The politics of hijab in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Abstract

In Brick Lane, Monica Ali problematizes the practice of hijab both implicitly and explicitly. To this end, the British Bangladeshi writer does not simply open the discussion within the fictional world of the novel. She also creates a series of characters whose dressed bodies silently project a broad spectrum of attitudes towards hijab, attitudes that range from the rejection to the ardent celebration of such a practice. Relying on socio-cultural studies on the subject, the present contribution intends to examine the politics of hijab as represented in Brick Lane, demonstrating how the novel fictionalizes many of the competing discourses which have surrounded the question of hijab in recent decades.

Introduction

The practice of hijab ¹ has triggered one of the most pervasive sartorial controversies of recent decades. A symbol of female oppression for some and an emblem of tradition for others, hijab has become the centre of attention both in the Muslim world and in non-Muslim countries with a high Muslim population resulting from recent migrating movements. However, despite its recurrent presence in the mass media and in certain academic fora, the question of hijab continues to offer a volatile and varied rhetoric. As Fadwa El Guindi has judiciously noted, hijab has been simultaneously “attacked, ignored, dismissed, transcended, trivialized or defended” (1999: xi). It is precisely for this reason that I have decided to devote the first part of this work to giving a brief outline of the different discourses which have surrounded the phenomenon of hijab in the past few decades, even though I am aware that any introspection into such a complex and contradictory subject is likely to constitute a potential exercise in reductionism. ² Nevertheless, the following observations serve as an explanatory prelude to my analysis of the politics of hijab in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.

Literature on the subject agrees that many of the complexities surrounding the Muslim veil stem from the multiple denotations and connotations that the practice of veiling acquires across time and space: “[the veil] means different things to different people within [Muslim] society, and it means different things to Westerners than it does to Middle Easterners” (Fernea, 1993: 122). Broadly speaking, the West and the East can be said to have held polarized views on hijab, regarding it as an oppressive or liberating practice respectively. In “Women and the Veil: Personal Responses to Global Process”, Helen Watson has succinctly analysed Western attitudes towards veiling, and she has concluded that, in general terms, Westerners tend to perceive the Muslim veil either “as an overt symbol of the oppression of women under Islam” or “as part and parcel of the exotic, sensual Otherness of Oriental traditions” (2002: 153). Nevertheless, the vision of the Muslim veil as a symbol of female oppression does not surface exclusively in a Western collective imaginary. Certain sections of the Muslim population and, in particular, the so-called Islamic feminists, have upheld similar discourses. Thus, for the influential Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, the practice of hijab has been — and continues to be — an instrument of female subjugation imposed and perpetuated by patriarchy — not by Islam — through a slanted interpretation of the Qur’an:

If women’s rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Koran nor the Prophet, not the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite. The elite faction is trying to convince us that their egotistical, highly subjective, and mediocre view of culture and society has a sacred basis. (Mernissi, 1991: ix) ³

Whereas some Islamic feminists have struggled to desacralize the Muslim veil, certain sections of the Muslim clergy and the Islamic elite have tenaciously defended and encouraged the use of this garment as an emblem of tradition, a symbol of obedience to Qur’anic principles, and an instrument to control men’s sexual temptation (see Abdullah, 1995; Afshar, 1985; Siddiqi, 1983). ⁴

All these caveats notwithstanding, most empirical and interview-based studies suggest that, within the Muslim world, the veil is perceived rather positively. In contradistinction to prevailing Western views of the veil as a symbol of women’s oppression, Muslims tend to regard it as an element of cultural identification which even transcends the mere religious sphere. Thus, in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, or Iran, the style of veil — or the type of fabrics out of which the veil is made — constitutes a visible marker of rank, social status, or ideological affiliation (El Guindi, 1999). Furthermore, the veil might additionally be imbued with aesthetic and erotic connotations (Schick, 1990), something that bears comparison to what occurs with high heels or the corset in Western culture. In contrast to those visions that regard the veil as an element that eroticizes the female body, for other factions of the Muslim female population, the practice of hijab entails a vindication against the objectification of women’s bodies. Thus, according to the Iranian writer Zahra Rahnavard, the use of hijab prevents women from becoming “an object whose value lies solely in her looks” (Rahnavard, 1990: 9). In this respect, theorists from Frantz Fanon (1980) to Jasmin Zine (2002) have even argued that the Western urge to unveil Muslim women underscores the desire of the controlling Western male gaze to appropriate the body of the Muslim woman who can see without being seen.

Throughout the twentieth century and thus far into the twenty-first, the Muslim veil has also acquired a prominent political dimension both in the Muslim world and in non-Muslim countries with a high Muslim population. ⁵ Set beside conflict-based politicizations of hijab is a return to veiling amongst young Muslim women who participate in the public sphere. In recent decades, many Muslim women have increasingly begun to (re-)use the veil as a visual indicator of their Muslim identity (Tarlo, 2007; 2010) and/or as a symbol of resistance against the power of Western culture and the synergies of capitalism and consumerism associated with it. Muslim women’s voluntary return to hijab can be understood as part and parcel of a feminist, yet anti-Western-feminism, agenda. As Albert Hourani puts it: “By what might seem a paradox, this [the use of the veil amongst young Muslim women working in the public sphere] was more a sign of their assertion of their own identity than of the power of the male” (1991: 442). These new feminist re-conceptualizations of the veil — either as a liberating element which serves to withdraw the male gaze or as a symbol of resistance against Western and patriarchal impositions — collide with the rejection of veiling propounded by other Islamic feminists, thereby showing that contradictions are likely to arise whenever the veil is at issue.

Given the far-reaching controversy aroused over the practice of hijab, it is not surprising that writers whose fictions revolve around Muslim communities have made an issue of hijab in their respective works. What seems more striking, however, is the little attention paid to the question of hijab — and to the writers’ own interest in the topic — within literary criticism. One of the few exceptions which serve to counterbalance this critical void is to be found in Daphne Grace’s The Woman in the Muslim Mask (2004), a study which provides a compelling analysis of the veil as represented in the works of several writers from Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and India. As a literary critic interested in contemporary depictions of the veil within literature, I find Grace’s work a path-breaking study and a valuable source of information. Yet, I consider it necessary to expand this type of analysis in order to account for recent representations of the veil within non-Muslim countries where, as I have previously noted, the question of hijab has also become the centre of attention. Within British Asian fiction, for instance, I have detected that many diasporic authors writing about Muslim communities in the West have alluded to the question of hijab in their works, offering a two-fold perspective as connoisseurs of both Western and Eastern realities. ⁶ Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) constitutes a prominent example in this respect because the novel (re-)locates the controversy over the question of hijab within Western frontiers, problematizing the practice of hijab within a Bangladeshi community in London.

In the following section, I shall examine the politics of hijab as fictionalized in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, showing how literature, as an artistic manifestation that intervenes in contemporary culture, is echoing current sartorial debates. Not in vain, dress historians and anthropologists have recurrently resorted to literature to gather information about various “clothing matters” (Tarlo, 1996) and yet, as Clair Hughes has perceptively pointed out, “Literary critics have been puzzlingly slow to return the compliment” (2006: 2). Indeed, except for some recent contributions, ⁷ the study of dress within literary texts has mostly been obviated or reduced to foot- or endnotes. This absence of studies on dress in literature has probably much to do with the triviality with which fashion has traditionally been associated; the dichotomizing assumption which associates dress with the feminine and the widespread condemnation of fashion by worldviews such as Marxism and feminism. As a result of these and other deeply entrenched prejudices, scholars have tended to refrain from engaging with clothing issues, and those who have resolutely opted for dealing with them have often felt the need to justify their academic interest in a subject that has recurrently been the butt of “pointed neglect, ferocious satire, heavy irony (Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus), and sarcastically exaggerated respect” (Hollander, 1993: 450). By examining the trope of hijab within Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, the present work is ultimately intended to contribute to overcoming this prevailing lack of studies on dress in literature. To this end, the foregoing exploration will combine the literary analysis per se with different socio-cultural studies on the phenomenon of hijab — some of which have already been mentioned — thereby creating a socio-literary methodology which might favour the socio-cultural approach to literature.

The politics of hijab in Brick Lane

Monica Ali’s Brick Lane has been widely heralded as an outstanding contribution to British Asian fiction, following a literary genealogy which goes back to writers such as Kamala Markandaya, Salman Rushdie, Ravinder Randhawa, Hanif Kureishi, or Meera Syal, to name but a few. Ali’s debut novel ⁸ has been translated into more than twenty languages and made into a film under the direction of Sarah Gavron (2007). The favourable critical reception and huge commercial success of Brick Lane — along with that of other works such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2001) or Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002) — highlight the prominent role that multi-ethnic literature has recently acquired in Britain (Bradford, 2007; Galván, 2000), contributing, as Kobena Mercer has judiciously noted, to “making present what had been rendered absent in dominant discourse” (1994: 84; emphasis in original) and the literary canon.

Brick Lane narrates the story of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi migrant woman who arrives in Britain as a result of an arranged marriage to Chanu, a man of forty. Revealing a polyphonic narrative, in Bakhtinian terms (1984), Ali’s novel also gives voice to other characters from the Bangladeshi community of Brick Lane, mostly — albeit not exclusively — female characters. In fact, Brick Lane can rightly be considered a novel about female self-empowerment, not only because the narrative itself allows many female voices to be heard, but also because the main female personae are constantly struggling against patriarchal constraints, eventually succeeding in becoming independent subjects and active agents in their migrating experience. In this respect, Sara Upstone has noted that the literary value of Ali’s novel lies precisely in “re-imagining the migrant narrative from a female perspective” (2010: 168), redeeming the prevailing invisibility of female migrating experiences and counterbalancing the sheer number of male-centred accounts of migration.

Although Brick Lane has received considerable critical attention, so far little criticism has been devoted to examining the conspicuous profusion of sartorial descriptions which surface in the text. Indeed, we could say that in Brick Lane the “language of clothes” (Lurie, 1981) constitutes an actual subtext which, albeit mediated through the written word, runs parallel to the verbal discourse of the novel, anticipating its content and filling its silences on many occasions (Pereira-Ares, 2010). In a novel in which the protagonist’s (Nazneen) knowledge of English is limited, dress becomes an alternative system of communication for her and, by extension, for the reader who more often than not perceives the fictional reality of the novel through Nazneen’s eyes. ⁹ In Brick Lane clothes bespeak gender, class, and ethnic differences as well as the potential ideological affiliations of the characters. As Arzoo puts it in Ali’s novel, “‘You think that a clothing is just a clothing. But as a matter of fact it is not […] it is a serious thing’” (Ali, 2007: 377). ¹⁰ This statement pronounced by a minor character in the narrative nonetheless articulates one of the main thematic concerns in Ali’s novel. For, in Brick Lane, clothes, besides their potential as descriptive and communicative devices, are also thematized. The clothing subtext which pervades the whole novel serves Ali to problematize many contemporary debates surrounding the attire of certain ethnic minorities living in the West, including, as I have previously suggested, those related to hijab. To this effect, the British Bangladeshi writer does not simply open the discussion within the fictional world of the novel. She also — and perhaps more tellingly — creates a series of characters whose dressed bodies silently project a wide spectrum of attitudes towards hijab, attitudes which range from rejection to ardent celebration.

In Brick Lane, the question of hijab first appears in Chapter V when Nazneen and her husband Chanu arrive, uninvited, at Dr Azad’s house. Dr Azad, the family’s doctor, is an Asian man who, despite having achieved considerable professional success in London, is at odds with Western life and the Westernized manners of his wife and daughter. Mrs and Miss Azad are antithetical to the submissive-Muslim-woman stereotype; they are highly opinionated, drink alcohol and, more importantly for the purpose of the present study, wear Western clothes:

The door swung out. A woman [Mrs Azad] in a short purple skirt leaned against the doorpost. Her thighs tested the fabric, and beneath the hemline was a pair of dimpled knees. Her arms folded beneath her breasts. A cigarette burned between purple lacquered nails. She had a flat nose and eyes that were looking for a fight. Her hair was cropped close like a man’s, and it was streaked with some kind of rust-coloured paint. (106-7) ¹¹

As tends to occur in Ali’s novel, most characters are introduced through Nazneen’s scrutinizing gaze and, as the above quotation demonstrates, Nazneen’s gaze reveals a conspicuous fixation with clothes. Through an instance of indirect thought, we see how Nazneen eyes Mrs Azad up and down, noting her tight miniskirt, varnished purple nails and rust-coloured hair which, incidentally, Nazneen describes as being manly in style. The miniskirt worn by Mrs Azad — in itself an epitome of Western fashion — places her in visual opposition to Nazneen who wears a sari ¹² and, anticipating any potential verbal explanation, this piece of clothing already discloses Mrs Azad’s Westernization.

Nevertheless, seeing Nazneen’s incredulous glance, Mrs Azad decides to articulate the reasons why she wears Western clothes and avoids the practice of hijab:

“Listen, when I’m in Bangladesh I put on a sari and cover my head and all that. But here I go out to work. I work with white girls and I’m just one of them. If I want to come home and eat curry, that’s my business. Some women spend ten, twenty years here and they sit in the kitchen grinding spices all day and learn only two words of English”. She looked at Nazneen who focused on Raqib. “They go around covered from head to toe, in their little walking prisons, and when someone calls to them in the street they are upset. The society is racist. The society is all wrong. Everything should change for them. They don’t have to change one thing. That” she said, stabbing the air, “is the tragedy”. (114; [emphasis added])

The italicized words show how the question of hijab becomes explicit in Mrs Azad’s explanatory speech. Dr Azad’s wife admits to complying with hijab when she is in Bangladesh, but she displays a marked reluctance to cover her head when she is in London. Indeed, in the above quotation, Mrs Azad seems to imply that the British Asian subject should only eat curry behind closed doors and should only wear Asian clothes when back in the Indian subcontinent, suggesting that, in Britain, racism often circulates around Asian cooking and dress. Therefore, for Mrs Azad, the use of hijab in her new diasporic milieu constitutes a potential marker of Otherness which, rather than eluding the objectification of the female body, as certain pro-veiling apologias argue, turns the body of the Muslim woman into the target of curious gazes as well as into a potential locus for racist attacks. ¹³ As for many Muslim women living in Western diasporic contexts, for Mrs Azad, Western-style clothes seem to constitute a strategy through which she manages to feel visually at home. In fact, when in London, Mrs Azad seems to desire the invisibility of her cultural background, something which, as we shall see when discussing the militants of the Bengal Tigers, contrasts with the attitude of many Muslim women who have voluntarily returned to traditional dressing styles in order to make their Muslim identity more visible (see Tarlo, 2007; 2010).

In a similar manner to Mrs Azad, Mrs Islam, the old money-lender in Brick Lane, also acknowledges that in order to survive in London she has tactically assimilated many aspects of Western culture, clothing being one of them: “‘I am not old-fashioned,’ said Mrs Islam. ‘I don’t wear burkha. I keep purdah ¹⁴ in my mind […] Plus I have cardigans and anoraks and a scarf for my head. But if you mix with all these people, even if they are good people, you have to give up your culture to accept theirs. That’s how it is’” (29). ¹⁵ It is worth mentioning, however, that whereas Mrs Islam’s speech betrays certain feelings of powerlessness and resignation in relation to her strategic adoption of Western clothes — whether these feelings are real or contrived — Mrs Azad’s words transmit a more positive tone with regard to the same question. Indeed, although Mrs Azad concedes that she does cover her head when she sporadically goes back to Bangladesh, her discourse reveals that she nonetheless conceives of Western dress as a sartorial liberation, for she refers to the traditional clothes of Muslim women as “little walking prisons” (114).

Mrs Azad’s attitudes towards hijab can be said to coincide with those views which perceive hijab both as a symbol of female oppression and as a potential sign of Otherness within non-Muslim countries. By identifying these views with an Asian character, Ali’s novel destabilizes the paradigm that tends to associate pro-veiling attitudes with Muslims and anti-veiling stances with non-Muslim people, as I have explained in the previous section. Depending on the cultural background of the potential critic and on his or her own views on the subject, Mrs Azad’s attitudes towards hijab might trigger as many different interpretations as the veil itself. Thus, Mrs Azad’s refusal to wear the veil — at least when she is in London — might be negatively interpreted as an act of cultural perfidy that champions and even reinforces Western-centric views of the veil as an element of Otherness. Yet her denial of hijab can also be positively understood as a strategy for survival or as Mrs Azad’s personal vindication of her right to choose what she wants to wear and with whom she wants to be identified.

Like Mrs Azad, Shahana, Nazneen’s oldest daughter, refuses to wear any garment that might betray her Bengali origins and which might consequently distinguish her from the rest of her British classmates: “Shahana did not want to listen to Bengali classical music. Her written Bengali was shocking. She wanted to wear jeans. She hated her kameez and spoiled her entire wardrobe by pouring paint on them” (180). Shahana represents a British-born character for whom Bangladesh is just a foreign country. Shahana’s homeland is Britain; her cultural references are those belonging to a Western imaginary; and, accordingly, her favourite items of dress include “a pair of shoes, jeans and a t-shirt” (216). Unlike Mrs Azad or Nazneen herself, Shahana does not have any direct point of identification with Bengali sartorial traditions apart from her parents’ clothes and the clothes they force her to wear. Therefore, a priori, Shahana’s reluctance to wear traditional dress does not underscore a studious anti-hijab statement as seems to occur in the case of Mrs Azad. Instead, Shahana’s refusal to wear traditional dress simply marks her adherence to Western culture, the culture in which she was born and grew up. Nevertheless, as a teenager, Shahana is subjected to the patriarchal influence exerted by her father Chanu who wants her to follow Bengali culture — and by extension Bengali dressing practices. ¹⁶ Yet, Chanu’s efforts are to no avail and, as the novel moves forward, we see how Shahana succeeds in her rebellious ways by “taking advantage of Chanu’s distraction to […] wear[…] her tight jeans” (327).

The character of Razia, Nazneen’s best friend in London, constitutes a more complex case with regard to Asian clothes in general and the practice of hijab in particular. If at the beginning of the novel she is dressed in a sari, her appearance becomes more and more Westernized as the novel progresses, reaching a climax when Razia jettisons her sari: “She was wearing a garment she called a tracksuit. She would never, so she said, wear a sari again. She was tired of taking little bird steps” (95). To a certain extent, Razia bears comparison to Mrs Azad for, as the last sentence of the previous quotation shows, she also finds her traditional clothes constrictive and oppressing. Razia’s changes in attire take place after the death of her chauvinist husband and, consequently, her new garments can also be understood as overt symbols of her liberation from patriarchal constraints. Indeed, Razia is one of the most sartorially self-aware characters in Ali’s novel. Not by coincidence, once she gains British citizenship, Razia dispenses with her tracksuit and pointedly begins to wear “a sweatshirt with a large Union Jack printed on the front” (188). Stressing her conspicuous awareness of the communicative dimension of clothes, Razia even tells Nazneen that she cannot give up wearing this sweatshirt because then those who insidiously attack her for so doing would think she has succumbed to their critiques: “This top is too hot. Too hot. […] But I must wear it, from time to time. I hear what they are saying […] “Razia is so English. She is getting like the Queen herself” […] If I stop wearing this now, they are going to think I listen to them” (229).

Despite the fact that Razia never appears wearing her Asian clothes again, her attitude towards the practice of veiling remains ambiguous and equivocal. Throughout the course of the novel, there are certain passages where, although wearing Western clothes, Razia is casually revealed to cover her head: “Razia pulled down her headscarf. She rubbed at her strong jaw. Now that she wore trousers she sat like a man, right ankle resting across left knee” (123; [emphasis added]). Although Ali’s novel does not provide further evidence, the above quotation seems to reveal that for Razia the sporting of Western clothes does not clash with her presumed predisposition to wear the veil. Like Mrs Azad, Razia rejects seeing herself as a dislocated subject, but unlike the former character she does not apparently desire the complete invisibility of her Asian self. On this assumption, we could affirm that Razia fashions a hybrid identity for herself, mixing and matching different sartorial practices which make visible her duality as a British Asian subject. As Annelies Moors and Emma Tarlo have suggested, the emergence of these hybrid styles answers to the need of Muslim women to “position themselves both in relation to the majority culture and in relation to their cultures of origin”, and their hybrid fashions therefore blend “concerns with religion, modesty, politics, and identity with a creative engagement with both Western and Eastern fashions” (2007: 138). Extrapolating Homi Bhabha’s reconceptualization of the notion of “cultural translation” from the penultimate chapter of The Location of Culture (1994), we could also argue that Razia has learnt to inhabit two different cultural identities and to speak various languages — amongst which we can certainly include that of clothes — translating and negotiating across them. Epitomizing this process of cultural translation, towards the end of the novel, Razia sets up a textile business where many women from the Bangladeshi community of Brick Lane — including Nazneen herself — translate Indian fashions into marketable Western commodities, thereby blurring the boundary between Western- and Eastern-style clothes. This in turn serves to highlight the increasing commodification and even fetishization of Asian dress in Western societies, ¹⁷ a question which is conspicuously explored in Brick Lane as well as in other British Asian novels such as Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) or Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999).

Along the continuum established at the beginning of this section, the protagonist of Brick Lane, Nazneen, can be said to occupy a middle position, as she neither rejects nor celebrates the practice of hijab. Unlike Mrs Azad, Nazneen never abandons her Asian clothes — let alone her veil — and, unlike the militants of the Bengal Tigers to whom I shall return later, she does not seem to use her veil with a conspicuous political intentionality. As Karim, Nazneen’s middleman and lover, puts it in rather chauvinistic terms, “You [Nazneen] are the real thing” (384; emphasis in original), neither a “westernized girl, [who] wears what she likes, all the make-up going on, short skirts and that”, nor one of those “religious girl[s]” who wear “the burkha […] [and] think they know best because they’ve been off to all these summer camps for Muslim sisters” (384–5).

For Nazneen, her Asian clothes in general and her veil in particular represent an inherited reality sanctioned by gender, cultural, and religious discourses. To begin with, Nazneen seems to perceive her traditional attire as a sign of correct female attitudes. This becomes patently obvious when, initially, Nazneen describes Razia’s new clothes and manners as being “unbecoming to a Bengali wife” (127). Secondly, for the protagonist of Brick Lane, the veil seems to be additionally imbued with religious significance. Indeed, as I have outlined in the previous section, for many Muslim women the wearing of the veil in certain contexts represents adherence to those Qur’anic precepts which apparently prescribe the covering of the body as a sign of privacy, modesty, and morality. ¹⁸ Judging by Nazneen’s own behaviour, her use of the veil seems to be largely determined by these religious principles for, on several occasions, the heterodiegetic narrator of the novel portrays her in the act of veiling before leaving the flat and plunging into the public sphere: “She [Nazneen] put on her cardigan, took her keys and left the flat […] Nazneen pulled the end of her sari over her hair. At the main road she looked both ways, and then went left” (53–4; [emphasis added]). Similarly, Nazneen’s veil is also mentioned when she reiteratively forgets to cover her head in front of Karim, as she theoretically should have done in front of an unknown man: “Nazneen sat. She folded her hands in her lap. She smoothed the soft blue fabric of her sari and folded her hands again. She had once more forgotten to cover her hair” (232; [emphasis added]). This passage does not simply anticipate the subsequent sexual encounter which is to take place between Nazneen and Karim. It also serves to prove, albeit indirectly, that Nazneen’s use of the veil answers to her compliance with a religious discourse based on and ostensibly sanctioned by the aforementioned Qur’anic tenets.

Besides its potential as a cultural and religious symbol, the veil also provides Nazneen with a mechanism of protection against the male gaze. Thus, when Nazneen passes a group of young Bengali men, she covers her face in order to withdraw their gaze: “they parted and bowed with mock formality. One remained straight and still and she caught his look […] Nazneen pulled her headscarf over her face” (143; [emphasis added]). Likewise, when Nazneen realizes that a woman is pointing at her with a camera, she makes sure to pass unnoticed by using her veil once again: “Nazneen adjusted her headscarf. She was conscious of being watched” (254; [emphasis added]). In a novel where the male prerogative of the gaze is neutralized and even subverted, ¹⁹ the use of the veil prevents Nazneen from losing her position as subject of the gaze on several occasions. In this respect, Nazneen’s strategic use of the veil can be said to dramatize those stances which claim that this piece of clothing can act as a “gaze inhibitor” (Bullock, 2000), offering Muslim women certain protection vis-à-vis the male gaze.

Either as an element which inscribes gender, a cultural−religious symbol, or a mechanism that allows for public anonymity, Nazneen perpetuates the practice of hijab throughout the whole novel. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that, in the course of the narrative — and presumably influenced by Razia — Nazneen recurrently weighs up the possibility of wearing Western clothes (see 141; 220; 277), eventually posing a compelling rhetorical question: “where’s the harm?” (141). Furthermore, at a given point in the novel, Nazneen almost discards her sari as she feels, both physically and metaphorically, trapped inside this piece of clothing:

The sari, which seconds ago had felt light as air, became heavy chains […] Suddenly, she was gripped by the idea that if she changed her clothes her entire life would change as well. […] If she wore trousers and underwear, like the girl with the big camera on Brick Lane, then she would roam the streets fearless and proud. And if she had a tiny tiny skirt with knickers to match and a tight bright top, then she would — how could she not? — skate through life with a sparkling smile and a handsome man who took her hand and made her spin, spin, spin. For a glorious moment it was clear that clothes and not fate, made her life. And if the moment had lasted she would have ripped the sari off and torn it to shreds. (277–8)

Through another instance of free indirect discourse we see how Nazneen imagines herself wearing trousers and sensual underwear like the girl she saw in Brick Lane (218) or rather a short skirt with a matching bright top like the ice-skating woman whose movements, charged with freedom and self-assertion, enthralled Nazneen at the beginning of the novel (36). In this passage, Nazneen feels that her sari is limiting her individual agency, imposing certain codes of behaviour on her. She feels that this piece of clothing bears — and imposes on her — the doctrine of fatalism that she inherited from her mother, a doctrine which probably finds its best expression in Amma’s words when she tells Nazneen that “if God wanted us [women] to ask questions, he would have made us men” (80). Nazneen imagines that if she changes her clothes, she will be able to overcome this fatalism. She could then walk along the streets of London freely and fearlessly, arranging business over a mobile phone with the man she had chosen at her side.

After passages such as the one quoted above, the reader is likely to think that Nazneen will eventually discard her sari in favour of Western clothes. However, this never happens and, as I shall argue in the conclusion, it is precisely in Nazneen’s decision to keep the sari — and ostensibly the veil — where the final message of the novel lies. As the narrative progresses, Nazneen does refashion her identity as an Asian Muslim woman and she does overcome the idea of having her life subjected to an irrevocable fate. ²⁰ She moves from being a speechless wife to becoming a self-assertive woman who rejects following Chanu or Karim; and from being an almost despised female character to becoming the breadwinner of the family. She substitutes the passivity imposed by the doctrine of fatalism for individual agency; and she comes to understand that an individual’s identity is not something deterministically given or inherited, but rather something which evolves and can be performed. Yet her new attitude towards life collides neither with her predisposition to maintain her traditional sartorial practices, nor even with her religion. Indeed, as Dave Gunning has perceptively suggested, throughout the course of the novel, Nazneen “comes to an understanding of Islam as supporting, not obstructing, agency: ‘God provided a way, and I found it’ (373)” (2012: 103). This becomes patently obvious at the end of the narrative when Nazneen materializes her wish to go ice-skating without renouncing her traditional clothes. In so doing, Nazneen does not simply project and assert her cultural−religious identity through her dress. She also gives a message both to her Asian community and the wider British society. To the former, she is saying that there are new forms of being Asian and Muslim in Britain, and to the latter, that “being British isn’t what it was. Now it is a more complex thing, involving new elements” (Kureishi, 1986: 38).

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, “A pinch of New York dust”, imbued with Islamophobia, “blew across the ocean and settled on the Dogwood Estate” (368). As a consequence, new sartorial confrontations arise in the novel. Out of fear, some Bengali characters decide to hide any trace which might visibly identify them as Muslims — “Sorupa’s daughter was the first, but not the only one. Walking in the street […] she had her hijab pulled off” (368) — others, in stark contrast, begin to use ethnic clothes as a visual vindication of their “Muslimness” in a way they have never done before. Thus, Karim, who up to this point has always worn Western clothes, adopts traditional Muslim clothing: “Karim had a new style. The gold necklace vanished; the jeans, shirts and trainers went as well […] Karim put on panjabi-pyjama and a skullcap. He wore a sleeveless fleece and big boots with the laces left undone at the top” (376). In a similar vein, the young women who are active members of the Bengal Tigers ²¹ also transform their respective attires. As Nazneen accurately notes, these women whose names remain unknown change their hijabs for burkhas as a political sartorial statement: “Across the aisle, Nazneen saw the musician. Next to him were two small black tents. She recognized the voices. The girls who attended the last meeting, who wore hijab, had upgraded to burkhas” (279). The choice of words in this quotation is worth commenting on, particularly with regard to the term “upgrade”. As a synonym for “elevate”, the word “upgrade” indicates that the Bengal Tigers have taken on a more committed attitude towards Islam. But as the term “upgrade” might also mean updating or modernizing, the wording of the previous quotation suggests — and anticipates — that the burkha of the female members of the Bengal Tigers is also about reconceptualizing the meanings traditionally associated with this piece of clothing.

In fact, for these women the burkha is neither an old tradition, as Mrs Islam regards it — “‘I am not old-fashioned,’ said Mrs Islam. ‘I don’t wear burkha’” (29) — nor is it usually a patriarchal imposition as in the case of Aleya whose husband has only acceded to her working on the condition that she wears a burkha (150). Instead, for the militants of the Bengal Tigers the burkha becomes a sign of resistance against the anti-Islam discourses which have engulfed the Bengali community of Brick Lane after September 11. At a more global level, their burkhas represent an act of defiance vis-à-vis Western dominance and ethnic−religious racism, as well as a sign of female political activism. For these women the adoption of the burkha is not only about giving visibility to the Muslim community in general, but also — and perhaps more tellingly — about giving visibility to Muslim women, thereby destabilizing the paradigm that has traditionally associated Muslim women’s clothing with the notion of invisibility (see Tarlo, 2010). In line with this, Helen Watson suggests that the adoption of the veil by young Muslim women who actively participate in the public sphere is not to be interpreted as an act of anti-feminism, but rather as a sort of “feminism in reverse”:

the apparent paradox of a return to the hijab among women in the public worlds of employment and education is not “anti-feminist”, but is a kind of “feminism in reverse” with a moral connotation as well as a political one. The interweaving of secular and sacred concerns represented by the adoption of the veil also can be seen as a reaction against the secular feminism of the West, and as part of the search for an indigenous Islamic form of protest against male power and dominance in public society. (2002: 152)

This feminist, yet anti-Western-feminism, message that Watson articulates seems to be inscribed on the burkha worn by the militants of the Bengal Tigers. For, in the various meetings of the group, these women recurrently set themselves up as representatives of Bengali women, vindicating their individual and collective rights: “‘Women’s rights,’ called one. ‘Sex education for girls,’ called the other. ‘Got to put that in’” (240). The feminist agenda of these female characters is not therefore so dissimilar to that of Mrs Azad in terms of content, although it is rather different in terms of approach, something which becomes patently obvious through their choice of attire. Unlike Mrs Azad, the female members of the Bengal Tigers seek to vindicate the rights of Muslim women within and from within Muslim culture, thus dissociating themselves from secularized versions of Western feminism. Nevertheless, the fact that the voices of these young women are repeatedly silenced raises questions about their success:

“Brothers,” said the Questioner, “let’s keep our heads.”

The two girls in burkha rose. “And sisters,” they said.

The Questioner glared at them. “The Qur’an bids us to keep separate. Sisters. What are you doing here anyway?”

In defiance, they remained standing. (285)

After Karim’s departure to Bangladesh, apparently to prepare himself for jihad, the Bengal Tigers fade and so do the voices of these young women. What is more, judging by the words of one member of the Bengal Tigers, women do not seem to have a place in the new Islamist groups whose future the novel leaves unresolved: “‘I’m starting a new group. You know, I never approved of allowing women in the Bengal Tigers. It was supposed to be an Islamic group! It was a mixed-up idea. Not my idea’” (486). This point tacitly recalls Spivak’s words when she explains: “‘the subaltern cannot speak’ means that even when the subaltern makes an effort to the death to speak, she is not able to be heard” (1996: 292). Like the Spivakian subaltern, the female members of the Bengal Tigers do speak, but we do not know the extent to which their voices are actually heard.

Through the Bengal Tigers, Monica Ali portrays the allure of politicized Islam for those characters who wish to vindicate their right to being Muslim and simultaneously having a place in British society. ²² What is more, as Jane Hiddleston has pointed out, Brick Lane presents these characters’ anger “not as a mythical, incomprehensible hatred of the West but as a desperate reaction to their unequal status in that society” (2005: 66). Yet, through the Bengal Tigers, Ali’s novel also exposes the danger of “get[ting] radical” (283), as Karim proposes, for, while the Bengal Tigers initially emerge as a response to exclusionist discourses, their new Islamist route verges, on many occasions, on another form of ethnic and religious absolutism which is similarly exclusionist. Indeed, at a certain point in the narrative, Karim seems to suggest that the coexistence of different cultural influences leads to the loss of an individual’s identity: “When I [Karim] was a little kid […] If you wanted to be cool you had to be something else — a bit white, a bit black, a bit something. […] It weren’t us, was it? […] Bangladeshi” (263). For the leader of the Bengal Tigers, being Bangladeshi seems to collide with other identity affiliations. This different approach to what being Bangladeshi in contemporary Britain might mean is arguably one of the reasons why Nazneen and Karim take different paths at the end of the novel.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that, through the dialectical struggle which brings the Bengal Tigers face to face with the Lion Hearts, the question of hijab becomes an open discussion within the fictional world of the novel once again. The leaflets which both groups pass around the community of Brick Lane provide evidence of this:

HANDS OFF OUR BREASTS! ²³

The Islamification of our neighbourhood has gone too far.

A Page 3 calendar and poster have been removed from the

walls of our community hall.

How long before the extremists are putting veils on our

women and insulting our daughters for wearing short skirts?

Do not tolerate it! Write to the council! This is England!

KEEP YOUR BREAST TO YOURSELF ²⁴

And we say this. It is not us who like to degrade women by showing their body parts in public spaces. (258)

In the first leaflet, the Lion Hearts accuse the extremists — as they call the Bengal Tigers — of withdrawing a poster from the community hall. As we can infer from the words on the leaflet, this poster contained the image of a naked or semi-naked woman. On the basis of this event, the Lion Hearts launch an insidious message where they warn British men against the bigotry of the extremists who, according to them, might eventually want to impose the wearing of the veil on their wives — meaning Western women. In direct response, the Bengal Tigers write a leaflet where they claim that they are not the ones who degrade the image of women by exposing their naked bodies in public. As we can clearly detect, the two messages transmit polarized visions over the question of hijab. Yet, both concur in deploying the female body as a discursive weapon which allows them to hide the true reasons behind the conflict. This does not come as a surprise given that, as I have already mentioned in the previous section, the female body — and in particular the body of the Muslim woman — has recurrently been used as a rhetorical device in various political conflicts, turning the Muslim veil into a palimpsest on which different political, religious, and social discourses have been written and re-written. In line with this, it is also worth mentioning that Chanu himself uses the dressed bodies of his daughters to visualize his ambiguous views towards the cultural−religious debates aroused in the community: “today Chanu had ordered skirts and no trousers. Yesterday, both the girls had to put trousers beneath their uniforms. It depended where Chanu directed his outrage” (264). After Chanu’s departure to Bangladesh, Shahana and Bibi, like most women in Ali’s novel, free themselves from patriarchal pressures and regain control over their dressed bodies. In a narrative in which female self-empowerment and independence is championed, most female characters — some cases excepted — decide in favour of or against hijab of their own will, confronting not only patriarchal impositions, but also the potential pressures coming from their own community and from the Western angle. This constitutes a quantum leap for, as the Syrian writer Rana Kabbani (1994) has sagely pointed out, the crucial question with regard to hijab does not lie in its potential meanings, but rather in women’s freedom to choose, something which more often than not becomes more difficult to gauge.

Conclusions

In the foregoing text I have attempted to examine the politics of hijab as represented in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, showing how the British Bangladeshi writer fictionalizes some of the competing discourses that have surrounded the phenomenon of hijab in recent decades. As we have seen, in Ali’s novel, the question of hijab is explicitly addressed and discussed by various characters, eventually becoming the main focus of the leaflets distributed by the Bengal Tigers and the Lion Hearts respectively. In a more implicit fashion — and demanding greater doses of interpretation — the clothes with which Ali deliberately dresses the bodies of certain characters also serve to project a wide spectrum of attitudes towards hijab. These attitudes range from rejection to celebration, from compliance to defiance, from enforced acceptance to voluntary adherence. Thus, on one end of the scale we might place the character of Mrs Azad who rejects hijab explicitly, arguing that within her diasporic Western context, the wearing of the veil constitutes a marker of Otherness. Furthermore, as Mrs Azad’s own words reveal, she regards the adoption of Western dress as a sartorial liberation for she metaphorically refers to her ethnic clothes as prisons. In stark contrast, on the other end we find the militants of the Bengal Tigers who celebrate the practice of hijab in one of its most constricting forms: the burkha. For these young women, the burkha represents neither an old tradition, nor a patriarchal imposition. Instead, their burkhas become a symbol of political Islamism and female public activism. Along the middle positions of the continuum, we can place the ambivalent stances of characters such as Razia and Nazneen. For her part, Razia shows a certain degree of ambivalence towards the Muslim veil given that, although she adopts Western clothes, she does not seem to abandon the practice of veiling all together. As far as Nazneen is concerned, she never relinquishes her ethnic clothes — let alone the veil — thus asserting her gender, cultural, and religious identity through her clothes.

In Brick Lane, Monica Ali dramatizes and documents the multiple factors which intervene in the practice of hijab. Through her characters, we learn that the wearing of the veil might respond either to patriarchal impositions or to personal choices, either to a compliance with the values of the Muslim community or to an act of defiance vis-à-vis the dominance of Western culture, either to a cultural−religious tradition or to the emergence of a new socio-political situation such as that brought about by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In so doing, Ali’s exploration of the question of hijab goes beyond the dramatization of prevailing discourses on the veil as an oppressive or liberating element. What is more, the cornucopia of factors that inform the sartorial choices of the characters encourages the potential reader to question the extent to which those religious discourses that base the use of hijab on a strict interpretation of the Qur’an or those Western liberal feminist discourses that see the veil as an oppressive element are valid for understanding the wide range of aspects which intervene in the practice of hijab. Indeed, if Brick Lane endorses a final message regarding the question of hijab, that message is one in which simplistic and simplified views of the veil have no place and one which is probably located somewhere in the middle of the spectrum that I have previously established. It is not a coincidence that in Brick Lane the most essentialist attitudes towards hijab such as those represented by Mrs Azad and the militants of the Bengal Tigers are dissolved towards the end of the novel, giving way to the image of Nazneen who, significantly enough, realizes her ambition to go ice-skating without renouncing her sari:

In front of her [Nazneen] was a huge white circle, bounded by four-foot-high boards […] Nazneen turned round. 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 was already lacing her boots. “This is England” she said. “You can do whatever you like.” (492)

The final paragraph of the novel leaves us with the sight of Nazneen as she tints the whiteness of the ice with the colourful hues of her sari, thus providing an actively created and artistically formulated image of a harmonious coexistence between Western and Eastern elements. Although throughout most of the narrative Brick Lane exposes the failure of multiculturalism by portraying London as a balkanized locus, the novel offers a more positive scenario in its last passage. Unrealistic and even utopian as it might seem, the end of Brick Lane suggests that a multicultural Britain where a Muslim woman can enjoy Western life without renouncing her “Muslimness” is possible. The possibility of such a multicultural society is to be based neither on a process of making the cultural−religious background of the Muslim subject invisible as occurs in the case of Mrs Azad, nor on the rejection of cross-cultural influences as the members of the Bengal Tigers seem to propose. Instead, future promise is based on the coexistence, interchange, and creative engagement between Western and Eastern cultural forms on the part of both the minority and the majority community, without this implying the blurring of cultural differences. Finally, it is worth mentioning that, by offering the sight of Nazneen wearing a sari on an ice-skating rink located in the centre of London, the last passage of the novel also envisages a multicultural society where geographical compartmentalizations on an ethnic basis are destabilized, something which simultaneously opens the doors to a reconfiguration of the “sartorial maps of London” (Tarlo, 2007: 146).