The Tropicalization of London

The Tropicalization of London is Gibreel Farishta’s attempt to transform the city into a tropical place, a grandiose intervention that turns his private demand for moral certainty into an imagined remaking of public life. He regards the English climate as the source of a national inability to distinguish between opposites, and proposes heat as a cure. The plan is both extravagantly concrete and profoundly unstable: it promises new birds, trees, habits, and industries, while emerging from a visionary state in which Gibreel believes himself to be hovering over London and preparing to act with angelic power.

The proposal and its logic

Gibreel’s vision begins with a posture of mastery. From above London, he imagines himself beyond the reach of the devils and resolves to make changes to the city. His reasoning is shaped by a demand for clarity: distinctions between light and dark, land and sea, political positions, sexual partners, and religious beliefs should not dissolve into shades of equivalence. He interprets London’s damp, cold conditions as the physical cause of what he condemns as moral fuzziness, and heat as the force that will restore sharper boundaries.

That conviction also informs his attempt to interpret his adversary. Gibreel sees the two of them as bound together from their fall to earth, but recoils from the implication of intimacy or mutual dependence. Seeking a cleaner opposition, he turns to the Qur’an’s description of Iblis as one of the djinn and concludes that the adversary is not a fallen angel but pure evil. The decision helps him replace uncertainty with a simple division between darkness and light, even as London’s greys frustrate the stark categories he wants to impose. The city is not merely a setting for the plan: in Gibreel’s view, its weather produces the very ambiguity that he hopes to abolish.

The imagined tropical city

Gibreel’s proposed transformation is not an abstract change in temperature. He imagines a broad reorganization of urban routines, public culture, and commerce. A national siesta would interrupt the working day; vivid behaviour, popular music, religious fervour, political ferment, and renewed intellectual life would replace habits he associates with reserve. Neighbours would visit without appointments, extended families would gain importance, and old people’s homes would close. Even domestic practice would change, with water used alongside paper in English toilets and hot-water bottles displaced by the heat of the nights.

The city’s landscape would be remade as thoroughly as its social customs. Macaws, peacocks, and cockatoos would appear in its trees; coco-palms, tamarind, and banyans would grow beneath them, while spidermonkeys would occupy the oaks. Magenta, vermilion, and neon-green flowers would brighten the streets. Gibreel also supplies the transformation with an economic programme: air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, mosquito coils and sprays would find a mass market, a coir and copra industry would develop, and London would become more attractive as a conference centre. Cricket would improve, while footballers would prize ball control over the traditional emphasis on work rate. The list makes his fantasy feel almost like a civic prospectus, but its commercial and sporting details sit beside more sweeping promises of religious and political renewal.

The plan has costs as well as attractions. Gibreel names cholera, typhoid, Legionnaires’ disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, and a culture of excess among its disadvantages. These hazards do not lead him to reconsider the transformation; they are items in a reckoning whose scale he imagines himself able to command. Standing on the horizon with his arms spread, he gives the order for the change. As the forces of transformation rush out of him, he is briefly overcome by a spinning heaviness and closes his eyes. The scene gives the proposal a physical beginning while leaving its status suspended between deliberate miracle and mental crisis.

Weather, vision, and apparent realization

The book later places reports of tropical weather in London beside Gibreel’s attempt to tropicalize it. When Alleluia Cone speaks with her mother, Alicja Cone, Alicja notes that the weather might last for months: television has described a blocked pattern, with rain over Moscow while London is experiencing a tropical heatwave. She treats the change with a joke about London finally having weather of its own; her daughter answers that Gibreel is asleep. The juxtaposition lends the vision an apparent counterpart in the outside world, without making the relationship between his command and the weather straightforwardly verifiable.

That uncertainty matters because the tropicalization is presented through Gibreel’s own increasingly unstable interpretation of events. He thinks he is above the city, endowed with power, and able to remake it. The transformation’s imagery amplifies his conviction, while its movement from visionary command to a reported heatwave tempts the reader to take the fantasy as effective. Yet the book does not resolve the tension by turning his detailed inventory into an ordinary plan or by separating supernatural agency cleanly from delusion. The city’s altered weather instead prolongs the question of where Gibreel’s vision ends and waking reality begins.

London’s social boundaries

Gibreel’s desire to impose sharp distinctions unfolds in a London already structured by racial classification and unequal credibility. Earlier, after the destruction of the Bostan, an anonymous report of a suspicious person on the beach brings fifty-seven constables and thirteen dogs into the search. The officers find Saladin Chamcha at Rosa Diamond’s house and treat his account of having fallen from an aircraft and swum ashore as ridiculous. Though he claims British status and the right of abode, he cannot produce identifying documents; the policemen’s laughter overwhelms his attempt to explain himself. The episode shows how quickly a migrant can be assigned the identity of an illegal entrant, regardless of his account of who he is.

Saladin’s professional life offers another version of this exclusion. Hal Valance, creator of The Aliens Show, dismisses him after market research suggests that ethnic viewers do not want an ethnic programme and that Saladin’s presence makes the show too racial. Valance’s commercial language turns racial representation into a market category to be managed or removed. Later, when Saladin is a goat-like being, he tries to invoke his full name, professional identity, memberships, and car registration number as facts that a computer could verify. The officers instead treat his visible body as decisive evidence of what he is. These episodes do not result from Gibreel’s proposed climate change; they show the social realities against which his imagined power to reorder London takes shape.

The same conflict between official explanation and lived suspicion appears after Uhuru Simba dies in custody. At a public gathering outside the police station, his mother, Antoinette Roberts, challenges Inspector Stephen Kinch’s description of the death as an extraordinary accident. Hanif Johnson points to the circumstances of Simba’s death and disputes the account that a nightmare explains it; the crowd answers with anger, and Simba’s brother Walcott Roberts urges those present not to let that anger cool. The scene’s contested account of police custody contrasts with Gibreel’s wish for a world of unmistakable moral divisions: London’s actual struggles do not become simple merely because he imagines the climate could make them so.

Significance

The tropicalization converts weather into a theory of society. Gibreel imagines that heat will produce clarity, but the catalogue of changes mixes moral renewal with consumer markets, domestic routines, environmental hazards, and sporting improvements. Its exuberant specificity makes the fantasy persuasive as an image of transformation even as its source in Gibreel’s visionary crisis makes its authority uncertain. The later tropical heatwave appears to echo his command without finally explaining it.

The proposal also exposes a contradiction in Gibreel’s pursuit of certainty. He wants to divide the world into light and darkness and to identify his adversary as pure evil, yet his vision begins with their inseparable physical bond and takes place over a city whose weather, in his own description, blurs boundaries. The tropicalization is therefore not just a fantasy of climate control. It is an attempt to force a mixed and contested world into categories that will not hold still, set against London’s continuing capacity to make identities conditional, racialized, and politically disputed.