I conceived of this anthology during a period as writer-in-residence at a university in Singapore. The head of my department asked me to give a lecture, and among the suggested topics was a familiar one. Would I be interested in addressing the phenomenon of the recent wave of writing by ‘outsiders’ to Britain which is ‘reinvigorating’ the canon? I bristled at the implication that before this ‘recent wave’ there was a ‘pure’ English literature, untainted by the influence of outsiders. To my way of thinking, English literature has, for at least 200 years, been shaped and influenced by outsiders.
As I thought more about this subject, it occurred to me that to compile and edit an anthology of writing by British writers who are outsiders in the most clear-cut way – those not born in Britain – might illustrate my point. I left Singapore and returned to Britain, whereupon I began to collect and read works by authors who fitted my brief. An organizing theme soon began to emerge around the vexing question of ‘belonging’. The once great colonial power that is Britain has always sought to define her people, and by extension the nation itself, by identifying those who don’t belong. As a result, Britain has developed a vision of herself as a nation that is both culturally and ethnically homogeneous, and this vision has made it difficult for some Britons to feel that they have the right to participate fully in the main narrative of British life.
The truth is, of course, that Britain has been forged in the crucible of fusion – of hybridity. Over the centuries, British life at all levels – its royal family, the nation’s musical heritage, Parliament, military, sport, entertainment and the City – has been invigorated and to some extent defined by the heterogeneous nature that is the national condition. However, in the face of overwhelming evidence, the mythology of homogeneity not only exists but endures. Daniel Defoe’s late-seventeenth-century poem ‘The True-born Englishman’ defines the mongrelized ‘mixtures’ that underpin the heterogeneous British tradition.
The Scot, Pict, Briton, Roman, Dane, submit,
And with the English-Saxon all unite;
And these the mixtures have so close pursued,
The very name and memory’s subdued.
No Roman now, no Briton does remain …
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
Whate’er they were, they’re true-born English now.
Defoe’s satirical work was levelled against the English for their mistreatment of the Dutch who arrived in Britain with William III. In the 300 years since it was written, one can add to Defoe’s ‘mixtures’ the Pole, American, Nigerian, Jamaican, Hungarian, Indian, Trinidadian, German and so on. In many ways, this anthology is an attempt to illustrate what Defoe perceived all those years ago: that British society has always been a melting pot of diverse cultural influences, and her heterogeneous condition runs very deep.
For British writers not born in Britain, the question of ‘belonging’ surfaces in their work in a variety of ways. Depending upon race, class and gender, the degree to which they feel alienated from British society will differ, and these variables will, of course, be further complicated by factors of time and historical circumstances. However, out of the tension between the individual and his or her society – in this case, British – the finest writing is often produced, and this would certainly seem to have been the case with reference to the work collected in this anthology. In their many different ways, all of the writers here are seeking to understand how they ‘belong’ to Britain.
The first group in the anthology comprises the black writers who emerged in the wake of the slave trade. Best exemplified by Olaudah Equiano, they grappled not only with the ethnic difficulties of belonging but also with linguistic problems. They were succeeded by a group of writers who were born in British colonies and were keen, if not altogether contented, observers of Britain. William Thackeray stands at the head of this nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century tradition, and to his name can be added those of Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell. The colonial subjects among whom these writers were born eventually began to express themselves in literature. These ‘subject’ writers, who betray a deep desire to ‘belong’ to the mother country, are primarily represented here by Caribbean migrants to Britain, C. L. R. James being the pre-eminent figure, along with writers such as Samuel Selvon and V. S. Naipaul.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the legacy of empire has produced writing by both descendants of the colonizers and descendants of the colonized. The former are represented by writers such as Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Penelope Lively and William Boyd, and the latter by Salman Rushdie, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Ben Okri among others. All of these, whether colonizers or colonized, seem to be carrying a freight of expectation with regard to Britain, and their various anxieties are reflected in the extracts here.
Standing somewhat apart from these groupings is a category that includes writers such as T. S. Eliot, George Szirtes and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose work exhibits an often microscopic concern with the nature of Britishness. Although these writers’ lives are unencumbered by the trappings of empire, it is clear that the powerful traditions of Britain exert a strong hold over their imaginations. Finally, there are the writers who, armed with the English language, appear to have moved to the literary centre in order to take part in a cosmopolitan world that is free from the difficulties of either geographical marginalization or political turbulence. Katherine Mansfield, Peter Porter and Christopher Hope would seem to fall into this group.
For many British people, to accept the idea that their country has a long and complex history of immigration would be to undermine their basic understanding of what it means to be British. One of my hopes in compiling and editing this anthology is that by engaging with the following writers and their work, readers will come to accept that as soon as one defines oneself as ‘British’ one is participating in a centuries-old tradition of cultural exchange, of ethnic and linguistic plurality, as one might expect from a proud nation that could once boast she ruled most of the known world. The evidence collected here confirms that one of the fortuitous byproducts of this heterogeneous history has been a vigorous and dynamic literature.
Caryl Phillips,
September 1996