeois manners and morality. As evidence of this educational function, Armstrong notes the coincidence of the rise of the domestic novel with the construction towards the end of the eighteenth century of a specifically female curriculum and the inclusion of these newly sanctioned female-authored novels as part of this education (whereas before novels were seen as morally corruptive to young girls). There are again links to be drawn with The Translator which has had a similar reception, at least among the readership most able to scrutinize its moral credentials. It has been celebrated in the British Muslim press as “the first halal novel written in English” (Ghazoul 2001), and one prominent Muslim commentator has suggested that this “halal” (suitable for Muslim consumption) designation is merited because of the virtues of its female protagonist, calling Sammar “the heroine of this reviewer’s dreams […] a personification of Islam that is as genuine as it is complex” (quoted in Abbas 2011). The Translator is therefore positioned as a novel that is morally instructive rather than corruptive. The description of its female protagonist as a “personification of Islam” is also reminiscent of the way in which the “domestic woman”, as modeled in the nineteenth-century novel, came to embody the values of an emergent British middle class. Like the novels sanctioned to become part of

Domestic Fiction  107 female education in this earlier era, Aboulela’s “halal fiction” would also be considered appropriate reading for young Muslim girls living in the West, a kind of modern-day conduct book. However, notwithstanding Chambers’s (2010) assertion that Muslim readers are a fast-growing sector of the reading public in the UK, the reality is that Aboulela’s audience is likely to be a predominately white and largely secular readership. As discussed above, this readership has been encouraged to read a figure like Sammar not as a potential female role model but rather as an “oppressed Muslim woman” in need of saving through contact with the liberal values associated with the secular West. This trope (of the oppressed Muslim woman), of course, has a longstanding history, and emerges at roughly the same time as the domestic novel. Indeed, it is impossible to speak of the virtuous domestic woman without accounting for her other. In Jane Eyre it is Rochester’s first wife Bertha, a woman of the tropical colonies, who is overlaid with racialized tropes of madness and hyper-sexualization. However, perhaps more than any other in the nineteenth-century European imagination, such negative qualities were projected onto “the Oriental woman”. In her book Home and Harem (1996), Inderpal Grewal charts the progression of this figure as the alter ego to the moral middle-class woman who appears at the same discursive moment. From an analysis of European travel literature, Grewal draws out the binaries implicit in the construction of these female figures and their respective domains. Where the bourgeois Englishwoman is associated with morality, transparency and openness, the Oriental woman is cast as amoral, sexually promiscuous and opaque in nature (Grewal 1996, 27). By extension, the domestic spaces they each occupy are also understood through this binary logic – the middle-class English “home” set against the Oriental “harem”. While the first is a space of familiarity and comfort, where women exert moral power through the sexual contract and the institution of companionate marriage, the second is “despotism in the domestic space”, associated with secrecy, opacity and subjugation, a place where women have no power at all (Grewal 1996, 45). It is through the dissemination of this discourse that the harem, along with its complement the veil (hijab), came to be symbols of the oppression and incarceration of women in “Eastern” culture. By constructing for English readers the binary opposite of the bourgeois English home as something associated with “the East”, travel discourse mobilized the “proper” ordering of domestic space as a boundary marker between value systems. While Armstrong argues that representations of the household were central to constructing a sense of “middle-­ classness”, Grewal demonstrates how the domestic space was also essential for political constructions of Englishness (and, by extension, Europeanness) (33). The recurrence of these images and their implicit meaning also functioned to give female English readers a false sense

108  Islam at Home of their own unoppressed state, an effect that continues today with the “veiled memoirs” (50). In fact, the persistence of these tropes actually serves to reinforce the sexual contract by exhibiting its antithesis – the horrors of an arranged, polygamous marriage and imprisonment within the unhomely space of the harem. Returning to The Translator, Aboulela’s protagonist Sammar sits at the intersection of these two enduring female tropes. On the one hand, she occupies the position of the morally upright heroine, but, on the other hand, as a racial and religious other, she cannot unproblematically occupy the role of the Jane Eyre character. Though she possesses the appropriate qualities of virtue and self-sacrifice, the fact that Sammar is brown-skinned and wears hijab puts her in danger of being read through the familiar trope of “the Oriental woman”. 5 This complicates not only Sammar’s ability to successfully adopt the pedagogical guise of protagonists like Jane but also her appropriation of the domestic domain through the sexual contract. She is at once the modern domestic woman – exerting control over the moral and emotional realm – and the Oriental woman, physically and figuratively constrained, with no power and no voice. Sammar’s migration from Sudan to Scotland has the potential to further reinforce this image, setting the stage for yet another emancipation plot in which a subjugated “Eastern” woman is liberated through her contact with the West(ern man), a narrative Gayatri Spivak has neatly summed up as “White men […] saving brown women from brown men” (1999, 284). It therefore requires a skillful reworking of the domestic novel form in a way that recasts the “Oriental woman” in the guise of Jane Eyre and the Muslim “harem” as the European “home”. In doing so, The Translator transforms the terms of the binary relationship itself. From the outset of the novel, we can already see Orientalist readings being playfully overturned. At the opening, we encounter Sammar at home unable to go out. However, it is not religious restriction but the inclement Scottish weather, compounding her own personal depression, that keeps her from leaving her “hospital room” (16): She was afraid of rain, afraid of the fog and the snow which came to this country, afraid of the wind even. At such times she would stay indoors and wait, watching from her window people doing what she couldn’t do: children walking to school through swirling leaves, elderly smashing ice on the pavement with their walking sticks. (3) Here we see a play on the image of a sequestered Muslim woman looking out longingly through wooden mashrabiya at a world they cannot partake in. However, for Sammar, the vision of people “doing what she

Domestic Fiction  109 couldn’t” is mobilized to signify not gendered oppression but rather her sense of exclusion from the rest of Scottish society. In a mode reminiscent of Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “autoethnography”, in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizers terms (1992, 7), Aboulela here turns the restrictive terms of the Orientalist gaze on their head and redirects their meaning in the service of postcolonial critique. Such discursive moves have been central to anti-colonial movements seeking to reclaim political and symbolic power from the hands of European masters. We can consider, for example, the strategy employed by Indian nationalists in response to British perceptions of the “harem”, which were used as shorthand for the “backwardness” of Indian culture and justification for the colonizers’ continuing “civilizing” influence. Rather than succumbing to the symbolic system produced by the home/ harem binary, nationalist campaigners seized the logic of the sexual contract for their own ends. In a recasting of the separate spheres model, the Indian woman was mobilized as keeper of the home in opposition to the male world of the marketplace and politics (Chatterjee 1989). However, this “new” Indian home was not the darkened space of the harem but a moral and spiritual realm, over which the middle-class Indian woman was granted guardianship. This “Indian woman” then became the “moral and spiritual opposite” of the British memsahib, who was cast as “idle, useless and too free in her associations with men” (­Grewal 1996, 25). By extension, “what colonial discourses termed harem, a space of opacity, became home, a reconstituted Victorian space that was transparent in its clear manifestation of moral virtues as symbolized by Indian middle-class women” (25, emphasis in original). This spiritual space and the woman inside it then became the symbol of an “authentic” Indian culture, the antithesis of and antidote to the scourge of Western materialism. Although the cultural, historical and political context is very different and I do not wish to imply that there is an easy equivalence, The Translator employs an analogous discursive move. Sammar’s feminine morality is framed as a particularly non-Western spiritual kind and, by complement, her Islamic identity is presented as distinctively “female”. In contrast to the political variety promoted by the Islamist militants whose writings Sammar translates, Sammar’s Islam is one rooted in the emotions, a deeply personal and subjective connection with God. This Islam introduces a form of religious knowledge which is about personal engagement with sacred texts, as opposed to a “masculine” scholarly/ theological engagement, often with political ends. Though Rae is often chided by his friend Fareed for not accepting Islam fully because he will not be able to plead ignorance “when the time comes” (8), it is Sammar who puts the call for conversion into personal, spiritual terms, recalling that “She could have said things about truth, or about distinguishing

110  Islam at Home faith from cultural traditions. Instead, she had said something personal, ‘it will make you stronger’” (90). Rae frequently asserts that his interest in Islam is purely academic, stating “It’s not in me to be religious […] I studied Islam for the politics of the Middle East, I did not study it for myself. I was not searching for something spiritual” (126). However, it is nevertheless this argument about personal spiritual growth that eventually wins the day as, at the novel’s resolution, Rae appears to echo the sentiment of Sammar’s earlier words: What I regret most […] is that I used to write things like “Islam gives dignity to those who otherwise would not have dignity in their lives”, as if I didn’t need dignity myself. […] I didn’t think of myself as someone who would turn spiritual […] it was one step I took, of wanting it for myself separate from the work. (199, emphasis added) Indeed, the shift in Rae’s relationship to Islam is toward a personal bond that goes beyond a political or academic engagement and is explicitly framed as one that is brought about through his relationship with Sammar. In this way, Sammar exerts a form of moral power that is not only implicitly female but one that is also inscribed in a non-Western, Islamic value system. Through the subtle rhetorical turns of the novel, Sammar’s spiritual brand of morality is established as the only “true” way of being in the world so that by the time we arrive at Rae’s conversion, even secular readers can come to regard it as a happy ending. In addition to the desire for a positive resolution to the love plot, through our identification with Sammar as the novel’s protagonist-narrator, we are encouraged to feel sorry for Rae in his “unaware” state (94). Within this narrative logic, it is in fact the “Oriental woman” who “saves” the Western man from his own culture of secular materialism by showing him the path to spirituality in a direct reversal of the Orientalist emancipation plot. Nancy Armstrong points out that Jane’s return to Rochester is only triumphant because it is driven by purely emotional rather than economic need (owing to Jane’s recent inheritance) – she must have some economic power to relinquish in order for the sexual contract to be enacted (1987, 47). In the same way, Sammar’s true triumph in The Translator is that her need for Rae has nothing to do with his location in the West but is rather in spite of it. As Nash articulates, Sammar’s eventual victory, like Jane’s, is on her own terms. Rae’s eventual return, his having learned to pray like herself, is a statement that he has passed across the terrains of post-colonial polemics and settled in Sammar’s own territory […]. (2002, 30)

Domestic Fiction  111 This ending not only disrupts Orientalist logic through Rae’s conversion to “Sammar’s own territory” but also conforms to the recognizable contours of the domestic novel. Like Jane and Rochester’s union, Sammar and Rae’s is driven by what Armstrong terms “middle-class love” and ultimately leads to a companionate marriage. Earlier in the novel we are reminded that other forms of marriage exist through the possibility of a polygamous match for Sammar (Aboulela 2005, 23). Although Sammar is the driving force behind this marriage, we are still led to compare it less favorably against the love match which provides the novel’s resolution. Importantly, we are shown the potential of the companionate marriage even before an actual marriage occurs. In a moment reminiscent of Jane attending to an infirm Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre, Sammar goes to visit Rae when he is sick in the hospital. She not only cooks for him, but the soup that she makes is from a Sudanese recipe, requiring ingredients that she fails to translate into English. “Her feelings were in the soup” (97), she says, suggesting a form of domesticity which is rooted in a particularly “Eastern” kind of emotional power. All of Sammar’s images of the life she will share with Rae are articulated in terms of the ways that she will “look after him” and their family (123): She wanted to cook for him different things, and then stand in the kitchen and think, I should change my clothes, wash, for her hair and clothes would be smelling of food. Mhairi could come and live with them, she would not need to go to boarding school anymore, and he would like that, seeing his daughter everyday, not having to drive to Edinburgh. And Mhairi would like Amir, girls her age like young children. She would be kind to Mhairi, she would do everything for her, clean her room, sort her school clothes. She would treat her like a princess. (118) This projection of the life they could have together signifies a shift from Sammar’s Spartan existence in the “hospital room” in which “the part of her that did the mothering had disappeared” to reclaiming a “real home” with Rae (7, 15): “Once there was a time when she could do nothing. […] Yet Allah had rewarded her […]. She would make him happy, she could do so much for him” (118). It is due to Sammar’s increasing closeness with Rae that she is able to come out of her depression and rediscover her purpose as a wife and mother. This completes the sexual contract in that both parties benefit from the union that forms the novel’s resolution – while Rae is “saved” by being introduced to a spiritual existence through Islam, Sammar is “saved” by being restored to her rightful position as keeper of an Islamic spiritual domestic realm. In this way, Aboulela defers to the familiar emotional reasoning of the Western

112  Islam at Home romance narrative, despite her novel’s overarching “Islamic logic”. Like the women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by sticking to this seemingly benign literary form, Aboulela diverts attention away from her ideological intervention, which is perhaps one interpretation of the “restraint” J.M. Coetzee speaks of in his blurb on the cover of the 2005 edition of the novel. Aboulela distances her protagonist from the contentious realm of the “political” and instead inscribes her in the domestic domain. While this is not the purely secular space of the British middle-class home, it still maintains the “companionate” aspects of the sexual contract, which prevents it from sliding into the oppressive space of the Oriental harem. Rather, it becomes a spiritual space where women exert a uniquely Islamic form of moral and emotional power.

Conclusion Through a complex set of rhetorical operations, Aboulela encloses a work of fiction driven by an Islamic religious logic within the generic structures of the domestic novel, with its recognizable resolution of companionate marriage and seemingly apolitical message. By drawing on the discursive operations of this secular romantic genre, The Translator effects a “translation” between religious and secular worldviews. Through its discursive mechanisms, Aboulela clears space for a form of female Muslim subjectivity that is neither the “oppressed Muslim woman” in need of saving nor the “barefaced” woman who has rejected Islam in favor of a visible (though often superficial) female emancipation. It is from this “third space” that Aboulela’s novel addresses its readers. While the novel’s Islamic worldview serves as a “distancing” feature of the “translation”, its appropriation of the domestic novel form works to bring the text to the reader and serves a familiarizing function. It is through this combination of closeness and distance, adherence to generic structures and renegotiation of them that allows The Translator to navigate its message through a difficult reception landscape. As a result, like the character of Jane in Brontë’s novel, Sammar not only functions as the “moral guide” for her male counterpart but takes on a pedagogical function for her audience as well. While Rae is brought across the Orientalist divide to “settle in Sammar’s own territory”, the reader too is brought to an appreciation of Sammar’s dilemma, and thus the importance of her religious faith. One critic alludes to this cross-cultural pedagogical potential for Aboulela’s fiction, citing it as “a tool for religious and cultural competency in an increasingly polarized post 9/11 world” (Mabura 2012, 1). In other words, a work like The Translator takes on the task of educating non-Muslim readers about Islam and complicating their perceptions of Muslim women. At the same time, the emphasis on spirituality and the accompanying critique of materialism shift the gaze back onto Western secular values as well. However, it is through the discursive

Domestic Fiction  113 mechanisms available in fiction that facilitates this engagement. It is precisely by locating its narrative in the domestic, personal realm that The Translator produces a female-authored religious discourse that serves as an alternative to the more commonly encountered discourse of political Islam. As Aboulela has articulated in an interview, Islam isn’t just part of the culture in my fiction; it’s not a social norm or something like that, but has to do with the individual and their faith, beliefs, and aspirations. This has been central to my writing, and maybe this is what makes my writing different from that of other writers, who see the sharia solely as part of society and part of culture, rather than belonging to the individual herself. (quoted in Chambers 2011, 111, emphasis added) Her use of the feminine reflexive pronoun at the end of this statement does not seem to be an accident, framing women as active mediators between the different value systems on offer. In a development reminiscent of the rise of female authorship in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, Aboulela’s fiction produces a new kind of discourse that clears space for a female-authored “homely” Islam in the contemporary British literary and cultural landscape, which in itself serves a political end. However, like the authors of Armstrong’s domestic novels, in claiming the private sphere for her female protagonist as a route to authorship, something is sacrificed on a social level. As Partha Chatterjee notes regarding the resolution of the “women’s question” by Indian nationalists, employing the rhetorical move that consigned women to the position of guardian over a spiritual domestic realm served to hierarchize the relationship between gender equality and anti-colonial nationalism, such that the question of women’s rights in the new nation became subservient to their role in maintaining the nationalist narrative of middle-class Indian domesticity. Similarly, though The Translator subverts the Orientalist terms by which “Eastern” domestic spaces (and the women inside them) are constructed, enclosing the clash between “East” and “West” into companionate marriage codifies them in gendered terms. In other words, gender is still the ground onto which social difference gets mapped. Importantly though, this problem does not stem from Aboulela’s use of Islamic cultural modes, but is due to her appropriation of a popular Western secular literary form. Nevertheless, The Translator stands as an example of how the domestic sphere should not be overlooked as an uncreative and apolitical space. Though Aboulela’s articulation of modern female Muslim subjectivity is encountered in the discursive world of the novel, there is potential for material effects. In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Armstrong argues that in negotiating a space for “respectable” female-authored literature, domestic fiction provided women with a louder voice in the social sphere.

114  Islam at Home Similarly, by framing her social commentary within the familiar romantic form of the domestic novel, Aboulela negotiates a path for a discourse on gender in Islam that is able to cut through the limiting frameworks currently on offer. Furthermore, by appropriating a genre that is deeply embedded in the British literary landscape, The Translator asserts a place for its Islamic worldview within the British cultural milieu, rather than in opposition to it. Like the hybrid domestic form that emerges from Sammar and Rae’s union, the novel is a literary expression of the cultural entanglements taking place in the diaspora space of contemporary Britain. The next and final section moves away from an emphasis on race, culture or religion as a way into thinking about home and the domestic (though these factors are still important considerations in the analysis itself) and instead foregrounds “precarity” as a unifying principle. Having moved through an analysis of racialized tropes of domesticity and their literary responses, including the dilapidation and dysfunction associated with black domestic spaces, the increased suspicion towards and surveillance of Muslim private lives and enduring images of the Eastern “harem”, the section that follows returns to one of the book’s opening concerns, namely, the importance of home for those who have been denied it. Chapter 6 addresses an issue that has become all too salient in recent years, that of refugees and asylum seekers arriving to Europe’s shores. Refugees are perhaps the biggest foil to a reading of homelessness as inherently liberatory, given the circumstances of departure and arrival that often leave such involuntary migrants in a state of enduring temporariness. Through an engagement with Zanzibari writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea, I explore the stakes of achieving a sense of homeliness for its asylum-seeking protagonist. Finally, in Chapter 7, I  analyze a recent novel about queer migration, Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman. As with refugees, though for entirely different reasons, the relationship to “home” is often a precarious one for queer migrants, as it is at once a location of longing and aspiration and a source of socialization into heteronormativity. It is this tension that forms the basis of my engagement with Evaristo’s novel and exploration of the intersection between “queer” and “domesticity” more broadly.

Notes 1 One could possibly draw a comparison between Aboulela’s fiction and the memoirs of Leila Ahmed or Fatima Mernissi. However, memoir as a genre typically allows more space for critical reflection than does the novel. Azar Nafisi gestures at this difference in her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran in which she admits that, despite having the desire to write fiction, she is “too much of an academic”, saying, “I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narratives without pontificating” (2003, 266).

Domestic Fiction  115 2 Note also that new editions of all of these books were issued in the years immediately following 9/11. We might even attribute some of the increased media and scholarly interest in Aboulela’s work (including the switch from independent to mainstream publisher) to the heightened attention placed on “Islamic books” after 9/11. Whitlock cites a similar trajectory for Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, which was allocated a much larger print run than originally planned once the attacks took place (2010, 21). 3 The late twentieth-century phenomenon of “chick lit” is a well-known example of this association. For an exploration of Muslim women’s appropriation of this genre, see Newns (2018). 4 Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) discusses this concept in similar terms to Armstrong; however, there is no evidence to suggest that they were aware of one another’s work. 5 We see the persistence of these Orientalist tropes in the way that The Translator has been marketed in the UK. As Claire Chambers (2010) points out, the image of a headscarfed Leila Aboulela in the biographer’s note on the back cover of the 1999 Heinemann African Writers Series edition resonates with the illustrated image of a headscarfed woman (presumably meant to represent Sammar) on the front cover. These parallel images then serve as the badge of “authenticity” for the novel inside, while rendering Aboulela as comfortably “other” through the visual references to the “alluring, mysterious, veiled Muslim woman” (Chambers 2010, 402).

Part III

Precarious Domesticities

6 Homelessness and the Refugee Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea1

Up to now, this book has primarily dealt with representations of voluntary migration generated by the desire for economic or personal advancement. Such a focus has brought attention to the way migrant domestic spaces have been overlaid with a number of damaging tropes and discourses. One of the book’s aims has also been to reconsider how the home might serve as a space of resistance in the face of racism and structural discrimination in the public sphere. As previously discussed, such a position comes up against a critical suspicion of home, especially in postcolonial scholarship, where it has come to be associated with essentialist nationalism and exclusionary anti-immigration rhetoric. As a result, contemporary critical accounts of migration have been dominated by a progressive reading of the “homelessness” associated with migrant and diasporic subjectivity. This chapter centers on involuntary migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, who have arguably the most precarious relationship to “home”, in both its political and material sense. Such migrants exist in a state in which domicile in the homeland has become untenable and – especially in the case of asylum seekers – domicile in the place of arrival is tenuous and uncertain, as well as frequently temporary. Involuntary migration therefore presents a problem for postcolonial formulations that celebrate migrants for the way they bring about “counter-narratives” of the nation and “disturb those ideological maneuvers through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities” (Bhabha 2004, 213). As David Farrier has argued, to ask for asylum is to simultaneously acknowledge “the nation’s right to determine who is permitted to enter” at the same time that it “discredits the nation’s presuppositional founding mythologies of nativity and homogeneity” (2011, 6). Agnes Woolley expands upon this critique in her book on asylum narratives, arguing that refugees and asylum seekers do not have the same access to the creative mechanics of “remembrance and commemoration”, such as representation in local governments and communities, and that the cultural means of self-presentation is limited, not only because they are liable to be deported at a moment’s notice, but also because

120  Precarious Domesticities increasingly prevalent practices of detention and dispersal across refugee-receiving countries delimit the kind of everyday social interactions needed to cultivate such affiliations. (2014, 17–18) In other words, how can such migrants disturb the exclusionary narratives of the nation if they do not have a stable position from which to speak? Unlike other forms of migration that have engendered a sense of diasporic community/consciousness, an important precursor to the formation of what Paul Gilroy refers to as “alternative public spheres” (1993, 2002), refugees and asylum seekers are more often marked by invisibility and isolation as a result of the very political and legal structures that produce and regulate them. In light of these distinct conditions of departure and settlement, we need to reassess the place of refugees and asylum seekers within critical explorations of migration, especially with regard to readings of home. Arguably, such migrants are in need of the very things that much modern theory has been in the service of rejecting, namely, stability, placement and closure – those terms we associate with an ontological state of homeliness. As suggested above, this state is frequently inaccessible to refugees and asylum seekers due to the ongoing sense of instability and spatial precarity at the national scale (as a result of lengthy asylum application procedures or consignment to the no-man’s lands of refugee camps or detention centers), but is also a feature of the domestic scale. The urgency of departure often means homes are left behind in their entirety, with little time or space to carry the personal objects that might render an unfamiliar place of arrival more homely.2 Furthermore, the same practices of detention and dispersal described by Woolley above preclude the possibility of such material settling. Because this situation of precarity is the result of state power acting on individuals, practices of domesticity and homemaking might well be interpreted as subversive and resistant to the political and legal structures that maintain refugees and asylum seekers in a state of temporariness. Such practices have the further possibility of providing much-needed material and psychic stability in the face of chronic instability at the larger national scale. It is this potential of homemaking to be both resistant and restorative in the face of state-imposed spatial precarity that forms the point of departure for reading of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea in this chapter. At the novel’s opening, Gurnah’s ageing protagonist Saleh Omar declares, “I am a refugee, an asylum-seeker” (2002, 4).3 This statement explicitly locates the narrative in the realm of involuntary migration, where the dynamics of placement and displacement operate under very different conditions from other forms and where a celebratory reading of homelessness becomes less tenable. A key mechanism of contemporary asylum regimes involves the telling of stories. Asylum applicants must convey through the bureaucratic

Homelessness and the Refugee  121 structures of the state a narrative of persecution that meets the legal bar for granting its protection. In the next section, I will explore some of the effects of the legal–political frameworks available for telling asylum stories. The constraints of such narrative frameworks complicate the notion of migration as productive of creative expression in which territorial detachment serves as the basis of a unique writerly subjectivity. As I will then go on to show, through its foregrounding of houses and domestic objects, Gurnah’s novel produces a form of refugee storytelling that problematizes both the institutional structures of the asylum system and an aestheticized reading of “homelessness” as a route to authorship.

Storytelling and Home In this book’s introduction, I discussed Salman Rushdie’s well-known essay “Imaginary Homelands” (1992), in which he argues that the indeterminacy of the migrant condition provides a unique lens through which the writer is able to assemble “shards” of memory that are creatively valuable (12). He goes on to conclude that Indian writers in England have access to a second tradition, quite apart from their own racial history. It is the culture and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group. We can quite legitimately claim as our ancestors the Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews; the past to which we belong is an English past, the history of the immigrant in Britain. (1992, 20) This literary tradition, as Rushdie suggests here, is one that exists outside of national or ethnic bounds and includes those from a range of different backgrounds and circumstances of departure, from those fleeing religious persecution to Commonwealth migrants like himself. This collapsing of the material circumstances surrounding migration is something Abdulrazak Gurnah himself takes issue with, emphasizing the difference between the situation of someone like Salman Rushdie, “going from a relatively well-off life in Bombay to an English public school […] and leaving Zanzibar as an adult illegal immigrant” (Chambers 2011, 122). In his well-known essay “Reflections on Exile” (2001), Edward Said begins by making a much clearer distinction between different types of migration, setting apart the more privileged movements of expatriates and émigrés from the loss and pain associated with exile. He then goes on to make a finer separation: Exile originated in the age-old practice of banishment. Once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider. Refugees, on the other hand, are a creation of

122  Precarious Domesticities the twentieth century state. The word “refugee” has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance, whereas “exile” carries with it, I think, a touch of solitude and spirituality. (Said 2001, 181) While “exiled poets and writers lend dignity to a condition legislated to deny dignity – to deny identity to people,” he asserts, to concentrate on exile as a contemporary political punishment, you must therefore map territories of experience beyond those mapped by the literature of exile itself. You must first set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created. (175) In other words, Said insists that to access the experience of the refugee, one cannot look to literary works, as these, by their very nature, transform the material experiences of exile into redemptive poetic expression. The experience of the refugee, he seems to suggest, cannot be accommodated within the aesthetic realm.4 In her reading of this essay, Caren Kaplan argues that, while Said begins with the suggestion that he will illuminate how representations of displacement might differ in an age of refugees and asylum, he actually “returns to a figure more closely associated with classical Western traditions as well as modernist myths of authorship” such that Said’s deployment of the figure of the refugee in this essay serves to “authorize his discourse on exile” (1996, 120; emphasis in the original). Indeed, Said goes on to argue for a similar creative capacity in the experience of exile that Rushdie attributes to the migrant writer. He contends that “borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience” (185), remarking “it is not surprising that so many exiles seem to be novelists, chess players, political activists, and intellectuals” (181). In a double rhetorical move, Said consigns the refugee to an anonymous existence outside the domain of literature and aesthetics (and therefore outside the scope of his essay) and recuperates the figure of the exile whose ability to “cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience” and eschew the “safety of familiar territory” provides them with a unique authority from which to narrate experience: Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality

Homelessness and the Refugee  123 of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal. (186; emphasis in original) In other words, for Said, it is precisely the experience of homelessness, of “seeing the world as a foreign land”, that is productive of writing and the process of creation in general. The reason for this extended discussion of Said’s essay is to point to the persistence of readings of migrancy as creatively productive that I began at the beginning of book, even in explorations that purport to address material distinctions between different forms of migration. It also sets up the intellectual framework whereby refugees and asylum seekers are excluded from this creative subjectivity. As David Farrier puts it, “to seek asylum […] refers to […] induction into a condition of waiting, uncertainty and dependency that frustrates any chance for self-creation” (2011, 6; emphasis in original). At the same time, narration is an intrinsic part of the process of going from asylum seeker to bona fide refugee and, as Agnes Woolley argues, the basis on which the state makes a decision on asylum protection is one of “narrative interpretation” (2017, 378). The “asylum story” is the primary variable on which the distinction between legitimate refugee and “bogus” asylum seeker is founded. Judgment is largely determined by an assessment of whether a story “rings true” (Millbank 2009), which in practice means that the asylum seeker must produce “an idealized version of refugeehood” which “circulates in a narrative economy that sets the terms for the enunciation of refugee experience” (Woolley 2017, 378–379). Asylum stories must therefore follow a “pre-defined set of narrative plotlines” at the same time that they are expected to represent an objective and verifiable truth (Woolley 2017, 379). Such narrative strictures necessarily engender silences in the production of asylum stories, including the inability to narrate what Jan Blommaert (2001) refers to as “home narratives”, anecdotal stories that provide contextual information on the applicant’s home society and local events surrounding their decision to flee, details they feel the listener needs to know in order to fully appreciate their claim for asylum but which are deemed irrelevant within the asylum interview setting. These conditions surrounding the telling of asylum stories create a situation in which the asylum-seeking storyteller is not accorded full “rights to use narrative”, further contributing to their dehumanization (Blommaert 2001, 213). This “narrative inequality”, as Blommaert refers to it (2001, 213), excludes asylum seekers from the creative subject position Said attributes to the experience of exile, and, as already established, the narrative authority achieved from a state of “homelessness” is not an enabling position from which to speak for refugees and asylum seekers. Therefore, there is a need to find a critical approach for reading narratives of forced migration that is at once conscious of the narratorial effects of material

124  Precarious Domesticities homelessness and the interpretive terms of the state in its search for the “authentic” refugee. In her essay, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme”, Iris Marion Young offers an alternative model of narrative that is imbricated with home and the domestic sphere, rather than deriving its authority from a state of “homelessness”. Young’s reading of home is particularly applicable to the case of refugees, whose “homelessness” is less easily framed within a discourse of aestheticized loss (as in Said’s reading of exile above), and is particularly relevant for illuminating Gurnah’s representation of this experience in By the Sea. While acknowledging the exclusionary mechanisms that often go hand in hand with making a home, Young begins with the premise that homemaking has a “crucial human value” and therefore should be democratized rather than rejected (1997, 157). In a rereading of Heidegger’s philosophy of dwelling, Young focuses on his concept of “preservation”, which gets limited attention in Heidegger’s own analysis. She argues that preservation is not about “fixing identity” (which leads to exclusion) but is a creative process that anchors it in a physical being that makes a continuity between past and present […] by knitting together today and yesterday, integrating new events and relationships into the narrative of a life, the biography of a person, a family, a people. (1997, 151, 153) It is this centrality of narrative in the process of making home that underpins the story of forced migration in By the Sea. Rather than a privileged investment in displacement as a route to authorship, storytelling is deployed in Gurnah’s novel as a means of creating a sense of home in the face of material homelessness. The centrality of storytelling in By the Sea is evident in both form and content. The novel is essentially a series of interlinked stories about the period leading up to and after the 1964 Zanzibari Revolution, which are put together to form a novel. In addition to the many references to stories from One Thousand and One Nights, 5 the act of storytelling forms much of the novel’s frame narrative and also facilitates the resolution of the Mahmud-Omar family feud by the two migrant protagonists. Though there are two protagonist-narrators in By the Sea, the novel’s primary storyteller is the refugee Saleh Omar. Saleh frequently calls attention to the reconstructed nature of his narratives by informing his reader/listener that he will “tell it this way” (16) or accounting for alterations from the “original”. In the first few pages of the novel, for example, Saleh describes “leaving what we know and arriving in strange places carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions” as a “familiar climax in our stories” (4), drawing our attention to the process of fictionalization that shapes what we are about to hear (or read). Such narrative “embellishments”, as Woolley asserts (via Ranciere), are necessary “to make intelligible what would

Homelessness and the Refugee  125 otherwise be ‘condemned to presenting events according to their empirical order’” but are proscribed within an asylum system that insists on verifiably objective truths (2017, 382). By framing Saleh’s narration in this way, Gurnah reveals a self-consciousness about the process of writing displacement into fiction. However, by embracing a trope of storytelling over one of authorship, Gurnah appears to be inscribing his migration narrative in a more inclusive and collective domain (“our stories”), which contrasts greatly with the privileged vantage point of the exiled writer as celebrated by Rushdie and Said. Through its stories of dispossession, homelessness in By the Sea is not mobilized as an artistic trope, but rather as a traumatic material condition. By drawing on Iris Marion Young’s conception of homemaking as narrative practice, the relationship between storytelling and home can be further elucidated in By the Sea. In the novel, houses do not serve as mere settings for stories but form an integral part of their narrative machinery. Most important of these is Latif’s family home in Zanzibar, which is used in a complicated loan arrangement between Saleh Omar, Latif’s father and the unscrupulous Persian trader Hussein. After Hussein disappears, Saleh is forced to recoup his losses by seizing Latif’s childhood home, an act that escalates the historic feud between the families of the two protagonists. Disputes over houses and household objects drive the novel’s flashback plot, determining the series of misunderstandings and vengeful acts that lead to Saleh’s decision to flee Zanzibar, and Latif and Saleh to confront one another and finally enact reconciliation in a different country in yet another house “by the sea”. Before these stories of past injustices can be exchanged, however, Saleh arrives in Britain and goes through the process of claiming asylum, and it is this series of personal events that constitute exactly the kind of “home narrative” that would be considered irrelevant in an asylum interview. Rather, on arrival, the conditions of modern asylum seeking require that Saleh (travelling under the name Rajab Shaaban Mahmud) “perform” a story of his life that conforms to the expectations of refugeehood. Beginning with the seizure of a particularly significant personal object by a UK border official on arrival, the asylum system works to disrupt Saleh’s agency as storyteller, and the next section will explore the process through which such objects become invested with narrative meaning through the novel’s flashback plot.

Narrative Objects As a carryover from his previous life as a furniture seller, Saleh spends his days in England exploring furniture shops. He explains his enthusiasm for furniture by asserting that it weighs us down and keeps us on the ground, and prevents us from clambering up trees and howling naked as the terror of our useless

126  Precarious Domesticities lives overcome us. It keeps us from wandering aimlessly in pathless wildernesses, plotting cannibalism in forest clearings and dripping caves. (Gurnah 2002, 3) One interpretation of this passage is that Saleh, as an erstwhile “colonial stooge” (156), is parroting the rhetoric of colonialism as a civilizing project intended to “domesticate” the natives (see Chapter 3) so that they are no longer “howling naked […] plotting cannibalism”. However, given Saleh’s recent arrival to Britain as an asylum seeker, there is also another possible reading, in which “wandering aimlessly in the pathless wilderness” is an allusion to the condition of the refugee. Read in this way, furniture’s ability to “weigh us down and keep us on the ground” can be taken literally; in other words, that having a space to put one’s own furniture is the opposite of (and antidote to) a state of homelessness, or “wandering”. For Iris Marion Young, such personal objects are essential for what she refers to as the “sedimentation” of a life, as their arrangement in space, their presence and lack become “layered through stories, and the wordless memories of smells, rhythms and interactions” (1997, 150–151). Saleh here appears to ascribe a similar kind of psychic grounding function to these otherwise inert domestic commodities. The relationship between household objects and (life) narrative in By the Sea is further reinforced through the novel’s own narrative entanglements, especially in Saleh’s trade of an ebony table for a casket of the incense ud-al-qamari, which is already a vessel of stories of travel and migration: In Bangkok [Hussein’s] father purchased a consignment of the best ud-al-qamari from Cambodia for a good price, and had it shipped to Bahrain on the same boat that they took back. It was he, Hussein’s father, who explained that ud-al-qamari, the wood of the moon, was a corruption of ud-al-qimari, the wood of the Khmers. The Japanese war started soon after they returned to Bahrain, and there was no ud to be had for another seven or eight years, so Reza made a healthy profit for years on that consignment. […] We agreed that Hussein would pay me half my asking price for the [ebony] table in cash, and for the rest he would give me a twenty-­ pound packet of ud-al-qamari. He was generous, or I was better at bargaining than I thought I was. He gave me the casket as a gift, the casket Kevin Edelman plundered from me, and with it the last of the ud-al-qamari Hussein and his father bought in Bangkok in the year before the war, the casket which I had brought with me as all the luggage from a life departed, the provisions of my after-life. (29, 31)

Homelessness and the Refugee  127 This seemingly insignificant exchange of household commodities sets in motion the sequence of events that lead to Saleh’s downfall and eventual migration. The importance of this trade for triggering the ill-fated events that are to follow is further emphasized by the mode in which Gurnah has his protagonist remember them, as it is the discovery of the ud at Gatwick airport that prompts Saleh to begin the tale of his previous life. As Maya Jaggi points out (2001), like Proust’s madeleine, the ud acts as the aide mémoire, drawing the storyteller back to a crucial point that serves as an appropriate narrative beginning. The chapter where this episode is found is called “Relics”, suggesting that the casket of ud functions as a kind of spiritual object, full of significance beyond its mere economic or even sentimental value. Indeed, in the same way religious relics were exchanged in Christendom during the medieval period, it is through the casket’s (and its counterpart, the ebony table’s) purchase, gift and theft that it acquires a quasi-sacred value. As Patrick Geary has argued in Arjun Appadurai’s important essay collection, The Social Life of Things, “the value lay not in the [relics] themselves as alienable objects but rather in the relationships they could create as subjects” (1986, 183). Likewise, the various exchanges that these household objects undergo imbue them with social meaning beyond their mere materiality. In the sale of the table above, the “gift” of the casket transforms what would have been a purely economic exchange of goods into a form of gift exchange. Such gift exchanges, as analyzed in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977), are important for creating and reinforcing social bonds by producing “good faith” between exchanging parties. In this particular exchange, Hussein’s apparent “generosity” combined with the gift of the mahogany casket reinforces the trust between himself and Saleh, which is later used to Hussein’s advantage when he goes to ask Saleh for a loan. This second exchange, orchestrated by Hussein, ultimately indebts Latif’s family to a man they loathe (Saleh), setting up a third exchange (Latif’s family home for the defaulted loan) that finally destroys relations between the two families. Meanwhile, the ebony table is given to Latif’s brother Hassan as a token of affection (facilitating Hassan’s ill-fated relationship with Hussein), and then returns to Saleh Omar as “plunder” with the acquisition of the house (102). This “theft” of the table, and Saleh’s refusal to return it to Latif years later, reinforces the shame that its gift originally brought upon the Mahmud family. This insult, in turn, infuriates Latif’s mother, who uses her political influence to have Saleh arrested, tortured and imprisoned for more than ten years. Through this complicated series of events, these household objects amass layers of meaning through their function in facilitating and destroying human relationships. The social relationships created and broken through the exchange of these objects, and the ud in particular, form the narrative that makes up the novel’s flashback plot. In this way, the casket actually contains the stories that

128  Precarious Domesticities issue from it, and the value that it holds is therefore narrative, akin to the extensive provenance that accompanies any valuable religious relic. It becomes, so to speak, a narrative object. If, as Young argues, the preservation of such household “relics” becomes a way of “knitting together today and yesterday” to form the “narrative of a life”, for the refugee such attachments can no longer be accommodated, as the hastiness of departure and the process of seeking asylum produce a sense of rupture, breaking the narrative continuity between past and present. As Michael Jackson articulates, in the lives of refugees, “the very unities of space, time and character on which narrative coherence depends are broken” (2002, 91). For Saleh, this disunity is manifested in the circumstances of his arrival to Britain under a new identity. In order to assume this identity, Saleh pretends that he cannot speak English and leaves behind all personal items which might contradict the narrative he wishes the authorities to “read” in what he refers to as “a hermeneutics of baggage” (Gurnah, 7). As the immigration officer Kevin Edelman spreads out his meager luggage, Saleh confesses to the reader, “It was not my life that lay spread there, just what I had selected as signals of a story I hoped to convey” (8). By collecting such articles and remaining silent in the face of the immigration officer’s questions, Saleh performs a narrative of his life that becomes the replacement for all stories which may have come before, solidifying his new identity as a “refugee”. The only item brought from his past life is the mahogany casket of ud, important for its narrative value. However, this object is promptly “stolen” by Edelman, symbolizing a final rift in narrative continuity. As we know from the work of Stuart Hall (1994, 2000a) and others, identities are also kinds of stories, discursive constructions that “narrate” a particular person or people. While the discursive claims of other kinds of migrants and diasporic communities often mobilize identity as something to be held onto that gives the displaced body/community strength in the face of a potentially hostile host environment, in the case of the asylum seeker identity becomes a liability that must be scrupulously policed. Rather than preserved (in Young’s sense of the word) and celebrated, all markers of the personal or collective stories that make up the life and culture of the migrated body/bodies must be “sanitized” to produce the empty signifier “refugee”. Like the military practice of “sanitization”,6 in which soldiers about to be deployed to the front line go through a process of divesting themselves of any personal items from home that might give the enemy an advantage in interrogation should they be captured, the asylum seeker must do the same so as not to betray any information that could be used against them in the asylum process. As one article describing the military practice asserts, “Any personal trinket might offer a piece to the puzzle of their lives, a chink in their armour” (Judd 2003), rendering the process of sanitization as one of

Homelessness and the Refugee  129 depersonalization, where all vestiges of the private sphere are squared away as potential “chinks” in the armor of an identity that reads as nothing other than “soldier” or, in Saleh’s case, “refugee”. Others have argued that Saleh’s self-imposed silence on arrival should be understood as a form of resistance to structures of power which ordinarily “silence” refugees in other ways (Farrier 2008; Olaussen 2009). Nevertheless, the fact remains that his “refusal” to speak English is part of a larger performance through which Saleh attempts to conform to the state’s idea of what a “legitimate” refugee should look (and sound) like. While any sign of wealth may imply Saleh had benefitted in some way from the society he is now claiming is endangering his life, knowledge of English might signal a worldliness that cannot be accommodated within the figure “refugee”.7 As Latif puts it, “Without English you are even more of a stranger, a refugee, […] more convincing. […] You’re just a condition, without even a story” (143). Although this performance is a form of self-preservation, Saleh is still acting through power structures against which he has no other recourse. As a result of such a system, “asylum-seeker” and “refugee” become self-fulfilling labels, emptied of any prior personal content, leaving no room for the complexity of experience that defines us as human beings. Symbolized by the theft of the casket of ud on his arrival, Saleh undergoes a process of depersonalization, which is linked to an increasing sense of homelessness through a separation from objects that have narrative meaning. This homelessness is further reinforced by his movement through a series of what I call “non-homes” before finally settling once again in a home “by the sea”.

Non-homes and the Asylum System In their book Migrants of Identity, Rapport and Dawson (drawing on Marc Augé (1995)) declare that it is “non-places which have become the real measure of our time”, describing these as “transit points and temporary abodes: wastelands, building sites, waiting-rooms, refugee camps, stations, malls, hotels, where travellers break step and thousands of individual itineraries momentarily converge” (1998, 6). Following the work of phenomenological psychologist D.J. Van Lennep, Young argues that we should consider places that are not home to understand the meaning of home: D. J. Van Lennep suggests that we can learn what it means to inhabit a space as “home” by thinking about forms of shelter that are not home; he suggests that we consider why a hotel room is not a home. A hotel room has all the comforts one needs – heat, hot water, a comfortable bed, food and drink a phone call away. Why, then, does one not feel at home in a hotel room? Because there is nothing

130  Precarious Domesticities of one’s self, one’s life habits and history, that one sees displayed around the room. The arrangement is anonymous and neutral, for anyone and no one in particular. (1997, 149) As Young suggests here, it is precisely the work of preservation, of surrounding oneself with personal objects that make up the narrative of a life, which sets homes apart from such non-homes. As a bridge between these two theoretical formulations, I deploy the term “non-home” in my analysis here to stand for places that carry the formal qualities of a home but do not provide the kind of psychic support that Young deems necessary for a sense of homeliness. The kernel of this non-home can be found within the judicial concept of “asylum” itself. The term asylum implies the notion of sanctuary, a temporary shelter from harm, but one that is not meant to provide the sense of permanence required to make a home. Built into the idea of sanctuary is the implication that the harm itself is temporary, but in reality, the political conditions may never shift sufficiently so that protection is no longer needed. At the same time, the principle of non-­ refoulement 8 that underpins modern asylum policy means refugees are inevitably caught in the non-home established by the terms of the policy itself. Furthermore, the language of asylum legislation since the late twentieth century has contributed to what Sarah Gibson refers to as the “politicisation of hospitality”, in which “accommodation” has become haunted by its other meaning, “that of ‘adaptation’ (assimilation) and ‘containment’” (2003, 370, 373). Saleh’s first domicile after arrival is the non-home of a refugee detention center, a key stage in the “accommodation” of asylum seekers in this system. He describes the center as follows: The sheds that accommodated us could once just as easily have contained sacks of cereal or bags of cement or some other valuable commodity that needed to be kept secure and out of the rain. Now they contained us, a casual and valueless nuisance that had to be kept in restraint. (43) Here, Saleh’s likening of the “accommodation” of himself and his fellow asylum seekers to the sheltering of inanimate objects reinforces the figure of the refugee as non-person and the detention center as non-home, even though it may act as sanctuary. Furthermore, the temporal shift from “valuable commodity” to “valueless nuisance” and the semantic shift from “accommodation” to “containment” and then “restraint” can be read as gesturing at the historical shift from postwar economic

Homelessness and the Refugee  131 migration from the Commonwealth to European Union-era asylum migration. While Commonwealth migrants were perceived as valued commodities that could contribute to an economy in need of labor (at least for a time), the new language of asylum-seeking situates such new migrants as inherently “valueless”, or worse, as economic drains on a creaking welfare system. Despite the starkness of his surroundings, however, the existence of at least some camaraderie with other asylum seekers renders the detention center a more congenial space than the boarding house to which Saleh is moved next. Although formally possessing more homely qualities, Saleh experiences it as an even more demoralizing non-home. This is due in large part to the haunting presence of the landlady Celia’s personal effects, which are represented as potentially corruptive, both physically and psychically: The rug on the bed puffed up in a thin cloud of dust when I pulled it back. The bed-sheets looked and smelled as if they had been slept in before. There were spots of blood on the pillowcase. The bed had the same smell as the upholstery downstairs: old vomit and semen and spilt tea. I daren’t even sit on it out of an irrational fear of contamination, not just fear of disease but of some inner pollution. (56) Van Lennep defines dwelling as “the continual unfolding of ourselves in space”, which produces a bodily intimacy with a room that is unique to the dweller: “The pronoun ‘my’ in the expression ‘my room’ does not express my possession of it, but precisely a relation between me and the room, which means that my spatial existence has come about” (1987, 212). In contrast to the scrubbed anonymous space of the hotel room, he describes the alienating effects of entering a space that belongs to another and which “speaks the silent language of familiarity only to the occupant (210). Although Celia asserts that the objects in the room “all have meaning for me, every one of them” (55), for Saleh they can only represent horror and degradation due to his state of dependency and powerlessness in this space. He spends the evening “going through Celia’s valuable memories […], pricing and assessing them as if they were part of a house-lot I had acquired at auction”, emphasizing that he “had felt no interest in these objects, even in my own mind, that I did not even speculate on how they were precious to Celia, never even thought to imagine her life with them” (56). In this way, Saleh reduces Celia’s “memories” to their mere economic value in order to resist their corruptive power and gain some control over his spatial surroundings.

132  Precarious Domesticities Saleh’s detached reading of Celia’s belongings puts them in stark contrast with the trajectory of the ebony table and the casket of ud, which acquire narrative value far beyond their material value as objects. Furthermore, Celia’s assertion of her narrative connection to these items sets Saleh’s sense of homelessness into relief. The casket’s only substitute is a stolen towel given to him by fellow refugee Alfonso, and the “invisible place” it provides is Saleh’s only refuge from the polluted surroundings (59). The sacred space of cleanliness created by the towel becomes Saleh’s only anchoring point in this unfamiliar and corruptive space, casting the towel as a kind of new relic, but one that is born of the transience and depersonalization of refugee life. Its story is that of Rajab Shaaban the asylum seeker, rather than Saleh Omar the furniture seller. Both of these non-homes, the detention center and the boarding house, represent a kind of accommodation in impermanence, or “dwelling-in-travel”, to borrow James Clifford’s (1997) well-known phrase.

Stories of Home Michael Jackson asserts that, for those who experience the trauma of violence and displacement, storytelling functions as “a vital human strategy” that reestablishes a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances. “While we may not be able to determine events”, he says, “storytelling gives us the sense that we at least have a hand in defining their meaning” (2002, 15, 16). However, through the process of asylum, Saleh gives up his agency to construct meaning in all its complexity. Rather, meaning is placed onto him by the asylum apparatus of judiciary, immigration officials and social workers, as well as agents and ticket sellers. This turns him into “an involuntary instrument of another’s design, a figure in a story told by someone else” (Gurnah 2002, 68–69), and Saleh laments his sense of defeat by what he describes as “the overbearing weight of the nuances that place and describe everything I say, as if a place already exists for them before I utter them” (68). In having to speak the (non)language of the asylum seeker, Saleh’s stories become instruments in the state apparatus with its predefined image of refugeehood, while he becomes a mere object of the stories told by representatives of the state. This process that Saleh goes through in order to be read as a legitimate refugee by the asylum system is compounded by the depersonalizing effect of residing in non-homes. It is only when Saleh is finally moved to his own home “by the sea” that continuity begins to be restored through the process of storytelling, though of a very different kind. Through his encounter with the novel’s second protagonist, Latif, Saleh’s agency as storyteller and meaning maker is reasserted and a sense of home (re)created. This narrative continuity is echoed by

Homelessness and the Refugee  133 Latif, who describes his own migration as a journey between Saleh’s two homes, saying “it’s as if I went on from Saleh Omar’s house [in Zanzibar] and right out of the country, and through the years I have been finding my way to his other house by the sea” (104). While the narrative objects themselves are no longer present, the reconciliation enacted by the two protagonists give them new layers of meaning in spite of their material absence. Although the precious ebony table is gone (though echoed in the “low rectangular table of no refinement” that sits between them [144]), its significance in the story of their lives is heightened as Latif discovers the great price Saleh has paid for refusing to return it many years before. The casket, too, is recalled, as Saleh burns “lavender and fragrant gum” before Latif’s arrival, symbolizing the filling up of this new space with the narrative presence of the lost fragrance of the ud and sedimenting the stories of their past lives in this new space (143). For Latif, Saleh’s stories take on an explicitly restorative function, “to make complete the absences and to utter the silences in his life” (146), such that his family’s dispossession at Saleh’s hands is given new meaning, alleviating his anger and resentment. However, for Saleh, the storytelling is framed as an end in itself. He says, “I needed to be shriven of the burden of events and stories which I have never been able to tell, and which by telling would fulfill the craving I feel to be listened to with understanding” (171). In the narration of such events, Saleh once again draws attention to the role of the storyteller. Prefacing his account of the events surrounding Hussein’s pursuit of Latif’s brother, for example, Saleh declares, “This is the story, repeated in convivial exchanges over cups of coffee, and retailed with righteousness and relish”, implying that it is not his story, but one that has been told many times before by many others (160). While the stories Saleh must tell in order to gain asylum signal a loss of agency, here the process of storytelling becomes a way to make new meaning out of painful events that occurred long ago, in a different place. Through this difficult process of telling the stories of the past, the feud between the two families is finally laid to rest, and a new friendship is forged between Latif and Saleh. Restored to his proper role as storyteller, Saleh is no longer depersonalized into the empty signifier “refugee”, as he is finally able to divulge the private narratives that would previously have been dangerous to betray, or simply seen as irrelevant in an asylum system that demands “objectivity”. Like the sense of continuity produced by the physical location of Saleh’s new home “by the sea”, the process of telling these stories out loud functions as a replacement for filling the house with narrative objects. Rather, it is the stories themselves, in the absence of their representation in material form, that function to “knit together today and yesterday” as a continuation of the narrative of Saleh’s life, despite his forced displacement.

134  Precarious Domesticities

Conclusion In Young’s reading, “preservation” is not simply about maintaining the physical integrity of houses and personal objects but about renewing their meaning in our lives. She makes the point that “[w]hen things and works are maintained against destruction, but not in the context of life activity, they become museum pieces” (1997, 153). Upon entering Saleh’s house in Zanzibar many years before their reconciliation, Latif appears to illustrate this point. Confronted with the opulence of Saleh’s furnishings, he remarks that all of them were objects which had beauty and purpose, but which stood like refugees in that room, standing still because pride and dignity demanded it but none the less as if they had a fuller life elsewhere. Looking like objects in a gallery or a museum. (102) The analogy between these static “museum objects” and “refugees” in this passage is indicative of the argument I have been tracing in this chapter. The process of seeking asylum and the loss of Saleh’s narrative object on arrival to Britain signify his own reduction to near object status under the label of “refugee”. It is only in the action of narrating the stories engendered by the houses and household objects lost in the process of seeking asylum, that Saleh is restored to his rightful position as meaning maker and is able to imbue a sense of homeliness to his new home space “by the sea”. While the figure of the exile has been mobilized in critical discourse as an aestheticized form of displacement, refugees and asylum seekers are frequently positioned outside of literary and aesthetic realm, even outside of narrative itself. At the same time, their stories are overdetermined as signifiers of their status as “deserving” or “undeserving” migrants. Because of the constraints of this system, “refugee” is a self-fulfilling figure that has no narrative except the one provided by the label itself. In the narrative structure of By the Sea, the reader is positioned as the audience for the “home narrative” that is silenced within the asylum process, such that the novel draws attention to the limitations of this system for accessing “truth” and conferring legitimacy on asylum claims. In addition, the character of Latif, whose presence, though triggering uncomfortable memories, provides an alternative listener to the representatives of the state, and the process of exchanging stories reestablishes Saleh to a personhood that had been stripped in order to present as the ideal image of a refugee. The stories of the past are entwined with, and in large part driven by, houses and domestic objects, foregrounding the significance of material homelessness. It is only when Saleh has once again established a stable space from which to speak, his new home “by the sea”, that he is

Homelessness and the Refugee  135 able to finally reveal the full extent of his traumatic story. Through the narrative meaning invested in houses and household objects, Gurnah’s novel mobilizes an aesthetic of migration that is rooted in home and the domestic sphere, thereby rejecting an image of the unencumbered exile who shirks off home and through this process finds self-actualization through authorship. Instead, as a novel about involuntary migration, By the Sea asserts the value of homely places for those who have been denied them, and as spaces where the depersonalizing work of forced displacement and the asylum system can be resisted by the restorative work of storytelling. Chapter 7 addresses domestic precarity of a very different kind through an exploration of queer migration. Like postcolonial studies, queer theory has been dominated by a critical investment in unfixed subject positions. This has been an important theoretical practice for a field that works to break down binary structures of identity, but has also manifested at the experiential level as a dismissal of home as a constraining and unprogressive space. However, when placed in the context of the black diasporic experience in Britain, itself one of domestic hardship and precarity, as in the case of Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr Loverman (2013a), such positions become less tenable. Through its exploration of a novel that rewrites the first generation of “Windrush” arrivals to the UK, this final chapter also allows for a reflection on where this book began, and thus sets up its concluding remarks.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. See Newns (2015). 2 This contrasts with, for instance, Commonwealth migration in which the transport of such personal objects from home has been cited as an important part of “feeling at home” in Britain. See, for example, Divya Tolia-Kelly (2004) with regard to South Asian communities. The Geffrye Museum of Home in London also ran an exhibition on The West Indian Front Room in 2005–2006, which emphasized the “choices people made in furnishing their front room, the symbolism of particular objects and the links between objects and personal identity” and included objects such as “grips, […] reinforced cardboard suitcases that brought valued belongings from home […] to remind their owners of the Caribbean” (The Geffrye Museum 2005). See the book’s conclusion for a more extended discussion of this exhibition. 3 Subsequent references will be to this edition. 4 This positioning of the refugee outside of the aesthetic realm is reflected in the scholarship that exists on refugees and asylum seekers (as opposed to other forms of migration), which is largely found in the social sciences. This has been changing in recent years with the publication of important books by David Farrier (2011) and Agnes Woolley (2014), but the imbalance remains notable. 5 For an exploration of the novel’s intertexual resonances with the tales from One Thousand and One Nights, see Cooper (2008).

136  Precarious Domesticities 6 While this is likely to be a common practice among any military personnel who could potentially be captured, I have only encountered the term in reference to British troops at the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 7 The denial of asylum to Rwandan refugee Joseph Mutingira, as he is referred to in Jan Blommaert’s (2009) account of this case, is a poignant example. The UK government rejected Joseph’s application on the grounds of “abnormal linguistic repertoire” because he largely communicated in English and spoke poor Kinyarwanda (415). 8 Forcible return; the principle was officially enshrined in law in Article 33 of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

7 Reorienting Home Queer Domesticity in Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman

This book has made a concerted effort to think about domesticity intersectionally, in relation to multiple axes of power, so it has considered how texts engage with home in relation to questions of gender and class alongside those of race and religion. However, it has so far focused on heterosexual narratives of migration and settling, which contain a number of assumptions about how domestic homes are arranged and what they signify that become complicated when we consider narratives of queer migration. For example, Chapter 3 focused on the negative impact of British norms of domesticity in the colonies, but with these norms also came a compulsory heterosexuality that often goes unacknowledged. Though, to speak of “queer” migration is already to move away from straightforward categorizations. The term has evolved significantly since its original use as a derogatory label for those who defy normative gender codes and was reclaimed with the emergence of “queer theory” in the 1990s as a way beyond the gender binary seen to be reproduced by “gay and lesbian studies” (Lauretis 1991). “Queer” has also proved important for problematizing other binaries, including between heterosexual and homosexual, “gay” and “straight”, and opening up the possibility of a range of sexual desires and practices that do not necessarily conform to the identity categories established by “gay” and “lesbian”. Put another way, “queer” does not assume any straightforward equivalence between what one “does” and what one “is”, between sexual acts or desires and a coherent sexual identity. This conceptual flexibility has proven even more important as LGBTQ1 activism moves to a more global outlook and encounters a range of localized communities and practices that it seeks to accommodate within its purview. 2 “Queer” operates as a useful “big tent” under which a diverse range of nonnormative sexualities may coexist. As John C. ­Hawley explains, [Queer’s] definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics […]. [I]t is precisely this troublesome central feature of queer theory that suggests its possible utility in

138  Precarious Domesticities approaching sexualities that are less obviously binary than those in cultures in which “gay” and “lesbian” make compelling (political, public and private) sense. (2001, 4–5) It is precisely this ability to encompass diverse cultural contexts that makes “queer” the preferred term for exploring sexuality in relation to questions of race and the legacies of colonialism. Like postcolonial studies, queer studies promotes an anti-­essentialist conception of identity as something fluid and unfixed. Annamarie Jagose explains in her critical introduction to the field that while gay and lesbian movements were fundamentally committed to the notion of identity politics due to its perceived necessity for effective political intervention, Queer […] exemplifies a more mediated relation to categories of identification. Access to the post-structuralist theorisation of identity as provisional and contingent, coupled with a growing awareness of the limitations of identity categories in terms of political representation, enabled queer to emerge as a new form of personal identification and political organisation. (1996, 77–78) This post-structuralist ethos, which understands the self as constituted (and not merely expressed) through language, has meant that “queer” functions more as a recognition of difference than a bounded category that relies on a pre-given similarity. Queer theory’s post-structuralist roots also mean that, like postcolonial theory, it finds critical affinity with deterritorializing concepts like diaspora and globalization, and movement is frequently celebrated as an important catalyst for the reinvention and renegotiation of sexual identities. 3 This theoretical kinship has at times led to a critical overlapping, which “posit[s] an analogy between queerness as that which subverts gender normativity, and diaspora as that which troubles geographic and national stability” (Wesling 2008, 31). Both have ultimately been seen as troubling to national coherence: where the diasporic subject explodes the fantasy of ethnic homogeneity, the queer citizen challenges the nation’s privileging of heterosexuality as enforced through its “structural arrangements of citizenship, marriage law, and immigration regulation” (Wesling 2008, 31). However, warning against this theoretical slippage between geographic and sexual dislocation, diaspora and queerness, Meg Wesling writes that Newly emergent from the debris of nationalism is a figure of the “sexile”, a gay cosmopolitan subject who, once exiled from national

Reorienting Home  139 space, is therefore outside of the duties, identifications, and demands of nationalism, and is paradoxically liberated into free transnational mobility. (2008, 31) Wesling’s comments are particularly important to bear in mind when considering the material realities for what have been termed “queer diasporas”.4 In line with one of the central arguments I have been tracing in this book, Wesling asserts that diaspora may not be the most productive critical bedfellow for articulating queer ontologies because it enunciates mobility as always already liberatory. Diasporas also have their own mechanisms of regulation and control, including around sexual behavior, as we will see in the case of the Caribbean diaspora. Equally, an overemphasis on sexual transgression can render invisible the significance of other struggles (such as those related to race and class) that may come into play. In other words, in order to appreciate embodied queer migrant experiences, we need to allow space for the terms “queer” and “diaspora” to be mutually interrogative rather necessarily additive (queerness plus diasporic condition equals maximum liberation). If this book has been about casting suspicion on the critical investment in the unhomed migrant as the liberated subject par excellence, then the celebration of the queer diasporic subject, the “sexile” to use Wesling’s term, must be rendered equally suspect. This begins with a thorough exploration of how “home” has been desired, articulated and disavowed in queer diasporic narratives at both the domestic and national scales. I then go on to demonstrate how the complex stakes of queer diasporic homemaking are articulated in Bernardine Evaristo’s recent novel Mr Loverman (2013a).

Queer at Home In Sara Ahmed’s pathbreaking book Queer Phenomenology, the family home emerges as a constraining space for the queer subject, functioning as a fundamental mechanism for reinforcing compulsory heterosexuality: “In the conventional family home what appears requires following a certain line, the family line that directs our gaze. The heterosexual couple becomes a ‘point’ along this line, which is given to the child as its inheritance or background” (2006, 90). Ahmed recalls a memory of the sideboard in her parents’ dining room: One object, a fondue set, stands out. […] It was a wedding gift – a gift given to mark the occasion of marriage. The public event of marriage entails giving gifts to the heterosexual couple, giving the woman as a gift to the man, and even giving the couple as a gift to others, to those who act as witnesses to the gifts given. […]

140  Precarious Domesticities Everywhere I turn, even in the failure of memory, reminds me of how the family home puts objects on display that measure sociality in terms of the heterosexual gift. […] Such objects do not simply record or transmit a life; they demand a return. (89–90) In Chapter 6, I discussed the importance of such personal objects for “sedimenting” the self in space and producing a sense of homeliness. However, such objects can also serve as “orientation devices” that direct its inhabitants toward heterosexual desires, and among which a queer body is necessarily “out of place” (Ahmed 2006, 2). As with Gurnah’s novel, household objects here acquire narrative significance, but this narrative takes on an oppressive character as one that demands adherence to normative patterns of living and loving. Unsurprisingly then, a common narrative trajectory in coming-out stories involves leaving the family home as a precursor to reaching fulfillment of the “true” (non-heteronormative) self. As Anne-Marie Fortier puts it, “moving out” is frequently a key step in “coming out” (2001, 2003). The queer protagonist then finds the “true home” in the semipublic spaces of queer subcultures (e.g., gay and lesbian bars) (2003, 115). Though, Ahmed reminds us that such queer spaces are often “fleeting” and characterized by impermanence, suggesting that the kind of ontological security we associate with home may only be found in the heterosexual world (2006, 106). At the same time, Fortier suggests that there might be a way to decenter the heterosexual, familial home as “the emblematic model of comfort, care and belonging”, refusing heterosexuality as a necessary condition for homeliness (2003, 116). “Would it be possible to think of the familial home differently, in ways that opens it up to ‘queer belongings’?”, she asks (116). One way to bring such a possibility into focus is to look at narratives of queer migration, in which the stakes of home and belonging cut across several axes of power, where race and cultural identity intersect with sexuality. Though, in such narratives, the trajectory of “coming out” as “moving out” can be transposed into one in which the home nation/culture is disavowed in favor of the openness afforded by the Western metropolis. When read in this way, queer migration is presented as homecoming, which sits in contrast to the loss of home normally associated with exile and diaspora (Fortier 2003, 118). However, such a trajectory, especially from once-colonized regions of the world, also suggests a problematic narrative of progress that posits the home nation as sexually backward and in need of outside intervention or, failing that, escape. Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman tells the story of an elderly Caribbean man, Barrington (Barry) Walker, who migrated from Antigua to the UK with his wife Carmel in the 1960s. He has also had a longstanding secret homosexual relationship with his childhood friend Morris,

Reorienting Home  141 which continues from Antigua to London. With this novel, Evaristo weighs into ongoing debates about negative attitudes to homosexuality in the Caribbean and black communities worldwide and what some perceive as a culturally intrinsic homophobia. 5 Evaristo herself points to the conspicuous absence of narratives of same-sex romantic connections in Caribbean literature, including that of the diaspora, and frames her novel as a form of literary and historical reclamation, which is aimed at redressing the silence around this topic in the narrative inheritance of Caribbean diasporic culture (2013b). Mr Loverman was awarded the Publishing Triangle’s6 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, which perhaps reinforces the novel’s role as activist fiction. In spite of this endorsement, however, its exploration of the experiences of its Afro-­ Caribbean characters pushes against some of the recurring markers of mainstream LGBTQ literature, especially the trajectory in which “coming out” means “moving out”. Such narrative choices complicate any straightforward reading of the novel as a critique of homophobia in Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic culture.

Caribbean and Queer Recent works like Faith Smith’s essay collection Sex and the Citizen (2011) and Kate Houlden’s Sexuality, Gender and Nationalism in Caribbean Literature (2016) delve into the deep-rooted relationship between Caribbean nationalism and heterosexuality.7 Though, as discussed above, heterosexuality is to some extent always bound up with the idea of the nation through its need to continually reproduce itself anew in a continuous “family” line, the intense policing of sexuality in the Caribbean has been an effect of the region’s colonial history. As Smith succinctly articulates, debates about political and cultural sovereignty in the Caribbean have always been “languaged by sex” (Smith 2011, 1), in the sense that homosexuality and miscegenation are the region’s founding taboos. Such taboos, Smith argues, stem from European discourses that depicted its colonized populations as “improperly sexed”, which was used as further evidence of their inherent inferiority (7). Such discourses also served to stem European anxieties about its own sexual transgressions: in addition to facilitating interracial sexual entanglements, the colonies provided a more favorable atmosphere for conducting the kind of homosexual liaisons that would have been scandalous back home.8 The racialization of nonheterosexual sex led to a disavowal of such behavior as incompatible with whiteness and, indeed, civilization itself. Smith goes on to suggest further consequences of this history for Caribbean national identity: The continuing legacies of slavery, indenture and colonialism and the attendant threat to the integrity of the Caribbean (particularly

142  Precarious Domesticities nonwhite) body and psyche dictate that any departure from a wholesome, clean, straightforward sexuality would risk a return to the scene of colonial degradation. […] Every affirmation of sovereignty is part of a package deal that includes the assumption of heterosexuality as the best or only way to be Caribbean. (2011, 10) Homophobia viewed in light of this historical context can be understood as an expression of anxieties about the Caribbean’s continuing subservient position in the global power structure. Through an internalization of the colonial logic of sexual taboo, resisting an acknowledgment of a homosexual presence within functions as a defense mechanism against threats posed to the region’s national and cultural sovereignty, such as from extra-governmental bodies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As a way to ward off the homogenizing effects of globalization, “all real distinctions within a social group (such as sexual ‘deviance’) [are reduced to] the simple one of not-us” (Hawley 2001, 9). The “package deal” Smith mentions alludes to the Caribbean’s primary role as a tourist hub that is called upon to “service” the Global North, both materially and sexually. The increased demand for gay-friendly Caribbean holidays, accompanied by an uptick in gay male sex tourism in the islands, has contributed to the popular belief that nonnormative sexuality is “a contamination from the U.S. and Europe, a disease imported on cruise ships that threatens the national space” (Emily 2012, 191).9 Kate Houlden argues that these sexual anxieties were already evident in the early works of the Caribbean diaspora, such as Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners, in which the exchanging of stories of sexual exploits (largely with white women) between the text’s ensemble of male characters acts as a kind of glue holding the nascent Caribbean diasporic community together in the face of economic hardship and discrimination. This novel stands as a paradigmatic example of how the work of “imagining the nation” meant promoting its dominant ideals of hypermasculine heterosexuality. Evaristo’s intervention with Mr Loverman is therefore made all the more poignant by the choice to build her novel around a queer Caribbean character from this same “Windrush generation”, seen as the originators of the Caribbean diasporic community in Britain (Phillips and Phillips 2009). By inscribing a queer narrative into this founding generation of Caribbean immigrants, Mr Loverman disrupts the “clean, straightforward sexuality” that remains an unspoken condition of belonging in the Caribbean diaspora in Britain. One of the enduring markers of this condition of belonging has been the global circulation of Caribbean Dancehall music, known for its homophobic lyrics. Most notoriously was the 1992 hit “Boom Bye Bye” by the Jamaican artist Buju Banton, in which the lyrics condemn so-called

Reorienting Home  143 “batty bwoys” and incite the listener to “Shoot dem no come if we shot dem” [Shoot them, don’t come [to help] if we shoot them].10 In The Black Atlantic (2001), music forms one of the central threads connecting Paul Gilroy’s waterborne African diasporic world. However, Gilroy’s idealized image does not account for those who remain excluded from its mechanisms of trans-Atlantic identification and recognition because of their sexuality. This raises the question of what place queer subjects might occupy in a transnational community bonded, at least in part, by its rejection of their very existence. Such questions were brought to the forefront in Isaac Julien’s groundbreaking documentary The Darker Side of Black (1994), in which Buju Banton and other Dancehall artists accused of homophobic lyrics like Shabba Ranks are interviewed about their views on homosexuality. As Banton speaks, a voice-over narrator declares, “the masculine integrity of this down-pressed race requires your [gay Jamaicans] death. You shall die so that this race may live”. Such statements reinforce the notion of a crisis of Caribbean black male sovereignty that must be resolved through the oppression of those who transgress heteronormative patriarchal structures. However, Paige Schilt calls attention to the representational strategies used by Julien, as exhibited in this scene. She argues that such moments of voice-over enact what she refers to as a “queer humanist gaze” that establishes “queerness” as a universal norm and the homophobe (in this case Banton) as a subject of curiosity and scrutiny. Such a gaze, she elaborates, is found in the film’s use of the outmoded style of the BBC travel documentary, in which the narrator assumes the voice of cultural authority and explains the “backward” beliefs of the racial Other. This “curiosity and scrutiny” in turn spills over onto Jamaica as a whole, reproducing imperialist narratives that position the West as the culmination of social and political progress (Schilt 2001, 169). Schilt’s analysis of The Darker Side of Black serves as a poignant example of the potential pitfalls of critiquing Caribbean homophobia from a metropolitan position.11 As with feminist movements, LGBTQ rights activism can find itself rearticulating imperialist positions, even as it seeks to liberate black, queer subjects. Such instances of what has been termed “homonationalism” (Puar 2007) demonstrate how queer politics may not always stand apart from the national time–space but can actually serve its regulatory mechanisms. Like Julien’s documentary, Evaristo locates Mr Loverman in relation to the diasporic modes of identification provided by Dancehall culture. The novel opens with Barry and Morris in the collective space of a London dancehall, with “Mighty Sparrow blasting ‘Barack the Magnificent’ out of the sound system” (Evaristo 2013a, 1).12 Such a space provides Barry with an escape from the daily realities of his marriage and offers the couple some degree of freedom. However, the language of Buju Banton’s song also pervades this diasporic community, such as when

144  Precarious Domesticities Barrington learns of a local man who was killed, allegedly, for having an affair with a “batty man” (114). Barry himself has also been attacked by a gang of youths while cruising in Abney Park Cemetery, accompanied by accusations of “Batty man! Bum bandit! Poofter! Anti-Man!” (122). Such moments stand as reminders of the parameters of belonging, even among the British-born generation, as Barry remarks that “They was the same kind of boys who bullied any boy back home who wasn’t man enough, who wore too-bright shirts, who was a bit soft in his manner, who needed straightening out” (122). Most significantly, the homophobia of Dancehall culture is brought to the forefront during an incident that is spurred by the sound of Buju Banton’s lyrics in Barrington’s home: I stagger on to the landing, and the acrid stink of sensi gusts up my nose; at the same time I hear lyrics thumping out of the front room: something about killing a nasty batty boy. Oh Lord, it’s party time in Carmel’s precious inner sanctum, and that Buju Banton fella is being played inside my house? My house… (194) It is this song, played by Barrington’s teenage grandson Daniel, that is Barry’s final breaking point, leading him to reveal his sexuality to his family for the first time and ending his fifty-year marriage. In addition to the role of Dancehall culture and its disavowal of homosexuality in cementing Caribbean diasporic identity, religious belief functions as another mechanism for drawing the boundaries of community belonging. The strength of Christianity among Caribbean communities at home and abroad is again a testament to the success of colonial incursion and has taken on an important role as enforcer of the “clean” sexuality described above. Alison Donnell, for example, points to the region’s “extreme religiosity” as a deterrent against the portrayal of any sexuality in Caribbean literature, let alone homosexuality (2006). We also see the important role of the Church in Mr Loverman: one of the only times homosexuality is discussed in the Walker household is at a lunch following a Sunday service in which the pastor frequently condemns “philanderers, homosicksicals, and moral reprobates” (51). At this moment, Barry’s wife Carmel’s long-time friend Drusilla proclaims that [Homosexuality] is an abomination. Does it not say in Romans that if man lies with man as he lies with woman, he will surely be put to death? Same goes with woman-woman business, and even that high and mighty pope over there in the Vatican agrees with me on this one. (56)

Reorienting Home  145 While Carmel takes a somewhat more sympathetic approach, declaring homosexuality a “sickness” and calling on the group to “pray for their souls to be saved” (63), such moments once again reveal the high cost of transgressing such beliefs. They also suggest the role of women, alongside the male-dominated culture of the Dancehall scene, in policing the “clean” sexuality that is central to Caribbean identity. By presenting these two sources of identity and community for the Caribbean diaspora in Britain – the hypermasculine world of Dancehall music and the more feminized space of the Church – as deeply, and violently, opposed to homosexuality, Mr Loverman seems to suggest an impossibility of continued belonging for Barry, setting up his trajectory as one that necessarily entails a rejection of Caribbean culture and the wider black British diasporic community. Through the moments of cultural alienation detailed above, Barry’s coming-out story seems poised to be one that entails “moving out” from both a domestic and Caribbean national home towards cosmopolitan queer spaces. However, through the importance Barry places on the family home as a source of ontological security and as an emblem of triumph in the face of other struggles, the novel resists such narrative conventions and the kind of “queer humanist gaze” encountered in Julien’s documentary. Furthermore, the inclusion of women’s experiences via the more lyrical chapters told from Carmel’s perspective as well as Barry’s interactions with his daughters provides a counterpoint to Barry’s male-centered (and at times flatly misogynist) point of view. These sections run counter to the hypermasculine world found in Windrush novels like Lonely Londoners and prevent any straightforward demonizing of Carmel as someone who merely stands in the way of Barry’s happiness with Morris. Contrary to the convention of coming-out stories, in which the primary goal is to articulate the queer autobiographical subject, the inclusion of Carmel’s perspective also highlights the stakes of Barry’s choices for familial and even community success. Through the interaction between Barry’s and Carmel’s narrative perspectives, Mr Loverman articulates a reimagining of belonging that makes space for the complex entanglement of queer and diasporic ways of being.

Queering Home In her important work Impossible Desires (2005), Gayatri Gopinath highlights a number of queer South Asian diasporic texts that refuse a straight rejection of home and, as a result, articulate complex entanglements between queer and diasporic positions. A text like Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994), for example, disrupts such a narrative by rendering home as a space of queer sexual awakening rather than one of repression, “mapping […] homoeroticism onto the national space of Sri Lanka” (2003, 176). Though Selvadurai’s protagonist Arjie tells his

146  Precarious Domesticities story in retrospect from the diasporic space of Canada, we are never shown this world. Instead, Funny Boy sets Arjie’s narrative of sexual discovery alongside Sri Lanka’s unfolding tensions between Sinhalese and Tamil communities, and it is the latter that drives Arjie’s emigration along with his family. Furthermore, the family home is (at least at first) cast as a space that facilitates nonbinary sexual and gender identities through the aptly named “bride-bride” game in which Arjie regularly dons the precious white sari to “marry” one of his girl cousins (reluctantly cast as the groom). It is only the arrival of an American cousin – accosting him with imported words like “pansy” and “faggot” – that the fluidity of this space is disrupted (Selvadurai 1995, 11). Deepa Mehta’s film Fire (1996) also problematizes the narrative of “coming out as moving out” by inscribing homosexual desire into the rigidly heterosexual space of the Hindu middle-class domestic home. Mehta’s film recasts its traditional homosocial structure as a resource for the development of romantic feelings between two sisters-in-law. Given the deployment of the sacrosanct Hindu domestic space as an anti-­colonial nationalist image, which I discussed in Chapter 5, Fire directs its subversive message straight at the heart of Indian national identity. In the same way that Funny Boy links remembrance of Sri Lanka to erotic same-sex encounters, Fire’s domestic homoeroticism queers home (in both its national and domestic guises) rather than rejects it. As Gopinath summarizes, [W]hile many lesbian and gay texts imagine “home” as a place to be left behind, to be escaped in order to emerge into another, more liberatory space, the queer South Asian diasporic texts I consider here are more concerned with remaking the space of home from within. (2005, 14) There are productive parallels to be drawn between Mr Loverman and these South Asian queer texts for the way they open up more complex (if highly fraught) trajectories than the “coming out” as “moving out” narrative of progress. Like Selvadurai’s protagonist, Barrington’s memories of home are bound up with his relationship with Morris, queering the national space of Antigua and destabilizing its heterosexual self-image. It is in Antigua that the two originally meet and have their first sexual encounters. It is also where they are first discovered in flagrante on the floor of the family home by Barrington’s older brother Larry (Arjie’s first sexual encounter with a boy also takes place in his family’s home). Though Larry is initially taken aback by what he sees, he does not betray the boys’ secret, only admonishing them to take more care to avoid detection. Unlike Fire, in which a similar moment of revelation brings the status quo crashing down (and leads to the departure of both women),

Reorienting Home  147 Larry’s reaction seems to suggest that same-sex entanglements are not unheard of in this social world, even if such relationships would not be understood as a unique sexual identity nor antithetical to heterosexual marriage. Indeed, same-sex desire, at least between women, has been a feature of a number of Caribbean texts, including Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1985) which I discussed in Chapter 3. In this novel, the quasi-­ romantic bond between two young girls is mobilized as another form of resistance against heterosexual colonial domestic norms, rather than an identity or “orientation” as such.13 Through Barrington’s memories of Antigua, Mr Loverman suggests a similar, if even more submerged, world of male same-sex desire in the Caribbean homeland. However, unlike Selvadurai’s novel, which ends at the point of migration, Evaristo makes the diasporic space its primary setting. Where Funny Boy leaves the reader to assume a trajectory of increasing sexual freedom for its protagonist in Canada, Mr Loverman disrupts the narrative of “coming out” as “moving out” by rendering the place of arrival, London, not as the freeing space in which to fully express a “true” homosexual identity but as a continuation of the double-life practiced back home. Significantly, Barrington expresses a profound ambivalence toward metropolitan LGBTQ culture. As he puts it, he “don’t business with this gay-liberation stuff” (136), and any moment of possible identification is frequently overturned by a moment of distancing. He rejects the label “homosexual”, instead declaring himself “Barrysexual” (136), refuses to be associated with “pooftahs” (137) and playfully refers to being in the “wardrobe” rather than the closet (258). As much as Barrington may be alienated from the Caribbean community by its exclusion of same-sex love, the figure of Quentin Crisp (“that eccentric pooftah with blue-rinse hair” (137)) stands for Barry as representative of a culture that is equally if not more alienating. While Morris asserts that “He was the same as me and you. So that makes you a pooftah too”, Barry responds that I, for one, do not wear make-up, dye my hair, or do the mince-walk […]. Morris, when did you ever see me flapping about with limp wrists and squealing like a constipated castrato? […] Morris, I am individual, specific not generic. I am no more a pooftah than I am a homo, buller or anti-man. […] I am what I am. (137–138) Barrington’s distancing from a, albeit limited, male gay identity here can be read in a number of ways. On the one hand, it could be seen as a familiar step on the way out of the closet, a hatred of the self and repression of one’s “true” (homosexual) identity. On the other, however, it denotes a suspicion of narrow metropolitan definitions of same-sex desire, which Barry feels are unable to accommodate him: “I won’t have anybody sticking me in a box and labelling it” (138). As Hawley remarks, one of the

148  Precarious Domesticities problems with “traditional gay and lesbian discourse” is that it promotes “an implied invitation to ‘come out’ and embrace a ‘common’ (remarkably Western) gay brotherhood and lesbian sisterhood that cuts across any nice cultural distinctions” (2001, 7). By asserting that he is “no more a pooftah than […] a homo, buller or anti-man”, Barry alludes to the limited modes of identification and belonging available to him as a queer black man in British gay subculture as much as in the Caribbean diaspora. Tellingly, Barry’s rejection of the Quentin Crisp image centers on his makeup and dyed hair, in other words, his adoption of what are seen as typically feminine attributes. By contrast, Barry asserts that his sexual activities with men have nothing to do with any lessening of his masculinity. In fact, aside from his sexual preference, Barry is by all accounts the same hypermasculine figure found in Sam Selvon’s postwar novel. His attitudes towards women also seem right at home with the likes of Moses, Tolroy and Cap. In one attempt to better understand his daughter through an adult education class on feminism, Barry is ejected from the discussion for his offensive views about women’s “natural defectiveness” (127). Indeed, central to Barry’s identity is his position as patriarch and provider for his family. His adherence to this image is frequently contextualized within a history of black struggles that extends back to the time of slavery: Me and Morris often chinwag about how many of our men can’t settle with one woman at a time and how many of our men sow seed, then don’t hang around to watch it flower […]. It is embedded in our psyche from centuries of slavery, when we wasn’t allowed to be husbands or fathers. We was breeders for the stud farm, and our pickneys’ totemic (and morally criminal) father figure was the owner of the plantation, who held the power of life and death over us. (226) Kobena Mercer makes a similar point in his work on black (queer) cinema in Britain, suggesting that it is due to this collective experience of trauma that “black men have adopted certain patriarchal values such as physical strength, sexual prowess and being in control as a means of survival against the repressive and violent system of subordination to which they were subjected” (1994, 137). Such ideas also recall the explanation given in Julien’s documentary for the homophobia expressed in Jamaican Dancehall songs, though here they are being expressed by a queer black character, suggesting a complex layering of identification. Still, for Barry, to “be a man” is to defy a cycle of lapses in male familial responsibility and provide a stable household from which the next generation can thrive and, in this sense, is very different from the violent masculinity advocated in Buju Banton’s song. Central to Barry’s reluctance to disrupt the status quo is his determination to break “the curse of we people by

Reorienting Home  149 being a good husband and father” (159). This “curse” is further corroborated through the experiences of the novel’s female characters. In a flashback to their disappointing wedding night back in Antigua, Carmel comforts herself with the knowledge that “plenty woman round here don’t get husbands / they just get babies” (19). The statement is underscored by the experiences of Carmel’s childhood friends Drusilla, whose husband goes to jail leaving her with three children (48), and Asseleitha, who was raped by her father and forced to send the resulting child to New York (201), as well as Carmel’s own father, a philanderer that beat her mother and often left the family for long periods of time with no explanation. Barry’s daughter Donna and grandson Daniel’s abandonment by the womanizing Frankie further adds to the litany of absentee husbands and fathers, which serve as the history against which Barrington constructs his family role. Barry’s insistence on breaking the cycle of black male absenteeism is tied to his determination to provide his family with economic and ontological security, recalling bell hooks’ (1991) argument that for those who are still reeling from the effects of slavery and racial oppression, the home stands as a space of resistance against the many outside forces that seek to disrupt black family life. The physical space of the family house, with its “spacious dining table”, “capacious kitchen with its high Victorian ceiling and stately church-like windows that looks out on my amplitudinous, tree-adorned garden that stretches back seventy flower-bedecked feet” (31), is a reassuring presence for Barry throughout the novel, as much as it is also a barrier to a more fulfilling life with Morris. A recurring point of conflict for the couple is that Morris wants Barrington to move out of the home he shares with his wife and in with him: How did Morris expect me to abandon my manor back then when Odette [Morris’s ex-wife] left him? How did he expect me to move to the alien terra firma of another part of London – to live as man and man? […] Truth is, I only ever lived in three houses my whole life: parental, rental, familial. I was transplanted to Stokey over fifty years ago and I gone native. This. My. Home. (118) This conflict with Morris sets the novel within a very different set of problems than we have previously seen in diasporic fiction, such as those discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, in which the search for home (in both the literal and metaphysical sense) is central. This is especially the case for the Caribbean “Windrush novels” depicting Barry’s generation, which entailed “a desperate territorial struggle for home within the context of housing shortages and the overtly racist ‘colour bar’ surrounding domestic space” (Procter 2003, 4). Not only is Barrington a homeowner, he is

150  Precarious Domesticities a landlord who has profited from the gentrification of Stoke Newington rather than become a victim of it: I remember the exact moment when the Kingdom of Barrington was conceived. […] At some point I found myself paying proper attention for the first time to the three slummified Victorian houses on the Walk opposite [mine and Morris’s] spot. Vandalized windows, wrecked roofs, gardens being reclaimed by the forests of Ye Olde England. “Look how huge they is, spar. Once upon a time they must-a been built for the rich, and, you mark my words, one day the rich shall recolonize them.” (115) Barrington’s contribution to the restoration of these dilapidated homes is reminiscent of Hortense and Gilbert’s trajectory at the end of Small Island, though his vision goes beyond the establishment of a resistant black domestic space. It is figured as a means to “defy the low expectations the indigènes had of us, exploit an economy that, compared to our poor-poor islands, was a financial paradise” (115), to raise their economic position the way he notices other immigrant groups have done. He wants his fair share in the capitalist economy in which “[black] labour drip-fed plantation profits to this country for hundreds of years before manumission” (116). In its depiction of Barry buying into the British faith in property ownership as the route to social and financial advancement, Mr Loverman registers a shift in fortune for (at least some of) Windrush’s early arrivals. In this sense, it alludes more to Sam Selvon’s belated sequel to Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending (1975).14 In this novel, published nearly twenty years after Lonely Londoners, Moses Alouetta has climbed up from the bedsits of his earlier days with “the boys” and became a landlord, renting out rooms to a multi-racial set of tenants. “If you are a tenant,” he says, “you catch your ass forever, but it you are a landlord, it is a horse of a different colour” (Selvon 1984, 2). However, Moses Ascending is also framed by the rise of Black Power movements as a more confrontational strategy to achieving greater status in Britain. His old friend Sir Galahad has joined the movement and pays Moses a visit to try to convince him to take part: “I am glad to see you in prosperous surroundings. It is good for Our People to make progress. But you must not forget the struggle.” “I’m glad that you appreciate that I struggled to get where I am,” I say. “Not that struggle,” he wave my words away. “I mean the struggle. It is only right that you should contribute the cause.” (1984, 11)

Reorienting Home  151 Though he allows the basement of his house to be used as a headquarters by a local black political group, Moses asserts that he wants nothing to do with “black power, nor white power, nor any fucking power but my own” but just “to live in peace and reap the harvest of the years of slavery I put in in Brit’n” (1984, 14, 3). There are productive parallels to draw here between Moses and Barry as figures that are both suspicious of collective movements, especially when they threaten individual security. For Moses, the trouble potentially brought to his doorstep is good enough reason to avoid any entanglements with politics, whose gains are much less material, if they are made at all. While the younger generation like Galahad may perceive him as “selling out”, his own personal struggle provides him with a different set of priorities from those whose ways were paved, at least in part, by the older generation of Caribbean migrants. This tension between “the struggle” and Moses’s individual struggle to reach economic freedom resonates with Barry’s suspicion of gay liberation movements. As Hawley suggests, the “non-materialist” approach of queer theory has led to a downplaying of class (here as it intersects with race) as an explanatory factor in analyses of sexualities and a focus on “desire over needs” (2001, 7). For Barry, as for Moses in Selvon’s later novel, the memory of having just got out from under the yoke of one oppressive set of circumstances makes him reluctant to take on another. As Barry articulates it, when your people come from nothing, each subsequent generation is supposed to supersede the achievements of its parents. My father had escaped the fields of his predecessors […]. Bettering ourselves was no joke when we was only a few generations away from the hold of the SS Business Enterprise out of Africa. (158) Taking this history into account, “moving out” as the route to “coming out” takes on a privileged resonance as the domain of those who can afford to place familial and personal financial security in jeopardy for the insecurity of a queer life. The unevenness of such an exchange is alluded to in the one moment Barry feels tempted to reveal his sexuality to his daughter’s one-time lover Merle (herself in a state of near homelessness), but is pulled back by the image of his wife and child “safely asleep inside the big house that Barrington Walker had bought for his family” (130). Alongside the fear of losing these hard-won material comforts, the novel sets up a conflict between Barry’s desire to be with Morris and the sense of homeliness that is bound up with his heterosexual marriage. As he puts it, my feet are cemented to its [the house’s] foundations. Problem is, so are Carmel’s. […] [T]o leave here will be like dismantling and

152  Precarious Domesticities re-mantling myself in some strange, cold place. Houses don’t turn into homes straightaway. They need years of a life lived to feel comfortable. (39) Barry’s point that “houses don’t turn into homes straightaway” recalls the work of “sedimentation” that goes into transforming empty interior space into a meaningful and homely place, and acknowledges that it is through his wife’s labor that this process occurs. Barry associates a sense of home with “the smell of goat curry and rice and peas in coconut milk slow-cooking on the stove” (40) and bathrooms “all freshly cleaned, aired and anointed with sweet-smelling pot-pourri” (39), Carmel’s strict cleaning routines stemming from life in the Caribbean “where deterring tropical creepy crawlies was a necessity” (39). These rituals of cooking and cleaning and their accompanying sights and smells provide a sense of ontological security for Barrington against which cohabitation with another man (even if for love) provides a poor substitute. To Barry, such homemaking skills are intrinsic to women, which they “pass down through the generations, like secret rites, like how to give birth to children and how to give me grief” (167). Though misguided, such emotional attachments to gendered divisions of labor suggest his association of homeliness with heterosexual marriage (as in Sarah Ahmed’s example at the beginning of this chapter). Carmel’s ways of maintaining the home also imbue the space with cultural associations through sense memories tying Carmel’s practices of keeping house with that of his mother in Antigua. Such sensory associations place Barry in a complex relation to the family house as a space within which he is simultaneously at home and out of place. The significance of Barry’s attachment to this heterosexual domestic space is further underlined by a brief affair he has with Stephen, a man he meets in one of his adult education classes: Stephen could’ve walked out of Brideshead Revisited, with his foppish blond fringe and rah-rah vowels. Lived in a loft over at Canary Wharf. Old spice warehouse, acres of scarred floorboards, brick walls and wharf windows […]. Still with the same hoists outside that used to haul up barrels of cinnamon and turmeric, saffron and cumin – when all the spoils of Empire flowed upriver. (188) In contrast to his own female-centered home, Stephen’s flat suggests to Barry a “lifestyle for real men: wood and metal, leather and brick” (189). At the same time, however, its association with the spice trade “when all the spoils of Empire flowed up river” places it within a history of colonial exploitation and consumption, coterminous with nostalgia

Reorienting Home  153 for a lost home of English aristocracy (Brideshead) that is willfully blind to the source of its wealth and security. This linking of Stephen’s home with empire alludes to Gayatri Gopinath’s argument that queer desire is bound up with the submerged histories of colonialism and racism. As she states, “the queer racialised body becomes a historical archive for both individuals and communities, one that is excavated through the very act of desiring the racial Other” (Gopinath 2005, 1). In Barry’s words, the two men are merely “exotic beasts to one another” (189), recalling “the historical availability of brown bodies to a white imperial gaze”; the encounter remains inscribed in an “erotics of power” that is ultimately insurmountable (Gopinath 2005, 2). Although Barry may feel an affinity with the space because of its orientation towards a different lifeworld, he is inevitably “out of place” because of his racial difference (might Barry, too, be simply another “spoil of empire”?). These two home spaces stand as emblems of the complexity of Barry’s trajectory “out of the closet”: on the one hand, a family home that is inscribed with Caribbean cultural identity and within which he occupies a position of patriarchal authority, though where he must conceal his sexuality, versus queer (home) spaces within which he is marked as an object of exotic fascination. In this way, Barry’s dilemma is framed as a choice between two spaces where he is simultaneously “at home” and “out of place”. It is therefore useful to return to the climactic scene discussed at the start, in which the sound of Buju Banton’s music playing in Barrington’s family home prompts an epiphany that finally leads him to reveal his sexuality to his family. The repetition of “my house” (“that Buju Banton fella is being played inside my house? My house…” [194]) suggests that it is precisely this invasion of his otherwise homely space with homophobic music that is the final straw, as it renders this otherwise familiar and comforting space unhomely. After Barry’s relationship with Morris is out in the open, his youngest daughter Maxine takes him out to a gay bar to meet her friends. Though he is ambivalent about being initiated into this new world, Barry revels in the fact that he and Morris are finally free to hold hands in public for the first time as they walk through the queer public space of London’s Soho. This denouement might again suggest Barry’s “coming out” as a “moving out” from both national/cultural and domestic homes. However, this new queer family gestures at an alternative to the narrative of progress in which “coming out” is dependent upon a rejection of home (culture) and the reproduction of colonial power structures (as in Barry’s encounter with Stephen). The novel continues its refusal to deploy a queer humanist gaze by leaving Barrington and Morris in the midst of a London gay community that is not only multicultural (and multiracial) but is associated with a revisionist project that locates queer histories within a pan-African past. One of Maxine’s friends, a British Nigerian writing a PhD on the history of homosexuality in Africa, remarks,

154  Precarious Domesticities Let’s not forget […] that prior to Christianity sub-Saharan Africa had indigenous religions with their own or moral beliefs. The Zande Warriors of Zaire, the Berbers of Siwa in Egypt, transvestism in Madagascar, a boy’s rite of passage in Benin. […] It’s homophobia, not homosexuality, that was imported to Africa, because European missionaries regarded it as a sin. (258) In addition to providing a counter-narrative to African and Caribbean nationalisms that paint homosexuality as a foreign disease, such ideas also supply an alternative rallying point for queer organizing. Kobena Mercer has argued that [P]recisely because of our lived experiences of discrimination in and exclusion from the white gay and lesbian community, and of discrimination in and exclusions from the black community, we locate ourselves in the spaces between different communities – at the intersections of power relations determined by race, class, gender and sexuality. (Gever, Parmar, and Greyson 1993, 239) Barry’s previous refusal to leave his life behind and enter a fully queer life can be understood as a way of existing in this “between” that Mercer speaks of. However, this ending suggests the possibility of belonging in a queer black diasporic culture as a more concrete alternative to the two unhomely options. This counter-narrative of black identity “queers” the national home of the Caribbean rather than presenting rejection and escape as the only option for those who follow nonnormative patterns of living. We also see a similar process of transformation in Barry and Morris’s decision to remain in the marital home after Carmel moves out to start a new life in Antigua. However, they remodel this previously heterosexually oriented space in which the marital bed was “the site of a couple who’d trained their bodies to not so much as brush up against each other in sleep” (272) to a space that is able to accommodate their new relationship: [T]he builders moved in to obliterate all traces of my former life, wife and strife. They knocked through the front room and back room to create one large living room with wooden floors […]. We had the kitchen gutted, its back wall replaced with a (parlour-palmed) conservatory. Upstairs the marital bedroom joined forces with the marital bathroom to become one massive bathroom […]. The two remaining bedrooms became one large master bedroom […]. (295)

Reorienting Home  155 This physical transformation of space opens the home up to the sedimenting of other ways of being within its walls. Both of these new “homes”, the queer black diasporic space and queer domestic space, suggest a “coming-out” narrative that is not “moving out” in the sense of rejecting one’s previous identity in favor of a new one. Rather, it involves what Fortier refers to as the reprocessing of home that makes space for the queer body within (2003, 116). This reprocessing is, in many ways, the subject of Evaristo’s novel. By rewriting a queer narrative into the Windrush period, Mr Loverman asks us to look again at what might on first glance appear to be a stable heteronormative familial ground on which to build Caribbean diasporic identity. In one of the novel’s final scenes, Barry and Morris make love in their new queer home to the sound of Shabba Ranks’s “Mr Loverman”, which also lends itself to the novel’s title. “Oh yes, Ranks might spout homophobic doggerel”, Barry admits, “but this song is our perfect wine an grine theme tune” (243). By recasting Dancehall music, such an important symbol of Caribbean diasporic identity, as the sound track of gay lovemaking here, the novel refuses any simple rejection of this culture but instead suggests the possibility of reorienting its meaning in a process akin to what Sara Ahmed has dubbed “queer use” (2017).

Conclusion This chapter focused on a reading of Mr Loverman, while also situating it within a wider range of queer diasporic narratives and the conventions of the “coming-out story”. This enabled an exploration of the fractures and intersections between “queer” and “diaspora” around the question of home. The novel should be understood as participating in recent transnational debates about homophobia in Caribbean and African diasporas more widely. However, by also placing it within the longer (literary) history of black Britain, we can remain attentive to the ways that it complicates the struggle for sexual liberation with the material realities of achieving economic and ontological security in the UK. As much as Mr Loverman presents a critique of attitudes towards homosexuality within the Caribbean diasporic community, Barrington Walker’s more complex trajectory also problematizes an LGBTQ politics that expects its members to leave problematic cultural attachments behind and join a deterritorialized global sexual identity. Through its protagonist’s continued attachments to home, at both national and domestic scales, the novel refuses this straightforward narrative of progress in which the home culture and the family home are rejected in favor of “moving out” to the public spaces of a metropolitan gay lifestyle. Instead, the novel illustrates what Anne-Marie Fortier has described as a “queering of home”, contesting the idea of home as something inherently heteronormative and associated with sameness, but “reimagined as a

156  Precarious Domesticities site of struggle constituted by class, religion, ethnicity, nation” (2003, 132). The novel therefore complicates any simple overlapping between “queer” and “diaspora” as critical positions. It problematizes the celebration of the “sexile” as the ideal deterritorialized figure by opening up debate about whether “moving out” is a truly liberatory trajectory for its black queer protagonist. It also exposes how both queer and diasporic communities have their own systems of regulation and exclusion that often come into conflict, so that it is important leave space for the terms to be mutually interrogative rather than additive. By finishing on a work that looks back, in a number of different ways, to the postwar moment of mass migration to the Britain, this book in some sense ends where it began. In the first body chapter, I argued that Buchi Emecheta’s early novels about settling in London provide an important, if underappreciated, counter-narrative to the single male vision we get with the much more widely read and celebrated Lonely Londoners. Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and In the Ditch explore the trials of family life for these new arrivals, centering the domestic space as an important site of struggle and resistance. Evaristo’s novel also offers a similar kind of retrospective on this history that asks us to look again at the seemingly heteronormative origins of the black British “family”. By writing a queer character into this important moment, it too reorients our perception of what it meant to make home in a place where you are far from welcome.

Notes 1 In this chapter, I use the term “LGBTQ” to refer to the political coalition of those who identify with nonnormative sexualities and “queer” to refer to a critical/theoretical body of work (“queer theory”) and as a broader term that includes those who engage in nonnormative practices but do not necessarily identify as such. 2 Some examples include men who have sex with men (MSM) but do not identify as gay, such as is found in West Africa or Brazil and female romantic friendships in the Caribbean, which I discuss later in this chapter, as well as traditional transgender communities like the hijras of Pakistan or kathoeys (lady boys) of Thailand. 3 See, for example, Patton and Sanchez-Eppler (2000), Hawley (2001) and Cruz-Malave and Manalansan (2002). 4 As in, for example, Gopinath (2005) and Patton and Sanchez-Eppler (2000). 5 A controversial and much cited Time article dubbed the Caribbean, and Jamaica in particular, “the most homophobic place on earth” (Padgett 2006). There have also been a number of recent documentaries about homophobia in Africa (Born This Way, 2013; God Loves Uganda 2013; Call Me Kuchu, 2013) (spurred by the proposed bill to make homosexual acts punishable by death in Uganda in 2013) and the Caribbean (The Abominable Crime, 2013). Partly in response to such indictments, there has been a recent upsurge of work on sexuality in Caribbean literary production. See, for example, Smith (2011), Houlden (2015), writer Thomas Glave’s anthology of gay and lesbian writing from the Caribbean (2008) and a 2012 special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing on “Caribbean Queer”.

Reorienting Home  157 6 Publishing Triangle is an American association of gay and lesbian publishers. 7 The recognition of this connection can however be traced back much further to the work of M. Jaqui Alexander in the 1990s (1991, 1994). She explores the effects of colonial sexual mores on the region’s modes of social policing, which I discussed as it relates to Caribbean women in Chapter 3. 8 For a detailed account of the history of homosexuality among Europeans in the colonies, see Aldrich (2002), and in the Caribbean in particular, see Sheller (2012). As is frequently noted, the laws setting out the illegality of homosexuality in the Caribbean and other former colonies are largely hangovers from colonial statute books rather than legislation introduced since independence. 9 See also Patricia Saunders’s essay in Smith’s collection about the intertwining of sexual and material consumption in the Caribbean. 10 For a detailed exploration of the controversy surrounding “Boom Bye Bye”, see Chin (1997). 11 Schilt does go on to point to ways that Julien disrupts this “queer humanist gaze” in the film through his use of biblical imagery, which works to unite the struggle against racism and homophobia. 12 Further references are to this edition. 13 Both Smith’s volume (2011) and a special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing on “Caribbean Queer” (Emily 2012) address this submerged presence of female romantic relationships in Caribbean literature and culture. MacDonald-Smythe (2011) and Tinsley (2011) discuss practices like macacotte (in St. Lucia, Martinique and Dominica) and mati wroko (Suriname), respectively. Macocotte translates as “my darling” (the French cocotte is used as a term of endearment to refer to a young girl), and mati wroko literally means “the work of friends”, and both exist independently from imported terms and identities like “lesbian”. 14 I am grateful to John McLeod for drawing my attention to this resonance between Barry and Moses in Moses Ascending.

8 Conclusion Homing the Metropole

In 2005–2006 the Geffrye Museum of Home in East London held an exhibition entitled The West Indian Front Room: Memories and Impressions of Black British Homes, which featured an installation by British-Vincentian artist/curator Michael McMillan in which he recreated the front room from his childhood memories growing up in High Wicombe. The exhibition was widely acclaimed and went on to inspire a BBC Four documentary, Tales from the Front Room (Percival 2007), and similar installations in Manchester, Amsterdam and Curacao. For McMillan, the front room serves as an entry point for thinking about the journey of West Indian immigrants in Britain and the ambivalence that often accompanied the process of settling and “making home” in this at once familiar and hostile landscape. The front room came to stand for the hopes and aspirations of the first generation of arrivals who had experienced housing discrimination and the poor conditions of one-room living in lodging houses. In such spaces, “grips” (reinforced suitcases) stashed above the wardrobe held the only personal items, “valued belongings and memories from ‘back home’, [and were] an archive of memories and dreams: souvenirs, photographs, clothing, documents and cherished things ‘put down’ for a better day” (­McMillan 2009c, 5). While these “grips” stood as symbols of migration and transience, the front room, by contrast, stood as an achievement of some degree of permanence after years of hard work and saving. It represented social mobility, material security, privacy and the ability to create a sense of home in Britain; it was a space to have a family, to put down roots. The front room functioned as the conduit between inside and outside. It was the “front line” between the family and the world beyond its walls, as well a space to represent the family to the world. While its conservatism and meticulous policing (against dirt as well as clumsy children) echo the imposed norms of Caribbean “respectability” explored in Chapter 3, McMillan asserts that this space should not be thought of in such simple terms as a reproduction of colonial aesthetics in the metropole but as a “transcultural contact zone” where “there is no such thing as a pure point of origin” (2009a, 145). As he goes on to argue,

Conclusion: Homing the Metropole  159 The unpacking of the aesthetics and cultural practices of the front room reflects a blurring of boundaries between “high” and “low” culture, between taste and style, which connects to the “dialogic interventions of diasporic, creolizing cultures.” […] [It is] a dialogue between being seen to conform to conventions in fashion and certain standards of taste, and in dealing with the realities of everyday life and finding one’s own style. (2009a, 147) Indeed, as his work suggests, the front room was more than a domestic performance of respectability but provided a space in which the community could coalesce. Families now had a place to receive visitors and entertain, activities that were largely impractical or not even permitted in the lodging house. It was a space for the sharing of familiar food and drink (themselves an expression of cultural connections) and functioned as an anchoring point of psychic and physical safety protected from the frequently hostile streets outside. One of the reasons for the exhibition’s success was its ability to generate feelings of recognition in visitors who were frequently heard pointing at objects and exclaiming things like “remember that!” and “we had one of them!” (McMillan 2009c). Indeed, many commentators in the BBC documentary remark on the uncanny similarity of their childhood front rooms to those of their West Indian friends due to the presence of recurring objects and motifs. These include the glass cabinet containing precious and rarely used glass and chinaware – a display of the family’s material success; the drinks trolley filled with rum and other spirits (complete with pineapple ice bucket) – a typically male domain in this otherwise female-controlled space; patterned wallpaper and carpet in bright colors to stave off the dull English climate; and numerous glass ornaments atop handmade crochet doilies – crochet being one of the few skills imparted to girls in a limited colonial education system. Other key items included the radiogram, which stood like a “religious object” in many Caribbean homes. As McMillan explains, Since many West Indians, especially men, were excluded from white male-dominated pubs and clubs, entertainment took place in the home with music played on the radiogram. And whether it was bluebeat, calypso, ska, reggae or soul, it enabled us to reconnect with our original selves through song, rhythm and dance. (2009b) In addition to music providing some connection to home, the walls were filled with photographs of family members left behind. And, to complete the circle, family photos, often staged in domestic settings that conveyed maximum success in Britain,1 were sent to relatives back home.

160  Precarious Domesticities Also on the wall could be found images of black liberation figures like Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X alongside pictures of the Queen and Christian religious imagery, once again a testament to the ambivalent and negotiated nature of this space. In this way, the front room functioned as a portal between the home left behind and the new home abroad. Furthermore, through its “must have” objects, each one representing hours of hard work in this new country, it constituted the material expression of a collective social and cultural identity in Britain. At the same time, the front room was also a site of contestation, as the second generation grew up and came to experience a dissonance between the decorum of that private space and the need to stage visible resistance against discrimination outside. The West Indian Front Room therefore encapsulates many of the arguments I have been tracing in this book. It stands as a physical manifestation of the importance of material security and of having a separate space in which to rebuild the self and the community among the hardships that migration necessarily entails. Through its emphasis on objects and décor, McMillan’s installation is also a testament to how migrant domestic practices are not “merely” banal, everyday activities but expressions of complex intersections of race, class, gender and generation, as well as of the continued ambivalent presence of a colonizing domesticity. As a result, such spaces cannot be consigned to the purely “apolitical” realm, but are entangled with the power struggles – over space, culture, gender norms and national identity – that go on in the public sphere. The installation, like the original home spaces it was based on, functions as a statement of belonging in Britain and a refusal to bend to the many pressures that work to “un-home” migrant and diasporic communities materially and discursively. This book has centered on literary works that, like McMillan’s installation, engage with domesticity and homemaking as a political act. Through its textual readings, Domestic Intersections set out to do two things. First, my aim was to show how issues arising from making a home are as central to narratives of migration as those associated with leaving it behind. In particular, this was about foregrounding domestic homes and the “banal”, everyday activities that take place there and resisting a slippage between the material and the figurative in which the private sphere merely stands for the public. Doing so, however, required an approach that did not reinstate a nostalgic investment in the home as an unchanging and bounded space, maintained by women’s unacknowledged labor and designed to keep out anything that might threaten its comfortable familiarity. It is precisely by thinking intersectionally; considering race, gender and sexuality alongside class and other material factors, that essentialist readings of home and celebratory readings of migration can be confronted and complicated. When taking this approach, it is impossible to regard the home only as a parochial site

Conclusion: Homing the Metropole  161 from which one must cut ties in order to be initiated into the progressive realm of “ideas”. Paradoxically, it is only from the privileged position of “feeling at home” that the value of its material security can be so easily dismissed. And, far from an unthinking form of cultural reproduction, what actually emerges from the texts considered is a recasting of home as a space of creative cultural syncretism, ambivalence and ongoing negotiation with the demands of everyday life. It is through the activities of habitation discussed herein, that migrant and disporic subjects assert their belonging within the larger spaces of their adopted city and nation. Therefore, to return to Edward Said’s question in the opening epigraph of this book, one thing that is worth saving between the “extremes of exile” and the “bloody-minded affirmations of nationalism” might well be this unsung daily work of homemaking that capitulates to neither. The second and related aim has been to draw out the ways that literary representations of migration engage with and make productive aesthetic use of discourses and tropes surrounding the homes and domestic practices of racial and religious others within the British nation. Persistent representations of family dysfunction, architectural dilapidation, insularity, radicalization and female oppression have worked to render the residences and neighborhoods of migrant and diasporic communities as profoundly unhomely spaces. Alongside these discourses (and often feeding them) is the continuing legacy of the cult of domesticity and its exportation to the colonies as a benchmark of civilization. The novels discussed in this book, in a variety of ways, draw on these (re)circulating images as part of their discursive interrogation of the intertwined logics of colonialism, racism and xenophobia. We saw how seemingly apolitical activities like mothering (Chapter 2), cleaning (Chapters 3 and 7), cooking and eating (Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 7), dressing (Chapter 4) and decorating (Chapters 6 and 7) take on political significance when considered in their respective historical and social contexts. As a result, these novels demonstrate that we should look for resistance in the so-called private sphere as much as we do in the public. One of my central questions was how the processes of homemaking that take place in the domestic sphere are entangled with discourses regarding integration, assimilation, segregation, nationalism, national security and multiculturalism that are more readily associated with the public sphere. Put another way, I wanted to investigate how the works dramatize the political stakes involved in making a home in the metropole, but without a simple metaphorical substitution of the private for the public. Drawing on Susan Andrade’s (2011) work on African women’s writing, I employed the practice of “reading across the threshold” in order to locate meaning in the interrelationship between the domestic, private concerns of the works analyzed and the wider public debates they also engage with. This reading practice therefore facilitated an attention to how the works demonstrate the interdependence between

162  Precarious Domesticities the so-called separate spheres. Part I was framed by sociological and journalistic discourses that have produced a picture of a nation divided between “well kept homes and families” and a problematic black home life that must be policed or rendered invisible (Webster 1998). Then, Part II examined how notions about “self-segregating” Muslim communities have emboldened a British securityscape that seeks access to the private lives of those whose “alien” domestic practices are perceived as threatening to the status quo of British civil society. Lastly, Part III considered the state-imposed precarity of the asylum system and the potential limitations of an LGBTQ politics that does not acknowledge the material and cultural differences of those it invites to “come out” and join what can be a precarious existence in gay subcultures. I began by asking what it means to “make” a home when that home is in a foreign country and culture (and one of an erstwhile colonizer), with different codes and kinds of spaces within which to carry out this work. The novels considered each respond to this question in different ways, deploying a number of thematic concerns and formal techniques that dramatize the complex set of negotiations that are an intrinsic part of this process. Each of them challenges, through different means, the idea that the home spaces of immigrants and their descendants are culturally homogeneous fortresses aimed at keeping out the British culture beyond their walls. In Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (Chapter 4), for example, we get a picture of a hybrid form of domesticity, where Bangladeshi and British cultural signifiers are combined to respond to the needs of the characters in their daily lives. In spite of the mythological power of the “Going Home Syndrome” and the negative tropes foisted on the community from outside, Ali presents a home that is rife with negotiation. First, we saw how Nazneen’s performative techniques work to undermine the male investment in a stable and familiar domestic space. Then, we saw how the novel’s detailed attention to the materiality of the family’s flat and its domestic activities work as deflationary mechanisms against readerly expectations of an exotic or threatening space of alterity. In a different way, Leila Aboulela’s novel (Chapter 5) also works to engender a hybrid form of domesticity. By deploying the narrative machinery of the domestic novel, The Translator breaks down the binary between the tropes of “home” and “harem” that continue to operate in mainstream representations of Muslim homes and the experiences of women inside them. By repurposing these conventions, the novel recasts Islamic home spaces as those where Muslim women exert a unique form of moral and spiritual power. I also asked to what extent we can think of homemaking as meaningful work in spite of its gendered associations with reproduction and “immanence” (de Beauvoir 1997) when compared to productive work in the public sphere. In Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen (­Chapter 2), the home becomes a creative and resistant space for

Conclusion: Homing the Metropole  163 Adah when confronted by gender discrimination from within her own community and racial discrimination outside of it. Against a backdrop of the commodification of black women’s wage labor outside the home and a sociological discourse that pathologizes black motherhood, Emecheta’s novel represents mothering and domesticity as facilitators of black women’s self-actualization and creative production rather than barriers to its fruition. Then, in In the Ditch, mothering becomes a catalyst for community organizing and collective action against the gendered, racial and class discrimination ingrained in the British welfare system. In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (Chapter  6), homemaking also takes on a creative role as a form of storytelling that produces some sense of continuity in the face of the rupture and depersonalization caused by forced migration and an asylum system with restrictive narrative demands. We saw how domestic objects take on narrative significance through their function in building and destroying human relationships that greatly impact the fate of the novel’s refugee protagonist. In this context, making home also functions as a form of resistance against the state-imposed impermanence experienced by those who seek asylum. These examples, among others discussed, point to the need to reconceive homemaking as a practice which offers both productive and creative possibilities. At the same time, this book demonstrated how norms of domesticity can also be deployed as tools of subjugation. While in some contexts practices of homemaking can become subversive, in others they are hegemonic. Though in Emecheta’s novels domestic activities like mothering take on a resistant character, Andrea Levy’s Small Island (Chapter 3) engages with imperialist codes of “respectability” that have been used to police the black female body in the British Caribbean. In this discourse, cleanliness and the proper ordering of domestic space function as markers of social ascendancy beyond imposed, yet internalized, ideas of racial inferiority. Though Hortense adheres to these codes perfectly, we see the sense of betrayal they produce when she arrives in Britain to find she is read as just another black immigrant. However, via Queenie’s upbringing, we are made aware of how class differences in Britain have also been delineated according to the same set of gendered domestic codes. Through the fraught interactions in Queenie’s London lodging house, Small Island generates a critique of the cult of domesticity and its role in producing and regulating social boundaries. Benarndine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman (Chapter 7) points to the hegemonic role of domesticity in reinforcing and maintaining heteronormativity. Nevertheless, the novel complicates any straightforward rejection of the home as simply a source of disempowerment for its queer Caribbean protagonist. By framing its coming-out narrative within black people’s historical struggles to achieve material and familial stability, it presents a process of queering home as a more viable alternative. Therefore, in

164  Precarious Domesticities both novels, it is only through an attention to the intersections between class, race, gender and sexuality that the full complexity of the stakes of domesticity can be drawn out. I opened this book with an image of the dreary façades of houses in neighborhoods where we encounter Britain’s contemporary migrant populations. The chapters that followed were about crossing the threshold of these spaces and unpacking the nuanced worlds contained therein, beyond the reductive tropes that continue to circulate. This work poses further questions about how postcolonial scholarship engages with migration and displacement. It has underlined the importance of taking account of the material differences between migratory experiences and the need to revisit the notion that attachments to home are necessarily regressive or parochial. Rather, we need to think about ways that the experience of homeliness can be democratized in an increasingly exploitative and transitory globalized world. Furthermore, building on arguments put forward by feminists of color, it presents a challenge to the embedded idea that the domestic is a static, apolitical and fundamentally uninteresting space. Ultimately, I hope this work will encourage scholars of all kinds to look again at the private sphere as a meaning-making space, and one that can function as a potential site of postcolonial and other forms of resistance in a range of geographical contexts and historical moments.

Note 1 See Hall (2000) for a detailed exploration of this phenomenon.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to endnotes. Abbas, Sadia 100 Aboulela, Leila 19–20, 72, 95, 97–103, 105–9, 111–14, 162; The Translator 19, 20, 72, 95, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108–10, 112–14, 115n5, 162 accommodation 14, 32, 35, 130, 132 Achebe, Chinua 29, 34 Ahmed, Sara 3, 4, 6, 18, 68–70, 79–80, 94, 139, 140, 155; Queer Phenomenology 3, 139 Ain’t I a Woman (hooks) 33 Ali, Monica 19, 71, 76–7, 91, 92, 97, 99, 162; see also Brick Lane (Ali) Andrade, Susan Z. 29–31, 49n6, 50n7, 161 Annie John (Kincaid) 59, 147 anti-colonial nationalism 29, 31, 113, 146 anti-immigration 54, 119 anti-terrorism strategy 75–6 Armstrong, Nancy 59–60, 98, 102, 104–7, 110, 111, 113 asylum: regimes 120–1; system 129–32 authenticity 89–91, 94, 96n7, 115n5 autoethnography (Pratt) 109 Bachelard, Gaston 8 Banglatown branding project 19, 89–91, 94 Banton, Buju 142–4, 148, 153 Barthes, Roland 93–4 Beauvoir, Simone de 8, 42 Bhabha, Homi K. 5 The Black Album (Kureishi) 99 The Black Atlantic (Gilroy) 143

Blommaert, Jan 123, 136n7 Bondi, Liz 11 Bourdieu, Pierre 127 Boyce-Davies, Carole 59 Brah, Avtar 15, 72n5 Brick Lane (Ali) 19, 71, 76–9, 81, 83, 88–91, 94, 95, 97–9, 162; consumption 89–94; Nazneen and performance 79–89 British Muslims 75, 79, 98, 99, 106 Britishness 52, 58–60 Brontë, Charlotte 98, 102, 104–6, 112; Jane Eyre 98, 102, 105–8, 111 Brophy, Sarah 52, 56 Butler, Judith 82, 83 By the Sea (Gurnah) 21, 114, 120, 124–6, 129, 132–5, 163 Carby, Hazel V. 9, 10, 38 Caribbean and queer 141–5 Certeau, Michel de 13 Chambers, Claire 99, 107, 115n5 Chatterjee, Partha 5, 113 Christianity 144, 154 Civil Rights Movement 33 clash of civilizations 97 Clifford, James 11, 14, 15, 132 Coetzee, J. M. 112 colonialism 7, 11–21, 31, 34, 64, 126, 138, 141, 153, 161 Commonwealth migration 26, 51, 56, 121, 131, 135n2 community: Asian/Muslim 18; Bangladeshi 19, 76, 81, 88, 90, 91, 95; identity and 145; individual and 34; Nigerian 38; Sinhalese and Tamil 146

178 Index complementarity 105 consumption 89–94 Cormack, Alistair 83 Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre) 2 cross-dressing 87, 88 culinary voyeurism 94 Dancehall music 142–5, 148, 155 The Darker Side of Black (Julien) 143 Dawson, Andrew 129 Desire and Domestic Fiction (Armstrong) 104, 113 diasporic fiction 13–14 domesticity 2–5, 11–13, 17–19, 26, 27, 31, 41, 44, 46–8, 52, 54, 56, 57, 59, 62, 63, 67, 70, 71, 78, 79, 81, 98, 107, 113, 114, 119, 146, 149, 150, 152, 155, 156, 162, 163; challenge 40–8; and femininity 59; home and empire 56–60; Home and Harem (Grewal) 105–12; house and nation 52–6; middle-class 2, 8, 41, 42, 60, 65–71, 77, 89, 98, 104, 106, 107, 109, 111–13, 146; race, class and gender 60–7 Donnell, Alison 144 Emecheta, Buchi 17, 18, 26–36, 39, 40–5, 47–9, 49n4, 51, 67, 156, 162–3; In the Ditch 17, 26, 27, 31, 37, 40, 41, 45, 48, 49, 156, 163; “Feminism with a Small ‘f’” 43; The Joys of Motherhood 30–1; SecondClass Citizen 17, 26, 27, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38–44, 46–9, 67, 156, 162 The Emigrants (Lamming) 26 England, Kim 11 Englishness 36–7, 39, 67, 107 Evaristo, Bernardine 15, 21, 114, 135, 139–43, 147, 155, 156, 163; Mr Loverman 15, 21, 114, 135, 139, 140–7, 150, 155, 163 Every Light in the House Burnin’ (Levy) 51, 56–7 Farrier, David 119, 123, 135n4 Fire (Mehta) 146 Fortier, Anne-Marie 140, 155 Fruit of the Lemon (Levy) 52 Funny Boy (Selvadurai) 145–7 Geary, Patrick 127 gender: anatomy and 83; class and 67, 137; discrimination 163; equality

97, 98, 113; inequality 41; and national identity 79; politics 43, 48, 100; and race 12, 18, 31, 40, 49; schooling 61; and sexual identity 9, 146; social difference 104; socialization 66 Genres in Discourse (Todorov) 103 genres, romantic 103–5 George, Rosemary Marangoly 2–3, 10, 12, 53, 58 Gibson, Sarah 130 Gilroy, Paul 14, 53, 72n3, 120, 143 Githire, Njeri 57, 72n6 globalization 9, 99, 138, 142 Going Home Syndrome 81, 82, 88, 162 Gopinath, Gayatri 145–6 Grewal, Inderpal (Home and Harem) 105–12 Gurnah, Abdulrazak 15, 21, 114, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 135, 140, 163; By the Sea 21, 114, 120, 124–6, 129, 132–5, 163 Hall, Stuart 14, 128, 164n1 Hardt, Michael 7 Hassan, Waïl S. 100, 102, 127 Hawley, John C. 137–8, 147–8, 151 heterosexuality 9, 21, 69, 137–42, 146, 147, 151, 152, 154 Hiddleston, Jane 77 Home and Harem (Grewal) 105–12 homelessness 6, 7, 20, 25, 32, 114, 119–26, 129, 132, 134, 151 home-maker 4 homeplace (hooks) 8–9 home, storytelling 21, 121–5, 132, 133, 135, 163 homosexuality 137, 140–7, 153–5 hooks, bell 8–10, 33, 149; Ain’t I a Woman 33; homeplace 8–9 Houlden, Kate 141, 142 household objects 126 Ideal Home Exhibition 57, 58 Imaginary Homelands (Rushdie) 5–6, 121 immigration 16, 35, 54, 56, 67, 128, 132 Impossible Desires (Gopinath) 145–6 intersectionality 10 In the Ditch (Emecheta) 17, 26, 27, 31, 37, 40, 41, 45, 48, 49, 156, 163 Islam 99–102

Index  179 Jackson, Michael 128, 132 Jaggi, Maya 127 Jameson, Frederic 11, 29, 30, 49n7 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 98, 102, 105–8, 111 The Joys of Motherhood (Emecheta) 30–1 Judah, Ben 1–2 Julien, Isaac 143 Kandiyoti, Deniz 28 Kaplan, Caren 122 Kincaid, Jamaica 59, 147 Krishnaswamy, Revathi 7 Kureishi, Hanif 99 Lamming, George 26 Latifa 101, 125, 127, 129, 132–4 Lefebvre, Henri 2 “Letter to a Feminist Friend” (Mnthali) 28 Levy, Andrea 18, 49, 51–3, 55–60, 63, 67, 71, 72n3, 163; Every Light in the House Burnin’ 51, 56–7; Fruit of the Lemon 52; Small Island 18, 49, 51–4, 56, 58–60, 67, 68, 71, 72n2, 72n5, 72n10, 150, 163; see also domesticity LGBTQ activism 137, 141, 143, 147, 155, 156n1, 162 Lonely Londoners (Selvon) 17, 25–7, 48, 142, 145, 150, 156 McClintock, Anne 12, 58–60, 62–4, 72n10 McDowell, Linda 11 MacDonald-Smythe, Antonia 157n13 McLeod, John 27, 28, 40, 46, 50n10 McMillan, Michael 158–60 media attention 91–2 Mehta, Deepa (Fire) 146 Mercer, Kobena 148, 154 metropole 11–21 middle-class domesticity 2, 8, 41, 42, 60, 65–71, 77, 89, 98, 104, 106, 107, 109, 111–13, 146 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 12 Migrants of Identity (Rapport and Dawson) 129 Mills, Sara 12, 22n13, 58, 62, 63 Mnthali, Felix 28 Mohanty, Chandra 10 Moore, Gerald 29 Morey, Peter 75, 78, 97

Mother Country 56 motherhood as experience (Rich) 33 mothering: domesticities challenge 40–8; politics 32–40; resistance 28–32 Mr Loverman (Evaristo) 15, 21, 114, 135, 139, 140–7, 150, 155, 163 Muslim 18–19; Brick Lane (Ali) 19, 71, 76–9, 81, 83, 88–91, 94, 95, 97–9, 162; and British communities 75–6; and non-Muslim 89, 97, 101, 112; securitization of 19–20; women 19, 20, 72, 75, 95, 97, 98, 100–3, 112, 162 Nafisi, Azar (Reading Lolita in Tehran) 114n1, 115n2 narrative inequality 123–4 narrative objects 125–9 Nash, Geoffrey 99, 110 The Nation Write Small (Andrade) 29 Negri, Antonio 7 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 29 9/11 terrorist attack 18, 19, 75–7, 90, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 112, 115n2 non-homes 129–32 non-refoulement 130 “the Oriental woman” 107, 108, 110 Pamela (Richardson) 105–6 Pateman, Carole (The Sexual Contract) 115n4 Phillips, Christina 100–2 politics: blackness 9; coalition 156n1; culture and 121; of hospitality 130; intervention 29, 31, 49, 138; mothering 32–40; resistance 30, 48; work 31 postimperial melancholia (Gilroy) 53 Powell, J. Enoch 5, 54, 68 Practice of Everyday Life (Certeau) 13 Pratt, Mary Louise 109 Pready, Jo 72n6 private sphere 161 Procter, James 14, 17, 25, 26, 53, 63, 92, 93 queer migration 9, 20, 135, 137–41, 145–55; Caribbean and 141–5 Queer Phenomenology (Ahmed) 3, 139

180 Index racialization 141 racism 13, 27, 33, 34, 67, 80, 119, 153, 161 Rapport, Nigel 129 Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi) 114n1, 115n2 Reflections on Exile (Said) 121–2 refugee 1, 20, 114, 119–26, 128–34, 135n4, 163 “relics” 127, 128 religiosity 144 Relph, Edward 8 respectability 58–61, 64, 65, 71, 105, 158, 159, 163 Rich, Adrienne 33 Richardson, Samuel (Pamela) 105–6 Riley, Joan 27 romantic genres 103–5 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) 44 Rose, Gillian 8 Rushdie, Salman 5–6, 12, 99, 121, 122, 125; Imaginary Homelands 5–6, 121; Midnight’s Children 12 Rushdie, Salman (Satanic Verses) 99 Said, Edward W. 1, 121–3, 125, 161; Reflections on Exile 121–2 Sánchez-Arce, Ana María 96n7 sanitization process 128–9 Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 99 Schilt, Paige 143, 157n11 Second-Class Citizen (Emecheta) 17, 26, 27, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38–44, 46–9, 67, 156, 162 The Second Sex (Beauvoir) 8 self-segregation 18, 75, 94, 162 Selvadurai, Shyam (Funny Boy) 145–7 Selvon, Samuel 17, 25–7, 32, 48, 49, 51, 142, 148, 150, 151 separate spheres 48, 162 Seven African Writers (Moore) 29 Sex and the Citizen (Smith) 141 sexual contract 104, 105, 107–12 The Sexual Contract (Pateman) 115n4 Sexuality, Gender and Nationalism in Caribbean Literature (Houlden) 141 Small Island (Levy) 18, 49, 51–4, 56–60, 67, 68, 71, 72n2, 72n5, 72n10, 150, 163; see also domesticity

Smith, Faith 141, 142, 157n9, 157n13 The Social Life of Things (Appadurai) 127 Soueif, Ahdaf 102 Sougou, Omar 21, 120, 124, 125, 127, 132, 133 storytelling process 21, 121–5, 132, 133, 135, 163 Stotesbury, John A. 101, 102 strategic exoticism 90 Tales from the Front Room (Percival) 158 “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (Jameson) 29 This is London (Judah) 1–4, 17 Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha 157n13 Tolia-Kelly, Divya 135n2 traditional African society 34 The Translator (Aboulela) 19, 20, 72, 95, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108–10, 112–14, 115n5, 162 Trojan horse plot 75 Tuan, Yi-Fu 8 Twelve African Writers (Moore) 29 Van Lennep, D. J. 129–31 Walker, Alice 44 Warren, Austin 103 Webster, Wendy 36, 37, 67–8 Wellek, René 103 West African Families in Britain: A Meeting of Two Cultures (Ellis, Stapleton and Biggs) 33–6, 38, 40 The West Indian Front Room (McMillan) 135n2, 158, 160 Whitlock, Gillian 101, 115n2 Windrush 16, 21, 51, 135 Woolf, Virginia 44 Woolley, Agnes 119, 120, 123, 124, 135n4 xenophobia 13, 161 Yaqin, Amina 75, 78, 97 Young, Iris Marion 7, 93, 124, 126, 128–30 Yuval-Davis, Nira 28, 79, 80, 96n5 Zanzibari Revolution (1964) 124