Half a mile from Paul Southern’s home in Longsight, Manchester, a railway track divides the white and Asian communities. He is white but choses to live on the Asian side, where 90 per cent of the residents are Pakistani Muslim. “My heart is here,” he explains. “It’s the culture I want to be around. I’m excited by it. I feel close to my Pakistani friends. It’s like a drug.”
Ask him to elaborate and he talks about “moustaches, clothes, women and food — a heady mix”, with the zeal of the evangelist. He loves the colours, and especially the vibrancy of the road a couple of miles away where you can get a curry at 4am.
What Southern cannot claim, however, is that Longsight is a place of harmony. First, it is notorious for gun crime and drug-related gang warfare — you can’t miss the sleek shiny cars that slide too fast through the busy streets, or the security guard who stands outside Boots. Second, however much Southern might say that he feels at home here, there are members of the Asian community who do not welcome him. He is often abused, and has been attacked several times. In particular, he dare not risk being seen with his Pakistani Muslim girlfriend whose family knows nothing of their relationship.
They have lived in a state of “paranoia and siege” for two years, he says, and the bombings in July last year increased their difficulties. He senses too that the collapse of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill will not calm the community. “There’s an element of the Pakistani Muslim community that feels it’s being targeted unnecessarily and they want to be protected. The feeling that they’re not being protected is pronounced,” he says.
He says this in spite of his own view on free speech, which is unequivocal. As a writer of fiction who takes the society around him as his subject matter, he is adamant that nothing, including Islam, is beyond comment. What makes his perspective unusual is his own experience of racial intolerance.
“Racism cuts both ways,” he points out. “Although I feel a kinship with the community, I’ve been a victim, and my partner has been a victim. We get terrible hassle, mainly from young Pakistani men and boys. There is a patriarchal system in place and escaping from it is extremely difficult. I’ve lost a child to this and when you’ve seen your baby in a plastic bucket . . .” He tails off, his eyes full of tears. “Sorry. It ’s not good, you know, and bigotry wins out. Well, it shouldn’t.
“My partner had to have an abortion or she would have lost her family. Her sister is the most liberal and her reaction was, ‘What have you done? You’ve been with a white guy’. It was totally protective of the culture: ‘What is your Mum going to say, your brothers? I’m not going to support you’. So my partner was left isolated. It was the fear that swayed her. Girls don’t get away with this. They disappear. It’s not a regular occurrence but it happens and no one speaks about it.”
However reasonable it may be to call for mutual tolerance, you may wonder why a white guy who sounds like William Hague and wears a single fish earring, pin-striped jeans and tartan slippers is openly critical of a community in which he is not always embraced. The answer is that he believes in airing the issues he sees around him. His first novel, The Craze, an exploration of the shady interactions between white, black and Asian cultures in Manchester, is to be made into a TV film, and his second, Brown Boys in Chocolate, exposes the underbelly of the Asian community he observes — and the religious hypocrisy that Southern believes is commonplace.
“You get as many variants in the Pakistani community as you do in the white community, and the same problems. But the strange thing about the Asian community is that they don’t voice these things. Adultery, gambling, affairs, drug addicts, gay Pakistanis — oh they’re there, I know them. Pakistani prostitutes — they’re there but it’s an unwritten world. I’ve been in a dance house — all the colour, exoticism, sexiness is manifestly larger in these places. At the same time I thought it was shocking in the sense that no one speaks about it.
“I’ve read the Koran and if I hadn’t met so many Muslims I’d be an instant convert. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t take drugs, I do charity — I’m more of a Muslim than they are. I feel worried saying these things — a lot of people will want to kill me. They will see it as disrespect, others will say it is something that has needed to be said for some time. My writing is not a scurrilous attack, it’s a series of snapshots of a world that I know.”
Whether or not exposing a community’s private habits is the most sensitive way to encourage understanding and integration, Southern is clearly driven by his circumstances. To minimise the risk of being seen by someone who knows his girlfriend, they meet discreetly outside Asian areas. “When you’re in this situation you see the insidious effect of racism. It gets to you. The constant barrage of insults, it’s really wearing. Being seen by someone would be enough to kill it (the relationship). You can’t marry, it’s just not allowed, and even in liberal families you’re not considered married if you marry out. And you can’t escape from the family or the community unless you cut all ties. Pakistani boys have an easier passage — as long as the girl becomes a Muslim it’s largely accepted. It’s not just a matter of the religious leap, to me there’s a racial problem here.”
Is his relationship worth the difficulties it attracts? “Yes, yes,” he says. “I think we’ve gone beyond the point of return. During the abortion there were complications, she was bleeding profusely and the doctor, an Egyptian Islamic who understood, said that she had to stay in. She had to be home by 5.30pm and I said they’ll find out and it’s the end. She was distraught, we both were. We put her in a taxi just so she could get back. When you go through that together there’s a bond.”
So who is this intense 39-year-old? Born in Southport in 1966 to civil servant parents, he lived in Ireland, London and Yorkshire to accommodate his father’s postings. As a result he felt rootless. At 14 he discovered punk and started to rebel against his parent’s ultra-conservatism, and in his twenties he became half of a pop band called Sexus. He was styled, wore an Issey Miyake suit to bed, and arrived at a Melody Maker cover photo session with the suit tied to him with old rope. A single, The Official End of it All, was played in the background of several episodes of EastEnders, but the adventure ended, as they do, when the manager went off with the money.
So Southern did a PhD at Manchester University, taught there, and for the past 12 years he has been a private tutor in the Pakistani Muslim community, which has given him his access to it and enabled him to learn Urdu. Eight years ago he married a Pakistani Muslim woman who was from a liberal and fractured family that she was able to leave, and they have an adopted daughter, though more on this is out of bounds as they are getting divorced. What he will admit is that, perversely, he has not been able to leave his parents’ fogeyism entirely behind him — he stopped being a university teacher because of what he describes as dumbing down, and he is prone to riffs on the shortcomings of contemporary youth.
So the man who wanted the attention that surrounds a pop star, and who feels he has never fitted in anywhere, has pitched up in another area where he doesn’t quite fit in, and given himself the role of commentator. Which is certainly a way of being noticed, and when we go outside to take photographs he asks for a mirror to check his hair: “I’m an incredibly vain old sod. This is what I like — pop star stuff, the photograph.” He says he wouldn’ t be comfortable in a white middle-class area, but it is also true that his horizons are limited — consumed with an obsessive work ethic, he considers holidays a waste of money and has never been abroad. “I’m a little Englander physically.”
Does he accept that if he stays with his current partner they can never have children? “Unless she jumps ship,” he replies. “So I have hope, maybe a fool’s hope, that we will come to that point — either her family accept it, you manage to negotiate, or she will leave. Everyone around me says you’re on a hiding to nothing, and everyone around her says the same thing.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe that’s the beauty of it, maybe that’s why it’s so romantic. When I go to bed at night I think of her and when she goes to bed at night she thinks of me. Somewhere among the stars maybe we kiss. We could get nearer than that — foolish, OK, but there may be a way out and while there’s a chance I will go down that line and so will she.”
Brown Boys in Chocolate, Century, £12, available from Arrow on March 2, £6.99
