FOREIGN PARTS

all-powerful neighbour and regrets that Beijing’s indifference to accountable government means that the new roads and railways will come without any strings attached. For this he holds the Western powers responsible. Their thirty-year embargo of trade, aid and investment, though sanctioned by Suu Kyi herself and intended to embarrass the regime, has, he argues, spectacularly misfired, turning ‘the missing link’ into a lost cause. Outlawing a regime penalises people rather than liberating them. More constructive engagement with Rangoon, like that pursued by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and latterly by India, would have been preferable. One may not agree with this; few in Egypt, for instance,

would regard Washington’s support of Mubarak as having sown the seeds for the Arab Spring. On the other hand, one can’t help agreeing that being designated the new crossroads of a Sinocentric southern Asia may not do the Burmese any favours. It is telling that the subtitle of the American edition of Where China Meets India is not ‘Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia’ but ‘Burma and the Closing of the Great Asian Frontier’. In the case of a land closed to carnet-waving overlanders for as long as anyone can remember, this can only refer to its rejection of the West’s other curiosities: human rights, generous aid packages and responsible government, for instance. To order this book for £16, see LR bookshop on page 12

DANIEL MATLIN

ACROSS 1 1 0 TH STREET HARLEM IS NOWHERE: A JOURNEY TO THE

MECCA OF BLACK AMERICA

★

By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Granta Books 296pp £14.99)

SOON AFTER ARRIVING in Harlem in 2002, Shar if a Rhodes-Pitts overheard a conversation between two white men in one of the neighbourhood’s smart new cafés. One of the men, like Rhodes-Pitts herself, had recently moved into the area, while his friend seemed to be visiting for the first time. ‘This is fabulous,’ the visitor enthused. ‘Really, you have to do something to get the word out. There need to be more people up here!’

prospectors. Such land must not lie fallow. There needed to be more people up there. On a leaflet stuck to a lamp post on 125th Street, Rhodes-Pitts found the response of one supposed nonperson. ‘Attention New Residents of Harlem,’ it commanded. ‘Please be aware that you are contributing to the active displacement of the historic Harlem community. YES gentrification which is a pretty word for modern day colonization.’ Another notice declared that ‘10,000 Black families have been evicted from Harlem in the last ten years’ as a result of landlords cashing in on their buildings or raising rents. Piles of jumbled clothes and furniture dumped on the streets lent credence to the claim. As a Texan who had recently g raduated f rom Harvard, Rhodes-Pitts experienced her own ‘pangs of complicity’ upon moving to Harlem to research her book. She ‘asked a politically minded friend if I was a gentr ifier. He fir mly answered no – because I was bl ack and poor.’ Another fr iend ‘laughed at the archetypal nar rative of my move north and dubbed me Miss Great Migration 2002’.

For nearly half a century, Harlem was considered offlimits by white Americans, a morass of decay, violence, racial resentment and poverty. The same year that RhodesPitts arrived, I took the subway uptown f rom l ower Manhattan on my first visit to New York and was amazed to see all the other remaining white passengers in my carriage step off at 110th Street, Harlem’s southern verge. At that moment, the ‘invisible walls’ which the psychologist Kenneth B Clark once described as encircling Harlem seemed as thick as ever. Yet change was already afoot. Pushed by the spiralling cost of New York real estate, the adventuresome were beginning to extend the frontiers of white settlement northwards. The faded elegance of brownstone townhouses called out to these pioneers and

Universal Negro Improvement Association Parade, 1924

This self-awareness i s an endearing feature of her writing. Though the ‘journey’ of her subtitle evokes a genre which the critic Albert Murray used to call ghetto ‘saf ar i ’ , Rhodes-Pitts avoids the trap of presenting herself as an indige-

nous tour guide to black America. Too many writers, she observes, have moved too easily from the specificities of their own lives to reductive generalities and definitive assurances that ‘Harlem is this or Harlem is that’. Instead, Harlem is Nowhere offers a sensitive, determinedly personal meditation on the neighbourhood’s past and present and, above all, its mythology and symbolism. Searching beyond its cross-streets and avenues, Rhodes-Pitts revisits the layers of literary history that have imbued Harlem with its

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2011