1Since the Brexit referendum took place on 23rd June 2016, a considerable corpus of fiction has been published reflecting on the way in which the result of this vote and its aftermath has affected British society since then. This literary phenomenon has been referred to as BrexLit (Day, Eaglestone, Korte and Lojo, or Shaw, among others) and it appears, primarily, as a long-fiction British-centred phenomenon. Authors such as Ali Smith, Anthony Cartwright, Amanda Craig, Jonathan Coe, Linda Grant, Mohsin Hamid, Douglas Board, Sam Byers, John Lanchester, and Ian McEwan, amongst others, have offered their own take on Brexit. Much of this fictional corpus is highly critical of both the referendum’s result and the political decisions that followed it, something which can also be observed in the comments uttered by some of these authors in interviews (see Board, Smith, or McEwan). Generally speaking, BrexLit shows a polarised society unable to find common ground on quasi-controversial issues such as immigration, border control, Euroscepticism, and policy-making. Accordingly, the narrative techniques utilised by BrexLit authors are clearly dichotomic and could be classified within realist fiction, covering the time prior to the referendum and its immediate aftermath, or within speculative fiction, under the guise of near-future dystopias (see Alonso Alonso).
2However, academia has paid little attention to the representation of Brexit through short fiction, despite the significant corpus of stories that tackle it. This contribution aims to explore the different interpretations of this hostile landscape as illustrated through four short stories: Amanda Craig’s “Metamorphosis 2” and Marina Lewycka’s “A Hard-luck Story”—both pre-Brexit pieces published in an anthology of writing on asylum seekers entitled A Country of Refuge—as well as Agnieszka Dale’s “A Happy Nation” and Dom Haslam’s “Universal Sufferage,” which are two post-Brexit texts. These four stories are framed within a global interest in representing how borders and the fear of the “other” appear to spur creative writing. There seems to be a general consensus that both September 11th and the European refugee crisis in 2015 are two important temporal references to take into consideration when reflecting on how borders have been reconceptualised in the last two decades (see Heather and Townsend-Gault, Kolossov, Newman, Sayer, Fabbrini, and Clarke, among others). Issues related to porous borders (Korte and Lojo), postcolonial melancholia (Gilroy), imperial nostalgia (Hauthal), or reverse colonisation (Koegler, Malreddy, and Tribucke) transcend literary discourses to become important topics to understand global interconnections and the hostile landscape that Brexit has left in contemporary society. Some of these discourses are illustrative of how complicated Brexit, and everything that surrounds it, really is. Brexit transcends a for-or-against positioning regarding the European Union. It also goes beyond straightforward acceptance or rejection of migration policies. Actually, according to Kristian Shaw, “Brexit did not divide the nation, it simply gave voice to existing social, cultural, political and economic grievances within society” (167).
3Short fiction presents itself as the literary form with which to explore the increasing tensions between the British self and the European other (Hauthal 303), or rather the non-British other, as the short stories analysed below illustrate. As Barbara Korte and Laura Lojo claim, “the short story has been noted not only for the immediacy with which it can respond to social and cultural change, but also for its special interest in exploring border phenomena and experiences” (5). Korte and Lojo, who, together, edited one of the first academic anthologies to feature articles on the connection between Brexit and the short story form, relay the long tradition of short fiction within British literature. Additionally, Posthuman Theory (see Hayles, Haraway, Braidotti, Clarke and Rossini, and Bartosch and Hoydis, for example) will be utilised to frame a theoretical approach to the short stories analysed in the following pages. This will be done in order to examine alien configurations of subaltern subjects whilst considering Britain’s hostile landscapes both pre- and post-referendum. Special attention will be paid to how the authors present Brexit rhetoric in ways that will inform and educate the reader to truly understand the contexts and consequences of such a seismic political event.
4There are many texts that reflect upon British society before and after the referendum. In his highly influential Brexlit: British Literature and the European Project, Shaw explores the different literary manifestations of what Andrew Glencross refers to as the “neverendum” (3), that is, the complicated relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union. For Shaw, there is an entire corpus of literature that highlights the scepticism of the United Kingdom towards the European project long before the referendum was even conceived. Novels such as The Innocent by Ian McEwan, The Ambassador by Edwina Currie, or Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe are just some of the works in which Brexit existed as a literary concept pre-2016. There is no doubt, however, that the publication of novels such as Autumn, The Lie of the Land, The Cut, Exit West, Times of Lies, Middle England, Perfidious Albion, The Wall or The Cockroach implies a new take on how Euroscepticism and the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union is being represented in contemporary British fiction. Similarly, a plethora of poems and poetry collections covering Brexit-related issues has also appeared in the last few years. Scottish poets Claire Askew, Carol Ann Duffy, and Jackie Kay, Northern Irish poet Lorna Shaughnessy, or British BAME authors such as Kayo Chingonyi, Anthony Anaxagorou, Jay Bernard, and Zaffar Kunial have also contributed to what is now known as BrexLit with their own poetic pieces. The short story form has followed a similar path. As an example of this, Korte and Lojo’s Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story is a compendium which includes articles that analyse works such as Ian Parkinson’s “A Belgian Story,” Zadie Smith’s “The Lazy River,” Anne Enright’s “The Hotel,” as well as short story collections such as Breach, Refugee Tales I, and Refugee Tales II.
5Whilst much of the Eurosceptic literature published before Brexit “addressed Britain’s loss of political sovereignty and diminished post-war role on the world stage from a dominant player to a disempowered European member state” (Eaglestone 18), the truth is that a political evolution can be observed in the corpus named above. As previously mentioned, much of the literary production published on either side of the referendum is highly critical of the poll’s result and its subsequent societal polarisation. However, there are other common issues that can be identified within this corpus. These include the sizeable generational gap between leavers and remainers, the considerable division between rural and cosmopolitan Britain, the turmoil created by political manipulation, the power of the media relating to societal concerns, and the rhetoric of the far-right. For instance, immigration was a key issue during the Brexit campaign; and, frequently, it was the only issue, to the point that some British tabloids featured sabre-rattling headlines such as: “EU opens door to 79m from Turkey” (Daily Express) or “Migrants pay just £100 to invade Britain” (Daily Express). Indeed, it is almost impossible to forget the image of Nigel Farage standing in front of a huge campaign poster featuring a lengthy queue of racialised young males and emblazoned with the dog-whistling slogan Breaking Point. According to the far-right rhetoric that besieged the Brexit campaign, the migrant subject was a threat to the British population. This hostile landscape became a reality for not only those European, Eastern European, and Middle East migrants, but also for the UK’s own Windrush Generation. This suffocating atmosphere of hostility implied a rejection of anything that could be considered as a threat by a part of British society. This is something that can be easily identified in fiction through a number of controversial stereotypes which present the migrant subject as disenfranchised, hopeless, and problematic, all of which will be discussed in the analysis below.
6The forced austerity measures of the time, largely implemented by the European Union, together with the refugee crisis, exacerbated by some of the most terrible conflicts since WWII, became, for many, an inflection point. For the majority of the population, the effects of austerity and the detachment of the political elite from their citizens’ real concerns increased social unease and forced the rejection of the technocrat paradigm (Bellamy and Castiglione 437). The formation of knowledge about the realities of injustice, discrimination, and exclusion goes hand in hand with the denouement of Humanism as the only representation of critical thought. New debates bloom to interrogate dominant configurations of the human with a broader scope that incorporates subjects and subjectivities traditionally excluded from classical Humanism, primarily focused on the Vitruvian European male as the measure of all things. The terrible events that took place in different European territories during the first half of the twentieth century brought about a wave of anti-humanist thought (Braidotti 23). According to Braidotti, “anti-humanism rejects the dialectical scheme of thought, where difference or otherness played a constitutive role, marking off the sexualized other (woman), the racialized other (the native) and the naturalised other (animals, the environment or earth)” (27). In relation to this, and from a theoretical point of view, the last few post-Cold War decades witnessed cutting-edge debates about the human condition, questioning Western anthropocentric and androcentric understandings of the human. This is what is frequently referred to as the nonhuman turn, inspired by Bruno Latour when he called for the decentring of “the human in favour of a turn towards a concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality of technologies” (qtd. in Bruce Clarke 142). Accordingly, one could argue that Humanism has reached its end (Lyotard, Badmington, Herbrechter) and a new era of thought that includes alternative forms of agency should be considered. Within academia, this field of study is known as Posthumanism, and it manifests as both a theoretical and empirical form applicable to numerous fields of enquiry, including literary criticism. Posthumanism reconsiders the concept of citizenship at the turn of the century. For Braidotti, Posthumanism
is the historical moment that marks the end of the opposition between Humanism and anti-humanism and traces a different discursive framework, looking more affirmatively towards new alternatives . . . . The posthumanist perspective rests on the assumption of the historical decline of Humanism . . . towards elaborating alternative ways of conceptualising the human subject. (37)
Accordingly, a posthumanist reading of certain texts makes it possible to elaborate on a transversal and multifaceted fabric of thought, engaging with the various configurations of being in contemporary society and contributing reflections on the human condition after exposing the flaws of Western anthropocentric and androcentric understandings of human relationships. This is exactly what can be observed in BrexLit. Brexit was based on a number of constructed polarised discourses, understanding the term discourse in its Foucauldian sense as formulated statements influenced by other elements such as culture, social relations, or political interests, amongst others. As seen during the Brexit campaign, these discourses are used by hegemonic powers for their own benefit in order to manipulate and control a particular group as “discourse is one of the systems through which power circulates” (Hall 57). What follows is a posthumanist reading of four short stories published either before or after the Brexit referendum that have clearly been inspired by those turbulent times. This will identify the rhetorical strategies employed by the authors to explore binary oppositions and to expose their literary creations to other representations of categorical biases.
7A Country of Refuge is a collection of short stories, poems, memoirs, and essays edited by Lucy Popescu, whose motivation to gather these texts are laid out in her introduction. The publication project began in early 2014, more than one and a half years before the refugee crisis that took place at the gates of Fortress Europe in 2015. For Popescu, there is a significant inconsistency between the 1951 Refugee Convention and the way in which certain countries, including the United Kingdom, interpret and apply the law, and this is what she wanted to highlight with this anthology. Some of the contributors come from refugee or immigrant families themselves, whereas others are British, born and bred, with no multi-ethnic background at all. Their views intertwine to reflect on the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers during a time in which these two terms were effectively banished from official discourse and replaced with economic migrants for political purposes. This is Amanda Craig’s exact observation in “Metamorphosis 2,” a satire inspired by one of the most controversial of Britain’s tabloid commentators, whose hate speech during the Brexit campaign impregnated tabloids and inflamed far-right social media.
8“Metamorphosis 2” is the story of Katie F, who wakes one morning “from restless dreams to find herself transformed into a gigantic cockroach” (31). The short story is, obviously, a satirical re-writing of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. When Katie F realises that she is a cockroach, she is surprised, though not shocked, and proceeds with her daily responsibilities. At first, nobody seems to notice her new insect form; neither her daughters over breakfast, or the mothers on the school run who even take the time to praise Katie’s outfit: “‘Great tan!’ called another mother. ‘Is that coat Prada?’” (33). She is a single mother but also an attention-starved celebrity, which is why she needs to answer the phone when newspapers call to hear her views on the burgeoning refugee crisis: “‘There isn’t a refugee crisis, there’s an economic migrant crisis’ . . . ‘Who cares if they starve? There are millions of them swarming over there, we can’t be soft on them. They should stay in their own country” (33). The author immediately places the narration within the Brexit campaign and, specifically, in the months that preceded the referendum. Craig does not even refer to any of the physical differences between the before and after of the protagonist’s transformation into one of the most famously repulsive of creatures. That Craig chose to turn Katie F into a gigantic cockroach is significant, considering the hate-filled rhetoric the protagonist utters for attention. The cockroach is one of the strongest, yet most abhorrent insects on earth; an insect that needs to hide to avoid being discovered as everyone wants to dispose of it. At first, Katie F does not try to hide. She has no reason to since, as it seems, nobody notices her new corporeal manifestation and so, because it happened during the Brexit campaign, it is implied by the author that such hate speech has been normalised. Her transformation into a non-human body goes in parallel with her inhuman speech against those in need. The insect trope that Craig uses, hence, goes beyond a straightforward ecocritical reading of other-than-human characters (see Haraway, Braidotti, Segarra, among others). In this case, the cockroach does not stand as a metaphor for the need to find environmental sustainability or increased conviviality between human and non-human beings. Craig’s decision to turn Katie F into a gigantic cockroach has one single reading: the author wants to establish a direct parallel between a despicable insect and a despicable human. Thus, in the story, the process of “becoming-insect” (Deleuze and Guattari) follows the process of “becoming-other” (Said) as Katie F’s new look starts to be acknowledged. Funnily enough, the first person who notices this gigantic cockroach is a Kosovan immigrant, working at Katie’s house, who tries to kill the insect as soon as she sees it. It is at this point in the narration when Katie F’s insect instinct takes over and we follow her dual journey: one of seeking acceptance for her new insect form and another which takes her outside the national borders and into conflict zones like the ones that her nemeses were forced to leave.
9The short story, thus, envisions those who utter hate speech as other-than-human beings who have no place in contemporary society. They turn into posthuman subjects “likely to be seen as antihuman because [the posthuman] envisions the conscious mind as a small subsystem running its program of self-construction and self-assurance while remaining ignorant of the actual dynamics of complex systems” (Hayles 286). In the short story, Katie F quickly becomes one with her new insect consciousness, and she stops regarding humans as the centre of the world and ponders “what was wrong with human beings, they didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with their lives and spent half their time sleeping, whereas cockroaches were always busy eating or cleaning their antennae or making more cockroaches” (34). During her fugitive journey, she enters a flat where immigrants are “sleeping six to a room, the floor a sea of mattresses” (34). The residents also attempt to kill the insect as soon as it is seen, forcing Katie F to retort: “‘Piss off, I’m British’” (34) without any success at being heard. Katie is then forced to find a warmer location as the British winter approaches. This is when she manages to enter a truck returning to Europe, empty, without any fuss because, according to Katie F, “of course nobody wanted to leave Britain, only to get there” (35). She is the exception, though. The irony that surrounds this parable of alienation becomes increasingly factual as Katie arrives at continental mainland and wades through “a jumble of plastic tents and cardboard sheets” (35) and “all the idiots who had brought their kids, their grannies, their disabled, to push or pull in buggies and carts and wheelchairs or carry on their shoulders, their soft human bodies getting slower and wearier and colder and more bruised” (35). In contrast, Katie F’s insect form makes her resistant to any kind of inclemency. She is strong and she knows it; she is a cockroach, and she is proud of it. She even crosses the sea, floating on rubbish, past “several humans who had drowned” (35-36). After traversing both the Channel and the Mediterranean Sea, searching for her ideal destination, Katie F finds herself in a place “that was all broken concrete and twisted metal and craters [where] humans were running from place to place, shooting at each other, crawling on their abdomens into ragged tunnels and dark places where the noise and tremors from explosions had them all shaking” (36). It is here Katie Finds her perfect spot as there are not many humans remaining: “What a wonderful place this was!” (36). More and more cockroaches arrive to that wasteland over the passage of time, and Katie F finally has somewhere she can call home.
10Marina Lewycka’s “A Hard-luck Story,” also included in A Country of Refuge, is another satirical take on how the United Kingdom, and a number of its citizens, regard refugees and asylum seekers negatively. The short story is written by an author who, herself, was a refugee whilst she was still a baby, though that is something we only discover at the end of the collection in the biography section. Lewycka was born in a refugee camp in Germany, in 1946, and moved to England with her family when she was around one year old. In “A Hard-luck Story,” the author utilises the point of view of a male worker who is employed by a company hired by the British government to manage the deportations of whom they consider to be “illegal” migrants. The story is told in the first person, and the narration covers the time when he is required to deal with a woman who is “booked in for a deportation flight back to wherever she comes from. Somewhere . . . never heard of” (149). Her case, as the tale unfolds, showcases how unfair life can be for both those who are in desperate need as well as for himself, as he finds himself unemployed in the final twist at the story’s end. With this extreme comparison between the life of a mother, who risked everything in the search for opportunities for her family, and that of a mediocre worker, emotionally detached from the suffering around him, the author exposes the hypocrisy of Western society, a society often unable to engage with those who are in life-threatening situations.
11This personal drama becomes a social drama due to the final twist and, overall, could be considered a tale of morality. For the entire story, the first-person narrator uses a kind of automated speech, devoid of empathy, to inform this anonymous woman that she is being returned to the place from where she escaped. Despite this bad news, she narrowly avoids a nervous breakdown during the interview: “‘Plis. Plis help me. You no understand’” (149), and the worker subsequently files his report, and shares some light praise for her ability to speak English. Through reported speech, we know that this lady was a doctor in her home country and her late husband was a professor, and into politics, so from the beginning it breaks the stereotype of refugees and asylum seekers being lazy and illiterate, something the right-leaning commentators would like to portray when they refer to “economic migrants.” The narrator is not impressed, though, and keeps replying with a patronising tone to everything this woman says: “‘Politics never does any good’” (149). The rhetoric used by this government worker is significant as he fishes for the readers’ sympathy as he compares his own situation to that of the soon-to-be deported. His tone, his vocabulary, and the manner in which he talks to this woman is highly disrespectful and clearly portrays his inability to perform the job that he has been tasked with. He makes jokes to which “she doesn’t even smile. She’s the serious type. Too serious for me . . . she doesn’t’ laugh. No sense of humour. You’ve got to have a sense of humour in this world, haven’t you?” (150), removing himself contextually whilst he accurately retells the lady’s terrible story. We know that she has escaped with her two children from an uncertain location following her husband’s political murder. She and her children were also blacklisted which, in turn, forced her decision to cross the Mediterranean on a boat, under the most precarious of conditions, with “swarms” (150) of other people “All heading for England, you can be sure. It’s because of our benefit system, it just encourages them” (150). All these personal opinions and theatrical asides, that work as “Greek chorus,” are intertwined with further details of the woman’s situation. We know that she was sexually abused by human traffickers, a fact that, again, does not impress the narrator: “You’ve got to be broadminded in this world” (150). We also know that she had to care for the baby of a woman who drowned after their vessel capsized. Her own son, as well as some of her fellow passengers, disappeared. Here, when the detached narrator reveals this particular episode in the woman’s terrible journey, she breaks down and tells of how she walked the beach the next day, repeatedly and hopelessly calling her son’s name only to be consoled with “‘Never mind . . . You’ll soon be back home’” (152).
12Lewycka’s portrayal of this government worker is built on such dichotomic life experiences. He responds to the woman’s terrible story like a cybernetic mechanism with computer-based responses, completely unable to emotionally engage with the person in front of him. The story, though, suggests that this is exactly the manner in which these border control workers are expected to react. They should remove any trace of empathy during working hours, whilst convincing themselves that “Everybody has a hard-luck story” (149), as do they, themselves. The anti-human nature of border control workers is highly significant in this respect. The narrator, in this particular case, follows the depiction of a cyborg (see Clynes and Kline, Haraway, Balsamo, Gray, among others). He is the result of turning citizens into heartless artefacts by mandate. The cyborg subjectivity of this emotionless mechanism makes him become a regulatory, exclusionary, and discriminatory machine. This is exactly what Braidotti identifies as the starting point of posthumanism: “decentering the Enlightement’s most transcendent, yet most exclusionary creation: that of Man” (37). Through the lack of observable emotional response throughout the short story, the author succeeds in depicting the essentialist nature of the cyborg. Lewycka takes this lack of emotional response to its extreme, marrying it to the far-right discourse also found in “Metamorphosis 2”: “‘You’re an economic migrant, not a refugee. For all we know, your hubby is waiting to come and join you as soon as you’ve got your paperwork sorted’” (154). It matters not how terrible this woman’s personal story is in this pre-Brexit hostile landscape; border control workers will feel no compassion nor show any mercy. At the story’s conclusion, the lady is given a sedative to prevent a hysterical outbreak. The baby is forcibly removed from her arms and handed to her daughter, who has been silently in the background and indirectly learnt of all the terrible experiences her mother has endured, proving that even the physical presence of an affected child cannot alter the narrator’s response. The narrator loses his job immediately after perfectly executing this assignment as one of his colleagues took “advantage of the female residents . . . making all sorts of promises they know they can’t keep” (154). And this is the reason why, after being unemployed for over a year, suffering from depression, having his benefits docked for missing an appointment at the Job Centre, and having to rely on a food bank for sustenance, he dares to compare his plight with that of the asylum seeker.
13As would be expected, due to the anthology’s publication date, Brexit is not explicitly mentioned in these two short stories but the hostile landscape that energised the Brexit movement timestamps the narration. Both “Metamorphosis 2” and “A Hard-luck Story” depict straightforward discourses based around the idea of “us vs the others.” Refugees and asylum seekers are the targets of these exclusionary narratives whilst the British citizens that assert them are portrayed as emotionless beings unable to sufficiently engage with anything with any level of sympathy or empathy. Both short stories represent the environment that gave place to David Cameron’s decision to hold the referendum, although it should be noted that the European Union is not referenced by either. References to the refugee crisis of 2015 and other experiences of exile are enough to place them in the chronology of the events that followed, events that “A Happy Nation” and “Universal Sufferage” were, absolutely, written about.
14There are numerous parallels between Agnieszka Dale’s short story “A Happy Nation” and “A Hard-luck Story.” In Dale’s text, the narrator is a Polish migrant who is being interviewed by a British border official. Brexit is not referred to in the text, but the story can clearly be time-stamped as post-referendum. Brexit, however, does appear as a ghostly event that conditions the conversation which shapes the story. As a matter of fact, Polish migrants, plus the Eastern/Southern Europeans, were an explicit target of pro-Brexit rhetoric, alongside refugees and asylum seekers, as the list of threatening migrant groups got longer as the referendum approached. The dichotomy between those under threat (the Brits) and those that threaten (the others) became more glaringly apparent in the run-up to the referendum too. The non-British European population became part of the political discourse, turning them into subaltern subjects whose presence on the island also became a bone of contention, and the Polish population, the most recent of the arrivals, were directly alluded in these political debates due to the fact that they were “less than two percent of the population” (66-67), as Dale mentions at the start of her short story. In fact, of the five and a half million applications the British government received for post-Brexit settled or pre-settled status, precisely 1,107,060 were from the Polish community.
15“A Happy Nation” is a short story about anxiety; the anxiety of a nation unhappy with the presence of migrants within its borders. The protagonist and first-person narrator, Krystyna Kowalska, is being interviewed by a border control officer about her legal status in the United Kingdom. The border control officer, as we learn at the end of the story, is Adam Michalowski, a British-born descendant of Eastern European migrants. The narrator, over the course of her monologue, exposes the conundrum faced by those who, after spending much of their working lives in the United Kingdom, became undesirable overnight. The hostile landscape that is illustrated in this short story comes by the way of the Brexodus of EU citizens that occurred post-referendum: “Empty streets, shops closing down, and all the immigrants gone away, as if on holiday . . . it does feel a little empty without them. No? Not for you?” (66-67). Kowalska, though, refuses to leave, insisting that she has the right to stay. She states, rightly or wrongly, that she has a British family, she gave birth to British citizens; thus, she should have the right to stay. She claims her only motivation for leaving Poland was: “I came to Great Britain to mix my blood . . . . Not the benefits, not the work possibilities . . . but sexual intercourses with a Brit” (70). She denounces one of the key pro-Brexit mantras that the Eastern European migrants’ only motivation to emigrate was to claim government benefits. Here, the politics of reproduction also come into play to question the concept of national purity, that is at the core of the far-right concept of reverse colonisation (see Koegler, Malreddy, Tribucke). As Wiktoria Tunska mentioned in a conference organised at the University of Santiago de Compostela on BrexLit, this concept is married to the assumption that migrants not only occupy countries’ physical spaces; they also occupy the country’s metaphorical ethnic space, genetically tarnishing the purity of the imagined community (see Anderson). Dale knowingly mocks the language of these great replacement theories which, according to Stefano Bellin, also played a significant role in the Brexit campaign.
16National anxiety over the concept of purity is central to this short story, although usually addressed indirectly via Kowalska’s monologue: “So, what is the difference between us? Don’t you say that if you look like a duck, swim like a duck, and quack like a duck, then you are a duck? Even if you are not?” (71), she asks the interrogating officer before discovering his Eastern European background. The text poses a number of challenges to the concepts of ethnicity and Britishness. Dale does so by exploring the inconsistencies found in the widely-used equal opportunities forms that job applicants are required to complete, where they tick a box to show which social category they belong to such as white British or white other. The fact that the short story ends with the revelation that Michalowski is deemed white British, because he was born in Lambeth, is highly significant. This is the point when the narrator changes her mind and decides to leave after all: “Please, do let me out” (73). The juxtaposition of Kowalska’s white other status and Michalowski being “white British” introduces the final question posed by Dale, aimed at the foolhardy desire to label the migrant as both an Other (Said) and, worse, a threat to the country. “A Happy Nation” puts the white British subject in an ethnic limbo and, thus, questions one of the universal ideals of Humanism. Britain, as a nation, has become posthuman as there is no clear differentiation between what is truly British and what is not. As Bruce Clarke put it, “The posthuman imaginary starts from some transformation of the human image . . . a posthuman event names some transformative outcome that once followed, is now following, or will at some point follow from the human . . . . Posthumanism’s discursive projects aim to decenter the human by terminally disrupting the scripts of humanism” (141). Dale deconstructs the notion of the white subject being the centre of everything; as the perfect archetype that all things should be measured against. This is the identifiable core of Brexit anxiety, a fear of the presence of white others within the national borders. They disrupt the hegemonic idea of British whiteness by means of ethnic assimilation.
17The whimsical belief that the United Kingdom is a happy nation is central to Dom Haslam’s “Universal Sufferage,” a short story where Brexit is directly addressed without any embellishments. Here, Haslam examines the self-effacing moral superiority of remainers, something which can be observed in other BrexLit tales such as Jonathan Coe’s Middle England. George is the protagonist of a text that plants the metaphor of a divided nation firmly into the family realm. The day after the referendum, George and his wife, Emily, are at Heathrow Airport about to embark on their long-awaited holiday. George is not a patient man and gets anxious at the sight of the long queue ahead of him. He is also unused to waiting in departure lounges as his job rewards him with first-class travel. There, surrounded by working and lower-class citizens, he has time enough to recall the result of the Brexit referendum, the poll he usually refers to as “an idiotic ballot” (60). He awoke at five a.m. that fateful morning to discover that “the UK had voted Leave, his stomach knotting instantly followed by a nauseating disorientation as various certainties he held dear fell away. ‘Just how many idiots are there in this country?’ he kept asking himself” (60). In the middle of his ponderance of the outcome, he is further antagonised by a noisy family ahead of him in the queue: “‘I bet they voted Brexit’” (61), George whispers to his wife. He begins to refer to the unruly patriarch as Mr Brexit, and whose children start becoming increasingly fractious before him:
the young son—perhaps aged three and with lime green snow bubbling from his nose—kept wandering off, causing the mother to repeatedly stride after him to grab him by the arm and drag him back; the daughter—perhaps aged seven—kept whining, “Can I have the iPad?” over and over again. Sportswear. Tattoos. Computer games. Snot. Welcome to Brexit Britain. (61)
Here, we begin to see the developing disparity between said family with that of George’s Remainer superciliousness. We also learn, through the third-person narrator, that many employees of George’s company are “young people from the Continent” (62). It should be noted that the narrator does not refer to them as “immigrants” here, as if to demonstrate that these highly-qualified workers are unworthy of such a label. The story persists in highlighting this divide between the upper, business and middle Remainer classes, and the working and lower leave classes. George, clearly and proudly, identifies himself as a card-carrying member of the first group, a first-class travel group who should be expedited to the first-class lounge “with complimentary Wi-Fi, freshly brewed coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice, fruit, croissant, pastries and newspapers. And definitely not a Brexit voter in sight!” (62). This image of the idyllic first-class lounge, that George is used to, is juxtaposed with the apparent chaos of the bog-standard departure gates “full of Brexit voters!” (63), he decries. This juxtaposition emphasises George’s dual vision in a divided nation: he and his Remainer fellows represent the educated and erudite United Kingdom whilst Mr Brexit, and other Leavers, represent the uneducated and uninformed United Kingdom. There is a clear polarisation between one group and the other, and one which is constantly being dissected in BrexLit. Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut is a classic example of this, as it depicts London as “a state of enlightenment. Cosmopolitan, vibrant, young, liberal, multicultural. A place of goodness, decency and reason” yet “the north, all bleak and dark and backward . . . full of bigotry and hatred and racism and . . . evil” (69, emphasis in the original).
18George’s self-perceived moral superiority compels him to directly confront Mr Brexit and his “white trash” (71, emphasis in the original) family as they sit opposite each other at their “European holidays” (66, emphasis in the original) departure gate: “I hope the idiots who voted Leave are happy now” (67), he bellows after discovering that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, resigned as a direct result of the referendum. Then, as George confronts Mr Brexit as one of the “many stupid people [who] voted Leave” after his nemesis loudly shares that “for the first time in a long time [he’s] proud to be British” (74), George’s quiet and resigned wife, Emily, enters the fray. In an unexpected twist, the social drama, as represented by the insult-laden exchanges between George and Mr Brexit, becomes a family drama when Emily confesses: “‘I voted Leave’” (76, emphasis in the original) immediately before George’s “fist had connected flush on Brexit’s temple, who slumped with a thud into the laps of his children, who shrieked in panic” (77), and it is at this climactic moment that Emily announces her decision to leave her husband and file for divorce.
19“Universal Sufferage” turns this portrait of a failing nation into a metaphor for a failing marriage, shifting from the general to the particular. George’s ultimate solitude solidifies him as being a pariah in his own country; a country that he no longer recognises at that. For him, the real enemy is not to be found outside the national borders but among his own people, turning him into a stranger in the Kristevan sense of the term. George is depicted as an exclusionary subject who’s unable to accept the outcome of a democratic vote due to the result contradicting his own will. He is a conscious pariah, in Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of the term; he cannot find his place thanks to the socio-political mechanism that flung his country into its most tumultuous juncture in recent memory. George, as a Remainer, now belongs to the social grouping of the losers and he feels despised by the hegemonic powers that shook the nation into confrontation. He fluctuates between maintaining his moral superiority over those who voted leave and his longing for a sense of place in a (dis)United Kingdom. Now, abandoned by his wife and, seemingly, by his own people, he is left with no other option than to ponder: “‘what have I done’” (78).
20Craig, Lewycka, Dale and Haslam perpetuate social apprehensions regarding the way in which social conviviality has been complicated by the confrontational political discourses in a newly divided nation. On the one hand, Craig’s social satire, which could also be interpreted as a parable of the alienation of far-right subjects, feels important as she dissects the abundant bigotry and racism aimed at migrants during the Brexit campaign. In this case, those who dispense such racist comments are the true vermin and, what is more, they feel comfortable with that categorisation and, maybe, even be proud of it. Their anti-human nature is so contradictory to their own speech that they cannot find their own space within a humane society, a sense of alienation that runs through Haslam’s short story. The titular number two of Craig’s short story implies a double posthuman turn; Katie F first becomes inhuman before transforming into an other-than-human. Posthuman subjects, like Katie, do not find a suitable place in polite society; which is why they have to alienate themselves somewhere else. Additionally, posthuman subjectivities can also be identified in Lewycka’s interpretation of border control officials as cyborg subjects. The heartless border control worker that narrates the short story shares a number of parallels with Dale’s depiction. The differing points of view found in these two texts are illustrative of the way in which the depiction of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers within BrexLit can be highly subjective. Despite the efforts to control migration, as observed in Lewycka’s short story, the truth is that borders are portrayed as both porous and symbolic, yet necessarily restrictive. Migration can indeed be controlled; ethnic and biological assimilation cannot, that challenges the imaginary boundaries of a nation whilst questioning the humanist ideal of the white subject as the archetype of all things.
21British society was ill-prepared to answer the simple binary question posed by the referendum, and the ensuing confusion and cacophony exacerbated the hostility between the supporters of each side. The hostile landscape that Brexit has left behind can be identified in both long and short fiction, although, hopefully, the above analysis has demonstrated that short fiction allows authors to address the divide in a clearer, more direct manner. Brexit is a highly complex issue that needs to be analysed from a transversal and global perspective, taking into consideration the role of media and international politics within the increasingly unforgiving political stage of our current times. BrexLit, whether long fiction, short stories or poetry, focuses its interests in exploring the state of the nation, examining and dissecting Britain and its most turbulent post-war episode. The four short stories discussed above, as is expected of BrexLit, are constructed around juxtapositions and dichotomies; complex issues such as migration, refugees, border control, and policy-making, and all try to elaborate on the contentious environment that preceded and immediately followed the referendum.