Roadworks: British Bangladeshi mothers,temporality and intimate citizenship in East London

Intimate citizens of the road

As Irene Gedalof (2012) has argued, attention to the disruption of public places by the appearance of subaltern mothers brings us to matters of belonging and the right to occupy public space. In the case of these British Muslim mothers not only ‘Where have they come from?’ (Gedalof, 2012: 85, original emphasis) but also ‘What are they doing here?’ In what follows, the constellations of intimate citizenship that concern me are those fabricated out of what the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (2007) has dubbed ‘ordinary affects’. For Stewart, ordinary affects have a material life and a temporal quality of the unfinished, reverberating between bodies, objects and social worlds:

Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of. They give circuits and flows the forms of a life. They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation … they can be seen as both the pressure points of events or banalities suffered and the trajectories that forces might take if they were to go unchecked. (Stewart, 2007: 2)

The geographer Daniel Swanton (2008), amongst others, suggests that the street is an especially potent zone of contact in multicultural living where racialized differences are continuously sorted and assembled through ordinary affects. Not so much a constant, race for Swanton is an ‘assemblage’ shaped, modulated and put together through bundles of energetic and evolving forces. He writes,

For some – at particular times, or under certain intensities of sunlight – connections between particular bodies, things and spaces stir swirling intensities of terror, hate, fear and loathing. For others these temporary fixings of race inspire curiosity and engagement. Then again these assemblages might constitute an affective depression, laden with routine, banality and indifference.

There is an ontological and temporal roominess to such relational approaches to race that give attention to the content, tempo, shapes and changing (in)determinacy of everyday encounters. Although such diversity may characterize race-making in day-to-day life, racism as a temporality can also be experienced as more stable and enduring. And of course, to think about the ordinary affects of racialization on the streets for Muslim mothers at this contemporary moment is to involve ourselves in a bigger dialogue. A dialogue about gender equality and multiculturalism (Benhabib, 2002; Phillips, 2010; Prins, 2006), about mothering as a site of reproduction for race, nation and heteronormativity (Puar, 2007) and a dialogue in which the very category ‘Muslim’ has become homogenized and threatening amidst concerns of securitization and terrorism (Ahmad and Evergeti, 2010).

With specific reference to Muslim immigrants, Humphrey tells us that ‘Muslim immigrants in the West have come to occupy the space of the abject, the racialised slot of the “suspect other” … at the limits of citizenship’ (2009: 137). The racializing of Muslims as suspicious, dangerous and disloyal citizens is not confined to immigrants. British researchers have identified novel discourses of racialization arising from the involvement of British Muslims in the 7 July 2005 London bombings. Featherstone et al. (2010) argue that a post ‘7/7’ discourse has reordered British Muslims’ relationships to the state through the collapsing of the binaries foreign Muslim/British Muslim and ‘good’ Muslim/‘bad’ Muslim.

As much as such reconfigurations in race-making are being recognized, for many commentators it is the young Muslim man who remains the iconic threat to western democracies and whose citizenship has been most undermined (Humphrey, 2009). Yet, the effects of what can be described as a ‘super-surveillance’ (Puwar, 2004) of Muslim citizens is by no means restricted to Muslim men and entails diverse modes of gendered racialization. The use of the term citizenship in such discussions is varied. Citizenship can denote a formal legal status conferred by the nation-state. It also includes more discursive and regulatory forms of transnational governmentality in which struggles over inclusion and exclusion are being performed and interrogated on the terrain of rights and obligations (Isin and Turner, 2002), community (Anderson, 2013) and ‘civilization’ itself (Mahmood, 2005).

In the aftermath of the ‘7/7’ bombings some of the mothers in our focus group talked about anti-Islamic sentiment and suspicion being projected onto them as quasi as-if-terrorists, producing something akin to a Duboisian double consciousness: the ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ (DuBois, 1994 [1903]: 2). In the public spaces of trains and supermarkets, the women could also find themselves complicit with the public surveillance and scrutiny of men’s bodies:

The rubric of intimate citizenship captures and problematizes these material, affective and temporal relays between the public and the personal. However, an area that is unexplored in the intimate citizenship literature is how such relays are intertwined with our methodological devices, how methods are engaged with the matters that we investigate. In this case my concern is with the interactional and ethical apparatus of the focus group interview that convenes bodies, stories and opinions, and where polyphony can simultaneously convey and block the publicizing of intimacy. So my interest is in the mutual constitution of method and research problem (Lury and Wakeford, 2012). There are two aspects of this constitution that I explicate. First, how focus groups can manufacture a ‘paradoxical’ spatiotemporality (Rose, 1993), eliciting, showing and obscuring the extent to which phenomenon on either side of a threshold – intimate/public – can exist at the same time as well as sequentially. And second, how the dialogic nature of the method can promote an accounting for oneself in the presence of ‘narrative others’ (Cavarero, 2000).

The research

The focus group from which the mothers’ accounts are drawn was a part of an ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) funded project carried out with 19 first time mothers in Tower Hamlets, a poor and socially diverse area in East London. Carried out between 2004 and 2007, the study wanted to understand how women make sense of the identity transition involved in becoming a mother for the first time (see Elliott et al., 2009 for an example). Wendy Hollway and Ann Phoenix led the project, with research also being conducted by Heather Elliott, Cathy Urwin, myself and trainee child psychoanalytic psychotherapists undertaking infant observation.

The mothers who took part in the focus group were drawn from outside our core sample of 19 first time mothers. The rationale for using focus groups was to interrogate and contextualize the emerging findings from the one-to-one interviews. ¹ The women in the focus group were aged between 20 and 35. Soraya (all names are pseudonyms) was a first time mother. Nasreen (with two young children) and Shirin (with one child and pregnant with her second) were sisters. Ameera was a disabled mother with five children and Tahira had four children. Munira had one young child and was pregnant. All of the women except Tahira were wearing either a burka or the hijab. I facilitated the interview, with Heather Elliott acting as an observer. The discussion was audio-recorded and fully transcribed.

In analysing the interview data, the focus group accounts were compared with narratives of ethno-religious identity in the one-to-one interviews with nine Bangladeshi mothers from the wider project (the women were interviewed three times). The comparison showed that ethno-religious identifications were narrated in a variety of different ways, and sometimes not at all for the Bangladeshi Muslim mothers in the core study group. Ethno-religious identifications were more muted and/or were more directly drawn out by researchers in the one-to-one interviews. In the focus group it was the participants who initiated discussions about identity. For example at the very beginning of the interview I asked an open narrative-inducing question about what is was like for the women to live in Tower Hamlets,

The spontaneous discussion of being a practising Muslim did not feature in this way in the one-to-one interviews with Bangladeshi mothers. A possible reason for the difference is that the latter interviews were most explicitly concerned with the very first stages of becoming a mother, coinciding with and eliciting narratives of giving birth, feeding and the renegotiation of family relationships. This finding of differences in the nature of the interview accounts also supports the claims made by Sue Wilkinson (1998) that in focus groups participants are more able to exert control over the topics discussed. And at times it is some participants who exercise this control more than others. As you will notice the conversations about ethno-religious identifications were dominated by three women – Ameera, Soraya and Tahira. As the discussion moved on to consider a vignette about breast-feeding, the other women were more able to speak about their experiences of mothering.

Dress

In listening to the women’s conversations about dress and clothing – a recurrent, but variegated theme in their conversations – it became apparent that the topic of what the women wore and when, moved beyond the purely descriptive or religious. Talk about dress, and covering in particular, was used by the women in three main ways: to signify contested relations between substance and superficiality in identity practices; to mark the women’s movements through time and space (including biographical transitions and intergenerational relationships); and to demonstrate the move from identity as being positioned to being practised.

The following excerpt centres upon a narrative from Ameera. Ameera said that she began wearing the hijab after her five-year-old daughter took the decision to cover in 2001. This is itself a reversal of the dominant temporality of intergenerational transmission where tradition is seen as being passed forwards. In the extract, Ameera talks about how wearing the hijab whilst driving her car has disturbed the everyday give and take on London’s roads. This account was preceded by an exchange between Monira and Soraya about whether Tower Hamlets was a place of safety for practising Muslims.

Ameera’s story pivots on the binaries of linear time as a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ (of wearing a headscarf) and as continuous and disjunctive. The account records how changes in the social – with regard to increased hostility towards Muslims in London – can filter into something as ordinary, habitual and controlled as driving. The narrated significance of the event derives its extraordinariness from the playing off of two interrelated significations. First, there is driving as a highly mapped out and choreographed spatiotemporal system with rules, anticipatory calculations and social obligations (the latter of which involve voluntary ‘good’ citizenly practices such as stopping to allow the passage of others). Second, is the depiction of more arbitrary unpredictables that can cause a stalling in the expected flow of traffic (reciprocal courtesies being withheld or refused).

If time can be a tool for managing social differences through the production of commensurabilities (Greenhouse, 1996), Ameera’s story shows how gendered and racialized difference can be fabricated and excluded through incommensurabilities. Ameera’s body when marked by the hijab is not allowed to become a part of the familiar and synchronized motility of life on London’s roads. Her visibly inscribed body becomes a body out of place by virtue of being thrown out of linear time, disrupting the smooth workings of the world around her.

Global and local terror: Natality and being in London on 7/7

The following account from Soraya emerged from the discussion reported earlier between Shirin and Ameera about suspicion – including their own – towards visible Muslims in London following the 7 July bombings. Soraya’s story was narrated virtually uninterrupted over three pages of the interview transcript. The account describes events that took place in Soraya’s local petrol station on the 7 July 2005:

I put my headscarf on just before I became pregnant, and I stopped filling up at the petrol station because it stank. So there was this big gap until when I went there, which was on the 7th July … last year was it? (one of the women: ‘yeah’). I filled up, went to the petrol station. Oh it was horrible. I was like five months pregnant and um obviously the emotion was in me. I was having a big cry at home thinking ‘Well I’ve decided to actually practise my religion properly, but these idiots go and do this, and I am to blame. Now it’s me, my family, my children, my future children, they’re gonna be affected. They are labelled already and they haven’t even had a chance to come into this world.’ But I put that aside, went to the petrol station and the first thing I had was ‘Bloody terrorists, oh they should all go back.’ This is a lady just … filling up her car and she’s saying this. I’m like ‘Forget it. She’s ignorant’, went into the er (.) station to pay, he wouldn’t even look at me. This was the same guy that would make such a, he’d make a point of speaking to me … And I know he recognized me. I mean I don’t cover completely … He wouldn’t even look at me and I’m like ‘OK, right’ and since then … a lot of people … who’ve known you from before … and they don’t judge you, but then you’ve got some people who did know you back then, who know you now and just (.) their perception of you is completely changed.

In similar ways to Ameera’s account, in this story there is a temporality of a before and an after of an identity transition. In this instance, the passing of time is marked in the wearing of the hijab and in Soraya’s pregnancy and becoming a mother, all of which are located against the externalized temporality of the 7 July bombings. Hannah Arendt’s (1998 [1958]) theorizing of natality as the bodily process of gestation and giving birth to an unknown other and as the opportunity for a new unforeseeable future is valuable in thinking about the different types of violation, agency and time and their varied meanings in the narrative.

As a Muslim mother-to-be, Soraya fears that in the aftermath of the 7 July attacks, her unborn child and her future children will be preknown and misrecognized. The relationships between biological and political natality in Soraya’s story are nuanced in their multiple connotations (see also Guenther, 2006). That a being in utero could be ‘labelled’ and identified before his/her emergence into the social world is an absurd violation. Nevertheless, the idea of the unborn child as already racialized exposes as it dramatizes the very ordinary symbolic violence and temporal registers of racialization that always rely upon preknowing.

It is significant that the narrative here moves from a description of the petrol station event to a moral evaluation of the repercussions of the ‘7/7’ bombings for Soraya’s children. It is in this movement in the telling of the story that there is also a temporal sweep of identification in mothering as cultural reproduction. Within the account there is a taken-for-grantedness that Soraya’s unborn child will be a Muslim like her and that Islamophobia will also continue to flow into the future. So in the midst of the narrative projection of a threatening present into a fantasized future, the child is again foreseen. What differentiates this preknowing is the extent to which it can be read as a response to and a protection from racism at times of profound uncertainty and when a community is under threat.

I would like to pursue and further interrogate Carol Greenhouse’s ideas about the use of time as a device of agency in tracing how Soraya’s story is narrated as affecting and flowing into her future. Directly after the account above Soraya spoke of another incident, weeks before our focus group, when she had approached three workers in a supermarket in a neighbouring London borough to ask for charcoal for a barbecue. In this story, Soraya emphasized the multicultural nature of the neighbourhood and how one of the workers that she had approached was ‘an Asian lady’:

And I asked a simple question ‘Where can I get some charcoal … for a barbecue?’ First she had a stunned look on her face, she probably thought ‘You do barbecue?’ (several of the women laugh) … The way they spoke to me, the way they looked at me, I felt like they were looking down on me. And for whatever their reasons, which I don’t know, the only way I can think of is the fact that I am Muslim (unknown woman: ‘Yeah’) and ‘You’re the terrorist’. You see they could be thinking anything. They could be having a really bad day and thinking ‘For god’s sake, go away woman’, you know ’cause I sometimes feel like that myself, and there’s no underlying feelings there. But because of this incident [the petrol station incident], because of what happened, you, for some reason, I immediately feel like ‘Right, they’re suspicious’, you know because I am Muslim (laughs).

Soraya’s account is nuanced; generous and humorous in the possibilities of the readings that it allows for. The hostility that Soraya feels could be because she is a visible Muslim, but it might be a more banal irritation, a random consequence of having one of those ‘bad days’ that we all have. Yet the account also suggests that the affective aftermath of the petrol station event is a continuity that is carried on into this different set of encounters, working to more readily interpellate Soraya as an as if terrorist, a source of suspicion and resentment.

What is interesting is Soraya’s response to these causal chains of association and the apparent closing down of the hospitable spaces around her. Rather than valorizing an imagined safety in the naturalizing of commonality as community in Tower Hamlets, Soraya used the supermarket story and her anger at increasing anti-Muslim hostility to again critique the ‘cushion factor’ of Tower Hamlets, arguing for the importance of struggling for religious identity in less culturally diverse settings in the future. In this regard, Soraya’s second narrative of a paranoid racial consciousness freely associated with experiences of racism in the past stretches the affective field of community in unexpected ways. It reprises through Islam an ethical value for antagonism, and the interruption of commensurabilities in multicultural living.

Mothering dilemmas: Mothering as inoculation

So far, I have examined narratives that demonstrate something of the varied temporal relationships between ordinary affects and matters of intimate citizenship for the mothers as they negotiate public hostility. Temporality in such accounts both references and displaces mechanical clock time, revealing the intermingling of simultaneous and differently experienced qualitative temporalities. Within such temporal categorizations, the present for example can include ‘the absence of those presences that are no longer so, but which one remembers (the past), and absence of those others that are yet to come and are anticipated’ (Mbembe, 2001: 16).

I now turn more specifically to how the changing social environment has impacted upon the women’s dilemmas as mothers and their vantage points on the future. It is in these narrative orientations to the future that the dialogic space of the focus group becomes more apparent, as the women share and respond to each other’s stories, state their own perspectives and opinions, and explicate prescriptive narratives for Muslim mothers and children. In the exchange below, the women discuss conundrums provoked by living in the relative ‘safety’ of multicultural Tower Hamlets and how they should prepare their children to face racism. In this extract, time as a tool of agency is explicitly biographical, relational and moral in the face of racism’s enduring temporality.

The best way of describing Ameera’s narrative of ensuring that she makes her children aware of racism is as a mothering as inoculation discourse. By this I mean a schema of temporal causation in which controlled exposure to threatening realities such as racism in the present can help to build up a child’s resistance and resilience to anticipated racism in the future. The temporalities of mothering in a racist world have been an enduring topic in black feminist scholarship. The writing of Audre Lorde records numerous autobiographical memories of how her mother tried to protect her from an awareness of racist incidents in the street and on public transport (see Lorde, 1982). Lorde’s stories are offered from the perspective of the child and as part of the claiming of a retrospective racial consciousness (Ahmed, 2010: 83).

In Tahira’s story, told from a mother’s viewpoint, the response elicited from Ameera concerns a future-oriented racial consciousness that articulates the responsibilities of a subaltern mother in educating and preparing her children to live in a racist world. This continuing vigilance towards future racism also characterized the women’s recurring deliberations about whether the cultural diversity of Tower Hamlets was advantageous for them and for the socialization of their children. Soraya’s rendition of a mothering as inoculation discourse was the most explicit in the connections forged between the everyday work of mothering and the reproduction of a citizenry through Islam: ‘Islam is, for a mother especially, you educate a nation’. Alongside this assertion, Soraya went on to situate a Muslim child’s exposure to social differences and to racism within the Islamic duty of jihad (struggle/striving):

It’s amazing, there’s so many Muslim people in Tower Hamlets. And at the moment it’s just getting better for Muslim people because everyone’s practising, so you’ve got all the support you need to like you know, do the right by your religion, do the right by yourself and for your children. Then again, I wanna leave that because … what Tahira said, you know, you cushion them too much, then they get used to that one thing, and when something new happens it’s a shock to the system. ’Cause I’d like them to be out there and struggle to actually practise their religion, and see others, and have that respect back, rather than being cushioned in Tower Hamlets.

In narratives about multiculturalism the temporality of identifications became less linear and calculable, opening out to competing demands. Tahira, for example, articulated a longstanding ambivalence in multicultural discourses between particularity and pluralism:

I’m more open about other religions than just my own, and it’s like I learnt my children to respect other religion too … At the end of the day everybody’s human being, so that comes first to me. My religion obviously comes first, but human being comes first to me and you know I want all the religion education, but at the same time I want my children to gain knowledge about other religion, to respect that religion.

That both ‘my religion’ and ‘everybody’s’ humanity should ‘come first’ speaks of the ‘contradictory simultaneity’ of multiple orientations (Bastian, 2011) and an understanding of the temporal demands of multicultural living that also circulates in Soraya’s rendering of the jihad of identification. It is here that the commensurabilities of linear time in the mothers’ stories became more undecided. ‘Undecidability … names the condition of impossibility that underwrites decisive action’, the geographer Clive Barnett has explained of Jacques Derrida’s use of the term, ‘in the sense that what is impossible is founding action on a saturation of knowledge’ (Barnett, 2004: 520). Living with the undecidable is about responding to and negotiating two distinct but related temporalities: the compelling urgency of acting in the now together with a openness to a future that can never be adequately known or planned for, but which must still be cared for and oriented to.

Precarious life

A central aim in drawing out matters of narrative agency in the mothers’ stories has been to consider the ways in which understandings of time are critical to matters of intimate citizenship. It is important to make clear that when these stories were being told, the alterity signified by the mothers was narrated as a novel, unsettled one; an effect of relatively recent movements in the ordinary affects of the street that appeared to take them by surprise in their violent intrusions into their daily lives. And while the mothers’ stories attest to the everyday currency of subject formation in response to the disruption of the ordinary by unforeseen events, they also convey something of the temporal journeying of the recognition and refusals of (mis)identification by others, and how the wispy continuities of dis/identification can be carried forward into new times and spaces.

It is important to acknowledge the particular constraints of opinionated narratives about hypothetical futures with regard to both ordinary affects and the undecided. Opinions are more susceptible to the influence of the prescriptions of canonical narratives – of how things ‘should’ be. They can exclude the inventive and open capacities of identification and affect; of how ‘no-one knows ahead of time what affects one is capable of’ (Deleuze, 1988: 125). ‘The vagueness or the unfinished quality of the ordinary is not so much a deficiency as a resource’, writes Stewart, ‘like a fog of immanent forces still moving even though so much has already happened and there seems to be plenty that’s set in stone’ (2007: 127).

This tension between rationalized accounts and thinking and the openings of the embodied self, its non-volitional capacity to take its shape and rhythms from events and others in the world around it constitutes one vital quality of the intimate citizenship that I have been concerned with. But there is more. Throughout the process of writing, I have found myself returning to a passage that closes Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004). In this passage, Butler contends that if the human sciences are to have a future as cultural criticism we have to find ways to ‘interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense’ (2004: 151). For Butler, a critical task for those working in the human sciences is how to,

… create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform. (2004: 151)

The lure of this provocation lies in Butler’s insinuation of a reversal in a certain implicit spatiotemporal logic in citizenship scholarship wherein an intimate sphere is increasingly encroached on by the state. For me, this aspect of Butler’s work suggests the need for radical critique to hold open the possibilities for a democracy that is vulnerable to the incursions of marginal intimacies. This suggestion moves beyond identity politics and the importance of democratic tolerance or celebration of diverse bodies. It raises possibilities of how we might work towards expanding the receptivity and openness of the social body to the array of ambivalent and undecided times that some others struggle with, herald and bring with them.