Hanif Kureishi - Love + Hate - Stories and Essays

‘And did he?’ asked Michel.

‘Later I saw them come in, a bedraggled bunch, the women weeping and the sweepress with a broken arm and bleeding head, as Yasin got me into the car and sent me away.’

‘You did a good thing, my dear.’

She took his arm. Her husband, walking beside her, looked at the lighted cafes, the churches and the shops, and hummed a song.

She said, ‘I want to believe that people can make good lives and can even be happy, despite what has happened to them and the burdens they have to bear.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It would be a good idea to believe that.’

The immigrant has become a contemporary passion in Europe, the vacant point around which ideals clash. Easily available as a token, existing everywhere and nowhere, he is talked about constantly. But in the current public conversation, this figure has not only migrated from one country to another, he has migrated from reality to the collective imagination, where he has been transformed into a terrible fiction.

Whether he or she — and I will call the immigrant he, while being aware that he is stripped of colour, gender and character — the immigrant has been made into something resembling an alien. He is an example of the undead, who will invade, colonise and contaminate, a figure we can never quite digest or vomit. If the twentieth century was replete with uncanny, semi-fictional figures who invaded the decent, upright and hard-working — the pure — this character is re-haunting us in the guise of the immigrant. He is both a familiar, insidious figure, and a new edition of an old idea expressed with refreshed and forceful rhetoric.

Unlike other monsters, the foreign body of the immigrant is unslayable. Resembling a zombie in a video game, he is impossible to kill or finally eliminate not only because he is already silent and dead, but also because there are waves of other similar immigrants just over the border coming right at you. Forgetting that it is unworkable notions of the ‘normal’ — the fascist normal — which make the usual seem weird, we like to believe that there was a better time when the world didn’t shift so much and everything appeared more permanent. We were all alike and comprehensible to one another, and these spectres didn’t forever seethe at the windows. Now there seems to be general agreement that all this global movement could be a catastrophe, since these omnivorous figures will eat us alive. From this point of view, the immigrant is eternal: unless we act, he will forever be a source of contagion and horror.

It is impossible to speak up for the immigrant or, more importantly, hear him speak for himself, since everyone, including the most reasonable and sensitive, has made up their mind that the immigrant is everywhere now, and he is too much of a problem. There is, of course, always good reason to be suspicious of agreement: there is nothing more coercive and stupid than consensus, and it is through consensus that inequality is concealed.

Nevertheless, the immigrant is easily dismissed and denigrated since he is now no longer a person. The recently arrived immigrant, the last through the door, and now settling down in the new country, can himself be disgusted by the idea of this newer arrival or interloper, the one who could take his place, because this threatening other does not resemble him in any way. The migrant has no face, no status, no protection and no story. His single identity is to be discussed within the limited rules of the community.

Too superstitious, ambitious, worthless and strange — deposited outside the firmament of the acceptable — the migrant is degraded to the status of an object about whom anything can be said and to whom anything can be done. One thing is certain about him: he will not only rob you of your wealth and social position, he will be monstrous and obscene in his pleasures. These jouissances, it goes without saying, he has obtained at your expense, even as he is subjugated as your slave.

As an idea, then, this concept of the immigrant is familiar, and the usual clichés — the confining power of negative description — apply, as they always have done to those shadows who haunt the in-between or border zones. The immigrant will be inbred, suffer from sexual incontinence and mental illness, and will be both needy and greedy. But in this particular form the immigrant is also a relatively recent creation. Since we depend so much on that which we hate the most, the worse the economy, the more the need for the immigrant — even in a time when we like to compliment ourselves on our relative tolerance.

Women, gays, the disabled and other former marginals might, after some struggle, have been afforded dignity, a voice and a place. Yet diversity and multiculturalism can become forms of exoticism and self-idealisation, and exaggerations of difference new types of conceit. Meanwhile, a necessary level of hatred is kept going with regard to the reviled figure of the immigrant. Integration can never continue; there has to be someone shoved off the map. Today it will be him, and tomorrow someone else: the circulation of bodies is determined by profit. The rich buy freedom; they can always go where they like, while the poor are not welcome anywhere. But, all the time, by some perverse magical alchemy, those we need, exploit and persecute the most are turned into our persecutors.

Others only have the power we give them. The immigrant is a collective hallucination forged in our own minds. This ever-developing notion, like God or the devil, is an important creation, being part of ourselves, but the paranoiac, looking wildly around, can never see that the foreign body is inside him. Of course not: when the world is divided so definitively into the Hollywood binary of good and bad, no one can think clearly. Hate skews reality even more than love. If the limits of the world are made by language, we need better words for all this. The idea of the immigrant creates anxiety only because he is unknown and has to be kept that way.

This group fantasy and prison of cliché — a base use of the imagination — reduces the world to a Gothic tale in which there is only the violence of exclusion, and nothing can be thought or done. If it could be, the stranger, with a mixture of naivety and knowing, might be in a position to tell us the truth about ourselves, since he sees more than we know.

Luca said goodbye to the party host; he left the alcohol and his friends, took a last look back, almost waved, as if he were going into permanent exile, and went to find his coat with relief, but not without regret. Many of the most important people in his life — some he had known since he was eighteen and worked for a small theatre magazine — were laughing and drinking on comfortable sofas in that large room hung with modern paintings. Others were talking and smoking outside, on the balmy balcony overlooking the city. As it was a seventieth birthday party, a few of his friends had their grown-up children and even their grandchildren with them. Most of the people there, he thought, he would never see again.

But what more was there to say to such a group of successful actors, writers, directors, producers, designers, other critics? A number of acquaintances, knowing he had left regular employment more than five years ago, had asked what he was doing now. Earlier that evening, as he’d strolled to the party, Luca had worked out his story, replying to enquiries, ‘working, writing, thinking …’ It was easy to say, and soon his interlocutors were talking about themselves. What had disturbed him was that at least three people had failed to recognise him, not out of cruelty or even short-sightedness. It was worse than that: they had no idea who he was. He had made a simple mistake, one he swore he would never make again — he had aged.