Perceptions of the city
While the novel contains multiple vignettes focused on different characters, the most notable passage of the book takes the form of a ten-page stream of consciousness which is meant to mirror the state of mind of someone who lives in a big, hectic city. In this extract, ‘ Big City ’ , the character in question, is describing his summer. It begins with bucolic imagery: Selvon writes, ‘ Oh what a time it is when summer come to the city ’ and ‘the old geezers…would sit on benches and smile everywhere you turn the English people smiling ’ . These observations mirror the initial rosy perception of London that many immigrants feel. However, as the passage goes on, the imagery becomes darker and more foreboding. He describes a winter day by saying, ‘ you could look on a winter day and see how grim the trees looking and a sort of fog in the distance ’ . These descriptions, particularly that of the ‘ fog distance ’ , act as an analogy for the immigrants’ perception of London as they live there for longer. Gone is the positive outlook, and instead the city’s faults come to the fore. This ten-page sentence tells us of Kensington Gardens and the Bayswater Road, and casual hook-ups, and violence, and the mixture of pride (one character’s father is a Nigerian king) and fear that combines in the black men’s lives. Stylistically and thematically this passage has echoes of Patrick Bateman’s mental breakdown i n American Psycho . At the very end we find a glancing reference to the easier life that one character believes he could have in France: ‘ Daniel was telling him how in France all kinds of fellars writing books what turning out to be best sellers. [ . . . ] One day you sweating in the factory and the next day all the newspapers have your name and photo, saying how you are a new literary giant. ’ (I will be saying something about the French immigrant experience, as reflected in contemporary literature, later in this essay.) Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia is noted for its striking portrayal of London (and notably its suburbs) in the 1970s and British race relations at the time, while maintaining a strong comic perspective. The book is centred around the life of Karim Amir, a second-generation Pakistani immigrant growing up in the south-London suburbs around Bromley, and his experiences with his eccentric family and the zeitgeist. The Pakistani immigrant experience that Hanif Kureishi describes has some quite cl ose similarities with the life of the Caribbean immigrants in Selvon’s book. Like Selvon’s characters from Trinidad and Jamaica, some of Kureishi’s characters, or their fathers at any rate, came from privileged circumstances back home. But London proves to have been a difficult place to have moved to. ‘ London, the Old Kent Road, was a freezing shock to both of them. It was wet and foggy and people called you “ Sunny Jim ” ; there was never enough to eat, and Dad never took to dripping on toast. “ Nose drippings more like ,” he’d say, pushing away the staple diet of the working class.’ Karim finds happiness of a kind with the daughter of a family friend, Jamila, with whom he has his first sexual experiences. ‘ At the age of thirteen, Jamila was reading non-stop, Baudelaire and Colette and Radiguet and that rude lot, and borrowing records of Ravel, as well as singers popular in France, like Billie Holliday. Then she got this thing about wanting to be Simone de Beauvoir, which is when she and I started having sex every couple of weeks . . . ’ Jamila’s rebellious nature leads her father to con clude that he needs urgently to protect his family’s honour by marrying her off to a man from back home. However, the groom he finds for her – who he hopes will both give him grandchildren and help in his shop – is hopelessly and comically unable to perform either task.
Life for older immigrants is hard, however philosophical they would like to be about it. Jamila’s father tries unsuccessfully to console himself. ‘ What will I do with the profit? How many shoes will I wear? Thirty breakfasts instead of one? And he always said finally, “ Everything is perfect ” . “D’you believe that,
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