Shafayat
Hussain Bhat and Amandeep Singh
Shafayat Hussain
Bhat is enrolled as Ph.D. Research scholar in the department of Languages and
Comparative Literature, Central University of Punjab since January 2016 and has
also completed MPhil from the same university in 2015. His Ph.D. work is
concerned with diasporic fiction and the title of his thesis is Spatial
Dynamics of Home and Identity: A Comparative Study of Selected Diasporic
Fiction.
Dr. Amandeep Singh
is currently working as Assistant Professor in Punjabi under School of
Languages, Literature and Culture at Central University of Punjab, Bathinda.
His major interests include diasporic fiction, ecocriticism and spatial
concerns in literature.
Abstract:
Hotel as a space of temporary stay
represents the site of displacement, fluidity and homelessness, characteristics
which are at the centre of debates in postmodern geography. Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen (2009) is a postmodern spatial investigation
of a metropolitan city like London which is metonymically represented in the
microcosm of the Imperial hotel in the novel. This article attempts to locate
the hotel as a spatial metaphor fitting into the postmodern assertions of
multiplicity, fluidity and a mobile space. In
the Kitchen maps the segregationist spatiality of Britain and an unequal
and disempowering spatial pattern which is evidently manifest in the spatiality
of the hotel. The basement of the hotel, where immigrant workers of the hotel
reside presents a dreary picture of oppression and exploitation. While the
hotel stands for a postmodern notion of a home, the void created by the absence
of a conventional home is filled by spaces of exploitation and marginalization.
Those who have landed at the shores of Britain in the hope of a new home have
been confined to the underbelly of seemingly cosmopolitan centre of London,
rendering them both homeless as well as invisible to the outer world.
Keywords:
Diaspora, Home, Hotel, Space, Spatiality, Postmodern Geography.
The idea of a hotel, though hundreds of years old, fits perfectly into
the postmodern assertions of fluidity, arbitrariness, and an antithesis to the
modernist notions of fixity and rootedness. It is a space that reflects the
tensions between the idea of a conventional home and globalised world of travel
and flux. It is a contested space that refuses to be categorised as a public or
private space. This study is prompted by the need to explore the conditions of
the marginalized class of immigrants who, because of homelessness are caught in
the vicious cycle of exploitation.
Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen
(2009) provides an opportunity to explore the underworld of misery and
exploitation as it is set mostly in and around the Imperial hotel in the novel.
Since this study keeps its focus on the spatial dynamics of the immigrant
experience, insights from thinkers on human geography will be used to better
understand the issues. Analysing immigrant experience from a spatial
perspective sheds light on the hitherto underexplored prevalent spatial
structure of a cosmopolitan space like London, which is home to people of
diverse backgrounds. The seemingly innocent spatiality lends cover to an
embedded power structure and vicious segregation on which the capitalist model
of economy thrives.
In the Kitchen (2009) takes up the issues faced by
migrants from different parts of the world and the hostile treatment meted out
to them by the host country Britain. Monica Ali has used the microcosm of a
kitchen and the basement of a hotel as a spatial metaphor to foreground the
condition of invisible and alien immigrants. Though there are numerous
immigrant characters from various backgrounds, the novel primarily revolves
around the character of Gabriel Lightfoot, who is chef of the hotel named
Imperial Hotel and has a dream of his own hotel. A death in the basement of the
hotel exposes the dangerous conditions in which immigrants live. Ali has chosen
basement of the kitchen as setting of the novel to show how these immigrant
workers who speak different languages are underpaid and are involved in daily
deadly fights. Hotel as a trope is a space where multiple transnational
languages, cultures and identities interact and converge with each other. Ali
analyses London as a cosmopolitan, postcolonial city to expose the spatial
hegemony and segregation prevalent there.
In his influential book Postmodern
Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Edward
Soja remarks that, “Space in itself may be primordially given […] the
organisation and meaning of space is a product of social translations,
transformations and experiences” (80). Cities and towns or for that matter any
residential areas do not evolve naturally into their present form, but they are
deliberately designed in a way to create and sustain a model of space which is
responsible for producing an unequal society. Such a spatial structure creates
a division of centre and margins and those who are constructed as inferior on
the basis of race, class, gender or any other disempowering category are pushed
to the margins. Edward Soja in his book Postmodern
Geographies disapproves the myth of linear narratives which emphasise the
historical and progressive notions favouring time and giving space little
significance (2). Soja acknowledges the contribution of Henry Lefebvre who
revolutionised the category of space as a form of analysis to challenge the
historical imagination which had discouraged any critical insight towards
spatiality of life. For example, Lefebvre in his book The Production of space (31) refused to analyse or see city as a
progress from industrial to post-industrial state as a historical fact. Rather
he believed that the city was a web of complex spatial relations whose
fragmented composition can only be understood by analysing its spatiality or
spatial relations.
Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen (2009)
is a case study for unravelling a constructed space and a spatial structure,
where some live at the centre and many are pushed to the margins as
disempowered lot. In the Kitchen is
set in London and its action mostly unfolds in the kitchen of The Imperial
hotel. She has chosen the kitchen of a hotel as the setting of her novel with a
purpose to delve deep into a crisis that affects the lives of immigrants both
legal and illegal. At the heart of this crisis is the lack of a home for people
who have arrived in London from different places of the world. Kitchen as a
spatial metaphor helps us capture the real essence of immigrant experiences.
“In the novel, the hotel is a place of poignant antithesis where global,
mobile, and affluent elites and the global, mobile and impoverished
‘invisibles’ intersect. At the same time, the hotel functions as the most
obvious emblem of the nation” (Theodotou 13).
Hotel is a place that signifies homelessness and also a place where many
homeless immigrants in the form of cooks and chefs find a temporary home. Ali’s
focus on the immigrants who work in the kitchen of the hotel helps us
understand the acute sufferings of the immigrants who are relegated to marginal
spaces and rendered invisible. Hotel acts as a temporary shelter for people and
it cannot be called a home in the real sense of the word. “For Postmodernists
the collective identity of homeland and nation is a vibrant and constantly
changing set of cultural interactions that fundamentally question the very idea
of home and host” (Cohen 127). The number of immigrants who have come to
England and continue to come in have challenged the inward looking and
exclusive notions of home and identity. In
the Kitchen is a postmodern critique of the autochthonic narratives of home
and space: narratives that project home as an originary and primordial entity
of a native community. The Imperial hotel is an intersection where those who
have been dispersed and those with “indigenous” claims meet and disrupt each
other’s identity notions.
Looking at the kitchen of his hotel, Gabriel, an English Chef can see a
cosmopolitan environment thriving there but at the same time he cannot overlook
the living and working conditions of these people working in his hotel. “What a
place, thought Gabe, looking away at the grilled and bolted backdoor and the
barred and lightless window. What a place: part prison, part lunatic asylum,
part community hall” (14). The kitchen provides space to all the immigrants to
preserve and practise their respective identities, without lending space to any
particular identity to establish any kind of primacy over other identities. The
space of the kitchen does not project any particular identity on the basis of
class, race or any other category but promotes a cosmopolitan culture where
each individual respects every other individual’s language and culture. What
keeps them together is a shared responsibility to their work and not any
national identity. But Gabriel’s description of the place as prison depicts the
larger picture of beleaguered immigrant lives. These workers, who come from
different countries of the world, even do not know each other very well. They
are involved in quarrels, deadly fights but their world remains unknown to the
outside world. It is a kind of underworld that Monica Ali has chosen to write
about to explore its dynamics. “The colonial, postcolonial and neo-colonial
cartography of the city of London is metonymically contained in the space of
the hotel’s kitchen, where a number of workers of very different nationalities
– from porters to cooks, from the commis to chefs – meet” (Pereira 1).
The issue at the heart of the novel is “about a nation which needs to
rework its model of space” (Jain 12) to include those who are racially
marginalized. Jasbir Jain’s observation on the need to rework the model of
space captures the central message of Ali’s In
the Kitchen. The need to ‘rework the model of space’ stems from the need to
include ‘others’ in the spatial fabric of the nation which is home to both
natives as well as those who have arrived or have been brought to England due
to various reasons and compulsions. Monica Ali employs the hotel as a “symbol
of the transient condition of contemporary nomad and migrant selves and of
advanced capitalism and its forms of exploitation” (Paganoni 207). Kitchen of
the hotel bears testimony to the exploitation of the disenfranchised class of
the millennium. That the hotel is involved in two illegal scandals of
prostitution and human trafficking comes as a shock to Gabriel. Gabriel’s
search leads him to the unknown and invisible ugly side of Britain through the
microcosm of the Imperial hotel. A number of immigrants working in the hotel
are held hostage and in bonded labour by snatching away their documents and are
forced to work on low wages. Lena, who Gabriel meets after Yuri’s death is an
escapee from the prostitution mafia run by people associated with the hotel
where Gabriel works. Through her Gabriel comes to know about a larger network
of human trafficking and prostitution in which poor immigrants are pushed
forcibly. What comes as a shock to Gabriel is that many people he knows and
work in the hotel are involved in such scandals and that politicians like
Fairweather express helplessness about such things points to political
acquiescence in such matters.
Hotel as a spatial metaphor is quite relevant to the depiction of
immigrant experience of those who suffer from homelessness. While those who
work in the hotel, find a temporary home, yet this space is riven with death
and gloom. The issue of home in the novel can be analysed from three angles.
The first is homelessness of the immigrant workers and their exploitation at
the hands of influential people. Second, Gabriel who is a native Englishman
also suffers from a similar crisis of home and identity much like his
multicultural staff of hotel kitchen. Having lived in many places and
experienced different cultures, he also identifies himself with the condition
of his workers. Third, home can be analysed at the level of the nation which is
England. All these three angles can be understood by locating hotel as a
spatial metaphor of postmodern geography.
Hotel acts as a microcosm of the larger society of London which is the
global centre of migration and capital. Hotel is a place that signifies
homelessness and temporariness. “Ali’s novel exploits the liminal and fluid
setting of the hotel, a mutable and culturally constructed mixture of
representation and physical form” (Paganoni 206). By choosing a native as
principal character to depict the conditions of immigrants and changing spatial
scenarios throughout the world and particularly in Britain, Monica Ali lends
more credibility to her narrative. Through Gabriel’s eyes we witness the change
that has taken place in the spatial composition of London. The novel shows the
constant challenge to the exclusive notions of Britishness and how Britain is a
home to not only white British people, but people of multiple ethnicities and
races and immigrant communities. Gabriel’s kitchen is full of people who have
left their home and homelands behind for a new home in the UK, but they have
been contained in spaces that block their attempts at becoming part of the host
country. These workers like Nikolai (Russian), Lena (Belarusian), Oona
(Caribbean), Olek (Ukrainian), Benny (Liberian), Victor (Moldovan), Suleiman
(Indian) are all without a home. He often talks to them about their countries
and their homes and such talks make him aware about his own home and identity.
When he asks Benny whether he had someone waiting for him at home, he says that
it depended on what he meant by home. So he in a way frees the concept of home
from its territoriality, laying it open to multiple meanings. Everyday
practices of making home in Britain also reflect access to resources and
documentation. Those who are asylum seekers or undocumented migrants have
limited access to homemaking practices (Binaisa 52). So, for someone like
Benny, home is neither in Liberia, where he comes from and nor in London, where
he is staying.
Death of Yuri in the basement of the hotel, a space which is referred to
as catacombs, a spatial symbol for the dead, points towards the larger living conditions
of immigrants in the British society and how they are viewed. The ‘catacombs’
which is a resting place for the likes of Yuri is a kind of subterranean space
where they must retire after their work to remain invisible to the outside
world. The economy of Britain is dependent on the likes of Yuri, who burn their
blood to keep the engine of economy going, yet they cannot be accepted outside
in the spatial mainstream and must remain hidden in the underground. These
illegal immigrants who remain hidden due to police actions get trapped in the
networks of bonded labour and human trafficking. The question that arises is;
what makes this class of immigrants undesirable to belong to the spatial
mainstream? What is it that debars them imagining their host country as their
home? The answer lies in unravelling the definition of home and the narrative
that shapes the notion of home in a larger context. Rosemary George states
that, “national subjects/citizens who are in the process of formulating or
reformulating a new national identity for themselves and for fellow citizens
culturally create and recreate home as vigorously as do diasporic peoples”
(561). Rosemary’s remark brings attention to the politics of creating a home
whether in settler countries or in diasporic context. In both the contexts, the
process involves a complex set of negotiations that paves the way for
formulation of a home that may be found on the premises of inclusion and
exclusion. In the Kitchen basically
revolves around this provision of home as a space of inclusion and exclusion.
It analyses home in the larger context of the nation, which is bound to leave
some people on the outside.
Susheila Nasta in her book Home
Truths: Fictions of South Asian Diaspora in Britain quotes Caryl Phillips
to throw light on the notion of home in British context. She quotes Caryl
Phillips as,
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. Thus,
many black or Asian immigrants and their descendants in the post-war period who
did not conform to the predominant image of white cultural acceptability felt
that they had no place or space to express their relationship to the dominant
narratives of British life. (3)
Monica Ali addresses the issue of home in the larger context of the
nation which in this case is England. There is a fear and anxiety that the
outsiders are outgrowing in numbers and changing the very fabric of their
country and culture. The immigrants are not only affecting a physical change in
the surroundings but are also making an influence on the local culture as well.
The local populace wants to maintain a kind of distance from the outsiders. They
believe that too many immigrants have polluted their way of life. “The Howarths
moved into number 17. You can breathe a bit up here said Howarth. I have got
nowt against ‘em but who wants to smell curry seven o’clock in the morning to
eleven o’clock in the night […] breed like rabbits n all” (69). It is this
other perspective that mostly lacks in other diasporic narratives. Monica Ali
gives us a thorough insight into the home of an English family as well. Their
concerns and apprehensions regarding the changing demography are vividly
described. At the centre of this narrative lies a fear of the ‘other’. Jopi
Nyman sees Ali’s novel as an attempt “for the need to replace nationalisms with
cooperation and mutual acceptance” (Nyman 101). But as Caryl Phillips remarks
above, Britain as a nation defines itself by excluding those who do not fall
within the premise of ‘white culture’.
Nana’s concern about Asians especially Muslims taking over the place
shows that she feels her home and homeland are under threat from outsiders. She
believes in a home that is fixed and unchangeable, not recognising the change
that is inevitable. “These whatsits, Muslims, there’s no understanding them, is
there? I mean, we‘ve took them in. we’ve them a home […] Mug shots, terror
plots, training camps, grainy videos…what’ve we done to them? And we have to
check under our beds every night. Not safe, none of us. Are we? Not safe in our
own beds” (390). Gabriel’s grandmother Nana is one such character in the novel
who always feels that their homeland and country are being taken over by
immigrants. She refers to incidents that have actually not happened in reality.
She suffers from memory loss in her old age and imagines things that have not
actually happened. For example she believes that someone’s house was overtaken
by immigrants from Pakistan. “The whole attic said Nana in an ecstasy of
indignation, was full of Pakistanis”. Nana imagines things that don’t happen in
reality. It is her mental illness that makes her concoct imaginary happenings.
Ali seems to have on purpose such concerns expressed by a character who suffers
from dementia, to render them unfounded and merely speculative.
As Avtar Brah remarks that in diaspora space, both immigrants as well as
those who claim to be natives are on the same plane and are no different from
each other and this holds true in case of Gabriel. Gabriel’s experience and his
later crisis also stems from the fact that he has lived in many places across
the world and this transnational experience has impacted him accordingly. “Gabe
had worked in places where porters came as a job lot, the first getting along a
cousin who recommended a brother-in-law who also brought his friend. Before you
knew it, there was gang of them, and that only spelled trouble ahead” (99).
Gabriel is production of the transnational experience, a globalised world where
everything from capital, labour, technology, culture, crime etc. travel from
one part to the other part of the world. Gabe at times feels like the people who
are working in his kitchen. He too feels without a home and suffers from an
identity crisis. For instance, when he once observes his flat where he lives,
he feels a strong sense of homelessness.
Back in the
sitting room he paced steadily. The more he looked at the furniture, the less
familiar it felt. The hard green sofa belonged in a waiting room, the black
chaise was hideous, the lacquered shelves were empty and the white-cube coffee
table was pretentious beyond belief. Who would want to live here? Who could
call this place a home? (433).
Having lived away from Britain for
so many years, Gabriel faces a crisis in imagining Britain as his only home.
Any individual such as Gabriel whose ideas and identity have been shaped by a
transnational experience would exhibit similar tendencies of identity crisis
and homelessness. As Avtar Brah says, “home is where you are from, but it is
also what you move towards socially, politically and psychically. It is not a
fixed node, but a moving signifier constructed and transformed in and through
social practices, cultural imaginaries, historical memories and our deepest
intimacies” (“Some Fragments” 173). This gives home a subjective twist which
has psychic and social composition. Gabriel is a modern mobile individual who is
uprooted despite living in his homeland, completely disoriented and struggling
to make sense of home. He empathises with his workers who are homeless and
feels one like them. “Transnational practices are often conceptualized as being
carried out across spaces, excluding the possibility of attachments to specific
places” (Sheringham 61). So, it is quite natural for Gabriel to not to feel at
home in Britain only as his transnational experience also cuts across spatial
boundaries of home.
The new
world that Gabriel Lightfoot enters is one of unhomeliness: traditions no
longer secure a sense of identity for its inhabitants […] In The Kitchen shows that contemporary globalization and its
effects demand a reassessment of Britishness […] the novels vision of
Britishness forces us to think the role of nation as a source of identification
(Nyman 213).
Gabriel like his multicultural staff in his kitchen also faces the
dilemma of identity and belonging. Unlike his white chauvinist father, he never
identified himself with the milling town of Blantwistle, the place of his birth
and an epitome of an England that promotes whiteness as the essence of British
identity that is struggling to keep the narrative intact. Gabriel’s father Ted mourns the fact
that the homogeneous British identity has been displaced by a more inclusive
and heterogeneous identity formation. Gabriel responds by inviting Ted’s
attention to the kitchen of his hotel which is plural and cosmopolitan and
represents every part of the earth. “You should see my kitchen, Dad. I’ve got
every nationality in there and everyone gets along” (242). Gabriel is a product
of the contemporary London, which is a centre of global flows in the form of
people and capital. As Doreen Massey in her article ‘Geographies of
Responsibility’ asserts that, “it might be argued that London/Londoners have
begun to assume an identity, discursively, within self the self-conception of
the city, which is precisely around mixity rather than a coherence derived from
common roots” (3-4). In his interactions
with his father, he points towards the kitchen of his hotel as an example of
multiculturalism and coexistence, even though there are serious limitations to
what he refers to as a space of mutual living. The notion of home is still tied
to a nativist discourse which renders so many people homeless despite living in
a place for centuries.
Conclusion
By choosing to keep hotel at the
centre of her narrative, Monica Ali has attempted to depict the disruptive
postmodern spatiality which is characterised by flux and mobility. The focus of
the novel remains on the space and place, the politics and the power relations
that are embedded in the spatial structure of a society. Issues depicted in the
text are visualised through concrete geography that is shaped by the narratives
of race and is also confronted by the new realities of globalisation and
immigrant arrivals. The hotel reflects the tension between the conventional
home and forces of globalisation. The town of Blantswistle and the kitchen of
the Imperial hotel are two cartographic representations of the segregationist
as well as the changing spatial dynamics of England. The Imperial hotel serves
as a kind of mirror of Britain as a nation, where two worlds exist side by side
but spatially segregated from each other. Ali’s novel espouses the cause of
heterogeneous communities and the space of kitchen is a rebuttal to the
homogenous majoritarianism. The multicultural space of the kitchen of the hotel
stands for the changing spatial dynamics of Britain. It is now a home to not
just the white British but to those as well who have landed at its shores as
immigrants in search of a new life. Ali’s novel is a compelling narrative for
the need to recognise the ‘other’ as an indispensable part and to recognise
their rights to call Britain as home. It challenges the autochthonic claims of
home or narratives of identity based on tribal notions and exclusive premises
of whiteness in the contemporary transcultural and transnational world. She
does this by placing these discourses within the spatial rhetoric of
transcultural and diaspora space. She situates her novel in the space of the
hotel, especially in its kitchen, to portray the diverse life and people of
multiple nationalities struggling to make their way into the fabric of British
society. These unacknowledged and unwanted immigrants are spatially confined to
the subterranean world and Ali tries to give voice to them. The Imperial hotel
stands as a symbol for Britain which has lost its past glory even though it
still exists to exercise control over its multicultural staff that Gabe calls
“United Nations task force”.
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