‘London is a City Built on the Wreckage of Itself’: State Terrorism and Resistance in Chris Cleave’s Incendiary and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Abstract

The impact of post-‘9/11’ terrorism on how the city of London has been reimagined is significant. In this paper, we will explore two post-‘9/11’ novels, Chris Cleave’s 2005 Incendiary and Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 Exit West, which complicate the tradition of British literature featuring terrorists (Taylor, London's Burning: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture, 1840–2005 (London: Continuum, 2012), 1–2) by reenvisaging London as a nexus of state terrorism. Incendiary, published on the day of the ‘7/7’ bombings, highlights the complexity of political violence through the story of a traumatised woman who loses her son and husband during a terrorist attack in London. Cleave critiques the post ‘9/11’ city by constructing a narrative centred on the Londoners’ response to the terror perpetrated by the government, the police, and media (e.g.: violence against civilians, suspension of civil rights, martial law, and surveillance). Similarly, Hamid’s Exit West depicts London as a place where refugees live in terror, exploited in work camps and subjected to surveillance (through drones and by citizens turned vigilantes) by the British state. This paper aims to interrogate how these texts problematise mainstream representations of sovereign power in London. If state sovereignty is understood as ‘an aspiration that seeks to create itself in the face of internally fragmented, unevenly distributed and unpredictable configurations of political authority that exercise more or less legitimate violence in a territory’ (T. B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds.), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2005), 10), literary fiction creates a space suitable for questioning the legitimacy of this aspiration. The state actively produces ‘fear, terror, and violence’, embedding in the construction of cities (D. Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), 4). The London of Cleave’s and Hamid’s novels becomes a site for both projecting terrorism and resisting terror in all its forms. Our interdisciplinary theoretical framework combines postcolonial theory and elements of urban and cultural sociology (S. Graham (ed.), Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); S. Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2011); J. C. Alexander, Performance and Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2011)) with inquiries into the cultural imaginary of terrorism (Frank, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film: Narrating Terror (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), 75.) in post-‘9/11’ literature. We subscribe to the proposition that the ‘only real solution to our current geopolitical crisis’ is asserting the global values that connect the Self with the Other (Gauthier, 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 1.) and we argue that Incendiary and Exit West provide a counternarrative to the dominant discourse of terrorism post ‘9/11’, which champions the state’s supreme authority through stereotyping and polarisation. The proposed reading of Cleave’s and Hamid’s novels will show how the city of London, as imagined in literary responses to ‘9/11’, can crystallise a counternarrative of protest by revealing the systemic violence through which sovereign power is performed at the expense of civil populations, particularly minoritised populations through discourses of hate such as Islamophobia and antiimmigrant/refugee rhetoric.

KEYWORDS:

• Terror in Literature
• British Literature
• War on Terror in Fiction
• Counter-Terrorism in Fiction
• Postcolonialism
• Migration
• Contemporary Literature

ORCID

Maria-Irina Popescu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2208-2150

Notes on contributors

Dr Maria-Irina Popescu is an early career researcher and graduate of the University of Essex. She has previously published in the European Journal of American Culture and the Journal of American Studies. Her research interests include US mythologies, contemporary literature, media and cultural studies, human rights, and terrorism studies. Popescu would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their excellent and insightful suggestions and Dr George Legg for his patience and continued support. Special thanks to Asma Jahamah, an inspiring colleague and collaborator.

Asma Jahamah is a doctoral candidate at the University of Essex. Her thesis examines neo-imperial and postcolonial representations of terror in post-9/11 Anglophone novels. Her research interests include postcolonial literature, post-9/11 US and UK literature, terrorism studies, and Islamic feminism.

Notes

1 In 1883, the London Metropolitan Police established the ‘Special Irish Branch’—the first dedicated counter-terrorism unit in the world. B. Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch Before the First World War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987).

2 E. Boehmer and S. Morton (eds.), Terror and the Postcolonial (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 7.

3 T.B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds.), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2005), 10; D. Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), 4; S. Graham (ed.), Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); S. Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2011) and J.C. Alexander, Performance and Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

4 Boehmer and Morton, Terror and the Postcolonial, 8–9.

5 D. Gregory, ‘The Everywhere War’, The Geographical Journal, 177:3 (September 2011), 238–50, 238. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00426.x.

6 Other examples include: R.L. Stevenson and F. van de Grift’s 1885 The Dynamiter, T. Greer’s 1885 A Modern Daedalus, and H. G. Wells’ 1898 The War of the Worlds, alongside twentieth-century novels like J. S. Fletcher’s 1901 The Three Days’ Terror, E. Wallace’s 1905 The Four Just Men, and, more recently, D. Lessing’s 1985 The Good Terrorist.

7 Following from Jacques Derrida’s assertion that ‘when you say “September 11” you are already citing’ (G. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85), throughout this essay we will use the labels ‘9/11,’ ‘7/7,’ and ‘War on Terror’ inside quotation marks because they represent a ready-made image, an inherited, Western-centric set of assumptions.

8 M. Hamid, Exit West (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017).

9 London has a long history of negotiating the presence of displaced populations. R. Moss, ‘A Short History of London Refugees: A Museum Trail’, Culture, 24 (13 June 2007) <http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/art38046> [accessed 4 July 2018] and A. Woolley, Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-first Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

10 From fears of Chartist insurgency in the 1840s and the anarchist threat in the popular crime fiction of the 1890s–1900s, to fears about a Bolshevik revolution in the East End (1920s–30s), fears related to the rise of Fascism in the interwar period, and the threat of counter-culture in the 1970s. A. Taylor, London's Burning: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture, 1840–2005 (London: Continuum, 2012), 1–2.

11 M. C. Frank, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film: Narrating Terror (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), 75.

12 Ibid. 75.

13 Taylor, London’s Burning, 51.

14 R.J.C. Young, ‘Terror Effects’, in E. Boehmer and S. Morton (eds.), Terror and the Postcolonial (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 307–28, 319.

15 J. McLeod, ‘Writing London in the Twenty-First Century’, in L. Manley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 258.

16 Frank, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism, 75.

17 Young, ‘Terror Effects’, 309, 311–12.

18 Ibid. 310.

19 Young writes of the novel’s ability to capture ‘the invasion of the psyche, the transitions of effective terror from outside to inside’ (Ibid. 315–16).

20 Ibid. 307–28, 320.

21 Ibid. 319.

22 Ibid. 324

23 ibid. 323.

24 Ibid. 324–26.

25 The label ‘7/7’ establishes the bombings in the British and European collective memory as the equivalent of the ‘9/11’ attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City, the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the failed attack intended for Washington, DC.

26 L. Adams, ‘Terror Fiction’, The New Republic, 233:12 (19 September 2005), 39.

27 V. de la Torre, ‘“Incendiary”: The Book That Became Too Hot to Handle’, Washington Post, 18 August 2005 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/17/AR2005081702109.html> [accessed 28 November 2018] Emphasis in the original.

28 J. Zulaika and W.A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996), 4.

29 Frank, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism, 228.

30 Young, ‘Terror Effects’, 307–28, 310.

31 Ibid. 307–28, 309.

32 Zulaika and Douglass, Terror and Taboo, 10.

33 A Pakistani-born, American-educated writer who lived in the US and the UK before returning to his native Lahore, Hamid is a novelist whose work is hard to pinpoint using the generic labels of national literatures. His stories, which speak of hybridity and multiplicity and complicate the encounters between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, secured a place in the Western literary canon on either side of the Atlantic. The Reluctant Fundamentalist was both shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and awarded the Asian American Literary Award.

34 G.C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader [1995] (London: Routledge, 2003), 24–28.

35 Hansen and Stepputat (eds.), Sovereign Bodies, 3.

36 T.B. Hansen and F. Stepputat, ‘Sovereignty Revisited’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 35 (2006), 295–315, 297. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123317.

37 C. Cleave, Incendiary [2005] (London: Sceptre, 2009), 92.

38 Ibid. 91–92.

39 Ibid. 86.

40 Ibid. 90.

41 Ibid. 90–91.

42 Graham, Cities Under Siege, 18.

43 Cleave, Incendiary, 309.

44 Hansen and Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies, 2.

45 K. Rennhak, ‘Philosophical and Literary Dialogues in a Time of Terror’, in D. M. Mohr and B. Dawes (eds.), Radical Planes?: 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016), 56–76, 67. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004324220_005. For Derrida’s idea of terrorism as an ‘autoimmunitary process’ see Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 94: ‘As we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity.’

46 J. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays [2002] trans. C. Turner (London: Verso, 2003) and S. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002).

47 Frank, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism, 25–26.

48 Hamid, Exit West, 188–89.

49 Ibid. 132.

50 Boehmer and Morton, Terror and the Postcolonial, 8–9.

51 Hamid, Exit West, 126.

52 K. Oyedeji, ‘Out of the Frying Pan … ’, Wasafiri, 28:4 (2013), 47–52, 51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2013.826889.

53 Hamid, Exit West, 181.

54 Frank, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism, 26.

55 Ibid.

56 G. Agamben, State of Exception [2003], trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2.

57 Hansen and Stepputat, ‘Sovereignty Revisited’, 301.

58 Ibid. 301.

59 Hamid, Exit West, 126.

60 Hansen and Stepputat, ‘Sovereignty Revisited’, 297.

61 Hamid, Exit West, 131–32.

62 Hansen and Stepputat, ‘Sovereignty Revisited’, 302.

63 Ibid. 297.

64 Ibid. 306.

65 Hamid, Exit West, 132.

66 The ‘coming night of shattered glass’ is a reference to Kristallnacht (the ‘Night of Broken Glass’), a pogrom against Jewish people throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. This attack was carried out by paramilitary forces and German civilians, with no intervention from the authorities, who looked on as civilians destroyed the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues.

67 Hamid, Exit West, 134–35.

68 Young, ‘Terror Effects’, 319.

69 Taylor, London’s Burning, 15.

70 Cleave, Incendiary, 87.

71 Ibid. 87.

72 Ibid. 88.

73 Ibid. 88.

74 Ibid. 89.

75 Ibid. 166–67.

76 Ibid.

77 D. Gregory and A. Pred (eds.), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence [2007] (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 4.

78 Cleave, Incendiary, 137.

79 Ibid. 138.

80 E. Boehmer, ‘Postcolonial Writing and Terror’, in Boehmer and Morton (eds.), Terror and the Postcolonial, 141–50, 145.

81 Cleave, Incendiary, 262–63.

82 Ibid. 261.

83 Hansen and Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies, 3.

84 Cleave, Incendiary, 262.

85 D. Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life [2005] (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2005), 53.

86 See M. Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (London: Penguin, 2013): The second person narrator mentions global surveillance (‘From the perspective of the world’s national security apparatuses you exist in several locations’, 161), the ubiquity of on-site security (‘A series of CCTV cameras observes various stages of your progress … ’, 162), online surveillance (‘you can be tracked, and indeed you are tracked, as are we all … ’, 168), remote access (‘the computer sits open on a counter, and through its camera a woman can be seen by herself at a low table … ’, 169), and the presence of drones, one which ‘circles a few times, its high-powered eye unblinking, and flies observantly on’ (175).

87 Hamid, Exit West, 88.

88 Ibid. 101.

89 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975] trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1977), 201.

90 S. Graham, Vertical: The City from Satellite to Bunkers [2016] (London: Verso, 2018), 77.

91 Hamid, Exit West, 154–55.

92 Ibid.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid. 117–18.

95 Ibid. 120.

96 Ibid. 143.

97 Ibid. 118.

98 Graham, Vertical, 200–01.

99 Hamid, Exit West, 124.

100 Ibid. 141.

101 Ibid. 139–40.

102 Ibid. 142.

103 Ibid. 147.

104 Boehmer and Morton, Terror and the Postcolonial, 12–13.

105 Young, ‘Terror Effects’, 314.

106 Hamid, Exit West, 142.

107 S. Groes, The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2.

108 Hamid, Exit West, 167–68.

109 Ibid.

110 L. Colombino, Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body [2013] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 3.

111 Hamid, Exit West, 181.

112 Cleave, Incendiary, 87–88.

113 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.

114 T. Gauthier, 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 1.

115 Ibid. 29.

116 Ibid. 5.

117 B. Kempner, ‘“Blow the World Back Together”: Literary Nostalgia, 9/11, and Terrorism in Seamus Heaney, Chris Cleave, and Martin Amis’, in C. Cilano (ed.), From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 53–74, 66.

118 Cleave, Incendiary, 297.

119 Ibid.

120 E. Said and D. Barsamian, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2003), 159.

121 K. Rennhak, ‘Philosophical and Literary Dialogues in a Time of Terror’, in Dunja M. Mohr and Birgit Dawes (eds.), Radical Planes?: 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016), 56–76, 67. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004324220_005.

122 A. Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 20.

123 Cleave, Incendiary, 13.

124 J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 20.

125 Cleave, Incendiary, 298.

126 Hamid, Exit West, 124.

127 Ibid. 131–32.

128 ‘There was such earnestness in the boy, such empathy and good intent, that though some argued, none had the heart to refuse him’ (Ibid., 135–36).

129 Hansen and Stepputat, ‘Sovereignty Revisited’, 296.

130 V. T. Nguyen, ‘“Exit West,” by Mohsin Hamid’, New York Times Book Review (2017) <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/exit-west-mohsin-hamid.html>.

131 Hamid, Exit West, 164.

132 Ibid. 209.

133 Cleave, Incendiary, 114.

134 D. Dreyer, ‘Letters to Osama and Terrorist Mindsets: Coming to Terms with 9/11 in Chris Cleave’s Incendiary and John Updike’s Terrorist’, in Mohr and Dawes (eds.), Radical Planes, 105.

135 Cleave, Incendiary, 115.

136 The phrase ‘with incredible noise and fury’ comes from W. Thornbury’s 1878 translation of the North panel inscription, originally in Latin: W. Thornbury, ‘The Monument and its neighbourhood’, in Old and New London: Volume 1 (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, London, 1878), 565–74. British History Online <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol1/pp565-574> [accessed 30 November 2018].

137 Cleave, Incendiary, 144—our emphasis.

138 J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), xix.

139 Ibid. xix.

140 Taylor, London's Burning, 174.