How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge with them. She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfenishness. The purity of it. It didn't occur to her that the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and Poland, né Chalfenovsky), or that they might be as needy of her as she was of them. To Irie, the Chalfens were more English than the English. (12.110)
For Irie, the appeal of the Chalfens is a one-two punch of social status (Englishness) and class status (they are just so middle class). Yet she totally fails to realize that the inverse might also be true—that the Chalfens might find her just as appealing. This is one of those things that would be good to remember. You know, in life. The grass is always greener and all that.
Quote #2
I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)
While it's easier to stick with one-to-one equations like Samad = waiter, we miss a whole lot when we view people that way. Samad hasn't always been working class. In fact, how did he go from being a scientist and a student to a waiter?
Quote #3
She'd never been so close to this strange and beautiful thing, the middle class, and experienced the kind of embarrassment that is actually intrigue, fascination. (12.67)
Irie just cannot stop staring (literally and metaphorically).
Quote #4
While Irie had been lost in her reveries assessing the Chalfens like a romantic anthropologist, Millat had been out in the garden, looking through the windows, casing the joint. Where Irie saw culture, refinement, class, intellect, Millat saw money, lazy money, money that was just hanging around this family not doing anything in particular, money in need of a good cause that might as well be him. (12.75)
Millat and Irie look at the Chalfens' middle-class comforts very differently. But they both want to posses what the Chalfens have. Irie wants to meld smoothly into their lifestyle; Millat wants to take the money and run.
Quote #5
"The reason I don't worry about Josh, as you well know," said Joyce, smiling broadly and speaking in her Chalfen-guide-to-parenting voice, "is because he's just trying to get a little bit of attention. Rather like you are at this moment. It's perfectly natural for well-educated middle-class children to act up at his age." (Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term "middle class." In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite, and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say. (16.112)
Where did they get this idea? And why does the narrator say that it's hard to say? Why should Joyce feel shame about using the term middle class? Joyce seems to be saying that her son is acting up in a normal way, but Millat is acting up in a problematic way… when there is really very little difference between their versions of acting up.
Quote #6
That evening there was an awful row. Alsana slung the sewing machine, with the black studded hotpants she was working on, to the floor.
"Useless! Tell me, Samad Miah, what is the point of moving here—nice house, yes, very nice, very nice—but where is the food?"
"It is a nice area, we have friends here."
"Who are they?" She slammed her little fist on to the kitchen table, sending the salt and pepper flying, to collide spectacularly with each other in the air. "I don't know them! You fight in an old, forgotten war with some Englishman... married to a black! Whose friends are they? These are the people my child will grow up around? Their children—half blacky-white? But tell me," she shouted, returning to her favored topic, "where is our food?" (3.108-110)
Alsana and Samad work hard at jobs they don't like so they can move into a more "acceptable" neighborhood. Why does Alsana act this way about Archie and Clara? In what way might she be worried about the social status she and Samad are fighting so hard to achieve?
Quote #7
O'Connell's is no place for strangers.
O'Connell's is the kind of place family men come to for a different kind of family. Unlike blood relations, it is necessary here to earn one's position in the community […] (8.1-2)
We have to admit that O'Connell's has a strange vibe. It's full of men who seem to be in roughly the same social class but who are very different in many other ways. People say that friends are like family you get to choose; Archie and Samad chose O'Connell's, and ended up with each other.
Quote #8
He had to please all of the people all of the time. To the Cockney wide-boys in the white jeans and the colored shirts he was the joker, the risk-taker, respected lady-killer. To the black kids he was fellow weed-smoker and valued customer. To the Asian kids, hero and spokesman. Social chameleon. And underneath it all, there remained an ever-present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. (11.29)
How is it that Millat has so much social currency and so little sense of belonging? And what exactly allows Millat to move so freely between social groups? Are there any groups he doesn't have access to?
Quote #9
Like any school, Glenard Oak had a complex geography […] The school had learned to its cost that you cannot unite a thousand children under one Latin tag (school code: Laborare est Orare, To Labor is to Pray); kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement. (11.257)
Perhaps it is no surprise to you that a thousand children in a school are not all easily united under one motto. When we see where a few of these kids come from, the houses they go home to, and the neighborhoods they live in, it becomes clear that Irie and Millat's school is a fairly accurate representation of the wider world in which they live—it's very diverse.
Quote #10
"And you know, the exciting thing is, this could be a kind of guinea-pig project for a whole range of programs," said the headmaster, thinking aloud. "Bringing children of disadvantaged or minority backgrounds into contact with kids who might have something to offer them. And there could be an exchange, vice versa. Kids teaching kids basketball, football, et cetera." (11.392)
Wow. Way to stereotype.