Living London, Living Between the Lines: Negotiating New Identities in the Postcolonial City

Bernardine Evaristo's depiction of Roman London in her versified novel known as The Emperor's Babe has a lot in common with our current perception of the vibrant metropolis; “It sounds uncannily like our London” as Peter Forbes points out in his article entitled „Latin Lovers' (The Guardian), and this couple of verses stemming from „Londinium Tour Guide' is a shining example of that. They give the impression of London as “the hotchpotch” (Rushdie quoted from Ball 25) of the world where multiple identities and multiple localities are fused together in a unique, multicultural atmosphere against which it is difficult to compete on the international scene.

My aim in this final chapter is to revisit the areas of London traced by Zadie Smith, Atima Srivastava, Monica Ali and Andrea Levy in an attempt to see how the latter have rewritten the city in their novels. In order to do so, I will mainly draw inspiration from Roberto Bertinetti's guided tour as described in Londra: Viaggio in una metropolis che non si ferma mai, which presents an overview of the most distinguishing features of the relentless city.
As evidenced in Bertinetti's title, the most outstanding feature of London is indeed its dynamism and vitality. As a matter of fact, the first thought which flashes through your mind when you visit it for the first time as a tourist is the life of luxury that Londoners live as well as their frenetic living standards. They give the impression of living in a sort of Pinocchio's „Land of Toys', a place where everything is magic, where the unthinkable happens.

As pointed out in Bertinetti's introduction, Sir Jack Pitman's vision of England as a „theme park' would seem to be indeed London's magic spell, which has been drawing tourists from every corner of the world. We must not forget, however, that Sir Jack Pitman's England is just a miniature version built in the Isle of Wight, and his words are nothing more than remnants of what Paul Gilroy has referred to as postcolonial melancholia; in other words a “hangover of a colonial past” as Atima Srivastava would say in Looking for Maya.