Londonistan Calling (Page 3)

At times this mix is playfully subversive--one character is told to "wake up, smell the masala tea"; Jas tells us Desi fathers will "drop you like a hot samosa." But it can be jarring, too. Like Forest Whitaker fumbling to maintain his English accent for the duration of The Crying Game, Malkani puts unlikely middle-class words into the narrative voice of the supposedly streetwise Jas:

Regarding it as some kind a civic duty to educate others in this basic social etiquette, he continued kickin the white kid in the face, each kick carefully planted so he din't get blood on his Nike Air Force Ones (the pair he'd bought even before Nelly released a track bout what wikid trainers they were).

It's unclear how someone who thinks in terms of "civic duty" and "basic social etiquette" can move so easily to Nelly's "wikid" sneakers; still, Malkani's overall portrait of a hybridity of races, religions, ethnicities and globalized reference points is a welcome reflection of the everyday life of London's youth.

Britain exported its codified racism to the colonies, which was also where the civil rights movements took place against colonial rule. With no history of official segregation or mass struggles for integration on British soil, there are relatively few autonomous spaces for racial and ethnic minorities outside of religion. One in two black men and one in three black women are in relationships with white people. (Bangladeshis, meanwhile, are the group least likely to intermarry.) At the same time, you will hear white and Asian kids speaking an Anglicized Jamaican patois. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. pointed out in The New Yorker several years ago, "Black culture simply is youth culture in London today." Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G didn't come from nowhere.

Racism, of course, still exists--in May, for instance, the fascist British National Party won eleven seats in the suburban district of Barking and Dagenham. But for the new urban generation of which Malkani and his white, black and Asian peers are part, a return to an exclusively white national identity is impossible to imagine. Two-thirds of those of Caribbean descent, a third of those of Chinese descent and the majority of children in every minority community in Britain were born there. Indian restaurants not only make the country's most popular dish; they employ more people than shipbuilding, steel and mining put together.

Malkani gives voice to this generation of young people who flirt with the world both Phillips and her ideological American counterparts fear most--not the world of jihadis but of those ambivalent to and at times even scornful of British establishment norms. These are people who are talked about often--usually in the context of crime, immigration, race or fundamentalism--but whom we rarely hear talk. (True, none of Londonstani's main characters are Muslim, but as Sikhs and Hindus, none would be welcomed in Phillips's monocultural utopia, either.) Malkani is interested in youth who are socially disaffected and sexually distracted, culturally integrated and autonomous, indifferent in their religious observance and aggressive in their tribal affiliations--a cause for concern but certainly not panic. His London is not a city of countless terror cells about to be torn apart by extremism but a parallel universe where nonwhites are so tightly interwoven into the fabric that to try and pick them out would make the whole weave unravel. There is neither racial harmony nor animosity but a banal, occasionally volatile coexistence of various traditions that rub up against one another because they have done so and they have to continue to do so.

When the boys' former high school teacher--a poorly painted pastiche of white liberalism--tells them he is tired of hearing the misogynistic language they glean from rap videos, Ravi accuses him of being racist. "I don't mind you using your mother tongue," says the teacher.

In actual fact I've often thought it admirable the way you boys mix up Hindi with Urdu and Punjabi to create your own second-generation tongue. It's the English code words I can't stand.... The way your use of English makes your lot look like you're some kind of Asian mafia rather than your use of your mother tongue.

When they speak in languages he doesn't understand, it irks him far less than when they say things he doesn't like in a language he does.

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