Book review | Peter Kalu

Book Review: Citizen, by Claudia Rankine (Pete Kalu)

In Citizen, Rankine focuses on moments of discordance when black and white citizens interact. These moments seem to hold no weight in the blind charge of the day, or seem to be simple misunderstandings; but upon reflection, they unpack troubling, raced contents. The book begins with the author lying on he bed at night, going through her thoughts on what happened in her day, as we all do. In that liminal darkness, she arrives by a chain of association at a troubling, distant memory: The girl in class who paid you the compliment that you are almost white. This is typical of the reflections in Citizen. They are a sifting of the author’s consciousness, a slowing down of hurried moments, and in that slowing, a dissection of them, and a revelation of their hidden contents and associative echoes: A white friend who accidentally calls you by the name of her black housekeeper. A colleague who confides in you his department is being forced to hire a person of colour when, he says, there are so many talented people out there. Your neighbour ringing to say a menacing black guy is casing your home and the guy turns out to be your friend who you asked to babysit, taking a breather outside, phoning you. The key text is written almost entirely in the second person – the ‘you’ voice – and the use of this voice is the making of the book. It does several things. It brings the black reader in close to the author. It reflects the research Rankine did with her black friends – so the experiences described are owned by the community – black citizens in general – rather than being a testament of one individual. It gives the sense of a conversation, where that storytelling mode use of ‘you’ is often found, though this conversation is not colloquial, trivial. The first line of the book begins: When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices… The ‘you’ here is not that winsome kind of you, nor the jokey vernacular; it contains an urgency. The line is not “when you’re alone” but “when you are alone”. The difference matters. It’s there also in the use of the term, ‘devices’ – at once a 21st century term, yet retaining formality. It suggests the serious language – of the courtroom, of earnestness. The language of weighting, sifting, defining and naming. It’s beyond post modernist playing or the egocentric shout of ‘I’. I wonder also, of the effect of that ‘you’ on the white reader. Now, for once, they ride along, they become the Other, they wear the shoes; as they read the book the white reader intermittently becomes the black ‘you’. Rankine is saying, this is how it is. How it is is laid out quietly. Impressively. The ways these small episodes dull the life out of you, snatch your breath, wear you away slowly, increase your sigh rate. The myriad resonances and meanings of these discordant encounters, the alternative ways of responding emotionally and intellectually, the power structures they reveal and the way a black person must select an option to move through them – accommodation, adjustment to your own sense of self, anger, disappointment, confusion, denial. You are forced to choose one. Just so you can get along, put food in the fridge, petrol in the tank, do your job, pay your bills. The moments occur around cars, in public spaces, on streets, in offices, in restaurants – in all those places citizens encounter one another. Citizen is a lyric but there are no cascading strings of love here. It’s an essay in Civics. How we get along. The messy complexity of that. Interspersed in the book are essays, artwork, photos and cut-ups. They provide a breathing space between the encounter descriptions; and further context. As far as I know this is the first time this has been done. It is a novel of the middle class black person getting along in the city. It radiates a quiet intelligence, a questioning strength, a submerged rage. The descriptions are in their nature descriptions of water torture- of the small daily stresses endured, their never-ending-ness. It brought to my mind Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. There is in Citizen a similar nod to the moral courage needed to endure in the face of absurdity: in Sisyphus existential, in Citizen racial. Hell is other people, Sartre wrote. Oftentimes, hell means white people, adds...

Book Review by Pete Kalu In the 60’s and 70’s there were so few black people on television that whenever a black face hit the small screen, the shout went out in my house, ‘there’s a black person on the television!’ and everyone would gather round, fascinated. It was the same with footballers – few were seen until Brazil and the 1970 World Cup(*1). I’ve often wondered what those early solitary black British footballers felt as they moved from training ground to dressing room to manager’s office to pitch, to life –after-football . This is the greatest reveal Onuora’s book holds. Finally, we hear from them. Onuora has had the ear of most of the highest profile black footballers. They have spoken to him frankly and their stories often hold great poignancy. He’s also recorded the experiences of journeymen black footballers (all of whom had more talent in their little toe than most of us have in both feet). It makes for a revealing read and a courageous book. Onuora shows how back in the days it was a widely held opinion that black players had no brains and lacked courage. This view, often shared by Chairmen of clubs and team managers- people who could put those prejudices into practice, had a pernicious effect on team selection all the way up to the highest level. As a kid I often wondered why certain players were not in the England football team. Onuora quotes an explanation that is alleged to have come from the former England team manager, Graham Taylor (Taylor has subsequently denied making the statement) – that the then FA powers-that-be did not want too many black players in the England team. Whether hypothesis or fact, the explanation provides a simple, “good-fit” logic for some of the glaring omissions of that era at England level. (I have no room here to show Onuora’s excellent dissection of the appalling treatment at England level of Britain’s greatest ever black football player, John Barnes.) Looking back, the 70’s and 80’s black players’ heads-down approach mirrored the heads-down approach we kids had to adopt to racism in those times. Banana throwing. Name-calling. Monkey noises. As on the playground, so on the pitch. My heart sank when I watched a match at Man City’s old ground and saw the treatment City supporters meted out to John Barnes. I never went back to Maine Road. Yet, according to Onuora, City’s supporters of that time were by no means as racist as those of Everton, Chelsea, Milwall, Leeds… it’s a long list. Football was often described then as a man’s game. Players glorified in nicknames like ‘Chopper’. Getting fouled and not complaining was how you proved you had hairs on your chest. Getting racially abused was a badge of honour to a real man, black footballers were told by senior (white) players. This hyper-masculinity cult carried into the manager’s office and the dressing room. The typical manager had a box of insults and swear words to throw around when needed. So a black player of the opposing team might be called a ‘black bastard’ or a ‘fucking nigger’ and players be exhorted to kick shit out of him. It wasn’t just a tactic. Former football manager turned pundit, Ron Atkinson’s 2004 broadcast description of Marcel Desailly as a ‘fucking lazy, thick nigger’ when Atkinson thought he was off-air was revelatory of ingrained attitudes not mere mind games or verbal slips. All in all, what the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s players went through is a sorry tale. Perhaps it sounds ludicrous to young ears some of the stereotyping – that black people could not endure the cold, that they had no tactical brains, that they hadn’t the cool head needed for playing midfield or centre of defence. And yet this was the dominant thinking. Of course it affected black footballers at professional level, but it also had an impact all the way down to schools football where young black footballers suffering the same stereotyping – they were natural wingers or strikers, not defenders or midfielders, magicians not artisans. Thank God for Brazil. The significance for black British footballers of the Brazil World Cup victory 1970 is well highlighted in the book. For many black players pre-2000, Brazil provided the alternative narrative. Pele’s poise, technique and intelligent link-up play was light years ahead of the European times. Onuora argues how, strangely, the sea change in British attitudes at Board and Administrator level, appears to have been ignited by a complete outsider: Eric Cantona. What many black footballers must have been tempted to do, Eric Cantona did. The enigmatic Frenchman Cantona, who transformed Manchester United into the world beating side it became, was not a ‘heads-down’ kind of guy. He skipped the class in deference. And drop-kicked a racist fan after being taunted one time too many. Onuora takes us through the subsequent official agonising and the final commitment to change that sparked off the climate of anti–racism that virtually eliminated racist name-calling and behaviour on the terraces. In the final section of the book, Onuora holds the mirror up to the game’s current administrators. He asks whether the earlier (for the most part successful) commitment to change fans’ behaviour has been replicated at boardroom and administrator level. Has the racism of the institutions that run football been challenged? He points out how few black managers get appointed...

Book Review: The Outsider by Albert Camus

The Story In Brief: A French Algerian office worker in his 20’s, Mersualt, learns his mother has passed away. He goes out to the retirement home where she spent her last days and attends the funeral. Later, he makes friends with a petty white criminal, Raymond, who lives in the same apartment block as himself. This man beats his Arab girlfriend up and the girlfriend’s brother seeks revenge. There is a fight on the beach. The brother has a knife, and cuts Raymond, who seeks to retaliate with a gun. Things cool down. Mersault is walking alone along the beach some time after the initial confrontation when he spots the brother, lying in the sand. Mersault remembers he still has the gun, given to him by Raymond for safekeeping. He shoots and kills the brother. Mersault is arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. The novel has two parts: events leading up to the shooting; and events subsequent to Mersault’s arrest. I’ve been reading A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon at the same time as The Outsider. The two authors have much in common. Camus was born in Algeria in 1913 and spent his formative years there. Fanon was born in 1925 in Martinique and spent time in Algeria as a doctor. Camus was active in the French Resistance to the German Occupation. Fanon was active in the Algerian Resistance to the French Occupation. Some of the riddles of The Outsider: Why did Mersualt kill the Arab? Why is he so calm about the consequences afterwards? Why does he not better his defence by pretending the death of his mother affected him profoundly – boost his chances of avoiding the death penalty by being more emotional about it? The Outsider is a short book, only 120 pages, written in a plain, easy to read language. The world of the book is seen through the consciousness of the main character, Mersault. The text is written in the first person ‘I’. Its innovation at the time was to set down on paper aspects of human consciousness and feeling that were would not at the time of publication have been conventional. The character Mersault displays an emotional honesty that can shock: examples range from Mersault not dwelling particularly on his mother’s death to being relatively unperturbed by the thought of his impending execution, to killing the man and not dwelling particularly on the act nor feeling particularly guilty about it. In thinking in this manner Mersault moves ‘beyond the pale’ of conventional society around him – he makes himself a stranger to these conventions. Camus seemed to want to arrive at a point in the novel where a man faces death by execution and to suggest that, if life is an infinite ‘now’ then we are most alive who understand how precious each day, each moment, each sensation in each moment is. Reservations: The Outsider seems to elevate Mersault, other characters are erased. The girlfriend of the Arab hardly features. There seems thematic maladroitness to Camus’ lack of engagement with her plight or that of her brother, respectively beaten and killed. (I accept the counterweight to this argument is that the character, Mersault is similarly disengaged at the death of his own mother). In contrast, Fanon’s discussion of the veil in A Dying Colonialism and his brilliant description of the changing role of Arab women in the resistance movement and how the veil was used by them as part of that resistance is magisterial. I would argue that there is an implied judgement rendered by the author that today would be impossible: the causal sidelining of the world of the Arab in Algeria and the use of the two Arabs- the brother and sister – as plot devices for whom no sympathy is lent by the author would not work for today’s global literary audience. That said, The Outsider is a great work. Thought-provoking. Poetic in its ordinariness. Here are some of my favourite lines from it: P115 [ On the priest visiting prior to Mersault’s execution] The priest was beginning to bore me. P117 [On belief in the afterlife] Everybody had that wish at all times, but that had no more importance than wishing to be rich, or to swim very fast, or to have a better-shaped mouth. It was in the same order of things. P118 [ On the priest visiting prior to Mersault’s execution] None of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair. P119 All alike would be condemned to die one day. P120 [thinking about his mother’s last days] Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom P120 I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the...