BRICK Lane by Monica Ali, the last novel I will introduce into these pages, differs from Cracking India and The God of Small Things in that the family at the heart of the book is working, not middle class. Brick Lane moves between two major settings: the eponymous London ghetto, into which Nasneen, one of two sisters, has come from her Bangladeshi village to enter into an arranged marriage with an older man, and Bangladesh, where the other sister, Hasnia, has remained. The novel begins in 1967 East Pakistan (not yet Bangladesh), briefly recounting the birth and girlhood of Nasneen before shifting to London (1985–2002) as the book settles into its close third-person presentation of Nasneen’s experience of her immigrant neighborhood. The main narrative is spatially confined, with few scenes occurring beyond the Brick Lane council flats, though this is punctuated throughout by letters received from Hasnia (written by Ali in poor English, to reflect Hasnia’s limited literacy in Bengali) that convey that sister’s ongoing life in Bangladesh.
Ali met with strong protests from London’s actual Brick Lane Bangladeshis over what they deemed an unflattering portrait of their community. She was attacked as a person of privilege, someone with neither the right nor the credentials to speak for garment workers and other poor Bangladeshis. As an outsider to the culture, it’s hard for me to judge these concerns. Hasnia’s poor English does seem something of a contrivance. But from my vantage point, one of the greatest strengths of Brick Lane is the author’s compassion for her characters as they struggle to find their bearings in diaspora.
The stricter meaning of diaspora is the experience of a people who have been dispersed and who desire to return to the homeland. Nasneen’s husband, Chanu, who for all his degrees can find steady work only as a limousine driver, holds to the notion of return in the face of his own failures and the assimilation of his daughters into British culture and actually does return to Dhaka at the end of the novel. Karim, the middleman in the garment business who brings Nasneen piecework and becomes her lover, turns for self-respect to Islam. And he, too, though born in England, chooses return to his “imaginary homeland.” Whether going back to Bangladesh will bring the restoration of dignity these men seek is left at the end of the novel up in the air. But I like Ali’s respect for their struggles. Brick Lane is a solidly feminist book, yet never unkind to men.
Diaspora has also come to signify, more broadly, all aspects of cultures of displacement, and Brick Lane explores the diasporic experience in these more general terms as well. Hasnia in Bangladesh is equally alien and equally resilient as her sister is in England. Both their lives are rooted in place yet at the same time reflect the routes of globalization. In Hasnia’s life there are many vicissitudes as she moves from runaway, then battered bride to worker in a garment factory to prostitute to exploited nanny for a nouveau-riche family that has made its money in global plastics. Finally, not giving up, she runs away with the cook!
Nasneen leads a seemingly more settled life in England, although in a sense nothing can be settled as her husband and lover struggle to find their dignity in a global economy that offers them such constricted choices. Still, we see her evolve from a woman passively accepting her fate to one taking charge of it, and the novel ends with a satisfying scene. Having for the sake of her daughters decided not to accompany Chanu to Dhaka, Nasneen has entered with two friends into their own fusion-style dress making business. At the end of the novel her friends and daughters give her a surprise. Since her arrival in England she has been fascinated by ice skating, and they take her to a rink. As her daughter hands her a pair of boots, the text reads:
Nasneen turned around. To get on the ice physically—it hardly seemed to matter. In her mind she was already there.
She said, “But you can’t skate in a sari.”
Razia [her friend] was already lacing her boots. “This is England,” she said. “You can do whatever you like.”
The metaphor of ice skating with its suggestion of the sweep of movement within a confined space seems well chosen for this slowly unfolding yet powerfully moving novel, and I come now to my personal relation to the book. It lies, first of all, in my admiration for Ali’s characters. Nasneen and the others find power within themselves, despite their dislocations, in their tolerant ties of affection that strengthen family and community. The ties occur in specific places—indeed the book takes its name from place. But more than place, more than Bangladesh or England, Brick Lane, it seems to me, celebrates a kind of sweep of spirit—spirit that adapts and resists and even flourishes in whatever cramped inhospitable settings it may be asked to dwell.
This achievement is all the more moving for me because the Brick Lane neighborhood of London, now inhabited by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, was home a century ago to an earlier immigrant group of Russian and Ukranian Jews. Stepney Green, where my mother lived with her mother and two of her brothers in their two-room basement flat, is adjacent to Brick Lane. I see the two place names a half inch apart on the map I have pulled up on my computer, and I feel a surge of excitement that Ali’s novel is set in the same part of London where my mother experienced her early poverty.
Then I’m led to ponder the differences between my mother and Ali’s heroine. My mother couldn’t wait to leave the East End of London. Nasneen takes root there. My mother believed that only through a herculean act of self-reinvention could she find and seize adequate opportunity. Nasneen lives within her family, an ordinary woman but also a heroic one as she slowly and
