Warring selves : the quest for identity in selected works by Hanif Kureishi

Abstract

MODERN Britain is a study in contrasts and Hanif Kureishi uses them as metaphors for the postcolonial condition: between rich and poor, the upper and lower classes, native British and immigrant groups, pleasure and duty, fundamentalist and liberal, straight and gay, Christian and Muslim. THE CONTRASTS are reflected in the choices Kureishi's young British Asian male characters are called to make in the process through which they come to accept the fluid, mongrelised condition of the Self and society at large (Englishness) while rejecting a pure, dogmatic religious faith (Islam) and the previously desired assimilation into a British society defined as exclusively white. KUREISHl'S characters deconstruct the idea of the Self and the Other and the fixed, pure and homogeneous body of values the centre/margin model brings with it. He reveals these values as "historically constructed, corrigible formations" in projecting the warring selves within his male characters who fail to find the solution in a single, homogenous individuality. NEITHER do they accommodate the tension in Homi K. Bhabha's 'Third Space of enunciation' since the identity becomes necessarily a fusion of two cultures within one person whereas Bhabha maintains that the differences between cultures continue to exist in a complementary relationship, usually of productive tension. Rather they project a Self composed of an ambivalent pick from the postmodern supermarket of identities, a process closer to Salman Rushdie's mongrelisation.