Anthony House
English 497-01
Fr. Alvaro Ribeiro, S.J.
5 December 2001

Hierarchy and Nativity: Booker Authors, Homeland
Alienation, and Social Stratification

The Booker Prize stands firmly among modern literature’s most prestigious awards. With the exception of the United States, the prize considers novels from the grand majority of the English-speaking world, a daunting task by almost any standard. Compounding the awards’ intensity is its singularity. The Booker Prize charges its judging panel to do no less than "reward the best novel of the year." Competition, then, is fierce. Among novelists, a nod from the Booker panel—even to the shortlist—is a coveted accolade. Booker authors, though, are not a homogeneous group. Recluses (J.M. Coetzee, for example) and eccentrics (Beryl Bainbridge comes to mind) are included in the Booker’s elite ranks. First-novel authors such as Arundhati Roy stand alongside literary powerhouses like Margaret Atwood. Some are English, born and bred, but many come from the Commonwealth. Of the latter, many have left their nations of origin, taking up residence in England or the United States. These authors, alienated from their homelands, face particular challenges in their creative endeavors. Salman Rushdie—author of the Booker of Bookers, Midnight’s Children—has written extensively about his experience as an "alienated author." His observations on author-homeland estrangement are a useful lens through which to view the works of other novelists, whether similarly situated or not.

In "Imaginary Homelands" Rushdie defines the alienated author as a cultural translator: "It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained" (Rushdie, Homelands 17). Though the novelist’s separation from his homeland obliges his cultural translation, the primary motivation for such translation is the combination of physical and temporal distance with creative nostalgia. Under the influence of nostalgia, current experience loses its claim to primacy, and history gains ground. Rushdie contends that "it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time" (9). This phenomenon produces a sense of dual alienation, whereby that which is immediately accessible is foreign while that which is home is permanently absent. Restoration of the lost home becomes the calling of the alienated author, who is "haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into [a pillar] of salt" (10). This task is not easy, though; Rushdie admits that it is impossible to reclaim the past with any pretence of perfection. Speaking specifically of his Indian compatriots, Rushdie concedes "that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind" (10). The mental creation of an imaginary homeland, though, does not free the alienated author from his struggle. As Rushdie says, "description is itself a political act" (13). The act of creating a public narrative—even one as steeped in magic realism as Midnight’s Children—maps an imaginary homeland onto a real one. In such cases, description is hyperpoliticized. To a certain extent, of course, every author is in the business of creating imaginary homelands. The preponderant concern of Booker books with social strativicatioin, then, is hardly surprising. Still, Rushdie would argue that the alienated author creates an acutely imaginary homeland, growing from an identity that "is at once plural and partial" (15). Pluralistic identity directly informs Midnight’s Children’s approach to issues of class. The same is true for Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, though, provides the contrast of a fundamentally Indian perspective (as does the work of white South African author J.M. Coetzee). Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love takes a pluralistic view of social hierarchy similar to Rushdie’s, but within an Egyptian context. In The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro creates an imaginary homeland unique among Booker Prize novels. In each of these cases, the literary depiction of social power differentials reflects the degree to which an author is alienated from his homeland.

Taking Rushdie’s words to heart, a careful reading of Midnight’s Children provides practical examples of the ideas he expresses in his essay. Rushdie has experienced a full range of alienating circumstances. He has been emigrant, expatriate, and exile. Rushdie was an alien of sorts from birth, born to a Muslim family in a predominantly Hindu nation at the eve of its independence. At fourteen, Rushdie moved to England to attend the Rugby School. A few years later, his parents reluctantly joined the Muslim exodus from India to Pakistan as the two nations moved ever closer to war with one another ("Rushdie"). Rushdie continued his schooling at King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied history. On graduating, Rushdie moved to Pakistan and worked in television for a short time before returning to London’s theatre community. Over the next ten years, leading up the publication of Midnight’s Children, Rushdie worked as a freelance advertising copywriter. He made his authorial debut with Grimus in 1975. His first marriage, which began in 1976 and lasted eleven years, gave Rushdie one son. The publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981 launched Rushdie into the international spotlight. Eight years later, though, he was forced into hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him in response to controversial portions of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. From hiding, Rushdie continued to write, publishing several novels and a compilation of criticism. In 1993, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named him an honorary professor of the humanities. The fatwa was lifted officially in 1998. Though the Ayatollah Hassan Sanei maintains a reward for Rushdie’s murder, the author has come out of hiding recently, moving from London to New York last year.

In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie recreates his homeland, personifying India in the quasi-autobiographical protagonist Sleem Sinai. Sinai’s birthlink to the young state makes his saga the saga of India generally. Written from outside India, the class issues at stake in Rushdie’s novel relate Sinai to his peers and India to hers. At the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, India is born. So is Saleem Sinai. "Clockhands joined palms in respectful greeting" as he comes into the world (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 3). Sinai’s good timing earns him more than the welcome of the Prime Minister. It links him (and midnight’s thousand other children) to the Indian nation: "All over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents—the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history" (132). Even without his claim as a child of the fourth dimension, Sinai would hardly merit the label of his parents’ offspring. Sinai’s conception is a direct result of the "little game" that "a departing colonial" played with Vanita, the wife of Wee Willie Winkie (105). His status, though, results from the work of his unknowing, ethnically Muslim "parents" and the deceit of a well meaning (if poorly guided) Christian woman. The seeming simplicity of Sinai’s identity belies its inherent complexity. Who are his true parents? He claims several throughout the novel: time; the departing colonial William Methwold; his birth mother Vanita; her husband Wee Willie Winkie; Mary Pereira, who made him a changeling; and his adoptive parents, Amina and Ahmed Sinai. In its sheer complexity, the modern state of India has roots that very much resemble Sinai’s. Publicly presented as the creation of the people of the subcontinent, the influence of the departing British went largely unacknowledged. Furthermore, though various factions were involved in her creation, the infant state was immediately placed in the hands of the privileged class. Rushdie calls India "the new myth—a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the other two mighty fantasies: money and God" (125). The myth of India, though, cannot maintain its mystical aura for long.

For Sinai and India, pluralistic origins create both opportunities and problems. Unlike Sinai, though, India must address more than simply her political infancy. With independence, India becomes a unified whole for the first time in hundreds (if not thousands) of years and finds herself obliged to create a cohesive national identity. Clearly, thousands of years of cultural history are not readily mapped to a political system that is more accurately measured in days. The variety of forces acting in the creation of India’s modern state leave her politically independent from Britain but still very much reliant on the British administrative legacy. When those forces fall out of accord India and her citizens find themselves split between mutually exclusive loyalties. In Sinai, the war with Pakistan creates a similar crisis for him personally. Not only does he become a part of "the biggest migration in the history of the human race;" he also joins Pakistani forces against his former compatriots (411). Universally disillusioning, the war leaves both Sinai and India in states of semi-orphanage. Sinai loses his parents to a bomb; India permanently alienates millions of her original citizens. Perhaps more importantly, though, the war altered familial ties: "When mad aunt Sonia heard that I had fought on the wrong side in the war, she refused to feed me" (451). In India’s case, the war created a rift between the subcontinental siblings, India and Pakistan. Either way, the social hierarchies embedded in India’s creation assert themselves during this crucial period. The novel’s focus on sociopolitical hierarchies at the international level seemingly reflects Rushdie’s own international perspective.

Anita Desai examines an entirely different aspect of Indian systems of social power. Though she maintains links to India, Desai, to has spent much of her adult life in England and America. Her concerns in depicting the social structure of her homeland are distinct from Rushdie’s. Born in 1937 to a Bengali father and a German mother in Mussoorie, north of Delhi, Desai published her first English story by her tenth birthday ("Anita Desai"). She attended Queen Mary’s Higher Secondary School and Miranda House, Delhi University, where she received her BA in English literature in 1957. Her first and only marriage, which began the year after her graduation, produced four children. Five years after marrying, Desai published her first novel. Since then, Desai has written more than a dozen books while amassing an impressive list of credentials. She has taught at Girton College and Clare Hall, Cambridge, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Barnard, and MIT, where she remains a professor of writing. She has written several reports for the UN and UNICEF. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature at London and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born into a pluralistic family, Desai has lived throughout India, England and the United States during the last half-century. Desai continues to teach one term each year at MIT, spending several months in India annually.

In Fasting, Feasting Desai explores the social structures affecting women in her native India and her adoptive Unites States. While Rushdie uses internal class distinctions allegorically in Midnight’s Children, Desai ignores those distinctions, focusing rather on the manner in which social power is allocated according to sex and the consequences of that allocation. In India, men openly enjoy higher social standing. Though there are hints that women’s status is improving slowly, the indicators of that improvement are viewed with disdain. Mama fondly recalls her childhood, for example: "In my day, girls in the family were not given sweets, nuts, good things to eat. If something special had been bought in the market…it was given to the boys in our family" (Desai 6). The parents imply the importance of masculinity in other ways, as well. Arun’s birth ("A boy…at last!") is the only event that elicits any sort of positive emotional response from Papa, who leaps over "three chairs in the hall, one after the other, like a boy playing leap-frog, his arms flung up in the air and his hair flying" (17). Such overt indications of the preferential option for the male are exceptional, though. For the most part, MamaPapa enforce a gendered hierarchy through more subtle means. When Mrs. O’Henry invites Uma to a coffee party, for example, MamaPapa dismiss the possibility entirely. Social events in the house family are reserved for Papa’s work, claims Mama: "we have to invite certain people, and we have to visit them. But where is the need for you to go running after Mrs. O’Henry?" (113). Similarly, the imposition of marriage on girls of a certain age is taken for granted: "it was is if their mothers had been tending them, in their flowerpots, for just this moment when their cheeks would fill out and their lips take on a glisten and all the giggles and whispers would arrive at that one decision – marriage" (66). Uma has a difficult time accepting (or, for that matter, finding) her inevitable marriage. Her parents, though, "see no reason to continue her studies beyond class eight" (74). Their decision to discontinue Uma’s education leaves her dually ill-equipped for the world, particularly after several failed attempts at finding her a suitable husband.

So Uma remains single and dependent. This, of course, is as much a blow to her parents as the loss of two dowries. Uma becomes "an outcast from the world of marriage…all that mattered." She dreams of escape, though her options are limited. Uma cannot "visualize escape in the form of a career. What was a career? She had no idea" (131). Even if Uma had the training or the initiative to pursue her independence, she would meet with the unequivocal disapproval of MamaPapa, who see women as existing primarily in relation to their fathers or husbands Uma’s distant cousin Mira-masi is the first independent woman Desai presents. Mama, ironically, shuns Mira-masi as too "old fashioned" (38). Mira-masi has lived on her own as a pilgrim—a vocation Uma clearly admires—since her widowhood. Uma’s final hope of joining Mira-masi, though, is in vane; "she knew MamaPapa would never let her visit Mira-masi in the Himalayas; it was pointless to ask" (140). If pilgrimage is an unacceptable calling, a profession is all the more so. Though Papa is "quite capable of putting on a progressive, westernized front" in public, he views the unmarried Dr. Dutt as "an aberration he had to tolerate" (141). His toleration of her success, though, does not extend to approval of his own daughter’s joining in Dutt’s practice. He frowns a "frown filled with everything he though of working women, of women who dared presume to step into the world he occupied" (143). MamaPapa refuse, both actively and passively, to allow Uma to live independently of the male-dominated class structure they maintain. Despite numerous reasonable alternatives, Uma remains dependent on her father.

In the prototypical American family of Fasting, Feasting, women do not face the same sort of active social exclusion that Uma experiences in India. The passive triumph of masculinity, though, leaves American women in no better a position than their Indian counterparts. Seen through the eyes of Arun, Uma’s younger brother, American men are characterized primarily by their mild anger, indifference, and emotional detachment. Mr. Patton heads the American family with which Arun resides for the summer, commanding, marching, and generally assuming the role of a military commander. Patton, though, remains eerily distant from his troops. Facing disagreement, Mr. Patton withdraws, "walking off, denying any opposition, any challenge to his authority, his stony wait for it to grow disheartened, despair – and disappear" (186). The Patton’s son Rod is no more emotionally connected than his father. When Arun raises the issue of his sister’s bulimia, Rod "gives a snort that is both derisive and amused," but shows no concern (204). Though neither Rod nor Mr. Patton actively maintains his position of dominance, the indifference of each to the power differentials in their family perpetuates those disparities.

Defined by their familial roles as wife and sister (as opposed to the activity-based identities of employee and athlete embodied by men), American women have no means to effect change on their environment. Mrs. Patton and Melanie react to their general impotence in different but equally disheartening ways. Mrs. Patton plays "the role of distracting decoy" to her husband’s general perpetual state of mild agitation (166). She goes through her days pantomiming banal activities in an effort to minimize familial discord. She is eager to escape her mundane life, though, reacting to Arun’s novelty "as happily and eagerly as if she had discovered a new toy" (180). Melanie fares worse. Suffering under the tyranny of impotence within her family and the socially-constructed desire "to turn herself into a slim chick," Melanie exerts control over the only thing she can—her body (204). Mealtime becomes the battleground on which Melanie struggles for her independence. Refusing to eat with her family, Melanie maintains a diet of "cookies and candy bars and peanuts," forcing herself to vomit after bingeing (194). Her parents are too detached to notice her destructive behavior, and Rod sees it was necessary: "that’s all these girls are good for, y’know…they’ve got to sick it up" (204). Eventually, Mrs. Patton discovers Melanie "lying in her own vomit, her hair streaked with it, her face turned to one side, and it still leaking from her mouth" (223). There is no indication, though, that Mrs. Patton’s horror at the sight has any chance to bring about a change for the better for either herself or her daughter. Despite Arun’s appreciated parting gifts, the last scene of the novel depicts her as both numb and pathetic, "sitting on the porch with a box of tea on her knees and the shawl around her shoulders" (228). Desai’s depiction of life as a woman in India and America—both of which she has experience personally—exposes the dangerous consequences of powerlessness.

Arundhati Roy contrasts both Rushdie and Desai. Neither in hiding nor in the hallowed halls of American academe, Roy writes from within India, and her one novel, The God of Small Things, focuses more narrowly on her homeland than does either Midnight’s Children or Fasting, Feasting. Her life, though, has been as colorful as that of any other Booker author. The New York Times’ description of Roy as a "screenwriter and New Delhi aerobics instructor who was trained as an architect" gives a glimpse of her enigmatic existence (Bumiller). Roy was born in 1961, the second child of an unhappy marriage between a Bengali Hindu father and a Christian mother from Kerala; she has spent her entire life estranged from her father. Roy spent her early years in the Kerala village of Aymanam, receiving an informal education at a school founded by her mother before leaving home at the age of sixteen to live in squatter camp in Delhi (Simmons). Her life quickly became a whirlwind of activity. Over the next few years, Roy began studying architecture, married, abandoned architecture, moved to Goa as a flower child, tired of life in Goa, divorced her husband, and returned to Delhi. While working at the National Institute for Urban Affairs, Roy was offered a small role in a film by a man whom she would later marry. Roy moved to Italy on a scholarship for the study of monument restoration, where she realized her desire to write. She began work on a television series with her husband, but it was cancelled after three episodes. She began writing screenplays and criticism and, eventually, started work on The God of Small Things. The novel was a resounding success, in every way the Booker Prize defines success: literary, public, and financial. "Six weeks after completing the manuscript, Ms. Roy had already sold The God of Small Things to publishers in 18 countries…for a total of more than $1 million" (Bumiller). Squatter, architect, flower child, actress, monument restorer, screenwriter, author, aerobics instructor, millionaire: Arundhati Roy has not written another novel.

In The God of Small Things, Roy depicts the clash of the western experience of love with the Indian caste system. Writing from within India, Roy focuses on an aspect of caste she calls the Love Laws, "the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much" (Roy 33). The novel's treatment of social hierarchy centers on a single family and how a mother's disregard for the Love Laws affects both her own life and the lives of her children. From the beginning, Ammu ignores the relatively straightforward precepts of who should be loved. Her choice is final: "She had had one chance. She made a mistake. She had married the wrong man" (38). Her marriage, entered without the consent of her parents, produces the twins Estha and Rahel. Her husband’s abuse, though, prompts Ammu's unwelcomed return to Ayemenem. Ammu's aunt, Baby Kochamma speaks as the voice of propriety, of class distinction, of the Love Laws: "She subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parents' home. As for a divorced daughter--according to Baby Kochamma, she ahd no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daugher from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma's outrage. As for a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage—Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject" (45). It is the fact that Ammu married across caste lines that causes the greatest problems for Estha and Rahel. Ammu envisions them as "a pair of small bewildered frogs engrossed in each other's company, lolloping arm in arm down a highway full of hurtling traffic" (42). Unaware of their own precarious position, the twins have no way to prevent their mother's further transgression of the Love Laws.

Ammu's disregard for the Love Laws stretches beyond her ill-advised marriage. Her affair with Velutha has predictibly negative consequences. Velutha is a paravan, an outcaste "not allowed to touch anything that Touchables touched. Caste Hindus and Caste Christians" (71). In the eyes of Baby Kochamma, arbiter of propriety, untouchables are interchangeable and universally abhorrent. Embarrassed publicly by one paravan, "Baby Kochamma focused all her fury...on Velutha" (78). Ammu is clearly attracted to Velutha, who is consistently depicted in erotic terms. All pretense of restraint disappears in the first moments of their sexual encounter: "The cost of living climbed to unaffordable heights; though later Baby Kochamma would say it was a Small Price to Pay. Was it? Two lives. Two children's childhoods. And a history lesson for future offenders" (318). Truly, the price of their affair is enormous. It left in its wake both death and despair. It was not simply the affair itself which proved so destructive. It was also the betrayal motivated by Baby Kochamma's uncompromising adherence to the Love Laws. For Baby Kochamma, the crisis indicated by police involvement in the affair has a simple solution. She guilts Estha into complicity with her: "What's done is done. The inspector says he's going to die anyway. So it won't really matter to him what the police think. What matters is whether you want to go to jail and make Ammu go to jail because of you. It's up to you to decide that" (301). Estha caves to his baby grandaunt's emotional blackmail. The Inspector asks, Estha says yes: "Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt" (303). The rest of the novel hinges on Estha's lie. Upholding the Love Laws forces him to betray a loved one. The tense relationship of love and betrayal haunts him and Rahel for the rest of their lives.

J.M. Coetzee has also remained in his homeland. John Michael Coetzee was born in 1941 in the Karoo, a vast desert in the Cape province of South Africa (Head 1). He grew up speaking English with his parents, a lawyer and a schoolteacher, though the rest of his family spoke Afrikaans. Coetzee did his undergraduate work in English and mathematics at the University of Cape Town, and he received his masters from the same institution. In 1962, Coetzee moved to England, where he worked as a computer programmer. Three years later, Coetzee began work on his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin. From 1968 through 1971, Coetzee taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, when he returned to South Africa to begin teaching at the University of Cape Town. He published Dusklands, his first novel, in 1974. He has written seven novels since then, including two Booker Prize winners: Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999. Additionally, Coetzee has published his memoirs and numerous works of criticism. Coetzee has been professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town since 1984. A reclusive man, little can be said of his nonprofessional adult life. His succinct prose, though, speaks volumes about the social order in his native South Africa. Though the setting of Michael K is a dismal imaginary version of Coetzee’s homeland, its class structures are representative of those existing contemporarily in the South Africa of reality.

The Life & Times of Michael K is a story about race, disability, and social standing in a South Africa dystopically warped by civil war. The novel traces the life of its title character, a black man with mild physical and mental handicaps, telling the story of his struggle to escape the oppression and alienation which universally characterize his encounters with society. K’s exclusion from the normal realm of human relationships begins at birth. Anna K, Michael’s mother, shivers "to think of what had been growing in her all these months" (Coetzee, Life & Times 3). Michael responds to her aversion from him in kind. When he has grown, living together with his mother in her closet of a room, Michael finds her ailments disturbing, going so far as to turn "his eyes away when he had to help her out of bed" (7). Their mutual distaste for one another, though, does not break the bonds of responsibility implied by their close relationship. Her death, though, releases him from his sense of duty to her: "He tore a black strip from the lining of his mother’s coat and pinned it around his arm. But he did not miss her, he found, except insofar as he had missed her all his life" (34). K’s life in the Cape includes a level of alienation beyond that he experiences with his mother. In a society without castes, K is an outcaste: "because of his face K did not have women friends. He was easiest when he was by himself. Both his jobs had given him a measure of solitariness" (4). At once forced upon him and self-imposed, K’s separation from the larger community serves to lower his status further. K resolves to escape with his mother. Her death slows his exodus, but he continues without her. His decision to appropriate the abandoned Visagie farm offers K his first chance to claim dignity for himself. The arrival of the Visagie grandson ends that possibility. He mistakes K for an employee of his family, and treats him as such. Forced to provide food for the grandson and abort his initial attempts at farming, K reverts to his Cape Town self—serving his superiors while his own needs go unacknowledged. The presence of the Visagie boy transforms the freedom accompanying life on the farm into a mere extension of K’s previous state of oppression. K escapes further into the wilderness, emerging only when sickness forces him out of the mountains.

K’s return to civilization brings him in contact with societal forces even more willing to disenfranchise him than were his mother or the Visagie boy. Arrested as a vagrant and forced into an ostensibly voluntary work camp, K for the first time faces systematized maltreatment because of his class. To K, this experience is the most debasing of his life: "it was better in the mountains, K thought. It was better on the farm, it was better on the road. It was better in Cape Town…It is like going back to childhood, he thought: it is like a nightmare" (77). K escapes the work camp. Returning to the Visagie farm, he finds it abandoned once again. There, beyond the boundaries of a society that never embraced him, K begins to build a life of dignity for himself. The war, however, will not leave him to grow his garden in peace. Frail, sickly, and malnourished, K is captured for "running a stating post for guerillas operating out of the mountains, caching arms and grown food, though obviously not eating any of it" (129). His fragile health relegates him to the hospital ward of a prison camp in the Cape, where a condescending doctor spells out K’s dual roles of pariah and a prophet for the reader: "No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy" (142). K finds the doctor’s obsession with him and his story as oppressive as the work camp, though. Again, K escapes. Returning to his former home, K comes full circle. His encounter with the tramps at Sea Point reinforces his disillusionment with human society; their attempts at charity drive him away. He dies in the closet he once shared with his mother—where they have been replaced by "a dense clutter of furniture" more appropriate contents for the space (180)—still trying to escape the oppression and alienation that characterize his entire life.

Ahdaf Soueif, like Coetzee, speaks with an African voice. Her homeland of Egypt—though culturally, ethnically, and legally a world away from his—shares with South Africa a history of European occupation, a history that national identity still struggles to address. Soueif was born in Cairo in 1950, though she spent four of her first eight years in England while her mother worked on her dissertation at London University. There, Soueif "learned to read from Little Grey Rabbit and English comics" (Bloomsbury). At eight, she returned to Egypt to continue her education. Eventually, Soueif entered Cairo University, where she pursued a degree in English literature. She continued her studies at the American University in Cairo, where she earned her masters in English and American literature in 1973. Soueif returned to England, working toward a 1978 Ph.D. in literary stylistics from Lancaster University. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled Aisha and published in 1983, earned substantial praise from critics and was shortlisted for The Guardian Fiction Award. She has since written three books, one of which was banned in the Arab world. In the Eye of the Sun, published in 1992, was censored for its depiction of an Egyptian woman’s extramarital affair with an Englishman. Her works have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and Turkish. Additionally, she has written criticism, essays, and stories for periodicals throughout the United States, England, and Egypt. Soueif has two sons from her marriage to poet-biographer Ian Hamilton and currently lives in London and Cairo. Her own cosmopolitan life informs the approach she takes to issues of social power.

In The Map of Love, Soueif depicts Egyptian experiences of class in imperial contexts. Spanning the twentieth century, the novel examines the effects of empire on Egypt’s people. She contrasts the active form of British political imperialism in the early years of the century with the passive (though potent) economic imperialism employed by America in its last years. Under British occupation, unambiguous class lines exist between colonist and colonial. Egyptians, though subjugated, have the good fortune of being openly and publicly disadvantaged. During the first months of Anna Winterbourne’s visit to Egypt she admits feeling that, despite her desire to experience Egypt, something fundamental is missing: "there is something at the heart of it all which eludes me – something – an intimation of which I felt in the paintings, the conversations in England, and which, now that I am here, seems far, far from my grasp" (Soueif 102). Her previous letters to England give clues as to the source of her malaise. Anna, though physically in Egypt, may as well have remained in England. The infrequency of her contact with Egyptian nationals means that each encounter merits specific mention: "the apex of the Egyptian Winter Season: the Khedive’s Ball" is "the one Event here at which all the Nations mingle" (92). Besides superficial contact in her daily activities, Anna has little experience with individuals not directly connected to the British Agency in Cairo. She remains unaware of the severity of the break between the two peoples until she marries Sharif Basha. Arriving at the Agency to register her new marriage, Anna suddenly witnesses the ever-widening rift between the two cultures for the first time: "the place, once so familiar to me, grew strange as I saw the consternation in the faces of the staff and how they avoided meeting my eye as we were ushered through and into the Lord’s office" (320). Thenceforth, Anna’s observations are from the other side of the social divide. Having previously enjoyed the privileges of English birth, Anna’s loss of naivete quickly becomes indignation at the injustices of the British. Her anger is not limited to the segregation of élites. In her mind British occupation, which "had the sad effect of dividing the national movement," does great disservice to the people of Egypt as a whole (383). The imperial presence "makes itself felt at every turn" by every Egyptian (384). During British occupation, the search for an ideological foe is an easy one. Cromer’s administration oppresses the Egyptian people. Cromer represents Great Britain, so Great Britain becomes the clear antagonist for Egyptians.

The lines are not drawn so neatly in the last decade of the century. Most obviously, the decline of a clear racial divide has eroded the once insurmountable distinction between colonist and colonial in the upper class. For Sharif and Anna’s great granddaughter of mixed heritage, splitting life between Cairo and New York is neither unbelievable nor unworkable. For their grandnephew, living abroad does not oblige him to relinquish his deep concern for the well being of his homeland. Egypt, though, still answers to a western power. America’s imperialism is indirect and economic, and it serves to divide the governing class of Egypt from the majority of the nation. American financial aid is ubiquitous, and when "many powerful people have links to the West," their loyalty to their compatriots becomes questionable (230). It is more difficult to demonize bank transactions than British military blunders. The sheer power of the United States, though, forces Egypt to assume a reactive outlook. As with the British a century before, Egyptians must again evaluate their action with a mind to maintaining the goodwill of the United States. When a bomb kills eight people, the fear is palpable. Fear of American retribution rather than respect for life defines the event as a disaster: "Of course it’s a disaster. They [the Americans] won’t stop until they’ve ruined the country" (408). The tragedy in Cairo has drastic effects on the fallaheen throughout Egypt. In an effort to appease the West, the government declares a state of emergency. The arrest and presumed torture of thousands of Egyptian peasants follows. Some, like those of Tawasi, are saved by the resourcefulness of their landlords. The implication, however, is that most suffer needlessly because of the reliance of the upper class on Western favor. This aggravates the less fortunate: "Everything that happens they say Amreeka wants this" (176). Distinctions between America and the West have little meaning to the peasants, whose suffering cannot distinguish the two. In the end, the blending of the Egyptian and Anglo-American élites, though relieving tensions among aristocrats, widens the social gap within Egypt. So Egypt remains, in a manner of speaking, a colony.

Kazuo Ishiguro, standing among his peers, is an anomaly, and an amazing one at that. Ishiguro has been physically (though by no means culturally) separated from his native Japan for all but a few years of his life. His The Remains of the Day depicts an imaginary homeland unparalleled in Booker novels. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954 to two Japanese parents (which, in itself, sets him apart from many other postcolonial Booker authors). In 1960, he and his parents moved to the United Kingdom. It was not their intention to raise Ishiguro in England: "At the time, his parents thought that they would soon return to Japan and they prepared him to resume life in his native land. They ended up staying" (Bass). The young Ishiguro was raised in an insular family, clinging to its homeland in the midst of a very different culture. Ishiguro pursued his undergraduate coursework at the University of Kent and later entered the University of East Anglia’s prestigious creative writing program, from which he received his masters. He published his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, in 1982. Since then, Ishiguro has published four novels, three of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His almae matres have both granted him honorary doctoral degrees, and he has won numerous literary awards including, in addition to the Booker, the Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature, the Whitbread Book of the year Award, and the Cheltenham Prize. Ishiguro’s work has been translated into thirty languages. He continues to write today, living in London with his English wife and their nine year old daughter.

Ishiguro’s first two novels focused entirely on Japan. His third, The Remains of the Day, not only shifted that focus: it secured Ishiguro’s place among contemporary literary masters. In it, Ishiguro tells the story of Mr. Stevens, the aging butler of Darlington Hall. Stevens’s road trip across the English countryside to visit a former employee allows him to reflect on his career. His reflections tell the story of a man struggling to find value in a life centered on service to an English aristocrat with questionable ties to Germany’s nazi past. As much as anything else, though, The Remains of the Day depicts the evolution of British social class through the first half of the twentieth century.

One of the primary means through which Ishiguro communicates the characteristics of class structure is the protagonist’s interactions with his employers. The novel opens with a suggestion from Stevens’s new American boss that he take a brief vacation. Perplexingly, Mr. Farraday’s thoughtfulness initiates a crisis for Stevens, who takes it as an attack on his performance as a butler. He concludes that the invitation is a response to "a series of small errors in the carrying out of my duties" (Ishiguro 5). Though Stevens acknowledges that the offer was meant as a kindness, his preoccupation with it as an indictment of his professionalism reveals the extent to which servitude defines his worldview. The shift of the British upper class toward the general populous, symbolized by Farraday’s purchase of Darlington Hall, is lost on Stevens, who clings to a more traditional sense of class. Farraday’s nonchalant small talk is as troublesome as the suggested holiday: "It is quite possible, then, that my employer fully expects me to respond to his bantering in a like manner, and considers my failure to do so a form of negligence. This is, as I say, a matter which has given me much concern" (16). Though Stevens’s crises with Farraday depict the contrast between two forms of class interaction, his experiences with his former employer, Lord Darlington, provide a view of a social structure characterized by more clearly delineated class distinctions. Among the most striking depictions of the traditional class distinctions is the scene wherein a guest of Lord Darlington mockingly seeks Stevens’s opinion on several current events. Stevens’s simple decline ("I’m very sorry, sir, but I am unable to be of assistance in this matter") indicates that he values his lordship’s guests above his own dignity (195). His commitment to service is rewarded with ridicule. The death of Stevens’s elderly father provides another prime example of the social structure to which he is bound. Stevens’s primary commitment is to his life of service. His familial ties join his personal dignity as victims of Stevens’s social status. As he tends to the needs of Lord Darlington’s summit guests, he knows that his father lays in another wing of the house dying. Stevens clearly struggles with the situation. Even Lord Darlington notes his tears. Stevens, though, dismisses them as "the strains of a hard day" (105). In the end, by failing to step away from his work Stevens misses his father’s passing by four minutes. Interactions with both Farraday and Darlington expose some of the changes in class structure during the twentieth century.

Stevens’s musings on the nature of dignity provide a more ambiguous commentary on social hierarchy. Dignity, in the protagonist’s mind, is intimately tied to notions of class. "Great" men and women—the aristocrats served by the likes of Stevens—possess dignity innately. For anyone of lower social standing, though, "it is a prerequisite of greatness that one ‘be attached to a distinguished household’" (Ishiguro 113). For Stevens, dignity has a "crucial link with ‘greatness’" (113). It is hardly surprising, then, that the sale of Darlington Hall to an American causes Stevens to doubt his own worth. As if that weren’t enough, Stevens clearly maintains doubts about the greatness of Lord Darlington (and, therefore, the legitimacy of his own dignity). Both in Darlington Hall and while on vacation, Stevens denies having worked for the late Lord Darlington. Darlington’s memory is obviously a tarnished one, and though Stevens treats his repudiation of links to Darlington as a choice "to tell white lies…as the simplest means of avoiding unpleasantness," he clearly harbors some degree of shame about his former employer (126). Regardless, Stevens’s ongoing attempts to define dignity tend to make the term less applicable to his own life. He even goes so far as to reject an alternate definition of the concept, one that would allow him to partake fully. During his unintentional visit to the village of Moscombe, Stevens engages several of the townsfolk in conversation. One of them insists that "dignity isn’t just something gentlemen have. Dignity’s something every man and woman in this country can strive for an get" (185-6). Though Stevens acquiesces verbally to the sentiment, he mentally notes his disagreement, ironically citing his own embarrassment at the hands of Darlington’s elitist guests as an argument against the dignity of the masses. For Stevens, though, such repudiations call into question his attempts to balance his social status with his quest for personal dignity.

New York and London form the twin foci of the English literary universe. Both are also world centers of culture and commerce. That many authors move to either city, then, is not a great surprise. What is lost, though, when a foreign author chooses to live in the direct line of the Anglo-American cultural axis? Salman Rushdie would claim the reverse question is more appropriate: what is gained by the choice? An examination of several Booker Prize authors suggests that those novelists who migrate to England and the United States create novels with more obvious international implications. On issues of class structure, in particular, Booker novelists alienated from their homelands take a recognizably different approach than their fellow novelists who remain in their native states. Rushdie’s treatment of Indian religious tension is decidedly more concerned with that tension’s international implications than is Arundhati Roy’s treatment of the same concept. J.M. Coetzee’s discussions of racial and sexual imparity seem insular in light of Ahdaf Soueif’s approach to such issues. Certainly, such differences can be attributed in part to individual differences among writers. Though the generalization is imperfect, it does provide a relatively accurate heuristic for examining postcolonial Booker novels. The prestige of the Booker Prize relies largely on the variety of authors whose work is considered. Whether Commonwealth authors maintain close ties to their homelands or not, their work is integral to the narrative of the prize. Once recognized, trends among Booker authors can help followers of the prize to understand that narrative more fully.

Works Cited

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Bass, Randall. "Kazuo Ishiguro's Life and Works (1954- )." 18 November 2001. <http://www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/curric/english/resource/ishiguro/kibio.htm>.

Bloomsberry Author Information. "Ahdaf Soueif." BloomsburyMagazine.com. 17 November 2001. <http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/Authors/default.asp?id=43&section=1>.

Bumiller, Elisabeth. "A Novelist Beginning with a Bang." The New York Times, 29 July 1997, p. C-9.

Coetzee, J.M. Life & Times of Michael K. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Desai, Anita. Fasting, Feasting. New York: Mariner Books, 1999.

Head, Dominic. J.M. Coezee. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1997.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: Random House, 1997.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981 – 1991. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. New York: Penguin, 1991.

"Salman Rushdie." Books and Writers Website. 17 November 2001. <http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rushdie.htm>.

Simmons, Jon. The Arundhati Roy Web. 17 November 2001. <http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy/>.

Soueif, Ahdaf. The Map of Love. New York: Anchor Books, 1999.