e-reader - text 12 - rosenberg - 'stop thinking like an english man' - 2008

8/8/2019 E-Reader - Text 12 - Rosenberg - 'Stop Thinking Like an English Man' - 2008

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121 Internationale Forschungen zurAllgemeinen undVergleichenden LiteraturwissenschaftIn Verbindung mit

Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+New Perspectives inLiterature, Film and the Arts

Norbert Bachleitner (Universitiit Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (FriedrichSchiller-Universitiit Jena), Francis Claudon (Universire Paris XII), JoachimKnape (Universitiit Tiibingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-UniversitiitMainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (UniversitiitWien), Manfred Pfister(FreieUniversitiit Berlin),Sven H. Rossel (UniversitiitWien)

herausgegeben von

Alberta Martino(Universitiit Wien)

Redaktion: Emst GrabovszkiAnschrift der Redaktion:Institut fill Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 1115,A-I090Wien

1i

.,

1,

Edited byLars Eckstein, Barbara Korte,

Eva Ulrike Pirker and Christoph Reinfandt

Amsterdam - NewYork, NY 2008


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Yvonne Rosenberg'Stop Thinking Like an Englishman' or:Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate'sCity a/Tiny Lights (2005)In a post-9!11 geopolitical climate,Tommy Akhtar, the protagonist ofPatrick Ncate's novel Cityof Tiny Lights - published in 2005 shortly before the 7/7 bombings - l ives a l ife of variousidentities in multi-ethnic London: a Ugandan-Indian, a 'Paid', an c x ~ m u j a h i d c c n , Marlowcwannabe, cosmopolitan, Londoner, and an Englishman. Yet, he always stays in the position of theimmigrant because the often limited contemporary view of theother has led to the perception ofinternally homogeneous groups. hi the course of the novel, it becomes clear how central the issueof ftxed labels is in a society characterised by the linguistic and cultural need to taxonomisc,securing apparently coherent identities. Thisarticle has two closely connected goals. Thc first is todiscuss racial and cultural idcntity as metaphysical concepts, which inflammatory reporting,however, has often engrained in society as biological facts. The second and more impor..ant aim isto stress the need to rc-formulate seemingly fixed concepts like alterl'ly and terrorism in order toopen up perception and to avoid racial stercotyping. Therefore, I will analyse the connectionbctwccn the construction of meaning, the linguistic games and the cultural codes in Neate'snovel.

London-born author Patrick Neate, who won the 2001 WhitbreadNovel Awardfor his second novel Twelve Bar Blues, has a strong interest in writing aboutquestions of identity, ethnicity, and racial discrimination. In his latest novelCity of Tiny Lights' he tackles problematic issues of contemporary multicultural metropolitan life, such as racialised anxiety and white narcissism, in apost-Chandleresque detective plot. The text is steeped in images of crosscultural urban life in a geopolitical climate after 9/11: published in 2005, shortlybefore the 717 bombings, the novel deals with several attacks on the Londonunderground.The prototypical setting of a hard-boiled detective novel is the Americanmetropolis: like Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the main characters of traditionalAmerican detective fiction tend to be ambivalent and non-locatable, walkingthe line between good and evil in a corrupt and often violent society. Incontrast, classic English gentleman detective fiction is often set in London orthe countryside, presenting a more or less idealised society, which is disturbedby a mysterious murder, as epitomised by Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.Placing an ethnic hard-boiled sleuth in London discloses the heterogeneity,

Patrick Neate, City of Tiny Lights (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006). All further referencesappear parenthetically in the text.


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356 Yvonne Rosc:nbcrgWriting Against aFixed Lexicon ofTerrorism in Patrick Neatc's City ofTiny Lights (2005) 357

individuality and inconceivability of the British metropolis and its inhabitants.As the narrator-protagonist in Patrick Neate's novel puts it: 'Amazing all the\vorlds you never see in this city because of your ovm particular Londonlifestyle' (p.241).

Both types of detective fiction claim that the solution to the mystery of amurder, the punishment and identification of the culprit, will inevitably leadto the stabilisation of social order. Characteristic of the murder detection plotis a process of analytical deduction, based on the symbolic order, which leadsto a conception of the universality of truth and to the one and only solution ofthe puzzle: at the end all signifiers seem to reveal their significations, or inother words '[n]othing is more definitive, complete, and single-minded thanthe ending of a detective story'. 2 Neate's text changes this assumption bydiversifying the two modes of genre fiction and some of its generic conventions. The novel questions COmmonsense reasoning and deduction based onideologically charged premises and does not answ;r a desire for orientation.Thus, Tommy Akthar, the protagonist of Neate's novel muses: '1 decided towrite down the facts of the situation as it currently stood. 1found a paper andpen. I didn' t get far. I knew the facts of the situation as it currently stood andwriting it down wasn't going to help anyone but my biographer (TommyAkthar, Private I, something like that)' (p.267). Tommy Akthar is unable tofind the truth by stringing together seemingly obvious facts based on merecommonsense thinking.

In Neate's hard-boiled novel, the plot's brutality highlights the corporealreality of violence and the vulnerability of society. Thus, crime is shown tobe a social issue and therefore to refer to intersubjective relations and thecommunity. The novel clarifies how the crimes are embedded in largerquestions of national and postcolonial politics. Moreover, the novel pointsout that the protagonist's Ugandan-Indian background is considered to be asocial marker of outsider status. Standing on the margins of the dominantcultural discourse, the protagonist is definitely not in a position of socialcontrol. He is a Private Investigator and cricket aficionado who finds himselfhired by Exoticmelody, a prostitute, to find her flat mate Sexymssian, whodisappeared two nights earlier. When the client with whom Natasha - aliasSexyrussian - was last seen, turns out to be a British MP who is found deadin a hotel room, Tommy is already fascinated by a case that promises moreaction than tracking down straying husbands. After tracking down Natasha'swhereabouts he cannot drop the case because he has this 'strange affection

Susan Sweeney, 'Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Thcory, and S e l f ~ R e f l e x i v i t y 'in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary LiteraryTheory, ed. b y Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazcr (Urbana: Western Illinois University,1990), p.5.

for the truth' (p.107). Plunging deeper into the investigation he is confusedand unable to locate the enemy in a system that is not clearly divided intofriend and foe - the intentions and actions of Intelligence Agencies and aterrorist recruiting network (PWA)3 turn out to be much more inconsistentand ambivalent than their stereotypical presentation in mainstream media:'That was a shift. Check the understatement. It struck me that the PWA hadgot their way. It struck me that Jones [MI5] and Paradowski [CIA] had gottheir way too. They were all on the same side. London was scared' (p.299).Bytheend of the novel, Londoners are still scared and the culprits are neitherpunished nor revealed to the public. Consequently, society cannot declareitself innocent by shifting theblame onto one individual suspect.

Paral le l to this invest igat ion , we get to know the story of Tommy'simmigrant family, especially the story of his father, Farzad, the first generationimmigrant who came to London from Uganda in the early 1970s fleeing theregime of ldi Amin. Moreover, Tommy actually regards himselfas an Englishcosmopolitan, Le. he does not feel homeless or exiled. Throughout the novelhe has to face the fac t tha t a lthough he feels very Br it ish, he is not reallyaccepted as an Engl ishman. When he is inter roga ted by the po lice hisnationality is questioned, which forces him to scrutinise his sense ofBritishness. This enquiry focusing upon Tommy's presumed membership inthe Muslim faith leads to an equation of religion with ethnicity, and he isovertly classified as 'dangerous'. He is left in complete disillusionment andhas to reconsider his former idea of British democratic fairness, epitomisedfor h im by the game of cricket: 'The opposi ti on - and they were theopposition- might have been playing by the rules but they'd abandoned thespirit of the game' (p.288). The idea of a multicultural society remainsendangered by fantasies ofwhite supremacy:

It sounded to m e like she [an MI5 officer] wanted people to be scared. I thought about heruse of language: euphemistic, for real. Jwondered if she believed what she was saying. Jwondered if she even understood what she was saying. J thought about 'our way of life',hers and mine. I wondered if wc shared onc. I thought about my way of life as variously, aUgandan Indian, a Paid, an immigrant, a Londoner, an Englishman. I wondered if it wasworth protecting. (p.291)

Britishness suddenly appears to be synonymous with whiteness. Plurality anddiversity, in the 'English' view represented by the MI5 officer, becomeostensibly dangerous features of society and are said tobring destruction andchaos. City of Tiny Lights presents a picture of immigrant London whichagrees with Paul Gilroy's notion that ' [ t]hey have been among us, but they

ThePWA, in this case, is not the abbreviation fOT the PrivateEye Writers ofAmerica but forP o s t ~ W e s t e r n - A I l i a n c e .


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358 Yvonne Roscnbcrg WritingAgainst aFixedLexicon ofTerrorism in Patrick Ncate's City o/Tiny Lights (2005) 359

v/ere never actually of us'. Immigrants are always treated as traitors because'immigrants are doomed in perpetuity to be outsiders'.4This attitude is surely far from what Detrida calls the ethics of unconditioned

hospitality. The concept of unconditioned hospitality negates the discoursesof sovereignty and absolute autonomy in order to welcome the other withoutcondition. The novel seems to implement a state similar to Derrida's modelin Farzad's home which is referred to as a 'parallel universe' (p.323). In thecourse of the novel, several uninvited people arrive at this realm where thedifference of the other is accepted. The concept is a seemingly utopian onewhich would include a passive relation towards alterity: 'Ou bien I'hospitalit"est inconditionnelle et sans limite ou elle n'est pas'.' In contrast to Derrida'sconcept, the text reveals that Muslim culture is actively constructed as adistinct, inaccessible, and homogeneous whole - in other words, it isperceived as an encapsulated community. What it comes down to is that bythis act of reductionism, the other is locatable in 'the commonsense lexiconof alterity' (pp.33-34) despite Britain's obvious ethnic and national diversityand essential contradictions which Tomrny Akthar describes as follows:

The England I knew was a c h c e k ~ b y - j o w l kind of place where seemingly polar oppositeswere wedded by nation, frustration and location, location, location: stroppy Pakis to smalltown racists, the morally fundamental to the: morally bereft, office juniors to senior management,t h u g ~ l i t e s to petrified pensioners, suburban swingers to pregnant pubeseents, coke-addledhookers to coke-addled media whores, aspirant Africans to resigned Rastas, loaded gymfreaks to obese benefit junkies, cntreprcneurs to economic migrants, organized crime to

. chaotic bureaucracy, politicians to teITmists, hopeless to hopcful . And l ike all marriagesthese werc for bcttcr or worse, richer or poorer, till death them would part as discovercd byonc Anthony Bailey, MP [the murdercd politician]. (p.274)

1. The Commonsense Lexicon of A1terity and the Illusion of FixedIdentities

City ~ Tiny Lights shows us a present-day London that is scared, a mood towhich British mainstream media greatly contribute: 'They said they'd beright back af te r the news with the la test band formed on the lates t rea li tyshow, plus tips for concealing your cellulite, plus a phone-in: "Islam- friender foe?'" (p.300). Media repmis a re shown to have a d irect impact Onindividual human lives, as people are labelled and categorised: "'According tothe Br iti sh media," Farzad began "Azmat AI-Dubayan is a notoriousfimdamentalist terrorist." He held up a finger like I was trying to interrupt. I

Paui Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (London: Routledge, 2004)p.134. 'Mohammed Seffahi, Manifeste pour l'hospitaliti. Autour de Jaques Derrida (Grigny: Parolesd'auk 1999l.p.148.

wasn't. "I said according to the British media, Tommy boy'" (p.I 57). Theuse of language is never ideologicall y neutral but used to create anatmosphere of xenophobia: 'In the absence of trust, fear is a solid basis for arelationship. [...]: keep the people scared and you'll keep them in check. Andkeeping them scared of you is the simplest but keeping them scared of anidea (Communism, Islam or whatever) is the height of progress' (p.102).Discriminatory practices are actually encouraged through the media and theirostensibly neutral commonsense coverage. Even if a more objectivepresentation is given by the media, Tommy has to realise that many peopledo not listen becauseit is not part of the usual racial and cultural stereotypingthat has been habitual in sensationalist reporting:

I blinked. I asked the TV to Say that again. The TV was uncooperative. Had the geezeractually said something worth hearing? He had. No religious motives. No connections toother terrorists. The camera panned the faces of assembled hacks. It was too little too late.Nobody was listening anyway. (p.301)

My main thesis is that Patrick Neate's novel problematises the insufficiencyof words and the absence of full representation which becomes undeniablyobvious in a climate of fear. Language has to admit its powerlessness and isthus reduced mechanical enunciation. However, perhaps the most unfortunateresult of fear is that people tend to delineate fixed categories, digging a trenchbetween us and them, ignoring historical contexts, making up entities andgroups. In this dualistic system it is most important to name, identify andlocate the other as stable signifiers or arbiters of identity. Manichean terms arethus used as a 'commonsense lexicon' which builds a dominant discoursethat implies a certain legitimisation and truth. Thus, Gerd Baurnann remarkson the power of seemingly natural and self-evident concepts: 'This false fixingof boundaries is a direct consequence of the reified version of culture, andthis reification is the very cornerstone that holds the dominant discoursetogether across all political divides'.6 The dominant discourse which impliesa fixed lexicon demonstrates the limits of infmite alterity within hegemonicgovernments and its potential loss of civil liberties. This is described by Farzadas follows:

One: when someone is labelled a terrorist, they arc inunediately removed from the rules ofhumanity that regulateus all . Two: the nature ofwar as agreed by civilized socicty is that itis fought within sueh a set of rules. (pp. 158-159)

Moreover, the lexicon is also utilising tenns like tolerance to guarantee thestatus quo. Tommy, the immigrant, is merly tolerated, and tolerance is, accordingto Derrida, just 'a paternalistic gesture in which the other is not accepted as

Gcrd Baumann, Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in M u l t i ~ E t h n i c London (Cambridge:Cambridgc University Press, 1996), p.ll.


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360 Yvonnc Roscnbcrg Writing Againsta Fixed Lexicon ofTcrrorism in Patrick Ncatc's City OjTil1)'Lights (2005) 361an equal partner but subordinated, perbaps assimilated, and certainly misinterpreted in its difference'. ' It implies that 'I am l eaving you a place in myhome, but do not forget tha t thi s is my home'. 8 In the course of the novel,Tommy realises what his father, Farzad, meant when he talked about life inexile and tha t even bureauc racy and the mark of being British in one'spassport cannot disprove racial discrimination and ethnic profiling:

[...J coming through Hcathrow is always a riot if you arc of ethnic persuasion. You canalmost sce the Immigration officers rubbing their hands in anticipation. You can almostsmelt their disappointmentwhen theyclock your British passport. You canalmost hearthemthinking, Lucky bastard. You can almost be bothered 10 tell them that there's no luck aboutit andthat they should readcolonial history. (p.194)

In Gilroy's terms, '[d]ifferentpeople are still hated and feared, but the timelyantipathy against them is nothing compared to the hatreds turned toward thegreater menace of the half-different and the partially familiar' (p.l37). Becauseknowledge and control are only existent within certain signifying systems,people who are located beyond the system and not in a commonsense lexiconare seen as uncontrollable. The self-assuring repetition of this commonsenselexicon seems to conquer the loss of authority and to reinforce existing powerhierarchies. Farzad describes this behaviour as follows: 'You may not thinkstraight but your vocabulary is f lawless' (p.3l2) . The surface seems to beunder control and no one questions the status quo. The lexicon is used by thedominant culture to describe and thereby to fixate the other.

By securing one's own identity the other is labelled with an illusionaryinferiority and with a difference to which we can attribute responsibility andguilt. Tommy remarks about the terrorist-figure in the novel, Al-Dubayan:'Then I figure that ifhe didn't exist someone would have to invent him' or 'I fyou believe that something is undetectable, then the fact that you can't detectit becomes evidence of its existence' (p.166). Within City of Tiny Lights themedia widely reports that Al-Dubayan is a Muslim terrorist. In broad terms,the public continues to believe in reality via TV. This problematic aspect ofperception is a lso s ta ted in an argument made by the cultura l theoris t DavidHawkes: ' [B]ut the real battle takes place in the realm of perception.Governments devote unprecedented attention to constructing ideologicalnarratives that "spin" their adventures in appropriate fashion,.9 It seems thatthe permeability and contextual def;nition of all ethnic boundaries woulddestroy fixed categories and therefore the illusion of control and superiority,or as Gilroy argues: 'When national and ethnic identities are represented and

Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time o/Terror: Dialogues with Jiirgen Habennas andJaquesDerrida (Chicago: ChicagoUniversityPress,2003),p.16.Borradori, p.l27.David Hawkcs, Ideology (London: ROlltledgc, 2003), p.180.

projected as pure, exposure to difference threa tens them with dilut ion andcompromises their prized purities with the everpresent possibility of contamination,.lo

It is worth noting here that identity politics based on what Gilroy calledethnic absolutism are additionally problematic because they encourage peopleto see themselves only as members of religious or cultural groups. As an indirectconsequence of this representation, the image of a multi-ethnic London is toooften criticised without an awareness of global complexities and experiencesof living. That Britishness is not a self-evident concept and that our future isnot def ined, is a creat ive approach which is often too easily dismissed, asGilroy observes:

Everybody knows that conceptual innovations cannot bring racism to an end, but they dohave the ir uses. They can reveal how sharply scholast ic theories diverge from commonsense. They can highlight the regrettable fact that the life-threateningjeopardy provoked bybeing racialized as different is undiminished and may even have increased now that 'race'and i ts certain ties can claim to heal or a1 least calm the anxieties over identity, which havebeenprecipitated by the insecurities and inequalities of globalization. 11

In City afTiny Lights, Tommy faces thefactthat Britishness is a mere construction,the product of human powers and projections: 'I could have hypothesised thata conception of British patriotism depends on a conception of what i t meansto be British' (p.209). The stable self-representation of imperial power, theEmpire, naturalised superiority and imaginary concepts like the self-disciplinedgentleman and the fairness of cricket , the s table centre of a mythicisedimperial past, are negated. This does not imply that all changes have positiveoutcomes but that transgression of imagined borders is inevitable in proceduralconcepts of cultures and identities. Tommy puts it like this:

It made me think of Sir Garfie ldSobers. I grew up with his 365 against Pakistan in '58 asthe benchmark for Test batsmanship. It was a record and one t ha t s tood for so long that i tseemed like i t would never be broken. [ .. .] Then Brian Lara broke i t in '94 and thirty-sixyears of r ec eived w isdom, consensus and myth was suddenly sha ttered. [ .. .] Certaincommenta tors have writ ten that the game has changed [.. .] The p oi nt is t ha t w he n Lar acreamed England 's f inest to a ll points Antiguan in '94, he crossed an invisible line of thcimagination, and when it had been crossed once, i t was a whole lot easier to cross it again.So London was nevcr a citywhere opportunistscxploded kids on yourdoorstep; not becauseit couldn't happen butbecause it didn't. And then i t d id . So London was diffe rent . (pp.299-300)

These arguments against an essential fixation of metaphysical essences arealso applicable to the term terrorism. In the following, I wish to therefore analyse

IQ Paul Gitroy, Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at theEnd a/the Colour Line(London, AlIan Lane, 2000), p. t05." Gitroy (2004),p.60.


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362 Yvonnc Rosenbcrg WritingAgainsta Fixed Lexicon ofTcrrorism in Patrick Ncatc'sCityofTiny Lights (2005) 363

the 'fixed lexicon of terrorism' via a reading of City a/Tiny Lights. I want torevea l the reduc tion ism and es sent ial ism that goes hand in hand wi th theunreflected use of the term which Farzad criticises thus: 'I told you I don'tlike that word. It isjust a noise. Meaningless. Like a bowler's appeal. The youngcricketers these days have quite forgotten what they're saying' (p.169).2, The Negotiation ofMeaning or Writing Against a FixedLexicon of TerrorismTommy's father Farzad has always tried to force his son to become a perfectEnglish gentleman but Tommy just learned to love the 'gentleman's game'.Thus, he draws analogies between cricket and life in general to analyse the worldhermeneutically, That Tommy is 'a man of principle' (p.127) who has 'astrange affection for the truth' (p.l07) might nevertheless be one reason forh is being caught in a sys tem of fixed labels and binary oppositions. At thebeginning of the novel there are c le ar boundar ie s and fixed categor ie s inTommy's England and therefo re he thinks t hat he can make out twooppositional poles: friend and foe. Tommy sees li fe as a game- in which oneis playing according to f ixed rules . There are two sides and one - the betterone - is going to win which actually soundsl ike fairplay. In the course of thenovel, he has to realise that the rules of the game are not that simple and thatto know the ropes does not imply that everybody sticks to them: 'They [thepolicemen] began to ask me questions of the rhetorical variety. Only thesewere rhetorical questions to which they had all the wrong answers' (pp.207208). Apparently fixed terms are based on conventions, language is a systemof interpretation, and the more slippery a concept the easier it is toappropriate it in an opportunistic manner. The problem is that the prevailingdiscourse relies on an already organised interpretat ion that uses popularmedia and off ic ia l rhe toric in a hegemonic fashion to form public opinion.The same applies to the term terrorism. It is a fixed category which leads toblindness rather than insight: 'When a car is c lamped they place an enormoussticker on your windscreen. Religious fundamental is t? Terrorist? Theselabels are just the same: ea si ly appl ied , hard to remove and des igned toobscure your view' (pp.159-160). These labels are part ofthe commonsenselexicon.

Norms which are inscr ibed in our language forec lose the ref lexivi ty oflanguage and actually illustrate the powerlessness of naming, identifying anddescribing. Furthermore, we find astonishingly simple equations in languagethat reduce social complexities between terrus like culture, ethnic identity,and nature. Everything seems to be a homogeneous whole or a superlative:ethnic identity, fundamentalism and terrorism - producing the subsequentcriminalisation of marginalised groups or communities. Paul Gilroy remarks

that 'immigration is perceived as a master analogy of warfare',12 and Farzadin City a/Tiny Lights observes:

Therefore I dislikethe way the establishment andthe celebrated fourth estate in this countrymy country - use the word 'fundamentalism' when their meaning is 'fanaticism', I t is yet

another example of every Tom, Dick and Harry playing silly buggers with the Englishlanguage. (p.l58)

The already organised interpretat ion in a commonsense lexicon is used toempower its users by purporting concepts that are believed to ground knowledgeand meaning.

The novel as a whole clarifies that knowledge or meaning are not based ina f in it e logos - or finite language: meaning is not grounded in metaphysicsbut rather is inter-linguistic, where words and signs negotiate meaning. Andas a resul t Farzad demands: 'Stop thinking like an Englishman' (p.3l3),impl yi ng t ha t h is son is just naively adopting pre-given answers withoutreinterpreting and negotiating its context-bound meaning in specific contexts.Thus, terms like Britishness or terrorism can be interpreted and negotiated indifferent ways. The novel stages a deconstruction of the opposition betweendeterminism and absolute freedom.In contrast to the prevailing public opinion, terrorism is not a self-evidentconcept. It has to be recoguised as a discourse with an ideological purpose, asDerrida holds:

Not all terrorism is voluntary, conscious, organized, deliberate, intentionally calculated:there arehistorical and political situations where terroroperates, so to speak, as ifby itsclf,as the simpleresult of some apparatus, because of the relation afforce inplace [ . .. J. IJ

This means that violence can also be the labelling of the non-accepted otherwho is set outsi de the limits of an imagined English identity. The morepeople are othered through exclusion, the more English identity becomesideologically dangerous. As a consequence, the essence of terror is not justthe physical elimination of those perceived to be different but can also be theeradication of difference in people, namely their individuality.14 And Tommyobserves: 'I think about this city of tiny lights that was on the verge of whothe-hell-knows and how many of those l ights might have been and, 1 guess ,might yet be extinguished' (p.121).

Though homogeneity is illusionary and dangerous, we nevertheless needsome congruity in our language, words andmetaphors, which form the underlying

12 Gilroy (2004), p.161.13 Borradori, p.l08.14 Derr ida has explicitly proposed using the word violence as an alternative rather than the

confusedwords war and terrorismwhich despitetheir confusion work as destructive, ascriptivelabels.


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364 Yvonnc Roscnbcrg \VritingAgainst aFixedLexicon ofTcrrorism in PatrickNeate's City o/Tiny Lights (2005) 365

principles of our lifeworld and our identities. Without any sense of knowledge,meaning, and congruity our lifeworld would be falling apart. In that respect,my point is that City of Tiny Lights works against a fixed lexicon of alterityas well as of terrorism not by merely revealing their uselessness but, moreover,by at the same time creating and negotiating meaning by using apparentlyeccentric metaphors and idioms, or in other words, by abandoning thinking infixed categories only. These linguistic games are not arbitrary neologisms butvariations and intertextual allusions of well known patterns. The protagonistrefers to this creative act once as 'bastardising Voltaire' (p.320).153. Literary Strategies: Writing Against a Fixed CommonsenseLexiconCity of Tiny Lights as a whole aims at destabilising the structural priorities ofbinary constructions and ethnic boundaries. It demonstrates that we live in asociety characterised by the cultural and linguistic need to taxonomise andthat we rely on a set of imposed standards that makes identification withEnglishness possible for some people, but accepts the exclusion of others,depending on context and intention. The destabilisation of fixed concepts canbe found on different levels of the text: the characterisation of theprotagonists and its implied identity politics, the use of language and stylisticdevices, the crossing of genres as well as the narrator's point of view. Thefollowing section introduces ti,e strategies which undermine the ideologicallycharged dominant discourses of unity, presence and origin without denyingtheir material effects on people's lifeworld.

In contrast to the image of a fixed and coherent self, Tommy Akhttu isperforming his identity in a multi-ethnic partofWest London. In this ethnicallymixed neighbourhood Tommy lives as a Ugandan-Indian, a 'Paki', an exmujahideen, Marlowe-Wannabe, cosmopolitan, Londoner, and an Englishman. Clearly, he is no diasporic character rooted entirely in the myth of ashared Ugandan history. Neate's protagonist is constantly shifting betweenhi s new life and his pas t existence. As a detective Tommy is not justsearching for the truth but also for authenticity in the midst of posteolonialand postmodern confusion. The novel shows that ident ity emerges as acluster of unstable categories: mutually independent criteria that cut acrosseach other in many ways. Although we are talking of an identity in progress

i5 Voltairc's quotations arc chaHengcd and these rc-citations arc used to describe the fluidity ofcultural mechanisms and principles. More precisely, wc have a context-bound dialogue ofdiscourses and language. The challenged quotations change me idea that texts have fixedmeanings. This demonstrates' the dynamic potential of languageas well as the contingent andcontext bound meaning of words.

we cannot randomly select a place of fmal destination. Tommy describes thisaspect of identity formation as 'life as tourism' (p.47) or as a perpetual detourwhich highlights the arbitrariness of knowledge and questions the completeautonomy of decision: 'most roads don't lead nowhere special: they just passplaces' (p.39). We can not consciously defy the control of the dominantdiscourse or completely ignore the rhetoric of those who are allowed to speak_ and who are able to construct a lexicon of alterity. Tommy formulates thisinsight in the following way: 'Welcome to the city of tiny lights. It takes youa lifetime to get somewhere you've no particular desire to go' (p.34).

Still, Neate's protagonist apparently uses the dominant discourse - whichoften relies on equating community, culture and ethnic identity - for hispersonal aims: '1 gave her the myst eri ous Asian eyebrows by way ofapology' (p.9) or: 'I guessed he did the archetypal Arab as well as I didarchetypal Paki' (p.269). Wbile this cannot guarantee him independentagency, it shows that Tommy is aware of the way in which he is representedor racialised andhe knows thatin some contexts the stereotypical speech andbehaviour of the immigrant can help h im to reach his goals. Mimicry isemployed strategically, here, but even though there seems to be an agencythat suggests ontological priority to his various roles we come to realise that,in Judith Butler's words, '[t]here is no making of oneself outside of a modeof subjectivation and, hence, no self-making outside of the norms thatorchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take'." Tommy cannotchange the social nonns surrounding tenus like truth, mankind or meaning,yet he can attain linguistic agency by citing the dominant discourse to hisown end and thus uncannily reiterate its power - by bastardising Voltaire.

Yet Tommy is not the only character playing to type. The whole novelworks with constant references to exaggerated racial stereotypes: '[t]he a v e ~ g eCaribbean person is intrinsically idle, isn't that so?' (p.247) or 'Africans areas hones t as the day is long and, if they are not, you can tell straight awaybecause they have such honest faces that they're unable to hide it' (p.248).These hyperbolic simplifications show how absurd these generalisationsare: li by the use of comical tone, the pointlessness of overt essentialism, andemerging ambivalence, it becomes clear in the course of the novel that ethnicboundaries are defined relatively rather than objectively, even if peoplecontinue to conflate culture and identity withrace andnature. Tommy and hisfather show us tha t culture and identity exi st only insofar as they areperformed and negotiated. In this respect, the novel makes clear that culture16 Judith Butler, Giving an Account ofOneself(}Jew York: Fordham UniversityPress, 2005), p.17.J7 Nonetheless, these simplifications also point to the illusion that racial difference could be a

stabilising force in the process of identity formation without noticing any dc-individualisingeffects or cultural scgregation.


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366 YvonncRoscnbcrg Writing Againsta Fixcd LcxiconofTerrorism in Patrick Ncate's City ofTiny Lights (2005) 367is neither a detennining force nor an imprisoning cocoon and therefore alsonota safe haven: 'There is no authentic culture, Tommy boy: It is an international ice rink and that is h ow you and I manage to skate across it withsuch ease and grace. [... ] We're ice-dancers, Tommy, ice dancers' (p.126). Itis thus possible to transgress racial and cultural boundaries, but it remainsdifficultand risky because as Paul Gilroy observes,

wc- arc all scaled up inside our frozen cultural habits, and there seems to be n o workableprecedent for adopting a morc generous and creative view of how human beings mightcommunicate or act in concert across racial, ethnic or civilizationa! divisions. (p.76)

City of Tiny Lights, moreover, writes against a fixed lexicon through itspervasive recourse to metaphor and word games. Traditional approaches tometaphor are no longervalidhere: the opposition between concept andmetaphor,implying that a concept is closer to reality than a metaphor, crumbles. Based onthe insight that there are no pre-l.inguistic categories and that meaning is aprocess of semantic differentiation and not an entity, City of Tiny Lightspropagates the notion that metaphors are as close to - or as far removed from- reality as every other linguistic concept. The metaphors used in Neate'snovel are as meaningless as every other word that implies a stable and fixedanalogy or meaning, and are therefore neutralised in their capacity to disruptthe dominant discourse. Yet working with such unusual and often eccentricanalogies, metaphors and varied quotations, the effect remains that the textencourages amore dynamic and open-minded approach to language:

'The truth is a lie nobody contests.' Wbo said that? [...]Originally, however, it ''''


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Works CitedYvonnc Roscnbcrg

Baumann, Gerd, Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-EthnicLondon (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996).

BOITadon, Giovanna, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with JiJrgenHabennas andJaques Derrida (Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press, 2003).

Butler, Ju,dith, Giving an Account ofOneself(New York: Fordham UniversityPress, 2005).

Gilroy, Paul, Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End ofthe Colour Line (London: Allan Lane, 2000).

-- . After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (London: Routledge,2004).

Hawkes, David, Ideology (London: Routledge, 2003).Seffahi, Mohanuned, Manifeste pour I 'hospitalite: Autour de Jaques Derrida

(Grigny: Paroles d'aube, 1999).Sweeney, Susan, 'Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Theory, and

Self-Reflexivity', in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on DetectiveFiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. by Ronald G. Walker andJune M. Frazer (Urbana: Western Illinois University, 1990), pp.I-14.

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