Politics of Audibility and (In‐)Visibility

The two wives do not recognize George as a cultural construct, but as a man who was led astray by his licit and innocent aspiration, and for this reason they almost never come into a real intercultural conflict with him. George is a Pakistani in England and an Englishman in Pakistan. Different territories, or liv-ing places, see different rules and jurisdictions, but also different perceptions of reality.

A diasporic identity is always asked to find new ways to be human, new im-ages of him- or herself,¹³ and that is often connected to his or her physical ap-pearance since the migrant‘trans-lates’his or her body from one land to the other.¹⁴I wonder if the complex matter ofhabeas corpus, and in particular the

“Habeas corpus, ad subjiciendum judicium!”(“You should have the body for submitting”), which is conceived to determine whether the custody is unlawful, can be useful to unveil discriminatory rules. In a multi-ethnic society the body often becomes the pretext for discrimination. The display of different cultural identities can be a limit to a good dialogue, albeit we must keep in mind that also a non-verbal, physical confrontation can assume the value of a fair hearing if grounded on an equal comparison.

Literature and cinema have exploited the controversial relationship between the visibilityvs.invisibility of the Other. Cultural studies highlight how the body is a social marker which emphasises differences in an us/wevs.they/them rela-tionship. If on the one hand, abuse and oppression are directly put into practice on the mind and the body of the human being, on the other hand the body might become the‘ground’where to root a constructive intercultural dialogue. It hap-pens that the visual image of a body does not only become the metonymy of a national (or racial) identity, but also a‘location’that enquires as well as a ‘loca-tion’enquired into. Once the self is embodied in a given situation, the body can be seen as a situated self, therefore by making oneself visible, one becomes the agent of one’s own presence in the community. We might argue that the visual-ization of the identity re-codes the personal semiotics by additions, deletions, and revisions, in what actively constitutes and motivates the operative‘I.’¹⁵ It

 See Salman Rushdie,Imaginary Homelands(London: Granta Books,):–.

 See Silvia Albertazzi,Lo sguardo dell’Altro. Le letterature postcoloniali(Roma: Carocci):

–.

 See Edwin Thumboo,“Conditions of Cross-Cultural Perceptions. The Other Looks Back,”in Embracing the Other. Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures of English, ed. Dunja M. Mohr (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi,):–,–.

happens that the visual semiotics of one’s own identity becomes a form of nar-ration which could be more or less efficient in a fairinterculturalhearing. Let’s take for example Gandhi’s outfit during his visit to England in 1931 and in par-ticular to Buckingham Palace, when he decided to wear the loincloth of the poor-est Indian farmers. His aspect was eloquent not only of the living conditions of the most disadvantaged Indians, but also of the British imperialist responsibili-ties towards his country.

We cannot forget that the display of the diasporic identity forces the West to reassess itself as a centre, since any‘alien body’makes also the peculiarities of the‘domestic body’visible thanks to a dialogical hermeneutics guided by differ-ance, which is favoured by the physical distance of the migrant from his own country. A variation in the proxemics fosters the complexity of the signified and the awareness of racial individual features. Caroline Nagel and Lynn A. Stae-heli maintain:

Bodies are imbued within ideas about difference and sameness. […] Integration, in this sense, needs to be understood as a visual practice and politics that involves identifying par-ticular visible differences as meaningful and placing these differences in wider narratives of belonging and social membership.¹⁶

With respect to the delicate and long debated theme of integration and assimi-lation, the impossibility to cancel the physical difference of the foreign body has come to the fore. It might be worthwhile remembering what Henry Hopkinson, Foreign Minister in 1954, addressing the House of Commons, stated:

As the law stands, any British subject from the colony is free to enter this country at any time as long as he can produce satisfactory evidence of his British status. This is not some-thing we want to tamper with lightly. […] We still take pride in the fact that a man can say civis Britannicus sum whatever his colour may beand we take pride in the fact that he wants and can come to the mother country¹⁷[My italics].

But also what Enoch Powell said in his (in‐)famous“The River of Blood”-speech:

To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistin-guishable from its other members. Now, at all times,where there are marked physical

differ- Caroline Nagel, Lynn A. Staeheli,“Integration and the Politics of Visibility and Invisibility in Britain: The Case of British Arab Activists,”inNew Geographies of Race and Racism, ed. Claire Dwyer, Caroline Bressey (Farnham:Ashgate Publishing,):–,.

 Ian R.G. Spencer,British Immigration Policy Since: The Making of Multi-Racial Britain (London, New York: Routledge,):.

ences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible¹⁸ [My italics].

In both statements the body becomes the social marker of a cultural construction associated to a value judgment, that is, the superimposition of a striated territory which creates the opportunity for a war. It is a good space for a war-machine, as Deleuze and Guattari would say.

In such a context, politics legitimately(even if unfairly, sometimes) makes territorial rights prevail, so to say that if ordinary language is flexible with re-spect to meaning, the language of law tends to avoid ambiguities (inclusion, ex-clusion, estrangement),¹⁹as the British laws of migration reveal. In the 1940s the formula“European workers”was much more appreciated than‘foreign workers’

since migrants from the Commonwealth were regarded as foreigners, being most of them coloured and so less eligible as Britons (British Nationality Act, 1948); in the 1960s the Commonwealth Immigrants Act explicitly talks about“coloured colonial workers” since white migrants were considered more suitable candi-dates for assimilation; in 1971 the Race Relations Act stated that immigration was forbidden for“black people”enforced by patriotic rhetoric based on tradi-tional values.²⁰While the narration of one’s identity is culturally and psycholog-ically determined by the observer and the social context, the law insists on its truth.

In postcolonial literature, many characters make experience of the dispos-session of their coloured body in favour of the white-body, as the only pure and authentic one, which is followed by the re-territorialization or re-location of the black body in a new social and geographical territory. We can generally recognize different attitudes, which create a dialogical barrier and reveal the am-biguity of any representational system, that is, the provisional truth of any cul-tural construction. In London in the mid-fifties, the Caribbean protagonist of Naipaul’sThe Mimic Man, Ralph Singh, says:

In the great city, so three-dimensional, so rooted in its soil, drawing colour from such depths, only the city was real. Those of us who came to it lost some of our solidity; we were trapped into fixed, flat postures. And, in this growing dissociation between ourselves

 Enoch Powell,“Enoch Powell’s‘Rivers of Blood’speech,”(November,),The Tele-graph <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment//Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.

html> (acc.March,).

 See Cavalla,“Retorica giudiziale, logica e verità,”.

 See Linda McDowell,“On the Significance of Being White: European Migrant Workers in the British Economy in thes ands,”inNew Geographies of Race and Racism, (Farnham:

Ashgate Publishing,):–,–.

and the city in which we walked, scores of separate meetings, not linked even by ourselves, who became nothing more than perceivers: everyone reduced, reciprocally, to a succession of such meetings, so that first experience and then the personality divided bewilderingly into compartments. Each person concealed his own darkness.²¹

The figure of the mimic man pervades all postcolonial literature, since it ideolog-ically implies an assimilation to a supposedly more valuable civilization and seducing mores. In this case the intercultural dialogue is denied from the begin-ning in view of the fact that the diasporic individual aspires to cancel differen-ces: conformity to a situated body rather than confrontation. But it can also hap-pen that the concealment of the body or the denial of its narration might be a matter of life-and-death struggle. In My Place by the Australian writer Sally Morgan, the grandmother of the narrator hides her aboriginal origin from her nieces and neighbours because she is scared of government officers and worried about social discrimination. Her attitude comes from the trauma for being victim of abuse in her early years, like any other Australian‘blackfella’(see the stolen generation, transportation and the outback movement):

‘Hmmph, you think you know everything, don’t you?’she replied bitterly.‘You do not know nothin’, girl’. You don’t know what it is like for people like us.We are like those Jews, we got to look out for ourselves’[…]

‘In this world there is no justice, people like us’d all be dead and gone now if it was up to this country.’[…]

‘Nan’, I said carefully.‘What people are we?’

She was immediately on the defensive. She looked sharply at me with the look of a rab-bit sensing danger.‘You’re tryin’to trick me again. Aaah, you can’t be trusted. I’m not stu-pid, you know. I’m not saying nothing. Nothing, do you hear.’²²

Metaphorically, we might state that she denies herself the right to a fair hearing and along with it also her right to be free to show what she is: a‘blackfella’not a black Indian migrant, as she lets people think. Albeit indigenous, she can be considered a diasporic subjectivity as a consequence of the peculiar British oc-cupation of Australia. The woman narrates herself in relation to the danger she had experienced for being Aboriginal. Because of the violence she went through, the grandmother accepts to be narrated by the white Australians or, metaphorically speaking, by the counterparty: as Salman Rushdie states in The Satanic Verses“They describe us, […] That’s all. They have the power of

de- V.S. Naipaul,The Mimic Men(Harmondsworth: Penguin,):.

 Sally Morgan,My Place(Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre P,):.

scription, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.”²³ But this kind of de-scription is a monologue, not a dialogical praxis which could promise truth and equity with respect to the concept ofhumanitas.We might observe that a bal-anced right or duty of description or self-narration is often undermined. Litera-ture shows that a co-existence of a subjectivity which belongs to a tradition and a subjectivity defined by social membership is the result of a mature collabora-tion between will, accollabora-tion and consciousness. It is worthwhile remembering what in the late sixties Wole Soyinga said about Leopold Senghor’s Négritude Move-ment: “A tiger does not shout its tigritude, it acts”: representation is the line of action of a subjectivity within the community. As I have tried to point out, the praxis of representation makes the‘rule’emerge.

Literature highlights the nuancesof characters and thematic significances hard to discern in reality: the more the detailed charting of the self isdefined, the more the perception of the other isrefined. A careful logical argumentation makes similarities rather than more obvious cultural differences come to the fore so that a narration of co-existence turns into knowledge for the entire reader-ship. The ‘race’ becomes thought-in-action working on hegemonic attitudes, that is stereotypes and mainstream. In a multicultural context, citizenship relies on theagencythe members of the community exercise in order to be ‘visible,’

that is‘audible,’in their statements. As I have already said about West is West, visibility and audibility are assumptions of responsibility which imply the right to dignity and freedom.

Similarly, stereotypes might make the confrontation difficult and turn into silence but also violence: from the forum to the battlefield. A work which exem-plifies this last approach is the short story and movie by Hanif Kureishi,My Son the Fanatic,²⁴where a group of second-generation Muslims engages in an iden-titarian struggle mediated by their‘fashionable’and highly visible bodies as a form of “resistance to the white men, the dismissal of Christian meekness”as Kureishi himself maintains in his essay“The Rainbow Sign.”²⁵InMy Son the Fa-naticKureishi thematizes this process as an initiation to tradition which leads second-generation migrants to fanaticism and fundamentalism. The story high-lights the hyper-visualization of the identitarian body: Farid dresses in a white suit with a Muslim cap, lets his beard grow, and speaks Arabic or some Pakistani language. At the beginning, Farid is very well integrated in British society and

 Salman Rushdie,Satanic Verses(London:Viking,):.

 Hanif Kureishi,The Black Album / My Son the Fanatic: A Novel and a Short Story(London:

Scribner,).

 Hanif Kureishi,“The Rainbow Sign,”inMy Beautiful Laundrette and The Rainbow Sign (Lon-don: Faber and Faber,),.

his father is proud of it, but then he decides to take up his Muslim culture, so that he becomes an integralist. The boy is actually looking for an ideological, an-cestral pureness, which is quite far from his cultural and socio-political sur-rounding (both British and Pakistani). Religion becomes a transnational identity, and its hyper-visualization leads to the detachment from a territorial identity.

Likewise, inThe Black AlbumChad takes on his religious transnational identity to avoid being considered a foreigner. He hides himself behind his Muslim clothes, so as to be the ‘Islamic brother’ and no longer the‘Paki.’He prefers being considered a threatening harm rather than engaging in dialogue, but in this way he misrepresents himself.

Still Kureishi writes:

I saw the taking up of Islam as an aberration, a desperate fantasy of world-wide black brotherhood; it was a symptom of extreme alienation. It was also an inability to seek a wider political view or cooperation with other oppressed groups–or with the working class as a whole–since alliance with white groups was necessarily out of the question.²⁶ As a matter of facts, Chad/Farid is unable to represent himself, so he plays the newcomer who puts on stage his own conquest of England. Louise Bennett, the Caribbean poet, talks about a“Colonization in Reverse”: while you make yourself extensively visible, you are colonizing a cultural as well as a physical space. It is my opinion that the British did the same in India, when they imposed their civilisation through their political and visual behaviour, that is, by keeping Indians at a distance. But we must point out that inMy Son the Fanaticwe are far from those counter-narrations²⁷Homi Bhabha talks about as the only discourse able to break the ruling ideology. Indeed, Farid deliberately and ostensibly hyper-visualizes himself to create a visual lexicon of difference, in opposition to the phenomenon of mimicry or even to (his previous) social assimilation. In so doing, he opens himself to scrutiny, misrecognition, dissonance:contra not versus.If in open court the evidence is the result of a dialectical argumentation of opposing positions regulated by the fair play, Farid puts himself contra – against –rather than versus– towards– opening the way for intolerance and violence since he denies any kind of dialogue and shared knowledge of the cul-turalhiatus.First of all, fair play means respect for the fair hearing, since only the right method provides the right evidence for a legal truth. By accepting the fair play, the parties accept also to hear a counter-evidence in order to attain

 Kureishi,“The Rainbow Sign,”.

 See Homi Bhabha,“DissemiNation. Time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation,”

inNation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge,):–.

the knowledge required by the court to come to a sentence (not to a verdict!).

Farid cannot break out of his own cultural and linguistic constructions, and that is the ideological boundary of his discourse on diaspora. Once again Kur-eishi writes: “the debasement of one race and the glorification of another in this way inevitably leads to murder.”²⁸