Diversity in Writers: Will the Real Jeeves Please Stand?

The article below is from my Camera Lucida blog posted on December 7, 2005 (twelve years ago).

Then, I started to examine what multiculturalism meant to non-White Canadians (Americans, British etc.) and my views have remained exactly the same today as shows my article a couple of days ago Thanksgiving.

Note: The links to the Amazon.com book lists are not current. Ishiguro, Smith and Rushdie are prolific and have produced books through 2018, and they continue to write in the dystopian style they adopted early in their careers. I recommend changing the Amazon.com search by "publication date" to see their current activities, and the rave reviews all round, including:

- Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, published in 2015:

Ishiguro has created a fantastical alternate reality in which, in spite of the extremity of its setting and because of its integrity and emotional truth, you believe unhesitatingly. - The Financial Times, February 2015

- Salman Rushdie's 2017 The Golden House, published in 2017:

The Golden House” has been billed by its publisher as Rushdie’s return to realism. Yet the New York City on offer is so gilded and remote that the novel reads like what one’s impressions would be if all one knew of it came from back issues of Vanity Fair magazine. - The New York Times, September 2017

- Zadie Smith's Feel Free:

“…You will have to take liberties, you will have to feel free to write as you like…even if it is irresponsible. - Zadiesmith.com

(Note: Rather than use "truth" as the target, Smith, like all dislocated people, who gravitate towards dystopia - and violence - choses "irresponsible" instead. She knows words and her word choice is not an error.)

All have won various prizes and perhaps the most prestigious is Ishiguro's Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017:

Kazuo Ishiguro
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017
[...]
Prize motivation: "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." - The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017

Jeeves of course died in 1975 (born in 1881), and his ghost did not write the 2018 listed books. Rather, they are contemporary reprints which probably do not do the aesthetic credit that the older versions did to his craft.

First edition
Author: P. G. Wodehouse
Publisher: George Newnes
Publication date: May 1919 [Source]

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Diversity in Writers: Will the Real Jeeves Please Stand?

England has witnessed several years of non-English authors who keep winning literary prizes, or just literary acclaim. Zadie Smith was recently in the headlines, Salman Rushdie has managed to outlive his fatwa, and another less famous but prolific writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, has written yet another book from those fair British Isles.
I’ve read books by all three, even tried more than one of each. And all leave me less than enthralled, slightly confused, and struck by a lack of authenticity. I find their characters to be caricatures. Both Rushdie and Smith go for hyperbole, while Ishiguro goes for exactly the opposite.

I’m beginning to wonder if non-British writers, however much they were born on the Island, can really capture the spirit of the land.

“Remains of the Day” by Ishiguro has a gloomy, undecipherable, remorseful butler try to recapture something of what he’s lost during all those years of selfless service. Actually, I recant my observation about Ishiguro’s understatement. What could be more of a hyperbole than this?

Then there is P.G. Wodehouse, with the inimitable Jeeves. His adroit butler who really always does save the day, after a lot of scampers and near-disasters along the way. And he does get to have his day at the sea-side also, and quite frequently.

I think Wodehouse captured his character with affection as a butler who certainly is not going to be bossed around by any Lord! No remains for him to collect.

Sometimes I wonder; if you don’t have your full emotions invested in a place, how can you write positive things about it? Like Rushdie, Smith and Ishiguro, who seem to deny a possibility for a future in their books, and press on with their circular exaggerations trying to find meanings for themselves.

Ishiguro’s 2001 book “When we were orphans” is about an Englishman who mysteriously lost his parents as a young boy in Shanghai. He returns as a professional detective to solve that ultimate mystery. It reminds me of these writers, trying to find clues about their past by digging into words.

Ishiguro’s latest book forfeited the unapproachable Far East, and his ancestral home, for something even more alien. It seems like he’s completely given up on ‘his’ England. “Never let me go” is about a Utopia (or a dystopia) on cloning. No more real people, real places or real stories for Ishiguro in the advent of the 21st century.

Why doesn’t this progression of his thoughts and stories not surprise me?

Quote from an interview with Ishiguro on "When we were Orphans":

There's a certain kind of branded, packaged atmosphere of Shanghai: this exotic, mysterious, decadent place. The same in Remains of the Day. It was a case of manipulating certain stereotypical images of a certain kind of classical England. Butlers and tea and scones: it's not really about describing a world that you know well and firsthand. It's about describing stereotypes that exist in people's heads all around the world and manipulating them engagingly.

"Les Anglais"

The contemporary thinking about foreigners turns them into moral, cultural or social issues, but downplays the most important one: actual logistics.

Foreigners are people who travel to lands which are not their own, with cultures and social structures different from theirs, with languages they don't speak or speak without the fluency of their own languages.

In less progressive eras, when a foreigner came to a country other than his own, he had to understand the country he came to and subjugate himself to these different circumstances, and behave accordingly. He would always remain a foreigner, however many years he has lived there, and however many obstacle tests he has passed (and with distinction even).

There was an intriguing and endearing time in my life in Paris.

When we just arrived, our apartment was in a neighborhood which had its own boulangerie, patisserie, cafe, tabac and all the other accoutrements of French neighborhood life. It was like a mini-village within the large city, as all Parisian residential neighborhoods are (our next neighbourhood was slightly more cosmopolitan being near the Tour Eiffel and the shopkeepers were friendly but too busy to ask for details, although they always greeted us familiarly).

I went to a French bilingual school for the first six months and later we went to the first of two boarding schools in England, in Kent.

We had always been English speakers, having had our elementary education in Addis Ababa at what was then called The English School. I was fluent in English at a very early age.

As is always the case, neighborhood merchants, especially those one frequents regularly and with a Mom & Pop management style, make an effort to know their clientele, and even their names.

This particular French boulanger and his wife would greet us in a familiar way and I'm sure, when we (the kids) no longer came accompanied by their mother, asked: "Ou sont les enfant?"

By then my mother knew some French and no doubt told them as best she could that we were at school in England.

This was an instinctive association by country. If this Arab-looking family sent their children to a pensionat in England, then they must be of the English cultural persuasion and therefore they are English. Most Arabs in France have a French - colonial - association, and they would have kept their children within the French culture.

On a side note, this was the argument - the debate - used to say that North Africans (Moroccans and Algerians mostly) were French because of this colonial past, and that the huge numbers of immigrant North Africans can live in France as Frenchmen. Of course Arabs feel differently: they ARE NOT Frenchmen!!! They would always be Arab.

Back to my Parisian neighbourhood. We became known as "Les Anglais!" The patriotic neighbourhood baker and his wife (his wife mostly because she was the one who ran the storefront and communicated with the customers) associated us with their perennial and historical antagonists, the English, those most foreign of foreigners!

But she loved us! Who wouldn't! This cute threesome, with their coats and hoods in the winter rushing to school early in the morning, or coming in for their favorite "Kim-Cone" ice cream in the summer which they bought with long-saved pennies, now going across the seas to learn things! How brave they are!

"Quand viennent-ils, les enfant?" she would ask my mother those long months when we were away.

But we always remained "Les Anglais."

Coffee With a Sprinkle of Jihad

Texting With the Syntax of a Jihadi

I was in Starbucks where I managed to find a seat in the corner. It was quite a nice seat considering seating is hard to come by in Starbucks. I started to read from my tablet, and found this article on the Jihadi John.

I then noticed that the guy next to me looked like he could be a Jihadi John.

I started to test him on his accent and comprehension level (if he even understood what I was saying).

Turns out guilty on both counts (accent and comprehension level).

Me: You've got yourself a nice place here.

Guy: (Looks up with a half smile, looking intimidated.)

Me: You have a pretty nice spot.

Guy: I donent no.

I just sat down and momentarily watched him push his fingers around frantically on his phone. I couldn't make out the language, but it looked like the Latin alphabet (not Arabic, although I wonder how one would text in Arabic on a Latin keyboard?)

Me: Is that the new iPhone?

Guy: i-ye-Phoneee?

Still no comprehension. His "i-ye-Phonee" sounded Hispanic.

Me: You don't speak English?

Guy: Englishi?

Me: Where are you from?

Guy: Colombia.

I returned to my tablet, and continued to drink my coffee.

He was glancing back and forth at me (I guess he thought he could chat me up or something, and wasn't astute enough to realize that I wasn't asking him pleasantries):
"Where do you work?"
"Near Walmart, like this..."
"Ah, McDonalds."
"Where is your family?"
"In Montreal and here."

All this with ample sign language and repeated words. I speak good enough Spanish, but I wasn't about to make things easy for him.

Such is the state of our Multi-Culti land.

And I still don't trust him.

What is to stop him from joining Arab Muslims, whom he greatly resembles, to find himself a welcoming community in this land of those evil, racist whites?
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat