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is never explained, illuminated or resolved. In their north of England narratives, a spade is a spade, and race and empire are surface events rather than moments of profound revelation or epiphany. However, it is not that empire is merely outside, or even peripheral to, the insular landscapes of Peace and Barker’s self-consciously non-metropolitan, white working-class fictions. If the West Indian character of Bertha in Barker’s Union Street presents, in a text replete with doubles and mirrors, obvious parallels with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Peace’s is
i n t i m acie s 193 Nick begin to question these interactions. After all, like Leo’s mother, who denies her son’s death is AIDS-related, Nick too turns away in the street from an evidently ill Leo.52 If Nick is paralleled with the conservative politics and class aspirations of the West Indian matron, he is also, importantly, aligned with another conservatively inclined matriarch and upholder of English proprieties, Rachel Fedden. Originally from a wealthy Jewish banking family, her friends are mostly left-wing, from her art and theatre days at Oxford, which make
of virtual silence about this intriguing figure in twentieth-century studies of Caribbean writers, scholars began in recent decades to mine carefully Césaire's few published works to better appreciate the key means they craft for embracing a distinctly West Indian cultural identity and for advancing an emerging Martinican surrealist poetics. 8 For, despite her status as co-founder of Tropiques and the lyrical beauty of the seven short essays she wrote for its pages, Césaire's separation from her famous husband
curtains and cuts herself off from the outside world) creates a hook which invites the reader to look backwards and to read between the stories. It is not the only instance of this technique in Cheating at Canasta. In the same story, the self-named paedophile ‘Clive’ gleefully points out a side-street where ‘A West Indian kid got killed … White kids took their knives out. You ever see a thing like that, Jasmin?’ (98–9). ‘Clive’s’ comments carry disturbing echoes of the brutal murder of the British teenager Stephen Lawrence in Eltham, south east London, in 1993. Not only
. Published in the year which saw the arrival of West Indian immigrants on the Windrush and a year after Indian independence, the novel’s anxious discourse about cultural difference and the breakdown of social hierarchy and order in the metropole is grounded in a phantasmatic evocation of traditional British values, values Gilmour and Schwarz, End of Empire and the English Novel.indd 56 18/07/2011 11:14:12 joseph i ne t e y a n d her de scen da n t s 57 under threat in a country transformed by historical forces which largely go unnamed. But not quite. The empire
larger milieu of union activism [and] community organising’. 11 One of the consequences of this, Brennan suggests, is that the black communities which are represented in The Satanic Verses are not presented in a serious or politically effective light. Indeed, Brennan believes that ‘The book’s characterisations of West Indians (like its characterisation of women) are often embarrassing and offensive’: Some random examples might include … the comically stupid and overweight Afro-Caribbean community activist, Uhuru, given the last name ‘Simba
emergence of British Guiana’s first national poet, Egbert Martin, best known to his readers as ‘Leo’. Throughout the 1880s, before his death in 1890, Martin published two collections of poetry, a book of short stories, and numerous uncollected works in every major periodical in British Guiana. The Guiana Herald claimed he was ‘far and away the first West Indian poet’. 23 About this characterisation A. J. Seymour writes, ‘I presume the writer means first in quality’, although, given what I have suggested above, the description does double duty, not only glorifying
compelling reason for this: outside class Albert’s escapades with Terry are conspicuously those of teenagers; hanging around in cafés, kicking beer cans, throwing milk bottles. Another link can be seen when we realise that Albert’s near-fracas with the West Indians ( AA 150–1) shows marked similarities to adventures recounted (or made up) by members of his class in the composition ‘What a
the numbers of West Indians, Africans and Asians concentrated in her major cities mount toward the two million mark, and no diminution of the increase yet in sight. But race signified more than immigration. It was, in Powell’s imagination, the issue which bound together all the arenas of disorder, the single principle with the capacity to articulate all that threatened ‘the peaceable citizen’. ‘The exploitation of what is called “race”,’ he said, ‘is a common factor which links the operations of the enemy on several different fronts.’ Race, in this larger sense
to show off, to use language to impress rather than to communicate. Nevertheless, the lack of communication is viewed by Mr Bird as a failure on Mr Obd’s part rather than his own. Earlier in the novel we have been told how Mr Bird had discerned Major Eele’s predilection for black women and had taken him to a strip joint where he could witness naked West Indian and African women. Later Major Eele goes to see a film called Island of Purified Women, ‘a work with an all-female, all-African cast’, and we are told that in his youth Mr Obd ‘had often spoken against the