Notes Introduction: Backgrounds: Facts and Fictions of Multicultural London 1. Conservative MP Aidan Burley, for instance, notoriously took to Twitter to denounce the ceremony as ‘leftist multicultural crap’ (quoted in Watt 2012, np). In the Daily Mail, Rick Dewsbury described the ceremony as a ‘bonanza of left-wing propaganda’ whose ‘multicultural equality agenda was so staged it was painful to watch’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dewsbury’s piece has subse- quently been removed from the website of the Daily Mail but can, at the time of writing, be viewed at www.freezepage.com/1343493744VDGIBPHPUW [accessed February 2014]. 2. All census data referred to is freely available online through government websites. See http://data.london.gov.uk [accessed February 2014]. 3. See ‘London migrants year of arrival’, http://data.london.gov.uk/taxonomy/ categories/demographics [accessed February 2014]. 4. See ‘Londoners born overseas data download’, available at http://data.london. gov.uk/census/themes/diversity [accessed February 2014]. 5. This data, from the Office for National Statistics, refers to the UK rather than to London specifically. See ‘Migration Statistics Quarterly Report, November 2013’, Figure 4.2: ‘Immigration from most common countries of last resi- dence for 2008–2012’. Available at www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_335330. pdf [accessed February 2014]. 6. All data relating to UK book sales has been obtained from Nielsen BookScan UK and is correct as of February 2014. Nielsen’s sales figures are estimated to cover over 90 per cent of the UK trade book market. Coverage varies over the years, starting at about 65 per cent in 1998 and increasing to over 90 per cent. Therefore, sales figures for novels published before this period – such as Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) – are only partial, with no data available before 1998. Nielsen’s data shows that more than 824,000 copies of White Teeth have been sold, more than 860,000 copies of Brick Lane and more than 881,000 copies of Small Island. 7. The three major studies to date in this field are Sukhdev Sandhu’s London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (2003), John Clement Ball’s Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (2004) and John McLeod’s Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004). Of these, McLeod’s study has had a particularly strong influence on the present volume. I have resisted describing post-imperial London as post- colonial London – I remain wary of the risk of conflating literature of the for- mer imperial centre with literature of former colonies – and have placed less emphasis on authorial ethnicity and on reading authors within theorised categories. However, Postcolonial London is an insightful, even groundbreak- ing account of literature written by migrants to London and their children from the 1950s to the millennium, and is highly recommended to readers. 202 Notes 203 Ball’s book, which covers some of the same material, is interesting in its attempt to give a sense of the different areas of London on which such lit- erature has focused. Sandhu’s book, which is more informal in tone, covers a much longer time span, from the eighteenth century to the millennium. 8. SV, pp. 3; 4; 31; 35; 38; 200; 249; 322; 356; 399; 425; 459; 532. 9. While both Rushdie himself and Kenan Malik perhaps rather overstate the role of ‘the Rushdie affair’ as a precursor for the attacks of 11 September 2001 (and, in the case of Malik, those of 7 July 2005), for comprehensive accounts of ‘the Rushdie affair’ see Rushdie’s Joseph Anton and Malik’s From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy. 1 Multiculturalism and the Work of Hanif Kureishi 1. Kureishi’s treatment of Riaz’s poems is the clearest example of the ways in which The Black Album pokes fun at the notion of religious texts representing divine will. 2. In 1998, Kureishi’s sister Yasmin wrote a letter to The Guardian stating that she would not let her family’s past be ‘fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif’s profit’. Ten years later, after the publication of Something to Tell You, she published a list of family members that Kureishi had ‘exploited’ for the purposes of his work in The Independent. Quoted in Poets and Writers, 11 March 2008 www.pw.org/content/author039s_sister_writes_next_ chapter_kureishi_family_feud [accessed February 2014]. 3. ‘I loved being with my family, but I felt very alienated in Pakistan.’ Quoted in Kumar and Kureishi 2001, p. 121. 4. Given that Wachinger employs a hyphen in ‘post-ethnic’ while Stein does not, when referring to both I have chosen to bracket the hyphen. 5. Making a distinction between ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘postcoloniality’, Huggan describes the former as an academic discourse and the latter as being ‘largely a function of postmodernity: its own regime of value pertains to a system of symbolic, as well as material, exchange in which even the language of resist- ance may be manipulated and consumed’ (Huggan 2001, p. 6, italics original). 6. Since Stein tends to employ a hyphen in ‘post-colonial’ where I do not, when referring to his treatment of it (or when paraphrasing him) I have bracketed his hyphen accordingly. 7. ‘When this is done – and eighteen months, say, have passed, as they surely will – there may be another man in this house. He might be sitting where I am now. My sons, if they are having a nightmare, will go to him. Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They’ll sit on anyone’s knee’ (I, p. 117). 2 ‘Fold the paper and pass it on’: Andrea Levy’s London Fiction 1. See, for example, Fischer 2004a. 2. Although her third, Fruit of the Lemon, does disrupt this rather neat correla- tion in employing a single narrator, in a further coincidence that narrator does record a series of (hi)stories ‘as told’ to her by three of her relatives. 204 Notes 3. For a comprehensive account of Every Light in the House Burnin’ see Perfect 2014. 4. See Toplu, who suggests that it is Faith’s own ‘self-denial of her blackness [that] reaches a climax’ (Toplu 2005, np). For a more detailed analysis of the ways in which a pattern of silencing and erasure throughout Faith’s life brings about her breakdown, see Saez 2006. 5. For a comprehensive discussion of the roles of Small Island’s Gilbert and White Teeth’s Samad as colonial subjects who fight for Britain during the war and who subsequently migrate to London, see Perfect forthcoming a. 3 Multicultural London in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000): A Celebration of Unpredictability and Uncertainty? 1. Interviewing Smith in 2000, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina stated ‘People have compared you to Rushdie, and I can think of lots of reasons for that ...’, to which Smith replied ‘Can you? I can’t. [...] I hadn’t read any Rushdie until I’d finished the book [White Teeth].’ In Nasta 2004, p. 273. 2. For a discussion of the roles of White Teeth’s Samad and Small Island’s Gilbert as colonial subjects who fight for Britain during the war and who subse- quently migrate to London, see Perfect forthcoming a. 3. Interestingly, in Smith’s third novel, On Beauty – a campus novel set primar- ily in the United States – racism surfaces in a rather similar manner. During a brief visit to London, protagonist Howard Belsey – a white, English, middle- aged university lecturer who is married to, and has three children with, black American Kiki – goes to see his elderly father Harold in his North London neighbourhood of Cricklewood. The two have not met since the whole family visited Harold four years earlier, an occasion which, we are told, ‘did not go well’ (Smith 2005, p. 292). Smith gives a lengthy account of the interior of Harold’s somewhat outdated living room, describing the lighting, the wall- paper, the carpet, the furniture, various ornaments and so on in great detail (pp. 293–4). Conversation between the two is tense, and it becomes increas- ingly clear that they have little in common and that their relationship has always been strained at best. Harold manages, in a relatively short period of time, to insult feminists, homosexuals and the obese, and it quickly becomes clear that he is something of a stereotype of prejudice, chauvinism and bigotry. It turns out that, during the family visit four years previously, he managed to ‘tell his only son that you can’t expect black people to develop mentally like white people do’ (p. 296). As Howard tells his father of his marital problems, Harold attempts sympathy by telling him ‘She [Kiki] found a black fella, I spose. It was always going to happen, though. It’s in their nature’ (p. 301). Unsurprisingly, the visit ends with Howard angrily cursing his father before leaving. Harold does not surface again in the novel, and neither does the kind of racism that he represents. As with White Teeth, On Beauty’s only real account of overt racism occurs in the form of an elderly white man in his home – a domestic, familial setting – with such racism again being portrayed as an anachronism. Notes 205 4 Permanence and Transience: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and In the Kitchen (2009) 1. Metro (no author given), Review of In the Kitchen, 5 May 2009 (available online). 2. In 2011, Ali published her fourth novel, Untold Story. Set in a small town in the US, it focuses on a protagonist who closely resembles Princess Diana, and who faked her own death in order to escape the media limelight.