The rhythms of the city: The performance of time and space in Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag

Abstract

This article concentrates on Suhayl Saadi’s novel Psychoraag, which is analysed in the light of urban space theory, paying special attention to Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis. It contextualizes the text within the emergence of postcolonial writing in post-devolution Scotland. It focuses on the articulation of the consumption, production, and performance of the rhythms of the city by its protagonist, whose corporeal and metaphysical exploration of space and time will be alleged to mirror the analytical standpoint termed by Lefebvre as “rhythmanalyst”; namely, to represent a subject who enquires into the social, emotional, and biological rhythms of everyday life, as developed in his work. It will be argued that the novel in fact has two protagonists. One is Glasgow and its social body, which is clearly polyrhythmic, if experiencing constant states of arrhythmia. The other one is Zaf, a young Pakistani-Glaswegian, who challenges the normativity of Glasgow’s polyrhythms by intentionally creating individual, multi-layered states of disorder and interference. Lefebvre’s classification of rhythms into “secret”, “public”, and “dominating–dominated” will be used to revise the portrayal of personal and social exchanges: intergenerational relations, interethnic affection, and the negotiation of new masculinities in the framework of a deregularized environment.