The Black Album

The headline in the London freesheet on my way to Hanif Kureishi’s new play The Black Album read ‘Racists Kidnap Muslim Leader’. Noor Ramjanally, from Loughton, Essex, was reportedly abducted from his home at knifepoint by two men, bundled into the boot of a car and driven to Epping Forest. There he feared he was about to be murdered when one of the men said ‘Let’s do it here.’ Instead, he was warned, ‘We don’t want [your] Islamic group in Loughton. If you don’t stop, we’ll come back.’

Ramjanally has been the target of a hate campaign, including the firebombing of his house, since starting a regular Friday afternoon prayer meeting in a Loughton community hall in March. It’s the sort of overt, spilling-over-into-violence bigotry that frequently goes along with far-right electoral success. The BNP has four councillors in the area, whose leader Pat Richardson denied his party’s involvement in the attacks on Ramjanally with the comment that ‘firebombing is not a British method. A brick through the window is a British method, but firebombing is not a way of showing displeasure.’

It is indeed a brick rather than a firebomb that goes through the window of a Pakistani butcher’s home in The Black Album. But the effect of such attacks, and the lower-level, everyday racism encountered especially – and, since 9/11, increasingly – by Muslims of Asian origin in Britain is no less incendiary.

It is this anti-‘Paki’ sentiment that provides the backdrop to Kureishi’s play, which is based on his second novel, written in 1995 and set in 1989, when the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie called on Muslims to murder the author and his book The Satanic Verses was being burnt in Bradford and other cities. The Black Album relates the rise of a militant, political Islam, told through the prism of Shahid, a young student, newly arrived in London, who had been so scarred by his experience of racism at school in Sevenoaks that he had wanted to deny his own identity and be a racist himself.

Shahid, like his creator Kureishi, feels himself disconnected from both the society in which he resides and the one from which he came. Like Kureishi, his love of literature takes him into a world of the imagination that distances him from others in his family and ethnic community. Even so, he has an immediate bond with his new Muslim friends in London, Chad, Hat and Riaz – ‘the first people he had met who were like him; he didn’t have to explain anything’. The novel follows their radicalisation in the face of the toxic cocktail of racism and the seemingly empty hedonism they encounter in a London whose youth are revelling in the drug-fuelled euphoria of rave culture following the ‘second summer of love’. The play takes us forward a further decade, to the suicide bombers of 2005, finishing with a literal bang as one of the characters dons a rucksack and blows up himself, the set and everyone on it.

I was left wanting more from Kureishi, who remains one of a very small number of writers of Asian Muslim origin who has made the crossover into the British literary milieu. The Black Album as a play felt too trite and obvious (the opportunistic Labour council leader was little more than a silly parody of George Galloway). Caught between the racists and the Islamists, I can’t help feeling that the likes of Kureishi have been cast adrift. The kind of cultural fusion that his work represents seems to find itself on ever more uncertain ground, speaking to an almost entirely white liberal audience – not so much a bridge bringing together different traditions as a no man’s land being bombed from both sides.

The Black Album as novel finishes on a life-affirming note, with Shahid and his college lecturer lover Deedee agreeing that they will continue with their ‘adventure’ together ‘until it stops being fun’. The fun has clearly stopped long before the end of the play.

Medusa's daughter and the golliwog

In the league table of personal insults, calling someone a ‘golliwog’ ranks about on a par with calling them a ‘muppet’. Even as a racial insult, it’s not quite the sort of epithet that you hear bandied about at BNP meetings (though they do sell golliwogs in BNP t-shirts at some of those meetings, apparently).

Nevertheless, if Carole Thatcher had said it on air, I don’t suppose there would have been much disagreement about her being taken off air as a result. Nor do I think there can be much disagreement with The One Show presenter Adrian Chiles, Jo Brand and others for picking up Medusa’s Daughter over her use of the word during an after-show conversation in which she blabbed out her ‘off-the-cuff remark made in jest’ to describe a tennis player in the Australian open.

(Why the widespread coyness, by the way, in naming the tennis player concerned? I couldn’t find one mainstream news outlet prepared to say who Thatcher was talking about. Didn’t any of them think it might have been instructive to get his opinion on the subject?)

I don’t think it suggests any degree of sympathy for the use of racially-based epithets, however, to feel that the reaction to Thatcher’s foot-in-mouth has been just a little OTT. When the Beeb doesn’t have the bollocks to broadcast a Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for Gaza, it feels a mite disproportionate to start acting all macho over an ex-prime minister’s gobby offspring.

BNP membership list online (2)

BNP membership list online

'I can't believe it. I own a PC retail outlet and this could ruin me. It makes me want to puke on my shoes.'

Just one of the comments on the highly-entertaining 'North West Nationalists' blog this afternoon about the news that the BNP's entire membership list has been posted online. The details provided include names, addresses, phone numbers, emails and in some cases notes about ages, occupations and interests. One member is apparently a male witch - or was, as I'm told the Pagan community is already moving to kick him out of his coven.

First they came for the Roma . . .

An email arrives from Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP, Liberal Democrat European justice spokeswoman, ahead of a vote by MEPs on a resolution condemning plans by the Italian government to count and fingerprint all Roma gypsies, including children. I’ll let the baroness speak for herself:

‘Singling out Roma people for a census and fingerprinting is illegal discrimination contrary to European law, which was passed precisely to stop Nazi and fascist racial persecution. It beggars belief that the government of Silvio Berlusconi can be so dismissive of history as to launch this misguided plan.

‘It is a disgrace that the EU’s other 26 member states are keeping their silence, and that Italy’s foreign minister, until recently the EU justice commissioner, has endorsed the human rights abusing scheme. The fingerprinting of children is particularly abhorrent.

‘There needs to be a European Roma strategy with funds attached to improve the status, education and integration of Roma people, rather than marginalising and stigmatising them.’