Who We Are / Are We

It has been six years since we last heard the curious tone of Magda Iveta’s voice. It often rises in volume from initial uncertainty to a more confrontational, near-attacking stance as the weakness of her opponent is revealed. She does not shout, but her adversary will often feel the assumed safety of their viewpoint being violently undermined beneath them. And then the soft apology as if it is she that has lost her temper.

At the Southbank Centre, former colleagues from the Institute for Public Policy Research are in the audience to hear her read from her first novel, Who We Are / Are We. She had been a prominent researcher and spokesperson on matters of national identity before seemingly disappearing from the organisation, surprising people when she produced the documentary film Isaac, about a white working class single father who gave his child up before apparently committing suicide. The film was praised for its poetic style, which fused long unbroken shots of inner city Birmingham with deeply focussed confessions from the characters involved in the tragedy. The film narrowly missed out on the European Film Award for Best Documentary.

The novel is another surprise, although the way it approaches the question of authorial voice and individual identity might be seen as an emerging theme in Iveta’s work. The overall scope of the book might be a quest for identity and stability, using collective voices to try to attain compromise from the warring factions in a disturbed mind. It is a collage of opinions and argument, and the characters themselves may even be real voices. But it is being presented as fiction; indeed, Iveta never fails to remind her audience of the fictional nature of the work as she reads.

Who We Are / Are We follows the lives of a geographically spread group of people in the run up to the vote on Scottish devolution. There are possibly as many as one hundred characters whose voices we hear, or who the seemingly omniscient narrative voice describes, including Beathan, a builder who lives on the outskirts of Glasgow, Dumitru, a Romanian IT consultant trying to find a job in Carlisle, and Yiannis, who is receiving group therapy after a nervous breakdown. These are the characters Iveta evokes as she reads at the Southbank, making no effort to perform their words in character, but rather describing their thoughts and actions through the first-person plural narration.

“We knew Yiannis had never really spoken very often about the event, and we knew we would never get more than two words from his family about it, but between us we thought we had enough evidence to make a judgement. That judgement, perhaps, is what Yiannis strove to get past, or to hide from, but we could not let him forget about it; we had to confront him about it at every turn. Every time one of us met him, or took the time to speak to him, or even merely caught a glimpse of him across the street, our judgement was clear.”

As Yiannis struggles with his agoraphobia, the voice of the narrator at first seems to be that of his neighbours, perhaps, or of his therapy group. But then the voice continues with the other characters, across the British Isles, and we begin to see a kind of identity emerging for this narrator, insight and experience shared across the entire population. The conceit of a collective narration is perhaps meant to bind the lives of the islands’ inhabitants as their collective identity is under review.

This nosism is perhaps a legacy of Iveta’s editorial we, the voice of a range of considered reports for the IPPR that drew on opinions and criticism of government policy to create a necessarily partisan viewpoint. In its apparently fictional manifestation, the we seems to transcend this viewpoint, and articulates the thoughts and gossip and desires and regrets of a whole population. The approach is rare in fiction. In Faulkner’s Rose For Emily and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, the collective voice hides the identity of the narrator in small town affairs. In Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End, the first person plural is the voice of corporate culture and self-identity in a Chicago advertising agency, an interpretation that is meant to satirise the nervous groupthink and homogenisation of the modern workplace.

Iveta’s we is allowed to state the unsaid things in the national psyche; racism, fear, envy, guilt, sadness, anger, frustration. It acts as the editorial lens through which she assembles her cast of characters and presents their actions and reactions during the approach to the referendum. This is at times the “we” of populism, and the personal identification with sports teams that means fans use the term “we” when speaking of their team’s endeavours. It is the exclusive “we” of the ruling classes, in political speeches and newspaper editorials, which are often quoted from in the text. It is occasionally the Royal we of the British monarchy.

At the Southbank Centre, Iveta’s reading moves on, towards a darker tone and more troubled states of mind. Dumitru takes a Life in the UK test as part of his journey to settle in the United Kingdom.

“It seemed obvious to us that Dumitru would have no trouble in proving his commitment to the country, even though the test, we all knew, was a bizarre mash of history and civics and general knowledge that even we would have trouble scraping a pass in. Even we, who had demanded and designed the test in the first place, would have trouble with the questions on Tudor history or the Supreme Court. Well, some of us would pass, we knew, while others, we weren’t too sure why they hadn’t had to take the test.”

A strong theme seems to emerge through this later reading, and this is the gradual fragmentation of the collective narrative. It is not sure of itself, and becomes unreliable, sometimes contradicting itself, or making no sense at all. It becomes apparent that the we is not meant simply as an editorial device, but represents the shared identity, but cannot hold. Indeed, towards the later stages of Iveta’s reading, there is a sense of different personalities speaking through the narrative voice. There is more than a hint of madness.

The we becomes the voice of secessionists and unionists, militant nationalists and is used to articulate a call for separation rather than a collective voice. The we is heard in slogans and political broadcasts, and no longer seems to represent everyone, but is always a partisan call to arms. It becomes the voice of those who have yet to find an identity, of a nation that does not yet exist, or no longer exists. This seems to be apparent when Iveta reads from some of Beathan’s story.

”… but we don’t need them do we we’re done with them and them with us we heard him say he was angry and stared at his friends across the bar the veins in his neck were swollen and his face red from shouting we should be a separate nation if we’re to have any pride in ourselves if we’re to give our children some kind of self-respect some of us knew he was right but we didn’t say anything we knew that when the time came we’d have to decide if we hadn’t already and live with the consequences…”

The narrative breaks down into a near cacophony towards the end of the reading, a medley of voices and thoughts and suspicions and accusations. Is this the splintering of the collective identity, the end of the union? This is presumably what Iveta’s intends, although this conceit seems to undermine the otherwise documentary style she had cultivated earlier in the novel. From believing that the characters are perhaps real, drawn from her research work, or at least based on actual people, the dramatic discord towards the end seems to undermine this realism, and is an obvious and perhaps clumsy intrusion.

The audience applauds as the reading finishes. Many had not expected this move into fiction, perhaps because of the very engagement with political issues that Iveta has always promoted. But in Who We Are / Are We, perhaps the commitment is the same, a stark illustration of the confusion of modern British identity, the historical impulse towards fragmentation, and the consequences that might await if that fragmentation occurs.