Referring to the BBC comedy “The Kumars at No. 42”, in which Meera Syal plays the role of Sushila, the Kumar family’s grandmother, this chapter heading points to one of the most commented upon stylistic devices in Syal’s work, including Anita and Me: its humour (cf. Dunphy 2004: 643). Yet Syal’s acclaim as “the most ‘funny’ British Asian voice” (Upstone 2010: 120), which her work on television and radio shows has firmly established, must not only be viewed as her way to “meet the image of a confident, self- assured British Asian identity” (ibid.: 120). As Upstone proposes, the comedy of Syal’s work and in particular Anita and Me can also be interpreted as a challenge to a predominant mood of optimism that fails to acknowledge the continued difficulties of British Asian women in particular (cf. ibid.: 120).
Many of the comical situations the autodiegetic narrator in Anita and Me presents originate from the tensions generated by the portrayal of a nine-year old experiencing I of Meena Kumar and the grown up narrating I who relates her memories of being the only Asian child in the fictional village of Tollington. The temporal distance between narrating and experiencing I is disclosed in a paratextual preface,163 in which the
narrator imagines her biography and fabricates childhood memories which she “trot[s] out in job interview situation or, once or twice, to impress middle-class white boys who come sniffing round, excited by the thought of wearing a colonial maiden as a trinket on their arm” (AM 9 f.).164 This admission indicates that the narrator is an adult British
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163 For a detailed analysis of the forms and functions of prefaces, see Genette (2001 [1987]: 161-293).
164 Roger Bromley (2000: 144) reads the preface as the novel’s way of distancing itself from “the stereotypical migrant narrative which it mocks […] by staging and stylising the ‘Windrush’ moment: deference, impoverished housing, sweated labour, pregnancy,
Asian woman and at the same time already points towards one of the key concerns of the narrative, the distinction between truth and lies, as the narrator states in the preface: “I’m really not a liar, I just learned very early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong” (AM 10). The narrator addresses her own unreliability before the narrative starts and continues to challenge the notion of a trustworthy account when the first chapter starts with the nine-year old Meena crying out: “‘I’m not lying, honest, papa!’” (AM 11) Yet by reflecting on the reliability of her own narration in the preface,165 the narrator emphasizes that it is not
actually the unreliability itself that is of importance for the interpretation of this novel, but rather the question of why both the grown up narrating I and the nine-year old experiencing I feel the need to turn to mythology or lies to spice up their biographies. Furthermore, the discussion will have to return to the question of why the narrator is deprived of history and why memories have to be fabricated.
The temporal difference between the adult narrating I and the child experiencing I is – with exceptions – bridged by employing the child Meena as the focalizing subject of the narrative, rendering the child’s perception of the events of the story. Devon Campbell- Hall’s (2009) semi-autobiographical reading of Anita and Me, which ascribes the paratextual preface’s narrative transmission to the real author Meera Syal, shows that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
exclusion. In some ways, this has become a staple documentary, the obligatory realism of the migrant narrative.” Maintaining the realist convention in the novel, the preface of Anita and
Me highlights the narrative’s status as fiction and ironically rejects the apparent universality
of the migrant experience presented in earlier migration literature.
165 Sara Upstone (2010: 123) reads the admission to unreliability as a warning not to trust the narrative: “I am an unreliable narrator of the worst kind: one who disguises their falsehoods with a veil of realism. Even though you will find little conscious narrative distancing in the novel to distinguish narrator from protagonist (only a handful of occasions in the whole book), this doesn’t mean such a distance does not exist. Don’t fall for the authority of the first-person voice and forget the subjectivity that lies behind it. Remember that the age of verisimilitude is long behind us: that realism is no longer, as indeed it never was, a synecdoche for truth. Don’t look at just what is said here, but look beyond it, look behind it, look in between the often breezy, simple story offered. Undertake instead what Edward Said calls a contrapuntal reading: look for what is not said, and – when you discover what is missing – consider why it is absent, and what this absence might in fact stand for. Don’t fall for the suggestion that, at the end of the novel, ‘Meena understands that the lies she concocted in the past are no longer necessary’, for – this introduction explicitly suggests – the narrator’s propensity for falsehood is still clearly at work.” While Upstone’s plea underlines the argument of the present interpretation to read the novel not only as a Bildungsroman and aims at including genealogical relations in the analysis, some of her statements will have to be challenged. For example, as will be shown in the course of this chapter, the distance between narrating and experiencing I can often be found in social criticisms hidden in the humorous tone of the narrative. Therefore, while some of the points are valuable, this analysis will not restrict its focus to these points alone.
[a]n adult writer fictionally rendering a child’s point of view faces the challenge of creating an authorial voice that successfully marries the writer’s adult experiences with the child’s innocent perspective. The tensions inherent in this project prevent its narrative stability. One of the contributing factors to the instability of this fictional narrative space is the power-struggle between Meera Syal as an adult writer and Meena Kumar, her child-protagonist, as each battles to become the dominant narrative voice. (Campbell-Hall 2009: 293)
While the autobiographical elements of the novel cannot be denied, the present approach to the novel avoids equating the author with the narrator and therefore concludes that the noticeable struggle for narrative predominance is created through the age difference between narrating and experiencing I as well as the character conception of both. As the narrator announces in the preface, she has “always been a sucker for a good double entendre; the gap between what is said and what is thought, what is stated and what is implied, is a place in which I have always found myself” (AM 10). Meena, both as the narrator and the protagonist, is characterized as aiming for ambiguity to create a space for interpretation – her own interpretation of events as well as the narratee’s – and to functionalize the age difference between the child and the grown up to offer possible interpretations of what is narrated: “Sometimes we must distinguish this child from the narrator, who is the same girl grown up; that is, on occasion the narrator does bring an adult perspective to bear on the things she is remembering and alludes to insights which she gained only much later” (Dunphy 2004: 643). These re- interpretations of events, which the child-perspective only recounts, are revisited by the adult narrator, a device that allows “polite sidestepping of awkward social issues” including “portrayals of violent racist attacks perpetrated by well-known members of the local community, and depictions of the effects of abuse within broken homes” (Campbell-Hall 2009: 294). The distinction between the narrating and the experiencing I thus allows the narrative to address these issues while maintaining the humorous tone. The generally linear narrative comprises a story time of about two years, slowing down the speed of the narrative during the school holidays because this is the time of the year that important events happen in the life of the narrator. The narrative is continuously interspersed with analepses that refer to events taking place in Meena’s life before the narrative sets in. The main effect of these analepses is to “create suspense as the reader has to wait for the conclusion of the drama which has been interrupted” (Dunphy 2004: 643). They further stylistically refer back to the theme of memory, which underlies the narrative by creating “a multi-layered effect, defying chronology as memory often does” (ibid.: 644). The analepses further function as a menas for comic relief; this is employed in situations in which the child Meena either does not fully grasp a situation but realizes that something is wrong or when she is trying to avoid having to face an
unpleasant encounter. A scene in which Meena reports her near death experience of almost choking on a hotdog while her parents are preoccupied with worrying, presumably about their families left behind upon migration (cf. AM 26 ff.), is examplary. This memory is an analepsis that reaches two years into the past and interrupts Meena’s waiting for punishment after having been caught lying. While the flashback includes vital information for a characterization of Meena’s parents, the narrator does not elaborate on them, but uses the jocularity of the memory, in which the child chokes on a sausage, to break the tension in the flashback itself as well as the actual narrated time, to which the narration returns. These information-carrying analepses are used especially in the first three chapters of the novel, “where the framework narrative represents the action of a single day, while the flashbacks form the bulk of the text and have far more informative content” (Dunphy 2004: 644).
The narrative centres on the nine-year old Meena Kumar, living with her parents Daljit and Shyam – who in the course of the narrative have a second child, Sunil – in the village Tollington during the 1960s. The fictional setting Tollington is located in close vicinity to Wolverhampton (cf. AM 12), thus establishing a reference to a real location outside the fictional text. The opening scene of the novel, in which Meena is dragged to a sweet shop by her father, who is rightly suspecting her of having stolen money from her mother’s purse, offers an expository description of the village:
I scuttled after papa along the single road, bordered with nicotine-tipped spiky grass, the main artery which bisected the village. A row of terraced houses clustered around the crossroads, uneven teeth which spread into a gap-toothed smile as the houses gradually became bigger and grander as the road wandered south, undulating into a gentle hill and finally merging into miles of flat green fields, stretching as far as the eye could see. We were heading in the opposite direction, northwards down the hill, away from the posh, po-faced mansions and towards the nerve centre of Tollington, where Mr Ormerod’s grocery shop, the Working Men’s Club, the diamond-paned Methodist church and the red brick school jostled for elbow room with two-up-two-downs, whose outside toilets backed onto untended meadows populated with the carcasses of abandoned agricultural machinery. There was only one working farm now, Dale End farm, bookending the village at the top of the hill, where horses regarded the occasional passers-by with mournful malteser eyes. (AM 11 f.)
Meena’s depiction of the village presents a combination of the child’s imaginative and naïve description of her surroundings with a sociological description of the class structure and economic situation of Tollington. Her anthropomorphization of the village, indicated by her use of corporeal vocabulary such as “artery”, “teeth”, “gap- toothed smile”, and “nerve centre”, shows that the child perceives the village as a living organism that exists through and is animated by its inhabitants. Tollington is further described as divided along economic factors, as the south end of the village appears to
be a better-off area with houses becoming gradually bigger and grander with a view over green fields and gentle hills. Down this hill with the bigger houses, the north end is described as being the bustling centre of village life in which houses have outside toilets and the meadows have developed into a wasteland in which only the Dale End farm managed to survive. Pointing out the “occasional passers-by” the narrator characterizes Tollington as a secluded community in which transgressing the village borders is the exception rather than the norm.
Tollington’s relative seclusion in the shadow of the “industrial chimneys of Wolverhampton, smoking like fat men’s cigars” (AM 12) was until the “late Fifties” (AM 14) supported by the source of the economic stability, the Tollington mine. “The mine and the village had been as intertwined as lovers, grateful lovers astonished by their mutual discovery; you could see it in the stiff backs of the men and the proud smiles of the women” (AM 14). The mine was the main source of employment in Tollington until its sudden closure rendered the village’s established gender and class system void. Consequently, the able-bodied men and their families left the village in search of work, “leaving behind a gaggle of wheezy old geezers and dozens of stout, dour-faced miner’s widows who had nowhere else to go” (AM 14). With the rural exodus taking effect in the late 1950s, the population of Tollington underwent a demographic change: “It had been a community of tough, broad-armed women and fragile old men until a few new families started moving in, drawn by the country air and dirt-cheap housing – families like us” (AM 14). Notably, the inclusive “families like us” refers to the country air and cheap housing, because the Kumars believe they are the only Indians in Tollington (cf. AM 22) until proven wrong towards the end of the novel by the owner of “the Big House” (AM 13) who is “an Indian man, as Indian as my father” (AM 317).
With the mine closed, the initially stable gendered division of labour is turned upside down. Because the remaining men are out of work, it falls to the women of Tollington to assure the families’ livelihood:
These women were commonly known as The Ballbearings Committee as they all worked at a metal casings factory in New Town, an industrial estate and shopping centre and our nearest contact with civilisation. The factory had opened, by way of compensation, soon after the mine closure, and everyone had assumed that the jobs would be given to the ex- colliers. But it was not the men they wanted; they wanted women, women who could do the piecework and feel grateful, women whose nimble fingers would negotiate their machines, women who, unlike their husbands, would not make demands or complain. So it was that in the space of a few months, the hormonal balance of Tollington was turned upside down. There must have been a time when women waved their men off on doorsteps with lunch boxes and a resigned smile, but I could not remember it. It seemed
to me that they had always run the village and they had always been as glamorous and shocking as they were now. (AM 19)
Again with a mixture of the nine-year-old’s innocent observation and the critical commentary of the adult narrator, Meena relates how the power relations in the village changed through the women being favoured as factory workers and how the factory replaced the mine as the main source of income for the inhabitants of Tollington. The criticism levelled at the working conditions specifically created for women because they are not organized in unions as the mine workers were, and the expected gratitude towards the employers for allowing the women to work, point to the unequal treatment of women and men in the work place in the 1960s. At the same time, however, this situation implies progressiveness in the small village in which it becomes the women’s job to support their families, giving the former housewives a new independence from the old patriarchal structures. Yet the freedom and independence the women gain from the employment outside the house is in return indirectly problematized by introducing single mother-characters who need their neighbour’s help when coming home late from work (cf. AM 28 f.) or women leaving their families (cf. AM 246). Again the humorous tone of the narrative manages to introduce this twofold social criticism by privileging the child’s innocent perspective over the narrator’s critical re-evaluations.
Being the only child of migrant parents, Meena struggles to find her place in the Tollington community. In the small village with few children to associate with, Meena seeks the friendship of Anita Rutter, “the undisputed ‘cock’ of our yard, maybe that should have been ‘hen’, but her foghorn voice, foul mouth, and proficiency at lassoing victims with her frayed skipping rope indicated she was carrying enough testosterone around to earn the title” (AM 38 f.). Anita is characterized as rude, tough, and precocious, embodying the “local, white working-class community” (Bromley 2000: 143). With her rough demeanour Anita soon becomes Meena’s role model. Meena, in contrast to Anita, is scolded by her parents as well as her extended family (cf. AM 30), who find her boyish behaviour inappropriate.
Anita and her two friends, Fat Sally and Sherrie, are “much older” (AM 39) than Meena, an assertion which has to be relativized because of the child’s perspective. While Meena experiences the age differences between herself and Anita and her friends to be quite significant, the fact that they are the only children in Tollington to associate with gives reason to regard them as Meena’s peers; they are the only available characters that could be considered to become a generationality. Although this assumption will be disproven in the course of this chapter, the relationship between Meena and Anita has been highly significant for previous studies, which classified Anita and Me as a
Bildungsroman. Therefore, a closer examination of the generational relationship between the two characters – who eventually fail to be peers to each other, and which later on will be replaced by the genealogical relationship between Meena and her grandmother – will support the hypothesis that a limited focus on Anita in relation to Meena’s transformation reduces the novel to the genre of the Bildungsroman.
Although a limitation to the character of Anita in the analysis of represented generations is too narrow an approach, a study of her character as a possible ‘generational other’ has to be the starting point in the examination of the character constellation. Because of her age and tough demeanour Anita is described as the ruler of the local playground:
She ruled over all the kids in the yard with a mixture of pre-pubescent feminine wiles, pouting, sulking, clumsy cack-handed flirting and unsettling mood swings which would often end in minor violence. She had a face of a pissed-off cherub, huge green eyes, blonde hair, a curling mouth with slightly too many teeth and a brown birthmark under one eye which when she was angry, which was often, seemed to throb and glow like a lump of Superman’s kryptonite. (AM 39)
Anita is the uncontested leader of the Tollington youths and exerts the power that comes