The Problem of Immigrant Identity In Buddha of Suburbia By Hanif Kureishi

Bu calisma, Kureishi'nin Varoslarin Budasi adli eserinde gocmen kimligi soru-nuna yaklasimini incelemektedir. Gocmenler daha iyi bir yasam surmek icin anavatanlarini gonullu veya istemsiz olarak terk ederler. Ne kendi kulturlerine devam edebilirler ne de yeni kulture dâhil olabilirler. Homi Bhaba'nin deyisiyle, 'arada kalmislik' yasarlar. Bu calisma Homi Bhabha'nin melezlik, taklit, liminali-te ve ucuncu alan gibi fikirlerine gonderme yapmaktadir. Bu calismada Bhab-ha'nin teorileri, Kureishi'nin karakterlerinin liminal alanlar yarattigini ve bu alanlardaki kimliklerini nasil gerceklestirdigini vurgulamaya yardimci olacaktir. Romandaki karakterler icin goc, gecmisle bugun arasinda ayni anda yasadiklari hic bitmeyen bir surectir. Cunku irk, dil, din, renk gibi bircok ayrimciliga maruz kalmislar ve toplumda daima “oteki” olarak ilan edilmislerdir. Karim, arada sikismaktan muzdarip en onemli karakterlerden biridir. Hint olan baba-sinin kulturunu reddederek Ingilizmis gibi davranmaya calissa da, icinde yasa-digi irkci toplum tarafindan asla kabul edilmez ve bu liminal alanda kimliksiz bir sekilde kalir


Introduction
The United Kingdom, which started during the Elizabethan period with the confidence that enlightened ideas were at the forefront and reached the peak of its power in the nineteenth century, dominated the world both economically and politically until the second half of the twentieth century with its colonial activities. As a result of its loss of the hegemony that it achieved with colonialism, as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin put it, the empire started to write back. One of the most crucial political developments that paved the way for the postcolonial period is that India gained its independence.
Some have argued that arrival of the English spelled doom for the Indian people and led to the deindustrialization of India. A second version contends that India underwent deindustrialization prior to British colonization due to the collapse of the Mughal Empire, which drove down grain productivity, pushed up nominal wages, and hurt India's competitiveness in terms of manufactured textiles. The second stage of deindustrialization occurred after the British invasion, as Indian manufactures could not compete with advances in production in England. There is yet a third interpretation of colonial experience. According to this view, colonization brought with it the foundations for a modern India, which was enhanced by investments in improving India's infrastructure as well as through the establishment of, and improvements in, the institutions necessary for economic growth (Hindman, 2009:778).
As we have seen, many critics have linked India's economic backwardness to British colonialism. Independence of India is a very important development. This development was also considered a turning point in the colonial history of the United Kingdom. As a result, many colonial states broke away from Britain and gained their freedom, officially breaking away from the empire. Despite these changes, the relations that continued after the colonies gained their freedom through the Commonwealth also ensured that the former colonies that gained their freedom continued to be governed under the influence of Britain. Many people from Asian countries had to migrate from their homelands to Britain in the expectation that they would have better social, economic and educational opportunities, which they didn't have in their own homelands. The economic and cultural relations that continued in the years following the Second World War also affected the immigration model of England and this model had an important impact on the population structure of the country.
With this process, the United Kingdom has now become a multicultural nation-state and many communities from the old colonial areas have migrated to the important centers of England, especially London, which has significantly changed the British society and its cultural structure.
In the last twenty years the population of London has changed dramatically, but it is in the last five to ten years that it has become Europe's most international and cosmopolitan city. There are now more than 300 different languages spoken in the city and over 33 worldwide communities with a population of over 10000 and 12 of over 5000. Some have been here for a long time: Indians, Jamaicans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis (Waddel, 2012: 294). This change in the population structure that happened in the second half of the twentieth century also brought the former colonizers and the colonized into a multicultural environment. Despite this situation, concepts such as the "East" and "Other" produced by Western ideology have remained important in the transnational space, especially in the colonial process and literature. This new situation continues to produce, by the host British society, a continuation of the hierarchical (colonizer and colonized) relationship that has | 181 Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi Cilt/Volume: 4, Sayı/Issue: 1, Nisan/April 2020 lasted for centuries. Conservative politicians who could not tolerate the change of the population structure and believed that immigrants further impoverished the White-British society played the "race card." The most important of these politicians is the conservative party deputy Enoch Powell, known for his famous Birmingham speech, also known as the "Blood Rivers" speech. Powell's speech led to racist and marginalizing attacks that turned the lives of immigrant groups in the United Kingdom into a nightmare. Powell said the following: We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre (Perry et al, 2011:388).
As can be seen in his statement, Powell ignores the contribution of colonized communities during centuries-old colonial history to the British culture and economy, while ignoring the effect the United Kingdom had on its former colonies. Rather, he sees the immigrant citizens who set foot on the island from the former colonies as dependents. Similarly, prime minister Margaret Thatcher developed a very hostile policy on Asian immigrants. In a TV interview she states: if we went on as we are then by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and … the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in" (World in Action 19 January 1978).
According to Thatcher, being born in England does not make Asians British. She never accepted that immigrants would be integrated into society and become a member of society. She also thought immigrants were disrupting the social structure and promised to stop immigration during election campaigns. Stuart Hall defined Thatcherism as follows: Ideologically, Thatcherism is seen as forging new discursive articulations between the liberal discourses of the 'free market' and economic man and the organic conservative themes of tradition, family and nation, respectability, patriarchalism and order. Its reworking of these different repertoires of 'Englishness' constantly repositions both individual subjects and 'the people' as a whole-their needs, experiences, aspirations, pleasures, and desires -contesting space in terms of shifting social, sexual and ethnic identities, against the background of a crisis of national identity and culture precipitated by the unresolved psychic trauma of the 'end of empire'. Culturally, the project of Thatcherism is defined as a form of 'regressive modernization' -the attempt to 'educate' and discipline the society into a particularly regressive version of modernity by paradoxically, dragging it backwards through an equally regressive version of the past (Hall, 1998:2). But immigrants have provided labor to the British economy, which needed it in light of its economic collapse after the Second World War. As Martin Barker states: It is a theory that I shall call biological, or better, pseudo biological culturalism. Nations on this view are not built out of politics and economics, but out of human nature. It is in our biology, our instincts, to defend our way of life, traditions and customs against outsiders -not because they are inferior, but because they are a part of different cultures (Barker, 1998:23-24).
All these developments have also affected the literature. Concepts such as immigration, minority and identity problems have come to the fore as frequently used Postcolonial literatures developed through several stages which can be seen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousness and of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centre. During the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial centre is inevitably, of course, produced by a literate elite whose primary identification is with the colonizing power…. Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor can they be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists in the countries invaded. Despite their detailed reportage of landscape, custom, and language, they inevitably privilege the centre, emphasizing the 'home' over the 'native', the 'metropolitan' over the provincial' or 'colonial', and so forth. At a deeper level their claim to objectivity simply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they are created (Ashcroft, 2011:4-5).
The Buddha of the Suburbia, set in Britain in the 1970s during Thatcher years and considered to be one of the most important works of post-colonial writing, is dominated by this political background. This novel can be regarded as a fictional reaction to dominant British ideology. While this novel mainly examines the problems experienced by immigrants living in a new culture, it also focuses on concepts that reflect the reality of contemporary social order such as immigration, identity, otherness, stereotyping, and the East. This work of fiction reflects on how the discriminatory, marginalizing, and racist attitudes faced by firstgeneration immigrants and their second-generation representatives in the postwar British society have problematized the concept of multiculturalism. A major aspect of the controversy surrounding the novel is that for migrants notion of home means ''an illusory and fictional place constructed through the myths and fragments of the migrant imagination'' (Nasta, 2002:133). Buddha of Suburbia offers us the quest for an imaginary homeland for the immigrants. Because they do not feel at home and safe. I breathed more easily now he'd changed the subject. The best women always are/ he went on. 'But she didn't give you the book. She's trying to protect you from your destiny, which is to be a half-caste in England. That must be complicated for you to accept -belonging nowhere, wanted nowhere (Kureishi, 1991:141). As can be seen from the above quotation, as a debilitating result of the otherization, immigrants feel a sense of unbelonging and displacement. In his novels, Hanif Kureishi chose most of his material from his close social circle so he cannot be considered independent of the social and historical context in which he was born. Hanif Kureishi was born in 1954 in the London suburbs with a non-English origin. He was brought up as an Englishman and did not remember his non-English origin unless he was reminded by racist hostility. Hanif Kureishi suffered discrimination reinforced by government policies and feels disgusted as he contemplates policies applied to immigrants in the 1960s. He experienced most of the troubles his characters had in this novel. "I stress that it is the British who have to make adjustments. It is the British, the white British, who have to learn that being British isn't what it was. Now it is a more complex thing, involving new elements" (Kureishi, Dreaming and Scheming, 2018: 55).
Benedict Anderson's ideas on nation and nationhood may be helpful to understand the idea of Britishness or British nationalism. From an anthropological perspective, Anderson proposes the following definition about the nation: ''nation is an imagined community -and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (Anderson, 2016: 7). Anderson argues that nationalism, after first emerging in America, is a model that can be Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi Cilt/Volume: 4, Sayı/Issue: 1, Nisan/April 2020 reproduced, first by popular movements in Europe, then by imperialist powers and finally by the Third World anti-imperialist struggles. Fanon draws a parallel to this thought History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labor, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps (Fanon, 1968:147).
The way immigrants tried to integrate into society shows how a nation's putative characteristics are transformed. According to Anderson, the conception of nationalism, which claims itself to be "the oldest and most rooted" and constantly legitimizes itself with an identity of "WE" against "external enemies", is destructive. As Anderson assiduously proposes that nationalism is constructed through some codes of imaginary devices, The Buddha of Suburbia demonstrates how British nationalism is constructed by Thatcherism. "The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English we were always wogs and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it" (Kureishi, 1991:53). This novel also shows how the concept of Britishness is regarded by Britain's' citizens and immigrants. As immigrants seek to be accepted by the British, they try to mimic them and become like them. With this process, they have re-established the definition of Britishness.
At the root of his English storytelling … Hanif Kureishi suggests that the dogma of nationalism is in conflict with the reality of today's multicultural England. He demands that we accept the inherent contradictions of a pluralistic society within England. Contemporary English society is a paradox of overlapping communities, and told from his Anglo-Asian perspective, his stories proclaim that as individuals reinvent their identities, so too must nations (Kaleta, 1998:3). According to Thatcherite understanding, people from different ethnic identities are not included in the definition of Britishness. Kaleta declared that this understanding is no longer valid and the reformulation of people's identities changed the idea of nation. When Haroon was in India, he believed that the British were a superior race. In England, where he came with great hopes for education, he was disappointed when he realized that the British were just ordinary people. Haroon's condition bears resemblance to Anderson's concept of imagined communities.
Dad was amazed and heartened by the sight of the British in England, though. He'd never seen the English in poverty, as road sweepers, dustmen, shopkeepers and barmen. He'd never seen an Englishman stuffing bread into his mouth with his fingers, and no one had told him the English didn't wash regularly because the water was so cold -if they had water at all. And when Dad tried to discuss Byron in local pubs no one warned him that not every Englishman could read or they didn't necessarily want tutoring by an Indian on the poetry of a pervert and a madman (Kureishi, 1991: 24-25) Therefore, it can be deduced that the concept of Britishness varies according to the immigrant perspective. This concept is a myth. There are even situations when he sees himself superior to the British while in England. Because he comes from an aristocratic past in India. Haroon can't help acting like an Englishman, even though he feels that way.

Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi
Cilt/Volume: 4, Sayı/Issue: 1, Nisan/April 2020 Dad was sitting on the white counterpane of his bed, cleaning his ten pairs, with patience and care, every Sunday morning. Then he brushed his suits, chose his shirts for the week-one-day pink, the next blue, the next lilac and so on -selected his cufflinks, and arranged his ties, of which there were at least a hundred. (Kureishi, 1991: 47) Haroon's situation represents a paradigm based on the notion of in betweenness. As "the brown skinned Englishman" he has a hybrid identity. He has both eastern and western elements. There is no pure culture in the novel. As Robert J. Young puts it "[Englishness] has never been successfully characterized by an essential, core identity from which the other is excluded. It has always like the Prime Meridian, been divided within itself, and it is this that has enabled it to be variously and counteractively constructed" (Young, 2010:3). Kureishi attempts to show that there is no stable identity disagreeing with Thatcher's understanding of Britishness. Although Karim was similarly a hybrid race at the beginning of The Buddha of Suburbia, he first emphasizes that he is British: My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don"t care -Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored (Kureishi,1991: 3).
That Karim introduces himself in this way has an important meaning, Karim does not just tell the reader about events, he tries to do more, he tries to express his lack of identity. There are many points of note in Karim's narration. He starts primarily with an ambiguous statement to its narration. He seems to be trying to isolate a specific and precise aspect of his identity. The adjective "almost" he uses at the end of his first sentence actually evokes uncertainty about his identity. It is a kind of legitimation that Being born and bred in a country is not enough to be a citizen of that country. Uncertainty in identity is a fact that has existed from the very beginning for Karim. His mother and typical Thatcherite character Eva wants to raise him like an Englishman. Theater owner Shadwell, on the other hand, wants to present him as an authentic Indian. However, Karim claimed that he was British from the beginning of the novel. Karim cannot be considered British in the Thatcherite sense because of his suburban background and color. Karim's identity problem has more cynical results when he goes to the USA to perform the play. This time, instead of the Indian heritage, his Britishness stands out. He feels alienation in the USA, but his step brother Charlie, who is British, acts like an American, not an Englishman, adapts to America immediately and even criticizes Karim.
"Sit down, Karim, for God's sake," said Charlie. "Stop farting about. You're not in Beckenham now." "I know that." "Well then, can't you stop standing there and looking so English?" "What d'you mean, English?" "So shocked, so self-righteous and moral, so loveless and incapable of dancing. They are narrow, the English. It is a kingdom of Prejudice over there. Don't be like it!" (Kureishi,1991: 254). This conversation emphasizes how the concept of nationalism is slippery. The main trouble for Karim is that he had to admit that he has an "inescapable hybridity and Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi Cilt/Volume: 4, Sayı/Issue: 1, Nisan/April 2020 intermixture of ideas" (Gilroy, 2007: xi). Kureishi is in parallel with Homi Bhabha's emphasis on the slippery nature of nationalism. Nationalism ... seeks to represent itself in the image of the Enlightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualise itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself. (Bahabha, 2013:293).
The British define Britishness to rule their superiority by excluding the Other from the definition of nation. As an 'other 'Karim believed that being British while in England was privileged, but being British in the USA didn't have the same meaning. With his English identity, Karim's proclamation of "the other" in the USA shows how meaningless Thatcher's narrow-minded Britishness is

Theoretical Background: Homi Bhabha's Postcolonial Approach: Hybridity, Mimicry, Third Space, and Liminality
With an interest in "boundaries of cultural displacement" and "the historical hybridization of the post-colonial world," Homi K. Bhabha questions hybrid culture as a theory and design of colonialism. His purpose is not to analyze colonial policies, politico-economy, or domination but rather to "construct otherness" in colonial discourse. According to Bhabha, hybridization is politically destructive. Colonial discourse always tries to establish an "other" but always builds hybrid ambivalence. Hybrids also imitate the colonialist. Starting from psychoanalytic and poststructuralist views on subjectivity and language, Bhabha argues that unlike the one-sided concept of hegemony expressed by Orientalism, one-sided colonial discourse cannot function smoothly; hybridity has some kind of disruptive effect.
According to Homi Bhabha, the racial identity conflict witnessed today goes back to the colonial period. Bhabha is in the opinion that "hybridity" is an important concept in the field of identity. The term hybridity is one of the most frequently repeated concepts in postcolonial cultural criticism. Homi Bhabha draws attention to the ambiguity in the colonialist's attitude towards the other he has colonized, and attempts to explain the inherent contradictions in colonial discourse. In his The Location of Culture, Bhabha defines hybridity as follows: It is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the 'pure' and original identity of authority). Hybridity is the reevaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power. For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory -or, in my mixed metaphor, a negative transparency (Bhabha, 2012: 159-160).
The Location of Culture was written in 1994. It is a fairly new study in postcolonial criticism. According to Bhabha, postcolonial cultures are "hybrids" defined by their own people as well as colonial power. According to him, people can no longer be classified in terms of ethnicity. ''People's characteristics are not limited to their ethnic heritage, but rather are subject to change and modification through experience'' (Bharatti, 2010:44). Bhabha

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Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi Cilt/Volume: 4, Sayı/Issue: 1, Nisan/April 2020 questions in betweenness between cultures. It is also important to explain the concept of mimicry to better explain hybridity. In his "Of Mimicry and Man" Bhabha talks about mimicry: [M]imicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which 'appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an imminent threat to both 'normalized' knowledges and disciplinary powers (Bhabha, 2012: 122-3).
Mimicry means imitation in the most general sense. Imitation occurs when members of a colonized society imitate colonist culture. According to Bahabha, "The effect of mimicry is camouflage...it is not a question of harmonizing with the background but against a mottled background" (Bhabha 2012: 121). In a sense, mimicry symbolizes colonial authority. In Bhabha's terms, postcolonial "locates an area of considerable political and cultural uncertainty" (Bhabha 2012: 142) as the postcolonial subject first mimics the colonizer. According to Bhabha, where new cultures emerge is called a "third space." "It is the 'in between space that carries the burden and meaning of culture" (Bhabha 2012: 119). This space is an ambivalent area in which concepts such as colonizer and colonized no longer bear weight and their relationship is weakened.
Along with the third space, liminality is another important concept for Homi Bhabha. Liminality means remaining uncertain between the two social statuses when moving from one social status to another. In the postcolonial era, migration from previously colonial areas to the West has begun, and this has inevitably led to the emergence of new cultures. This new culture is neither the host culture nor the culture of the immigrant's own country. This culture is a mixture of the two. In other words, immigrants created their own liminal areas while trying to integrate into the host culture. This culture represents the culture in the liminal area. Culture has fluid features. Bhabha emphasizes that people are not structured with what their ancestors gave previously, that identities are structured later, and interpersonal interaction is very important in this structuring. He explains that there is not an original identity: The move away from the singularities of 'class' or 'gender' as primary conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions -of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation -that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'inbetween' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood -singular or communal -that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself (Bhabha, 2012: 2).
Identity is not pre-given but it is a performative process. There are a lot of factors in the identity formation process such as culture and politics. In Buddha of Suburbia Kureishi creates a set of characters who are stuck in the margin of host culture and face prejudice from the host culture.

The Problem of Immigrant Identity
Migration has played a pivotal role in human life from past to present. The phenomenon of mi-gration, which initially examined scientifically at the end of the 19th century for the first time, is of interest among the various disciplines today, and different aspects of migration are explored by these disciplines. In today's global world, the immigrant is at the center of the controversy more than ever before. Migration from Asia to England started after World War II for various reasons, and the results of this migration continue to be felt today. Because England traditionally does not identify as a migration country, there have not been enough studies on the integration of immigrants. Previously, the concept of "guest worker", was used to ensure that migration was temporary, and the related return was encouraged for fear that migration could be permanent over time. From a sociological pointof-view, the issue of immigration in the UK is reflected in the literature. From this perspective, it is possible to posit that the stages of migration and migrants are transferred to literary works via various contexts.
Hanif Kureishi addressed the problem of immigration and immigrant identity and analyzed the identity crises in the liminal space created by immigrants living in the Indian diaspora in the UK. Migrants from non-Western backgrounds experience the identity problem in many dimensions. Immigrants first try to create their own identity in their new country, but they can neither maintain their own culture nor integrate into the new culture which tenaciously rejects them. Their identity is referred to as hybridity which is "an original mixedness within every form of identity" (Huddart, 2007:6-7). As Phelan puts it: Identity emerges in the failure of the body to express being fully, and the failure of the signifier to convey meaning exactly. Identity is perceptible only through a relation to an other-which is to say, it is a form of both resisting and claiming the other…In that declaration of identity and identification, there is always loss and the loss of not being the other and yet remaining dependent other for self-seeing and self-being (Phelan, 1999: 13).
The Buddha of Suburbia consists of subplots that progress in Karim's quest from childhood to adulthood. Karim, the main character and narrator of the novel, is Hanif Kureishi's representative in the book. This novel addresses issues of race, ethnicity and social class in postcolonial discourse. Karim's mother is a white British suburbanite like Kureishi's mother. Karim-depicted as an individual who is embarrassed by his ethnicity and social class and, as a result, becomes insensitive to his identity and environment-makes us feel the inevitable crises of multicultural societies. Kureishi gives an example of his own sense of alienation in The Rainbow Sign: "Since the beginning, I have tried to ignore my Pakistani self, origin, and origin. I was embarrassed and wanted to get rid of it, I wanted to be like everyone else" (Kureishi, 1989:3). To be like everyone else, Kureishi wants to forget his past and keep his present values alive; in Collected Essays, he explains clearly the difficulty and complexity of this situation with the following words: I was having a little identity crisis. I'd been greeted so warmly in Pakistan, I felt so excited by what I saw, and so at home with all my uncles, I wondered if I were not better off here than there. And when I said, with a little unnoticed irony, that I was an Englishman, people laughed. They fell about…. Strangely, anti-British remarks made me feel patriotic, though I only felt patriotic when I was away from England… But I couldn't allow myself to feel too Pakistani. I didn't want to give in to that falsity,  (Kureishi, 2011:11). Karim is neither British nor Indian. In fact, Karim is too brown to be British and cultural legacy which comes from his father keeps him from being British. Despite everything, he cannot be said to be Indian because he has never been to India and he also learned the history of India from British books. Hanif Kureishi is predominantly interested in hybrid identities and he uses hybrid identities as cultural forms in his novels. In England, where an ideological concept of Britishness was created, being in betweenness is inevitable for the immigrants. Since they cannot be identified with the host culture which has hierarchical assertions, the mimicry concept of Homi Bhabha appears. They wish to be like the host people. As Bhabha puts it in Location of Culture, Mimicry is the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which appropriates the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and possess an imminent threat to both normalized knowledges and disciplinary Powers (Bhabha,123).
Haroon, Karim's father, has a hybrid identity. He exhibits more British characteristics than Indian. For example, he reads the Daily Mirror every day on the train. ''Having one of the typical English jobs, he carries a briefcase and an umbrella with him (Kureishi, 1991: 29). On the other hand, he impersonates a Buddhist. Interestingly, the novel portrays Haroon as a person trying to transfer the mysticism of the East to Western thinking. "In fact, for Bhabha there are no cultures that come together leading to hybrid forms; instead, cultures are the consequence of attempts to still the flux of cultural hybridities" (Huddart, 2007:7). We can see Bhabha's perception of hybridity in Haroon's case. Together with his close friend Anwar, they come to England in the 1950s, hoping to provide the financial means necessary for a better life before returning to India. However, things do not go as expected; reducing their expectations of living in the West, the two friends find themselves in a situation which strains their relationship. The following words between Haroon and Anwar, one day, about why it would be difficult for them to rise in the society they migrated to, are important: The whites will never promote us,' Dad said. 'Not an Indian while there is a white man left on the earth. You don't have to deal with them -they still think they have an Empire when they don't have two pennies to rub together (Kureishi, 1991:27).
With regard to this quotation Haroon and Anwar emphasize that it is almost impossible to exist in society as "the other", reflecting the disappointments, racist attacks and exclusions faced by the immigrants of that time. They created their own hybrid identities. According to Kumaravadivelu, ''otherization is a crudely reductive process that ascribes an imagined superior identity to the Self and an imagined inferior identity to the Other'' (Kumaravadivelu, 2008:16). Accordingly, otherization in colonial discourse occurs "when people are unable to see the different other as they see themselves, they rely on stereotypical representations of those they perceive as different" (Nelson, 2014: 29). The dominant group sees itself as the only authority with a natural right to command on the minority groups. This situation causes minority groups to be alienated.
Adrian Holiday, Martin Hyde, and John Kullman first used the concept of otherization in 2004. For them otherization defines a group or a person who is different from Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi Cilt/Volume: 4, Sayı/Issue: 1, Nisan/April 2020 the dominant one. ''This theme explores a major inhibition to communication by looking at how, so easily, one can construct and reduce people to be less than what they are'' (Ameli, 2006:33). According to Edward Said, otherization ''is a crude process of domination, of varying degree of a complex hegemony" (Said, 1978: 5). Otherization can be defined as "a set of dynamics, processes, and structures that engender marginality and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences based on group identities" (Powell & Menendian, 2016: 17). Kureishi divided the novel into "Suburbs" and "City". Karim has had different experiences from both lives in the suburbs and in the city. As a result, a double identity has emerged for Karim. While Kureishi describes the processes of otherization, he depicts Karim and his family in a lonely and disoriented world where minorities are exposed to xenophobic pressures. Kureishi depicts immigrants' subjectification in an alienated world.
The Buddha of Suburbia also depicts the feeling of unbelonging. The notion of home is problematic for the characters in The Buddha of Suburbia. ''The room immediately seemed to contract. Tension rose.
[I] couldn't wait to get out of the house now.
[I] always wanted to be somewhere else, [I don't] know why" (Kureishi, 1991: 4-5). From these words it can be understood that Karim seeks for a sense of belonging. The place where Karim's parents live is in a London suburb where several black Britons live. He later stated that he felt more comfortable when they moved to a more central area of London, realizing with great relief that "there were thousands of black people everywhere, so I wouldn't feel exposed" (Kureishi, 1991: 121).
Migrants in the novel always yearn for a home with "the hopes for new beginnings" (Brah, 1996: 193). They have a desire to belong to a place. The sense of home causes them to feel stuck in the past and unable to adapt themselves for the present. For example, Anwar feels guilty for not being able to return to India throughout the novel. Migrant characters in the novel lost their attachment to their home. This novel is filled with the journeys of characters leaving their homes. The first generation of immigrants, Anwar and Haroon, left India and came to London. Karim, a second-generation immigrant, travelled to the United States from London. As seen, the novel is filled with the character's journeys and the quest for home. They are not content with their existing home so they are in search of their dream home. As Nasta puts it, '' home is also "an illusory and fictional place constructed through the myths and fragments of the migrant imagination" (Nasta, 2002: 133).
Immigrants have to survive creating their own spaces. Jamila, the daughter of Anwar, portrayed as the figure whose ethnic and cultural sensitivity reacts harshly to racist, othering attacks and attitudes; at its core, the novel uses her story to evidence racism. As stated by Fanon, "racism is only one element of a vaster whole: that of the systematized oppression of a people" (1952: 33). The shops Jamilia run with her father and mother are so heavily attacked that later in the novel, Anwar, unfortunately, is seen as a mentally unstable paranoid man who attacks every white man he sees with a stick. His wife Jeeta tires of deleting racist writings on the walls of his shops. Because of her personal and cultural development, as well as her sex, Jamila does not receive enough education. She has a close relationship with the library owner, Miss Cutmore, who works right next to their store. Jamila benefits from Miss Cutmore's resources for cultural education, yet also avoids using it to its potential, due to Miss Cutmore's history of teaching in British Colonies. Jamila approaches Miss Cutmore's internalized stereotypical, hegemonic, and marginalizing discursive system of Colonial Western ideologies with a missionary sense. However, Karim, who has no ethnic and cultural sensitivity, criticizes Jamila with the following words: But when Miss Cutmore left South London for Bath, Jamila got grudging and started to hate Miss Cutmore for forgetting that she was Indian. Jamila thought Miss Cutmore really wanted to eradicate everything that was foreign in her. 'She spoke to my parents as if they were peasants,' Jamila said. She drove me mad by saying Miss Cutmore had colonized her, but Jamila was the strongest-willed person I'd met: no one could turn her into a colony. Anyway, I hated ungrateful people. Without Miss Cutmore, Jamila wouldn't have even heard the word 'colon/. 'Miss Cutmore started you off,' I told her (Kureishi, 1991:53).
Karim finds Miss Cutmore's actions innocent. But, from Jamila's perspective, the reader concludes that the "civilized white" ideology still carries its colonial mission, that it considers immigrants to be the "absolute other". Kept under "protection", it forces the immigrants to label their own "others" through representations from the colonial power. Jamila's sensitivity of being the "other" and her harsh reactions to the exclusionary attitudes she faces are indicative of her "impact-response". Karim also criticizes Anwar: I didn't know how much money [Uncle Anwar and Aunt Jeeta] had. But if they had anything they must have buried it, because they never bought any of the things people in Chislehurst would exchange their legs for: velvet curtains, stereos, Martinis, electric lawnmowers, double-glazing. The idea of enjoyment had passed Jeeta and Anwar by. They behaved as if they had unlimited lives: this life was of no consequence; it was merely the first of many hundreds to come in which they could relish existence. They also knew nothing of the outside world.… (Kureishi, 1991:51).
There is a conflicted relationship between another first-generation representative, Anwar, who represents a more traditional, patriarchal identity than Haroon, and his daughter Jamila, who represents the second generation. Overwhelmed by the racist attitudes of the British, representing the host culture, Anwar becomes more and more traditionalist and asks his daughter Jamila to marry Changez from India with an arranged marriage. Although she agrees to marry Changez so that her mother, Jeeta, would not suffer more, Jamila has always resisted both her father and the colonial attitudes with her libertarian and combative attitude during her marriage. The othering experiences experienced by the characters of Anwar and Jamila exemplify otherization based on race and culture, as well as on religion, class and gender. Kureishi, who makes hard references to the anti-democratic and discriminatory management approach with his ironic and humorous style in his novel, explains how being a lower-class citizen with exposure to racial/class discrimination affects life negatively in England.
The contemporary black English, like the Anglo-Africans of earlier generations and perhaps, like all blacks in the West, stand between (at least) two great cultural assemblages, both of which have mutated through the course of the modern world that formed them and assumed new configurations... -black and white (Gilroy, 2007:1).
Gilroy acknowledges that being white or black underwent a transformation. This transformation is in-betweenness. In the same manner Karim is trapped between Indianness and Englishness. "Karim sees himself as consisting of torn halves, a conception he introduces in the opening paragraph. This raises the question of how these two halves interact, how they feed upon each other, and in how far they remain irreconciled to each other" (Stein, 2004:121).

Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi
Cilt/Volume: 4, Sayı/Issue: 1, Nisan/April 2020 Kureishi has an urge to assert the importance of identity through the characters in Buddha of Suburbia, for example, another of Jamila's notable aspects is her self-improvement as a woman and her resistance to the patriarchal understanding of society that others her. On the other hand she has nowhere to go other than the home of her father or husband. Kureishi creates this contradictory situation, shedding light on the problems of migrant characters. They have to behave as expected, not as they wish. Anwar wants his daughter to marry Changez, who is from India because he wants grandsons and to continue their culture. But although he believes that he has persuaded Jamila with the 'hunger strike' tactic, Jamila and Changez's marriage can never be a traditional one. Jamila, who broke off her relationship with her father, never engages in a husband-and-wife relationship with Changez and takes on the role of supporting for her family financially. Jamila, who responds to the patriarchal understanding that others her with a sexist approach and, as a rebuttal, 'other-izes' patriarchal expectations out of her life, plays an important role in conveying the concept of the 'other' in the novel. She does this, as Spivak points out, as a subaltern trying to make her voice heard in the space where the sovereign is dominated. When Karim tells Anwar that arranged marriage is not suitable for Jamilia, Anwar gets angry and says "'That is not our way, boy. Our way is firm. She must do what I say or I will die. She will kill me.' Jamila started to punch the bed. 'It's so stupid! What a waste of time and life'" (Kureishi, 1991:60). Anwar is a traditional man who is very devoted to his traditions. However, one of the reasons he depends on his Indian traditions is that he has always been excluded in England. However, for Karim, who is not familiar with Indian culture, this situation is rather strange. This is something Karim does not understand. Arranged marriage is a part of Indian culture, however Jamila and Karim, who were already born in England and witnessed their parents' integration into the British society, are not able to understand Anwar's behavior. "Maybe there were similarities between what was happening to Dad, with his discovery of Eastern philosophy, and Anwar's last stand. Perhaps it was the immigrant condition living itself out through them. For years they were both happy to live like English-men" (Kureishi, 1991:64). Karim's father, Haroonn, also supports Anwar in this regard. "Anwar is my oldest friend in the world,' he said sadly when we told him everything. 'We old Indians come to like this England less and less and we return to an imagined India'' (Kureishi, 1991:74). The perspectives of first generation immigrants and second generation immigrants differ from each other. For immigrant societies, it is a common problem.
In his autobiography, Kureishi was ashamed of his Pakistani origins before maturation, Karim appears to be a character who goes through the two origins and experiences an identity crisis. Ashamed of his race and class status in society due to the tension caused by the racist environment that identifies him as "the other," Karim wants to get away from his poor neighborhood in the south of London, which reminds him of poverty and "otherness," and achieve success. Karim has a separate world. It is noteworthy that he does not react to events, even events that provoke him. Here, perhaps learned helplessness is a fact. For example, Anwar's daughter Jamila gives the harshest response to racist attacks from time to time, telling Karim what to do, but Karim cannot react too much. Karim meets Helen during a yoga session with her father, Haroon, and Helen's interest in Karim is immediately noticeable. However, Helen represents otherness for Karim. His father reminds him of his non-Britishness. Karim, who goes to Helen's home to take her out the next day, is exposed to the racist words of Helen's father at the door: "You can't see my daughter again,' said Hairy Back. 'She doesn't go out with boys. Or with wogs'' (Kureishi, 1991:40). Karim goes away without reacting. Helen's father represents one of the most influential examples of xenophobia that emerged in post-war British society. Karim is placed in a ''stereotypical role, that as an Indian" (Ambursle, 2006: 28). Dominant Eurocentric consciousness prevents minorities from fully integrating into the dominant culture. As Hashmi puts it "the blackand-white aspect of the social reality literally reduces them to certain roles which, howsoever they may modify them, they cannot reject or transcend" (Hashmi, 1992: 89).
Concepts such as racial relations, religion, color and gender discrimination, imperialism, identity crisis, and alienation are frequently seen in both plot and character analysis. A constructed Britishness is evident in the novel for example Ted and Jean call Haroon as Harry to anglicise him. They also criticize his Buddhist practices claiming that "Buddhism isn't the kind of thing she's [Margaret] used to. It's got to stop!" (Kureishi, 1991:48). Immigrants who have been exposed to many discriminations have always been seen as subgroups. As Blumer states: Through talk, tales, stories, gossip, anecdotes, messages, pronouncements, news, accounts, orations, sermons, preachments and the like definitions are presented and feelings expressed. In this usually vast and complex interaction separate views run against one another, influence one another, modify each other, incite one another and fuse together in new forms. Correspondingly, feelings which are expressed meet, stimulate each other, feed on each other, intensify each other and emerge in new patterns... It is through such a process that a collective image of a subordinate group is formed, and a sense of group position is set (Blumer, 1958: 5).
The Dominant discourse that marginalizes those with different ethnic and racial backgrounds causes minorities to feel alienated and othered. Immigrants with a colonial past feel otherized in the postcolonial West because they are kept away from the centre. There are various examples in the novel. For example, Karim is "sick too of being affectionately called Shitface and Curryface, and of coming home covered in spit and snot and chalk and wood shavings'' (Kureishi, 1991:63). This situation is the "sign of cultural/historical/racial difference" (Bhabha, 1983: 18). The dominant British people regard themselves as the single authority. As an immigrant Karim feels different and inferior. This otherization creates an inferiority complex in the colonized immigrants. Another challenge Karim faces in relation to otherness is his girlfriend Eleanor. Eleanor is an attractive actress who also took part in Pyke's London show. Eleanor has a very different lifestyle from Karim. She is sophisticated and highbrowed. She is also a character that causes Karim to experience a fear of 'otherization' and 'inferiority complex' in terms of class and education. Eleanor's father is a bank owner, her mother is a prominent portrait artist, and her brother is a teacher at the University. Eleanor who grew up in a very intellectual environment in all respects, has reached a financial satisfaction, and Karim who grew up in the suburbs, hates social status and origin. Karim's fears of abandonment and "marginalization", plus his resulting actions, reflect the social problems of multicultural England.
Eleanor's father was American and owned a bank; her mother was a well-respected English portrait painter; one of her brothers was a university professor. Eleanor had been to country houses, to public school and Italy, and she knew many liberal families and people who'd flourished in the 1960s: painters, novelists, lecturers, young people called Candia, Emma, Jasper, Lucy, India, and grown-ups called Edward, Caroline, Francis, Douglas and Lady Luckham. Her mother was a friend of the Queen Mother, and when Ma'am turned up in her Bentley the local kids gathered round the car and cheered (Kureishi, 1991:173). However, the circumstances were very different for Karim. He wasn't like Eleanor, and he never could be, because first of all, he was an Asian immigrant. Karim had many reasons for his alienation beyond his ethnic identity. He had no rich family, no good income.

Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi
Cilt/Volume: 4, Sayı/Issue: 1, Nisan/April 2020 What infuriated me -what made me loathe both them and myself -was their confidence and knowledge. The easy talk of art, theatre, architecture, travel; the languages, the vocabulary, knowing the way round a whole culture -it was invaluable and irreplaceable capital ... hard words and sophisticated ideas were in the air they breathed from birth, and this language was the currency that bought you the best of what the world could offer. But for us it could only ever be a second language, consciously acquired (Kureishi, 1991:177-178). Otherization which is at the backdrop of the anxieties of immigrants inevitably leads to the formation of a disintegrated identity. As Phelan puts it: Identity emerges in the failure of the body to express being fully, and the failure of the signifier to convey meaning exactly. Identity is perceptible only through a relation to an other -which is to say, it is a form of both resisting and claiming the other. In that declaration of identity and identification, there is always loss and the loss of not being the other and yet remaining dependent other for self-seeing and self-being (1999: 13).
The immigrants' inability to integrate into society has also reduced their expectation from life. Being an 'outsider' they are also paid less and economic crisis is inevitable for them. For example, we see that Haroon did not take any action other than coming home from work and watching television until he moved to Eva's house. "Mum and Dad always felt out of place and patronized on these grand occasions, where lives were measured by money'' (Kureishi, 1991:42). He was also subjected to many racist attacks on his way to work. He sometimes changes his route "for fear of having stones and icepops full of piss lobbed at him by schoolboys from the secondary modern" (Kureishi, 1991:28). Even if he takes on the role of a guru and gains some kind of respect from some people, he is still an 'other'.
But the office, where he was an unelevated lazy Indian who had run away from his wife and children, there was disapproval from the clerks he worked with: there was mockery behind his back and in front of his face (Kureishi, 1991:115).
Haroon tries to make amends for his own failures through his son. Haroon insists Karim will become a doctor or a lawyer. Despite great expectations, his son's education appears to be a complete failure, but he thinks that failure is not just his son's, but his own. Haroon has missed the point that, although he was born in England, Karim is also an Eastern immigrant, and in this country dominated by Western White, the immigrant is not even likely to succeed.
We have stated that all immigrants are looking for a new homeland. In a country beset by seemingly racial challenges, a deeply embedded feeling of homesickness is clear. The relationship between Haroon and Eva can be exemplified in this regard, and Haroon is looking for a third space to get rid of his own inferiority complex. Since Eva is a woman different from Margaret in every sense, she manages to attract Haroon's attention easily with her economic and social status. Even at first glance, she affects him with her living standards. She is living in "a bigger house, with a little drive and garage and car…. [and] bay windows, an attic, a greenhouse, three bedrooms and central heating" (Kureishi, 1991: 8). The inferiority complex and the exclusion from the community have also affected Karim so much that he supported his father's extra-marital relationship with Eva, just to gain dignity. The more he is othered by the society the more he tries to be like the British. If he moved into Eva's house with his father, his life could change. Karim was so tired of living in the suburbs that everything that would save him from the suburbs represented hope for a new life. However, Karim later learns that because of his roots and skin color, he will never be considered a true Englishman. Pyke who is another director, tried to create convincing performances and characters, saying, "you have to be someone else successfully you must be yourself" (Kureishi, 1991: 220). Later, Pyke asks the actor group to portray any character, inspired by someone in their lives. Karim wants to portray Charlie, but Pyke immediately intervenes there. He wants Karim to choose one of his own relatives, that is, someone black. No matter how hard Karim works, he is always given limited roles by both Pyke and Shadwell. These roles are those that reveal his Indian ethnic identity. Here again we can see the eastern image in the eyes of the white man. In the play, Karim is not given the right to express his identity or ethnicity. In short, it is the director who creates the image of a typical Eastern and black identity. As stated by Said: From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist's work (Said, 1978: 283).
At the end of the novel, Karim returns to London and is very happy. His memories teemed with the memories of London when he was in the USA. He missed London so much. London, which once reminded him of his otherness, is now his homeland. We can see Karim in most part of the novel mimicking the British and sometimes highlighting his Indianness. Mostly he feels marginalized. The identity of immigrants is intertwined with the society in which they live. They harmonize these contradictory parts of their life by creating a new part space. Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia is an important example of highlighting identity problems of immigrants through marginalization, inequality, alienation and otherness.
Karim's identity crisis appears once again at Anwar's funeral, Karim regretted not being attached to his Indian roots any more.
But I did feel, looking at these strange creatures now -the Indians -that in some ways these were my people, and that I'd spent my life denying or avoiding that fact. I felt ashamed and incomplete at the same time, as if half of me were missing, and as if I'd been colluding with my enemies, those whites who wanted Indians to be like them (Kureishi, 1991:212). Karim, who fully admits his feelings, stresses his broken relationship with his Indian origins, and his ambiguous identity. It is also interesting that while he regrets being so disconnected from them, in some ways he still goes on to call them "strange creatures". Having more than one cultural background, Karim suffers from ''in betweenness''. In this way, he tries to create an identity by living between the two cultures. As the narrator of the novel, Karim does not want to alienate himself from both cultures. Karim's presence in the novel as a narrator and immigrant well summarizes the situation of immigrants of mixed ethnicity. Karim's struggle to gain recognition among the white British is not just an individual issue; this is an issue that concerns all immigrants.
In the post-colonial world, there is a negative view of Eastern immigrant culture, which stems from the West's desire to gain superiority. When the immigrants from colonized countries came to colonial countries, they experienced an identity crisis. We see this identity crisis in all aspects with the immigrant characters in the novel. The uncertainty about what constitutes identity becomes increasingly clear throughout the novel.

Conclusion
Frantz Fanon, who addresses the psychological aspect of the exclusion experienced by the colonized in the face of the colonizer, says that while the white person is a prisoner of the inferiority complex, he or she also lives within the illusions of the superiority complex. The white person treats the black person as if he were dealing with a child. Black man is out of history, and this perception cannot change at all. Based on Fanon's argument, it is possible to say that immigrants representing the Eastern image, with their internalized psychology, are excluded from the community. Othering elements are basically distinguished by colorbased distinction. This novel, however, also reflects the racist and discriminatory attitudes towards other religious, class, and gender-based identities. In the novel, mostly Haroon and Karim characters are exposed to color-based (black and white) othering behaviors. Although they want to get rid of the isolation from society and escape the attending identity crisis by imitating the host culture, Haroon and Karim cannot escape being marginalized because of their race, color, class, and culture. Yet another element of othering in the novel is genderbased. Jamila is declared 'the other' because she does not fulfill the traditional gender roles expected of her, but rather opposes them. Haroon and Anwar represent first-generation immigrants within the multicultural British society structure, which is problematized in the study. Both have been silenced by ruling British society because they were seen as intruders and dependent. Karim, who is the representative of the second-generation immigrants, is stuck between the two cultures and the 'other' identity, and thus he experiences a crisis of identity and belonging.