Inglan is a bitch
y’u haffi know how fi suvvive in it
well mi dhu day wok an’ mi dhu nite wok
mi dhu clean wok an’ mi dhu dutty wok
dem seh dat black man is very lazy
but if y’u si how mi wok y’u woulda sey mi crazy
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
y’u bettah face up to it
dem have a lickle facktri up inna Brackly
inna disya facktri all dem dhu is pack crackry
fi di laas fifteen years dem get mi laybah
now awftah fifteen years mi fall out a fayvah
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no runnin’ whey fram it
mi know dem have work, work in abundant
yet still, dem mek mi redundant
now, at fifty-five mi gettin’ quite ol’
yet still, dem sen’ mi fi goh draw dole
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch fi true
is whey wi a goh dhu ’bout it?
Romesh Gunesekera
[1954–]
Romesh Gunesekera was born into a distinguished family in Sri Lanka. When he was twelve years old, he left for the Philippines and four years later moved to Liverpool to board at a small public school. He later attended Liverpool University, where he studied English and philosophy. In 1993 he published a collection of stories entitled Monkfish Moon. Like Gunesekera himself, the characters in these stories are caught between the worlds of their colonial homelands and England.
Gunesekera’s first novel, Reef(1994), written with a Writer’s Bursary from the Arts Council of Great Britain, is the moving tale of a young boy named Triton who works for a marine biologist in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Triton begins as an innocent, impressionable servant, but by the end of the book Sri Lanka is in the midst of political upheaval and Triton and his master have moved to London, where Triton eventually establishes his own restaurant. Through a rich, sensuous and often humorous narrative, Gunesekera depicts Triton’s emotional growth and disillusionment. Reef won the Yorkshire Post’s Best First Work Award, and was short-listed for the 1994 Booker Prize.
Gunesekera has two daughters and currently works in the London headquarters of the British Council.
The following extract from Reef addresses the step-by-step method by which assimilation into English society takes place. Gunesekera wishes us to understand that the process of becoming English is one fraught with danger. The slow inevitability of accepting that one stands at the head of a ‘line of bedraggled, cosmopolitan itinerants’ is lyrically evoked.
Strandline
In London, Mister Salgado settled us into an apartment near Gloucester Road and immediately started work at his institute. It rained continuously in those first months, dribbling down the sides of the building and darkening the wintry sky. The rain seemed to denude the trees and shrink the earth outside our window. I stayed indoors most of the time with the television on. Mister Salgado didn’t have much time to show me anything. We didn’t go anywhere until the following spring, when he arranged a visit to Wales where a colleague of his had a cottage to rent.
There was a pebble beach at the bottom of the cliff near the cottage. When the tide retreated, the shingle gave way to muddy sand and revealed the debris of a whole new world to me: Irish moss, moon jelly, sea kelp, razor-clams and cockle-shells, sand dollars and frisbees, blue nylon rope and dead sea urchins. In the evenings, when I walked along the path of crushed, purple-ringed mussel-shells and grey whelks, I would hear the sea birds cry, plaintive calls of cormorants and black-tipped herring-gulls as sad as our uprooted, overshadowed lives. Then the northern sun would find its prism and the sky would flare into an incandescent sunset above the oil refinery on the other side of the estuary; petrochemicals stained the air in mauve and pink as deliciously as the Tropic of Capricorn off our coral-spangled south coast back home. The sea shimmering between the black humps of barnacled rocks, mullioned with gold bladder-wrack like beached whales, thickened into a great beast reaching landward, snuffling and gurgling. The sky would redden, the earth redden, the sea redden. In pockmarked, marooned rock pools speckled hermit-crabs and rubbery, red sea anemones dug in; limpets and periwinkles and bubble weed held fast waiting for the tide. Thin, furry tongues flickered out of their lidded shells, casting for the slightest light in the eddies of cool water.
I asked Mister Salgado, ‘Do all the oceans flow one into the other? Is it the same sea here as back home?’
‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘The earth has spun with its real stars under a beautiful blue robe ever since the beginning of time. Now as the coral disappears, there will be nothing but sea and we will all return to it.’
The sea in our loins. A tear-drop for an island. A spinning blue globule for a planet. Salt. A wound.
Back home that April, in 1971, the first of the insurgencies erupted in a frenzy of gunfire and small explosions. Bands of zealous young guerrillas roamed the villages and townships staking out their place in a crude unending cortège. Thousands were killed in the reprisals. The earth of a generation was forever cauterized. ‘Our civilizations are so frail,’ Mister Salgado said, reading the news reports of ghastly beheadings on the beach. But these were only precursors of the staggering brutality that came, wave after wave, in the decades that followed: the suffocating infernos, the burning necklaces, flaming molten rings of fire; the Reign of Terror, abductions, disappearances and the crimes of ideology; this suppurating ethnic war. The bodies would roll again and again in the surf, they would be washed in by the tide and be beached by the dozen. The lives of brothers, sisters, men and women, lovers, fathers and mothers and children would be blighted time and again, unremembered.
But as we walked up the sheep-hill together he would only say, ‘She could have been here, you know. Plucking mushrooms out of the earth, or tying a knot in the long grass.’ He would hold my arm and step over the puddles on the pewter rocks. ‘Look at the bracken rippling between the heather. Here even the wind weeps.’
