Between rocks and hard places..
Dr Marcus Chalfer begins a new chapter in our genetic future in 1992, he believes, man makes himself after all and he is responsible for what he makes.
The simple biological facts, he thought, the structure of animal cells for instance are mystery to all but 14-year-old children and scientists like himself.
The former spending their time drawing them in class, and himself injecting his laboratory mouse with foreign DNA.
In between, flows a great ocean of anima-right activitst, students of politics, fundamentalists who professed strange objections to his life's work.
If it were not for the mouse that would be little interest in his work. To determine a mouse's future stirrs people up.
It isn't determining the future of a cancer, it is determining the future of the mouse.
They seem unable to think of the animal as site, a biological site for experimentation into heredity, into disease, into mortality...
Marcus, the scientist argues: "All animals are in a sense programmed to die. It's perfectly natural. If it appears random, that's only because we don't clearly understand it...."
"...why some people seem predisposed to cancer, why some people die of natural causes at 63 and some at 97..."
"...surely the point of the laboratory mouse is that we are given the opportunity to see a life and a death stage by stage unedr the microscope."
His son, Marcus junior, a young environmentalist of the year strongly believes in every creatures' right to live.
Marcus, the scientist feels as he does abut all human decisions of this kind. One can neither agree or disagree with them as ideas...
...there is no rhyme, nor reason for so much of what people do. And in his present estrangement from his son he feels more powerless than ever.
Marcus junior, the environmentalist, believes in his first commitment to animals and yet can he harm his father?
He wants to be more proactive in the face of future. He has thought a lot about extreme decisions. It always seems more likely to him that he will just return to his room...
...and calmly finish constructing Lego Medieval Castle. What else can he do?
What other choices can he be certain about?
Because choices need time, the fullness of time, time being the horizontal axis of morality - you make a decision and then you wait and see...
But 12-years old scientist's son feared the consequences and it is the same now...
...always the fear of consequences, what he is about to do to his father is so colossal, the consequences are inconceivable...
...he can not imagine a moment occuring after that act, only blackness, nothingness, something like the end of the world.
And facing the end of the world, or even just the end of the year, has always given him a strangely detached feeling.
He glares up and down at the happy people watching his father presenting them his famous laboratory mouse. They are all confident that nothing will happen or cetain they can deal with it if it does.
But the world happens to you, you don't happen to the world. There is nothing you can do.
For the first time in his life, he truly believes that. And his father believes the direct opposite.
And there he realizes how he has got here. This is how we all got here. Between rocks and hard places.
The founder of the 'Keepers of the Eternal and Victorous Islamic Nation' was born in Barbados in 1960 to Presbyterian parents. He converted to Islam after a vision and went to study at Saudi Islamic University where he studied Arabic for 5 years.
He changes his name to Brother Krahim and comes to England. He locks himself in his aunt's garage in Birmingham and after that he starts to preach:
" My brothers, ideology means a kind of brainwashing, what is the result of this democracy - oppression, persecution, slaughter, chaos, disorder, confusion, the entire world is in turmoil, everywhere men indulge in promiscuity, vice, corruption...
...and indulgence, and on this day 1 December 1992 I bear witness that there is nothing worthy of worship besides the sole Creator..."
His speaches start to be widely popular within the black and Asian community, especially among the 16 to 25 age group.
Milat is preparing himself, the Metropolitan Police has their eye trained on him. Millat is stoned. He is ready for revenge, retribution, jihad but before that he stops at home..
His father, Samad Miah Iqbal opens the door angrily: "...the one I sent home comes out an Englishman and the one I keep here is fully paid fundamentalist terrorist...."
Milat passes him in the doorway without even looking at him. Samad closes the door and talks to himself more quietly: "We live in a place where we are never welcomed only tolerated..."
" Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil's pact, it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere..."
"...and then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging."
Milat listens in his room to his father's moaning, then just gets up and leaves the house again. He comes to Trafalgar Square.
In the distance Big Ben. In the square, Nelson, George IV...all the statues facing the clock. He asks himself: "Now, will somebody please tell me: what is it about the English that makes them build their statues with their backs to their culture...
...and their eyes on the time?" Then he nods to himself: "Maybe because they look to their future to forget their past." He sits on a bench nearby.
A few months after Milat's father arrived in England he has sat on the bench Milat is now sitting, nursing a bleeding thumb, the top sliced off buy a careless stroke from one of the older writer.
he was sent home. He went outside, sat on the bench and wrote his name with the dribbling blood.
Then, in an attempt to make it more permanent he had gone over it again with a pen knife, scratching it into the stone.
His father was depressed. Looking at it now, Milat feels nothing but contempt. All his life he wanted a Godfather, and all he gets a faulty, broken, one-handed waiter of a man...
who has spent 18 years in a strange land and made no more mark than this.
"Don't you see, Abba?" whispers Milat: "That's the long, long history of us and them."
Milat was here to finish it, to revenge it. To turn that history around. He is stoned. He believes the decisions that are made, come back.
He believes we live in circles, his is a simple, neat fatalism: 'What goes around comes around."
He looks up and see Irie's face in a window of a passing bus. She sees him too for a moment...
like the moment between thought and speech, like the split second intervention of memory or regret.
Irie is 8 weeks pregnant but will never know if Milat is the father or his bother...because whichever brother it is, it is the other one two. She will never know.
Archie Jones looks at his daughter, Irie and she looks at him: " The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you. They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land, they need it...
...but what can he tell her? This is how we all got here. Between rocks and hard places."
Imagine the world
with no beginning
or end,
imagine,
if you can,
events in the world
happening
repeatedly,
endlessly,
in the way
they always have..
White teeth,
white clouds,
a solid block
of ice
appear untouchable
and yet,
heat
may crack it,
the interaction
creates change...
water for life,
disappears
into a dense fog
of nothingness.
Then
death
brings
its icy cold
breath
into emptiness,
the further interaction
creates change...
to its original form
of
white teeth,
white clouds
a solid
block of ice.
The continuity of life,
a sprawling tale
'...about how we all got here
-from the Caribbean,
from the Indian subcontinents...
and about what
here,
turned out to be.'
(Salman Rushdie)
On the outskirt of London
amid a restless hybrid
of voices,
tones
and textures,
on New Year's morning
of 1975
people are tired
of almost dying,
and yet,
life goes on
with a raucous energy
and confidence.
Archie Jones seals up the windows
of his car
and waits for the exhaust fumes
to fill his lungs,
failed marriage,
and a bag
full of kitchen appliances,
on his lap
this is what divorce is,
taking things you no longer want
from people you no longer love,
but dying is no easy trick...
For 18 years the butcher Mohamed
has been a victim
of serious physical attacks
and robbery,
without fail,
three times a year.
Knifed a total
of five times,
three fingers lost,
broken arms
and legs,
his teeth kicked out
and feet
set on fire.
He was a big man.
He gave as good as he got.
But he was one man
against army,
there was nobody who could help.
“Paki, why don't you go back to your own country?”
The culprits call after him,
teenage thugs and their parents,
the local football team
and mouthy, white-skirted secretaries
in deadly heels,
they are all white,
just like Archie Jones
trying to commit
such an unholy act
while parked
in front of his shop.
“ You must live life
with the full knowledge
that your action will remain.
We are creatures of consequence,
our forbearers knew it,
some day, our children will know it.
They will be born of our actions,
our actions will become their destinies.”
He pulls coughing Archie out of the car
throwing his bag after him.
Clara Bowden,
an unusually tall Jamaican woman,
raised as a Jehovah's Witness
sits in her room
just below street level
with bars on her window
and partial views
of feet,wheels, car exhausts
and swinging umbrellas,
such slight glimpses are often telling,
a lively imagination can squeeze
much pathos out of a frayed lace,
a darned sock,
a low swinging bag
that has seen better days,
its content spilling slowly
in front of her eyes...
She runs out and picks it up,
giving Archie a wide grin
that revealed
possibly
her one imperfection,
a complete lack of teeth
in the top of her mouth.
Archie sees her hither look,
tingled with sadness
and disappointment,
she doesn't have
a great deal
of other options
left,
she is 19 and he is 47.
Six weeks later they are married.
Nine months later
their daughter Irie
is born
as races mix
and bloodlines
half black
half white
watching her parents
through the grey-green eyes of loss.
And she grows
into a teenager
a stranger
in a stranger land,
unwilling to settle
for genetic fate,
waiting
for her transformation
from Jamaican hourglass
heavy
with the sand
to English Rose...
Her father, Archie,
his quiet fear,
his pigeon steps,
her mother
sneering
at his impotent indecision.
Only his friend,
Samad, the Iraqi,
has looked at him
with a great sympathy,
their wartime friendship
severed
by 30 years of separation
across continents,
but in the spring of 1973
a middle aged man
seeking a new life
with his 20-years old
Bangladeshi bride
seeks Archie out.
Archie is surprised,
does he remember him?
Oh yes,
he does...
the kind of friendship
an Englishman makes
on holiday
a friendship that crosses
class and colour
a friendship that survives
because the Englishman assumes
the physical proximity
will not continue,
and yet...
Samad Miah Iqbal is here to stay.
He works
as a waiter
for his younger cousin
in his Indian restaurant,
never seeing the sun,
never seeing his wife,
wanting desperately
to be wearing a sign:
“ I am not a waiter,
I have been a student,
a scientist,
a soldier once,
I have a wife,
we live in East London,
on the wrong side
of High Road,
I am a Muslim,
but Allah has forsaken me
or I have forsaken Allah,
I have a friend, Archie
I am 49
and I have twin sons
Magid and Milat.”
“ All I wanted was
two Muslim boys,”
Sadam said to Archie:
“ You teach them,
they don't listen,
you show them the road
and they take bloody path
to the Inn of Court.
You guide them
and they run away
from your grasp
to a Chester Sport Centre.”
Holding a five years old Magid
by his hand, he continued:
“ But if you could
begin
again,
you could take them
back
to the source of the river,
to the start of the story,
to the homeland...”
And that is
what he does.
One of them
is sent
to Bangladesh
to be raised by relatives
into a proper devout Muslim.
The people of Bangladesh
live under invisible threat
of random disaster
flood,
hurricane,
debris
and mud
everywhere,
but Magid
is not
the only one
who learns to hold
his life lightly.
While he watches
cyclone shaking things
from high places,
Milat on the other side
of the world,
is pushing his luck
along the towering wall
of the cemetery,
pot-smoking.
When Magid
returns
to England,
white-suited,
silly wig lawyer,
more English
than the Englishman,
his brother
becomes
the extremist
of Islamic faction
dedicated
to violent actions
and ridiculed
in the press.
Mr and Mrs Chalfen
have two
successful
scientific jobs
and two
whiter than white
well educated
sons.
This white
middle class
family
is asked
by school
to help
poor
and
disadvantaged...
Irie and Milat
are invited
for a lunch,
The proper lady
of the house
looks at them
the way
she has looked
at her delphinium.
There is damage here.
There is a quiet pain
in the first one,
in the second
there is
a deeper sadness,
a terrible loss,
a gaping wound.
A hole
that needs more,
than education and money,
that needs love.
She longs
to touch
the site
with her green finger,
close the gap,
knit the wound.
But they are foreigners
to her
as she is to them.
On the outskirt of London
amid a restless hybrid
of voices,
tones
and textures,
on New Year's morning
of 1995
people are tired
of almost dying,
and yet,
life goes on
with a raucous energy
and confidence.
Milat and Magid
stands face to face,
a loaded gun
between them.
“Do you really believe
there is a type of man
who kills and a type of man
who doesn't?”
Milat asks his returned twin brother,
“His family threatened,
his beliefs attacked,
his way of life destroyed,
his whole world coming to end,
he will destroy everything
that stays in his way.”
“It has long been my intention
to make the life of my people
easier,
new laws are required
to deal with our unlucky fate.
The English fight fate to the death.”
Magid looks Milat
closely into eyes.
“So we both say, it has to be!”
Milat points his gun at him.
“It doesn't have to be.”
Irie appears from nowhere
and grabs the gun.
“Nothing does.”
Milat steps forward
shading his violet eyes
from a fading hatred
in his heart.
Magid embraces him,
his tensed
high cheekbones
released
in a beautiful smile.
Irie kisses them both.
Their past,
present
and future
is linked
as races mix
and bloodlines,
like attracts like,
the feeling of belonging
nowhere
that comes to people
who belong everywhere.
They are all,
she has got,
they need her,
and she gives herself
to them,
body and soul.
Nine months later
their daughter Beauty
is born
as races mix
and bloodlines
half black
half white
and half brown
watching her parents
respectable Mr and Mrs Chalfen
through the violet eyes of loss,
her high cheekbones released in half smile,
unaware,
that just beyond
the corner,
on the wrong side
of High Road,
one or two,
of her real fathers live.
That is how
Beauty
gets to be
the new 'English Rose'.
That is how
we all get here,
between rocks
and ice
and hard places....
This story has no end,
or does it?
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
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