Post-Colonial Identity: The Black Album and The Satanic Verses

British writer C.C. Colton once claimed, "Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but--live for it" (Copeland 345). Indeed, if nothing else, Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album shows the depths to which people concern themselves with questions of religion, ethnicity, and the identity associated with them. Kureishi's themes and symbolism work within a larger context of the politics of identity, race, and nationality. Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and the larger religious question associated with it, serve to polarize the British community between Muslims and non-Muslims, as well as to polarize people supporting liberation and those supporting containment. Combined with other cultural references, Kureishi uses the literary allusion to create his themes and symbolism.

The question of the racial, religious, and socioeconomic identity of Shahid becomes a central question posed as Shahid undergoes translation from his Pakistani ancestry to his desired identity as a Briton. Shahid's translation parallels the translations of the former Asian colonies of Britain into their new postcolonial identities. Unfortunately for Shahid, the struggle over The Satanic Verses catches him as he is translating himself, presenting him with a series of tough choices.

The quest for identity in Indo-English writing has emerged as a recurrent theme, as it is in much of modern literature (Pathak preface). Indeed, often the individual's identity and his quest for it becomes so bound up in the national quest for identity, that the individual's search for his identity becomes allegorical of the national search (Pathak preface). Complicating The Black Album is the fact each character is searching for something different. While all the Asian characters are Pakistani, not all identify most with Pakistan. Riaz, for example, identifies with Muslims as a whole. He wants to "fight for [his] people ... in Palestine, Afghanistan, [and] Kashmir," explaining that "we're not blasted Christians" (Kureishi 92). The struggle in Riaz's mind is thus one existing between different religions. For Shahid, however, the question of identity is more racially-oriented. His uncle Asif exposed him to thinking in terms of "the brown man's burden" (Kureishi 14, emphasis mine). Shahid also sees the world in terms of race; he consistently worries that he'll be "the only dark-skinned person" (Kureishi 18, see also 75, 131). The skinheads consider him to be just "a Paki," a identity defined through the nation (Kureishi 83, 100). Thus Shahid finds himself caught between different versions of identity: religion, race, and culture. Despite these three areas of identity, I will assert that Pathak's statement cited earlier is correct and can be applied similarly to each area, based on Kureshi's use of broad words like "brown," (Kureishi 14) "our people," etc. (Kureishi 92).

Shahid, born British and to wealthy entrepreneur parents from Karachi, has found that his place in the socio-cultural matrix of Britain has not been vouchsafed him by society. He began to feel that "there was something (he) lacked" (Kureishi 18). According to Pathak's writings on identity, Shahid was stumbling onto a minefield. When one has an identity crisis, one soon devolves into alienation (Pathak preface). Indeed, The Black Album establishes a framework similar to that of Afzal-Khan. On one hand, the postcolonial writer can accept the historic view himself as a colonized, objectified person, which results in "self-hating" (Afzal-Khan 5). On the other hand, he can respond with an "ideology of liberation" that allows the postcolonial writer to "transform [his] past, [his] culture, and [his] people" (Afzal-Khan 5). Afzal-Khan presents the options as mutually exclusive (see use of "either," 5), but Kureishi's narrator brings Shahid down both paths.

Shahid hates himself and his foreign ancestry, but he also tries to liberate himself from the colonial ideology and its inherent limitations. First, Shahid loathes his racial and ethnic background. He "wouldn't touch brown flesh, except with a branding iron," and "the thought of sleeping with Asian girls made (him) sick" (Kureishi 19). He despises "all foreign bastards," including himself (18). Indeed, he has bought into the colonial mentality that being English inherently meaning following an esoteric code of conduct and having "contempt for foreigners" (Gorra 11). As he is being translated, he yearns for acceptance from both his fellow Asians and from the British. After telling Riaz how his girlfriend had a late-term abortion, he becomes "apprehensive that this would make Riaz think badly of him, probably because he felt bad about himself" (Kureishi 17). Shahid thus wants acceptance from Asians, but also as a Briton. "[E]verything's anonymous!" he exclaims as he discusses London. This is in keeping with other Kureishi works, such as the Buddha of Suburbia, where the main character, Karim, finds that "the narrative of Englishness hasn't been reimagined to include him" as a person of color" (Gorra 13). In the end, his choice comes down to whom he will really attempt to join, which brings about the restrictions/liberation theme of The Black Album.

Before going into the debate on restrictions and liberation, I will take a moment to place Shahid's identity crisis in a historical context. Smith College's Michael Gorra begins with a discussion of Rudyard Kipling's story, "The Man Who Would Be King." The lost tribe in "King" is described as people who have "grown to be English," (Gorra 2) suggesting that Englishness is an acquired trait, not a matter of skin color (Gorra 3). Thomas Babington Macaulay once planned to create a class of people "Indian in blood, but English" in culture (Gorra 3). The idea that Indians could be converted to Englishmen or even would want to be converted demonstrates the patronizing relationship of Englishmen to Indians. Now, however, not only are England and her colonies rearranging their relationships, but England finds herself becoming a nation of immigrants and needing to rework her identity, currently seen as being one mass of people with uniform characteristics (Gorra 9). Thus a critic like Gorra would likely see the need for a complete re-working of the postcolonial national and racial matrix. England must begin to recognize its population of people of color, and at the same time help to reduce the turmoil created in the wake of the colonial period.

The rigid colonial structure is falling, and none too soon for a person like Deedee, who dislikes any restriction. (See Kureishi 33, "all limitations are prisons.") Shahid begins to feel the same way, his feelings are underscored by the two major literary texts alluded to in The Black Album: Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba and Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. First, Alba is used to reject "enclosure and imprisonment" (Wilkie and Hurt n.p.g.). Shahid recalls when he and his mother saw Alba performed, and how he felt "triumphantly justified" as he found "new emotions and new possibilities" (Kureishi 84, emphasis added). Shahid's father, however, feels that Shahid is focusing too much on "flowers and trees," and not enough on "the real world" (Kureishi 85). The narrator astutely points out that if "flowers and trees" aren't the real world, what is (Kureishi 85-6)? Shahid is caught between his desire for liberation, and his desire to be accepted by his father (Kureishi 86).

Secondly, The Satanic Verses is used to point out the number of confining "rules, rules, rules" established by religion (Rushdie 376). Riaz appoints Shahid his scribe to typeset the "God's work" (Kureishi 79) he has composed, but Shahid gets "carried away" (Kureishi 245). Similarly, Mahound appoints Salman, a "slimy foreign coward" like Shahid (Rushdie 380), to be his scribe and to write down the revelations he claims he has received through God and his messenger, the archangel Gabreel. When Salman dreams that he is Gabreel, he begins "surreptitiously, to change things" (380). Indeed, when Mahound does not notice even substantive changes Salman makes to his transcriptions, Salman wonders:

Indeed, the narrator asserts that the profane has been mixed ("Maybe ... [by] Shaitan" (Rushdie 379)) with the holy, and not even God's own so-called messenger notices! This incident gives credence to the doubt established earlier in the chapter as to the accuracy of the Qur'anic verses as the word of God. For example, Salman asserts that Mahound "didn't like his women to answer back," so suddenly "the angel starts pouring out rules about what women mustn't do" (Rushdie 378-9). Is this God speaking to Mahound, or Mahound writing convenient rules that suit his own purpose (Rushdie 376)?

The prostitutes of The Curtain, in adopting Muhammad's wives' names and personalities, further blur the line between the sacred and its "profane antitheses" (Rushdie 389), to the point that they forget their old names (Rushdie 402). When their blasphemous husband Baal is hauled before the Prophet, readers finally glimpse "mirror facing image, dark facing light" (Rushdie 405). Yet we know not which is real: the "false prophet" (Rushdie 384), or the dirty old man who denounces him? Similarly, in his compromise with the Jahalian Grandee to leave three idols in the Ka'aba, does Mahound not violate the very monotheistic basis of his religion, and promote a religion that is both profane and sacred? (Afzal-Khan 167).

Even the structure of the novel itself calls attention to the mixing of the profane and the pure. Several parts are told almost word-for-word from non-fiction sources, such as when Khalid goes to clear out the idols from the Ka'aba. When Muhammad/Mahound sends Khalid to remove Uzza (Rushdie 385), the story is told much like it was in Martin Ling's definitive work Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (1983). Lings, for example writes:

Rushdie recounts it as:

These two remarkably similar accounts of the same incident, one a prize-winning non-fictional account, the other a work of fiction, was surely intentional on Rushdie's part to show the inextricable mixture of profane with holy, in what passes otherwise as holy. Muslims consider it evil even to consider challenging the orthodoxy of Islam (Afzal-Khan 166). To say that "the epic revelations of the Archangel Gabriel [are] reduced to the banal level of hallucinations" is going a leap further (Afzal-Khan 166).

Readers find that the traditional colonial divisions between "black and white, self and other, us and them," &c., cannot truly exist (Afzal-Khan 168), just as nothing truly holy can exist according to Rushdie. "Binary oppositions," those where even divisions between one group and another are said to be drawn, must be destroyed (Afzal-Khan 169). Yet binary oppositions do not exist only in colonialism. They also are held by Muslims. Consider Riaz's claim that "all fiction is ... lying--a perversion of the truth," with no middle (Kureishi 193). The need to change worldviews exists on both sides.

Shahid's taking on the role of Salman and his "mixing it [i.e., his profane words] with the religious" (Kureishi 245) shows his desire to break the molds, to break the colonial dichotomy between white/British and non-white/non-British, and to include himself and the vast body of others like him in the matrix of what is British. This is just one of the limitations Shahid wants destroyed.

Shahid also sees unnecessary limitations originating from religion itself. Clearly, religion does have some virtue that the narrator acknowledges, such as preventing Chad from destroying himself or others (Kureishi 118) after his "soul got lost in translation" (Kureishi 117). However, religion also confines people on the basis of its rules. Just as The Satanic Verses shows the need to break out of old colonial mentalities about British and non-British, it also shows the need to liberate oneself from the mentalities accompanying religion. Why, ask both Salman and Dr. Brownlow, is there a need for a rule on "[h]ow to wipe your bottom" (Kureishi 107)? And even if there is a need, why, asks Shahid, should "one confine (oneself) to one system or creed," (Kureishi 285) especially when that creed unknowingly upholds the old colonial mentality of binary oppositions in its refusal to bend, change, and acknowledge its own imperfections?

To say that Kureishi dodges the important questions he raises (see Saynor n.p.g.) is to see his book in a vacuum and divorced from its literary and historical context. In the case of The Black Album, history and culture inherently build off each other, and readers must thus view it through the lens of British imperial history and the effect history had on culture. The Black Album paints a picture of postcolonial people who are at least just as British as the British, yet they feel rejected, mocked, and loathed by themselves and society. They desperately want a home and an identity, but none is to be found. The fact that Shahid refuses to accept the colonial mentality and all its accompanying restrictions, limitations, and binary opposition, draws Kureishi's vision for Britain's future.

Shahid's rejecting traditional thinking in exchange for a hedonistic life with Deedee, shows that he does indeed make a choice among options, and he does not ignore the tough choices he faces. To say otherwise ignores the allusions that Kureishi weaves into his work, especially the use of The House of Bernarda Alba and The Satanic Verses. It also ignores the historical paradigm of the history of Indo-English culture and relations. The Black Album is a novel about a future without colonial limitations and unfair divisions based on race or nationality; it does not view the future through "evasion and conservatism" (Saynor n.p.g.). Far from it, The Black Album rejects the old conservative views in favor of the new postcolonial view of a world without limits that Shahid pursues. 

Works Cited

Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. Cultural Imperealism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State UP, 1993.

Copeland, Lewis, ed. Popular Quotations for All Uses. Garden City, New York: Garden City, 1942.

Gorra, Michael. After Empire: Scott, Naipul, Rushdie. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

Kureishi, Hanif. The Black Album. New York: Simon, 1995.

Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Revised edition. Bartlow, Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 1991.

Pathak, R.S., ed. Quest for Identity in Indian English Writing. New Delhi: Bahri, 1992.

Rusdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. First Owl Book edition. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

Saynor, James. Rev. of The Black Album, by Hanif Kureishi. The New Statesman & Society, March 3, 1995, p. 40(2).

Wilkie, Brian, and James Hurt. Literature of the Western World. 2nd edition. In Galloway, Stan. "The House of Bernarda Alba." http://www.bridgewater.edu/~sgallowa/203/alba-notes.htm, April 26, 1999.