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Book Review
A metaphor for immigrant angst?
GOWRI RAMNARAYAN
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Heartrending account of the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between classes, cultures and generations
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IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME BY NOW — A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton: Sathnam Sanghera; Penguin-Viking, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. £ 9.99
His writing communicates easily, fluently, even compulsively, almost chattily. “If you’re in the right place, say Paris or New York, in the right bar, somewhere with pavement tables or window seats… it could be quite pleasant kicking back with a whisky sour, watching those less fortunate shuffle past as you sit snug and smug in your tailored Gucci suit.”
But in his family-lancing, existence-searching, soul-paring debut book Sathnam Sanghera, 31, who works for The Times, does more than journalist speak. He takes us into the crowded, claustrophobic hives of working class Sikh community in Wolverhampton, where whole clans remain innocent of English, panic at interactions with Whites, dread seduction of their sons by a “gori” (synonymous with “whore”), never go anywhere they haven’t gone before for fear of losing themselves.
Sanghera belongs to both worlds. Education has made him a success in London, while by birth and rearing he belongs to the unlucky shufflers. His mother wants him to live like a 1950s farmer in village Punjab, while diasporic exposures have transformed his weltanschauung. He is at home with George Michael, not the Gurugranth Sahib.
Breaking free
But in one aspect, Sanghera belongs to the species of the Indian male celebrated in old song and story, as also in the new myths of Bollywood: he adores his mother. To break free from the community stranglehold, to escape unreason and superstition, he must somehow obtain her approval and consent. He writes the story of his parents to get over six hit-and-run relationships in London, and the nightmare of an arranged marriage with a girl of the right caste, creed and skin colour. The 323 pages of this book strive to achieve this understanding of himself, and get his mother to understand him.
Probes into murky family history reveal generations of schizophrenics — great grandfather, father and sister, sans understanding of the condition. (The father’s violence is attributed to blood pressure, a kick from a bull, wife’s black magic.) Sanghera’s fear of himself becoming a victim retards and accelerates his probes. Hadn’t he estranged himself from family, hometown and culture? Wasn’t his first language English? Didn’t he have to find a Punjabi translator to disclose his infelt thoughts to his mum? Hadn’t he allowed education to compartmentalise his mind? He wants to cure himself by re-integrating himself with a closed world, smothered memories, and fragmented relationships.
In an alien land
Finally, schizophrenia becomes a metaphor for a society where inexplicable brutality, apathy and depression are the accepted norm. The underprivileged have little hope of being seen, heard, or answered, but every chance of being trampled upon. In an alien land, who gives a toss for an illiterate, uneducated, unemployed mentally ill Asian man, for people from an oral culture who have neither written documents nor the ability to discourse in an alien tongue? Certainly not the state.
Every chapter records Sanghera’s advance and retreat, guilt and frustration, fantasies of messiah-hood. He posits a clinical objectivity to hold self-pity in abeyance, by patch working into the narrative extracts from dictionary, encyclopaedia, newspaper article, medical report, prescription, legal document, tourist brochure, school prospectus, prayer book, book extract, letter and handwritten note.
Frequent footnotes make the narrative masquerade as a treatise. Doubtful, partial memory, smudged visuals, and conflicting recollections paint ambivalences. Repetition becomes a technique for gaining confidence. Direct speech and personal experience ensure intimate frankness.
Raw melodrama
Black and white photographs of family members pop up between the paragraphs — mute visual evidence for the author’s “case”. The characters are sliced in at need. The mother is a full portrait though, both stereotypical and her own individual self. A hardy survivor. She endures physical abuse from her spouse without knowing that he suffers from schizophrenia, or what that word means; as the sole breadwinner she ensures her children get the best she can give; continues to love them through grief, hardship and bewilderment; never loses trust in god and guru.
The raw melodrama of religion-illusion-superstition-ridden, immigrant Punjabi family life is refracted through a sceptical, amused eye, but also a heart that cannot shrug off its values. Sanghera feels pride in a tradition that respects and cares for waifs and elders. He realises that born white, his father would have been shunted to a nursing home, not protected in a loving home.
At one point, the schizophrenic sister voices the eternal human plight, “Nobody understands me, not even me.” At the end this distress brings anagnorisis for the writer, “Know where you come from, but let it not stop you becoming who you want to be.” Sanghera’s lively prose strives to turn lifetimes of secrets and lies — twisting through extended bloodlines, stretching from the farmlands of Punjab to the Midlands of Britain — transparent.
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