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Council Estates As Cultural Enclaves in Recent Urban Fictions

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Council Estates As Cultural Enclaves in Recent Urban Fictions Susanne Cuevas ‘Societies Within’: Council Estates as Cultural Enclaves in Recent Urban Fictions This essay examines Courttia Newland’s The Scholar (1997) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), two recent ‘council estate novels’ and literary representations of two of Britain’s most underprivileged and highly stigmatised communities which are segregated along class, ethnic and religious lines. The former is an exploration into the vicious circle of violence and crime that thwarts the young Afro-Caribbean protagonists’ ambition to leave the estate behind – very much in the tradition of 19th-century ‘slum fiction’ by Arthur Morrison or Emile Zola. The latter closely follows the process of emancipation of a Muslim woman from the Bangladeshi society recreated on the estate and is more optimistic about her chances to permeate the estate boundaries. Finally, this paper explores how both Newland and Ali have had to position themselves in terms of the ‘authenticity’ of their experience and have had to re-address the ‘burden of representation’.1 After having been long forgotten and neglected, council estates in Britain have recently moved back into the media spotlight and onto the political agenda in the context of concerns about the rise of an underclass, increasing violent crime and ethnic segregation. The New Labour government, who had made tackling social exclusion one of its priorities in the 1997 election, has re- cently admitted its failure to deliver on parts of this promise. In February 2006, Tony Blair identified the plight of children ‘brought up in workless households in poor estates […] who are the clients of many agencies of government but the charges of no-one, prey to drugs, into crime and anti- social behaviour, lacking in self-belief, lacking a basic stake in the society into which they are born’2 as an urgent problem in his speech to the Scottish Labour Party conference. As one measure, Hilary Armstrong was appointed as Minister for Social Exclusion in May 2006, a new post created to co- ordinate government initiatives in this field. In February 2007, a government- commissioned report into the future of council housing found that half of all social housing is concentrated in the poorest 20 per cent of neighbourhoods in Britain and that more than 50 per cent of social housing tenants of working age are without paid work. The author of the report, Professor John Hills of the London School of Economics, put forward plans to break up council 1 This article is an abridged version of a chapter called ‘Return of Realism’ of my dissertation Babylon and Golden City: Representations of London in Black and Asian British Novels Since the 1990s (Heidelberg: Winter 2008). 2 Tony Blair, ‘Big challenges need big changes’, speech to the Scottish Labour Party Conference, 24/02/2006 <www.scottishlabour.org.uk/pmconfspeech2006/>. 384 Susanne Cuevas estates through a targeted mixing of private and public housing in order to reverse the geographical polarisation of social disadvantage.3 The review co- incided with debates about social disintegration in Britain, which have also been fed by a recent series of fatal stabbings and shootings among black teen- agers in London that have shocked the British and international public.4 A large part of Britain’s six million council home tenants5 is recruited from unskilled, unemployed, poor and marginalised groups. The sale of better council housing under Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ scheme which left behind a body of unattractive high-rise flats and poor housing on marginal estates further con- tributed to the allocation of poor council housing to ethnic minorities6 such as Afro-Caribbeans, who (initially ineligible for council housing) moved in great numbers into council sector flats in the 1970s. Especially young people and single parents remain overrepresented among occupants of council housing. Though early migrant fictions, such as Buchi Emecheta’s In the Ditch (1972) are sometimes set on council estates, it was not until the success of Victor Headley’s Yardie (1993), and the discovery of the marketability of popular literature to a black working-class readership in the 1990s, that these settings were developed into portraits of a micro-society within society, sometimes undeservedly labelled ‘ghetto fiction’.7 Among the number of young authors who are or have been working in this genre are Courttia Newland, whose novel The Scholar and short story collection Society Within are set on a fictitious West London inner city housing estate, Alex Wheatle writing about South London in Brixton Rock and East of Acre Lane and Stephen Thompson with Toy Soldiers about North East London. Benjamin Zephaniah’s latest novel Rap Culture also falls into this category, its protagonists are from East London. Beyond the metropolis, Karline Smith’s novels Moss Side Massive and Full Crew are set in Manchester. Though the protagonists in all of these novels are Afro-Caribbeans, the field has recently expanded to examine other ethnic groups, such as Bangladeshis in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), and 3 John Hills, Ends and Means: The Future Roles of Social Housing in England. ESRC Research Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, February 2007. 4 Since the end of January 2007, seven young black boys have died in violent attacks. The attackers and their victims were typically aged between 13 and 16 and of Afro-Caribbean descent, although Asians have also been involved. 5 Data taken from: Amelia Hill ‘Council Estate Decline Spawns New Underclass’, The Observer, 30 November 2003. However, available data on the number of council homes varies greatly (between 2.9 million and 5.3 million). A possible reason for this may be the ongoing transfer of council housing stock to housing associations. 6 Cf. J. Parker and K. Dugmore, Colour and the Allocation of GLC Housing, Research Report 21, Greater London Council, 1976. 7 Andy Wood, ‘Contemporary Black British Urban Fiction: A “Ghetto Perspective”?’, Wasafiri 36 (2002), 18-22. .
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