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English Literature and Empire
From: The British Library
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Penelope LivelyCaryl Phillips |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
How do writers working in Britain today respond to the memory and experiences of the British empire? Alongside the "Chapter & Verse: A Thousand Years of English Literature" exhibition of literary manuscripts at the British Library, Alastair Niven, director of literature at the British Council, discussed English literature and the empire with authors Penelope Lively and Caryl Phillips.
Penelope Lively is the author of many prizewinning novels and short-story collections, including The Road to Lichfield, According to Mark, Passing On and Oleander, Jacaranda.
Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts, West Indies, grew up in Leeds and was educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, theatre, radio and television. |
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| Penelope Lively. | |
Alastair Niven: Good evening. We're very conscious that in this building at the moment there is the most wonderful exhibition, which tells the history of English literature from the time of King Alfred and later Beowulf through to J.K. Rowling, and in the manuscripts we see the story of the literature of these islands. Do we see much there that is to do with empire? That's something we want to explore during the course of this conversation, but we want to explore other things, such as what people read if they grew up in imperial circumstances. |
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| Caryl Phillips. | |
All of us in some way or another are children of empire. Penelope Lively and Caryl Phillips will say something about their own experiences of that during the course of the discussion. In my own case, my father, who died last year, told me shortly before he died that he spoke better Hindustani up till the age of 7 than he did English, because he was brought up by a Hindustani-speaking ayah in South India and in Burma. That kind of imperial background is not uncommon in many families up and down this country. The evidence of it, of course, is seen in the ornaments on their mantelpieces and the carved tables that they've inherited and so on. Empire has impinged upon us all. But are we forgetting empire? Does it impinge on our thinking at all now? Are we still living in an empire culture or post-imperial culture, or have we moved beyond that? These are the sorts of issues that we want to explore today. |
Penelope Lively: In a sense, I suppose I really was a child of empire. I was born and grew up in Egypt, which of course wasn't, strictly speaking, empire. When I was there, it had been a protectorate and was by then enjoying a rather curious form of independence, which Egyptians quite properly perceived as not being independence at all, and was very much under British control. Until the age of 12 I had never been to this country except once rather briefly, before the war, which I don't remember at all. So for me it was simply this place, this imperial centre that everybody talked about and about which everybody had feelings that I found I couldn't have. |
When I did eventually get here, in 1945, at the age of 12, it was with a sense of being completely alien. I felt I'd come to a foreign land. Now, obviously it wasn't that, in that I had the language and I was surrounded by people speaking that language, but I wasn't used to this. I was used to being in a polyglot cosmopolitan society, which in a strange way I seemed to understand much better than this one in which I'd arrived, which was dominated by an impenetrable class structure. I didn't have the perceptions about it that any British-bred child would have, and it mystified me. There were all sorts of codes that I couldn't follow. I was always getting things wrong. I couldn't follow how it was that everybody else knew their way around this place. There was this adulation of the Royal Family, of whom--rather bizarrely--I barely seemed to have heard. I was packed off to a boarding school at which everybody else collected newspaper photographs of the little princesses. I couldn't understand why. |
My feelings, my focus on empire and on what it was to be English and the essence of Englishness was simply derived from how the adults felt. They were misty-eyed about this mysterious place which was apparently full of gambolling lambs and thatched cottages and policemen called bobbies, all of which to me sounded incredibly exotic. I could see looking around my own humdrum surroundings of palm trees and camels and pyramids that all that was indeed extremely exotic and dramatic, but I couldn't feel any kind of empathy with it and also I couldn't feel that I belonged to it. I felt rather guilty about it; I felt a sham, because patently I was English, growing up according to all the signs and signals of English culture, and yet I couldn't feel that I had any right to it, that I had any right to empire. This derived mainly from what the grown-ups were talking about, what they were saying, but also a lot of it came from reading, from literature. |
I had a very odd kind of education. I didn't go to school until I came to England at the age of 12, and much of my education about history was based on a work called Our Island Story, which was a narrative of the nation's rise to glory from Boadicea to good Lord Kitchener. It was the Whig interpretation of history made manifest, and again I used to read this with a sense of guilt, that this really was nothing to do with me, that I couldn't lay claim to all this. So I think that a start in life of this kind, a child growing up under these circumstances, does something very curious to the psyche. |
Clearly I now absolutely assimilate, I feel totally at home at here, but I dream constantly of a place that I left behind nearly half a century ago. I think what it does to the psyche is give you forever a sense of not quite belonging, of finding it difficult to ever feel a paid-up member of anything, to feel completely a part of any aspect of society. I've always had a slight feeling of being an outsider, of standing on the outside looking in, observing, watching. I think possibly for a writer this is no bad thing. It's quite a healthy thing, but that's what it does, and the strange thing is that, looking back, I realise that I was doing the same thing back then over the concept of being an imperial child, of being a child of empire. I didn't feel a part of that either, I didn't feel that I had any claim to this. So that was my early experience of empire. |
Caryl Phillips: I was born in a colony, in St. Kitts. But very quickly I moved as a child--as a baby, actually--to Leeds, which had an entirely different set of problems from empire. I grew up in this country obviously not feeling the residue of empire; in other words, no Empire Day celebrated when I was a kid in the '60s and '70s in this country--the 24th of May was like any other day. At some curious point, I think in the late '50s or early '60s, the Empire Games became the Commonwealth Games. Which leads me to wonder why you think we should celebrate the Commonwealth, because it's the same thing in a different disguise, it seems to me. |
The notion of empire itself has impinged upon my life I suppose in two ways. As a traveller, I've not just travelled in the Caribbean, looking and observing and feeling the historical impact of empire upon those islands and upon the people's lives there, but have done the same thing in India, in Sri Lanka, throughout Africa. I've seen how this experiment of empire has affected people's lives, their ability to earn a living, how they think of themselves, how they think of their country, how they think of the world, obviously how they think of Britain. This has been a large part of my life for the last 20 years as a writer and a traveller observing the residue of empire. |
As a writer, I completely agree with you, Penelope, that the sense of dissonance, the sense of being of something but not of something which was created by empire, has had a profound effect not just upon my life as a writer, and obviously upon your life, but upon a whole generation of writers' lives, contemporary British writers. It's also had an effect on writers going back as far as the seventeenth century who have had this feeling because of empire, because of the sense that empire created a notion of "the other." It's made them question who they are perhaps in a more vigorous fashion than they might do if British society wasn't looking out at the world and looking out at the world sometimes benevolently, sometimes rapaciously. But it has created, I think, a particularly vigorous literary sensibility in British life, and it certainly has had a profound effect upon British writers for 300 years. |
Niven: You've both spoken of writers as witnesses and commentators, which I suppose is in the nature of being a writer, but you have suggested that there's something about empire that has made you particularly observers and commentators, has given you that sense of being a little bit outside. I'm intrigued by this, because I suppose if you are an imperialist, the dogma of empire is conformity, isn't it? I mean, the public schools in this country encourage conformity. Empire is about telling you that there is a right way of living, is it not, and that is true of all empires, whether it's a Soviet empire or a French empire in the past--it's about everyone hopefully thinking along the same lines. |
Phillips: I'm not sure about conformity. When I think of empire, I don't think so much of conformity; I think of something slightly more pernicious: membership--which partly embraces the word "conformity." But membership is pernicious. The first thing that the British did when they arrived in those countries is establish a club, and a club involves membership--some people are in it and some people are out of it. There you have at the very inception of the experiment a notion of dissonance between belonging and not belonging which I think Penelope was referring to. Obviously, that does involve conformity to some extent, but it's pushed quite early and quite vigorously right at the inception, beyond mere conformity. |
Lively: Writers tend to be nonconformist anyway. You probably couldn't really be a writer unless you had a streak of nonconformity and unless you had an instinct towards questioning, an instinct towards discussion, a reluctance to accept dictation of any kind, so writers probably make very bad imperialists. |
Phillips: There surely have been imperial writers, someone like Macaulay or Saki. |
Lively: Of course. Or Kipling. Clearly, Kipling in a sense was stating what it was that had to be conformed to, and I remember having problems with Kipling. I think we may want to get on to talking about what we read and what we felt about that, but I remember having problems with Saki--not with the Just So Stories, which were fine, but with Kim, which I simply could not follow at all. I couldn't understand what it was that was going on. And Puck of Pook's Hill, where clearly there was some sort of ethos that was being offered, there was something that you were supposed to be empathising with, agreeing with, but I couldn't put my finger on it at the age of 12, 13, 14, in order to define what it was and why it was that I was out of sync with it. I think the other point is that we came at the tail end of empire, too, when it was all right to question it. It might have been very different before that. |
Niven: Just for the sake of provocation, couldn't somebody now who was a real individualist take up a pro-imperialist stance? Isn't the new conformity to be liberally anti-imperial, to accept that the whole experience was bad and to have a kind of united front against colonialism? So haven't we replaced one kind of conformity with another? |
Lively: I'd like to look at it from the point of view of a novelist. Now, supposing, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to say, "All right, empire was a splendid thing, there's a great deal to be said for empire--and, in fact, why did the British get out of India?" Maybe things would have gone much better if they hadn't. Actually, that would be a rather interesting novel to write, but I think that if you were doing it you wouldn't give that point of view the authorial voice. If you wanted to discuss this in a novel, you would create perhaps a central figure, a protagonist. |
Niven: But would he be a figure of fun? |
Lively: Not necessarily, no. He could be a heavyweight serious figure. The authorial voice perhaps would be absent altogether; you would simply be putting him there making his case, and then the other case would be made differently. Or it might be made by the narrative itself. But I can only think of it in a fictional way. |
Phillips: I think there's a large difference between trying to tackle the pros and cons, the right and wrong of most situations in fiction as opposed to nonfiction. One has a privilege as an author of fiction: if you like, hiding--which is often an extremely good place to be hiding, in writing. To write nonfiction you have to step in front of the arrows, and perhaps this accounts for the fact that certainly in the British literary tradition there are not that many authors that one can think of who switch easily between fiction and nonfiction. Obviously Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul, but not as many as in perhaps, say, French literature or German literature, and there's been an almost severe division between the two. |
Niven: Can we come back to this question of what's on display in the exhibition downstairs, because as you walk round "A Thousand Years of English Literature," the word "empire" doesn't leap out of those cases, and it's quite difficult to think of an absolutely front-ranking work in English literature that is explicitly about empire. Someone will mention The Tempest, which, of course, I think was written out of a response to travel adventures that were happening at the time that Shakespeare wrote the play. We all think of Kim, as Penelope has done. No doubt A Passage to India will come to mind. Are there many really front-ranking works? I would argue contentiously that Kim and A Passage to India are not actually Middlemarch or Bleak House--they're fine novels, but perhaps they're not absolutely the greatest novels. |
Lively: I think you've got a point, Alastair. When I think of imperial literature and what I read in childhood, I think essentially of Rider Haggard. Here was somebody who was still being fairly widely read in the '30s and '40s but, I would imagine, absolutely not at all now. This was the kind of stock, but by no means a central, literary figure, purveying a particular kind of derring-do adventure. I'll stick my neck out and say it's a very male kind of literature. There was a whole subculture of people writing that kind of thing. In fact, I can see the kind of books--you find them in secondhand bookshops now, with those wonderful embossed covers. It was a genre of literature. If you wanted to make a parallel, it was almost like, well, perhaps not the science fiction of the time but the thriller of the time. |
Niven: Did you both grow up reading such books? What did you read? |
Phillips: I read the type of books that I guess most people read, which had, I suppose, tangentially more to do with the class system in Britain--which I felt outside of--rather than an empire or international context. You read books, if you've grown up on a council estate in Leeds, like Five Go to Kirrin Island Again. And you want to be there with them, but that's partly to do with the material circumstances. That's not to do even with aspects of race; that's to do with coming back to this thing of belonging, of participating in a society. |
I'd never seen a public school in my life, but I was reading Jennings and I was reading Bunter and so on. These were books which were at the nexus of race and class in British society, but I never perceived of them in a more transnational, empire context at all. I saw them purely in a British context and in the context of being a black kid in this country in the '60s and '70s, when the question of belonging, the question of being allowed to participate in the society without there being a glass ceiling was what was preoccupying my generation. These were not so much questions of belonging that would perhaps have preoccupied you, Penelope, in the sense that you grew up in another country until you were 12. |
Niven: But as you've grown up and become a writer, your books have so often gone back to different kinds of imperial experience. So it was perhaps fermenting away? |
Phillips: Penelope is absolutely right when she says there's a certain unconventional streak in all writers, where they're not going to toe the line, they're not going to conform. I certainly wasn't going to conform to the mythology of the history that I was given to read at school, for the simple reason that I wasn't in that history. So as soon as you begin to find out where you are located as an individual vis-à-vis this thing called British history--which you're not just studying; you're having to do exams about, you're writing about the history of the country which you know you are playing a part in today, yesterday and tomorrow, as if you don't exist for three hours, double spaced, hand it in at the end--as soon as you begin to question the orthodoxy of that history, then you have to go back, and obviously, because of the country that we're all citizens of, it's often a matter of leaving the shores of Britain and looking at the forces, the places, the geography, the environment, the history of other places. In 1945, if you looked at a map of the world, a quarter of the world was British. Naturally, one has to look at those places for a sense of a complete personal history. |
Lively: Could we swing back for a moment to something that we've left, which I was just getting to find very interesting, and that was this difference in what you can do and what you can say, whether you're writing fiction or you're writing nonfiction. As Caryl was rightly saying, not an awful lot of British writers move from one to the other, but that's something that you've just done in The Atlantic Sound, which is a wonderful examination of the African diaspora by moving around the Atlantic Triangle, looking at what has come out of slavery and looking at pan-Africanism, which you don't have much time for. I thought this was a very interesting, a very brave book, and that it was doing something that you have done in fiction but doing it in a completely different way. Now, how much more difficult was that to do than writing a novel? I would suspect that it was very difficult to do. |
Phillips: It's a lot more difficult. Thanks for saying the nice things about the book. It was a lot more difficult, though, because of the idea of being exposed. You know as well as I do in fiction that there are different points from which you can write, there are different degrees of visibility for a narrator. Somebody like Salman Rushdie is a very visible narrator. There are other narrators; when I think of Moon Tiger, for instance, you're a very invisible narrator there, so there are different positions you can take as a writer of fiction and visibility. |
One of the concerns that I felt along with a lot of other people, yourself included, Alastair I know as well, is what we term the "postcolonial legacy" of empire in many countries around the globe and how it has impinged upon the sensibility--the literary sensibility, obviously, but the broader cultural and social sensibility of those countries. I was looking for a way to write about this in fiction and write about it, as it turns out, in Ghana in fiction. But somehow the urgency of what I was seeing, the feelings that were provoked in myself, made me feel that I didn't want to hide and I did want to try and stand and speak openly, and yes, a lot of the things that I felt I had to say were not easy to say. |
Niven: It seemed to me that the book was partly telling us that we are shaped very much by empire and by the historical experience of it, and any sense that we've moved away from it in a postcolonial moment is simply not the case. |
Phillips: It's not the case. It may seem a bizarre analogy, but I remember 20 years ago going down to the South, in Alabama, to do a documentary with an ITV crew. They had the temerity to leave me on my own for six weeks in Birmingham, Alabama, and then come back and say, "Well, you tell us what it was like and we'll film you." What I had thought was that because we were in a post-civil-rights era, because there was a black mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, which was one of the most segregated cities prior to the civil-rights movement, that it would be better, that it would be wonderful, that I would have a terrific time. An Irish researcher and myself in a city of 400,000 people found two bars in which we could drink together, and that was in 1983. So very quickly I realised at the end of this tortuous six weeks that you can't eradicate in one generation, you certainly can't legislate away, what's in people's hearts. |
Niven: Growing up in an Arab diaspora world, Penelope, did you feel that you were part of a different kind of empire? |
Lively: I was a deeply ignorant child. Most children are ignorant, and most children simply accept the circumstances in which they are, don't they, so I in no sense questioned that I was growing up in the cauldron of the Middle East, as it was in the '30's and '40's, and with a world war raging on the doorstep. You see this as normal, this is just how things are, so I didn't question it. Nothing very much, I realise now, was explained to me, but at the same time you do question, children do question. But the questioning that goes on, I think, is something that you then reinterpret in later life, you're only aware of it later on, so that you can fish out with the wisdom of adult hindsight what you looked at, and interpret it differently. |
Niven: Is that what lay behind Oleander Jacaranda? |
Lively: Yes, absolutely. I wanted to try and write a memoir which would do that, which would look at the nature of childhood experience in the light of adult wisdoms. I think anybody can do that, in fact. I mean, each childhood is unique and each childhood can be reinterpreted in the light of how you see it when you're able to look at it with the eyes of an adult. It's a very interesting process. |
Phillips: I love Oleander Jacaranda. One of the passages in it that I've mentioned to you before which really struck me forcibly was when you talked about arriving in Britain in the mid-'40s and you began to see Britain through the eyes of a young girl who felt of it but not of it. You talked about realising how the immigrant must feel, how the refugee must feel. Obviously--perhaps not exactly-- it gave you a perception of what it was like to be the other in British society. During the '50s and '60s and '70s, when Britain started to change and there was visibly--because you were to some extent invisibly the other--when the visible other began to arrive in this country, did you recognise in their attitudes, in their posture, in their responses to Britain similarities with your opinion? |
Lively: Yes, I did. I remember in my twenties or so becoming very interested in immigrant literature and first of all cutting my teeth on American immigrant literature. I think it's a very difficult and taxing and demanding experience, but my goodness, it's a great resource for a writer to have that experience to draw on, and obviously mine was not the real, the true immigrant experience. It was a pale shadow of that. But I do think there are ways--and we've seen it in American literature and we're seeing it in our own literature now--in which the immigrant writer is able to serve up the sharpest, the most perceptive picture of the society, which is in a sense by then his or hers but in another sense is not. It's a very enriching thing for a writer, although for a person, for a human being, it may be a very draining one. |
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