China Mieville is an interesting author – at times he infuriates me, but some of the ideas he has are really thought-provoking and he has a skill of exploring them through fiction in a compelling way. The City & The City is him playing with the genre of detective fiction, but the core idea is an overlaying of two cities in one. Where Cold War Berlin was made up of two areas that were at once separate and yet part of a whole, at least they were distinct* and separated by a wall. Mieville’s twinned cities are interwoven – they’re a fractal Berlin, you might say; one with no wall, or perhaps with a wall of the mind.
But, this together with a (half-baked and unlikely to see execution) fiction idea I have had at the back of my mind for a while, left me thinking about how Berlin isn’t the only city in history to have had such an ambiguous existence. There are twin cities I have mostly not been to. Budapest, Minneapolis, but these are twins of a different sort:
Hong Kong – a trading outpost on the edge of China – was at once Chinese and yet not Chinese. Tax havens in the present day exist precisely because of they are outside of other jurisdictions, but Hong Kong was important because it was so close to China. And at the same time as Hong Kong and China there was the Kowloon Walled City – a patch of land that neither China nor Britain governed. Other of the treaty ports – Shanghai, or in Japan Yokohama – were even more ambiguous, definitely inside their countries, but with their own unique legal conditions. Shanghai was split very concretely into the Chinese city and the foreign settlements (‘No dogs and Chinese admitted’ as the probably apocryphal sign read), whereas Yokohama and others were less obviously demarcated but still derived their importance by retaining a foot both inside and out. Before Yokohama, in Japan there was Dejima/Deshima, the artificial island through which the Dutch traded for 200 years. It was the size of a fairly big supermarket car park, by my calculation, and the Dutch merchants lived there for years on end – in Japan, but unable to set foot on Japan.
The two names Derry and Londonderry refer to the same town, but reveal two very different identities, communities, that make up the city – Protestants who add the London in memory of a siege in the distant past, and the Catholics who do not. And in the 1970s there was ‘Free Derry’, a Catholic area where the police and army couldn’t reach. Garrett Carr reflects on this in his book, The Rule Of The Land, describing how more recently people seek to elide this sharp distinction by talking of ‘Derry-stroke-Londonderry’, or even ‘Stroke City’. (A colleague told me of the period in the 30s when Czechoslovakia became officially Czecho-Slovakia, before dropping the hyphen again in 1945.)
Tokyo was once Edo – the capital of the Tokugawa, before it was renamed after the Meiji restoration, so they are names split not geographically or politically but chronologically. But despite being the same city, the two names connote two very cities, two very different eras: Edo so central to the Tokugawa that their rule is often known as the Edo Period, when the city was split into high and low, a spatial reflection of the formal class system; whilst Tokyo (whose name ‘Eastern Capital’ looks across to Kyoto, the Emperor’s old home, and maybe echoes even Nanking and Beijing, southern and northern capitals, respectively) figures Japanese modernity and now hypermodernity as it has swollen and grown.
* I think, these things almost always turn out to be more complex the more you dig.
Fireflies 