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Dottie, Cruel Optimism and the Challenge toCultureDavid CallahanPublished online: 22 May 2013.

To cite this article: David Callahan (2013) Dottie, Cruel Optimism and the Challenge to Culture, EnglishStudies in Africa, 56:1, 28-38, DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2013.780678

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DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2013.780678 English Studies in Africa 56 (1)E-mail: callahan@ua.pt © University of the Witwatersrand

pp 28–38

DOTTiE, cruEl optiMisM And thE chAllEngE to culturE

david callahan

Abstract

Gurnah’s fictional world evinces an anti-reductionist sociology which constitutes in part a subtle critique of culture as identity. His work is infused with cultural flows, rhizomatic and liquid connectivities that challenge both the certainties and categories of his characters as well as the institutional ascription of a single cultural voice to Gurnah himself. His determination to write narratives that cannot be aligned with his own aetiology or location is especially evident in Dottie, centred not only on a woman but on one whose family origins and history are not mappable onto Gurnah’s own. The refusal to use fiction as only a type of cultural alibi can be related to a view of personal and collective identity flows which this article explores with recourse to Seyla Benhabib’s rejection of radical incommensurability and self-consistent cultures in The Claims of Culture. What will be seen to structure Dottie’s pragmatic daily struggles is rather the ‘cruel optimism’ as elaborated upon by Lauren Berlant, the desire for something that hinders and frustrates you but which continues to organize your plans and choices, in this case the connectedness of family.

Keywords: Gurnah, Dottie, Culture, Optimism, Family, Individual, Race.

Before Dottie begins the linear journey through Dottie’s adult life that it will follow, the novel contains a brief section in which she is called from her job because her sister Sophie has had a baby. The episode appears to be no more than a narrative device wherein the fact of birth licenses Dottie to reflect on her own beginnings. It is much more than this, however, for it constitutes a type of pressure point in the fictional world of the novel, putting under notice the optimism and consolidation indexed by birth, and, by implication, the site of affective belonging constituted by the idealized family. Uniquely in the novel, the event is represented twice: at the start and a little over half-way through. By the second time both the symbolism of beginnings and connectedness interpellated by the birth have not so much been exposed as illusory as inflected by Lauren Berlant’s elaboration of how lives may be structured by what she calls cruel optimism: ‘when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (1), but which is at the same

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time necessary to psychic and communal survival. What Dottie desires is to have her identity grounded in family, secured in the community, and shielded from traumatic interruption, but what the book will explore is how the creation of the optimistic subject is inhibited by the overinvestment in cultures as avenues to affinity.

In The Claims of Culture, Seyla Benhabib critiques ‘a premature normativism in much contemporary political theory’ which has led to ‘an all-too-quick reification of given group identities’ (viii). The post-1960s rush to institute identity as above all cultural required that there be identified and named cultural groupings into which individuals fell, ironically reprising to some extent the forced colonial divisions and parcelling up of peoples to suit colonial administrations and control systems. As if in response to these pressures, much contemporary literature challenges the assignment of individuals to cultures, given the progressively mixed and disrupted inheritances individuals increasingly experience. Certainly, the United Kingdom is now one of the places where this is more evident, as witness statistics concerning mixed marriages of ever-growing complexity and the fluid identity matter more and more people combine depending on context (see George Alagiah’s three-part 2011 BBC documentary Mixed Britannia). For Benhabib, however, the rising numbers of mixed-heritage individuals are scarcely the point when it comes to considering the reification of identities, for even well before reaching this stage: ‘The interpretation of cultures as … internally self-consistent wholes is untenable and reflects the reductionist sociology of knowledge’ (36). Benhabib’s rejection of unitarily-identified cultures as a classificatory system through which to describe or manage human beings is congruent with ‘both democratic and more basic epistemological considerations’ (ix). That is, in a properly democratic society, space for contestation and freedom is actually opened up by the denial of cultures as ontological units, describable in a bounded, precise, and hence exclusionary, way. This seems to be clearly in line with Gurnah’s anti-reductionist sociology and critique of culture as form or identity throughout his entire body of work. In Tina Steiner’s summary: ‘Offering counternarratives to myths of nation, land, and language, Gurnah’s fiction points out precisely the lack of freedom such discourses and politics can produce’ (125). Rather than cultures, then, Gurnah’s work is infused with cultural flows, rhizomatic and liquid disruptions and connectivities, that challenge both the certainties and categories of his characters, not to mention the institutional ascription of a single cultural voice to Gurnah himself.

The destructively reductive inscription of identity as cultural is constantly made apparent to Dottie as she and her family are insidiously excluded from membership in the polity by others who read her skin colour as a cultural marker. The majority population unrelievedly configure Dottie as a foreigner: from the teacher who tells her ‘that now she lived in England, and she should determine to do what she could to make herself acceptable’ (11), to her first lover, who, even trying to compliment her, marginalises her repeatedly by thinking of her as a ‘foreigner’ (121). When Dottie’s sister Sophie is to be sent to a school in Hastings, the social worker attempts to be positive by saying ‘they had some experience of foreign girls’ (32). Even critic Jaqueline Bardolph says the novel deals with ‘groups of characters who are migrants’ (77), and Monica Bungaro is misled in the only previous (and good) article on the novel into writing that Dottie’s mother Bilkisu ‘eventually settles in Britain’ (26), when she was born there and had never left the country. Despite the fact that the sisters are English, their skin colour marks them as not really belonging in the eyes of the surrounding society, a difference that registers them as having always already failed in such a way that the only options, particularly for women, appear to be Dottie’s severe self-policing as she works her way up the ladder of class respectability, or Sophie’s self-confirmation through men and hedonism.

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This putative ontological failure, central to fictions dealing with people perceived as culturally other by majority populations, cannot be resisted by the sisters’ organisation of their identities in terms of a strong cultural or family counter-narrative. The customary assertion of cultural provenance that operates as both a bulwark against and an obstacle to the surrounding majority culture is denied by the rupture in the family line arising from Dottie and Sophie’s mother not knowing who their fathers were. As well as constituting a partial erasure of identity as conjugated principally through one’s cultural origin, their unknown patrilineal source does not become as much of a destabilising absence as might be expected. Instead, it is the brother, Hudson, whose father was a black American, who is the most socially limited of the three of them. Identifying himself culturally only undermines Hudson, for it deludes him into expecting a recognition that no-one, from his family to the surrounding society, is prepared to confer. Dottie and Sophie, on the other hand, have been partially freed from the nostalgia of absent origins by not knowing anything about their fathers, the novel to some extent refusing to buy into the complaint of disabling broken origins that accompanies much mixed-heritage fiction.

By the end of the book, Dottie is nonetheless moving towards her mother’s possible late realisation that ‘her children would need these stories to know who they were’ (15), but it is noticeable that while the erasure of the mother’s story is expressed as loss and rupture, the absence of the fathers’ stories is not. Moreover, only the reader is witness to the compressed story of Dottie’s maternal grandfather’s origins in the northwest border areas of Pakistan. It is not a sentimentalized story of harmonious cultural practices broken on the wheel of colonialism, but a story of translocation arising out of the brutalising effects of poverty and ancient custom, of a place ‘where petty chieftains ruled the face of the earth to their autocratic pleasure’ (17). This grandfather, Taimur Khan, realises that ‘if he did not escape at once, he would be a slave all his life’ (17), and after his wanderings land him in the British Navy during the First World War, he ends up in Cardiff. In this family chronicle, Dottie’s maternal grandmother’s story is absent. Of Lebanese origin, we learn her name and little else. Dottie’s mother Bilkisu becomes estranged from this background when she flees in order to avoid an arranged marriage, entering a life of itinerancy and frequent changes of sexual partner which leaves her broken, diseased and the mother of three children by different fathers.

The inception of this family story on the face of it is replete with the markers of the exotic that have valorized fictions from non-European cultures for western anglophone readers: a cultural origin of colourful poverty, adventures, displacements, becoming the object of white violence, family fragmentation brought about by the pressures of dislocation, dreams of love filtered through the mysterious story-traditions of the East, name-changing self-invention, defiance of archaic traditions, ending with the heart-rending death of the mother at an early age, her death ascribable to the mismatch between her family’s cultural formations and those of the surrounding culture. This first chapter is nevertheless the last occasion Gurnah uses the grammar of the exotic in the book, a repertoire of events whose disgusting denouement – ‘In [Dottie’s mother’s] uterine canal they found a pair of nylon stockings that was green with slime’ (28) – rejects the exotic as a healthy basis for family or community life. It is Gurnah’s ruthless demolition of the literary market’s foregrounding of the exotic as in itself a moral valorization of the culturally other that marks the relation of this chapter to the rest of the book, a demolition that is consistent with his repeated unpacking of the exotic from different angles throughout his career.

With the death of Bilkisu, any link with the knowledge of family history from outside England is sundered, and the reduction of the family to the three children calls in the power of social services. The struggles of a parentless family in South London with Dottie as the

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teenage head of the family further becomes a test of the truth of her mother’s having told her that ‘she should never allow past things to tyrannise her, that religion and culture were stuff and mumbo-jumbo for old people to force those who come after them to toe the line’ (36). Dottie’s life is devoid of religious or cultural excuses. Not only that, it rejects the model provided by her mother, as Dottie strives to care responsibly for her siblings despite a series of difficulties presented by the breakup of the children by social welfare, her struggle to reunite them, and the obligations and pressures that affective relationships of differing degrees of closeness force upon daily life. Dottie’s life resembles nothing so much as that of a respectable, diligent, working class single woman battling against hard times, carefully managing her money and constantly looking forward to bettering her family’s living conditions.

This story of class aspiration is however intersected with the added disadvantage of a constant residue of racial meaning ascribed to her by ‘teachers and the supervisor at work and the policewoman’, who ‘made her feel dirty: grubby and covered with mud and ochre like the savage’ (36). Her initial response is to desire to fit in, while being well aware of the injustice that denied that ‘they all belonged as they were’ (37), but as the book goes on she comes to think that ‘she had given too much away, that her life was already given to tasks that would never bring her any joy’ (219). At the same time, after every setback and discouragement, she quickly reverts to her ever-aspiring discourse in which she veers from despair to feeling ‘invigorated, filled with schemes of retrieval’ (223). So far, this articulates well Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism, ‘a relation of compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic’ (24). Desiring normalcy in a raced economy that consistently forecloses it for those it perceives as not white only underlines the mismatch of such optimism. No amount of self-cancelling on Dottie’s part can deliver her acceptance in a society that writes its very scripts of belonging partly in terms of excluding raced others.

What will be found to lessen the constant injuries of having this belonging foreclosed are neither counter assertions of culture nor the redoubt of the family, but the intermittent recognition of Dottie along intersectional lines as an individual rather than as a racial category on the part of people she has extended contact with. This intersectionality may use the grammar of women’s solidarity, social class or colour, but in all cases it is inflected by ambivalence and conflicting discourses, rather than by any notion of hybridity. Dottie and the people around her do not enact or valorize hybridity for they do not represent or enact cultures, even in terms of the mixed references produced by the supposedly hybrid identity. If cultures as discrete and identifiable entities not only do not exist but as notions are harmful to the development of a civil polity, in Benhabib’s argument, then strictly speaking one cannot be hybrid either, which would merely be multiplying one’s repertoire of discrete cultures. To be mixed is a much more liquid and individualized identity flow than being the more static hybrid, but in any case Dottie does not import even rhizomatically mixed cultural matter from elsewhere. Skin colour is not a culture, and the repeated assertions that it is are one of the principal targets of the book’s critique. What Dottie represents rather is one of many ways of being British (the mother’s upbringing in Wales being relevant here), with British accordingly destabilized as a ‘Culture’ precisely through thinking of it as not belonging to any clear set of signifiers (or any clearly-defined people). In Gurnah’s fictional world recognition cannot be argued into being abstractly, however; if it is going to occur, it stands a better chance when people have repeated contact at an individual level rather than confronting each other in or as groups or cultures, in what Steiner refers to as ‘the carefully delineated juxtapositions between hostility and pockets of hospitality [which] gesture towards alternative spaces where relation becomes a possibility’ (126).

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In this light, the position of the deranged and incontinent Polish woman who lives on the top floor of Dottie’s building may serve as an example of a person who has no family of any sort, whether personal or cultural. Her interactions with Dottie’s family are few, but one is telling: one day when the door is open, the Polish woman comes in and smears excrement on the baby Hudson. Dottie’s response is to rub excrement in the woman’s face. There is little pity for the lost and damaged in Dottie’s world view, in which responsibility is absolute. That is, individuals are responsible for their actions and historical or personal contexts are no excuse. At times she wavers, and allows that circumstances might excuse her brother’s behaviour, or Sophie’s, or their own struggles, but generally she holds to a stern ascription of people’s duty to act ethically. In the case of the Polish woman’s act, however, Dottie reads it as raced, rather than as that of someone who is mentally defective, and her response is to retaliate in terms of the race war, in which her reference to ‘these dirty white scum’ (194) reprises discourses used against black people. This event breaks down Dottie’s pragmatic determination to refuse the victim role, but it is noticeable that seeing the act as a raced one her response is to fight back viciously, the sort of fighting back she has denounced in the men (sic) who espouse it. But who she is fighting against is patently a broken person whom Dottie reads in terms of her skin-group rather than in terms of some sort of context for her behaviour, a context in which traumatic loss and displacement attendant on the Second World War are likely explanations. History loses out to skin and the possibility of pity evaporates, until Dottie calms down and is sorry. Yet when the Polish woman appears at the door again to suggest that Sophie has died, Dottie’s rage flares up once more, as she calls her a ‘[m]ad white bitch’, and smashes the woman’s head against the wall until she crawls back up to her room ‘blubbering with fear’ (215). Dottie’s use of race here is not only extreme, but highly unusual for her, implicitly serving to critique race as an atavistic and destructive category, a shortcut to cope with difference. The fact that it takes such an extreme event to call up such responses from Dottie just shows how morally organized she is most of the time, and yet also how the apparent incoherence of the Other (although literal in this case) can destabilise even those who believe they are able to deal with people as individuals.

Sophie is in many ways both a continuation of the mother’s methods of coping with the world and an opposed model of women’s options to Dottie. Her articulation of her self-worth in terms of the attention paid to her by men is seen as self-destructive, but her value for Dottie seems secure. Nevertheless, as the book goes on Sophie is so dependent on male attention that she has neither ambition nor self-sacrifice as structuring desires. Echoing their mother’s decline, Sophie increasingly spends all her time ill and passive, eventually being taken to hospital with emphysema. For Sophie history is nowhere as an explanatory tool, and even family history evaporates under her application of sentimental clichés to her life. Despite the example of their own mother, Sophie says things like ‘you can’t know how a mother would rather die than see harm come to her child’ (303), and this in the context of having elaborated a story designed to garner a doctor’s sympathy, a story in which she deliberately omits to tell him she had a child. In this fable, Sophie has been colonised by Dottie and given up her will and independence, a version the doctor accepts without ever having met Dottie. The one-sided story replicates the one-sided stories of victimisation that Gurnah has been at pains to explore and explode throughout his career. Without excusing anyone, he has not accepted those versions in which the subjects of empire were totally stripped of their will or responsibility, able around the time he wrote Dottie to refer unfashionably to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Matigari as a ‘simple and unattractive polemic’ (72), to take one of many possible examples of his investment in the nuanced over the comfortably clarified.

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Dottie is not simply the story of her and her family, however, for a significant element in the novel is the inflection of what is happening to her in terms of brief insertions of references to contemporaneous events in decolonising Africa or the United States in the civil rights era. That is, historical events provide contexts in which individuals’ possibilities are both underwritten and questioned. This listing of contemporary events is not infrequent in fiction that reflects upon the imbrication of people in a time that impacts upon their individual lives whether they pay attention to the rest of society or the world or not. From John Dos Passos’s serious collage of social tableaux in U.S.A. (1930-1936) to André Brink’s parodic list of date-related events in The First Life of Adamastor (1993), novelists have used the device as a shorthand for the embedded nature of individual lives in changing social patterns. Gurnah’s insertions signal that while Dottie is living her life greater forces and changes in the global social fabric are occurring that both promise to alter her possibilities and experiences but at the same time routinely enclose them within group scripts associated with her skin. The election of the Labour government in 1964, for example, only serves to indicate to what passes for the Left that they, like the Right, need to appeal to the majority’s racism if they are to succeed. Optimism is associated with achievements by white people like Kennedy and Yuri Gagarin, but reports of events in Africa are uniformly negative. The network of historical references is perhaps one place where Gurnah’s own origins overdetermine the material, for they reference Africa above all, and not the Asia whence Dottie’s mother’s family comes. After one such reference to a military coup in Togo in 1963, in which Sylvanus Olympio ‘became the first civilian head of state in black Africa to fall victim to a military coup’ (178), Sophie tells Dottie she is pregnant, a conjunction of news from which Dottie concludes: ‘How much effort they put into the stupid lives they lived!’ (178), reprised later by incipient partner Michael: ‘We’re just such laughable creatures, carrying on as if what we do matters. Out there, in this country too, are events of real importance’ (310). As for the optimism associated with President Kennedy, ‘mobs of white citizens … were attacking black school-children in the streets of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for wanting to attend the same schools as their children’ (162), and the second Hudson’s birth which opens the novel almost coincides with Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

The optimism implied in the project of constituting oneself as a recognised subject is cast into relief by contemporary historical contexts in which black people are situated: contexts expressing dysfunction, violence and incommensurable difference. While Marc Augé cryptically points out that ‘[c]hange is not necessarily the equivalent of history’ (4), history certainly does not add up to change. In the events related by the novel it merely reinforces more of the same. One defence against the ascription of culture to colour seems to be knowledge, the knowledge that in part Dottie has access to through her frequenting of the public library: ‘her own discovery of how complex the reality of those places was had given her more strength’ (152; italics in original). It is to the library she returns after her first boyfriend Ken has left her, and it is also to the library she turns when she feels stifled by Sophie’s partner Patterson’s control over their lives, finding out about a secretarial course which leads to both friendship and improved employment. The library is pointedly opposed to the Church as a source of knowledge, and, finally, her slight connection to a gracious elderly man in the library leads her to meet the man’s grandson, Michael, with whom it seems at the end of the novel that Dottie will develop a relationship.

The elderly black man who would lift his hat to her politely in the library could ‘brighten her whole day’ (284). This axis of solidarity appears postcolonial when he holds up a newspaper showing that Algeria had asserted itself against French control. For both Dottie and Michael, however, the man activates key terms in the contemporary understanding of historical trauma:

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‘guilt and atonement’ (286). When the man’s grandson comes looking for anyone who knew him, Dottie feels guilty that her diffidence had meant she had never spoken to the man, while Michael was brought up in Ghana, and had been too busy as a reporter in decolonising Africa to get to know his grandfather, whom he never met. Dottie chronicles a time when hysterical repudiation of black immigrants was articulated in Britain in terms of its traumatising imposition upon white people. At times Dottie manifests her ‘responsibility’ for this imposition as shame, in the sense of the self that has failed in front of witnessing others: ‘shame has been consistently theorized as a specular effect that has the fantasy of visibility and disclosure built right into it’, Ruth Leys summarises (128, her italics). More commonly, however, what Dottie feels is guilt, generally understood now as an interiorized assessment of having failed oneself or someone else. This guilt surfaces in Dottie’s story of her incomplete encounters with the elderly Dr Mann, who she says looked as if he was dropping his head when they crossed in the street, ‘[a]s if he was ashamed or sorry about something’ (299). While Dr Mann’s shame can barely be speculated upon - a sense of being seen in the public space as ineffectual, reading about opposition to colonial power but unable to do anything positive himself? - for Dottie he comes to represent her guilt at having failed to make contact with strangers, overvalorizing the immediate family to the extent that gestures of solidarity from beyond the family are unable to be invested in.

Family is ever-present in the novel as the intense affective realm becomes the principal theme of the final chapter in which Michael and Dottie deal with their respective family stories. ‘Families, you know what they’re like’ (300), says Michael, but what transpires is that families are only alike in their uncanny enunciation of both centripetal and disjunctive scripts. At one point the educated Michael expostulates about the wealth of convulsive events occurring in the world that usher in or presage greater freedom and dignity for colonized peoples, complaining bitterly that: ‘It’s humiliating … that it is only our own stories that move us’ (311; Gurnah’s ellipsis). Dottie gropes for the right words with which to counter Michael’s heroic peroration: ‘people give their lives to things, dedicate themselves … to a way of living or to knowledge’ (311). Despite Michael’s support for a grammar of social convulsion as the best way for polities to evolve, he is unable to conjugate his family in the same terms. His family has been the site of a series of disruptions and loss of contact, which he feels not as productive evolution but as damage, diluting his insistence on the smallness of family problems. Implicitly, if families cannot communicate, and fall out of touch for decades over misunderstandings and uninformed assumptions, then it is no wonder that whole communities or nations are so dysfunctional, even murderous.

The juxtaposition of family with the heady sense of new realities being born, in which family is sidelined, is offered without narratorial comment, as is usual in Gurnah’s work. It is left to the reader to negotiate what is clearly difficult for many, if not most, people: on the one hand Michael’s initial relegation of family to a secondary position in favour of contact with larger socio-political realities, or on the other Dottie’s privileging of the struggle to keep the family together and aspirational. Options such as Sophie’s receive a little sympathy, but not much, although of course Sophie has certainly also dedicated herself to ‘a way of living’. Sophie’s partners and Patterson’s (and the brother Hudson’s) perception of the impossibility of normativity for black people not only also leads to ‘a way of living’, but asks licit questions of a society where black men commonly reach such a conclusion. Jimmy is hostile to white people, his ‘general advice was simply not to trust a white man’ (147), while his views on white women are ‘too disgusting’ (147) for Sophie to tell her sister. Perhaps the most difficult character for Dottie to assess, Jimmy is mostly solicitous and caring to both sisters, but he is also menacing and

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unknown to Dottie, part of the reason she suspects him. Dottie is scarcely surprised to find out he has been imprisoned for burglary, although his friend Patterson’s explanation is simply that in the eyes of the police ‘all black men are criminals and deserve to be locked up … If they could, they would kill us’ (202). Soon, Patterson himself is sent to jail for affray, or in his opinion for ‘the same battle we have been fighting all this time … How to keep our freedom and how to keep our dignity’ (209). The only answer, says Patterson, responding to mid-1960s racism, is ‘to make them fear us the way they taught us to fear them’ (253). However, where these characters invest in solidified decoding practices or value sets through which they experience all social reality, Dottie encapsulates dynamic interrogative processes, a type of psychosocial incompleteness that appears to enact Berlant’s description of ‘a fantasy that someday the self-consuming negotiation of ambivalence will stop and the subject can rest’ (159). Given the constant assault of the injuries of racialization, such a fantasy is certainly understandable, but Dottie occupies the centre of the book in large measure because of her liquid attempts at sense-making and her refusal to validate the simplified dichotomies secreted by either the hysteria of the white majority or the mirroring response of black males.

In the last section, Michael’s summary of a reporting job interviewing rebels deep within the East African interior is at turns sarcastic, at others bluntly direct about the discourse and the actions involved in the period’s civil wars, carried on in this case by ‘an assorted bunch of thugs’ who wield ‘wounded, psychopathic talk camouflaged by words like justice and freedom’ (314-5). As Erik Falk points out, in Dottie ‘the gap between high-flown political rhetoric and everyday practice is used to ridicule (Pan-)African nationalism’ (31). In contrast, after nearly a book-full of white people ranging from the reportedly hostile (Dottie herself encounters little hostility) to the more generally patronising and insulting, near the end Michael’s white father’s family in Cumbria ‘are wonderful people’ (318), and Dottie’s white friend Estella in the last part is unrelievedly supportive and close to Dottie (her possible distant trace of Algerian heritage as under-determining as Dottie’s own origins). The last section also brings the reuniting of Patterson’s family, which he brings to England (‘What is a man without his family’ he says, 324) and yet which signals a failure in the post-colonial project in Ghana, a strategic failure given Ghana’s status as the first black African nation in the British Empire to become independent. This failure is ‘[a]ll over Africa’ (323) says Patterson gloomily.

Despite Patterson’s bitterness about England, he has stayed there and in the end brought his family there. Geopolitical events can leave people with few and imperfect options, and how this imperfection is dealt with determines the quality of our survival. In an interview, Gurnah has remarked that ‘human lives are inevitably sorrowful. I have always written about how vulnerable we are’ (Nair). Berlant asks ‘why the bad life is not repudiated by those whom it has failed’ (180), and speculates that a ‘normativity where there is no foundation for the expectation of it beyond a lasting fantasy can also be read as a form of bargaining with what is overwhelming about the present, a bargaining against the fall between the cracks, the living death of repetition’ (180). One of the negotiations in this bargaining concerns the fantasy of our status as private individuals over against our status as public counters and categories, but as all of Dottie suggests there is no stockade where one can be securely private, shielded from larger public forces and hierarchies. For some, this absent stronghold of the private is what is substituted at a larger order of magnitude by culture, a hermeneutic to read belonging into the fissures of resistant surroundings. In Paul Gilroy’s view, this is further reinforced when ‘Black Britain defines itself crucially as part of a diaspora. Its unique cultures draw inspiration from those developed by black populations elsewhere’ (152). And yet the more definitely identified the inspiration

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(Ghana, African-Americans), the more it fails those characters in the novel who underwrite their identities in these terms. Modulating the hermeneutic of belonging in terms of diasporic, chromatic or more narrowly cultural viability finds little traction in Gurnah’s fictional world for it all too easily accretes into bloc-thought, polarized dichotomies that mirror each other’s exclusionary logic.

Does this leave the individual and the private as the only potential guarantors of identitarian comfort? This sounds as if it would satisfy the neo-liberal desire for the consuming and manipulable unit, cut adrift from larger social polities that might mount opposition to its atomizing configurations. Gurnah’s symbolic drama, however, is not so much a plea for the unreferenced individual, as a challenge to rethink connection and the story-lines that enable it. In Felicity Hand’s view, ‘personal memories - however exciting and stimulating - on their own provide little more than vicarious pleasure and fail to serve as a model for future generations’ (78). At the end, Dottie and Michael are talking about origins, about family, and he wonders whether she might investigate her family as he is investigating his. After all, his investigation has brought them together, a connection between very different family histories, cutting athwart cultures, and given that it has ultimately ensued through the solidarity of skin colour flowing between Michael’s grandfather and Dottie, confirming Gilroy’s supposition to some extent. What appeared the drama of recognition between individuals is recuperated for inclusive ways of being British that slip between both the ‘culture’ of Britishness or Englishness and the ‘culture’ of anywhere else: Michael, Dottie and Estella’s heritages are non-standard in terms of conventional scripts of belonging, and so is everyone else’s in the novel as far as one can tell. Not knowing about the families of others stunts the possibility of positive connections. When she finds out that social worker Brenda’s husband is dying, Dottie realises she had not thought about Brenda’s family, but only about herself. Brenda had been representative of a system and not an individual, serving to confirm Dottie’s expectations of her own position as a raced counter (144).

Berlant warns against the understandable comfort recognition may bring to individuals:

Self-transforming compassionate recognition and its cognate forms of solidarity are necessary for making political movements thrive contentiously against all sorts of privilege, but they have also provided a means for making minor structural adjustments seem like major events, because the theater of compassion is emotionally intense. (182)

While so-called ‘minor structural adjustments’ do not add up to the revolutionary programme implicitly favoured in Berlant’s comment, Gurnah knows all too well what major structural adjustments of this sort feel like, an intensity whose destructive energies find a ready explanatory framework in the notion of ‘a culture’. The optimism of imagining that things can improve is confirmed, when it is, in daily low-level interaction, not in convulsive ‘major’ events. The women at Dottie’s factory, while unabashedly racist, are mostly ‘pleasant to Dottie’ (56) and able to come to a good-humouredly gendered conclusion in which black men ‘can’t be worse than this lot we’ve been lumbered with … Just the same ‘effin buggers that men always is’ (sic 56; italics in original). When Dottie’s grandfather Taimur Khan arrives in Cardiff he tolerates with equanimity both the ‘petty persecutions’ in the street (18) and overzealous attention in his lodgings to ‘the call to prayer’ (19). After all, given human beings’ propensities, ‘where had he been where strangers were not treated with high-handed mockery?’ (18-19). When the mockery mutates into the major event of racist rioting and violence in Cardiff in 1919, the possibility of what Jonathan Keates refers to in conjunction with Gurnah’s work as ‘a sublime pragmatism’ (23) is clearly diminished.

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Dottie, Cruel Optimism and the Challenge to Culture

The novel portrays enough of Dottie defying authority, refusing to accept the colour and class script written for her, resisting men’s control of her, and interrogating the solutions offered by others to suggest that her pragmatism is not supine accommodation. After repeated examples of sundered family histories Dottie finally comes to realise that the self cannot auto-generate, but the answer is not to resignify herself as belonging to a cultural origin, ‘moral agency … reduced to cultural puppetry’ in Benhabib’s words (89). At the end answers may now involve investigating her own family’s trajectories, but this is only admitted as a licit aim, not as something that is a priority for Dottie. Her priority remains the pragmatic focus on ‘what we do, how we live’ (332). Berlant might see this as ‘an effect of the relation between capitalism’s refusal of futurity in an overwhelmingly productive present and the normative promise of intimacy’ (189), but in Dottie the danger of individuals’ weakened resistance to power lies rather in aligning themselves with groups, principally those groups called cultures whose normative promise of inclusion substitutes for thought processes potentially capable of re-thinking established hierarchies. Thus it is that virtually the whole novel represents Dottie’s thought in process, rather than clearly achieved conclusions, an optimism whose vindication is cruelly deferred only if we read optimism as requiring total and permanent confirmation. Berlant’s thought undergoes its own modulations when she admits that ‘optimism might not be cruel at all, but the bare minimum evidence of not having given up on social change as such’ (259). In her incremental movements towards economic and affective resistance to the varied forms of racism and exclusion that have patterned her life, Dottie provides a lesson in the resistance of the examined life, the optimism of thought.

WorKs citEdAugé, Marc. An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds. Trans. Amy Jacobs. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1999.Bardolph, Jacqueline. ‘Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Admiring Silence: History, Stories

and the Figure of the Uncle’. Contemporary African Fiction. Ed. Derek Wright. Bayreuth: Eckhard Breitinger, 1997. 77-89.

Benhabib, Seyla. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.Bungaro, Monica. ‘Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Dottie: a Narrative of (Un)belonging’. Ariel 36(3-4),

2005: 25-41.Falk, Erik. Subject and History in Selected Works by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yvonne Vera, and

David Dabydeen. Karlstad, Sweden: Karlstad University Press, 2007. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Dottie. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990.Gurnah, Abdulrazak. ‘Matigari: A Tract of Resistance’. Research in African Literatures 22.4,

Winter 1991: 169-172.Hand, Felicity. ‘Untangling Stories and Healing Rifts: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea’.

Research in African Literatures 41.2, Summer 2010: 74-92.Keates, Jonathan. ‘Travels with a perfumed casket’. Rev. of By the Sea. TLS. 25 May 2001: 23.

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Leys, Ruth. From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Nair, Vijay. ‘In Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah’. http://archive.deccanherald.com/Deccanherald/may152005/artic114802005513.asp Deccan Herald. 15 May 2005. Accessed on 18 January 2012.

Nair, Vijay. http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald /mayl 52005/articl 148020055 1 3.asp. ‘In Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah’.Deccan Herald 15 May, 2005. Accessed 20 January 2012.

Steiner, Tina. ‘Writing “Wider Worlds”: The Role of Relation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Fiction’. Research in African Literatures 41.3, Fall 2010: 124-135.

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