Do you remember cassettes? Did access to a two deck cassette player seem like a technological turning point of your childhood? Then prepare to be charmed by Nikesh Shukla’s 90’s nostalgia filled debut novel ‘Coconut Unlimited’.The novel begins as Amit, the narrator, prepares for his stag do. His old friends Anand and Nishant arrive for a Blood and Crips theme night and their appearance makes him remember a significant time in their lives when they formed a hip-hop band, called ‘Coconut Unlimited’. The novel is a tale of adolescence, told in retrospect and the rest of the book follows the teenage characters as they try to negotiate complicated, but typical lives.
Amit and his two friends are the only Asian students at a prestigious private school in Harrow. Pressured by the high expectations of parents who work multiple jobs to pay the fees and appear like martyrs to the boys, all are straight A students headed for sensible, well-paid jobs, until Amit discovers hip-hop. Listening to naively titled ‘Rap Trax!’ cassettes with his nerdy but confident cousin Neel he finds the music inspiring a deep, immediate feeling of power and excitement:
‘I wanted to remain cool. Instead my heart was trying to burst out of my chest. My mind was trying to pump its righteous fist...My mind was fizzing with the spirit of black power and black rage and black funk and black edu-tainment. It rendered me speechless.’
Although his life is far removed from the gang culture that his favourite hip-hop talks about and his Asian peers tell him he should be more into Bollywood, the spirit of hip-hop music speaks to him. It becomes an integral part of his identity and he rushes to convert Anand and Nishant to the wonder of the genre, so they can form a band and become glamorous gangster rappers.
Amit is a sweet, stumbling main character, a flawed teenager who reminds me a lot of myself at that age despite my different gender, race, background and musical taste. When his year is split and he’s left in a separate class from Anand and Nishant he becomes incredibly self-conscious and timid, leaving him open to being harassed by racist teachers and fellow students. To remove himself from the shame of these encounters he creates a harder persona that he can be proud of, based on grand ideas about his hip-hop skills and ‘showing everyone’. Amit’s unconscious decision to create a new idea of himself, that doesn’t quite match his outward presentation, is the first appearance of a central theme of the novel: the difference between authentic identity and fake posing. ‘Coconut Unlimited’ shows that it is not always as easy to sort out the difference between these two positions as the reader might think.
It’s that hard, shielding aspect of Amit’s fake personality that keeps him from developing better hip-hop skills and gaining more knowledge. He has little access to hip-hop culture, or music, so all his information comes from a couple of magazines which run hip-hop reviews and the tapes his cousin lent him, but he sets himself up as an expert on the subject. He finds himself required to bluff his way through hip-hop conversations, as (again I’m making assumptions based on my own recollections of teenagerhood now, as this isn’t explicitly stated in the text) to be taught about hip-hop would seem to take away from the authenticity of his connection to hip-hop (oh teenage self you were so embarrassing). Cue uncomfortable humour, as Amit tries to fake out anyone who seems to know anything about hip-hop:
'Ahmed nudged me. ‘So, who’s your favourite rapper?’
‘Nas,’ I replied without a misstep, even though I hadn’t actually heard anything by Nas.
‘Yeah, he’s good.’ Good? Just good? The guy was the best. Apparently. ‘But I prefer Wu Tang...’ This was getting confusing now, balancing popular opinion with genuine thoughts.
‘Yeah, they’re alright.’
‘Alright? Nas is just one man and there’s about nine of them, all with skills as big as his. Mans are great. Come round. I’ll play you “Protec Ya Nec”. It’s their gang mentality single.’
‘Yeah alright.’ ‘
Part of this posture is due to his fear of looking stupid if he doesn’t appear to know everything, but it’s also possible that other people’s knowledge threatens the protective shield of authentic power that his interest in hip-hop gives to him. When white, posh boys like his classmate Paul Fine offer to share his enthusiasm for hip-hop he disqualifies them from being hip-hop fans based on their lack of ‘realness’, calling them things like ‘cracker’, maybe because hip-hop gives him that feeling of difference that convinces him he will show everybody because he has big plans that will set him apart from the peers he hates. He doesn’t appreciate the irony of his rejection of Paul’s opinions, considering his lack of hip-hop knowledge and his lack of self-awareness highlights how ideas of authenticity can be complicated by biases and defensiveness. It’s unfortunate that Amit can’t let other people contribute to his enthusiasm about hip-hop, because learning more would be rewarding, but it’s not exactly unexpected as he has to keep his shields up so high in a world that constantly abuses him.
So, Amit continues to fake his knowledge of hip-hop, while also emulating gangster rappers and attempting to impress the awesome nature of his hip-hop hardness on all his peers. Many of the novel’s funniest moments come from the disastrous results of Amit’s self-conscious posturing and the disconnect between his constructed street personality and the anxious, straight A student from a good background the reader sees as real. Amit looks a bit of a fake fool at times, for example when he and his friends show up on non-uniform day decked out in serious rap clothes that they don’t have the confidence to pull off. Why teenagers?! Can you not see disaster coming? Of course, they can’t. Can any teenager see social exile coming, no matter how non-conformist their actions are? No, never (and isn’t that kind of a good thing, even if our adult selves does cringe for all the hassle that is sure to follow ‘being themselves’).
However, Amit’s presentation as a gangster loving Asian provides an interesting challenge to preconceptions about what creates fakeness and authenticity. As he embraces hip-hop and show contempt for typical Asian entertainment like Bollywood other Asian teenagers call him a coconut. Coconut is a derogatory term that implies someone is ‘not brown enough’ or is denying their own culture (Ari wrote a great post expanding on what being called a coconut means and I owe all my knowledge to her). Looking at Amit and his friends who go around calling themselves ‘politically black’, dressing like stereotypical gang members and sneering at everyone Asian around them it at first appears that they have dropped their culture in favour of something they feel is cooler. Talking about a local dealer called Ash, Amit says:
‘He was everything I hated about being Asian. He listened to loud bhangra in his BMW, spoke in a stupid bud-bud/street accent and was only friends with Indians.’
which suggest that he thinks stereotypical Asian culture is uncool and has rejected his Asian community.
However, as I see it rejecting your cultural heritage goes deeper than taking up something because it seems cool and knocking something else because it doesn’t (although unconscious elements complicate that idea). It implies an element of self-hatred, maybe even of internalised racism. To use a stereotypical gender example it’s the difference between a woman saying she finds teaching sciences (traditionally a male area of interest) more exciting than teaching humanities (traditionally a female area of interest) and a woman saying she thinks teaching the humanities is a worthless activity because it’s a traditionally female area of interest. The first example expresses a preference, the second expresses misogynistic cultural rejection. Amit’s interest in hip-hop doesn’t automatically indicate that he hates Asian people (while he dislikes that Ash is only friends with Indians, he also only has Indian friends) or Asian culture. The beginning of the book shows that Amit’s allegiance to hip-hop begins because he enjoys the music and towards the end of the book Amit clarifies why he decided to be hip-hop by saying ‘I decide I like something different from everyone else’, showing that his interest in the hip-hop world is a preference inspired by a desire to distinguish himself, rebel a little against his parents and follow notions of what is cool. It’s a pretty typical teenage preference that gets him unjustly persecuted for rejecting his culture.
He doesn’t identify with what he sees as the stereotypical aspects of Asian culture (although he could be nicer to people who do like those things). He doesn’t see why he should perpetuate these stereotypes just to appear authentically Asian, when he is Asian. His sincere, if less than well researched, feelings of connection to hip-hop confront common ideas that the authenticity of someone can be determined by examining their interest in light of their race. Amit’s character also shows readers that race doesn’t always predispose someone to be interested in a particular culture of entertainment. A wider examination of ideas about the connection between race and authenticity could have been provided if another character had expanded on the idea that sometimes when people take up a culture that is not traditionally associated with their race they do so out of internalised self-hatred, or for reasons of appropriation, but as it is ‘Coconut Unlimited’ throws some interesting complexity into the world of thought.
Like most novels in this world ‘Coconut Unlimited’ isn’t perfect. The ending is abrupt and includes an incredibly brief rundown of what has happened to all the characters involved in the novel, as the focus returns to adult Amit on his stag night. The novel’s conclusion is just about saved by a final hurrah for the boy’s terrible hip-hop band, which is predictable and sentimental but still gives out good fuzzies. Amit and his friends use the word gay as a negative term a lot. Other derogatory remarks Amit makes because he’s a flawed character, for example the way he talks about girls, are undermined cleverly throughout the novel. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel their use of gay was addressed as well. And a final blip for me was Amand's character, as I’m not sure we get much of a picture of his personality, beyond his status as a solid friend and a girl crazy lad.
At the same time the charms of ‘Coconut Unlimited’ are great. The friendship between the boys is affectionate and supportive. It’s actually funny, when humour seems so rare in award nominated adult fiction sometimes. There’s a funny side plot about drug dealing in a posh school. And I hope I’ve provided a space in this post that explains what how sympathetic the main character is and what interesting ideas the text makes available. Even if you were never a misunderstood Asian/African/British hip-hop devotee living in Harrow the commonality of early 90s music technology and teenage uncertainty will help you form a bond with narrator Amit.
