Interview with local activist

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For someone who enjoys an almost iconic stature among a certain generation of anti-racist activists, one of the first things that you notice about A. Sivanandan is sheer unassuming normality of the man. It doesn't take long after meeting him that smallness of his physical stature belies a person of immense energy and verve. It is even more of a surprise to discover then that Siva, as he is more commonly known is actually 77 years old. There is a tradition in literary circles that that great novelist often turn into good polemicists eg. Salman Rushdie, Arundati Roy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. After a lifetime spent writing and campaigning in the cause of anti-racism and anti-colonialism, Sivanandan by publishing his first novel at the age of 74, seems to have turned conventional wisdom on its head. Beautifully crafted, When memory dies, has been rightfully lauded and showered with prizes as a work of great passion and originality. But what took so long? How long did he have this yearning? 'All my life' replies Siva who has been scribbling all his life. But the fight for various causes took precedence. But the pain of having left his homeland such a long time ago has stayed with him through the years. And it is out of what he describes as hollowness that the novel came. Siva is proud, in a diffident sort of way of the contribution to the fight against racism and colonialism. ' But I hadn't made a contribution to my own country and my own people. So the novel came out of that'.

The son of a Tamil post master, young Siva, the eldest son, was lucky to receive a pretty decent education, in the expectation that he would then get a good job and look after his younger siblings and parents. But it was the very nature of that education that ultimately forged him into the rebel that he remains to this day. It was a school, he says, where teaching was in English but which 'taught us English history and which taught us English literature and nothing about our own country'. The whole history of Sri Lanka was therefore taught through the prism of colonialism. Sri Lankans were taught to think of themselves as second class citizens who should be grateful for the bounty that European colonial rule brought them.

Coming to England and abandoning a nascent career as a banker for that of a committed anti-racist fighter and writer seems only a short step. Sivanandan's early life in England, although full of personal strife and pain, led him to develop new insights into the nature of racism and colonialism and eventually to the path of the Institute of Race Relations where he assumed the position of librarian under the patrician guidance of Philip Mason . It did not take long for him to realise that the IRR's main role in fact was to serve the interests of big business. Ever the brilliant tactician, Siva eventually liberated the IRR from the grip of the old guard and moving it from its prestigious West End offices to the rather seedy looking corner of King's Cross, turned it into a fighting, campaigning weapon for progressive causes. What then, does he think of events like Black History Months which are controlled and promoted by big local authorities. Siva, though, sees it in very tactical terms. If Black History Months help to promote the idea of broader, tolerant and more inclusive culture, then he is all for them. 'It is very important for black people, Afro-Caribbeans and Asians and everybody to know where they come from in order to know where they are going'. Events like Black History Months therefore, help us to understand the cultural hybridisation that has taken place in this country through the fact of colonialism and globalisation which have brought us together in this country. Nor does he see Black History month simply in terms of its African context. He recalls with pride the time when he met famous Black Panthers like Bobby Seale and Huey Newton who were surprised to hear an Asian using the word Black to describe himself. Black is something he sees as a political colour uniquely British. That doesn't mean that he sees non-white people as an undistinguished homogeneous mass. Of course, there is a diversity of cultures. 'But in terms of politics, we defined ourselves politically as blacks'. Black for Siva, is therefore a political colour born out of unique shared history of colonialism and racism in the same sense as red is political colour. So if Black History Months help to counter the narrow identity based culturalisms that have recently emerged, then Siva welcomes them.

As Director of the IRR Sivanandan is also responsible for editing the journal Race & Class. In recent years both Siva and the journal have come in for criticism for several of Britain[base ']s leading black writers, always anonymously for some peculiar reason, as having lost touch with latest political trends and philosophies. Doesn't it hurt him that the very same people who yesterday looked up to him for inspiration think that today he is a bit of an irrelevancy. 'Not a bit' says Siva. 'the dogs bark but the caravan moves on. It doesn't bother me one bit because, if you look at some of these people who have made these criticisms, they are ardent multi-culturalists, who condemned my view against multiculturalism, because I said I was for anti-racism and against a culturalism which ethnicises us and puts us into ethnic ghettos'.

For Siva, the doughty fighter, it is the fight against injustice and oppression everywhere, and the quest for a better world that remains the main driving force of his life. He sees himself writing more fiction because, 'I do not make a distinction between political writing and creative writing. I try to be creative in my political writing and political in my creative writing'. Long may he continue to inspire newer generations of fighters against racism and injustice.

Dr A Sivanandan, Director of the Institute of Race Relations and editor of the journal Race & Class is a well known writer and campaigner against racism and injustice. He is also the author of When memory dies, his debut novel which has garnered admirable reviews and awards. The IRR's exhibition From resistance to rebellion is to form a key part of the programme of events and activities around Birmingham City Council's annual Black History Month in October. To coincide with the launch of Black History Month Dr. Sivanandan agreed to be interviewed about his life and politics by Raj Pal, Curator, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

R.P: Well Dr. Sivanandan, how does a really well educated Tamil banker intellectual come to be the Director of the Institute of Race Relations based here in this very seedy corner of Kings Cross?

A.S: (Laughs loudly) What a question? The answer is long. Before I was a banker in Ceylon, I was a teacher and I came from a very poor peasant family in the north of Ceylon where nothing grows except children. So education was very important to us. My father was a post master and he managed to get me a pretty decent education and as I was the eldest son he invested everything in me and expected me to help my younger brothers and sisters. And I suppose there were two things influencing me. On the one hand there were the roots that I came from: the village, the peasantry, the interdependency. We were hungry but no one starved because we shared everything we had. A sort of feudal relationship. And on it was superimposed an understanding of the colonial relationship which came from my English education. In a sense there was an anti-body within the body politic. I was going to a school which was teaching English which taught us English history, which taught us English literature nothing about our own country and everything about our own country was seen through the prism of colonialism. We were second class citizens being denigrated in one way or another. Despite that, I suppose the fact that I came from this sort of feudal, extended family with interdependent, personal relationships created a resistance to the type of thing that I was being taught. And out of that contradiction arose my understanding of injustice. It was a visceral thing. Colonialism was a pain in my stomach, in my solar plexus. And at the same time I could understand the benefits that we were getting through an English education, the horizons that were being opened to us through learning the English language. But those horizons were again limited by the colonial experience. So it is that first basic contradiction, I think, that gave birth to other contradictions that you speak of. That[base ']s how the bank manager came to a seedy place like this.

R.P: But it is interesting you say that because in your essay, which admittedly you did write a long time ago, I think its called The liberation of the black intellectual. I mean its quite a contested essay because you sort of go on to hint that really, and this was 1974, I accept, that really the only way that a black intellectual can possibly gain acceptance in a white society like this, is somehow to deny his blackness and even if he does deny his blackness, that really the main thing that really matters to people is that he would always be a nigger or a wog. Do you think that that still holds for black intellectuals in society?

A.S: I don't think that that interpretation is quite right. What I was trying to say was that there's a contradiction here. It is only through embracing our blackness that we begin to drive out Englishness from our psyches. That is the liberation of the black intellectual. Is he a black or an intellectual? If he's an intellectual he throws himself into the arms of the oppressor, of the colonial oppressor, of the enslaver. If he's a black, then he begins to understand the inscape of his politics, to understand what exactly he has got to do to liberate himself. James Baldwin once said that he was a writer who happened to be black rather than a black who was a writer. Now I do not except that we, the oppressed and exploited, can have that choice. We are not writers who happen to be black, we are blacks first and last and writers only secondary. So that is the whole purpose of the essay I wrote on the black intellectual. A black writer who says he just happens to be black is a mercenary on hire to his people. A black who says he is a writer is a solider in the people[base ']s army. Unless the intellectual who is black liberates himself from the intellectualism that has been visited upon him, which is a very white western- oriented intellectualism he cannot become black, he cannot become himself.

R.P: So an intellectual who happens to be black doesn't really have the choice then to be just an intellectual in other words.

A.S: Absolutely, absolutely, for us there is no such choice. A black intellectual, an oppressed intellectual, a third world intellectual has to be an intellectual engagé. He has got to be involved in the struggle to liberate himself and his people whether it is the family, school or the black movement, third world movement any of these things anti-colonial movement anti global movement. Wherever there is oppression and injustice we want to liberate ourselves. We cannot be intellectuals per se and hide ourselves away in an academic ivory tower. That is the treason of intellectuals in the western world.

R.P: Well, elsewhere in the same essay on the intellectual you go on to say something even more kind of striking, which is that somehow the common denominator of racial oppression means that the black worker, if I can paraphrase you correctly, has more in common with his black boss than he does with white workers on the shop floor. Do you think that, a quarter of a century on, that view still holds?

A.S: No, it does not hold. For a number of reasons. First of all in 1974 I was writing for the [OE]60s when black became a political colour in this country. The Afro-Caribbeans and Asians might have defined themselves culturally but they acted against racism politically. So we were a people and a class and a people for a class. We lived cheek by jowl in the same ghettos. We helped each other out in strikes. We might have been divided in terms of the labour that we did because some people came from the Indian sub continent from factories and so forth, and Afro-Caribbeans came from plantation societies, like my own - Sri Lanka. So, there was a division of labour that took place. Most of the Afro Caribbeans were herded into the service industry, and most of the Asians went into foundries and textile industries. But we lived in the same inner-city areas because of the discrimination in housing and the discrimination against us was not as black and as Asian. It was undifferentiated. We were all blacks. We were niggers and wogs and all that. We were non white. So that allowed us to come together and also the fact that we had a common language in English. Maybe a different type of dialect, of broken English, some English, but we managed to communicate with each other, Afro-Caribbeans, Africans, Asians, and we also had that common colonial experience and the fight for independence. So all those things brought us together as a people and as a class. So in that period when the trade unions were racist we had to create our own black workers organizations. We had to fight working class racism as well. Those of us who were on the left had to tell our working class brothers in the white community that they had a problem with racism which we had to surmount before we could become brothers on the factory floor. And on the ideological level also, we had to point out to the ideologues, that you cannot subsume race to class. The struggle against racism and the struggle against class were symbiotic. The ideologues kept telling us that once we had a classless society then we would have a raceless society. We didn't believe that. So, if you like, when I was writing the liberation of the black intellectuals I was also saying, first of all, that the intellectuals, the black intellectuals must return their skills, their education to the struggle. As Nyerere said "we must return our education to the people who gave it to us". We couldn't hive off, we couldn't become uncle Toms.

The other message was that although the working class were our comrades, we had to travel down a different route from them, we couldn't take instructions from them. Our struggles had to be autonomous and therefore that period was in a sense a black nationalist period. Of course circumstances have changed qualitatively from the [OE]70s because we have had a technological revolution. And that technological revolution has brought about a leap in the productive forces which has enabled capital more or less to liberate itself from the strictures of working class struggle certainly in the metropolitan countries. And capital can now take up its plant and walk to any part where labour is cheap, in any part of the world. So the exploitation, the centre of gravity of exploitation, has moved from the metropolis to the third world. There the surplus value that capital gets is almost absolute. And that is the sort of exploitation we should be talking about. So here again are differences with my white working-class ideologues. They do not take into account the fact that the centre of gravity of exploitation, as I have said, has moved to the third world. Whereas the third world workers are being immiserated and exploited. And another thing of course you have to take into account is that the working class struggle because of the technological revolution has become, the working class itself, has become dissipated, desegregated and therefore the political clout it had... we don't have 30 - 40,000 people on a factory floor in one place anymore. We have the factories stretched right across the globe. The workers are stretched right across the globe.

R.P: But surely it isn't, I mean do you not exaggerate a little bit, because surely it isn't as easy for capital to move fixed capital as it were, to move machinery, to move plant as easily as you make it out to be because if the rate of exploitation in the third world is as high, and I agree with you it can be very very high, why do we still have manufacturing capacity in advanced capitalist countries like Japan in countries like America in countries like France. I mean I know Britain is a bit of an exception but there are many advanced capitalist societies which have very high rates of industrialization still. Why don't they just move to the third world.

A.S:Well they have moved to the third world to a great extent. To the so called newly industrialized countries. Like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore and places like that. But it is almost as though the big industries are kept in the centre, while the small industries can flourish in the south. But the other thing is of course, when I say that capital can take its plant elsewhere, of course I'm exaggerating. I'm exaggerating because that exaggeration highlights the scheme of things today, as compared to what it was during period of industrial capitalism. I keep saying this because our people should pay attention to the fact that there is a qualitative change and therefore the forces of struggle have changed. The way we struggle has got to change. It is no longer just the working class struggle alone that is important but the struggles of the community, the struggles about the closing of a motorway, the environmental struggles, the women's struggles, very local struggles ...

R.P: Now, it is interesting you say that because one of the criticisms that has been levelled at you, and I was going to ask you whether it hurts you, is that, I shouldn't say loyalists, that erstwhile admirers say, and they are always anonymous, black writers who say 'well you know yes,he was very relevant and he wrote some wonderful stuff in the past but really (they say) you know he has not really written much for a long time that is relevant to the times today so he is a bit of an irrelevancy' and yet at the same time publicly they go on paying you tributes, even in Race and Class. Doesn't that hurt you somewhat?

A.S: Not a bit. The dogs bark but the caravan moves on. It doesn't bother me one bit because, if you look at some of these people who have made these criticisms, they are ardent multi-culturalists, who condemned my view against multiculturalism because I said I am against culturalism and for anti-racism and that culturalism ethnicises us and puts us into ethnic ghettos. And we allow the system to buy us off. You want dreadlocks, you want samosas, the system will provide them. Some of them who have criticised me are now coming around to my point of view. And others, one black writer in particular, have said they prefer the truth of my fiction to the fiction of my truth [^] very neatly put. But you see, the point is that I do not make a distinction between political writing and creative writing. I try to be creative in my political writing and political in my creative writing. But, to come back to your question about the Liberation of the black intellectual, some parts of it are outdated. It was right for the time. And I was right for the time because I am essentially a pamphleteer. Like Milton, I write for the time. I write for the struggle. I don't write like the sociologist.

R.P: Now, its interesting, the issue that you raise about the sociologist. Now, I have been in my previous kind of karma I have been a sociologist myself and one of the things that made me give it up was the convoluted language of sociology. Now, your language is very refreshingly accessible to anybody, layperson or specialist. I really wanted to ask this. I mean what do think of, you know there are so many writers, black writers who will remain nameless, and they use some of the most inaccessible, the most arcane language, and it seems to me, and want you to comment on this, my perception seem to be that they are so far removed from struggles, from ordinary struggles that go on in people's lives, that rather than talking to people generally they seem to be talking to each other.

A.S: Absolutely. I don't know if you saw a piece of mine, a talk I gave at the ICA a couple of years ago called La Trahison des clercs, the treason of the intellectuals where I talked exactly about this. The Liberation of the black intellectual is an important starting point. Because some of the things I said haven't changed. What I was arguing there was for the black intellectuals to devote themselves to the struggle. And today these people have hived off and created their own language, their own sort of pie in the sky and they have a vested interest in obscurantism. The purpose of language is to communicate, right. And in a world, a so called media world, a multi-media world, where communication has been taken over by the conglomerates, we are not allowed to communicate in any meaningful way. Everything is spin or soundbite, we hang our thoughts on pegs, or we hang visions on television. We have lost the capacity to listen because there is so much noise. Pop music is pap music. Today in the information society, the intellectuals are in the engine room of power. They are the software merchants. They are the people who produce all the stuff for Bill Gates. And so they have a greater responsibility and particularly where art is concerned in the cultural sense. Culture became so important in the [OE]70s and [OE]80s and [OE]90s right - the whole question of culture began to replace economics. So we became culturalists, cultural determinists, right. You know opposing economic determinism we became cultural determinists. And in the sphere of culture, black culture, Afro-Caribbean culture, African culture, Asian culture, people in these areas began to say, 'oh yes, these are our strengths, these are our histories, these are what we have got to contribute'. And then they created, they found in post-,modernism, a language which allowed them to obscure what they were saying. A special language for a special people, so they hived away even further into an ivory tower and became rarified further removed from the struggle.

R.P: I was going to raise that question with you, glad that you have come up with it now, is that I get the impression from some of the critics, even they would laud you at times, privately would say, you know when they say 'he doesn't understand the new complexities of culture and of feminism, of community politics etc. and you have just actually demonstrated that they are actually very important. But do you think that there is a danger that in opting for culture they have in some way veered away from the commonalities that would tie people of different ethnicities, of different nationalties together and they have actually gone on to issues of culture which can lead to chauvinism, cultural kind of separation, the glorification of cultures of smaller groups can actually lead to chauvinism.

A.S: Yes, more than that, it leads to nationalism. And that nationalism is replicated in the internecine struggles in third world countries or in Eastern Europe you see. It resonates with Tamil/Singhalese in Sri Lanka, in Rwanda, the genocide in one time Yugoslavia. And so on and so forth. You see that sort of culturalism leads to nationalism. And nationalism is what we can least afford. When capital is becoming international we are breaking up into smaller and smaller tribes and nations. But I am veering away from your question. I would again answer it differently and say that this whole business of culture in terms of individuals turns into identity politics and we begin to navel gaze. Who am I? The answer for me is: who I am is what I do. It is not socially necessary for anybody to know who I am that's my private business, right. But who I am is what I do. I want to be judged by what I am doing socially. When it becomes a private individual construct, am I gay? Am I black? Am I Asian? Am I old? Am I young? Where do begin to go into this whole business? Do I come from a peasant background? Is my blackness very important for me to gain places? Does it mean I can get a job somewhere because of the quota system because black is now a required condition for employment? When I ask myself these questions then I turn myself inwards and the struggle gets away from me. Other people become less important.

Culture defines but economics determines. Now that for me is very important because what is happening now because of the technological revolution and the ability of capital to divide society into two thirds well off one third poor. This one third in the metropolitan countries are in the ghettos, black, Afro Caribbeans, Asians, African, Afro-Caribbean youth locked away in the inner cities and forgotten. Their struggles don't amount to anything for the culturalists. Let me come at this a different way. I was asked about racism some years ago when a BNP member was elected for the first time to the local council in the East End of London. I then made a distinction between the racism that discriminates and the racism that kills. The racism that discriminates applies to middle-class people. But they have got enough race relations acts, they have got all these people in the media.

R.P: I want to interrupt you at this point because you are one of the few people who has not actually [OE]sold out[base '] and you have remained very committed to struggle and committed to the notion of building a better world and a better society. And yet I find a paradox in that a lot of people who are interested in the racism that discriminates, i.e. black middle class intellectuals, can quote you very very approvingly, although their class position is very different to that of the underdog, that you talk about.

A.S. : Their quoting me doesn't mean anything to me because I am also quoted at the grass roots level, and that means a lot more. Look at the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, or look at my appearances on the platform of the Civil Rights Movement, or on various other platforms at the grass roots level, against the Gulf war for instance, or against brutal policing, or against the killing of a taxi driver. My spoken word, where I go and talk, that for me, the oral tradition if you like, is the one they can't appropriate. Even when they quote me, they are in a sense, showing that they are divided against themselves. That is good. I am not writing off the middle class bourgeois, I am trying to keep them on their toes, I am trying to say, 'look here you[base ']ve got a duty to the people you came from, don't forget that'.

R.P: O.K. I want to come back to the question of what is black, your definition of black. Now Stuart Hall in his own sort of convoluted sort of tortured way says that, you know he talks about this 'complex internal cultural segmentation' which has happened among ethnic minority communities in this country. And he says that maybe the term black is no longer relevant. I think what he means is that people have too many different identities of being Hindus or Muslims or Indians or Punjabis or Pakistanis and so on and so forth, that somehow to compress all of these people into one term, black is longer relevant.

A.S: Well, we can't compress them into one term or class, either. Can We? You see, I said before, may be black is not politically as relevant as before. Forget about what Stuart said. It is because times have changed. At the time when we first came here after the war Britain needed all the labour it could lay its hands on. And unlike Germany where they had to get Gastarbeiters Britain had colonies. And that why the 1948 Nationality Act made us citizens. But that gave us strength. Because you see, unlike the Gasterbeiters in Germany we were citizens. So they couldn't send us back. Now, during that period where that racism was undifferentiated as between Afro-Caribbeans and Asians there was a hell of lot of self-reliance and self-help. And that self-help went across Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities towards each other. And there were instances where an Afro-Caribbean may have been on strike and the Asian landlord might have said 'right, you carry on on strike' or the Asian grocer would have said ' we will provide you with food. Don't worry about it. We will give it to you on tick till the strike is over'. So there was a lot of unsung co-operation that went on. And then of course there were all the parties. The Black Unity and Freedom Party, The Panthers, Grassroots, Avtar Johal and Jagmohan Joshi and the Indian Workers Association, all these people who started the Pakistani Welfare Association and tremendous activists like my great friend Vishnu Sharma in Southall. There was a whole mass of struggles that went on. And though we defined ourselves culturally, we went to the Sikh temple, we went to the Hindu temple we went to church (we had no problems about identity, we knew who we were) we defined our identities in a cultural sense if you like, in the religious sense, in the way we ate and drank. But in terms of politics, we defined ourselves as blacks. In other words, when there was big march in Birmingham of the Universal Coloured People's Association, for example, all these peoples came out on the street and marched. We marched against racism. So against racism we were black, right. For ourselves we were Afro-Caribbeans or Asians or Sikhs or Gujaratis or St.Lucians or Trinidadians.

R.P: So, the term black is still sort of relevant?

A.S: Black is a political colour like red is a political colour. Young black people still call themselves black, Afro-Caribbeans and Asians still call themselves black. It's the intellectuals who have reneged on the term.

R.P: I want to talk to you about Black History Month. You have talked about, written about the whole history of the Institute of Race Relations and how you came into it and how you broke from it. And one of the things you say, quite rightly, is that the IRR was funded by big business and really essentially served their interests in terms of economic exploitation of the areas of the third world etc. What then do you think about the CREs and the local authorities and the local CREs which are actually sponsored by and controlled by big institutions like local and national governments?

A.S: You see there are various areas of struggle. We can't be monolithic about it. So though I am against culturalism, culture is important because it is what combusts agitation. It is what combusts a political movement. Amilcar Cabral once said that the culture of a people can at any moment in time take on a political form or military form to overthrow an oppressor. The culture that combusts is a progressive culture, not an inward-looking, navel-gazing, identity politics culture which has been summarised as you know in the steel bands and samosa idea. That is what I call culturalism.

Now, it is the hybridisation of culture, it is the mingling of culture, that makes for a great heritage. I am a bastard, culturally speaking. I am a bastard in other ways too.

R.P: A bastard child of history?

A.S: Yes. You see that bastardisation process is very important. Here again, some of the intellectuals and post-modernists carry on about hybridisation. I am not using the term in the same passive way that they are doing. I am using it in the active way as Amilcar Cabral was doing of culture as a combusting force. But if culture is a combusting force, it has got to be progressive. It can't go back into history and be traditionalist. No arranged marriages. All that stuff we have got to get out of. We have got to lead ourselves out of that.

R.P: Many councils and many local authorities have actually taken up Black History Month as key thing in October. You talked earlier about the fact that many of these kinds of organisations and many of these events have become an alternative to anti-racism in society. So do you not think that there is a danger that the real things that challenge racism, the things that affect people's life chances, things like housing, things like jobs, things like education and health etc. may be left untouched often because councils are committed to doing [OE]Black History[base '] in one concentrated month?

A.S: That is the danger. That is why as I have said, a contradiction comes in. Because culture can be a progressive force or it can be a reactionary force. Culture can lead to revolution or it can lead to nationalism. And this is what the Black Panthers were talking about. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in their heyday, they were talking about revolutionary nationalism not cultural nationalism. That is what Cabral was talking about. So we want culture back. BHM is very important. It is very important for black people, Afro-Caribbeans and Asians and Africans to know where they come from in order to know where they are going. But it is equally important to know of the hybridisation that has taken place through our presence in this country, through the fact of colonisation, through the fact of globalisation. Look at the reality. WE cannot go away, hive ourselves into some sort of ashram and look at our navels and say 'hey this is our identity'. The purpose of culture, if there is a purpose, is not to find out who you are but to find out what you are going to do with who you are. Having found out who you are through your history, then you must also ask yourself: what am I going to do with this [OE]who I am[base ']? And that what am I going to do with it relates you to the culture and the revolutionary stuff that has been created within this country. And that history is also important. So, black history is not the history that you had 500 years ago in Africa or in India, it is also the history of now. So if we are going to change our history we have got to understand how we also make that history. And that history is black history. So, there are two blacks. BHM has got contend with two blacks. One is the black of our origins. The other is the black of our doings here. (The black that is created in this country is something that is unique to Britain. When I went to lecture in the U.S.A in 1969 I went to see Bobby Seale when he was arrested in Oakland and I was in Harlem and Oakland and places like that. And they were surprised that here was this Asian who was talking black you see.) And that is unique to Britain. Black became a political colour only in Britain. And is some of the advantage of our common colonial history you see. Look I am from Sri Lanka you are from India maybe, or somebody from East Africa or somebody else from the Caribbean we sit down and talk about Brian Lara's century like yesterday.

R.P: You know that the EU is committed to this 2001 year of diversity. What do think of this. Do you not think there is some sort of irony in that it is being promoted, this 2001 year of diversity, by the very same organisations and individuals who are busy turning Europe into some sort of xenophobic fortress against migration.

A.S: (Laughs) Yes absolutely. You see it reflects the confusion at the heart of Europe's economics in terms of migration. They are not able to make up their minds whether having asylum seekers and refugees they should put them to work, because there is a shortage of workers, especially unskilled workers in the service industries. There is a contradiction at the heart of Europe, whether these people should be put to work, like Afro-Caribbeans and Asians were put to work in the post-war period and also because there is an ageing population in Europe. That is the debate that is going on now isn't it? Whether these people are needed as workers. And at the same time how to come to terms with the fact that they are different from us. They are diverse, they don't speak the same language. And what is worse is, now there are half a dozen different languages, almost like Babel. It[base ']s not just Indian languages and Afro-Caribbean patois. We have got east European languages, we have got Germanic dialects. We have got all sorts of languages and cultures coming in. How are we going manage a Europe that needs all these workers but at the same time wants to bring them down, flatten them down to same sort of general culture. That is why the whole question of the Roma and the Gypsies is so important. Because how Europe sees the Roma, and this is where your fortress Europe comes into being, is important. You see under the communist regimes the Roma and the Gypsies were part of society but they were second class citizens. They may not have been given certain jobs etc. but they were treated as equal citizens. Because they were forced into the communist mould. With the collapse of communism the Roma have become not an underclass but an outcast.

R.P: But the highly-trained workers from Bangalore don't want to go to Germany because of levels of racism and uncertainty. They would rather go to America. And also, Jean Pierre Chevenemont, the French interior minister, has actually talked about Europe having to get used to the idea that it is going to be a multi-cultural society because demographic change means that Europe needs migration.

A.S: You have hit the nail on the head. That is exactly the position. First of all they need the labour but don't need the labourer. Secondly in the U.S and in Canada too, they have a system whereby they can take these people in. The racism against them is not so profound as in Europe. So how do we become less racist and stop the braindrain to America? So on the one hand there are the unskilled workers whose labour we need but we don't need them. On the other hand we need the skilled workers from silicon valley in Bangalore. But there is so much racism that they are afraid to come here. How to attract the people we want and keep away the people we don't want but still have their labour. Those are the contradictions at the heart of fortress Europe.

R.P: I want to come lastly, I know I have taken rather a lot of your time, I want to come to the novel When memory dies. I mean you seem to have put received wisdom on its head writing a novel at this age. Mostly people start off as novelists and then become polemicists later on. You seem to have done the whole thing upside down. How long was this yearning inside of you?

A.S: All my life Raj. I have been writing and scribbling all the time but fighting was more important. And there was so much fighting to do that most of my writing was for fighting. Writing is a way of fighting. So all of my early stuff were pamphlets and polemical stuff on race, class and the state which was very important. All those were engagements in struggle weren't they? And they have changed a few things, I would like to think, if you would allow me to be so immodest. They were my stations of the cross. But also I like to think that I bring the creative into my political writing in as much as I would like to bring politics into my creative writing. There is no departure of one from the other. I had no problem with who I was. I was both a political writer and a creative writer. But creative writing needs time, you need to sit down and think. You can't say 'right I will go to the office, I have got to give a talk at some meeting in Hackney, I have got to go and help this Tamil refugee who has come from Sri Lanka and who has been arrested, I have got to find a lawyer'. Or I have got to change the IRR somehow and then come home and say 'now I have got to write the next chapter in the book'. I can't do that. And the other thing is that, you see I am not a novelist. I am a storyteller. Novelists are made. Storytellers are born. Novelists are made in these writers' workshops. I am not interested in being a novelist. I want to tell you a story. So human beings are grist to my mill, personal relationships are grist to my mill, race relations are grist to my mill. So, there is no dichotomy in my life.

R.P: The novel was extremely well received. And you have been lauded for it quite rightly. And that has been followed by Where the dance is the new short story book. Are we then to look forward to more writings by you?

A.S: Yes, hopefully. If I live long enough.

R.P: And you haven't softened, incidentally?

A.S: No, I hope not. Not a bit.

R.P: And still playing tennis?

A.S: (Laughs) Still playing tennis. On one leg. You know on the question of the novel, let me say this Raj. All the time that I have been here...there was a hollow in me where my country was. There is a pain in me where my country was. The old pain of imperialism I was fighting. The other pain, of being evacuated from my country, I hadn't come to terms with. That is the most beautiful country in the world. Everybody says that I suppose, of the their country. I had to get the novel out of my system. I had to make contribution to my country, I had to make a contribution to this country. I had made a contribution, I hope, to the fight against racism, the fight against colonialism and so on. But I hadn't made a contribution to my own country and my own people. So the novel came out of that.

R.P: Thank you very much. You have been very kind and have given me a lot of your time. Thank you very much again.

September 2000

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