The representation of London in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret : Home,neighbourhood,travel

Abstract

This article addresses the representation of London in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005), tackling in particular three aspects of the portrayal of urban space: the house or home, the neighbourhood, and travel within the metropolis. Through these features of the text, an analysis of the relationship between multicultural or cosmopolite urban communities and the spaces they inhabit is undertaken.

Introduction

Ishtiyaq Shukri wrote the award-winning The Silent Minaret, his only novel to date, while ostensibly pursuing his PhD at the University of London (Shukri, 2005b: n.p.). The novel, rather than being explicitly British or metropolitan is, as Sarah Nuttall argues (Nuttall, 2004: 731−48), evocative of a shift away from the dualistic reasoning inherent to South African scholarship (Frenkel, 2011: 119). The narrative thus emerges from a variety of narrators, locations, and temporalities, resisting the rigidity typical of Shukri’s national academic heritage. Indeed, the very form of the novel — incorporating a multifaceted blend of, for example, prose, prose-poetry, popular music lyrics, and apparently authentic documentation — gives an impression of arbitrariness and inclusion. Moreover, if it can be said to prioritize London at all, The Silent Minaret renders an intriguing sense of the city from the outside in rather than from the inside out, as shall be demonstrated. Certainly, as Jane Poyner argues, the text reveals the nexus between the colonial rhetoric of the past and contemporary expressions of “terror” (Poyner, 2011: 313–30). Moreover, Tina Steiner’s juxtaposition between Islam’s historical interconnectivity and today’s “nationalised world constricted by race and ethnicity” (Steiner, 2012: 181) is also indicated. M. Neelika Jayawardane reads Issa and his life as an exploration of autonomy (Jayawardane, 2014: 19) in the context of public narratives of the “war on terror”. While the global north’s preoccupation with “terror”, and, moreover, Western constructions of Islam and its practitioners are indeed pronounced aspects of Shukri’s novel, these are not my focus here.

Rather, the emphasis of this discussion is on locating Shukri’s work within the multicultural–cosmopolitan spectrum. If multiculturalism is founded upon the preservation of actual or assumed intrinsic differences, while cosmopolitanism is based upon negotiating such differences (Thompson, 2011), is an attempt at forging a universalizing philosophy evident in the text? Or is the conservation of discrete cultures a priority? My argument traces representations of the house or home, the neighbourhood, and travel in the novel’s urban space. The rationale for analysing these three sites is primarily that their curve of spatial amplification engages with varied (although by no means exhaustive) aspects of metropolitan existence. Moreover, the contrast between the private space of the house and the public situation of urban travel anticipates a comparable disparity to be read in representations of inter-cultural interactions within them. Here I shall trace the correspondence between spatial expansion and cross-cultural segregation.

It is therefore of note that the literature of London has a protracted heritage that has been permanently altered by the processes of colonization and decolonization (McLeod, 2004; Sandhu, 2004; Ball, 2006). As a space containing myriad communities (Jacobs, 1996: 4), it has been said that the character of contemporary London is intrinsically postcolonial (Gilroy, 1993: 57). Incidentally, the postcoloniality of this text is neither tactically exotic (Huggan, 2001: 32) nor hegemonically resistant (Ashcroft, 2001: 17) — to borrow from two dissonant notions of the postcolonial. Rather, its postcolonial methodology evokes the global changes of the aftermath of colonialism (Quayson, 2005: 2). Set predominantly in post-imperial London, it contains lengthy descriptive passages of the city’s multiracial condition (Phillips, 2004). Indeed, within the British context, colonialism was the mode whereby “race” was generated, with the two remaining inextricably linked (Tabili, 2006: 59). With over two million non-white residents at the turn of the twenty-first century (Ball, 2006: 4), London is today one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities in the world, second only to New York City (Racoma, 2013). Yet celebratory multiculturalism isn’t necessarily a defining characteristic of contemporary London, as the Prime Minister’s own troubling assertion of the failure of racial and cultural integration at a national level suggests (BBC, 2011). The metropolis, a site of constant encounters with “the other” (Barthes, 1981: 96) is doubtless the location sans pareil with the potential for transcultural conflict. Moreover, despite London’s cultural variance, little cross-cultural interchange actually occurs (Dabydeen, 1991: 104). London’s diversity thus does not necessarily indicate integration, assimilation, or cohesiveness.

The extant body of work on the city is, moreover, riddled with discrepancies. These include tendencies towards structural or institutional relationships, the function of economics and politics (Manley, 2011: 2), and the analysis of the evolution of human behaviour within such urban communities of hitherto unimagined proportions (De Vries, 1984: 14). It is therefore clear that in both its manifest reality and its critical discourse, the metropolis is a location of variety and dissemblance. Contemporary London, specifically, exhibits the characteristics of a “world city” (Massey, 2007: 7). The internalized influence of the “world coming into it”, and the externalized authority it yields through the “lines that run out from [it]” (Massey, 2007: 7), is a persuasive interpretation of present-day metropolis. Late global capitalism has resulted in the historical imperial capital being transformed into a “seat of neoliberal globalisation” (Massey, 2007: 11), a space that constantly and consistently impacts and is impacted upon by other spaces.

It might initially appear that today’s global capitalism functions no differently from the interconnection between the imperial metropolis and its margins. Yet it has been suggested that colonialism was the means by which London became a major participant in the globalized economy (King, 1990: 10). Parenthetically, this implies that London’s function within the neoliberal global economy is one of many derivatives of imperialism: tracing a mere linear continuity would be an oversimplification.

Nationhood and rootedness: The house and/or home

The portrayal of private living space within the novel is both detailed and consistently implemented. The house and home are quite different phenomena. Indeed, a house is delineated as a straightforward edifice “fit for human habitation” (Pocket OED, 1969: 426), while a home is defined rather more nebulously as the “place where a thing originates, is kept, or is native or most common, [or the] place where one is safe” (Pocket OED, 1969: 420). However, their conspicuous yet often neglected (Upstone, 2009: 116) recurring evocations in postcolonial literature are not merely incidental: the yearning to reconstruct “home” (Kuortti and Nyman, 2007: 192) is indeed central to diasporic literatures in English (Nasta, 2001: 7). As it has been succinctly put, “home and the domestic sphere, relatively free from colonial control, was the best guardian of the […] identity” of the idiosyncratic culture of the nation-state (Young, 2003: 97). The persistent and often troubled appearances of these motifs of nationalist experience (Grewal, 1996: 53) in postcolonial literature, perhaps suggest a need to articulate the disquietude surrounding many migrants’ troubled sense of cultural or national identity (Ashcroft et al., 1989: 28). To provide some examples of texts in which the figure of the house or home demonstrates a postcolonial fixation with residency (Ball, 2006: 92): Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys, 1966), The God of Small Things (Roy, 1997), and Small Island (Levy, 2004), all make ample use of this symbol. Indeed, Levy’s potent utilization of the theme to imagine the “possibilities for intimacy, community, and a multiracial future” (Brophy, 2009: 100) is perhaps most intriguing given the perspective of this discussion. The hypothesis of a profound, level sense of interpersonal solidarity, which is merely conceived of rather than manifest within the space of the nation (Anderson, 1983: 7) perhaps assists in elucidating this notion further. The discrepancy between the imaginative construction of the nation as a community and its actuality as a place of continuous conflict (Esman, 2004: 43) is perhaps one rationale for postcolonial literature’s utilization of the house or home as representative of the nation, and the concerns thus raised. In my analysis, I seek to enquire as to whether this space, as emblematic of the nation, is indicative of ethnic, cultural, or racial integration.

In Shukri’s novel, Issa’s room in Finsbury Park is divided from that of Frances, his elderly housebound neighbour, only by “cheap paper-thin walls” (2005a: 14). ¹ Despite the isolation of Issa’s existence, Frances is able to recount his routine in great detail, from his “[not eating] very much” (17), to his avid consumption of “[newspaper] articles” (17) and his regular visits to the “fruit vendor outside the station” (18). The house, although thus instantly established as an environment of collective communality and experience, is also evidently one in which discretion would be almost inconceivable. Moreover, Frances’s own experience of the house is delineated in terms of transience and fluctuation — the mention of “portable altars, portable surgeries, portable meals” (21), coupled with the social worker’s vanishing act “through the door” (21) evidently evoke an atmosphere of irresolution and mutability.

Vasinthe and Gloria’s house, furthermore, although not located in London but in Taung, is also worth consideration. Here is a subversion of the traditional family home narrative: Gloria appears to perform the conventional female household role in her “[supervision]” (199) of the “two young girls” (199) cleaning the house while Vasinthe “retreats to her study” (199). While no explicit mention is made as to the nature of the relationship between Vasinthe and Gloria, it is the latter that “pours them each a cup of tea” (202) and insists that Vasinthe “‘take[s] a break’” (202). This destabilizing account of gender attributes, as “not expressive but performative” (Butler, 1990: 192), perhaps anticipates Issa and Frances’s relationship following his move to London. The household, and by extension, the nation, is thus presented as a space to be challenged and undermined.

Issa’s absence, furthermore, reverberates in Kagiso’s experience of Issa’s flat: “there isn’t actually much to pack. […] There isn’t really much to clean” (35). Indeed, the only item in Issa’s room that requires Kagiso’s attention is “the bookcase” (91). This immaculate item is itself described as a “towering city” (93) and Kagiso’s hesitancy in “dismantl[ing] it” (91) is perhaps indicative of a reluctance to interfere with the apparent regularity of metropolis. However, his discoveries upon finding it include, among other texts, a transcript of the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report” (93). I contend that trauma is therefore an inference of this portion of the narrative: in dismantling the bookcase and perusing some of its contents, Kagiso is able to begin repositioning Issa’s history within his own understanding (Caruth, 1991: 182) and thus begin to work through the disappearance of his brother. Perhaps the suggestion here is that in disassembling the bookcase, and demonstrating a willingness to grieve for Issa (Roberts, 2008: 164), Kagiso can therefore begin to acclimate to the distress (Gilroy, 2005: 99) caused by his brother’s absence. I argue therefore that both the house and home are presented in terms of cosmopolitanism. The lack of privacy in the Finsbury Park house between the Irish Frances and the South African Asian Issa, coupled with Frances’s experience of the ephemeral nature of the space, call to mind the longstanding association between cosmopolitanism and flux (Rumford, 2008: 53); the Taung house, moreover, is inhabited by a family of both black and Asian South Africans. Finally, to elucidate further on Kagiso’s experience of dismantling the bookcase, the text infers that in disputing an assumed sense of uniform invariability within urban space, the trauma of history can be uncovered, clarified, and settled.

To make some final remarks on the representation of the space of the house or home in the novel, it is initially worth mentioning that scholars have long argued that being established within a location is perhaps the most valuable and least acknowledged requirement (Weil, 1955: 53) of the human. Indeed, as Heidegger proposes, in his concept of “dwelling” (1971: 160), a truly legitimate existence for individuals is one that is embedded in a particular location. Although Heidegger’s notion has been critiqued on the grounds of its romantic and nostalgic tendencies (Cresswell, 2004: 22), it does suggest that the space of the house or home, as our initial point of contact with the world (Bachelard, 1994: 4), is integral to human, psychological fulfilment. However, the sense of fluid vacillation and changeability that pervades the representation of the spaces considered above evidently does not invoke them, or the nation-state for which they stand, as reliable standpoints from which to observe the world (Relph, 1976: 38). Shukri’s text treats the house or home as cosmopolitan rather than multicultural, and presents this space (and by extension the nation) as one worthy of challenge and destabilization. Moreover, the disassembly of the bookcase, itself symbolic of the metropolis, intimates that urban monotony must be interrupted in order to overcome the trauma of history. Shukri’s The Silent Minaret, in its evocations of cosmopolitanism rather than multiculturalism, coupled with its inferences of the potential lurking in challenges to the status quo, thus demonstrates a degree of optimism with regards to an assimilated and ethnically diverse nation-state. Although Shukri’s conception of the nation is imbued with suggestions of almost volatile changeability and flux, it can be negotiated to allow for both communal cosmopolitanism and the possibility of historical reconciliation.

A community enquiry: The metropolitan neighbourhood

The neighbourhood is derived from industrialism, with the latter’s division of towns into homogenized and bounded sections (Rasmussen, 1957: 197). This suggests that the concept of the neighbourhood, which is common to everyday parlance, is indicative simply of space or place. However, there is a dearth of unanimity in defining the term, an intriguing fact attributed largely to its range of “spatial, social, socio-spatial […] [and] functional” associations (Jenks and Dempsey, 2007: 153). Despite the fact that theorists have attempted the spatial classification of neighbourhoods as localities inside towns and cities acknowledged by inhabitants as discrete, imbued with both individuality and rough peripheries (Power, 2007: 17), the concept’s similarity to and interchangeableness with the notion of “community” clouds its definition further (Jenks and Dempsey, 2007: 153). It is, however, arguable that the neighbourhood, as an urban phenomenon — an isolated pocket of space within the larger metropolis — is more rooted in and concerned with place and time, while the community, with its added connotations of shared “values, activities, hopes and dreams” perhaps belongs more in the realm of the imagination (Niven, 2013: n.p.). To differentiate further between a neighbourhood and a community, it has been argued that contemporary technology has enabled people to have real-time, personal communication with geographically disparate entities, with the result that neighbourliness is no longer a requisite facet of quotidian existence (Amin, 2010: 55).

This rather dejected prediction for the prospect of community being embedded in space (Wills, 2013: 137) may indicate that while the neighbourhood does indeed endure, the notion of community is no longer rooted in location. Moreover, within the United Kingdom, there has been since the early 1990s a particular accentuation on the initiative that neighbourhoods with thriving communities will have a constructive effect upon various societal and economic after-effects (Shields et al., 2009: 422). Although this suggests the vital role the neighbourhood, with its potential for functional communities, is imagined to play in national wellbeing, the fact that public policy has emphatically addressed the issue intimates a level of dissatisfaction with the current performance of communities in the United Kingdom.

In Shukri’s The Silent Minaret, the area surrounding Issa’s Finsbury Park room is described by Frances as “vibrant” (19) due to the presence of “lots of Algerian, Ethiopian and Caribbean stores” (19). The tone, moreover, of her assertion that there it is possible “to buy almost anything you can think of” (19) constructs the space favourably. Cultural diversity is represented as impacting positively upon consumer choices, including the options for what might be termed culinary tourism (Zelinsky, 1985: 51). It is interesting that this notion of ethnically signified variety is played out in gastronomic terms: perhaps this motif of observing “public ethnicity” (Lu and Fine, 1995: 536) via the restaurant or shop, is somehow indicative of the perception of cultural authenticity. Moreover, Kagiso’s experience of “East London” (37) is initially bewildering: he confounds it with the location on the Eastern Cape of South Africa that bears the same name. Furthermore, Katinka’s comparison of “Brick Lane” (37) to “‘the Meghna River’” (37) further obscures the former’s actual situation in a British city, while simultaneously eliciting an impression of fluidity. Although the reader is at this point given subtle pointers as to the predominantly Bangladeshi nature of the neighbourhood, Kagiso studies a “long chain of graffiti” (37) which references 13 distinct locations, from “Israel” (37) to “Alsace” (37). Shukri thus demonstrates a revisionist inclination for dismantling the boundaries between West and East. Through exposing the labyrinthine bonds connecting geographically deviating spaces, he dextrously implies the compound, plural constitution of the globe.

Later, Katinka recalls her comparison of Brick Lane to “‘the Meghna’” (37) and describes the neighbourhood of Edgware Road as “‘the Euphrates, or the Tigris, or the Nile’” (189). While once again imaginatively constructing a London street as several large and shifting bodies of water, the local is further conflated with the global. Kagiso’s question, “‘Are we still in London?’” (189), destabilizes the security of location further. This is further developed in their discussion of the provocatively named “‘Baghdad Café’” (191), an establishment Katinka and Issa had frequented prior to the latter’s disappearance. Kagiso learns that they simply referred to it as “‘Baghdad’” (192), and through this unsubtle reference to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the reader learns that this is where Katinka finds Issa “watching the war” (192). In this instance, the local commingles with the global amidst undercurrents of military destruction, the conjecture being that the composite amalgam of which the globe is conceived in this novel is both a result of violence, and also the source of this violence. Through an examination of three different neighbourhoods in The Silent Minaret, a “‘glocal’” element (Bayart, 2007: 163) of the text is evident. The referential avenues of foodstuffs, disparate geographical locations, and globalized warfare demonstrate that the neighbourhood is a heterogeneous space of profound plurality.

Through the vehicle of the neighbourhood, therefore, while the concept of community is meagrely reproduced by the text, the contributions of migrants and their diasporas to the metropolitan and worldwide economy (Georgiou, 2007: 20) are prominent through allusions to sites of economic exchange including shops, restaurant, and cafes. Thus, the neighbourhood is first formulated as a dynamic space for the movement of capital, both within and outside its boundaries. That the temporal context of the neighbourhood is an epoch of admixture (Zachary, 2000: 277) is clear: the assortment of cultures living, working, and interacting with one another is a marked element of the novel. I therefore assert that only the neighbourhood of Finsbury Park is delineated in communal terms as it is the Irish Frances, referring to the South African Asian Issa’s activities, who portrays the purchasing options derived from the culturally assorted array of shops in a positive light. Conversely, although Shukri depicts Brick Lane and Edgware Road as both local and globalized spaces, the fact that they prioritize specific ethnic or cultural clusters (Phillips, 2007: 71) (predominantly Bangladeshi and Middle Eastern populaces, respectively), insinuates that community in these examples is evoked monoculturally. In sum, therefore, neighbourhood is not depicted as an inclusive or accommodating space, and community appears restricted within these metropolitan compartments to ethnicity, culture, and nationality.

Travel in urban space

In this final section of my reading of the novel, it is initially of note that examining urban existence through the phenomena of time–space motion and configurations of movement (Novak and Sykora, 2007: 148) is a compelling route through which to investigate the metropolitan condition. It is worth mentioning that contemporary urban travel is attributable to Western technological advancements, which, in the early 1800s led to the emergence of firstly the omnibus and later London’s present-day underground system (Ackroyd, 2001: 593; 567); the first motorized vehicles, moreover, manifested in London in the 1890s (Emsley et al., 2013). It is undeniable that the “postindustrial” characteristics (Schumaker, 2001: 1) of the early twentieth century, which were both induced by and manifest in mechanical innovation, made the metropolis a particularly uncomplicated space to navigate. As an immensely potent economic structure (Frost and Spence, 1991: 126), journeys within the capital are often motivated by capital gain, although leisure and tourism can also be considered incentives for movement. The age of time–space constriction (Massey, 1994: 43), of which the contemporary metropolis is indubitably a constituent, has had an acute impact upon personal and communal acquaintanceship with the urban (Harvey, 1989: 211). Indeed, critics and artists of the time treated the modern period’s progressive technological advancements with suspicion. The impression of psychological security within the city (Walkowitz, 1992: 39) was gradually subject to palpable erosion. Paradigmatic works of and on the modern, metropolitan era, including The Metropolis and Mental Life (Simmel, 1903/2002), The Waste Land (Eliot, 1922/2002), and Ulysses (Joyce, 1922/2010), are all indicative of the rapidly altering nature of the urban space, of which increased ease of movement within it was a derivative.

Despite the ostensible advantageousness attributed to the condensation of space and time in the postmodern age — an example being an abridged atlas’s listing on its cover the fact that over “30,000 streets” (The London Mini Street Atlas, 2010) can be condensed into the space of a pocket — some have viewed the technological advancements of urban travel as worthy of escape. Will Self’s championing of the merits of long-distance walking, as a method of disbanding the mechanical urban environment (Self, 2006), suggests that high-speed travel is in some way detrimental to human psychology. While Self’s practice of urban meandering (McDonough, 2009: 11) has been largely accredited to the notion of the flâneur, as outlined initially in The Painter of Modern Life (Baudelaire, 1863/2005), metropolitan walking’s function as a spatial allegory (Isin, 2000: 3) for actual occurrences in the space of the city is, indeed, longstanding. Furthermore, many contemporary London texts engage with ambulating in the metropolis — London Orbital (Sinclair, 2002), Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (Home, 2004), and Kingdom Come (Ballard, 2006) all incorporate the trope of walking the city. The gender and class politics of urban walking (McClintock, 1985: 81) are perhaps one basis for its recurrent evocations in metropolitan literature; the function of urban pedestrian travel in contemporary postcolonial literature, however, somewhat contorts the issues of male freedom and class authority. If imperialism denotes a crucial temporal moment of the formation of postcolonial national identities in antagonism with those situated within Europe (Chowdhry and Nair, 2002: 2), the class politics of postcolonial metropolitan rambling suggest the appropriation of the metropolis by those envisaged as necessarily worthy of exclusion from it. Therefore, due to both the prominence of the motif of walking in London literature and its undertones of power geometrics, it will, alongside the other methods of travel, now be subject to analysis.

To turn therefore to an exploration of the relationship between urban travel and the city as a culturally consolidated space in Shukri’s text, the first journey encountered by the reader is Kagiso’s “‘descent for London’s Heathrow airport’” (23). Despite the view available of the “enormous […] sprawling city” (23) below, Kagiso “closes his eyes” (23) in order to mentally inhabit “Johannesburg” (23). Once again, the notion of “glocalisation” (Robertson, 1995: 26) is instantly introduced; journeying into the city is imaginatively redolent of being outside it. This reciprocal correspondence between the local and the global is further evinced as Katinka recalls a summer tube journey — through the meteorological imagery of “cloudless day[s]” (33) in juxtaposition with “frozen motorways” (33), a plethora of locations is elicited, from “Russia” (33) to “Nairobi” (33), “the Caribbean” (33) and “India” (33). As with his representation of the neighbourhood, Shukri once again demonstrates a transnational propensity; in this instance, it is the medium of travel (by air and by tube) that enables the transcendence of space and place boundaries. This impression of situational interpenetration is metonymically reproduced during Kagiso’s later tube travels: uninterruptedly “walking the length of the [carriages]” (122) on the “Circle Line” (122), time and space are contorted and compressed as the train travels “clockwise” (122) from “Notting Hill Gate […] [to] High Street Kensington” (122) and then “anticlockwise” (122) from and to the same locations. If, for Shukri, the global is located within the local, then the local is itself a site of permanent fluidity and motion.

Kagiso, later “roam[ing] of the city” (116) on foot, observes “the destitute […] huddled in doorways” (116) with “faces […] obscured” (116). Pedestrian movement within the metropolis, with its lack of time–space compression, thus facilitates an awareness of the imbalanced distribution of economic resources. However, Kagiso’s attempt “to identify and embrace” (116) rather than “classify and exclude” (116) envisages the urban setting in an almost utopian manner. With the homeless people’s identifiable “faces […] [being] obscured” (116), Kagiso seeks the more universal features of the human body as a basis for formulating a sense of individuality; “ears, hands [and] fingernails” (116) are visually analysed in a quest for the attribution of a sense of character or identity.

Lastly, in considering Katinka’s drive “from Heathrow” (219) to the “Baghdad Café” (219) towards the novel’s conclusion, notions of simultaneity and flux are evoked through her “[drive] against the flight path on her right” (219). Transit into the metropolis is mirrored by journeys out of it; the city is thus unequivocally a site of perpetual, global movement. Moreover, after driving past “Hammersmith, Kensington [and] Knightsbridge” (219) the “boisterous singing” (219) of James Thompson and Thomas Arne’s 1740 piece, Rule Britannia, emanating from “Hyde Park” (219) provokes an array of conflicting sentiments for Katinka. Her personal and national “histor[ical]” (219) knowledge of the piece as symbolic of “relishing exclusion [and] celebrating subjugation” (219) collide with her “continued reverence […] [and] persistent tenderness” (219) for the “little corner of her past” (219) she cannot entirely discount. The piece’s overt connotations of patriotism, colonialism, and military power prompt Katinka’s imaginative digression on her despised childhood “excursions […] to national monuments” (219) in South Africa. This final construction of history as the catalyst for the convergence between the local and the global also contributes to an effect of temporal fluidity: that the chronicle of past, worldwide events, is itself a narrative of convergence, yet again suggests the novel’s cosmopolitan impulse.

It is therefore palpable that during the passages considered above, the issues of race, culture, or ethnicity are conspicuous only through their almost entire absence. Initially, the implication could be that through the medium of travel within the metropolis, the concerns of a multicultural space can be transcended. However, the function of travel here is rather more intriguing. Although travel enables Kagiso to witness the discrepancies in material prosperity within the city, movement within London is also denotative of movement outside it. As discussed above, despite the presence of socio-economic inconsistencies connoting the presence of racial, cultural, or ethnic inconsistencies in the metropolis, The Silent Minaret once again demonstrates a globally comprehensive perspective. Therefore, although through the means of travel in this text London cannot be read as a particularly ethnically, culturally, or racially unified system, the city’s incessant manifestation not as an unruffled midpoint of accepted standards (Tuan, 1977: 54), but as a space of international flux situates it firmly in the domains of both the local and the global. Katinka’s awareness of the historical integration of the globe also affixes a level of temporal fluidity to the established spatial liquefaction. In traversing the local, although it is not itself particularly internally assimilated, the interlaced connectedness of global “worldliness or cosmopolitanism” (Robbins, 1992: 171) is imagined.

Concluding remarks

To recapitulate on the topics and issues discussed above, and to consequently draw some conclusions, it is important to emphasize that the legacy of British colonialism, coupled with the subsequent effects of decolonization, has been instrumental in the contributions of myriad postcolonial writers on London. Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret is central to this urban and postcolonial lineage, and consistently evokes the metropolis as an unremittingly transmuting space, with the transformative possibilities for the reinvention both of itself and its inhabitants. If we consider Saladin’s final musings from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, they perhaps most poignantly express this notion. Saladin’s averment that “if the old refused to die, the new could not be born” (1988: 547), perhaps paves the way for the future racial, cultural, and literary regeneration of London, a route categorically traversed by the novel considered here.

In The Silent Minaret, although the nation is itself represented as a site of instability and traumatic history, the potential derived from the adaptive capacities of cosmopolitanism is gestured to by the use of the motif of the house or home. Moreover, in considering the neighbourhoods in the text, they are formulated as both local and global and imbued with elements of intercultural synergy, although they cannot be read as communal spaces of assimilation. Finally, through the mode of travel within the novel, the disproportionate allocation of socio-economic power is very much in evidence. Although London is definitively located within the global flows of population, capital, and history, it cannot be read as desegregated when traversed. In conclusion, therefore, what can therefore be apprehended is a general trajectory of spatial augmentation, from the house or home, to the neighbourhood, to the gross metropolis as a location of movement, which is mirrored by diminishing attestations of intercultural synthesis. In short, my analysis of the novel has discovered that just as the physical arenas considered here magnify in extent, so too does cross-cultural symbiosis wane.

To reiterate the queries I posed during my introduction, the objective of this discussion was to ascertain whether the novel somehow conveys a doctrine on bridging cultural diversity within the metropolis, or whether, within such a space, the preservation of cultural exclusivity, with its inherent undercurrents of conflict and seclusion, is an explicit and primary concern. The Silent Minaret, with its overt linkages between South African, European, and Asian histories, has been said to allow for the emergence of an innovative form of transnationalism (Rastogi, 2011: 30). This perhaps validates the fact of the text’s preoccupations as leaning towards a “glocal” cosmopolitan. The novel, moreover, with its constantly alternating temporalities, locations, and narrators, hints at the city as a space steeped in the history of other spaces: rather than being autonomously invested in its own collective unity, London in this text is instead a constituent of the consolidated nature of the globe.

Since it is arguable that Shukri’s novel is definitively evocative of the erosion of the rigid frontiers that have previously defined and encapsulated the nation-state (Mansbach and Wilmer, 2001: 65), a supplementary question arises. If within the British capital, immigrants and their descendants exhibit an unambiguous tendency for the preservation of their own cultures, and if the insularity of their nation-states across the globe is subject to corrosion, what is the reason for this evident metropolitan proclivity for cultural or racial seclusion? This is a subject that invites further research. Yet despite the increasing global interchange of people, information, and capital (Commission on Global Governance, 1995: 11), there remains an assumption that identity is inseparable from location (Vertovec, 2009: 87). As understood through this analysis, however, the metropolis is a space of human miscellany and heterogeneity, whether through nationality, culture, ethnicity, or history. To therefore conceptualize a strand of association between the physical space of the contemporary, globalized city and its inhabitants is practically absurd. The evident leanings towards pluralism that differentiate the contemporary metropolitan consensus from imperial societal hierarchy (Rex, 1983: 87) evidently do not equate to an alliance between people and location, or even between peoples within such a location. Finally, the fact that the current century is characterized as a key moment for the complete urbanization of the global populace (Koonings and Kruijt, 2009: 1) is worthy of further deliberation. If, as Michel Foucault suggests (Foucault, 1984: 57), the city is the foundation upon which the restructuring of the nation-state is premised (Ó Tuathail, 1996: 9), then surely novels such as The Silent Minaret call for a rethinking within the urban context, and, by extension, the global context, of the politics of affiliating the characteristics of a place with those of its people.