Hanif Kureishi Politcal Theatre & British Asian Politcs
Interesting article by Hanif Kureishi about the necessity of street or political theater today. I remember growing up in Delhi and watching street theater in Bhagwan Das Road, about dowry deaths and women’s oppression. There were no props and the actors were speaking from the heart when they described the brutality brides faced in their husband’s family.
Kureishi gives historical background to the change in the British Asian communities politics from progressive and secular in the 1970's and 1980's to religious and conservative from 1989 onwards. 1989 was when Salman Rushdie’s book Satanic Verses was being burnt on the streets of London by Muslim mullahs and youth.
I was in London for a year in 1992, and met many British Asian at SOAS (school of oriental and African studies). They were all uniformly against the Satanic Verses, as an insult to Islam. None had read the book, I had, but did not have a background in Islam to see where Rushdie was mocking them. I feel/ felt Rushdie understands what it means to be a migrant in an alien world. I think by speaking the oppressor’s tongue and challenging them through sophisticated books, he was much more successful than those burning his books. Burning books stoked the fires of the racist imagination of intolerance and the freedom of speech.
I am including most of Kureishi’s article from the guardian, since I find a lot of points relevant today.
Fear and paranoia
Hanif Kureishi based his 1981 play Borderline on the concerns of London's Asian community - riots, fascists, feminists. Twenty-five years later, it shows why we need political theatre more than ever
Saturday April 22, 2006
The Guardian
It was with some trepidation that I looked again at Borderline, a play I wrote in 1981. The Royal Court Theatre - where it was originally presented - wanted to mount a reading of it, as part of the celebrations to mark the company's 50th anniversary this month. My father was alive in 1981, and sat enthusiastically through many performances, laughing at everything, particularly at the character of the father, who rather resembled him. Now, 20 years later, two of my sons, aged 12, were present. I couldn't help wondering what it would mean to them - or indeed anyone, now.
The original director, Max Stafford-Clark, whose idea the play was, had worked often with Joint Stock, a touring company started by David Hare and Bill Gaskill with the intention of getting political theater out of London. Max told me the play would be cast, the research done in Southall - an immigrant area of west London - and then I would write it. As always, the company played in schools, community centres and gyms around the country, finally opening at a London theater - often the Royal Court - a couple of months later. This was political theater, emerging from the turbulent, radical intensities of the 1970s. In the case of Borderline, the idea was to show the community through its differences: different ages, political outlooks, and different hopes for the future, interweaving numerous characters and points of view.
At that time, getting a writing gig with Joint Stock was, as Max would say, "very high status". I was in my mid-20s, living with my social worker girlfriend in a low-rent council flat next to a railway line in Barons Court, west London. I can't have been making a living as a writer; I must have been on the dole. So far I had written only two full-length plays, and many unpublished novels. There were very few Asian or African-Caribbean writers, actors or directors who made a living from their work. Why did I think I'd be any different?
I was extremely nervous about the whole thing, and with good reason. It was, as far as I knew, the first play by an Asian to be produced on the main stage at the Royal Court, a theater known for its innovation and daring. The only other black playwright I knew was Mustapha Matura, whose work I'd admired. But his work was poetic; he was no social documentarian.
For me the Joint Stock process had been frantic, if not hair-raising. The actors and theatres had been hired; everything was in place, but the play had not been written, not a word of it, and we were to start rehearsing in six weeks. I was just beginning to find out whether I could be a writer or not, trying to find a subject, characters, and words for them to say. I was already learning a lot from the directors I worked with, and from the actors: as they began to speak, the clumsiness of the lines was obvious. Fortunately, I was hard-working then, with a fierce ambition.
The play did get written. It also got rewritten. This, I saw, was when the real work began. If I'd had too "pure" a view of the artist, I was soon to learn that aesthetic fastidiousness wasn't a helpful attitude. Max was severe and precise, sending me into a dressing room with instructions to write a scene about so-and-so, with certain characters in it. I rewrote as we rehearsed; I rewrote as we played it around the country; I rewrote it when we opened at the Royal Court, and even after that. This was the first time I'd worked in such a way and it was an important proficiency to develop; it came in handy two years later when I worked with Stephen Frears on My Beautiful Laundrette, and was required to rewrite on set.
I was also ambivalent about the journalistic process. I was full of material already; I had hardly touched on my own experience as a British Asian kid. Why were we interviewing strangers in order to generate material? Yet as we began to talk to people I found these conversations were not chatter; they were serious - some taking place over a number of days - and always moving. I was fascinated to hear strangers talk. It was something like a crude psychoanalysis, as one only had to ask a simple question to be drawn into a whirlpool of memories, impressions, fears, terrors. I was shocked at how much people revealed of themselves, and how much they wanted to be known, to be understood. The community was close and supportive, but the cost of this was inhibition and constraint.
Most of the actors who took part in this year's rehearsed reading of Borderline were younger than 10 when the Southall riots took place. They required a quick history lesson. We played the Specials' Ghost Town and The Jam's That's Entertainment. We mentioned monetarism, Norman Tebbit, the Falklands, the miners' strike, and rioting in Brixton, Bristol, Liverpool - and Southall, where many Asians worked.
When I was approached by Max with the subject for Borderline, Southall had recently become the focus of discontent and violence. Racism was a daily occurrence for most Asians in Britain. But the characters in the play refer often to the possibility of an "invasion", something they were afraid of and disturbed by, as it had already happened. In April 1979, the police allowed the fascist National Front to hold a meeting in Asian Southall. Two weeks earlier the residents met the Labour home secretary, Merlyn Rees, to ask him to ban the Front's meeting. On the day before the march, 5,000 people went to Ealing Town Hall in support of banning the National Front's meeting, handing in a petition signed by 10,000 residents. Local factories also agreed to strike in protest. Rees refused to give way. It was a question of free speech, even for fascists.
During the protest that followed the fascist meeting, organised by the Asians themselves along with the Anti-Nazi League - a front for the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party - the police on horses attacked the crowds; vans were driven at them. Blair Peach, a young leftwing teacher, was struck and killed by the notorious Special Patrol Group, a shadowy police/army group whose job, it was commonly said, was to beat people up. Many older Asians, who still respected the police and the British legal system, were shocked and disillusioned by the number of injuries and the unrestrained violence of the police. Meanwhile, the media represented the riots as an "attack on the police". In June 1979, when the lockers of the SPG were searched, one officer was found to be in possession of Nazi regalia, bayonets and leather-covered sticks. But no officer was prosecuted.
This, then, partly explains the atmosphere of paranoia and fear in which the play's events take place. This is why the arguments the characters have, about how to proceed socially and politically, are so important to them. They are thinking all the time about the kind of Britain in which they are living, and the kind of country the young will inherit and seek to remake.
To my surprise, looking at the play again after more than 20 years, I was not startled either by the naivety of the piece, or by the nature of my personal preoccupations then. Obviously it had dated, but in noteworthy ways. What did strike me was how little talk of religion there was among the characters. The unifying ideology of that time and place was socialism, with feminist groups such as the Southall Black Sisters, as well as some anarchist and separatist groups, also contributing to the debate. The play itself was written out of the 1970s and at each stage the question would have to be asked: how does this scene, or these lines, further the cause, not only of the play, but of the social movement we are pursuing? What are we saying, about Asians, women, the working class; how do we push the argument along?
By the 1990s, political theater was dead. It had come to seem crude as a device for explaining the world, or for bringing news from unexplored parts of the country. But in this age of mendacity, deception and violence, there is the need, once again, for public debate about contemporary issues. Political theater can be quick, immediate and adapted to changing circumstances, unlike most films.
Ten years after the Southall riots, in 1989 - the year communism died in Europe - there was another significant demonstration by Asians, this time in Hyde Park, central London. It was not about racial attacks, unemployment or indeed any of the concerns shown in Borderline. It was a demonstration against the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and Muslims had travelled from all over the country to protest. A group of Asian female demonstrators (perhaps from a group not unlike the Southall Black Sisters), who were carrying placards saying "Women Against Fundamentalism", were attacked by Muslim men. As these dissident voices were suppressed, as secular and socialist Asian voices were discouraged across the community, a range of new issues emerged, many to do with the idea of speaking, books, writing, words, and the place of the artist and intellectual as critic.
By January 2006, my two eldest sons and I would be going to Trafalgar Square to watch the community demonstrating against other blasphemies - cartoons, this time. The three of us, with Muslim names and a Muslim history, had no place in what was going on and criticism didn't appear welcome. During the same period one of the young actors who took part in the recent reading - he had appeared in Michael Winterbottom's Guantánamo Bay film - had been arrested, harassed and held under the Anti-Terrorism Act at Heathrow, on his way back from the Berlin film festival, where the movie won the Silver Bear.
During the 10 years between the Southall riots and the demonstration against The Satanic Verses, the community had become politicised by radical Islam, something that had been developing throughout the Muslim world since decolonisation. This version of Islam imposed an identity and solidarity on a besieged community. It came to mean rebellion, purity, integrity. But it was also a trap. Once this ideology had been adopted - and political conversations could only take place within its terms - it entailed numerous constraints, locking the community in, as well as divorcing it from possible sources of creativity: dissidence, criticism, sexuality. Its authoritarianism, stifling to those within, and appearing fascistic to those without, rejected the very liberalism the community required in order to flourish in the modern world. It was tragic: what had protected the community from racism and disintegration came to tyrannise it.
· As part of its 50th birthday celebrations, the Royal Court has joined forces with the BBC writers' room to launch THE 50, a mentoring scheme for 50 writers nominated by 50 theatres from across the UK.
Kureishi gives historical background to the change in the British Asian communities politics from progressive and secular in the 1970's and 1980's to religious and conservative from 1989 onwards. 1989 was when Salman Rushdie’s book Satanic Verses was being burnt on the streets of London by Muslim mullahs and youth.
I was in London for a year in 1992, and met many British Asian at SOAS (school of oriental and African studies). They were all uniformly against the Satanic Verses, as an insult to Islam. None had read the book, I had, but did not have a background in Islam to see where Rushdie was mocking them. I feel/ felt Rushdie understands what it means to be a migrant in an alien world. I think by speaking the oppressor’s tongue and challenging them through sophisticated books, he was much more successful than those burning his books. Burning books stoked the fires of the racist imagination of intolerance and the freedom of speech.
I am including most of Kureishi’s article from the guardian, since I find a lot of points relevant today.
Fear and paranoia
Hanif Kureishi based his 1981 play Borderline on the concerns of London's Asian community - riots, fascists, feminists. Twenty-five years later, it shows why we need political theatre more than ever
Saturday April 22, 2006
The Guardian
It was with some trepidation that I looked again at Borderline, a play I wrote in 1981. The Royal Court Theatre - where it was originally presented - wanted to mount a reading of it, as part of the celebrations to mark the company's 50th anniversary this month. My father was alive in 1981, and sat enthusiastically through many performances, laughing at everything, particularly at the character of the father, who rather resembled him. Now, 20 years later, two of my sons, aged 12, were present. I couldn't help wondering what it would mean to them - or indeed anyone, now.
The original director, Max Stafford-Clark, whose idea the play was, had worked often with Joint Stock, a touring company started by David Hare and Bill Gaskill with the intention of getting political theater out of London. Max told me the play would be cast, the research done in Southall - an immigrant area of west London - and then I would write it. As always, the company played in schools, community centres and gyms around the country, finally opening at a London theater - often the Royal Court - a couple of months later. This was political theater, emerging from the turbulent, radical intensities of the 1970s. In the case of Borderline, the idea was to show the community through its differences: different ages, political outlooks, and different hopes for the future, interweaving numerous characters and points of view.
At that time, getting a writing gig with Joint Stock was, as Max would say, "very high status". I was in my mid-20s, living with my social worker girlfriend in a low-rent council flat next to a railway line in Barons Court, west London. I can't have been making a living as a writer; I must have been on the dole. So far I had written only two full-length plays, and many unpublished novels. There were very few Asian or African-Caribbean writers, actors or directors who made a living from their work. Why did I think I'd be any different?
I was extremely nervous about the whole thing, and with good reason. It was, as far as I knew, the first play by an Asian to be produced on the main stage at the Royal Court, a theater known for its innovation and daring. The only other black playwright I knew was Mustapha Matura, whose work I'd admired. But his work was poetic; he was no social documentarian.
For me the Joint Stock process had been frantic, if not hair-raising. The actors and theatres had been hired; everything was in place, but the play had not been written, not a word of it, and we were to start rehearsing in six weeks. I was just beginning to find out whether I could be a writer or not, trying to find a subject, characters, and words for them to say. I was already learning a lot from the directors I worked with, and from the actors: as they began to speak, the clumsiness of the lines was obvious. Fortunately, I was hard-working then, with a fierce ambition.
The play did get written. It also got rewritten. This, I saw, was when the real work began. If I'd had too "pure" a view of the artist, I was soon to learn that aesthetic fastidiousness wasn't a helpful attitude. Max was severe and precise, sending me into a dressing room with instructions to write a scene about so-and-so, with certain characters in it. I rewrote as we rehearsed; I rewrote as we played it around the country; I rewrote it when we opened at the Royal Court, and even after that. This was the first time I'd worked in such a way and it was an important proficiency to develop; it came in handy two years later when I worked with Stephen Frears on My Beautiful Laundrette, and was required to rewrite on set.
I was also ambivalent about the journalistic process. I was full of material already; I had hardly touched on my own experience as a British Asian kid. Why were we interviewing strangers in order to generate material? Yet as we began to talk to people I found these conversations were not chatter; they were serious - some taking place over a number of days - and always moving. I was fascinated to hear strangers talk. It was something like a crude psychoanalysis, as one only had to ask a simple question to be drawn into a whirlpool of memories, impressions, fears, terrors. I was shocked at how much people revealed of themselves, and how much they wanted to be known, to be understood. The community was close and supportive, but the cost of this was inhibition and constraint.
Most of the actors who took part in this year's rehearsed reading of Borderline were younger than 10 when the Southall riots took place. They required a quick history lesson. We played the Specials' Ghost Town and The Jam's That's Entertainment. We mentioned monetarism, Norman Tebbit, the Falklands, the miners' strike, and rioting in Brixton, Bristol, Liverpool - and Southall, where many Asians worked.
When I was approached by Max with the subject for Borderline, Southall had recently become the focus of discontent and violence. Racism was a daily occurrence for most Asians in Britain. But the characters in the play refer often to the possibility of an "invasion", something they were afraid of and disturbed by, as it had already happened. In April 1979, the police allowed the fascist National Front to hold a meeting in Asian Southall. Two weeks earlier the residents met the Labour home secretary, Merlyn Rees, to ask him to ban the Front's meeting. On the day before the march, 5,000 people went to Ealing Town Hall in support of banning the National Front's meeting, handing in a petition signed by 10,000 residents. Local factories also agreed to strike in protest. Rees refused to give way. It was a question of free speech, even for fascists.
During the protest that followed the fascist meeting, organised by the Asians themselves along with the Anti-Nazi League - a front for the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party - the police on horses attacked the crowds; vans were driven at them. Blair Peach, a young leftwing teacher, was struck and killed by the notorious Special Patrol Group, a shadowy police/army group whose job, it was commonly said, was to beat people up. Many older Asians, who still respected the police and the British legal system, were shocked and disillusioned by the number of injuries and the unrestrained violence of the police. Meanwhile, the media represented the riots as an "attack on the police". In June 1979, when the lockers of the SPG were searched, one officer was found to be in possession of Nazi regalia, bayonets and leather-covered sticks. But no officer was prosecuted.
This, then, partly explains the atmosphere of paranoia and fear in which the play's events take place. This is why the arguments the characters have, about how to proceed socially and politically, are so important to them. They are thinking all the time about the kind of Britain in which they are living, and the kind of country the young will inherit and seek to remake.
To my surprise, looking at the play again after more than 20 years, I was not startled either by the naivety of the piece, or by the nature of my personal preoccupations then. Obviously it had dated, but in noteworthy ways. What did strike me was how little talk of religion there was among the characters. The unifying ideology of that time and place was socialism, with feminist groups such as the Southall Black Sisters, as well as some anarchist and separatist groups, also contributing to the debate. The play itself was written out of the 1970s and at each stage the question would have to be asked: how does this scene, or these lines, further the cause, not only of the play, but of the social movement we are pursuing? What are we saying, about Asians, women, the working class; how do we push the argument along?
By the 1990s, political theater was dead. It had come to seem crude as a device for explaining the world, or for bringing news from unexplored parts of the country. But in this age of mendacity, deception and violence, there is the need, once again, for public debate about contemporary issues. Political theater can be quick, immediate and adapted to changing circumstances, unlike most films.
Ten years after the Southall riots, in 1989 - the year communism died in Europe - there was another significant demonstration by Asians, this time in Hyde Park, central London. It was not about racial attacks, unemployment or indeed any of the concerns shown in Borderline. It was a demonstration against the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and Muslims had travelled from all over the country to protest. A group of Asian female demonstrators (perhaps from a group not unlike the Southall Black Sisters), who were carrying placards saying "Women Against Fundamentalism", were attacked by Muslim men. As these dissident voices were suppressed, as secular and socialist Asian voices were discouraged across the community, a range of new issues emerged, many to do with the idea of speaking, books, writing, words, and the place of the artist and intellectual as critic.
By January 2006, my two eldest sons and I would be going to Trafalgar Square to watch the community demonstrating against other blasphemies - cartoons, this time. The three of us, with Muslim names and a Muslim history, had no place in what was going on and criticism didn't appear welcome. During the same period one of the young actors who took part in the recent reading - he had appeared in Michael Winterbottom's Guantánamo Bay film - had been arrested, harassed and held under the Anti-Terrorism Act at Heathrow, on his way back from the Berlin film festival, where the movie won the Silver Bear.
During the 10 years between the Southall riots and the demonstration against The Satanic Verses, the community had become politicised by radical Islam, something that had been developing throughout the Muslim world since decolonisation. This version of Islam imposed an identity and solidarity on a besieged community. It came to mean rebellion, purity, integrity. But it was also a trap. Once this ideology had been adopted - and political conversations could only take place within its terms - it entailed numerous constraints, locking the community in, as well as divorcing it from possible sources of creativity: dissidence, criticism, sexuality. Its authoritarianism, stifling to those within, and appearing fascistic to those without, rejected the very liberalism the community required in order to flourish in the modern world. It was tragic: what had protected the community from racism and disintegration came to tyrannise it.
· As part of its 50th birthday celebrations, the Royal Court has joined forces with the BBC writers' room to launch THE 50, a mentoring scheme for 50 writers nominated by 50 theatres from across the UK.
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