“Oi, mister! Indo-Aryans…it looks like I am a Western after all! Maybe I should listen to Tina Turner, wear the itsy-bitsy leather skirts. Pah. It just goes to show…you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find the one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy tale!” (200)
Last time, I asked you who you were, and we came up with some general answers, most of which reflected issues relating to emotions or family associations.
One reason the question is so hard to answer is, as Alsana suggests above, it is hard to know “how far back your roots” go. That is to say, where is the dividing line between you, the biological entity, and the world that has formed and is formed by you?
So, today, I am going to ask you another, related question.
But we need to begin with an idea:
You might consider that it is more reasonable to think of “yourself” as a “somebody who has been assimilated into a culture, or cultures.”
Who you “are” represents the social and cultural systems that define your experience of life.
That is not to say that there is no “you,” and certainly not that “you” as an individual are not valuable or anything like that.
We’re not talking about Nihilism here…
To the contrary, it may give you a way to approach and address the concept of you – which is something we seemed to have some difficulty articulating last time.
Let’s do the following to consider this idea, and whether or not we “buy” it:
Journal Entry: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)
Describe an experience in your life when you have been “assimilated,” that is, brought into and changed by a new culture or social trend. It can be as routine as being “assimilated” into the conventions of a class, or a new family, or a religious or political entity.
What was the experience like?
Group Work: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)
Share findings, then come up with a list of the top ten qualities or definitive characteristics of the process of assimilation.
Class Discussion: (Suggested: 5-10 Minutes)
Mini-Lecture:
1:
Near the end of your reading for today, you encountered two significant news events from the late 1980s. The first was the violent reaction to Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”
The Satanic Verses:1988
Fiction that Deals with the life of Muhammad (we have seen the outcomes of such in our own times: The Danish Cartoon Protests)
Rushdie’s work has some parallels — Lots of Western Literary Techniques not well-received by some militant Muslims.
Some Muslim groups saw it as a blasphemous book.
Banned in India and it inspired riots – like the one you read about – in the UK.
In mid-February 1989, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a Fatwa against Rushdie, calling for his murder.
This tension parallels, and shows the larger political significant of, Samad’s dissatisfaction with Western life – though in an extreme form.
Clearly, it is not shared by all UK Muslims, as is demonstrated by Alsana’s “burning” of Millat’s western items as retribution for his participation in the riot (197).
2:
We also have the Fall of the Berlin wall, which is significant for a number of reasons, the most pressing of which for our purposes is the question it raised about assimilation – Samad: “You can’t just let a million people into a rich country: Recipe for disaster.”
We might notice a few things here, the first is that Irie seems to care a great deal about it, and we might wonder why she feels differently about it than Archie and Samad – I will argue that the issue here is assimilation, or the promise of assimilation – which holds currency for her, but not for Samad (who does want it) and not for Archie(who feels no need for it). Indeed, Archie is more interested in what is on TV.
3:
Samad’s resistance to assimilation is evident in his effort to send Magid to Bangladesh.
Millat’s life appears to justify those fears.
But where do these fears come from?
Well – we might notice that they begin to show up in the text right around the time Samad begins to have an affair with Ms. Poppy Burt Jones. Who is white, and, by all accounts, thoroughly English.
4:
Why is the fear of assimilation such an issue for Samad? Well – we might notice that he is unhappy with the possible identifies he has in London, and that he romanticizes his home country.
From Alsana, of course, and from the riots we read about, we learn that Bangladesh is far from an ideal environment, and that England is supposedly a more stable place – but then we see the hurricane and the Rushdie riots, which suggest things are not as calm in the UK as she is assuming.
These are all important questions going forward, but we might look back to an even earlier scene to get an understanding of their relevance to the next generation of Iqbals and Joneses.
5:
The Mr. J.P. Hamilton Scene: Notice all the recurring motifs in this scene – that’s generally a sign something important is going on in a novel.
1) Doorstep (141) – things they are about selling or robbing.
2) He is a WWII Veteran
3) He is racist (144)
4) Does not want what the children have to offer, even when it’s charity.
5) He is also clearly insane.
6) His teeth are fake. (144)(145)
Mini-Lecture in action:
What are the defining characteristics of an assimilated “Mainer”?
Presentations next time, read to 230.
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