Sukhdev Sandhu, Writer
A prominent journalist for the Daily Telegraph,
Sukhdev also wrote London Calling, an acclaimed book
on how black and Asian writers saw themselves living
in London. He frequently writes on a variety of literary
and cultural issues in the media
'At the top of the dial': A
Review Essay on Sukhdev Sandhu, London Calling:
How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (Harper
Collins 2003) ISBN: 000257182X-mSteven Barfield
<1> Sukhdev Sandhu's book has already created
something of a stir in newspaper review columns and
literary circles, which means that those interested
in Black and Asian writers connected with London probably
already know about it. It has been both extravagantly
endorsed and stringently criticized, which suggests
it has touched a nerve in some aspects of contemporary
British culture. As I am reviewing it for an academic
journal, rather than for a newspaper, I shall be both
considering the book and some of these telling reactions
in newspapers review columns.
<2> In the main, there is very much to commend
in this voluminous, expansive account of how Asian and
Black writers imaginatively reconstructed London in
their own terms as a kind of city of the mind, whose
representations have come to influence how contemporary
Londoners see themselves and the city. It is that unusual
species of academic writing: a good, indeed gripping,
read. As a literary history its coverage is impressive:
from the 18th Century shopkeeper, writer, former slave
and homilist Ignatius Sancho (a correspondent of Laurence
Sterne), to contemporary writers both literary (Kureishi,
Rushdie) and to those more popular and generic (Victor
Headley). While it could be objected that many of the
writers discussed are already well known exemplars of
Black and Asian British fiction (Sam Selvon, George
Lamming, V.S.Naipaul, Caryl Philips, Fred D'Aguiar);
the earlier chapters on 18th and 19th Century Black
and Asian writers dwell on those much less known to
the general public or even to specialists in the postcolonial
field. Such a criticism would also miss the point, that
one of the book's principal aims, is to make an argument
as to the essential continuity of black and Asian writing
about the metropolitan capital London, in contrast to
an accepted and still common history locating its beginnings
in the post-war period of the 1950s, with the Windrush
generation and after.
<3> It is similar, therefore, in certain ways
to C.L. Inne's magisterial A History of Black and Asian
Writing in Britain, 1700-2000 (Cambridge U P 2002),
but Sandhu's book makes for an easier, more narrative
orientated reading and there are some crucial differences
of intentions which make the books effectively complimentary,
rather than competing. (Sandhu's book is both much more
polemical about its argument as to continuity and written
more for the general reader than the professional academic.
Inne's book concentrates more successfully on certain
unknown writers before the post-war period.) As Sandhu
points out, it is this continuity critics have missed
because: 'blacks and Asians tend to be used in contemporary
discourse as metaphors for newness' (xviii). In addition,
he points out that the historical 'metrography' that
he is charting, is one marked by multiple perceptions
of what London means for Blacks and Asians who experience
and then write about it. This includes both their given
'locations' and the means by which they attempt to locate
or relocate themselves:
Not only have colonial authors lived and worked in
a variety of different boroughs, but they have also
imagined, perceived and described the city in very different
ways. ... Class, race, gender, historical context and
personal psychology have all inflected their descriptions
of the capital. ... There is no single black or Asian
London. (xxii)
<4> This brings us to a crucial point about one
of the distinctive aims of Sandhu's books: it is as
much about London as it is the Black and Asian writers
who have inhabited it. Instead of a now traditional
postcolonial opposition between the metropolitan centre
and a marginal Empire/commonwealth, which postcolonial
writers strive to subvert or challenge, through 'writing
back to the centre': we see a metropolitan centre that
was effectively being rewoven in a multiplicitous, multiethnic
image, as soon as it emerged. London as capital of Empire,
was no less changed by Modernity, than were the subject
people of the British Empire: in both cases, what was
traditional was remade. In this respect, Sandhu's project
is akin to what he praises in certain contemporary migrant/
second generation writers (Fred D'Aguiar, S.I. Martin,
Caryl Phillips, Gbenga Agbenugba) who tease out parallels
and contrasts between epochs of London to illustrate
the historical continuities and differences of Black
and Asian experiences in the capital. Even though Sandhu's
book is broadly chronological, he praises the non-linearity
of much black and Asian writing about London (294-7).
One advantage he perceives in such an approach, is that
they can show a black and Asian London than is at least
partially synchronic, for example, in D'Aguiar's use
of the Thames in Sweet Thames to centre very different
historical moments of black London life (312-320). London
is not therefore simply a bad thing or a good thing
in itself, but crucially something that can be empowering,
because it can be changed and promotes growth.
I would still argue that London has been good to people
coming from the old Empire, just as they have been good
for London ... They found in this old, old city a chance
to become new. To slough off their pasts. London gave
them the necessary liberty. (xxvi)
<5> The idea that London is itself a kind of already
'deconstructed' Imperial metropolis, rather than the
centre of the Old Empire, indeed of today's Britain,
raises some significant problems for any postcolonial
theorisation of the binary divide between metropolitan
and marginal and the postcolonial writer's (presumed)
attempts to subvert this. How can a postcolonial writer
subvert or resist a London that was never the centre
of the Empire or even of Englishness/ Britishness in
the first place? How can a diasporic writer maintain
a dual identity in a London, if it turns all such writers
into Londoners, rather than either migrants to Britain
or unwanted immigrants from elsewhere? These are rather
large theoretical questions and it is perhaps one of
the shortcomings of the book, that it fails to really
address them, (the book rather sidesteps postcolonial
theory, which may irritate some readers).
<6> I just want to consider one of these questions
for a moment. What does it mean for Londoners to possess
a diasporic sensibility within London? One suggestion
would be that they restlessly negotiate between what
they have 'lost' (they are metaphorically exiled from
their homeland), and what they have gained (modernity
allows them to literally remake themselves and their
culture). They can resist what they perceive to be the
racism of their adopted country, and simultaneously
challenge those parts of their native traditions that
they wish to analyze. In Sandhu's, otherwise intelligent,
well-informed and well written chapter on Sam Selvon,
for example, this type of tension is not really apparent.
London is the subject of love ('only Selvon loves London
with all the recognition and toleration of its faults
that the word "love" implies' [180]) and this
is in part, because London is 'changing, becoming creolized'
(182). The term 'creolized' is too easily inserted here.
Presumably, he is referring to Edward Kamau Brathwaite's
theory of cultural creolization in the West Indies following
linguistic hybridity. However, it could easily be mistaken
for the 'melting pot' theory popular in twentieth century
American discourse, where immigrants melted down and
lost their distinctiveness. As in Blue Mink's 1969 hit,
'Melting Pot':
What we need is a great big melting pot
Big enough enough enough to take
The world and all its got
And keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out coffee coloured people by the score
The discussion of Selvon, seems in part a defense of
the former by Sandhu; against Mike Phillip's charge,
that Selvon's characters are 'comic caricatures or sentimentalized
victims' (182). (Phillips, originally a journalist,
is a well-known black British thriller/ detective writer.
He is also the co-author of Windrush: The Irresistible
Rise of Multi-Racial Britain [Harper Collins 1998],
and most recently the largely autobiographical, London
Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain [Continuum 2001]).
I do have sympathy with Sandhu here, as Phillip's remark
seems to imply we should only read black and Asian literature
as a type of social realist reportage, where positive
representations of their 'constituency' are crucial,
and trying to understanding the specific aesthetic dynamics
of Caribbean post-colonial literature in diasporic writers
is simply irrelevant.
<8> Nevertheless, it leaves to one side the crucial
question of whether or not the type of creolization
Selvon's texts might or might not invoke, is perhaps
a type of postcolonial critique and an aesthetic politics
produced in the face of British racism. For that matter,
do Selvon's characters ever really fit in, or does his
principal protagonist Moses remain ultimately a marginal
figure in a London where marginality is sometimes less
noticeable? Moses' unsuccessful, attempted return to
the Caribbean in Moses Ascending, arguably, leaves him
a permanently liminal figure in terms of social identity,
neither British, nor finally West Indian. Little of
this should be news for the academic reader and has
been discussed fruitfully by major critics of Selvon
(particularly Susheila Nasta), and most recently, in
Martin Zehnder's impressive essay collection: Something
Rich and Strange: Selected Essays on Samuel Selvon (Peepal
Tree Press 2003). There is in general too little discussion
in London Calling of the body of the existing critical
literature on writers such as Selvon or indeed many
of the others -- though this would surely be germane
to critiquing the kinds of social realist views that
Sandhu singles out in his introduction:
For too long black literature has been considered in
extra-literary terms. It is treated primarily as a species
of journalism, one that furnishes eyewitness accounts
of sectors of British society to which mainstream newspapers
and broadcasters have little access. ... black writing
comes to be viewed as a kind of emergency literature,
one that is tough, angry, 'real'. (xxiii)
<9> This is a curious stance: surely there is
already a large body of critical work, which exists
on the likes of Kureishi, Rushdie, Jean Rhys and Caryl
Phillips? Yes, of course there is. However, Sandhu is
thinking about how it is read by general audiences,
not how it is taught and studied in Universities, or
even Schools and this returns us to the fact that this
book is aimed at general readers. This is why the discussion
of Mike Phillip's remarks about Selvon does not occur
in the context of academic debates about the latter's
work, or the aesthetic strategies of the Caribbean novel.
To be fair, such references are there in the endnotes
which would suggest Sandhu is familiar with these debates,
while Phillips is perhaps unaware of them, or indeed,
the exact Caribbean dimension to Selvon's work.
<10> Faisal Islam in a generally positive review
in The Observer, made a point that one of the central
(and to his mind questionable) themes of London Calling
is that: '[a] metaphysical conception of London as freedom
unites Sancho's story with those of Rushdie and Kureishi'
(Faisal Islam, 'Capital Accounts', Sunday August 17,
2003, The Observer available online at: books.guardian.co.uk/departments/
politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1020191,00.html).
This seems to me an interesting criticism and explains
why Sancho, a former Slave but keen royalist, is such
a central touchstone for Sandhu's book and why Sancho
is keenly defended from charges of 'colonial lackeyism'
(183). This is more than anything else, a book about
writers and their ability to be empowered by London
in creative terms, and indeed to change both themselves
and it. If, as previously noted, the literary analogues
of London Calling in terms of methodology, are historiographic
novels by writers such as Caryl Phillips, then the closest
thematic parallel is with Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of
Suburbia and its chameleon-like protagonist's ability
to reinvent himself and to view London as a source of
opportunity rather than problems. Sandhu approvingly
cites some lines from Kureishi's Sammy and Rose Get
Laid: 'We love our city and we belong to it. Neither
of us are English, we're Londoners you see' (249). In
fact, the affinity between Sandhu's book and Kureishi's
work, explains why the chapter 'Pop Goes the Centre'
is a particularly strong one. However, even if Kureishi
does indeed eschew the mode of straightforward social
protest literature and its desires to challenge racist
definitions of what it means to be Asian, this is to
underestimate the fact that his work largely function
within just such a framework as offering a different
kind of response. The Buddha Of Suburbia, after all,
is studded with images of both straightforward racism
against Karim and Orientalist stereotyping of him offered
by Left-Liberals. What is different is the character's
response and the strategies that Kureishi chooses to
deploy. But we can make a larger point here, that Sandhu's
polemical argument would appear to severe something
of the established and perceived relationship between
these writers and their communities. London may represent
freedom for many black and Asian writers, but is that
paralleled in the communities they are usually taken
to represent? Perhaps not, would be one possible answer,
though this is not something the book considers. An
implication of this argument would be that traditional
views of black and Asian literature as representing
a presumed community as a kind of literary version of
identity politics is itself problematic. After all,
we do not worry much about who Martin Amis or Jeanette
Winterson is representing. Perhaps such views of the
necessity of communal representation do effectively
reduce writers to no more than pseudo-journalist or
ethnographers.
<11> Hassan Mohamdallie in the Socialist Review
made the point that the story that is told is by far
too optimistic and is irritated that it stereotypes
the Left's view of both blacks and Asians as simply
that of 'victims'. (Hassan Mohamdallie, 'Capital Views',November,
2003, Socialist Review, available online at: http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=8662)
Leaving aside whether these two criticism are warranted
or not, one should say that in its emphasis on London
as freedom, London Calling would seem to equate creative
opportunity with capitalism's continuing and successful
growth. London as capitalist metropolis occasions the
possibilities of the idea of largely personal freedom
that Sandhu deploys to such effect, but do none of the
books on London by black and Asian writers question
such a correlation? What of the fact that many of the
contemporary writers that Sandhu focuses on, would see
themselves as part of that same Left? Is individual
freedom, ever the same as social freedom? This topic
is not discussed in the book.
<12> The sharpest and most extensive criticism,
however, has come from the novelist Mike Phillips in
a review in The Guardian, 'From Slaves to Straw Men'.
(Mike Phillips, 'From Slaves to Straw Men', The Guardian,
Saturday August 30, 2003, available online at: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1031668,00.html)
This is an abrasive review, replete with some journalistic
grandstanding and is unlikely to win much favour with
literary critics or students. It begins by arguing that
the most knowledgeable and well-read academics in the
field of black British fiction (which he seems to conflate
with such work as his own thrillers), are abroad rather
than in Britain. He may have a point in objecting to
the categorization of Black British fiction as 'postcolonial',
but he does not really tell us what he objects to about
this description. Is it all too theoretical and Left
wing, for journalists to make much from? Does it leave
out too many British novelists concerned with addressing
specifically British issues? Phillips then spends much
time reaffirming his criticism of Selvon, in the context
of what he takes to be Sandhu's critique of political
correctness. He seems to be irritated here by Sandhu's
objections (above) to his own criticism of Selvon's
characters, which he then equates with an attack on
'political correctness'.
Spurning criticism of his characters, Sandhu writes
approvingly: "Selvon prefers to reveal them in
all their foolishness, their venality, fear, aspiration,
confusion, passion, rather than have them stand tall
and man the barricades in the war for racial liberation."
<13> He goes on to say that Sandhu, like most
non-Caribbean critics is missing the point that Selvon's
characterizations are based on 'racist needling'. However,
who are these mysterious Caribbean critics and why is
this kind of view not typically represented in the not
inconsiderable body of critical work on Selvon? Phillip's
overstated argument about relations between the East
Indian and African Caribbean populations in Trinidad,
would also seem very questionable from a historical
point of view alone, bearing in mind Selvon was born
in 1923 and The Lonely Londoners was written in the
1950s. However, perhaps the biggest problem for this
kind of viewpoint, determined by aesthetics of social
realism, is that it misses the obvious point of Selvon's
irony. The continual jokes about 'blackness' in The
Lonely Londoners, which are made by the African Caribbean
characters about themselves are intended to highlight
the racist discourse of 'blackness' that imprisons and
demeans them. The characters are not fully conscious
of these processes which ideologically locate them,
but they are cognizant enough of this to make jokes
about it as a complex kind of transformation and defusal
of the way themselves are pictured. Rather than the
Selvon representing black identity in terms of 'foolishness,
venality and a childlike gullibility', as Phillips puts
it, one could equally easily speak of generosity, camaraderie,
and a stubborness in the face of considerable adversity.
Moreover, what of Moses who buys a house and becomes
a landlord and self made-man in subsequent books? Again,
all of this is familiar from the existing criticism.
<14> Perhaps unsurprisingly, Phillips places
great store on the docking of the SS Windrush in 1948
being a decisive historical event, and thereby undermining
Sandhu's claims for continuity. In historical terms
he is clearly right to do so, but as Sandhu's book is
about writers, rather than the communities they could
be taken to represent, it has less clear-cut significance.
Although since Sandhu is basically writing a literary
history, rather than producing a postmodern theoretical
bricolage, it would still appear as if the arrival of
SS Windrush very greatly intensified whatever tendencies
in burgeoning multi-racial London that he perceives
as already begun. I was much less convinced, by Phillip's
objection that there is no value in Sandhu comparing
Caryl Phillip's The Final Passage and Kureishi's My
Beautiful Laundrette, because they depict different
historical periods (the 1950s and the 1970s respectively).
This would seem to imply that novels are direct historical
documents, which attest to unmediated truths. Sandhu
is surely right to read them as very different kinds
of responses to the crisis of the 1980s, whatever there
subject matter. Whether he is right to favour the 'optimistic'
Kureishi over the 'pessimistic' Phillips, (or, for that
matter, the even more pessimistic Naipaul), is clearly
another question altogether.
<15> Where Phillips make his strongest objection
(and it seems to me inescapable), is that there is a
great deal of black and Asian London orientated writing
left out, particularly from novelists that are more
central to popular culture. I do not know enough about
the fiction he cites, but would suspect that it tends
to not only be genre based, but to represent a London
that is much less exoticised and celebratory, and may
well present a more traditionally realist social aesthetic.
It may indeed be more radical in its views, if less
so, in aesthetic terms. What kind of views of London
does such writing present and how might this modify
the picture Sandhu evokes? This is the kind of challenge
offered by his book and suggests that London Calling
opens up avenues of opportunity. Perhaps in the end,
this book is more of a creative intervention, that an
orthodox literary history. It seems telling that Sandhu
is particularly emotional, when recounting how D'Aguiar's
Sweet Thames includes film footage of the youthful Trinidad
Calypsonian Lord Kitchener singing 'London Is The Place
for Me' (316-7), on his disembarkation from the SS Windrush.
Sandhu, does single out moments of youthful migrant
idealism, that colour the complex story and these do
diminish the bad experiences, while emphasising creativity
and renewal. It is not mentioned in the book, but Lord
Kitchener actually went on to live in London and then
Manchester for some 17 years in all, marrying his English
wife Marjorie and raising a family, before returning
to Trinidad. Throughout his time, he composed and sent
back regular calypsos for Carnival, winning many roadmarch
awards, while at the same time leading a successful
life in Britain.
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