Englistan: A Post-Brexit Ode to Multicultural England
On one hand, according to Vulture, “2016 was the year Riz Ahmed went from cool, critically acclaimed actor to bona fide star.” He established himself to the masses via talk shows on both sides of the Atlantic, took to the radio with his latest Swet Shop Boys collaboration, and even invaded supermarket shelves in the form of his Bodhi Rook action figure. Through timely release dates and critical acclaim rather than intricate planning, the stars seemed to align to guide his way into mass consciousness. In addition playing a lead rebel crew member in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Ahmed saw recent roles in Nightcrawler, Jason Bourne and the HBO miniseries The Night Of.
On the other hand, 2016 was a year marked by profound disillusionment: Prince died, Britain Brexited, Drumpf rose. With the alt-right and hate crimes on the ascendant, and the narrative around immigration growing increasingly toxic, Riz Ahmed’s meteoric rise as a Muslim minority actor/rapper quickly came to symbolize “a small glimmer of hope,” as Noisey put it (Shukla, “A Conversation”). Given the sheer glut of media molding Ahmed’s star-image over the course of 2016, and his insistence that “[his] music is a very personal reflection of [himself] whereas acting a role, that’s a reflection of another character,” I would like to focus specifically on the understated significance of Englistan, his latest mixtape as Riz MC.
If Riz Ahmed’s star-image over the course of his career has highlighted the contradictions of national identity, diasporic heritage, and what it even means to be British in a globalized world, then Englistan is his thematic magnum opus. Englistan's nine tracks include on-the-ground riffs on double consciousness, economic stagnancy, and honor killings, documenting the perspective of a hyper-literate artist who’s had to deal with the internal dichotomy of being British and Pakistani. “I describe it as a love letter to modern Britain, which is multicultural Britain,” Ahmed told Newsweek, a sentiment reinforced by headlines labelling the album “a Post-Multiculturalism Shout” (“Riz MC’s Englistan Mixtape”).
Shot in London, the music video for “Englistan,” the album’s title track, features Ahmed wearing a shirt that is a stitched-together hybrid of the English and Pakistani cricket team jerseys. This costume not only inscribes his body as a site of cross-cultural mixing, but also ties his identity to the ambivalent legacy of British colonialism—which initially introduced the massively popular sport to British South Asia in 1935—and emphasizes its conflicting links to prejudice and heritage (Kardar, “Growth of Pakistan Cricket”). The song’s lyrics evoke a similarly painful profession of patriotism, an anomic yearning for a U.K. equivalent of the American Dream. Ahmed lovingly labels England “a kicharee simmering” as a play the Punjab word for mixture and the “great American melting pot.” However, he calls out the underlying “promise of a Patel as a [Manchester United] star,” criticizing the manipulative bootstraps ideology peddled to working-class immigrant communities (Riz MC, “Englistan”). The song’s chorus—“God save the queen/Nah she ain't mates with me/But she keeps my paper green/Plus we’re neighbors see/On this little island/Where we're all surviving/Politeness mixed with violence/This is England”—laces his plea for multicultural tolerance with a more scabrous subversion of the English idyll.
