The Buddha of Suburbia and White Teeth
“BORN AND BRED, ALMOST” – MIMICRY AS A HUMOROUS STRATEGY IN ZADIE SMITH’S WHITE TEETH AND HANIF
KUREISHI’S THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA
Abstract: This essay aims to show that Hanif Kureishi’s and Zadie Smith’s début novels The Buddha of Suburbia and White Teeth employ Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry to great humorous effect, turning it into the imitation of a perceived dominant discourse via the strategic use of perspective. Although some- what different in tone, both novels centre the most effective use of mimicry on characters blissfully unaware of their subversive potential. The essay will give some examples of such unintended subversions (on the level of character) of the Orien- talist gaze, after setting the scene for some of the particular problems that Smith’s and Kureishi’s protagonists have to face.
INTRODUCTION: A READING PROBLEM
In a scene from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, fifteen-year-old Irie Jones struggles to see something of herself, “a reflection”, in a classroom read- ing of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Venturing the idea that the “dark lady” of the sonnets might have been black (“the curly hair thing, black wires…”), Irie quickly gives up again “in the face of giggling” and the admonition of her English teacher, who warns her not to “read what is old with a mod- ern ear”. Thus, after a fleeting moment of interest, Irie relapses into self- consciousness and indifference:
Irie reddened. She had thought, just then, that she had seen something like a reflection, but it was receding; so she said: ‘Don’t know, Miss’.1
Irie’s short-lived attempt of recognizing herself as “English”, or part of English mainstream culture, is symptomatic of her sense of being “without reflection” before “a gigantic mirror” (266) she calls England. The felt in- appropriateness of her interpretation of the Shakespeare sonnets is brought (or rather hammered) home to her by an anonymous note that mocks both her reading and her looks: “By William Shakespeare: ‘ODE TO LETITIA AND ALL MY KINKY-HAIRED, BIG-ASS BITCHEZ’” (272).
It is no wonder that Irie has by this time developed a firm “belief in her ugliness, her wrongness” (268). Apart from ordinary teenage insecurity, Irie has to battle with painful feelings of cultural insignificance, of not
DOI 10.1515/angl.2011.044
1 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Penguin, 2001) 272.
being represented in what she feels is English society: her only concrete idea of herself is as “a stranger in a stranger land” (266). One of the many narrative strands of White Teeth explores how Irie Jones does man- age to construct an identity for herself, and stops staring at a “mirror” incapable of providing her with a legitimate sense of identity. This, how- ever, does not make either the note or her teacher’s incomprehension any less of a problem. Both teacher and classmates appear equipped with a comfortable sense of identity and cultural belonging in which Irie cannot share, and part of this comfort derives from their unspoken conviction that Irie’s reading of Shakespeare has no place in their version of English culture. Without having consciously been set up to be racist, Irie’s school- ing at a progressive London Comprehensive2 helps to perpetuate the fic- tion of an English culture that is, amongst other things, essentially white.
That literature is in fact not a “mirror” of life and its job not to provide a reflection of a stable, self-identical subject, seems to have acquired the status of a theoretical commonplace, and the harmfulness of the mistaken assumption of the possibility of a textual mimesis of the world has been widely explored in relation to race by postcolonial studies since Said’s groundbreaking work on Orientalism (“it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not ‘truth’ but representations”).3 Although Said has in recent years undergone a more critical re-evaluation,4 I still find his con- cept of Orientalism, and particularly his take on representation, fruitful for the themes I wish to discuss. Stuart Hall was later to emphasize this point:
My own view is that events, relations, structures do have conditions of existence and real effects outside the sphere of the discursive; but only within the discur- sive, and subject to its specific conditions, limits, and modalities, do they have or can they be constructed within meaning. Thus … how things are represented and the “machineries” and regimes of representation in a culture do play a con- stitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role.5
Representation, as meaning in the making, had to take the place of a mi- metic reflection of already existing and unalterable truths in order to be
2 The chapter from which the scene is taken is appropriately entitled “The Mise- ducation of Irie Jones”.
3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) 21. 4 See especially Ibn Warraq, Defending the West (New York: Prometheus, 2007); also Aram Veseer, Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism (New York: Routle- dge, 2010), Bill Ashcroft & Pal Aluhwalia, Edward Said: The Paradox of Iden- tity (New York: Routledge, 1999) and Counterpoint: The Legacy of Edward Said, ed. May Telmissany & Stephanie Tara Schwartz (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010).
5 Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities”, 1987. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara & Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996) 165.
MIMICRY AS A HUMOROUS STRATEGY 449
usefully applicable to the understanding of marginalized identities. What I would like to do is read Zadie Smith’s and Hanif Kureishi’s début novels White Teeth (2001) and The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), two classics (or almost classics) of modern (Black) British literature6 as particularly tren- chant, i.e. funny, examples of what such an anti-mimetic poetics might look like in practice, especially in relation to the fiction of an Anglo-Brit- ish culture in which White and Black (or English and Anglo-Indian or An- glo-Jamaican) inevitably clash to the invariable disadvantage of the latter.7
For however harmful such a fiction may be to Irie’s self-esteem, it makes perfect sense as a target, especially as a target for humour. Both Smith and Kureishi, although their novels are somewhat different in tone, employ a sense of the ridiculous that can be closely aligned to Homi Bhabha’s concept of “mimicry”, perhaps the most influential and complex postcolonial elaboration of the idea of representation, and a highly ironic take on the colonial ideal as mimetic.8 Both novels like to set the scene for the subversion of the remnants of colonial authority in public spaces (although private spaces are also explored) – Smith allocates, as can be inferred from the scene discussed above, some importance to schooling
6 Krishan Kumar, in The Making of English National Identity, cites White Teeth and The Buddha of Suburbia (as well as Kureishi’s screenplay My Beautiful Launderette) as works in a “somewhat darker but still hopeful key [than entirely jubilant depictions of “the new hybrid, multicultural Britain”]”, an indication, their great popularity and the consistent academic attention paid to their work aside, that these authors have made it into the national consciousness. Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 243.
7 Since postcolonial studies, like representation, is a “slippery customer” (Hall 1987, 165) in the sense of continually changing its emphases and representational strategies, recent work tends to move away from “comprehensive analyses of wider socio-cultural phenomenona”, such as Orientalism, towards the distinction “between specific postcolonial cultural pratices, experiences and histories.” Sus- anne Reichl & Mark Stein, “Introduction”, Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, ed. Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2005) 7. One could even argue that the Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Jamaican cast of Smith’s and Kureishi’s novels are in themselves “classic” protagonists of post- colonial literature, since, although “recent studies on literary texts dealing with migration and hybridity in Great Britain still focus mainly on non-European mi- grants and their experience, with the Indian and Caribbean diaspora serving as the prototype for exploring ethnic and cultural otherness”, by now the “migrant Other ... has acquired a distinctly new face” - that of the Eastern European immi- grant. Oliver Lindner, “‘East is East and West is Best?’- The Eastern European Migrant and the British Contact Zone in Rose Tremain’s The Road Home (2007) and in Marina Lewycka’s Two Caravans (2006)”, Anglia 128.2 (2010): 459–473, at 461.
8 See also Deborah Jenson, “Mimetic Mastery and Colonial Mimicry in the First Franco-Antillean Creole Anthology”, The Yale Journal of Criticism 17.1 (2004): 83–106, at 86.
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and formal education9 in the formation of one of her principal charac- ters, and two of the most memorable passages from The Buddha of Sub- urbia are set around the theatre10 – implying that the mimetic ideal still has a whiff of the institutional about it. And while Kureishi’s novel seems somewhat bleaker, less “educational”, one might say, than Smith’s, in that it deflects the most successful adoption of a mimicking attitude from the autodiegetic narrator Karim to a more minor character, whereas Smith at points inserts explicitly academic notions of representation into the learning curve history of her heroine Irie Jones, both novels confi- dently explore the possibilities of humour as a strategy of representation. In this, the historical situation of both novels is notably different: Smith’s 2001 novel, covering nearly 150 years and easily moving back and forth in narrated time, is typical of a more relaxed approach to migrant identi- ties in a twenty-first century Black British Fiction “come into its own”11, while Kureishi seems to transport a politicized and sometimes suffocating spirit of social and spiritual upheaval into his 1990 novel, set almost en- tirely in 1970s London (and briefly in New York). However the two no- vels exhibit some directly comparable humorous strategies. This paper, after setting the scene for some actual and some possible problems that Smith’s and Kureishi’s characters encounter, aims to show particularly striking instances of how the concept of colonial mimicry, a term capable of various interpretations, is used to humorous effect in White Teeth and The Buddha of Suburbia. It will lastly question in how far a successful adaptation of mimicry is linked in these novels to a “flexible” view of existence.
MORE PROBLEMS WITH “MIMESIS”
The complexity inherent in the phenomenon of representation makes it understandable why the more immediately satisfying idea of mimesis ap- pears still to be much more frequently appealed to, especially in the dis-
9 Margit Ozvalda claims that “[s]chools and schooling have had a special relation- ship” in postcolonial, and especially Anglo-Indian contexts, “for quite some time” and that “[n[ot surprisingly, education in colonial Indian settings has been the starting point of Bhabha’s elaborations on ambivalence”. Margit Ozvalda, “Worlds apart: Schools in Postcolonial Indian Fiction”, Reichl & Stein 2005, 193f. Smith also introduces us to adolescent Irie via the classroom scene already discussed.
10 See also Michael L. Ross, Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006) 241ff., and Eva Knopp, “‘There are no jokes in paradise’: Humour as a Politics of Representation in Recent Texts and Films from the British Migratory Contact-Zone”, Translation of Cultures, ed. Konrad Gross & Petra Rüdiger (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2009), 68.
11 Susanne Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiotics in Black British Literature (Trier: WVT, 2002) 24. See also page 6 and footnote 21 of this essay.
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cussion of literature outside the academic realm, which Smith in particular seems very aware of. We can see this happening when class 5F are doing their best to dismember Shakespearean sonnets: while Mrs Roody looks “close to orgasm” when Joshua Chalfen supplies the information that “the Elizabethans were very keen on a pale skin” (270), she is instantly dismissive of Irie’s attempts to see references to blackness in the poems: “No dear, she’s dark. She’s not black in the modern sense” (271), as if, before being so named from a “modern”, Western perspective, black peo- ple did not exist. This is not to say that Mrs Roody is set up as a raving racist intent on oppressing Irie. She is in fact a kindly, “average” teacher and, as a minor character,12 has importance only in illustrating what can be taken to be a typical instance in the “Miseducation of Irie Jones”. But the scene does show the disadvantages, especially in a classroom, of being unaware of one’s own location13 in a particular culture, and its complex systems of representation, with the unavoidable limitations this entails on one’s view of “that terrible thing: history” (Smith, 363). Mrs Roody’s ad- monition about blackness is thus as incongruous and unhelpful as her strangely mixed metaphor of “reading with a modern ear”, because it as- sumes the possibility of transcending history – as if, by understanding lit- erature as mimesis and looking up a few historical details for “back- ground information”, one could time-travel into the Elizabethan age and come up with a perfect interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets by swap- ping one’s modern with an Elizabethan ear – an idea that Smith clearly confines to the unhelpfully fictional, if not bizarre.
But while the fiction of the possibility of such an “objective” interpreta- tion is still upheld, and Mrs Roody gingerly dismisses Irie’s idea of an “Afro-Carri-bee-yan” (271) black lady,14 it is no wonder that Irie does
12 Ozvalda notes a propensity in White Teeth to treat teacher-characters as “objects of narrative ridicule.” Ozvalda 2005, 200.
13 The idea of location, as developed by Adrienne Rich, places its main emphasis on social markers such as ethnicity, gender, and class in building up subjective iden- tity, turning the physical location of one’s birth into a metaphor for the workings of history itself in determining individual ways of looking at and representing the world: as a Jew, “born and raised three thousand miles from the war in Europe”, Rich ponders that “[h]ad it not been Baltimore, but Prague or Lodz or Amster- dam … I would be somebody else. My centre, perhaps, the Middle East or Latin America, my language itself another language. Or I might be in no body at all”. Adrienne Rich, “Notes Towards a Politics of Location”, 1986. Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 640. That this view of history also works in much less dramatic contexts than the Holocaust is made apparent throughout White Teeth, with its emphasis on the complexity of everyday life and the impossibility of finding a “neutral place” (457) to clear up the family feud between Millat and Magid, or Irie’s failed at- tempts at finding “a blank page” (402) in her own family history.
14 Smith may or may not have intended a reference to the “hyphenated subject” of colonial discourse here (see Mita Banerjee, “Queer laughter: Shyam Selvadurai’s
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not feel represented by it: if the sonnet does not explicitly or metaphori- cally convey that the dark lady is “black in the modern sense”, and if moreover a teacher supplies the information that she could at the best have been a slave,15 then no value can be attributed to Irie’s reading. These limitations and disadvantages of a mimetic view of literature are reiterated most strongly at the end of the scene – also the end of the lesson – when Mrs Roody asks the class to write down her advice about not reading with a modern ear as “today’s principle”, with Smith’s laconic narratorial comment: “Class 5F wrote that down. And the reflection that Irie had glimpsed slunk back into the familiar darkness” (272), implying that the taking down of such advice will be of little use to class 5F in general, and even less use to Irie in particular. The scene may not be the most spectacular in the course of the novel’s many more overtly comic cross-cultural encounters, but it works well to demonstrate the more subtle aspects of Smith’s comedy, which can here be seen as based on the less than hilarious assumption that schools “do not even acknowledge the students’ needs they are supposed to cater for”.16
The “standard” of whiteness, the world seen through the Orientalist perspective, is thus seen to be a fiction based on the prevailing strength of the mimetic ideal, albeit a very powerful and insidious one whose long- term effects are still very much in working order, as both Smith and Kur- eishi’s novels acknowledge. Although neither Smith nor Kureishi write in a pessimistic or downtrodden mood, their novels at the most basic level still derive much of their power and humour from the idea that Black Brit- ish Fiction is pitted against the unspoken, because seemingly “natural” standard of White British Fiction. Irie’s silence in class seems the timid echo of Said’s assertion that “the West’s great cultural strength, its will to power over the Orient” depended on an Orient that was “silent … and unable to resist the projects, images, or mere descriptions devised for it”.17 That such an Orient was a “a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient” is made particularly apparent when “the
Funny Boy and the normative as comic”, Reichl & Stein 2005, 153) but the pussy-footing character of Mrs Roody’s comment is well borne out even typogra- phically, as well as an allusion to her Scottish intonation, made from Irie’s per- spective and thus unvoiced in the dialogue: “No one but no one said ‘doooood- ling’ quite like Olive Roody” (267) – an instance of internal focalization that helps us to side, albeit momentarily, with Irie as the underdog, to whom Mrs Roody’s “light” complexion appears grotesquely like “strawberry mousse” (272). The use of (partial) internal focalization in relation to Irie’s point of view will be discussed in more detail later.
15 “I mean I can’t be sure, but it does seem terribly unlikely, unless she was a slave of some kind, and he’s unlikely to have written a series of sonnets to a lord and then a slave, is he?” (272).
16 Ozvalda 2005, 202. Ozvalda explicitly refers to The Buddha of Suburbia and especially White Teeth throughout her article.
17 Said 1979, 95.
MIMICRY AS A HUMOROUS STRATEGY 453
people who were called Orientals”18 start talking back and “access to the rights to representation by black artists and cultural workers themselves” became an accepted, not a marginal feature of “the representational and discursive spaces of English society”.19
This is not a simple nor a necessarily productive phenomenon, partly because Orientalism affected “the people who were called Orientals as well as those called Occidentals, European, or Western”, which can result in a negative self-image and the “internalisation of the self-as-other”20 – this is what seems to have happened to teenage Irie and her sense of “her ugliness, her wrongness” (268) that holds her back from standing her ground in class. And partly, if the complexity of representation is taken seriously, obviously “the language of binary oppositions will no longer suffice”,21 and hence “[f]ilms [or any other cultural production] are not necessarily good because black people make them”.22 Another problem along the same line crops up when, for instance, black cultural politics, while acknowledging the importance of “New Ethnicities” and “imagined communities”, still assumes “that the categories of gender and sexuality would stay the same and remain fixed and secured”, or ignores the impor- tance of class as a social marker.23
But despite these possible problems, the emergence of a distinctly Black contribution to British fiction does harbour a very powerful potential: that of humorously subverting the limiting and racist “discourse of the other”. And this becomes particularly apparent when the uneven dialogue be-
18 Said 1979, 41f.. 19 Hall 1987,164. 20 Hall 1987, 167. Anthony Ilona is particularly eloquent about “the tragic geneal-
ogy of violated self-esteem, repressed creativity and mockery circulating in the colony’s [Trinidad] past of plantation slavery”. Ilona, in Reichl & Stein, 54.
21 Hall 1987, 165. This often-acknowledged problem of a “burden of a mere posi- tive representation of the ‘otherness’ of immigrant cultures” (Knopp 2009, 60) seems to have diminished somewhat since Hall’s first comments on it, particu- larly where it is met with humorous subversion (see also Knopp 2009, 62), so that Susanne Mühleisen, in her essay on Black British (linguistic) identities in re- lation to television drama and comedy, can trace a rough genealogy from the rather earnest and politically correct use of accent of the 1970s tv soap Empire Road to the hyper-ironic and downright rude pastiche mood of Ali G, which “clearly caricatures” London Jamaican – by now a “British variety in a true sense.” Susanne Mühleisen, “What makes an accent funny, and why? Black Brit- ish Englishes and humour televised”, Reichl & Stein 2005, 241.
22 Hall 1987, 166. 23 Hall 1987, 168. But see also Mita Banerjee on the way in which “white gay dis-
course may in fact mirror racist assumptions about black sexuality which are also held by a white, heteronormative mainstream”. She accordingly calls for a “pool- ing of resources” in all areas of literary theory engaged in resistance towards structurally similar praxes of subordination like racism and homophobia. Bane- rjee 2005, 150, 159.
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tween Orient and Occident is seen as what Homi Bhabha calls “mimi- cry”.24
MIMICRY AND POSTCOLONIAL HUMOUR
In The Location of Culture, especially in “Of Mimicry and Man”, Homi Bhabha describes mimicry as a highly ambivalent phenomenon, “at once resemblance and menace”, the result of a “post-Enlightenment English co- lonialism” which is itself ambivalent and “often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false”.25 The menace of mimicry stems from its potential to remind the colonialist of his own ambivalence26 and lack of stable iden- tity, as, for instance in his endeavour to educate a colonial subject, he is made witness to a “flawed colonial mimesis” which produces a “mimic man”- an “Oriental” person schooled in English ways and manners, who is “almost the same [as an Englishman] but not quite”, who, though “An- glicised”, is “emphatically … not English”. He is therefore seen as a dis- turbing “partial presence”, an elusive being who challenges the colonial- ist’s comfortable sense of stable identity and self-esteem: “The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colo- nial discourse also disrupts its authority”.27 Said already pointed out the “perspective rarely drawn” on the Orientalist’s sense of self depending on the reduced presence, the imaginatively controlled “otherness” of the Or- iental or colonial subject, which, through applying “epistemic violence” to the Orient, seemed to fill his actions with meaning in the first place.28 But if “the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disci- plined”, the Orientalist perspective is turned upside down, “the observer becomes the observed and ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence”29 – if the Oriental does not exist in the simplistic, pure form that the Orientalist had set up in his need to invest his exploitation of the Orient with meaning, then the Orien- talist himself might come to realize that he does not exist in any stable form either - although of course this does not mean that his actual power
24 Although Smith and Kureishi are often mentioned and sometimes studied in rela- tion to each other (see Knopp 2009, Kumar 2003, Helga Ramsey-Kurz, “Humor- ing the terrorists or the terrorised? Militant Muslims in Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi”, Reichl & Stein 2005, 73–89 et al), no work, as far as I am aware, has yet been done on their respective use of mimicry as a humor- ous strategy.
25 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge), 86/85. 26 For Hall, racism is characterised by an ambivalent pull between “fear and de-
sire”. Hall 1987, 167. 27 Bhabha, 1994, 87f.; emphases in original. 28 Said 1979, 95. 29 Bhabha 1994, 89; emphasis in original.
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ceases to wield influence: “The ambivalence of mimicry carries contrary meanings: it can seem to denote the black man’s inferiority and yet sug- gest how easily the imposition may be overturned”.30 But despite or rather because of its ambivalence mimicry harbours subversive potential, if only through rendering colonial power visible,31 as Bhabha also empha- sizes in a later chapter, “Signs taken for Wonders”.32
Although Bhabha himself makes only comparatively brief reference to the comic, mocking potential of mimicry,33 postcolonial studies, especially in the to date most comprehensive and multifaceted compilation of essays on postcolonial humour, Mark Stein’s and Susanne Reichl’s Cheeky Fic- tions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, has proved responsive towards the humorous potential of mimicry: “Ambivalence, as Homi Bhabha has ar- gued, is the essential feature of the mimicry that characterizes colonial dis- course”,34 and “[i]n postcolonial contexts, humour is strongly linked to the notion of ambivalence. Ambivalence in Bhabha’s understanding results from mimicry of the colonisers’ behaviour”.35 While mimicry can render power visible,36 humour can render power laughable,37and although they are not always studied in relation to each other,38 the close affiliation of mimicry to humour can also be gauged via one of the few basic assump- tions about humour and the postcolonial about which there seems to be something like a consensus: like mimicry, humour can “rearticulate the whole notion of identity” and thus subvert power imbalances.39 The ques- tion of who is actually laughing at whom becomes programmatic.
While differing interpretations of mimicry have been made use of in postcolonial studies,40 I find the idea that mimicry fundamentally and fun- nily “upsets the dichotomy between self and Other, between colonizer and
30 Detlef Gohrbrandt, “After-laughter, or the comedy of decline: Ronald Searle’s critique of postwar Englishness in The Rake’s Progress”, Reichl & Stein 2005, 133. See also Mühleisen 2005, 229.
31 See also Jenson 2004, 86. 32 See for instance Bhabha 1994, 128. 33 See also Ozvalda 2005, 195. 34 Gohrbrandt 2005, 133. 35 Ozvalda 2005, 194. See also Banerjee 2005, 155f., Ilona 2005, 48f., and Hsuan
L. Hsu, “Mimicry, Spatial Captation and Feng Shui in Han Ong’s Fixer Chao”, MFS 52.3 (2006): 675–704, at 676.
36 See for instance Jenson 2004, 86 37 See for instance Knopp 2009, 60. 38 See for instance Ramsey-Kurz 2005 and Knopp 2009, who in their essays on
Smith and Kureishi mention mimicry in passing, but do not discuss it as a subver- sive narratorial device. Ramsey-Kurz 2005, 83, and Knopp 2009, 70.
39 See Reichl and Stein 2005, 10; Ilona 2005, 49; Ramsey-Kurz 2005, 83; Banerjee 2005, 152; Ross 2006, 236; Knopp 2009, 65 and Hsu 2006, 678.
40 See for instance Susanne Mühleisen’s elaborations on Freud’s writings on mimic- ry. Mühleisen 2005, 227f.
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colonized”,41 especially fruitful. Here again interpretations may vary be- tween an emphasis on “attempted or imposed sameness”,42 i.e. on whether the colonial subject actually intends to mock colonial authority,43
or whether mimicry emerges automatically from the colonialist gaze: “[B]y the mere act of being there ... the colonial is seen to mock his master”.44
In the latter case, mimicry features not as a deliberate strategy of “mock- signification”,45 but as something in the paranoid colonizer’s mind, as a collective pathology. I would argue that Kureishi and Smith make a de- liberate narrative strategy out of this sad suspicion and turn it into hu- mour.
If mimicry destablilizes white complacency, if it quite literally makes a mockery of mimesis, it is no wonder that white characters in Smith’s and Kureishi’s novels often struggle with how to name and address black char- acters (Mrs Roody’s “Afro-Carri-bee-yans” are just one example), and that the recurring46 joke of the “exotic” “brown stranger” who declares himself to be from “Whitechapel … Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus” should confuse and tickle their sense of the ridiculous so much.47 The subtly disturbing idea of the suburban, unexceptional immi- grant as “the Everyman of the twentieth century”48 seems to be the most basic instance of the ambivalent character of mimicry, in which a former colonial subject, who is still subjected to the Orientalist perspective, speaks back as someone “almost the same but not quite”, to the confu- sion and disturbance of the white observer who tried to see him as “exo- tic”. This is where humour first comes into play, and the Orientalist, so to speak, starts laughing from the other side of his face. In Smith’s and Kur- eishi’s strategic use of perspective, mimicry emerges as the imitation, to
41 Banerjee 2005, 155. 42 Gohrbrandt 2005, 133. 43 See also Hsu 2006, 678. 44 Banerjee 2005, 155. 45 See Ilona 2005 on mimicry as part of a collective strategies of “mock-significa-
tion”, especially in relation to the Trinidadian practice of Picong. 46 In The Buddha of Suburbia, Jeremy Shadwell shows himself disappointed and
bemused by Karim’s lack of Oriental bearing: “‘Everyone looks at you, I’m sure, and thinks: an Indian boy, how exotic, how interesting … And you’re from Or- pington. … Oh God, what a strange world’”. Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber & Faber, 1990) 14.
47 The scene, later to be discussed in some more detail, is from White Teeth and describes Millat’s and Irie’s first afternoon with the Chalfens. Millat and Irie are both adressed as “looking very exotic” by Joyce Chalfen, whereupon Millat mocks her by speaking in “what he called a bud-bud-ding-ding accent” and de- claring himself to be “originally” from Whitechapel. This joke is so excessively successful with the Chalfens that Millat immediately retracts: “‘Chill out, man’, said Millat, suspicious. ‘It wasn’t that fucking funny’”. Smith 2001, 319.
48 It is again Jeremy Shadwell to utter this idea and be subtly disturbed by it. Kur- eishi 1990, 141.
MIMICRY AS A HUMOROUS STRATEGY 457
comic effect, of a perceived dominant discourse (which may also include mimicking the stereotypes and clichés of that discourse). It is a way of subverting colonialism by making it strange. As she progresses as a char- acter, for instance, it is no longer Irie Jones who is a “stranger in a stran- ger land”,49 rather the cultural preconceptions that make her feel this way acquire a distinctly odd flavour.
However, this does not mean that every occurrence of mimicry has ne- cessarily hilarious or liberating consequences. This can be seen in The Buddha of Suburbia, when Kureishi puts the idea of representing an In- dian essence in the theatre. This may sound like a good idea given its fic- tional character. Ironically, however, acting ties Karim to a stereotype50
rather than liberating him: “But Mr. Shadwell – Jeremy – I feel wrong in it. I feel that together we’re making the world uglier”, protests Karim to wannabe radical director Jeremy Shadwell, as, covered in “shit-brown” make-up and done up to look like “a turd in a bikini bottom” (146) for his theatrical début as Mowgli,51 he is forced to perform a conception of India utterly alien to his experience as a suburban Londoner. Shadwell’s comment that Karim has been “cast for authenticity, not experience” (147) shows him up as a “fascist” (148), who likes to see an Oriental essence under each dark skin, and presumes to know exactly how to di- rect those qualities most appropriately – with both ridiculous and humi- liating consequences. In the comicality of the scene, we can again see the disturbing and irreverent effect of the “mimic man”, which is arguably what Karim as “an Englishman born and bred, almost” (3) represents, at work, taking “Shitwell” (148), a.k.a. “Shadshit”, “Shotbold” and “Shit- volumes” (165) and his “colonial imagination”52 down several pegs by his constant allusion to the literally excremental quality of the director’s work. Yet the scene has a serious component. Karim after all participates in the play, and is not supported in his protest even by his most politically ambitious friends (“I thought: you prefer generalizations like ‘after the re- volution the workers will wake up filled with unbelievable joy’ to standing up to fascists like Shadwell”, 148). Moreover, his attempts to “dodge”53
Shadwell’s racist agenda by slipping from an Indian to a Cockney accent during performances – “mimicking the stereotype”54 not only of an exotic stranger but also of a lower class Londoner and thus underlining the im- posed artificiality and dreariness of his acting life - are only half-successful at best and meet with derision from Jamila, the “conscience”55 of the no-
49 See the scene discussed at the beginning. Smith 2001, 266. 50 See also Ross 2006, 241. 51 The fact that Shadwell chooses a work by Kipling for his “radical” play of course
has a noteworthy comic effect. 52 Bhabha 1994, 85. 53 Ross 2006, 241. 54 Knopp 2009, 68. 55 Ross 2006, 238.
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vel. It seems that the harder Karim struggles to be taken seriously as an actor – maybe he tries too hard – the more bitterly he fails to be taken seriously as part of English middle class society, becoming “even more perilously enmeshed with stereotypes” in his later work for the more suc- cessful and yet more cynical director Matthew Pyke.56 The humour of the scene thus in part depends on the prevailing strength of the essentially un- funny Orientalist perspective, making it typical of the mingling of sad and comic tones that characterize Kureishi’s novel. Zadie Smith offers a slightly less bitter-sweet instance of this in Irie Jones’ encounter with the Chalfen family, especially its presiding genius, mother Joyce Chalfen.
WHITE TEETH: MAKING THE “STANDARD” EXOTIC
In her portrayal of the Chalfen family – liberal white middle-class intellec- tuals -, Smith offers an ironical instance of the Orientalist perspective at work, but also “not working”, subject to disturbances and challenges they did not themselves think possible.57 The Chalfens’ utter complacency and self-centredness is mirrored by their “referring to themselves as nouns, verbs, and occasionally adjectives” (314), with their particular brand of “Chalfenism” becoming a sort of downsized, domesticated version of Or- ientalism. The parallels to Orientalist endeavours at appropriating “exo- tic” (and in the case of Millat Iqbal, also highly attractive) “brown stran- gers” (326) are drawn most forcefully in the case of Joyce Chalfen, who is perfectly comfortable informing Irie that “you read a lot about how Afro- Caribbeans seem to find it hard to establish long-term relationships” (322), and that her son Oscar “finds brown strangers really stimulating” (326). That this unflappable self-confidence has not only a comical, but also an aggressive side is implied again and again, for instance by the chapter heading “Canines: The Ripping Teeth”, which introduces the Chalfens, or by the image of Joyce as a modern-day missionary, “des- cended from the kind of bloody-minded women who continued through the African swamps even after the bag-carrying natives had dropped their load and turned back … who, armed only with a bible, a shotgun, and a net-curtain, coolly took down the brown men moving forwards from the horizon towards the plains” (350). This image, although used for comic effect, seems less of a joke than might at first appear. Joyce is pictured as
56 Ross 2006, 242. 57 This is perhaps most obviously illustrated by the fact that Joshua Chalfen comes
to call his father “quite possibly psychopathic” (405) and joins an animal rights group that plans his assassination – which is taking the family drama further than anything that happens within the “utterly dysfunctional” (515) Jones and Iqbal households. Marcus Chalfen’s failure to communicate with his son is summed up in his egocentric apprehension that “[I]t hurt him that even his own son was not as Chalfenist as he’d hoped” (421).
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a hopeless essentialist who cannot see the world in any terms but her own - which are almost entirely made up of simple binary oppositions (along with mimesis another very popular target of literary theory).58 The Chal- fens are in fact explicitly set up as opponents to modern theoretical no- tions of representation, constitutive discourse, and the like:
If you were arguing with a Chalfen, trying to put a case for these strange French men who think truth is a function of language, or that history is interpretative and science metaphorical, the Chalfen in question would hear you out quietly, then wave his hand, dismissive, feeling no need to dignify such bunkum with a retort. Truth was truth to a Chalfen. And Genius was genius. Marcus created beings. And Joyce was his wife, industrious in creating smaller versions of Marcus. (312; emphasis in original)
Smith, herself an English graduate, clearly knows her literary theory, and a lack of affinity with its tenets here seems to work as a marker of a lim- ited, if not foolish, view of existence - about as helpful as a belief in litera- ture as mimesis. It is exactly within their seemingly unassailable sense of superiority and endless self-congratulation that the weakness of Chalfen- ism lies. The family is static, self-referential (“Truth was truth to a Chal- fen”). Smith gives an explicit description of the “palpable boredom” of this: “Like clones of each other, their dinner table was an exercise in mir- rored perfection, Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself infinitely, bouncing from Oscar to Joyce, Joyce to Joshua, Joshua to Marcus, Mar- cus to Benjamin, Benjamin to Jack ad nauseam across the meat and veg” (314f.). This image, with its hints of the mimetic ideal as leading to end- less and fruitless repetition of stereotypes, is later echoed along even more explicitly dismissive lines by Neena Begum, Millat’s lesbian cousin sent to investigate the workings of Chalfenism, who describes the family as “bouncing off the walls” (351). Notwithstanding their comicality, both these images also allude to the stifling, closed-in character of the house- hold, which, despite Joyce’s conviction that there could not be a “happier marriage than hers” (313), has unhealthy consequences. It is Joyce in par- ticular who falls prey to boredom and excessive self-esteem. This precari- ous (if not decadent) mixture of emotions leads her to seek out Irie and Millat as “a good cause” (322) to invest her surplus energy into, acting from a conviction that her affiliation with the Chalfen genes (“All these brains. I mean, nurture just won’t explain it”) makes this endeavour noth- ing but a laudable enterprise, or, as she calls it in a conversation with Clara Bowden, part of “the Responsibility of Intellectuals” (352/354) – in another small aside against Kipling, Joyce is here seen constructing her
58 This works on various levels – for instance, Joyce, although declaring herself “a staunch feminist”, is still radiant about having “married a man cleverer than me” (324), and the image used to describe the Chalfens’ marriage is one of a “mis- sionary vessel” in which “tasks [are] delegated” according to strictly binary gen- der roles: “Marcus on the prow, looking for the storm. Joyce beneath deck, checking the linen for bedbugs” (323).
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very own White Woman’s Burden. We never see Joyce examining her other motives for taking Irie and especially Millat into the Chalfen house- hold – boredom and sexual desire excited by Millat’s beauty or “pulchri- tude” (317), as she calls it to herself. Truth is, after all, truth for a Chal- fen, and any analysis of it that might prove unflattering to Chalfenism is systematically blocked out.
It is this monolithic view of herself and others that makes Joyce such an unattractive as well as laughable character within White Teeth, which continually stresses the possibility of multiple identities.59 Her interference with the Iqbal family’s concerns thus seems as impertinent and unjustified as any colonialist endeavour at subjecting the Orient to corrective mea- sures, even though, or maybe because, it springs from love and a desire to help (“For Joyce truly loved him [Millat] and wanted to help him”, 375). In her impotent desire for Millat, Joyce in fact shows parallels to Irie’s great-grandfather Charlie Durham, the inept English colonialist who im- pregnates her great-grandmother Ambrosia in Jamaica, but later fails her, not because “he doesn’t want to help her, or … doesn’t love her”, but because colonialism is seen as a bad background to romance (“Maybe nothing that happens on stolen ground can expect a happy ending”, 361). It is not surprising that Joyce’s romantic feelings for Millat are even less fruitful – not only due to, in this case, insurmountable gaps in age and class, but much more to Joyce’s basic inability to think of herself and her family with anything but unvarying earnestness and exaggerated self-es- teem.
She is accordingly the target of some of Smith’s most merciless satire, the most outrageous instance of which occurs when she takes up what Said might call a “textual attitude”60 to Neena and her girlfriend Maxine. Staring at the couple in baffled incomprehension (“She just didn’t get it”, 348; emphasis in original) and pondering distractedly on “Who relies on whom? … Who pollinates and who nurtures?” (349; emphasis in origi- nal), Joyce finally comes up with the preposterous idea of asking “Do you use each other’s breasts as pillows?” (350). It is noticeable that the Chal- fens, other than, for instance, Irie, Millat, Neena, Alsana, or Samad, who enjoy and excel at jokes, teasing and sarcasm,61 are explicitly described as lacking any sense of the ridiculous: “Chalfens rarely made jokes unless
59 See also Knopp 2005, 69. Knopp also notes the particularly harsh satire with which Joyce is treated.
60 Said describes the “textual attitude” as one of the defining features of Oriental- ism, although he also acknowledges that “[i]t seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientation of direct encounters with the human.” Said 1979, 94. This seems to be the kind of trap Joyce falls into as she tries to cover up the ludicrousness of her question with a reference to Indian poetry: “It’s just, in a lot of Indian poetry, they talk about using breasts for pillows…” Smith 2001, 350.
61 See also Knopp 2009, 66.
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they were exceptionally lame or numerical in nature or both” (319). Like female homosexuality, humour is something that Joyce just “doesn’t get”.
But while some of the humour at Joyce’s expense works along these comparatively simplistic lines of satiric exposure, Smith also manages to downsize the aggressiveness inherent in the Chalfenist perspective by turn- ing them, especially Joyce, into “figures of farce”62 along the more am- bivalent and subtle lines of mimicry. This happens again and again when the Chalfen household is described through the eyes of Irie Jones, who is “fascinated, enamoured after five minutes” (319) of witnessing Chalfenism at work. Her fascination with the Chalfens runs parallel to Joyce’s fasci- nation with Millat’s “exotic” good looks, but this time the humour de- pends not on any preposterousness on Irie’s part, but on Smith’s ironic use of perspective. Looking round the Chalfen kitchen for the first time, Irie becomes a colonialist of a strange land herself, whose laws are no less exotic to her than her and Millat’s looks are to the Chalfens:
She’d never been so close to this strange and beautiful thing, the middle class, and experienced the kind of embarrassment that is actually intrigue, fascination. … She felt like the prude who walks through a nudist beach, examining the sand. She felt like Columbus meeting the exposed arawaks, not knowing where to look (321; emphases in original).63
Irie’s perspective on the Chalfens, which is compared to that of a “roman- tic anthropologist” (332), is also subjected to irony, albeit a more gentle version than that which is used on Joyce. Smith, for instance in her use of emphasis in the passage quoted above, allows us to feel close to Irie’s genu- ine amazement at the Chalfen’s middle-class habitat, yet continually sub- jects her views to mild narratorial censure through interpretation: Irie’s mistake about the Chalfens springs from her false notion that communica- tion between parents and children in the Chalfen household is “untram- melled, unblocked by history, free” (319; emphasis in original), and that it is the Chalfens who, through their very existence, define Englishness: “She wanted their Englishness. … The purity of it. It didn’t occur to her that the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and Poland, née Chalfenovsky), or that they might be as needy of her as she of them” (328; emphasis in original). Irie is thus as unaware of her location in English culture as the Chalfens, she only lacks their smugness in her failure to see that their appearance of being “free from history” is the result of privilege (while the same blindness constitu- tes the basis of the Chalfens’ complacency). This implicit comment on the pervasive harmfulness of thoughtlessly accepting a white “standard” - Chalfenism is continually shown up to be just as constructed as any other
62 “If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce.” Bhabha 1994, 85.
63 Irie is once more ironically pictured as Columbus, when she fancies that “[l]ike Columbus himself, just by discovering it [Jamaica], she had brought it into exis- tence” (402), like a true (or almost true) Orientalist.
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strategy of representation - is partly undermined by the humour which ex- poses it, but Irie’s attempts at building up an identity for herself by way of the Chalfens remain an unsuccessful (and later aborted) attempt “to sneak into England” (328). While Irie is still convinced, as she is in this scene, of her “wrongness”, her self-identification as English via Chalfen- ism is doomed to remain an “illicit thrill” (328). In this, it is not always clear whether we are laughing at Irie or with her – an instance of “im- pure” focalization mirroring the fundamentally ambivalent character of mimicry, its capacity to upset the dichotomy between object and subject. But without being set up to be aware of it, Irie as “romantic anthropolo- gist” has used mimicry to expose the contingency (and latent comicality) of “Englishness” as something inherently white and middle class.
Irie’s progression as a character can perhaps best be summarized by looking at two points in her history: her uncritical schoolgirl fascination with the Chalfens, and her later, more mature and angry recognition of such families as, at least in part, “[l]ucky bastards. Lucky motherfuckers” (515), which leads her to an uplifting vision of a future without “roots”:
In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won’t matter any more because they can’t because they musn’t because they’re too long and they’re too torturous and they’re just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it. (527)
The interior monologue is a mood very rarely used within White Teeth, one of the few other instances significantly stemming from Irie’s awkward schooldays and her disproportionately breathless desire for “[s]traight long black sleek flickable tossable shakeable touchable finger-through-able wind-blowable hair” (273), which again underlines Irie’s moral improve- ment as a character “miseducated” at school and reformed by her own experience of cultural location. And although Smith nowhere makes it en- tirely clear whether Irie’s vision of a happily rootless future might not be naïve, the tone of the passage implies that this time round she is at least excited about the right thing. A future without roots, and hence, for Irie, without racism and needless identity crises, might make the idea of any “standard” of middle-class whiteness such as the Chalfens’ so ludicrous that there is no need to mimic it any more. But while such a future is still only a vision, Smith can at least offer the relief of turning such ideas into comedy, making the “standard” itself no less exotic and strange than the “brown stranger” who observes it.
THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA: TWO MIMIC MEN
Like Smith, Kureishi enjoys subverting the Orientalist gaze, but the general mood of his novel is different from Smith’s. This is partly because of his choice of a more more troubled (and autodiegetic) narrator, who lacks the slightly academic tendencies of Smith’s heterodiegetic narrating voice. In the rebellious and colourful, but also often overwhelming and disorientat-
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ing nature of his experience as a first-generation migrant in 1970s Lon- don, Karim Amir the actor undergoes a notably less sobering fate than Irie Jones, who in twenty-first century London turns to single motherhood and dentistry (an occupation not only notable for its metaphorical apt- ness, but also, I find, for its decidedly low-key, unglamorous nature) with a largely resigned and cheerful attitude. Depressed and “waiting for [him- self] to heal”, Karim finds himself following his father’s example of not wanting to be seen weak in front of the British, the “ex-colonizers” who “expected you to be on your knees”: “For him [Haroon Amir], the British in India were ridiculous, stiff, unconfident, rule-bound. And he’d made me feel that we couldn’t allow ourselves the shame of failure in front of these people” (250). This is not only in direct opposition to a phenomenon noted by Said, namely that “it became common practice during the nine- teenth century for Britain to retire its administrators from India and else- where once they had reached the age of fifty-five”, so that “no Oriental was ever allowed to see a Westener as he aged and degenerated”.64 What is also interesting to note is that Karim at this point in the narrative is in New York, and that “these people”, a category which would already be very vague in England, are nowhere near “in front of” him in his present situation. Yet “their” influence is painfully felt, and it does not seem a coincidence that the oppressive legacy of colonialism is evoked in such serious terms at the moment of Karim’s worst personal crisis (“my depres- sion and self-hatred … the feeling of the world moving in to crush me”, 249), and thus appears bound up with it, though it is never set up as the one, primary cause for it. While Irie Jones’ struggles with “that swollen enormity, the Jamaican posterior” and “impossible Afro hair” (265) but also less ethnically specific disadvantages like “mole-ish eyesight” and “buck teeth” (268) are fought along almost exclusively humorous lines, Karim’s problems as a “half-caste” like Irie, are generally examined along more explicitly “political” and also rather less amusing lines.
But despite these frequently more solemn tones, humour is also em- ployed as a powerful stylistic device in The Buddha of Suburbia, and though Karim as glamorous anti-hero and uneasy mimic man is at the perceptual centre of the novel, it is a more minor character who makes the most successful venture into mimicry – and he is even less aware of it than Irie Jones. The character of Changez can be seen as particularly effec- tive, because his comicality works as a subversion of more than one stereotype:65 as a cultural mimic man, Changez has a highly idiosyncratic
64 Said 1979, 42. 65 The humorous potential of no longer accepting essential identities, especially
those that have in all seriousness been set up as worthy of the highest admiration, can of course also be explicitly be explored by, for instance, a feminist or queer perspective – see for instance Luce Irigaray’s call to women to “play with mim- esis”, in which mimicry features as an instance of “assuming the feminine role deliberately. Which already means to convert a form of subordination into an
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take on English literature as being all about “the classics”, which turn out to be a random patchwork of English and American light entertainment: “P.G. Wodehouse and Conan Doyle! … I also like the Saint and Mickey Spillane. And Westerns! Anything with Randolph Scott in it! Or Gary Cooper! Or John Wayne!” (83), implying, perhaps, that the colonialist en- deavour has also failed on the literary front if such blissful ignorance of the English literary canon can persist even in devoted Anglophiles like Changez. But Changez also undermines another “Oriental” stereotype in which ethnic, religious and gender clichés are blended: as the husband chosen by Jamila’s father (who is moreover described as a devout, nar- row-minded Muslim who “thought he was right about anything”, 172) for an arranged marriage, Changez might have been portrayed as the clas- sic instrument of patriarchal oppression. Yet, by a happy narrative turn, he not only adores his intellectual wife and accepts her refusal to have sex with him, finding a more suitable outlet for his energies in an amicable arrangement with the Japanese prostitute Shinko, who, by another happy narrative turn, he does not abuse or exploit.66 This does not mean that Kureishi downplays Jamila’s suffering at her father’s hands (“Jamila really was in the shit”, 61). But he also offers a different, rather more rarely drawn perspective on the family drama, in which Anwar himself becomes a victim of his strict view of gender roles and dies a lonely and failed old man: “Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself” (214). It is at any rate not Jamila the reader has to worry about anymore once Changez has been introduced. From Kar- im’s comment that Changez will live “happily ever after in [Jamila’s] muscly arms” (57), to his enjoyment of dressing up in his wife’s clothes (“he’d always have on one of her jumpers or shirts”, 182), to the loving and uncomplaining care he takes of his wife’s baby with another man, Changez is continually associated with a surprisingly playful approach to gender roles: “They’re gentlemen”, he claims of the English, “Especially the women” (223). Together with his strange appearance, his innocent view of sexuality and unsuccessful pursuit of Jamila make him a kind of Indian quasimodo with a Conan Doyle fixation, and emphatically not a domestic tyrant.
affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it”. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 76. Judith Butler subverts the idea of homo- sexuality as “a kind of miming, a vain attempt to participate in the phantasmatic plenitude of naturalized heterosexuality”, calling gender “a kind of imitation for which there is no original”, which makes all forms of sexuality performance, “drag”. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordination”, Inside/Out: Les- bian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991) 20. See also Reichl & Stein 2005, 10 and Banerjee 2005, 150.
66 The fact that Changez does have a very active sex life saves him, I think, from embodying another gender cliché – that of the feminized or desexualized Oriental suggested by Said.
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There seems to be some wisdom concealed in Changez’ naivety. Although he is frequently mocked by more sophisticated characters like Jamila and Karim, he is often surprisingly perceptive about their lives, for instance in his pragmatic view of Jamila’s bisexuality: “Jammie loves two people, that’s all. It’s simple to grasp. She loves Simon, but he’s not here. She loves Joanna, and Joanna is here”. It is only when Karim asks him how he is “coping with being married to a lesbian” (273) that Changez’ composure changes and he challenges Jamila as having turned to “perver- sion” (277). It appears to be Karim’s “textual attitude” to Jamila’s sexual- ity that triggers off this reaction in Changez – the register slipping from Changez’ simple evaluation of emotion (“She loves two people”) to Kar- im’s more “scientific” view of the situation (“married to a lesbian”). But in the case of Changez, actions speak significantly louder than words, and his love for Jamila is registered as one of the few stable things in his envi- ronment by Karim: “it was true, it was absolute, he knew what he felt” (275). Personal experience has imperceptibly mixed with cultural location, making Changez not only an originally comic, but also, despite initial ap- pearances, one of the most mature characters in Kureishi’s novel. Never- theless, irony is the driving force in Kureishi’s representation, and the “Dildo Killer” remains as unique and comic a mixture of subverted sexual and ethnic stereotypes as his nickname indicates. Simply by being himself, Changez achieves the liberation Karim, whose development tends towards the not exactly light-hearted recognition that “identity is problematic”67
and who until the end feels harassed by a notion of mimicry as “imposed sameness”,68 seeks. And it is Changez who not only inspires Karim’s most successful appearance as an actor, but who also, and crucially, stabilizes Karim by unleashing his creative energies. As he is working on his role as Tariq/Changez in Matthew Pyke’s play, Karim directly alludes to the heal- ing power of creativity: “I saw that creation was an accretive process which couldn’t be hurried, and which involved patience and primarily, love. I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through” (217).69
Mimicking Changez makes Karim feel significantly better about himself – it is especially his pervasive self-centredness that benefits from his only serious attempt at changing perspective. Unlike in Smith’s case, and due to the different narrative situation of The Buddha of Suburbia, the depiction of Karim’s ambivalent self-identification both as himself and another is
67 Ross 2006, 235. 68 “I felt ashamed and incomplete at the same time, as if half of me were missing,
and as if I’d been colluding with my enemies, those whites who wanted Indians to be just like them”. Kureishi 1990, 212.
69 Anthony Ilona, in his essay on Naipul (who of course coined the term “mimic man”) suggests that however much colonialism as “historical violence” may have “repressed direct acts of creative self-expression, it inspires among its mocking victims new forms of creative release”. Ilona 2005, 54.
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not so much characterised by vacillation between internal and external fo- calization, but rather by the mingling of tones in Karim’s description of the creative process. His mimicry of Changez is opportunistic but respect- ful, satirical but not mocking: he feels that he is “not caricaturing [Chan- gez] but getting behind his peculiar eyeballs”, adding grandiosely and irre- verently: “Robert de Niro would have been proud of me” (225). In Karim’s performance as Changez, the ironic reworking of mimicry reaches its climax: Changez is a mimic man who is in turn appropriated by another mimic man. But then Changez is different from Karim – he is (possibly) Black British Fiction’s first mimic man to come into his own.70
CONCLUSION: EMPOWERING FICTIONS
The way in which Karim makes up the better part of himself by turning Changez into a fiction can be read as an allusion to the made-up nature of identity – arguably the trait that representation most strives to empha- size. The point about representation is after all not what sort of fictions are “truest”, but which are most persuasive under what circumstances. Smith offers an instance of an “untrue”, yet powerful and moving fiction in White Teeth, in which this is made particularly clear: Samad, depressed and disillusioned about his attempts to turn his sons into “good Muslim boys” (406), pours his heart out to Irie, who has different, cheerfully athe- istic ideas about what a “good” ethnic identity might be. While Samad is frightened by the thought that maybe “birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident” (407; emphasis in original), Irie feels “ashamed to find that the land of accidents sounded like paradise to her. Sounded like freedom”. But when he asks her “‘Do you understand, child? I know you understand’” (408), Irie has the sense to see that
what he really meant was: do we speak the same language? Are we from the same place? Are we the same? Irie squeezed his hand and nodded vigorously, trying to ward off his tears. What else could she tell him but what he wanted to hear? ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ (408)
That Irie and Samad are “the same” is of course a fiction, as Irie herself realizes. Yet her answer is creative in the best sense of the word, because
70 Ross also notes Karim’s propensity to long for a reunion with Changez when he feels particularly pressured and confused by the earnest rigidity of some of his white middle-class friends and acquaintances. But his general take on Changez as an “endearingly companionable” and “amiable misfit”, whom Karim mocks but is surprised to share some “common qualities” with, seems to me an underesti- mation of Changez’ importance for Karim, and for the novel in general. This also causes Ross to downplay Jamila’s “muscly arms” as a “gender surpise” that sim- ply emphasizes the “craziness” of the arranged marriage, not as an indication that this arranged marriage might actually turn out the novel’s most liberated relationship. Ross 2006, 241, 246, 245, 237.
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it helps Samad to stabilize his sense of identity, not entirely unlike the way Changez helps stabilize Karim’s. Writers on postcolonial humour tend to emphasise that the one really significant rift in comic writing such as Smith’s and Kureishi’s is between those with a “flexible” sense of iden- tity and those without.71 In this reading, humour would have to work against those characters marked as unenlightened enough not to have ab- sorbed notions of representation and “transcultural competence”72 in the way that, say, Irie has. But Samad in the scene just discussed, fretting over “good Muslim boys”, can hardly be suspected of harbouring a particu- larly flexible view of identity, and still the scene works to cross barriers of age, ethnicity and gender. And Changez, with his “background of preju- dice against practically the whole world” (273) is allowed to be just as self-centred and limited as any Orientalist, but shown from a perspective that does not need the binary oppositions of the “standard” and the “other” any more except for play: “Whatever Jamila does is alright by me. I’m not a tyrant fascist, as you know. I have no prejudice expect against Pakistanis, which is normal” (273).
Maybe this is because flexibility always needs the foil of rigidity – for funny and also for intensely moving scenes such as the one discussed above. Without rigidity, flexibility would after all be hard to assert. Smith and Kureishi offer us some very funny instances of how we might cease to “make the world uglier”, and mimicry emerges as one of their most effec- tive strategies to achieve this – not least because it is shown at its best in characters who are blissfully unaware of their subversive potential.73 And one trait in particular seems to denote the freedom and flexibility that Smith and Kureishi grant some of their most likeable characters: they are even allowed their bouts of rigidity.
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71 This is an idea proposed with some frequency – see Knopp 2009, 69; Ross 2006, 235; Ilona 2005, 58; Ramsey-Kurz 2005, 84; Reichl & Stein 2005, 14.
72 See Reichl & Stein 2005, 14. 73 Cf. Mita Banerjee’s discussion of Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy, in which
the autodiegetic narrator, a “doubled” outsider in the sense of being a gay Tamil in a heteronormative Sinhalese society, consciously turns himself into “an invisi- ble mangler of (hetero)normative signification”. Banerjee 2005, 158.
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