Include me out
Alberto Manguel
EXTRAVAGANT STRANGERS edited by Caryl Phillips Faber, £15.99, pp. 260 Those who require definitions of nationality should follow the example of Mr Podsnap, whose world, we are told,
was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even geographically: seeing that although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other coun- tries, with that important reservation, a mis- take, and of their manners and customs would conclusively observe, 'Not English!' when, Presto! with a flourish of the arm, and a flush of the face, they were swept away.
To define, as Mr Podsnap understood, we must define by exclusion: anything else blurs the notion of who and where we are.
To the English (whoever they might be) being English (whatever that might mean) has always been a self-evident proposition, at least since Pope Gregory the Great (who had been mercifully spared the sight of Baroness Thatcher's countenance) called them 'not Angles but angels' because of their lovely faces. Much has gone into the angelic mix since then (from Pict, Scot, Roman and Dane to Indian, Nigerian, American and Caribbean, as Caryl Phillips points out in his short introduction to Extravagant Strangers) and yet Mr Podsnap continues to say, with the same flourish and flush Dickens described a century ago, `Not English!' to anything and anyone beyond his bathroom mirror.
Phillips, a distinguished novelist born in St Kitts but brought up in England, has sought to prove to Mr Podsnap that what might be called 'English' has always largely consisted of what Mr Podsnap swept away. To support his case Phillips has chosen examples of English literature ranging from disparaging accounts of the Promised Land of Albion by ancient newcomers such as Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Olaudah Equiano to inquisitive reports from resi- dent aliens such as Doris Lessing and Michael Hofman, from the oohs and ahs of fervent anglophones of the stature of T.S. Eliot and Kazuo Ishiguro to rumblings from within the belly of the beast by the likes of George Orwell and George Lamming.
If the title Extravagant Strangers is mildly ironic (these strangers are all too familiar and their extravagance, as Doris Lessing describes in her piece, often becomes an everyday English custom), then the subtitle, 'A Literature of Belonging', is largely wishful thinking. To contribute, as countless generations of immigrants know well, is not necessarily to belong. 'Depend- ing upon race, class and gender,' Phillips remarks of writers not born in Britain, 'the degree to which they feel alienated from British society will differ, and these vari- ables will, of course, be further complicat- ed by factors of time and historical circum- stances.' In other words, it helps to stand in the right place at the right time — and, of course, to look the part. To look English.
And that brings us back to the question Mr Podsnap seemed to be begging. What is English? What is England? These defini- tions have nothing to do with economic, social or artistic realities: they are creatures of the imagination and play roles assigned to them by whimsical casting directors. Innocent Canada, like the young lady in the ballad, constantly losing her honest name; hot-blooded Italy, frivolous France, humourless Germany, meticulous Switzer- land, England fair-minded, drab and with its own brand of wit: the geography of clichés is mind-numbing and almost always wrong. And yet each of us compiles a per- sonal atlas of such imaginings, be it as slim as Mr Podsnap's or as far-reaching as Phillips's, against which we measure the world. The world, in the meantime, pays no attention to our pleasing cartography and continues to shift and change.
Shift and change were at the core of Kipling's imperialism. His angry poem 'The English Flag' (rightly included in Phillips's selection) conjured up not the masses hud- dled around home fires burning but the throngs who laboured for England under the world's four winds. With one famous line, 'What should they know of England who only England know?', Kipling coun- tered Mr Podsnap's self-centred view, and in an ever more sarcastic poem (which Phillips did not choose to include) Kipling mocked him:
Father, Mother and Me, Sister and Auntie say All the people like us are We, And everyone else is They.
And yet it may be that the question of what is English is not altogether an idle question. That writers who were born in foreign places came and wrote next to those born in England is a matter that should concern only customs officials and the department of immigration. The reader doesn't (or shouldn't) much care whether the author of The Remains of the Day was to the manor born or whether the author of Othello spent his childhood on the Grand Canal. I like the fact that Dante and Dostoevsky are included in the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to English Litera- ture. This strikes me as gratitude, not arro- gance.
In a lecture given in 1953 Jorge Luis Borges considered the question of the Argentinean writer and tradition. 'We should not be afraid,' he concluded, after dismissing the temptations of local colour.
We should consider the entire universe our patrimony. We should attempt all subjects; we cannot limit ourselves to what is Argen- tinean in order to be Argentinean, because either being Argentinean is an act of fate and in that case we will be Argentinean no matter what, or being Argentinean is an affectation, a mask.
In spite of Mr Podsnap's reservations, English literature has, out of necessity and since its first mumblings, accepted this uni- versal patrimony and, as Phillips's antholo- gy shows, has grown none the worse for it.
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