Limitaciones y proyecciones del estudio

Any reading of The Black Album cannot but observe that the intersection of urban space, culture and politics occupies a far more anxious position in this novel than in any of Kureishi’s previous fictions. And, as we have seen, it is its account of nationalism that seems to be at the heart of this anxiety—indeed, the

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novel takes place in a London that is being quite literally blown apart by nationalist politics. It is reasonable to assume that in representing a bomb exploding on the main concourse of Victoria station a third of the way through the book (Kureishi Black Album 101-104), Kureishi has in mind the similar IRA attack of February 1991. But there are two important aspects of this episode that should be noted, the first and less important of which is its anachronism.52 More significant is the fact that any agency behind the bombing remains pointedly ambiguous: as Shahid travels along the Underground shortly after the attack he wonders of the jumpy commuters sharing his carriage, “What did they feel? Confusion and anger, because somewhere outside lurked armies of resentment. But which faction was it? Which underground group? Which war, cause or grievance was being demonstrated?” (103). In this way the oblique reference to the IRA attack has the effect of connecting the destruction of London’s urban space with nationalist conflict while never defining specifically the conflict—or the cause—concerned. As such, we might argue that a significant underlying anxiety of the novel is the general tension it perceives as arising from the presence of nationalist politics within an urban setting.

Of course, these politics are most clearly manifested in the agenda of Riaz’s group. Kureishi’s representation of the latter proved highly controversial, and has since been the subject of sustained attacks. The most acute of these is voiced by Ruvani Ranasinha, who argues that “despite Kureishi’s sympathy for his characters’ cultural disorientation, the attempt to demonstrate the draw of Islam for young people fails” because “the ‘debate’ is so weighted against the Islamists that Shahid’s liberal individualism and decision to leave the ‘paranoid’ Islamic group is unequivocally presented as enlightened self-interest” (Ranasinha 88, 85). However, the representation of Riaz and his group also has some eloquent supporters. In marked contrast to Ranasinha, Bart Moore-Gilbert argues that “The Black Album programmatically counters many stereotypes about ‘fundamentalism’”:

52 _{Being set over the winter of 1988-89, the events in the novel actually take place two years prior to}

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Shahid—at least in the beginning—respects Islam as a faith and understands its appeal both in the context of his own existential uncertainties and of the hostile attitudes of the host society. Riaz is initially a relatively complex character, and is by no means unsympathetic, as his avuncular interest in Shahid indicates […] Moreover, Kureishi is at pains to avoid suggesting that Riaz is simply an aged obscurantist. (Moore-Gilbert 135)

This contention that Riaz and his agenda are represented in a complex and sympathetic way is important, because it implies that Ranasinha’s perspective fails to appreciate fully how the novel is keenly aware of the political possibilities inherent to nationalism. Indeed, I think it is crucial to acknowledge that in The Black Album the latter is represented as possessing genuine potential for resisting the “hostile attitudes of the host society”, and that it is thus central to the book’s concern with the Left. For, despite the fact that Shahid decides to align himself with Deedee at the novel’s end—at least, until it “stops being fun” (Kureishi Black Album 276)—in many ways she actually functions as a symbol for the failure of Left culturalism. Indeed, I think that the novel as a whole can be read as a painful meditation of the failure of Left culturalism as an emancipatory project. For whereas in his earlier fictions Kureishi appeared relatively certain of the potential for a flexible understanding of space and culture to combat the new and entirely pernicious kind of cultural nationalism exhibited by Thatcherism, in this novel he seems far less certain that flux and mutability are in themselves capable of resisting the assimilationist strategies of the Right. Indeed, I think that in The Black Album we witness a sophisticated critique of the strategies for political resistance that were lionised by Left culturalism—and which, once upon a time, Kureishi had enthusiastically embraced.

Crucially, this attitude is not expressed straightforwardly in terms of the novel’s representation of cultural complexity, but via its account of how the latter intersects with urban space. As in much of Kureishi’s earlier work, urban youth culture occupies a central position in The Black Album, and the subculture it is particularly interested in is the acid house scene that emerged in Britain

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towards the end of the 1980s. From early on the febrility and ostensible subversiveness of this scene speak to Shahid’s thirst for the “real” London,53 _for it seems a world away from the “mundane poverty” that characterises his initial experience of the capital. And it is significant in this respect that Deedee is the one who introduces him to it. During an after-class meeting, she and Shahid discuss their shared enthusiasm for Prince, and Deedee suggests that he might write an essay about the musician’s indeterminacy: he’s “half black and half white”, she says, “half man, half woman, half size, feminine but macho too” (25). She invites Shahid to her house so they can discuss the essay further, but when he arrives it soon becomes apparent that she has other plans, and as he is summoned upstairs to help her dress, Shahid finds himself wondering “what she and the night promised” (54). In this way, Deedee is immediately established as the apogee of libidinal satisfaction. More importantly, however, Kureishi is explicit in concatenating her sexual appeal with the possibilities of the city and the unpredictable milieu of rave culture, while marking all with a promise of dissident possibility. Later, as they travel to a rave, Deedee offers Shahid an ecstasy pill and before accepting he looks out of the taxi’s window and thinks, “You could drive for two or three hours through this limitless city which had no shape, and not come out the other side” (57). London here recalls the labyrinthine spaces of Winterson’s Venice, just as Deedee, to the extent that she serves as a guide for the disorientated provincial, recalls Villanelle, and together

53 _{Dance culture had not by this point found a single institutional form, and was not yet dominated by}

the superclubs that would come to typify it a decade later. Instead, event organisers would occupy farmland and disused warehouses for the purposes of staging all-night raves that were sometimes free and often illegal. Partly because of this spatial transgressiveness—the leafy Home Counties, it was felt, were no place for young people to be enjoying themselves—and partly because of the prevalence of MDMA at these events, the rave scene soon faced moral panic, police hostility and parliamentary action. Most notoriously, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) attempted to target electronic dance music by defining it as “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” (Home Office Criminal Justice 63 1 b). Given this definition, and the definition of a rave as “a gathering of 20 or more persons” taking place “on land in the open air” (63 1A a, 63 1), the legislation appeared to criminalise military parades similar to the one that marks the Queen’s birthday—a curious decision for a Conservative government to take, since Tories are usually keen to celebrate such occasions.

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she and the city come to be associated with the excessive and subversive pleasure of expressive culture. This consonance between London and Venice, Deedee and Villanelle, becomes yet more striking when we arrive at the rave; when Deedee leads Shahid along the corridors of a dilapidated industrial building and they emerge into a fanstastical space full of performative and provocative indeterminacy. “Many of the men”, Kureishi writes, “were bare- chested and wore only thongs”, and “[o]ne woman was naked except for high heels and a large plastic penis strapped to her thighs with which she duetted. Others were garbed in rubber, or masks, or were dressed as babies” (59).

However, while Shahid’s intoxication with this milieu is clear—it is implied allegorically through his desire for Deedee—it cannot be said that Kureishi is convinced that its emancipatory promise is genuine, and it is important that our suspicion of this is aroused primarily through his representation of space. As the night wears on, Deedee says she wants to take Shahid to “a much better place” farther out of the city. They climb back into a taxi and it carries them to “a lush, open area without shops” where “[t]he unlit mansions, behind tree-lined high walls and iron gates, sat far back from the road”. When they finally draw to a stop, it is at “the sort of place an English Gatsby would have chosen” (60-61). However, in these opulent surroundings a riotous party is in full swing: inside there are marble floor tiles, a grand staircase and a Jacuzzi, but also drug dealers shouting “Up the working class!” and doling out pills called “Leg-openers” (61-62). The mansion is “overrun by hordes of boys and girls from south London”, and this initially encourages the reader to understand the party as a kind of expropriation of suburban space by the dispossessed denizens of the inner city. Kureishi writes of the ravers that “most had probably never been inside such a house before, unless they were delivering the groceries. Now they were having the time of their lives. By the end of the weekend the house would be ashes” (62). And this reading only becomes more persuasive when combined with the repeated, apparently ironic emphasis on whiteness—from the carpets, to the stuffed polar bear, to the pills that Shahid buys. Yet there persists throughout this a sense that, actually, this irony is an illusion; that, in fact, the party represents nothing like the kind of pluralism

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that Kureishi finds so compelling in his earlier fiction. In the taxi home Deedee apologises for taking Shahid places where there are “only white people” (66), and the author seems to imply that this homogeneity somehow alters the way his protagonist reads urban space. Arriving back at his inner-city digs, Shahid “recognize[s] the street” but finds that “all the doors [look] the same” (64). The “inner-European Orientalism” that Manfred Pfister used to describe Venice’s complex psychogeographical situation in The Passion—and which I think also applies to the way the inner cities were imagined by Left culturalism—appears to have been eradicated and replaced by sameness. Thus not only is the rave scene itself devoid of the promise of pluralism that Kureishi had previously considered inherent to youth subcultures; it somehow serves to occlude or elide the very spatiality that had previously served to express this promise.

What is more, in the context of the acid house subculture, identity itself is homogenised, individualised and emptied of the political possibility it possessed in the inner city. This is evidenced in Shahid’s experience on ecstasy while lying on a floor in an upstairs room with hundreds of other addled party-goers. Right at the outset of this episode Kureishi creates a clear link between anonymity, pleasure and death: “[K]ids were lying on the floor not moving—except to kiss or stroke one another—as if they’d been massacred” (63). And he is clearly horrified as his protagonist lies beside them; as Shahid succumbs to an annihilation of ego, self, subject, and abandons himself to the mercuriality of the ecstasy high:

He was […] liquid, as if the furnace in his stomach was simmering his bone and muscle into lava […] Somewhere in his mind there lurked desolation: the things he normally liked had been drained off and not only could he not locate them, he couldn’t remember what they were. He needed to find a pen and list the reasons for living. But what on the list could be comparable to the feeling of this drug? He had been let into a dangerous secret; once it had been revealed, much of life, regarded from this high vantage point, could seem quite small. (63)

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There is throughout this episode an implication that liquidifying the self in the putatively collective context of the rave serves to annihilate social distanciation in an apolitical rather than a fruitful way; that in rendering all boundaries permeable, the high serves to remove the subject from the realm of socialisation altogether. Earlier, as he watched the dancing in the warehouse—which is not quite ironically named the “White Room” (59)—Shahid “noticed, through the golden mist, that no one appeared to have any great interest in anyone else, though people would fall into staring at one another” (60). And in this way, Kureishi seems to suggest that the ultimate effect of the ecstasy high—and of the rave subculture in general—is a kind of social dislocation; that, in many ways, it is the nadir of atomistic individualism. The rave might resemble a community of difference—it is, to say the least, highly performative—but it has been robbed of the profound complexity that was the condition of the cultural model’s subversive potential, and so grown soporific and meaningless. In a way, Kureishi seems to imply that the rave is what remains of Left culturalism when it has been evacuated of its political content: superficial diversity masking sameness. And while the party might initially strike us as a hedonistic expropriation of suburban space, its provocativeness is undermined by his representation of it as a disengagement with the political challenges of the inner city—a kind of Rabelaisian white flight—and a way of evacuating identity of its political content.

At the same time, he is quite clear in implying that the difficulties faced by oppressed communities are more considerable than ever.54 _Unlike

Laundrette, The Buddha and (arguably) Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Black

54 _{Riaz’s “rescue” of Shahid at the end of the rave only serves to lend this implication an existential}

urgency. When the latter arrives home at the end of the night and tries, in an hallucinatory stupor, to make an omelette, he nearly gasses himself and has to be tended to by Riaz, who turns off the cooker, clears up the vomit and puts Shahid to bed. Without this act, Shahid—having disappeared as a subject during his high—would have literally disappeared, too. Thus when he announces to Chad the following morning that Riaz “saved my life” (Kureishi Black Album 70-71), the implication is clear that, in many ways, dance culture is a culture of death—social, political, even literal.

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Album is also much more preoccupied with representing the vulnerability of

disenfranchised inner-city communities over the progressive promise the latter possess as a whole. And in the absence of any alternative mode of resistance, these communities increasingly feel the need to protect themselves by possessing a stake in the physicality of the city. One particular episode in the novel demonstrates this neatly, and concerns a Muslim family whose home is being besieged by violent teenagers: “The husband had been smashed over the head with a bottle and taken to hospital. The wife had been punched. Lighted matches had been pushed through the letter-box. At all hours the bell had been rung and the culprits said they would return to slaughter the children” (90). In response to these threats, Riaz arranges for the family to be moved to a Bengali estate, but as this will not happen immediately he charges his followers with guarding the family’s flat. Shahid is asked to assist and, armed with machetes, bats and meat cleavers, the group drives to an estate that could not be more different from the kind of inner-city spaces celebrated in the earlier novels and screenplays:

A sombre sky, misty pathways and dead grass bound the blocks together. Small trees, in wire wrapping, had been snapped in two, as if they gave offence. There was graffiti, but only tags, nothing more to say, apart from the strange legend in foot-high gold and silver letters, “Eat the Pig”.

The streetlamps shed little light. The shadows of the posse rode beside them, like figures on horseback. The silence was broken by car alarms. There was the sound of a man running, followed by another, and shouts. The group stood and waited as one, anticipating attack. They were ready; indeed, they wanted, required, confrontation. But the moment passed. Menacing silence resumed. (89)

It is surely worthy of note that, where once the inner city was busy and boisterous—characterised by an excess of signs, actions, identities—here it is

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ominously barren. More importantly, in a departure from The Buddha—in which racism in its baldest manifestation takes place in the dreary suburbs55_—here Kureishi emphatically situates racist violence in the inner city. And as far as Riaz’s group is concerned, the best means of resisting such violence consists in establishing defensible spaces with vigorously—even violently—maintained boundaries: as Shahid walks through the estate Kureishi tells us that “[t]his area was notorious for racists”; when protecting the flat the group sits “on the floor like guerrillas”, and when there is a knock at the door they stand to attention while Chad “unbar[s]” the entrance (100, 92-93). This focus on spatial fortification is quite opposed to the porous and mercurial spaces that are emphasised Kureishi’s other fictions, as well as in The Passion. The clamour of competing and complementary voices has been extinguished to be replaced by simple tags, simultaneously proprietorial markers defining and fixing space as well as plaintive appeals for recognition. Where previously inner-city space underwent a perpetual process of reinvention, and was celebrated as formative and expressive of its inhabitants’ contingent and capricious identities, now a desperate imperative resides in claiming and protecting it. And it is through the lens of this spatial imperative, I think, that The Black Album’s anxiety over the presence of nationalist politics within an urban context is most fruitfully assessed. Because Kureishi fundamentally doubts whether the city is able to reconcile all these competing politics: it is being literally torn apart, but the agencies behind this process remain unclear, as there are so many of them. In short, the question Kureishi seems to be asking is this: with every conceivable identity potentially queuing up to stake a claim on urban space, how is it supposed to contain them all?

55 _{In one of The Buddha’s most memorable episodes Karim cycles to see his girlfriend Helen, who lives}

in the south London suburbs, only to be confronted by her objectionable father: “You can’t see my