The Book of Birmingham Edited by Kavita Bhanot

The Book of Birmingham Edited by Kavita Bhanot First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Comma Press. commapress.co.uk Copyright © remains with the authors and Comma Press, 2018. All rights reserved. ‘Blind Circles’ was first published in Where Furnaces Burn (PS Publishing, 2014). ‘Exterior Paint’ was first published in Protest (Comma Press, 2017), special thanks to Avtar Singh Jouhl for his original consultation on this story. ‘Taking Doreen out of the Sky’ was first published in Taking Doreen out of the Sky (Picador, 1999). ‘The Call’ was first published in The Sea in Birmingham (Tindal Street Fiction Group, 2013). The moral rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this Work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. The stories in this anthology are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are entirely the work of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, organisations or localities, is entirely coincidental. Any characters that appear, or claim to be based on real ones are intended to be entirely fictional. The opinions of the authors and the editors are not those of the publisher. A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 1-910974-37-4 ISBN-13: 978-1-91097-437-7 The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A ii Introduction Situated at the central crossroads of England, the city of Birmingham occupies an interesting (and not always central) position in national consciousness. It is both loved by those who know it intimately, and stereotyped or dismissed by those who don’t. It has been represented in the national media under headlines like, ‘White Brits set to become a minority in Birmingham,’ ‘Why has Birmingham become such a breeding ground for British-born terror?’ and ‘Is Birmingham still the gang and gun crime capital of the UK?’ It has been a magnet for entirely fake news – like the infamous Birmingham Trojan Horse affair, a false story about a Birmingham-based ‘Jihadist plot to take over schools’ – and a symbol for the nation’s fears and paranoias. Even Google gives it a bad rep: one of the first suggestions it offers when you type in ‘Is Birmingham’ is ‘Is Birmingham safe?’ There is also of course, the perception of Birmingham as the industrial heartland of the country.The area now known as Heartlands – more familiar to non-Brummies as the haunts of the Peaky Blinders – is where the factories of the Birmingham Small Arms Company were located, which made not just small arms, but also much larger weapons, tools, parts for industrial machinery, and the cars, cycles and motorbikes that have become an ineluctable part of modern and postmodern life. At one time connected to every other corner of the nation through a latticework of canals which facilitated the transport of raw goods in and finished goods out of the city, and across the world, Birmingham has been shaped by its industrial history v IntroduCtIon – in particular by the working-class roots of so many of its inhabitants who gave their professional lives to these industries. This working-class foundation is inseparable from the city’s literature, reflected in the voices of its best-known contemporary authors: Jonathan Coe, Catherine O’Flynn, Benjamin Zephaniah, Kit de Waal, Joel Lane... to name just a few. Meanwhile, Birmingham-based innovators, such as Matthew Boulton, James Watt and Samuel Galton, who helped power the industrial revolution, connected to the ‘Midland Enlightenment’, the Lunar Society and the Quakers, are all intertwined with the idea of the city, celebrated, commemorated everywhere – in plaques and statues, in the names of roads and buildings. Some of the industries they were associated with include the steam-engine, coin-minting (including for the East India Company) and gun-making. Perhaps less well known, or less well-acknowledged, is the role that these figures played in colonialism, a role which was entangled with Birmingham’s historical contribution to Britain’s banking, industry, and science – not only because of the coins that were minted here, or the guns that were forged here, but also because of the workers who were later invited to fill labour shortages. Recalling the anti-racist phrase, ‘We are here, because you were there,’ it is this industrial and colonial context that first brought immigrants to Birmingham; from early individual immigrants in the 18th century, to the larger waves of immigration in the 20th century: the Irish, Afro-Caribbeans (the Windrush generation whose enslaved ancestors helped build Britain), and the South Asians (Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi) whose homelands had been impoverished through colonial exploitation, displacement, famines and the devastation of land, trade and industries. After the Second World War, they were summoned to work in factories and foundries across Britain to help rebuild the economy. vi IntroduCtIon When they arrived in Birmingham, the new immigrants (it was the men who came first to work; later, as immigration laws started to tighten, they brought their wives and families over) were housed in pockets circling Birmingham city centre – Handsworth, Aston, Balsall Heath and Sparkbrook. They were packed in closely, enduring poor housing and living conditions, with large numbers occupying each house, often alternating both shifts in the factories and beds at home. They faced unforgiving working conditions, low pay and discrimination at every turn: this discrimination included racially biased housing policies, employment laws and trade unions, as well as colour bars in pubs, social clubs, barbers and, as Kit de Waal’s story recounts, personal relationships. This is a history that later generations of writers have become increasingly interested in retracing: the experiences of first generation immigrants are the subject matter for a number of stories in this anthology; Bobby Nayyar’s ‘Amir Aziz’ follows the set-backs and successes in the life of an eponymous entrepreneur, as recalled by an increasingly distant friend; Kit de Waal’s ‘Exterior Paint’ recalls the racism faced by a West Indian man daring to date a white woman in 1960s Smethwick; while Sharon Duggal’s ‘Seep’ traces the impact on an Indian teenager’s life when her family opens its doors to one particular migrant factory worker. These immigrants arrived at the tail end of industrial growth, just before British manufacturing entered its death throes. By the early 1980s many of them faced unemployment and poverty. This continues to have an impact on their communities today, along with the white working-class people who also lost their jobs when the factories and foundries started to close. Alan Beard’s story ‘Taking Doreen out the Sky’ centres on just such a moment, joining the narrator on the day he’s told his factory is to shut down. During this period,distinct white and immigrant communities had started to form across the city.When the immigrants had first vii IntroduCtIon arrived, many white residents had relocated to neighbourhoods and suburbs further away from the centre. As the migrants settled, and as manufacturing jobs started to dry up, they began opening their own businesses – restaurants, shops, cinemas – changing the landscape of the areas they were living in.This settlement pattern continues to this day, with new immigrants (often from Eastern Europe) settling in the same, overcrowded inner-city locations, while many of the earlier, aspirational immigrants have since relocated outwards – to Edgbaston, Solihull, or (in the case of Amir Aziz) to Handsworth Wood. Meanwhile, some areas of Birmingham have remained predominantly white areas; neighbourhoods that a person of colour might feel scared to enter. Here too, high rates of unemployment, poor housing, underfunding in education and healthcare, and a general lack of investment from local and national government have all combined to leave their occupants feeling abandoned. This neglect, combined with the incitement of a racist media along with the entitlement of whiteness, has meant that, in places like Kingstanding in North Birmingham, support for Brexit, the BNP, EDL, and Britain First have risen, so even the white supremacists of Joel Lane’s troubling Science Fiction story ‘Blind Circles’ don’t seem entirely fantastical. Despite being neighbourhoods that are, as Lane’s racist Terry argues, difficult to live in, they are also home to communities that are genuinely tight-knit, protective and loving (of their own kind). In the middle of this ring of complex, conflicting and often neglected neighbourhoods is the city centre: a never-ending work-in-progress, constantly in flux, endlessly undergoing ‘development’. Middle to high-end cafés, bars, restaurants, shops and department stores are continually popping up across the centre, as well as around the canal developments, Brindley Place, Broad Street, the International Conference Centre (ICC) – location for this year’s Conservative Party Conferences – the viii IntroduCtIon new train station, and Grand Central. New offices and luxury apartment blocks appear every month and, adding assertive splashes of primary colour to the city’s architecture, are the distinctive, blue Bullring Shopping Centre, the equally distinctive, yellow Central Library, and the bright red Mailbox. The centre has been growing and ‘developing’ for years, but not without cost.As the centre has spread its reach, it has demolished more affordable housing, taking communities with it, as well as leaving many people homeless. Likewise, many iconic buildings (and the memories attached to them) have also disappeared: the old Central Library, the Pallasades and Pebble Mill. Catering primarily for the moneyed classes – including newer, wealthier immigrants – the city centre is now a space whose primary interest is facing the rest of the country, or indeed the world, like a done-up front room for guests, hoping all this expensive new furniture will finally enable Birmingham to live up to its ‘second city’ status. Above the city, at junction six of the M6, there is a concrete spider web in the sky: the famous Spaghetti Junction. Meanwhile, threading through the city from below, also trickling out and away, are the canals that, designed by James Brindley, once powered Boulton’s Soho Manufactory; Hockley Brook and the Tame, the local tributary of the Trent. There are patches of the canal where the homeless gather, during the day or at night, to sleep. But mostly, especially around the city centre, these canals and towpaths, lined with newly built luxury apartments, are quieter, more middle-class (largely white) places, at odds with the lively city above. For this reason, they become an apt setting for Malachi McIntosh’s story ‘A Game of Chess’, representing his new life and a stark contrast to the figure from his past that he thinks he sees. What strikes the outsider most of all, walking around the city centre, is how alive it feels. Locals, adapting to the neverending ‘development’ and its accompanying disruption, are used ix IntroduCtIon to navigating its constantly changing spaces.The city derives a lot of its energy from those who have come from other parts of the world, their children and their grandchildren. (Birmingham is a youthful city, more than 40% of the population is under 25). However, although it is certainly true that this confluence of cultures, histories, and people is an important part of what makes Birmingham, the form that this takes is not the mixing and blending ‘melting pot’ that multiculturalism is often assumed to be. The truth is that mostly people in the centre operate as individuals, or as part of family/friendship groups consisting of those they feel a sense of belonging to; this belonging is often determined by race, religion, culture, and ethnicity. This is how people from the ‘separate’ pockets that surround the city centre, enter the centre. Maybe this separation (a word that I prefer to use rather than the often wielded, negative term ‘segregation’) is the reason people in Birmingham occupy the space so differently, and are able to express their ‘difference’ with confidence and creativity. It is a confidence that belies the austerity and under ‘development of their neighbourhoods and the arguably bland, generic gentrification that their city centre has undergone. The term ‘segregation,’ along with its accusatory counter ‘integration,’ has always been used to shift blame onto minority communities. The responsibility and impetus is often placed on them (Why do they segregate themselves? Why don’t they integrate?) when, as the history of Birmingham shows, there was little choice regarding where immigrants were housed, where they got jobs, or where their children were schooled. Even if migrants had a choice, it is not difficult to understand why people would travel to, or want to live in, areas where there were others from their countries, towns, villages or families, areas where support could be found that government or native locals weren’t able to provide – support that is evidenced in many of the stories in this collection. Nor is it difficult to understand why they might want to be close to those who understand them x IntroduCtIon – their language, culture, world view, experiences – or among those they feel a sense of belonging with. Those they don’t feel insecure or inadequate beside. It is this last point, above all, that calls into question the assumption that integration is needed or desirable. Integration, used always in reference to people of colour, is about dispersal and assimilation into a white context. Being a person of a colour in a climate of hierarchy and antagonism, can leave people powerless and isolated, taking away their confidence. Selfcensorship, self-loathing, self-erasure become inevitable. I would argue that is only through separation, or a degree of it, that people can retain or recover a sense of dignity and self-respectful growth. For those who are vulnerable, it is perhaps only from a ‘separated’ place that creativity and resistance can flourish. Separation, a word that doesn’t carry the judgement of segregation, can be a source of positivity, confidence, strength, creativity. Indeed, it is perhaps where one of the beauties of Birmingham lies. Separate (from the city as a whole), but surrounded by those who understand them, people are able to express themselves in rich and nuanced, rooted and original ways; it is no coincidence that places like Handsworth, Smethwick, Lozells and Aston have produced such a high number of musicians and musical forms (from reggae to bhangra, gospel to soul), that have in turn reinvented the music of Jamaica or Punjab, in new contexts. Other artists – photographers, playwrights, comedians, painters – have emerged from these neighbourhoods, as well as songwriters, poets, novelists and short story writers, all producing work that roots itself profoundly to place. Some of these writers are on show here: Jendella Benson, Sharon Duggal, Bobby Nayyar, Balvinder Banga – writers who may have moved away, but were formed by, and remain inspired by the places they grew up in. Separation enables possibilities for resistance too. Maybe this is why districts like Handsworth and Lozells have sometimes xi IntroduCtIon played host to uprisings (or ‘riots’ as the mainstream media calls them) and protest movements. Three key moments in Birmingham’s resistance history offer backdrops to stories in this collection (set in 1965, 1985, and 2005), and many more featured in the stories submitted. It is perhaps because of separation that, in places like Sparkbrook and Alum Rock, after the post 9-11 wave of Islamophobia, Muslim women were able to resist collectively, while still expressing their faith, through their wearing of the hijab. There are no hermetically sealed spaces, of course; the racism of the wider world is ever present, a constant backdrop. Racist attacks on the street, the constant surveillance of communities under anti-terror initiatives, the institutional racism (and elitism) in the police, education system, work environment and media... these have never gone away. The structures of racism abide (in Birmingham as elsewhere), disinterested, dismissive or antagonistic towards black, Muslim, working-class lives. I’m not suggesting that these separate spaces cannot also feel suffocating and oppressive. There can be other kinds of surveillance within communities. And even these pockets are not themselves homogenous – they too divide, in response to other hierarchies, into smaller separations, on the basis of religion, race, caste, gender and sexuality. Anti-blackness, Islamophobia, casteism, classism, patriarchy – these are also all entrenched in separated communities, hence the desire to separate further, even if temporarily: separate places of worship, separate schools, separate clubs and pubs, and so forth. All of these factors are in evidence in this anthology. Almost all the stories, set at different moments in recent history, and in different parts of the city, inhabit a contained ‘separate’ world – whether it is a home that welcomes South Asian immigrants who work in the foundries, or the high-rise flat of a factory worker in love with his wife, or a house party thrown by a xii IntroduCtIon group of Birmingham Surrealists – an informal group of artists and intellectuals who gathered here between the 1930s and 1950s.There is a sense of the wider world pressing in and how the characters might respond to it: racism in the workplace, or down the pub; the closure of a factory; the behaviour of the police. And there is also a sense of shame among those that left Birmingham behind. There are the circles within the circles, and circles that simply don’t overlap. Characters view ‘others’ in passing from a distance: the white narrator in ‘Taking Doreen out the Sky’ passes by ‘hoop-hatted Rastas’, he looks upon turbaned men and Asian women, as incomprehensible and exotic. In Joel Lane’s story ‘Blind Circles’, about a white supremacist gathering, this ‘othering’ is taken to an extreme. Occasionally, though, the circles overlap, and separate lives and worlds collide. Here the unlikely interaction that follows can be filled with fear, suspicion, even violence, but sometimes it’s beautiful. Above all, this anthology strives to give those who have grown up in Birmingham, who have lived or are living in Birmingham, the chance to represent themselves and to push back against stereotypes and derision from without. All too often the people of Birmingham have seen well-funded television crews roll into their communities looking to confirm their assumptions, looking to mock, ridicule and stereotype white working-class or Muslim communities. For example, shows such as Channel 4’s ‘documentary’ Benefits Street, set on James Turner Street in Winston Green, or the BBC’s ‘sitcom’ Citizen Khan set in Sparkbrook.With representations like these coming from outside, why wouldn’t we want to create our own schools, our own media channels, our own temples, our own publishing houses? One of the most significant movements in recent Birmingham literary history came from a group of Birmingham fiction writers, who shrugged off the parameters of an elitist London-centric publishing industry uninterested in their work. xiii IntroduCtIon The group was also a kind of separation, from the received literary culture. It was solidly rooted in context and place, in the working-class background of many of its members, and even named itself after the dead-end street on which they used to meet (at a pub): the Tindal Street Fiction Group. Four of the writers published here (including Joel Lane, who sadly passed away in 2013), and myself, were at one time, or another, members of this group, or continue to be. After two decades of running as a workshop, a publishing house emerged as a kind of offshoot, publishing, in the first instance, Alan Beard’s collection of short stories Taking Doreen from the Sky (the title story of which appears again here).Tindal Street Press was clear and solid in its agendas, publishing stories that were firmly located in the regions, the literature that London presses ignored. Its separation from the national scene was its strength – when its uncompromising literature appeared on the national scene, it took the literary centre by surprise, winning awards and recognition. Through the many anthologies it published, it excelled in its efforts to publish short stories – giving space to and nurturing many established and newer writers, as well as offering grass-roots encouragement and support.This activity is in some ways continued through the work of Writing West Midlands – led by Jonathan Davies, who is also connected to a regional and working-class sensibility. This anthology, bringing together both newer and more established writers, published and previously unpublished stories, reveals only a fraction of the literary excellence that has emerged, and continues to emerge, from this great, complicated city. Each story explores a particular moment and place, but these are just glimpses. No single book can ever completely capture a city’s complexity. Certainly not this one’s. For there are an endless number of Birminghams – circles within circles – Birminghams within Birminghams. Kavita Bhanot Birmingham, September 2018 xiv