The only novel I've read that attempts to address immigration even-handedly is T.C. Boyle's 1995 The Tortilla Curtain (which is terrific). Like Lorraine Adams, Boyle depicts his primary immigrant characters as honest and hard-working, but they are surrounded by a shadier lot: thieves, drug-runners and rapists. The Tortilla Curtain portrays the costs to the host community of unchecked, illegal immigration. The Mexican protagonist and his pregnant wife "America" sleep rough in a Californian public park, which they not only foul and litter, but inadvertently set on fire during a drought. For once, the host population is given the dignity of names and faces, rather than merely constituting a backdrop crowd of the fatuously well-off who are not very nice.

Yet Boyle's native-born Americans are still too affluent and small-minded to engage the reader's sympathy appreciably. When "America" loses the skin on her hands to toxic solvents because her employers can't be bothered to provide rubber gloves, or is preyed upon sexually and cheated of hard-earned wages, it's hard to get fussed when our American family on the wealthy estate nearby loses their dog. In the end it's still the Mexicans who stake out the moral high ground, even if they leave a few Coke cans behind.

The only novel I know of that puts the host population's case ferociously is Jean Raspail's infamous The Camp of the Saints - first published in French in 1973, but set in 2000, when the world's population has ballooned to 7 billion (and he was not far off). A stinking "river of sperm", 800,000 desperate residents of Calcutta hijack a fleet of ships and head for the coast of France. Meanwhile, gormlessly liberal France prepares to greet the convoy with open arms. The first landing party is a tide of bloated corpses thrown overboard. Similar sea-jackings are under way. The full-scale invasion of the first world by the third has begun.

The Camp of the Saints is blatantly racist. The mascot of the approaching ships is a grotesquely deformed dwarf, their human cargo characterised as a "sweating, starving mass, stewing in urine and noxious gases". The purple prose does the author's cause a disservice, for many defensible sentiments drown in hyperbolic poison. Raspail is at his best when writing about his own countrymen, who are, in his view, too paralysed with self-contempt to defend their own borders: "Cowardice toward the weak is cowardice at its most subtle, and indeed, its most deadly".

So are the powerful emotions surrounding immigration on the receiving end inherently unworthy of compassion? Are westerners who are uncomfortable with a tide of uninvited new arrivals ipso facto the villains of the tale? I think not. That discomfort need not proceed from bigotry alone, but surely from the same primitive notion of home that concerns Segun Afolabi. Illegal immigration occasions the sensation of a householder when total strangers burst through his front door without knocking and take up indefinite residence in the guest room. Britain memorialises its natives' brave fight against the Nazis in the second world war. In sufficient quantity, the arrival of foreign populations can begin to duplicate the experience of military occupation - your nation is no longer your home. Yet native western citizenries are implicitly told on a daily basis that to object is prejudiced, and they had best keep their mouths shut. This is a silencing in which fiction has been complicit.

As an American resident of Britain, I am an immigrant myself. Perhaps I can never quite regard the UK as home either, so that on my yearly trips to New York City I would like to relish returning somewhere that is. Yet one in four adults in New York today does not speak English. The recreation area where I once hit a tennis ball against a backboard in Riverside Park has now been colonised by immigrants from Guatemala. The last few times I practised my forehand, I drew wary looks and felt unwelcome. I don't practise there any more, and I resent that a bit. Does that make me a bigot? In a story, would I look bad?

Surely fiction could stand to render as passably sympathetic an unease - or even fury - at being made to feel a foreigner in one's own country. In the face of mainstream disquiet over immigration, most centrist politicians abdicate to the venomous rightwing. By likewise failing to engage with understandably primal reactions to the compromise of one's home, fiction writers may abdicate the role of comforter and champion to future Jean Raspails of a subtler, more beguiling stripe. Literarily, readers are being cheated, for filling in only one side of the equation deprives a compelling modern drama of its delicious complexity.

3) In this article which appeared in Le Soir, writer Pierre Mertens contemplates the recent tragic events in Antwerp in which an 18 year-old student shot and wounded a Turkish woman and murdered a 2 year-old girl and her Malian carer.

"...Jean-Paul Sartre remarked, in his Reflections on the Jewish Question that "antisemitism, is more than just a way of thinking. It is first and foremost a passion." The same applies, of course, to all forms of racism. The young Antwerp killer, who wanted to bash foreigners, had probably read neither Sophocles nor Sartre. His father disowned him and asked how his son could have done such a thing. But he didn't have to look too far: he himself militates in a xenophobic party and his grandfather was a Nazi collaborator during the war. Hadn't they both cultivated a very fertile field? Even if we push aside any determinism, wasn't the atmosphere 'favourable' for such an outcome? There may always come a day when supposedly harmless words and the weight of slogans constitute the ideal platform for the worst atrocities to occur...The worst thing about hatred is that as soon as it manifests itself, attempts are made to minimise it by finding accessory reasons to explain the actions of those who actually pull the trigger."

The Nice Nazi

¶ 12:47 PM 0 comments