My Beautiful Laundrette Trishala Dutta

“...HEARING ABOUT THE INBETWEENS”: QUEERING THE DIASPORA THROUGH HANIF KUREISHI’S MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE

Trishala Dutta St. Stephen’s College

Caught between worlds that collide as often as they collude, are we representatives of anything but ourselves?

- Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture

Inquisitions of queer diasporic identity narratives always seek to configure spaces of belonging, and work on shaping them through displacement and attachment. These spaces are reimagined and reconstructed through the use of memory. Memory establishes a connection between a collective or an individual’s past, between origins, heritage, and history. Identities that have been fragmented by displacement, dislocation or migration are given form and texture trough memory, and remembering.

Gayatri Spivak claims the subaltern consciousness is always subjected to presuppositions, memories, and generalizations of the élite (203) which means that the memory of the subaltern is monopolized by the dominant machinery. The process of remembering both at a collective, and a personal level, is always related to the memory politics of the social institutions that both structure and validate what can be remembered and how. Theorists such as Joan Scott and Michel Foucault have written about the instances of power shaping our processes of remembering and our conceptions concerning the past. This can be picked up as an important point to analyse the role of memory in queer studies: it is important to analyze how the normative outlines the other and remembers the other as the Other. Consequently, the other is forced to constitute its self in terms of the very memory-politics that produce the othering effect.

Within the postcolonial field of studies, the act of re/membering becomes a crucial reconstructive force, which along with the Foucauldian methodological tool of “counter memory” provides an alternative space for the telling of histories which have for the longest time been relegated to the margins. In the context of queer studies, remembering queerly, that is in a way that creates space for historical queer experiences, becomes a strong reconstructive force. The categories of ‘queer’ and ‘diasporic’ both imply a disruption of the fixed identity categories, making impossible the attempt to definitively ascertain location, both sexually and geographically/nationally. That is, the mobile body of the diasporic queer serves as the “mediating figure between the nation and diaspora, home and the state, the local and the global”. In Queer Diasporas, queer is defined as a particularly peripatetic mode of sexuality, a “mobility of sexuality across the globe and body” (3). The queer body is seen as a transgressive agent, who challenges not only the normative categories of desire but the stability of national identity. Queer diasporic cultural forms and practices point towards invisibilized histories of racist and colonialist violence that continue to resonate in the present and are made visible through

bodily desire. It is through the queer diasporic body that the alternative histories are brought into the present, histories which were conveniently forgotten by mainstream nationalist and diasporic discourse.

According to Marita Sturken, a scholar of cultural memory and visual culture, even our most subjective memories are entangled with cultural memory which is constituted within the multilayered network of language, shared experiences, popular culture, fantasy, and collective desires. (1999, 233–234.) Similarly, the normalizing fantasies of official memory shape our own queer memories and the ways in which “queer” becomes inscribed into our cultural memory. Personal and cultural memories remain intertwined and create one another in the domain of the politics of queer memory.

This idea of queer memory will be explored in the context of Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay “My Beautiful Laundrette”. Gayatri Gopinath in her book Impossible Desires talks about a particular scene in My Beautiful Launderette, a film about queer interracial desire in Thatcherite London where a white working class boy, Johnny moves to unbutton the shirt of his Pakistan-born lover, Omar. Omar initially acquiesces to Johnny’s caresses, but then abruptly puts a halt to the seduction. He turns his back to his lover and recalls a moment from the past where he is standing with his immigrant father and sees Johnny march in a fascist parade through their South London neighborhood: ‘‘It was bricks and bottles, immigrants out, kill us. People we knew . . . And it was you. We saw you,’’ Omar remembers bitterly (2). Johnny recoils in shame as Omar brings into the present this image from the past of his younger self. But then, as Omar continues speaking, Johnny slowly reaches out to draw Omar to him and embraces him from behind. The final shot frames Omar’s face as he lets his head fall back onto Johnny’s chest and he closes his eyes. The scene depicts the transformation of the racialized queer body as a historical archive for both individuals and communities, one that is excavated through the very act of desiring the racial “Other”. In Johnny’s desire for Omar, Gopinath sees an intertwining of the legacies of British colonialism in South Asia. In Omar’s memory of having seen Johnny march, Omar in a sense reverses the historical availability of brown bodies to a white imperial gaze by turning the gaze back onto Johnny’s own racist past. The scene’s ambiguous ending–where Omar closes his eyes and succumbs to Johnny’s caresses—may suggest that Omar gives in to the historical amnesia that wipes out the legacies of Britain’s racist past. Yet the meaning and function of queer desire in the scene are far more complicated than such a reading would allow. For Johnny, if desire for Omar becomes a way of acknowledging and erasing his racist past, for Omar, queer desire is precisely what allows him to remember (4). Indeed, the barely submerged histories of colonialism and racism erupt into the present at the very moment when queer sexuality is being articulated. Queer desire does not transcend or remain peripheral to these histories but instead it becomes central to their telling and remembering: there is no queer desire without these histories, nor can these histories be told or remembered without simultaneously revealing an erotics of power and sexuality.

The movie was subject to scrutiny, following its release in 1985, a time when there were ongoing debates on queer sexuality and dominant notions of communal identity both in South Asia and in the diaspora. These debates primarily spoke of the ways in which queer bodies, desires, and subjectivities became sites in the process of the production and reproduction of culture, tradition and community in the diaspora, and as Gayatri Gopinath notes “they also signal the conflation of “perverse” sexualities and diasporic affiliations within a nationalist imagery” (6). If conventional diasporic discourse is marked by an overwhelming nostalgia for lost origins, for ‘times past,’ queer diaspora mobilizes questions of the past, memory, and nostalgia for radically different purposes. Rather than invoking, an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history, what is remembered

through queer diasporic desire and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place driven with contradictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles.

Another central concern that the movie bring forward is the notion of home. Home as a conventional space of domestic comfort is renovated. A challenge is posed to the traditional definition of ‘home’ warrants the need for questions of sexuality to interrogate dialogues on home, nation, belonging, for they immediately make apparent that dominant notions of home that have naturalized privileged sexual categories at the expense of others. The space of the home in My Beautiful Launderette has been “queered” by the gay protagonists, Omar and Johnny, through the non-heteronormative acts that they perform which troubles the very circuits of the traditional domestic, bourgeois space of the home. Leaving behind the heteronormative structure of the home, an alternative space to belong, a new home is created- in the room of the laundromat. It is against the backdrop of the refurbished laundrette that the sexual bonds between Johnny and Omar climax, crossing the thresholds of race, class, and normative sexuality along the way. The queer, sexual act thus in some ways reconciles Johnny’s class difference with Omar’s racial difference. It also serves as the catalyst for a dialogue on race, space, and sexuality to ‘erupt’ into the present moment.

In conclusion, to acknowledge the function of memory as an inventive social practice is also to reckon with the traffic between personal and cultural memories and that all memories are part of a complex and ever-changing script that can be separated neither from discourses of nationality, sexuality, nor from debates over the home. My paper especially, seeks to debate the narrated scripts of embodied diasporic reality, and look for queer desire where it normally exists, in the margins, behind closed doors, in poorly-lit alleys, or dark rooms in laundromats.

WORKS CITED

Bhabha, K. Homi. Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Duke University Press, 2005.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Columbia University Press, 1987.

Sturken, Marita. The Image as Memorial: Personal Photographs in Cultural Memory. The Familial Gaze. University Press of New England, 1999.