Small Island, Crossing Cultures
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02690050801954385
ISSN1747-1508
Autores Tópico(s)Island Studies and Pacific Affairs
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. BBC Radio 4 ‘Bookclub’ with James Naughtie, broadcast 1 May 2005. See . I have transcribed the relevant ‘Question Time’ section of the programme as follows, with very slight repetitions edited out: Questioner: I didn't enjoy the book at all in many ways. Levy: Why? Questioner: Well generally, you know, there was a kind of dehumanising of any of the characters that happened to have an African heritage in the book, and it wasn't addressed; and I think when you actually kind of regurgitate racism without addressing it, you tend to support it, you tend to bolster it up. There are some very nasty and unpleasant comments in the book and they're just not addressed; and one of the examples is in the Prologue where you have the African woman at the Empire Exhibition, and you describe her as a kind of uncivilised shadow who can't understand any language other than drums, and it's just left, we move on. Naughtie: Just to be clear what you're saying, I mean you'd want the author at that point to take a view. Questioner: I think at that point you need to actually have a position: it's over fifty years after the … so we've got a lot of hindsight and we know that view was wrong. Now, you can tell me if I'm wrong or right here but I assume you were trying to show what the attitude of the British people would have been to an African weaving in front of a hut at the time, is that correct? Levy: Yes. Questioner: You don't address it. Levy: Sorry you felt like that. What I did with the book was with all four characters, everything that we see, everything that they say is from their point of view. They are going to say things that are horrible, things are going to happen to them that they don't analyse, they don't … I'm not writing a non-fiction book on what happened to these people when they came to this country, I'm writing a piece of fiction and I try to make you engage in it in an emotional way. This is how she saw it: she's a young girl from the Midlands, has never seen anyone black in her life, she sees somebody and that is what comes into her head; and what I want is for the reader then to think, to make their own … ‘What's this, why does she think like this; what is it that makes a girl like this feel like that about another human being’, and I want the reader to do that work. I don't want to then come in and sort of say ‘But actually, let's not dehumanise this person’. This person has been dehumanised by Queenie's narrative, by what Queenie sees, by what Queenie feels; and that is very, very important to the book. So, you know, it's not non-fiction. 2. Gilroy cites one of Tony Blair's advisers, diplomat Robert Cooper who, in an article called ‘The Next Empire’ in October 2001, argued that a ‘new imperialism’ was needed to counteract the effects of weak states and countries which might not be capable of governing themselves in a stable manner: There are countries that need an outside force to create stability … a system in which the strong protect the weak, in which the efficient and the well-governed export stability and liberty, in which the world is open for investment and growth – all of these seem eminently desirable. If empire has not often been like that, it has frequently been better than the chaos and barbarism that it replaced. There have even been times and places … where it has helped the spread of civilization. (Gilroy 173) For those who fail to bring themselves voluntarily or willingly into line with the new modern era, Cooper believes there are ‘the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth-century world of every state for itself’ (115). Such thinking matches well with that of American diplomats – the word has a hollow ring to it – such as Richard Haass, who had this to say in 2002 about ‘the limits of sovereignty’: Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own people. Another is not to support terrorism in any way. If a government fails to meet these obligations, then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside your own territory. Other governments, including the United States, gain the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, this can even lead to a right to preventive, or peremptory, self-defense. You essentially can act in anticipation if you have the grounds to think it's a question of when, and not if, you're going to be attacked. (Gilroy 169) Of course, we are familiar with the outcome of this softening up of public opinion in the aftermath of 9/11 and in anticipation of the attack on Iraq; but such rhetoric was also in play in the lead-up to the G8 summit, the rhetoric of aid to Africa driven by the exploitative logic of global capitalism, and the nervous limbering up occurring over the question of the Iranian government and its attitude to nuclear weapons. 3. Despite being distributed widely in Europe, and winning acclaim, the film could not find a UK distributor able to get it into cinemas quickly enough, and so had to rely on a broadcast by C4. See the following: , , . 4. Rowan Pelling, one of the judges from the Booker panel which left Small Island off their list of contenders, damned the book with the faint praise of being ‘worthy’: she thought the acclaim for the novel ‘comes from the topic rather than the treatment … . People feel guilty about not thinking about our colonial past. It is a good book, a powerful history lesson. But as a novel I found it implausible and schematic’ (CitationAllardice 14). But as I hope this essay suggests, the novel is much more challenging than this gives credit for, not least in its representation of multiculturalism.
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