East is East
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Identities and indeed traditions are always negotiating, always negotiated. They are negotiating in that they provide a way of "getting about" in the world, much in the way a trusted guide allows one to negotiate passage over a tricky and narrow bridge. They are also negotiating in that they give us the currency with which to negotiate our transactions with others. The basic questions "who am I" and "where am I" are questions answered in the construction of identities and traditions. But identities and traditions are also negotiated in another sense. They are always in flux. Even as they make boundaries behind which we feel safe, they themselves become boundaries that are tested by other identities, other traditions. Sometimes that negotiation is within the self, constituted in its various class, cultural, and faith locations. Other times it is outside (or placed outside) the self. In times of social crisis and change, the dynamics--and violent potential--of negotiations becomes evident. And when the terrain to be negotiated becomes antagonistic, a crisis of faith can ensure that actually drives faith toward ideology.
George, played masterfully by Om Puri, runs the neighbourhood chip shop called "George's English Chippy", which is a site of many crossings. We see English and East Asian people alike frequenting it, and even the local Priest comes in to collect for the church. The film's beginning, a church procession around the community, with the Khan children freely and playfully joining in while George is at Mosque introduces the two worlds in which the Khan family negotiate their identities. George's language throughout the film is strained but colourful, sprinkled with liberal uses of the term "bloody" and "bastard". The prominence of the latter term may simply reflect an attempt to capture the language of a certain context and location. But is also reflects George's deepest concern: the hybridity of his family and a quest to purify them (and hence himself). His response to his context is to assert "discipline". Sometimes this is, in George's mind, simply a reflection of "Pakistani traditional ways". He is, as he says, simply showing his family "a good way to live". Other times he identifies it as the necessary strategy for living in a "non-Pakistani environment". Then it becomes the only way to live. In the first conflict of the film, George chooses not to see his older son Nazir's different sexual orientation, and forces him into an arranged marriage. George must face the public humiliation of having his son run out of the marriage ceremony, and he subsequently pronounces his son "dead". Concerned that Sajid, his twelve-year-old son, was not properly circumcised, George exposes him to the painful ordeal, touching off a series of very humorous scenes. Even after it is done, George is obsessed with purity: having discovered that the doctor in attendance is Indian he questions the thoroughness of the work. His response to the pain of his son is to give him a watch that "tells time in Arabic", and that has his son's name on it. Unfortunately the name inscribed by his father is not accessible to him because he cannot read Arabic. The issue of naming also plays its way into the identity-construction of the children. Stealing away to a disco late at night, two of the sons give themselves English names ("Tony" and "Arthur"), which gain them entrance. Yet later, in a parallel setting, "Arthur" is left to sit in a pub by himself, drinking "the English brew" as he contemplates the wedding his father has arranged for him. George's English wife Ella, played with great sensitivity by Linda Bassett, is herself a site of many crossings. Freely engaging both English and Pakistani worlds, Ella negotiates an identity that is neither fully one nor the other. The children are startled when they hear her greeting a more conservative family in Arabic later in the film. George complains that she doesn't act like "a good Muslim wife", and (sometimes with a twinkle in his eye, sometimes not) threatens to bring his first wife over from the old country. But when the children speak disparagingly about George, even after a violent outburst directed against Ella, she forbids them to speak ill of him. Tradition and rebellion meet in Ella, though her body will be marked by that tension as the cultural choices made by the children clash with those of the father. Her negotiation of identities has a profound, tragic dimension, and can be read as a commentary on the domestic violence engendered by male obsession with identity. But it also--for good or for bad--provides the glue that holds the Khan family together. The narrative comes to a climax when George decides decisively to purge his family of hybridity by "joining the community (meaning the Pakistani community) fully". This is done by arranging a marriage between two of his "cross-bred" sons and the "in-bred" daughters of a "purer" Bradford family. We meet a different kind of Pakistani community in "Bradistan", as graffiti inscribed on a sign pointing the way to Bradford calls it. Here is a community of the "pure", with Pakistani markets and theatres, with the sights and smells of the old country. But class factors will soon interrupt George's plan as, amazingly, it is not the cultural tensions with his "English" sons that put an end to George's plan to purge his family of hybridity, that all-too pervasive factor in all British life. Even families with common cultural origins and faith orientations cannot escape it. Ella is horrified at George's plan, but cannot act on her knowledge. But when the two sons themselves discover George's plan, they run away, exclaiming "I'm not marrying a fucking Paki". This appellation generated much laughter amongst the audience watching the film. The use of the term "Paki" serves to underline the externalisation of one pole of the Khan children's hybridity, and to project it onto comic book-like characters (comedy turns into parody). The audience cannot but react as the boys did. Whether this is a legitimate device for director Damien O'Donnell to have employed is perhaps something that bears reflection. Also worth bearing reflection is the question of whether or not those who did laugh were not thereby exposing their own fear of the other. With the question of where the newly amalgamated family will live, it becomes clear that at the end of the day, class will win out over cultural or even religious identity. George's faith-assertion that Islam teaches a community in which all are equal contrasts sharply with the practices of the Bradford family who, contrary to "tradition", will not allow their daughters to live with the family of the sons-in-law, in the humble Salford house. In a scene of great comedy and triumph, Ella is finally able to assert the identity of the family, not as "Pakistani", nor as "English", nor as "Muslim", nor "Christian", but as themselves bonded by their loyalty to each other. She also is able to expel George who, in turn, realises that finally he is powerless to fully leave his "hybrid" clan. The triumph in the end is therefore not of faith or culture, but of the bonds--which are also tensile (George will never be able to leave because the property is in the name of Ella, it would be to play into the forces urging "repatriation")--within the Kahn family. But it is a lonely existence, for as the Khan children exteriorise the "Paki" other, represented by the Shah family, they also realise that they will never be fully "English". Hybridity remains their lot--and their bond. Indeed, the setting of the film in 1971 serves as a reproof to English society that the challenge of embracing its East Indian citizens as "British" still has to be seriously taken up. Perhaps it is a call to understand the dynamics within immigrant families, particularly in their inter-generational dimensions. The film says much about English society and its failure to embrace the other. Why is it of interest to South African Christians? One reason is because it shows the flexibility of faith in negotiating loyalties, particularly in situations of social change. We meet not a monolithic Islam in East is East, but an Islam engaged in different ways in preserving an old way of life in a different space, but also creatively allowing new negotiations. Perhaps Ella's accusation that George's Islam is one of "convenience" is to the point. However, his ideal of a community that transcends the class distinctions reflected by the Shah's, which is not always "convenient", remains the possibility which holds his life together in hope. The film also reminds us that while faith can be a way of openness to the other, faith that loses the dimension of openness can also restrict negotiation, as in the many times the metaphor of "listening" was employed in the film. "You are not listening", Ella shouts at George as he launches into a religiously-tinged tirade against "this bastard house". The challenge for faith in a pluralistic context--and pluralism is inside as well as outside the self and the community--is to empower the exploration of hybridities and crossings. It is to learn to listen to and to celebrate the "impure". From a Christian point of view, this is simply what it means to follow Jesus. |
In a joyous, often hilarious, sometimes poignant look at a Pakistani immigrant family in Salford (Manchester) in
1971, the film East is East confirms and deepens this idea of negotiation. While local xenophobia is arising in the row housing where he and his family live, and while his children one-by-one reject
the values he prizes, George Khan tries to assert a Pakistani identity for his family. This assertion is ironic, for he is married to an Englishwoman and their children, who mix not only socially
with their neighbours but also religiously, seem to see themselves more as "English" than "Pakistani". In the background of the film are also a growing movement to repatriate East Indians from
Britain, and the conflict between India and Pakistan. Indeed, the central events of the film take place during the climax of that war, serving to underline the tenuousness of the world of George
Khan.