Authors: Hanif Kureishi
I was fourteen in 1968 and one of the horrors of my teenage years was Enoch Powell. For a mixed-race kid, this stiff ex-colonial zealot with his obscene, Grand Guignol talk of whips, blood, excreta, urination and wide-eyed piccaninnies was a monstrous, scary bogeyman. I remember his name being whispered by my uncles for fear I would overhear.
I grew up near Biggin Hill airfield in Kent, in the shadow of the Second World War. We walked past bomb sites every day; my grandmother had been a ‘fire watcher’ and talked about the terror of the nightly Luftwaffe raids. With his stern prophet’s nostalgia, bulging eyes and military moustache, Powell reminded us of Hitler, and the pathology of his increasing number of followers soon became as disquieting as his pronouncements. At school, Powell’s name soon become one terrifying word – Enoch. As well as being an insult, it began to be used with elation. ‘Enoch will deal with you lot,’ and, ‘Enoch will soon be knocking on your door, pal.’ ‘Knock, knock, it’s Enoch,’ people would say as they passed. Neighbours in the London suburbs began to state with some defiance,
‘Our family is with Enoch.’ More skinheads appeared.
It was said, after Powell mooted the idea of a Ministry of Repatriation, that we ‘offspring’, as he called the children of immigrants, would be sent away. ‘A policy of assisting repatriation by payment of fares and grants is part of the official policy of the Conservative Party,’ he stated in 1968. Sometimes, idly, I wondered how I might like it in India or Pakistan, where I’d never been, and whether I’d be welcomed. But others said that if we were born here, as I was, it would be only our parents who would be sent back. We would, then, have to fend for ourselves, and I imagined a parentless pack of us unwanted mongrels, hunting for food in the nearby woods.
Repatriation, Powell said, ‘would help to achieve with minimum friction what must surely be the object of everyone – to prevent, so far as that is still possible, a major racial problem in the Britain of ad 2000’. It was clear: if Britain had lost an empire and not yet recovered from the war, our added presence would only cause more strife – homelessness, joblessness, prostitution and drug addiction. Soon the indigenous whites would be a ‘persecuted minority’ or ‘strangers’ in their own country. It would be our turn, presumably, to do the persecuting.
Powell, this ghost of the empire, was not just a run-of-the-mill racist. His influence was not negligible; he moved British politics to the right and set the agenda we address today. Politicians attack minorities when
they want to impress the public with their toughness as ‘truth-tellers’. And Powell’s influence extended far. In 1976 – the year of the Clash’s ‘White Riot’ – and eight years after Powell’s major speeches, one of my heroes, the great Eric Clapton, ordered an audience to vote for Powell to prevent Britain becoming a ‘black colony’. Clapton said that ‘Britain should get the wogs out, get the coons out,’ before repeatedly shouting the National Front slogan ‘Keep Britain White’.
A middle-class, only child from Birmingham, socially inept and repressed, Powell had taken refuge in books and ‘scholarship’ for most of his life. He was happiest during the war, where he spent three years in military intelligence in India. It was ‘intoxicating’. Like a lot of Brits, he loved the empire and colonial India, where he could escape his parents and the constraints of Britain, and spend time with other men. Many Indians were intimidated by and subservient to British soldiers, as my family attested. Like most colonialists, Powell was a bigger, more powerful man in India than he’d have been in England. No wonder he was patriotic and believed that giving up the empire would be a disaster. ‘I had always been an imperialist and a Tory,’ he said.
On his return in 1945, Powell went into politics. Like the grandees he aspired to be, he took up church-going and fox-hunting. Before his speeches on race, he was an obedient servant of the state, uninteresting, undistinguished
and barely known as a politician. But early on, during the post-war consensus, he was, in fact, a proto-Thatcherite: an individualist and anti-union supporter of the free market and lower taxes with a utopian vision of unregulated capitalism in which, miraculously, everything people required would be provided by the simple need for profit. Soon, as Thatcher said, there would be no alternative.
But, in 1968, that great year of newness, experimentation and hope, when people were thinking in new ways about oppression, relationships and equality, there was a terrible return. This odd Edwardian figure popped up into public life, and decided to become a demagogue. Richard Crossman, in his diary of 1968, wrote worriedly of Powell’s celebrity appeal to ‘mass opinion, right over our parliament and his party leadership’.
Appealing to the worst in people – their hate – is a guaranteed way to get attention, but it is also fatal. Partly because he liked to talk in whole sentences, Powell was called clever, and he was forever translating Herodotus. But he wasn’t smart enough to resist the temptation of instant populism, for which he traded in his reputation. Racism is the fool’s gold, or, rather, the crack cocaine of politics. The seventies were a dangerous time for people of colour – the National Front was active and violent, particularly in South London, and it was an ignoble sacrifice for Powell to attack the most vulnerable and unprotected, those workers who had left their homes to come
to Britain. He elevated his phobia to a political position, and there was no going back. He had convinced himself he had a message for mankind, and it was this unblinking certainty and sadism, rather than its content, which points to his madness.
Like many racists, Powell was nostalgic in his fantasies: before all this mixing, there was a time of clarity and plenitude, when Britishness was fixed and people knew who they were. Powell refused to allow his certainties to come into contact with reality. He had wanted to know India, but barely troubled himself with Britain and, apart from some weekends in Wolverhampton, lived for most of his life in Belgravia.
In contrast to the crude caricatures of people of colour perpetrated by Powell, the Guyanese-born, Cambridge-educated writer E. R. Braithwaite – who served in the RAF before becoming a teacher in the East End because he couldn’t get a job as an engineer – writes in detail about race between the late forties and the mid-sixties. Three important works in particular,
To Sir, With Love, Reluctant Neighbours
and
Choice of Straws,
deal with this period. If being a person involves recognition from others, here we see the negative. From a clear-eyed, brave novelist we learn about the everyday humiliations, abuse and remarks that people of colour had to face after being invited to help run the NHS and the transport system. To make the future it wanted, Britain
needed the best doctors, engineers, architects, artists and workers of all kinds, and it imported them, before insulting them.
Enoch Powell liked to complain about the vile ‘imputation and innuendo’ made about him. He was keen to be a martyr and victim. Braithwaite, for his part, really suffered. He catalogues the systemic and degrading exclusion from jobs and housing that so disillusioned immigrants with the British and their babble about fairness, liberty and the mother country. Braithwaite describes the rage and hate that relentless humiliation inevitably engenders, as colonialism did, in its time. Powell probably intuited the simple idea that tyranny creates resistance, and grasped that future conflicts would be caused by the tyranny he supported, hence his apocalypticism. Nevertheless, this was not something he had the human ability to understand, even as he had little sense of other people. Denial is the political trope par excellence.
Powell developed his own schoolmasterish look. Always in black, sometimes in a long overcoat and occasionally in a little homburg, he was punky and subversive, and came to enjoy making everyone furious with his perfectly judged provocations delivered at the wrong/ right time. And he had the cheek to call us ‘a roomful of gunpowder’. He didn’t fit in, but he certainly liked to disorientate and traumatise us. After he spoke, we were in freefall; we didn’t know where or who we were. Powell
wanted to confirm us as outsiders, as unintelligible and unwanted, but this helped us clarify things and created resistance. Out of Eric Clapton’s provocative statements, for instance, came Rock Against Racism, created by artists, musicians and activists to combat fascism. Then there was identity politics. We were not nothing; we had histories and, unlike him, we had futures.
Powell was creating the conflict he claimed to be the solution to. In the process he alienated and split his own party. This man who couldn’t conceive of, nor bear, the idea of equality soon found himself supported by the National Front. Powell had called himself a Nietzschean as a young man, but Nietzsche would have hated the wretched appeal to the mob or ‘herd’. Powell was merely addressing the bitter rabble, and, for so fastidious a man, this would have been distasteful, and he must have considered how incapable our intelligence can be when it comes to protecting us from the temptations of self-destruction.
He cheated his followers, because all he gave them was the brief thrill of superiority and hatred. Nothing substantial altered in the world, and the wild, conscience-less capitalism which developed out of the economic vision he adapted from Hayek created wealth for some, but otherwise had no respect for Powell’s followers’ homes or jobs, nor for the other things he cared about – tradition, national borders, patriotism or religion. In Enoch’s world
it would be everyone for themselves; selfishness would benefit everyone.
Although Powell was attacked and condemned by students wherever he went, he didn’t trouble himself to think about the profound social changes sweeping the country as young people attempted to liberate themselves from the assumptions of the past. Britain wasn’t decaying, it was remaking itself, even as it didn’t know how the story would end.
In London now, if you stroll through the crowds on a bright autumn Sunday afternoon near the museums and highly decorated shop fronts, even for those of us who have been here for years, this multiracial metropolis – less frantic than New York, and with more purpose than Paris, and with its scores of languages – seems like nothing which has ever been made before. And it grows ever more busy, bustling and compelling in its beauty, multiplicity and promise, particularly for those of us who remember how dull and eventless London could seem in the seventies, especially on Sundays.
Britain survived Powell and became something he couldn’t possibly have envisioned. When it came to human creativity, Powell was without imagination. He really was a pessimist and lacked faith in the ability of people to co-operate with one another, to collaborate and make alliances. The cultural collisions he was afraid of are the affirmative side of globalisation. People do not
love one another because they are ‘the same’, and they don’t always kill one another because they are different. Where, indeed, does difference begin? Why would it begin with race or colour?
Racism is the lowest form of snobbery. Its language mutates: not long ago the word ‘immigrant’ became an insult, a stand-in for ‘Paki’ or ‘nigger’. We remain an obstruction to ‘unity’, and people like Powell, men of
ressentiment
, with their omens and desire to humiliate, will return repeatedly to divide and create difference. The neo-liberal experiment that began in the eighties uses racism as a vicious entertainment, as a sideshow, while the wealthy continue to accumulate. But we are all migrants from somewhere, and if we remember that, we could all go somewhere – together.
What a hubbub! Hush! – I whisper animatedly to the male and female voices in the other room. I cannot hear, and I do not need to be made cantankerous!
In this room where I sit leaning forward on a hard chair, as alert as I’ll ever be, it is silent. In there, where my master Raymond lies on his bed, it is busy at the moment. He is working, giving a million instructions to his chattering staff. Meanwhile, I wait, straining to hear his voice. In a moment, when he tires, and it will suddenly occur to him that he could relax, he will blurt out my name and I will hurry to him. The others will leave. Today, perhaps, he will deliver his verdict. I need to hear it. At that moment my future will be decided. The world is complicated, but this question couldn’t be simpler.
Will I live or will I die?
If he’s at this house, rather than in one of his other properties, the old man usually calls me to his room at around this time. I make sure I am washed, perfumed and prepared. He will be lying on his bed and first I will massage his legs and feet, and then his whole body, particularly his head, which he loves, before offering him
my body to kiss, touch, penetrate or whip, whatever he wishes. Sometimes he likes to punish me a little, it amuses him, as he hates his dependence on me.
Later, when guilt makes him kind, I will satisfy him in one of the many skilful ways I have found it necessary to learn. I am a slim, pale, girly man, with narrow hips and a wiggly walk; my cock is long and thin, my buttocks like two fists. I am in my early forties, perhaps a little older, I am not exactly sure. Because we ‘young’ don’t diddle death beyond fifty, except in exceptional circumstances – if we are brilliant, related to the rich, or sponsored – I have to play my hand soon. I have been planning it for some time. My dream is of my master Raymond, and my mistress Sabine, adopting me. Don’t laugh; it’s been done by other slaves. I imagine the three of us photographed together on the steps of the government building. Most importantly, I am holding the official papers, and I am safe now, and forever, to age at my leisure – and, importantly, at the leisure of others. My ambition, the ambition of all of us slaves, is to become one of them. To join the old, and take our time to recover from the trauma of being young.
Raymond is wealthy and ancient; we recently celebrated his hundred and fifteenth birthday. He knows well, after I informed him – casually but unforgettably – that one of the major privileges of a man of his wealth and standing will have to be strong, powerful orgasms. Orgasms of an intensity, duration and oceanic plenitude
that others are not capable of, the aftershocks of which he could bask in for hours. I convinced him also that his excitement was his spirituality, and that I was drawing the divine through him. What would be the point, after all, of having a business of such a size, run by a huge staff, and with ten properties around the world, if a greengrocer or chauffeur could have your orgasms?
Desire never dies. Like vanity, it can even outlive us. You can try to deny desire; you can try to forget it, or masturbate. But you cannot make love to yourself. And that, as they say, baby, is where I come in.
Raymond is not in great health. He has long, lank, dyed black hair, and a weak neck; when he is tired, his head flops. He has glaucoma, and is losing his sight; full of fluid, his eyes look lazy, the lids drooping. This increases my indispensability, and I am happy to read and write for him. But he still plays bass in his band, and he should live another fifteen years at least; others now are living to a hundred and thirty-five, served by the young like me, who are soon worn out as slaves. The ‘old’ – those over fifty – have the best healthcare, drugs and prosthetics. They can afford as many professional trainers as they like, but I help my master and mistress work out every day: weights, stretching, running, boxing even.
Outside it is like a Brazilian slum, hot, busy, exhausting, whereas in here there is not a voice to be heard, nor a body to be seen. If you walk the street, contemplating the
mad and the frustrated, you soon see how angry everyone is, and how they look like people who have given up too much.
Money buys you space and peace. As a reward for my loyalty, Sabine and Raymond let me use the pool in the house, otherwise it is unused for weeks on end, the lights forever burning over the useless glassy surface. The same applies to the beautiful wood-panelled library, with its unequalled collection. Often I have been the only person working there, developing my mind. But, in the end, like everything else, my mind will always belong to them.
I must admit that I learned with gathering interest and fascination that many great works of literature, for instance
Oedipus, Hamlet, Karamazov,
are parricidal in nature. Who would not admit that the old must be removed for the young to flourish? A necessary killing is involved here. Otherwise the young will be strapped forever to a rotting corpse.
My question is: suppose the old refuse to get out or move? That is easily conceivable. And suppose they go even further and eliminate those young? Some say that God was never happier than when his son was suffering on the cross, deliriously delighted with the sacrifice of his pathetic offspring even as the boy called out to him. Other sons become suicide bombers out of desperate obedience. I have heard it said that wars have been designed as threshing machines to remove the young.
Here in the land of the old we are caught in this tension. Our fear here is not that people will die, but that they will never die. We will never be rid of them. One day we will have to smash the old bones, those who will not stand out of the way. But this will not be for a long time, and not without real sacrifice and much death.
Raymond and Sabine’s generation was considered one of the brightest of all, responsible for a revolutionary, fresh, creative upsurge, in a lucky time when the old was worm-eaten and done for. I learned, in the library, that Raymond, for a time, was a brilliant publicist for his products; he saw, early on, that you are selling yourself, rather than merely a thing. One of his brilliant but simple moves was to use French slogans of resistance and freedom – ‘Take your desires for reality’; ‘Beneath the street, the beach’; ‘It is forbidden to forbid’ – and turn them into advertisements for holidays. The simulacrum of freedom was enough for many. He gave them the shadow, not the thing, and how could he not be rewarded for that?
They conquered, his generation, flourishing in the new opportunities of capitalism. Soon after, they closed the roads so no one could follow them up, and now they will not let go. It didn’t take them long to see it would be a good idea to enslave the young, whom they patronised, envied and hated, and then, with some exceptions, began to kill off at fifty. For them this was barely murder, but more like abortion, on which they were keen, ridding the
world of the not-quite-born and unwanted, of those, they claimed, they could not afford. Those for whom there was no place.
Abandoned by my parents, I came to work for Raymond and Sabine at the age of ten. I was forced to find a decent place in the world by serving them better. When Raymond dictates his poetry to me, which, apparently, is his message, his ‘giving back’ to the world, I even memorise it, and then I repeat it to him later, with a smile. You will find that the more evil the person, the more likely they are to write poetry. More than this, as a people, you know you’re in trouble when your rulers want not only your obedience, but your love.
Sabine is not here today; she prefers to stay in one of the Caribbean properties. I am ageing, and not to everyone’s taste, but I taught her to become fond of my charms, and I have learned to overcome my loathing for hers. She is large and lusty, and noisy with it. And when I am done loving her, she likes to be bathed, kissed and talked to. There is nothing so beautiful, or so slow, as watching a woman take a bath. During these conversations I have tried to say to her, ‘I want to be your son.’
‘But you are my son,’ she says, spitting out her champagne. ‘And, luckily, not quite my son!’
I have learned that she likes young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to make love to her, and when she doesn’t want me, I roam the city looking
for beauties, those who know that their only possible advancement lies in serving their elders.
I whine, ‘But you must adopt me, mistress, so I can thrive. So I can survive. I know you are becoming bored with me, but I can continue to pick the finest boys for your delectation.’
‘I can’t see why we should keep you alive,’ she chuckles. ‘Give me two reasons. No – three, please, these are straitened times. I’m sure you know no one can live on just for the sake of it. Everyone has to demonstrate their use, and their ability to care for themselves. The world would collapse if we had billions of elderly people clogging up the hospitals. There can only be a few who will survive. Those who will get through have to be chosen carefully.’
‘Why is it always the rich?’
‘Because they have done so much to create our standard of living. You know that.’
‘Yes, I do.’
Talk about work; I wear myself out keeping Sabine’s mood even; she is more bitter and angry than Raymond, who has many other complicated liaisons, being interested in women in general, and even their stories. Having been together for fifteen years, my master and mistress have not one more word to say to one another, except about business. But I continue to spend time with her, improving her love for me. What I did notice, a few years back, is that Sabine has what they call ‘everything’:
property, jewellery, power, a long life. But she lacks the one thing there really is to want: the fire of love – to be desired passionately. There is no remedy for the disease of desire, except for a rosy mouth on yours, a loving fulfilment, flattery, jokes, and a welcome in the other’s eyes. For a long time a boudoir Olivier, I have given her an approximation of that thing, and become a comrade, a companion, even. So, like Jesus, I am also a family therapist, but one who is never allowed to forget that every breath he takes he owes to someone else.
‘Where are you, boy? Come on! I wait!’
I hear his voice. Has he been calling for a while? I had become lost in my thoughts. He will be angry. Up I get and hurry towards him. I push the door.
‘At last,’ he says. ‘Where have you been?’
I see, to my surprise, in the corner, a young man washing his hands at the sink. I wonder if he’s one of my master’s new lovers. If he were, though, he wouldn’t be dressed. Raymond always insists on his lovers, whether male or female, attending to him naked since a remarkable and desired body is, these days, of course, an achievement rather than a blessing.
But this man, being younger than me, and with the sort of beauty which could set you dreaming, is clothed. I have to say, without vanity, that he is not unlike a younger version of me. He turns and gives a smooth smile. Then he nods at Raymond.
I am looking at this man, and back at Raymond, when two heavily built guards in uniform enter and take me by the arms. As they lead me away I say, ‘Master—’
‘Goodbye,’ he says, waving. ‘However old you are, the truth always comes too late. Goodbye, and thanks.’