Imaginary Homelands - The New Empire within Britain

TOPIC : Imaginary Homelands - The New Empire within Britain

PAPER 11 : The Post-Colonial Literature

STUDENT'S NAME : Gohil Yashpalsinh Baldevsinh

CLASS : M.A., Sem-3

ROLL NO. : 15

YEAR : 2013

             Salman Rushdi is a diasporic writer. There are some special characteristics of diasporic writings. Diasporic writer is someone who is away from his/her homeland. So when I diasporic writer writes, his writing differs in a way. In his mind there is love for motherland and at the same time hate as well. So there is always conflicts goes on within him.

Approach – Avoidance Conflict

Approach – Approach Conflict

Avoidance – Avoidance Conflict

             There is a Nostalgia memory effect on the mind of a diasporic writer. So there are two types of memories in his mind. 

1. Good Memories

2. Constructive Memories

             This way these writers always shuttle between the past and the possible future. The memories of the past and possible future construct the diasporic writing. So, when this writer writes there are some gaps in its memory. So, the writer tries to fill those gaps with its knowledge or imagination. This way the writer will not be clear in the detail they are giving in their writing. So, this way those details might not be related to the reality.

             Salman Rushdi in this essay writes about racism which lies there in Britain within their unconscious mind. He says that the Britishers will never accept that they are also somehow govern by the racism in their unconsciousness. He says that Britain isn't South Africa. I am reliably informed of this. Nor is it Nazi Germany. I've got that on the best authority as well. You may feel that these two statements are not exactly the most dramatic of revelations. But it's remarkable how often they, or similar statements, are used to counter the arguments of anti-racist campaigners. 'Things aren't as bad as all that,' we are told, 'you exaggerate, you're indulging in special pleading, you must be paranoid.' So let me concede at once that, as far as I know, there are no pass laws here. Inter-racial marriages are permitted. And Auschwitz hasn't been rebuilt in the Home Counties. I find it odd, however, that those who use such absences as defences rarely perceive that their own statements indicate how serious things have become. Because if the defence for Britain is that mass extermination of racially impure persons hasn't yet begun, or that the principle of white supremacy hasn't actually been enshrined in the constitution, then something must have gone very wrong indeed.

            Then he adds that racism is not a side-issue in contemporary Britain; that it's not a peripheral minority affair. He believes that Britain is undergoing a critical phase of its post-colonial period, and this crisis is not simply economic or political. It's a crisis of the whole culture, of society's entire sense of itself. And racism is only the most clearly visible part of this crisis, the tip of the kind of iceberg that sinks ships.

So he says that the fact remains that every major institution in this country is permeated by racial prejudice to some degree, and the unwillingness of the white majority to recognize this is the main reason why it can remain the case. Let's take the Law. We have, in Britain today, judges like McKinnon who can say in court that the word 'nigger' cannot be considered an epithet of racial abuse because he was nicknamed 'Nigger' at his public school; or like great Lord Denning, who can publish a book claiming that black people aren't as fit as whites to serve on juries, because they come from cultures with less stringent moral codes. We've got a police force that harasses blacks every day of their lives. There was a policeman who sat in an unmarked car on Railton Road in Brixton last year, shouting abuse at passing black kids and arresting the first youngsters who made the mistake of answering back. There were policemen at a Southall demonstration who sat in their vans, writing the letters NF in the steam of their breath on the windows. The British police have even refused to make racial discrimination an offence in their code of conduct, in spite of Lord Scarman's recommendations. Now it is precisely because the law courts and the police are not doing their jobs that the activities of racist hooligans are on the increase. It's just not good enough to deplore the existence of neo-Fascists in society. They exist because they are permitted to exist. (I said every major institution, so let's consider the government itself. When the Race Relations Act was passed, the government of Britain specifically exempted itself and all its actions from the jurisdiction of the Act.)
 

              Then he gives an example of his own friend. A friend of mine, an Indian, was deported recently for the technical offense known as 'overstaying'. This means that after a dozen or so years of living here, he was found to be a couple of days late sending in the forms applying for an extension to his stay. Now neither he nor his family had ever claimed a penny in welfare, or, I suppose I should say, been in trouble with the police. He and wife financed themselves by running a clothes stall, and gave all their spare time and effort to voluntary work helping their community. My friend was chairman of his local traders' association. So when the deportation order was made, this association, all three of his borough MI's and about fifty other MI's of all parties pleaded with the Home Office for clemency. None was forthcoming. My friend's son had a rare disease, and a doctor's report was produced stating that the child's health would be endangered if he was sent to India. The Home Office replied that it considered there were no compassionate grounds for reversing its decision. In the end, my friend offered to leave voluntarily-he had been offered sanctuary in Germany-and he asked to be allowed to go freely, to avoid the stigma of having a deportation order stamped into his passport. The Home Office refused him this last scrap of his self-respect, and threw him out. As the Fascist John Kingsley Read once said, one down, a million to go.

              Salman rushdi talks specifically about the language that a language reveals the attitudes of the people who use and shape it. And a whole declension of patronizing terminology can be found in the language in which inter-racial relations have been described inside Britain. At first, we were told, the goal was 'integration'. Now this word rapidly came to mean 'assimilation': a black man could only become integrated when he started behaving like a white one. After 'integration' came the concept of 'racial harmony'. Now once again, this sounded virtuous and desirable, but what it meant in practice was that blacks should be persuaded to live peaceably with whites, in spite of all the injustices done to them every day. The call for 'racial harmony' was simply an invitation to shut up and smile while nothing was done about our grievances. And now there's new catchword: 'multiculturalism'. In our schools, this means little more than teaching the kids a few bongo rhythms, how to tie a sari and so forth. In the police training programme, it means telling cadets that black people are so 'culturally different' that they can't help making trouble. Multicultralism is the latest token gesture towards Britain's blacks, and it ought to be exposed, like 'integration' and 'racial harmony', for the sham it is. Meanwhile, the stereotyping goes on. Blacks have rhythm, Asians work hard. I've been told by Tory politicians that the Conservative Party seriously discusses the idea of wooing the Asians and leaving the Afro-Caribbeans to the Labour Party, because Asians are such good capitalists. In the new Empire, as in the old one, it seems our masters are willing to use the tried and trusted strategies of divide-and-rule.But I've saved the worst and most insidious stereotype for last. It is the characterization of black people as a Problem. You talk about the Race Problem, the Immigration Problem, all sorts of problems. If you are liberal, you say that black people have problems. If you aren't, you say they are the problem. But the members of the new colony have only one real problem, and that problem is white people. British racism, of course, is not our problem. It's yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your problem.

             Rushdi tells whites that you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multicultrualism, or immigration, but simply the business of facing up to and eradication the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new, and last, Empire will be obliged to struggle against you. You could say that we are required to embark on a new freedom movement.And so it's interesting to remember that when Mahatma Gandhi, the father of an earlier freedom movement, came to England and was asked what he thought of English civilization, he replied: 'I think it would be a good idea.'