Negotiation

“London Does Not Belong To Me” A novel about Negotiations. Written by: Lee Kok Liang By Amalia Qistina Abdullah INTRODUCTION This essay is written to show that the novel “London Does Not Belong to Me” by Lee Kok Liang is a novel of negotiation. In this novel, the small group of characters from different cultures with different personalities will be entangled in a web of deceit, lust and alienation. As the narrator’s association with the other characters is explored, so too is his relationship to place, culture, sexuality and power. Negotiation as defined in the Oxford dictionary 8th Edition, is an act or process of conferring or discussing to reach an agreement. It is a settlement or agreement. The key words would be: talk, dialogue; give and take; bargaining; mediation and coming to terms. Lee Kok Liang explores a place of an Asian in a predominantly European society. Using an unnamed narrator, who struggles to understand London and meets other characters in the novel. Characters who are a collection of desperate people from Ireland, Paris, Australia and also citizen of Britain, who tries to seek identity, purpose and a sense of belonging in an alien environment. The narrator tried to ‘fit in’ with these other characters, but it seems that he always experience being an outsider. In the end the narrator, goes back home and he decided to live a new life. There was a significant closure with his unrequited love for Cordelia; the narrator and Beatrice settled a negotiation that set him free. London was not for him as Cordelia was not for him. As the story unfolds, Lee seems to be showing the multiple personalities of the characters, how they need to negotiate with each other and settle their personal struggle of ‘self’ and ‘otherness’ in order for them to find their identity and their essence. THE NARRATOR’S NEGOTIATION WITH BEATRICE AND CORDELIA The narrator met Beatrice the first time when she was in the quadrangle and the narrator happens to pass by. She developed some tropical disease and the narrator went to visit her bringing with him a bunch of roses. For the narrator it was passive, but for Beatrice, it was the beginning of ‘special feeling’ for the narrator. Beatrice was ordinary like myself but tried to behave as if she were not. She had a bubbling friendliness, which I thought was forced. In any case, I was passive, accepting gestures of friendship, which were rare, when they came my way. (15) The narrator then develops a relationship, more of sexual in nature, with Beatrice when Cordelia disappeared. According to the narrator, he needed Beatrice to keep in touch with Cordelia. “I needed Beatrice as a stimulant to keep my love [for Cordelia] fresh.”(156) Beatrice’s love-hate feeling for the narrator is an adaptation of the colonial discourse called ambivalence introduced by Homi Bhabha. Homi Bhabah describes ambivalence as the complex mix of attraction and repulsion, characterizing the relationship between colonizers and colonized. There was a sort of negotiation from the binary state of a colonizer (narrator) to the colonized (Beatrice). The narrator being the colonizer as he could manipulate Beatrice, in a sense he was able to penetrate through Beatrice’s weakness and that is her love for him through sexual penetration of which the colonizer set the margin of their relationship. Beatrice as the colonized because she is at the receiving end being the one used as a sexual object. The narrator feeling of displacement, in need of comfort and ‘home’ in a place where he is not accepted, a place where he could always seek refuge. Beatrice gives him comfort and ‘home’; the narrator will turn to her by using her as a sexual outlet. Then I went over to the bed and lay down, fully dressed. I heard the old women moving in the next room, shifting their chairs so that they could sit by the windows, each with a Pekinese on her lap, watching for some bird to land on the bare branch of the tree outside. I suddenly decided that I need to see Beatrice and talk to her. (133) The narrator manipulated Beatrice to serve as a link between Cordelia and himself, the narrator had the power to control Beatrice, sex being a tool for subordination. Although at the end, Beatrice also was able to manipulate the narrator into submission by getting him to accept the love that she has offered for so long. “..She pushed my face into the pillow…something in her voice made me ashamed of myself…come to me she said.”(253) “…Beatrice loved me and in doing so had freed me.”(254) The negotiation of the binary ‘give and take’ was sealed. Beatrice turning to be the giver of hope and freedom while the narrator as the taker. Beatrice herself introduced the narrator to Cordelia when he calls at their apartment one night. He was mesmerized with her from the start. “The girl’s voice overlapped like wavelets running up the beach. She turned to me and the glow from the fire was on her cheek, bisecting her face- one eye distinctly in the light, twin freckles of reflection on her iris. That eye was blue, glass-marble blue.”(12) The narrator developed a relationship with Cordelia, though from the start the relationship was not in the open. Cordelia made the narrator hide what was going on with them from Beatrice and Arlette. Cordelia becomes the manipulator while the narrator the manipulated. This binarism is again, structurally related to the post colonial binary of colonizer and colonized Cordelia has this strong hold towards the narrator, making her as the colonizer and the narrator as the colonized. Cordelia had the power to manipulate the situation whereby the deal would be an unspoken understanding of affection without commitment. “before we reached the street where they lived, both of us slowed down, pausing on the pavement, and she swung to me gently as though she was tired and allowed me to kiss her.”(36) “We tried to walk as slowly as we could. But when we walked up the stairs, she suddenly disengaged herself and without looking at me strode into the room first. I looked away when I felt the tiny brush of a glance that Beatrice sent to me as we came in. I felt very vulnerable.”(37) “I walked up to her quickly and touched her on the neck and, as she turned round, very quietly kissed her on the cheek. She gently pulled the lobe of my ear. Then we heard Arlette coming down the stairs. Cordelia jerked back her hand and moved swiftly away.”(40) Cordelia was somehow filler for the narrator. He had something missing in his life, a sense of belonging, he always felt alienated and by acquiring Cordelia’s affection, he felt that Cordelia would fill the “void”. The narrator’s search for Cordelia was in a way a search for belonging, for him to be ‘accepted’ by Cordelia and London. Cordelia perceives the narrator the same way. She was emotionally dependent on the narrator. Both using each other as filler. The ‘silent’ deal which eventually broke upon the disappearance of Cordelia. In the end, the narrator finally came to terms that no one can possess Cordelia, as he cannot possess London. Cordelia’s rejection of his love and London’s cold reception of him gave way to another form of negotiation …the narrator’s coming to terms between the past and the present. He learned to let go of both Cordelia and London while looking forward in building a new life back to his country. “My hand clutched Cordelia’s handkerchief and I gave it a hard squeeze, trying to recall her features, trying to recapture my feelings for her. She did not come this time.”(282) The cold seeped from the wall of the compartment, freezing the back of my head as I rested on my seat. I closed my eyes, not wishing to see any of the passengers. They belonged to my new life and I did not want to meet them till I was ready. (286) Only after hitting rock bottom, for the narrator, when he came face to face with Cordelia during the Christmas party, does he begin to reconstruct his identity and ease the pain of rejection. For Beatrice, the colonial binary of rejection and acceptance, was in a way, her release from the bondage of ‘otherness’. The narrator was always rejecting Beatrice’s love. During their last coming together she was able to make the narrator feel the intensity of her love for him, she expressed with her body what she really felt for him and the honesty of her love for him had released her from the bondage of feeling like ‘the other’ in the narrator’s life. She found her identity and the essence of her existence with her unborn child from the man that she loved. “It’s funny, but I love you.”(253) “Yes, I really love you. (253) Tears traced rivulets down her cheeks, but her eyes shone with such an expression of joy that I have never before seen on her face. (254) Beatrice loved me and in doing so had freed me. She was now mine, thinking of me always (254) The narrator’s emotional and sexual relationships with two foreign ‘white’ women, Cordelia, whom he thought he was in love with and Beatrice who is in love with him. The relationship that he had is symbolic of his penetration of the colonial world. He subverted the binary of self/other, white/non-white, European/Asian and the colonizer/colonized. The vagueness of the binary where a thin line separates the binary of colonizer/colonized, the colonizer’s destruction of the colonized. The liminal stage of ‘destructive’ and ‘constructive’ found in the love triangle of the narrator with Beatrice and Cordelia. Destructive in a way because Beatrice suffered due to a rejected love, still she just cannot leave the narrator. The narrator also suffered during the disappearance of Cordelia. Cordelia’s suffering was caused by her egocentricity whereby she could not give more than what she is capable of; she was not able to love the narrator as much as the narrator loves her. Constructive because through it all Beatrice was able to accept her fate, the narrator was able to let go of Cordelia and Cordelia decided to go her own way. CORDELIA’S NEGOTIATION WITH STEVE AND KEN Cordelia does not care what other people do with their lives, she was able to accept Steve as who he is. She too was busy searching for her own identity. She lost her brother in an airplane crush in the Brazilian hills thus started her dependency on Steve who was her brother’s friend. There was a kind of ‘settlement’ between Steve and her. She needed him to keep her brother’s memory alive and Steve uses her as a ‘facade’ to keep him grounded while he was also in search of his own identity. Steve is bisexual, he was intimate with Cordelia, but at the same time, he is also attracted to the narrator and used to be intimate with Tristam, one of the reasons why Tristam does not like Cordelia. Tristam was jealous of her. “Don’t be so cocky, Steve,” Ken mocked, “You can’t be in both worlds. Poor Delia.”(67) “I’d better tell you this,” he began nervously, crinkling his nose, “probably you will only half understand what I’m talking about. It is really strange finding myself talking to you like this. Maybe we’re in the same boat. You with Delia…and Steve with me.”(75) “...surprising as it may sound, he’s [Steve] rather fond of you.” (77) -Tristam talking about Steve to the narrator – “We [Tristam and Cordelia] don’t hit it off as you see. There is something in that woman I just can’t stand…I could see through all her little tricks… she’s a leech.”(81) “If you [narrator] could love me [Steve] tonight... I suppose Cordelia would not have left you.”(282) The superficial relationship between Steve and Cordelia, addresses another postcolonial theme of liminalism. Liminality is the term used to “refer to in-between situations and conditions that are characterized by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty regarding the continuity of tradition and future outcomes. Liminality was first introduced by Arnold Van Gennep (1909), which was further developed by Victor Turner (1963). In this sense, liminal periods are “destructive” as well as “constructive”, Cordelia’s lost of her brother places her in a liminal stage where the sudden lost /death of her brother causes her to search life’s meaning in a world of illusion that she had built. “What I can’t stand is your illusions about yourself. Tormented. Why the torment' Because I tell you why, Delia. You cannot give anything away. Not even the cherished dreams you had for that mythological brother of yours. And yet you must live, mustn’t you' So you fasten your sucking pads on anyone who cannot run away fast enough, transfusing your illusions.” (65) Steve in a liminal persona, his sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation, but also the possibility of new perspectives. “I don’t feel so bad with a cigarette in my mouth. My faithful companion. I adore it.” “I think you should find a substitute too. In this world.” (283) The unspoken negotiation of affection without commitment between Steve and Codelia. Steve is there for her when she needs him. Cordelia’s acceptance of Steve’s bisexuality because she believes that love is universal. “You know, once Cordelia told me love is universal.”(282) -Narrator to Stephen. - Cordelia and Ken’s relationship started before she even met Steve. Ken introduced Steve to Cordelia. It is worth analysing the reason why Cordelia turned to Ken for refuge. “Quickly Ken went into the booth and shut the door. The three of us stood outside looking in. Ken talked, with his face half-turned to us and one hand holding on to the handle of the door. He was speaking rapidly; we could not see his expression clearly as the cold has frosted the panes, but it seems he was carrying on some argument.”(102) “Surprising Ken, you phoning from a public telephone. Who was on the other end'” “A girl big of buttocks.”Ken laughed. (103) Ken invited Beatrice, Arlette and the narrator to his house for tea, it was only later that it is revealed that he was talking to Cordelia and telling her that he invited these three for some tea in his house and the same place where Cordelia ran to from the time she disappeared. For a while, we drank our tea in silence. Suddenly a sound was heard which resembled that of a door being opened and shut. Ken sat still on the floor, holding the cup in the air, and when he noticed his gesture, put it down softly again. Arlette suddenly sat up. “Is that Dickie'” “If it’s him, he must be entering the wrong room,” Beatrice smiled, pretending to shiver. “Wonder who it was'”Arlette began, when Ken cut in, “there are so many rooms on this floor. The neighbours are very secretive.”(113) From Cordelia’s relationship with Stephen and then with the narrator it is noticeable that Cordelia has a problem with commitment. She is very much aware that the narrator is developing a strong affection for her and it might be the reason she decided to disappear. Suddenly I reached out my hand and closed it over hers [Cordelia]; and she turned her head sharply and looked at me inquiringly. Then silently she slipped out her hand and moved away towards Stephen. (59) As we walked passed Cordelia, she looked at me with a sad expression and I noticed signs of weariness under her eyes. I stopped; but she quickly lowered her head and continued tracing circles on the floor. (71-72) The question would arise why Cordelia chose Ken and not Steve. Steve though had an intimate relationship with Cordelia, still finds her unsuitable for the narrator. “Is she here'” Steve repeated in an annoyed manner and then, remembering me, softened his voice. “No, I’m sure she’s not here. I have not seen her at all. Look, let me tell you one thing – if you can listen to the words of a bastard like me- she’s not really worth it.”(220) Cordelia’s egocentrism does not allow her to be sensitive to the narrator’s plight neither would she blame herself for hurting his feelings. She struggles from the duality of her being tormented by the fact that she is the ‘under-dog’ compared to her dead brother and being the tormentor, tormenting the men around her. Cordelia’s egocentricity makes her want to be the centre of compassion. She tends to cling to those around her for emotional support but then runs away if they tried to cling unto her. She chose Ken because she knows Ken would not cling to her, Ken’s ego would not allow him to go to Cordelia, but rather waited for her to come to him. She knows she can depend on Ken, if not purely for compassion, then for financial support as Ken came from a very rich family. Ken and Cordelia have this settlement, an agreement of coming into terms with each other. Finding individuality through each other’s weaknesses. Ken is attracted to Cordelia, which is why he was jealous of Steve and why he sent the narrator in a wild goose chase in Paris in search of Cordelia, while the egocentric Cordelia is dependent on the dominant Ken. TRISTAM AND STEVE’S NEGOTIATION WITH THEIR SEXUALITY These two characters also feel alienated. Both of them are not recognize or accepted by the society because of their failure to conform to the heterosexual norm. Tristam being a homosexual while Steve is a bisexual, both trying to fit in among friends and society. “The terrible thing is that people can never accept that we still can be fond of people who are not one of us.” (77) “The tragedy. Ah yes, the tragedy.” He grimaced and reflectively rubbed the side of his nose with his little finger. “We’re not very much appreciated. And so we have a protective secret society with all signs and rituals.” (78) Tristam’s real desire is for physical difference. He equates Orientals with innocence and sexual allure. The narrator thinks that Tristam only keeps him for company because he is from the East. Tristam developed a friendship with Steve, but he became like a parasite and clang to Steve thus making Steve distant himself from him. Steve who himself is in search of his identity tries to attack the ‘western’ world, by verbal attacks. “It’s disastrous, yes disastrous, for our country. England is a long-teated bitch. If we must hang onto some umbilical cord it should be tethered to a dragon.” “Yes, look here Wally; are you serious that we hang on to England' What has she got to give us' A washout. Of course, as usual, you like to be hypocritical.”(53) “Everything here is so bloody faded. No push. No guts. Loss of nerve. A great unending diarrhea. Old England squatting over an effluence of words.”(54) Steve in a sense was attacking his own immorality and deterioration of his culture. He perceives himself as ignored or excluded in the society. Both Steve and Tristam are culturally and sexually marginalized. Though being alienated in London, both remain in London befriending other expatriates and trying to overcome their alienation by being a ‘shoulder to cry on’ by other immigrants. Steve gave his ‘shoulder’ to Cordelia while Tristam’s ‘shoulder’ was given to Gopal. Steve and Tristam just like a predators, wishes to give their ‘shoulder’ to the narrator. Their need to be accepted drives them to a sexual and cultural mayhem. Steve described very well how Tristam and he are still searching their identity and essence in life. “I know that. Perhaps a bit envious. I mean about Tristam’s way of life. Floating and moving. How one always wishes to be something else. What I mean is to have something that is not in our life and to add it on to what we think is our essence.”(284) The narrator’s rejection of Steve finally gave finality to their odd relationship, a liminal stage where the narrator needed Steve to find Cordelia and Steve’s need of the narrator for sexual fulfillment. “There is one thing; however, I’m glad for. Little nuts of experience… What is bad is that when each of us is eating our nuts, we’ll be doing it at different times and different places. No sharing of flavors. The core of our happiness is selfishness. I thought tonight both of us might break through this. Osmosis, as the scientific block calls it. One side, perhaps my pride, the other side, perhaps, your fear of being tainted.”(284) NARRATOR’S NEGOTIATION WITH ALIENATION The narrator is non-English, non-white. Constantly neglected, discriminated. He is insecure of his identity being an Asian in a western environment he feels alienated and lonely. He showed how language was linked with the question of identity and belonging. “…the easy casual manner in which strangers picked me up frightened me…” (16) “I am sorry I must go now. Got to catch the tube, I nearly said ‘got to tube a catch,’ language was a loose string of beads to me. I got tired easily trying to express it in a logical way even in my native language.”(26) The narrator’s relationships with the other characters show no permanence. He seems to jump from one relationship to another and from one friend to another. His connection with London is also fragmented. “London was full of rooms. I went from one room to another” (9) The fleeting relationships of the narrator only show that he never really understood the lives of those around him. They were still strangers with one another, not knowing the identity and the essence of the other’s existence. “London life was so abrasive, the human mind locked up in its loneliness ground away emotions, flinging them off like filings” ( 229) The narrator is part of the immigrant minority. A minority group considered liminal, they are in a midway position of home and host, part of society, but sometimes never fully integrated. Ironically, the narrator considers London as a liminal space. It is a place where the narrator and the other characters tend to pass through but do not really live in. The three stages that characterize the narrator’s liminality are separation, marginalization and re-aggregation. The narrator’s separation from Cordelia also symbolise his own separation from London. His search for Cordelia was also a way of searching his place in London. The cultural marginalization he felt, being an Asian in a predominantly European society. No matter how he tried to understand London, bringing a map wherever he goes, he just cannot ‘fit’ in London. “This is my dining table, a littered no-man’s land. London was full of rooms. I went from one room to another. Slowly I adjusted myself and lived the life of a troglodyte, learning the tribal customs of feints and apologies. Solitary like a spider, weaving a web...for in this city, men and women submerged their past. I swam along with them, flipping my fins.”(10) Finally, the narrator’s re-association/re-aggregation with his culture. He tried to ‘fit-in’ but still cannot totally let go of his identity as Asian. He wanted to belong in London but during his last date with Beatrice, he wanted her to remember him as an oriental that he is. I took her to an expensive Chinese restaurant. She was fascinated by the chopsticks, which I handled adroitly. I explained to her that one of the pair should be held like a Chinese brush...by taking her to this restaurant which was pretentious in its food and decor, at the back of my mind I wanted to recapture for her the mood she had luxuriated in when we left the room. And besides, it would leave her with a memory of gold and reds and dragons when she thought of me.”(248) CONCLUSION The essay shows, through the given evidences of negotiation among the characters in the novel London Does Not Belong to Me that this is a novel of negotiation. They were able to negotiate with each other and with themselves thus finding their identity and their essence. Written in a ‘European setting’, most of its events took place in London and some of it in Paris. The attempt of the author/narrator to enter European consciousness makes it a potential postcolonial work. According to K.S. Maniam: “He [Lee Kok Liang] is able, in a prophetic way, to mark out for himself and fellow Malaysian writers the cultural territories they have to enter and unravel.” Though the story was written somewhere in 1954, three years before independence was gained in Malaysia, Lee expresses himself in a colonizer’s language with all the cultural and political implications that entails. Most of the articles in the novel are like a “mirror image” of Lee’s personal life based on the similarities from his own journal-cum-dairy. The author/narrator protagonist addresses the postcolonial themes of ambivalence, binaries’, othering, hybridization and using sexuality to symbolize the ‘penetration’ of the colonizer to victimized the colonized. However, with his sexual/ emotional relationship with two white women the author/narrator was able to overcome the binary of white/non-white, self/other, and colonizer/colonized. The cultural difference of race, sexuality and place were not seen as merely that of a colonizer and colonized. This novel is a negotiation where the colonized or ‘the other’ attempts to overcome the dictates of the colonizer or authority. “If , in essence, London Does Not Belong to Me is an articulation of post-colonial grief and betrayal of memory, it also charts an ultimately enriching journey, representing, as it does, the narrator’s first tentative steps towards a repositioning of identity in the call and response of transcultural space” (Bernard Wilson, Maya Press) Homi Bhabha stated, “otherness and cultural stereotype would give way to diversity of multiculturalism” . “Splitting constitutes an intricate strategy of defense and differentiation in the colonial discourse. Two contradictory and independent attitudes inhabit the same place, one takes account of reality, the other is under the influence of instincts which detach the ego from reality. This results in the production of multiple and contradictory belief. The enunciatory moment of multiple beliefs is both a defense against the anxiety of difference, and itself productive of differentiations. Splitting is then a form of enunciatory, intellectual uncertainty and anxiety that stems from the fact that disavowal is not merely a principle of negation or elision; it is a strategy for articulating contradictory and coeval statements of belief. It is from such an enunciatory space, where the work of signification voids the act of meaning...” Interview with cultural theorist Homi Bhabha by W.J.T. Mitchell Artforum International Magazine Inc. 1995 The blending of two contradictory and independent attitudes of the narrator, like feeling of ‘otherness’ and yet the penetration of the European culture through his relationship with the two white women (Beatrice and Codelia). The love triangle of the narrator with Beatrice and Cordelia, Beatrice who loves the narrator while Codelia who the narrator loves, found a way to negotiate their standing in that relationship. The narrator finally letting go of Cordelia and releasing himself from her bondage is symbolic of accepting his defeat and realizes that she is not for him as London is also not for him. The relationship between the narrator and Beatrice, and eventually Beatrice redemption and acceptance of her rejection only shows a defense against the anxiety of difference, and itself productive of differentiations.The in-between of the binary of Asian/European would be Eurasian and the local/foreign as the immigrants. It is no longer about the colonial and postcolonial in the world of modernism, but rather the transcultural space, the liminal or in-between. The displaced characters in London Does Not Belong to Me found a way of surviving their alienation to which they were obviously tied. The postcolonial ‘other’, being the minority and alienated by society was no longer keeping them in bondage, the reversal of hierarchy, just like the narrator’s relationship with Beatrice and the narrator’s relationship with Tristam and Steve, Cordelia’s relationship with Ken. They were able to negotiate with each other and with themselves thus finding their identity and their essence.