THE RAINBOW SIGN

The Rainbow Sign

The Rainbow Sign

“From the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self. I was ashamed. It was a curse and I wanted to be rid of it. I wanted to be like everyone else.” (“The Rainbow Sign”, in: “London Kills Me”, p. 4). So wrote Hanif Kureishi in his autobiographical notes “The Rainbow Sign”. But in the London suburb Bromley it was impossible for the son of a Pakistani and a white Englishwoman to avoid the ingrained racism of England in the 60s. A teacher at his school refused to call him Hanif, preferring Paki-Pete. Kureishi responded by calling the teacher only by his nickname, whereupon he was expelled.

“I withdrew, from the park, from the lads, to a safer place within myself ... I was only waiting now to get away, to leave the London suburbs, to make another kind of life, somewhere else, with better people.” Young Kureishi began to listen to Pink Floyd and Cream and to write down the speeches of racist politicians like Enoch Powell, while hoping to leave the London suburb.

On getting to know the Black Panthers, he took down the poster of the Rolling Stones in his room and put up pictures of the icons of the Panthers - Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Kureishi viewed Islam critically in the form in which it was represented in the USA through Elija Muhammad´s “Nation of Islam”. He distanced himself from its black separatism and racism, as did James Baldwin. “Baldwin, having suffered … was all anger and understanding. He was intelligence and love combined.” Hanif began writing: “Perhaps that is why I took to writing in the first place, to make strong feelings into weak feelings.”

With his script for Stephen Frears´ film “My Beautiful Laundrette”, which he wrote while staying with his family in Pakistan and adapting Brecht´s “Mother Courage” for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Kureishi did not make himself popular with everyone, though his script was nominated for an Oscar, and the film received rave reviews. The Pakistani community was offended at not being shown as victimised or preferably heroic, and Pakistani organisations accused him of portraying Pakistanis as queers and drug-dealers.

Indeed, already in the opening sequence, Kureishi shows that he is not disposed to follow the clichés of the humble victim and the noble savage. The oily Pakistani businessman Salim, with dear clothes and cheap manners, joins with two Jamaicans in having white squatters thrown out of a building which he has just auctioned off. Kureishi here fictionalised what he took to be social reality: “Our cities are full of Asian shops … Those Pakistanis, who have worked hard to establish businesses, now vote Tory and give their money to the Conservative Party.”

They have managed to make the most of their opportunities, like Omar, Kureishi´s protagonist. He naively stumbles through his relatives´ conflicts between money-making, tradition, emancipation and the racist excesses of young white workers and also has to find his sexual ...