Narrative of feminist agency “What could not be changed must be borne… This principle ruled her life… So that when, at the age of thirty-four…when for.

Monica Ali

Brick Lane(2000)

Narrative of feminist agency

“What could not be changed must be borne… This principle ruled her life… So that when, at the age of thirty-four…when for the first time she could not wait for the future to be revealed but had to make it for herself, she was as startled by her own agency as an infant who waves a clenched fist and strikes itself upon the eye.”

“She is an unspoilt girl. From the village.” (16)

Nazneen’s sister

Hasina, Nazneen’s beautiful sister, elopes and runs away from the village and her family

“It worried her (N) that Hasina kicked against fate. No good could come of it.” (16)

Domesticity

Domesticity and the everyday as sites of feminist consciousness; “small insurrections” (50)

“Life made its pattern around and beneath and through her…” (31-32)

Tower Hamlets1985

Life in Tower Hamlets

Represented as a microcosm of immigrant life--working-class Bangladeshis, poor white on welfare (the tattoo lady)

the East End—poor, overcrowded, immigrant

Older networks and histories of immigration: Irish, Jewish, Bangladeshi

The city and the village: connections transported. Seen by Chanu (through a white person’s eyes): as peasants, uneducated, lacking ambition (21)

Different scales of spatial description: the City, the Hamlets, the flat (“large box”, a tomb)

The City of London

“Nazneen walked… She sensed rather than saw, because she had taken care not to notice. But now she slowed down and looked around her. She looked up at a building as she passed. It was constructed almost entirely of glass, with a few thin rivets of steel holding it together. The entrance was like a glass fan, rotating slowly, sucking people in, wafting others out. Nazneen craned her head back and saw that the glass above became dark as a night pond. The building was without end. Above, somewhere, it crushed the clouds…” (44)

Two cities

Global city

global capitalism is figured in the shape, texture and color of the building in the City.

The building is simultaneously machinic and natural, a monstrous outgrowth of the surroundings while also possessing both the vulnerability and transparency of glass and the indestructibility and opacity of steel.

It is both a landmark and a space without end. It reduces to insignificance the human life it swallows up or looks down upon. Human relations, too, are subsumed within the all-encompassing logic and presence of capital as symbolized by the building.

Global capitalism—its imperial history

Hywel Williams attributes the imbuing of the City’s capitalist machinery with magical qualities to the 1980s deregulation of financial services that severed capitalism’s connection to state and social control. Thatcher also cut spending on council housing.

Operating according to its own internal, purportedly supra-rational logic, capital becomes de-linked from social relationships and social purpose

London’s hyper-capitalist present is a reiteration as much as it is a successor to the city’s accumulating imperial past. Williams writes: “Britons nostalgic for the age of empire need only visit the City to find the heirs of Clive of India seeking the plunder and dividing the spoils. Here is the great mercenary army of our time, the most achingly modern and frighteningly efficient of Britain’s imperial institutions...”

Nazneen in the city

“Every person who brushed past her on the pavement, every back she saw, was on a private, urgent mission to execute a precise and demanding plan: to get a promotion today, to be exactly on time for an appointment, to buy a newspaper with the right coins so that the exchange was swift and seamless, to walk without wasting a second and to reach the roadside just as the lights turned red. Nazneen, hobbling and halting, began to be aware of herself. Without a coat, without a suit, without a white face, without a destination…

But they were not aware of her… They knew that she existed … but unless she did something, waved a gun, halted the traffic, they would not see her…” (45)

Culture and capitalism

cultural difference and neo-liberal capitalism as ideologies that nestle together within the space of London as a global city.

Capitalism’s rendering of culture as a form of commodification is exposed in the ways in which Nazneen’s cultural difference is rendered invisible (“they would not see her”) precisely because it is superfluous to the calculus of commodity production

Brick Lane’s commercialisation as a hub of curry restaurants

Eating curry on Brick Lane

Curry and profit

Jane M. Jacobs writes, “contemporary urban transformation is far more likely to engage consciously with the local character of an area than rapaciously obliterate it” such that the mobilization of heritage becomes “part of the legitimating framework of contemporary urban transformation”.

This is illustrative of capital’s selective use of cultural difference, in which “immediate and intense encounters” can opportunistically transform into indifference and even exclusion.

As the City concentrates and channels global capital through gentrification and redevelopment projects, a majority of Brick Lane’s residents suffer from high unemployment rates and subsist on sweatshop work or work in the down-market retail and restaurant sectors that offer a multicultural experience of consuming “curry” in the city.

Brick Lane and religious extremism

Brick Lane as a pathologized site of Islamic extremism—images of girls in headscarves being pushed into religious schools and radical mullahs controlling the local council abound in the media and the public imagination and in reality (English Defense League and the Islamists)

Ali’s novel directly references through its depiction of the radicalization of Tower Hamlet youths in the post-9/11 context (earlier seen as too Westernised, going to pubs and nightclubs)

Religious/social conservatism and gender—Nazneen’s daughters; Jorina’s young daughter sent back

See works by Manzurul Islam (The Mapmakers of Spitalfields (Peepal Tree Press, 1998) and Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses (Penguin, 1989), among others, for recent fictional accounts of life in a South Asian-ized Brick Lane.

The personal as political

Nazneen seems to be only inchoately wary of the kind of communal politics being mobilized in the context of global capitalism, white racism and the war on terror.

Kareem’s involvement in increasingly radical politics that precipitates the end of her extra-marital romance.

The narrative refuses a romantic ending in which Nazneen’s choice of London over Dhaka would in reality be a choice between her loving but older, secular, less attractive husband Chanu who decides to go back to Dhaka when his dreams to succeed in London as a postcolonial subject fail, and her dashing lover Kareem who seeks to reclaim London as the space of radical immigrant alterity as signified through Islamic radicalism.

Nazneen’s choice

The novel does not fully reveal the motivations behind Nazneen’s choice of making London her home.

the triumph of her desire for individual empowerment and self-making?

Is it a notion of a transnational feminist community? Her work as a sweatshop worker (exploitative and unfulfilling as it is) stitching garments for London’s fashion industry connects her not only with other women in her community, but also with her sister in Dhaka who also works in a sweatshop supplying garments to the world.

But whether Nazneen would go on to participate in any kind of socialist feminist or secular politics that could challenge the dominant neo-liberal and increasingly unsecular global city is of course a question that the novel’s plot does not accommodate, even as its discourse opens up these questions to critique.

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