Epistolary craft and the literary field

Abstract

This essay examines the epistolary craft of Monica Ali’s bestselling first novel, Brick Lane (2003), drawing on tools offered by Pierre Bourdieu’s model of the literary field. On one hand, the novel’s relation with its source texts, and attempt to forge an adequate literary material for banglabhashi (Bengali speaking) and oral narratives, signals a rejection of economic profit and pursuit of symbolic capital. On the other, Ali faces the overwhelming market demand for an accessible, marketable and saleable ‘big book’ for the English-language reader. The lack of fit between the spontaneous spoken language of the material that Ali attempts to present and the epistolary conventions that she uses, is subordinated to the need to conform with market requirements, masking what is a more challenging literary work than critics have allowed for. The ambition to present non-written and non-anglophone elements through English-language epistolarity therefore remains latent in the novel, but is ultimately traduced to the logic of the field of anglophone trade-publishing.

Sister I have not know what to tell and this is how no letter is coming before. Now I have news. In morning soon as husband go out for work I go away to Dhaka. Our landlady Mrs Kashem is only person who know about it. She say it is not good decision but she help anyway. She say it is better get beaten by own husband than beating by stranger. But those stranger not saying at same time they love me. If they beat they do in all honesty. (Ali, 2003: 46) ¹

So writes Hasina in Monica Ali’s hugely celebrated first novel, Brick Lane (2003), in a letter from Dhaka, to her sister Nazneen in London. The novel narrates the experiences of the two sisters: Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who moves to London for an arranged marriage; and her sister Hasina, whose sections of letters from Bangladesh are interspersed with the third person narrative and letters from London. Although it is extremely unlikely that either sister can speak or write English, both sets of letters are presented in English: Nazneen’s in standard English, and Hasina’s in the perplexing broken English seen above. Both women work in the garment industry, and the novel draws on an emergent tradition of recording the experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants through oral testimony, drawing heavily on Naila Kabeer’s sociological study, The Power to Choose (2000). Brick Lane was eagerly anticipated before it was published, and Ali received a significant advance for the novel, whilst the judges of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists Award “unhesitatingly” shortlisted it “long before it was published” (Jack, 2003: par. 3). Upon publication, the novel was shortlisted for almost every major literary prize and it rapidly achieved remarkable levels of sales. ²

Although, prior to the publication of Brick Lane, Ali was a newcomer to the literary field with very little economic or symbolic capital, it is clear that the UK publisher, Doubleday, spotted the novel as a “big book”: a term borrowed from the industry by John B. Thompson to describe the potential best-sellers sought by trade publishers in order to increase sales and grow business in an “essentially static” market (2010: 188). There is no doubt that the success of the novel owes much to the “Brick Lane” brand, and that its marketability, success and controversy was connected to its “setting in an area that was undergoing a dramatic transformation, a fact that the book’s publishers exploited by deciding to title it Brick Lane” (Brouillette, 2009: 445). The financial advance, sales figures, literary prizes, celebratory reviews and later adaption of Ali’s novel for film all, quite straightforwardly, mark the novel’s commercial success and popularity with a general reading public. Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory provides us with useful tools with which we can begin to analyse this success. ³ Literary critics have increasingly turned to Bourdieu’s model of the literary field to develop a mode of critical practice that hopes to overcome the opposition between “texts and contexts” (Ekelund, 1995: 17). ⁴ Because, as Jarad Zimbler and others have shown, position-takings in the field are always a “function of form”, our analysis of a literary work “will be hampered without the simultaneous study of its contexts (literary and social) and its formal characteristics” (Zimbler, 2009: 615).

The production of Brick Lane is best described as a position-taking in what Bourdieu describes as the “subfield of large-scale production”: a pole of the field of literary production in which the logic is essentially governed by the pursuit of economic capital. The logic of this field coincides with the fundamental principles of the field of power and the economic field, and therefore takes its principle of hierarchization “from indices of commercial success (such as print runs, the number of performances of plays, etc.)” (1996: 217). Pre-eminence in the field belongs to authors “who are known and recognised by the ‘general public’”, but, unlike the reverse-economy of the wider field of literary production, which is governed by the “ultimate values of ‘disinterestedness’” (1993: 79), the subfield of large-scale production “finds itself symbolically excluded and discredited” (1996: 217; emphasis in original). The opposing pole of the field is described by Bourdieu as the “subfield of restricted production” (1996: 217): a field in which “producers have only other producers for clients”, where authors “make no concessions to the demand of the ‘general public’” and which “excludes the quest for profit” (1996: 217). Although Ali’s book cannot be described as commercial in the strongest sense, in that its widespread public recognition comes not only from economic profit, but also from literary prizes, reviews and literary criticism, its mainstream symbolic consecration nonetheless serves its position-taking as a large-scale, “big-book”. Alongside the novel’s public success, local business leaders in Tower Hamlets loudly protested against the book and film by portraying Ali as a mercenary outsider, illegitimately making money by misrepresenting a community to which she does not belong.

Against this backdrop, it is perhaps surprising that the epistolary craft of Brick Lane seems to provide evidence for a strong relationship between the novel’s literary techniques and conventions, and an emergent tradition of Bangladeshi oral history narratives: narratives which are mostly published by small, independent and academic publishers, sometimes supported by Arts grants, with low levels of sales and narrow coverage and reviews. As we shall see, the epistolary techniques and conventions in the novel appear to be used to attempt to forge a literary material which can adequately present some of these Bangladeshi oral testimonies to an English-language reader. This attempted position-taking shows no obvious regard for the pursuit of economic capital, and instead reflects Ali’s allegiance to the political and ethical value of her sources in the research and composition of her novel: the obligation to reject racism, to oppose a majority politics, to create a correspondence between the Bangladeshi and the English, the oral and the written, and ultimately to craft a literary voice for the subaltern experience.

A closer look at the epistolary craft of the novel then, begins to reveal quite a different set of relations and source texts to the ones that are usually mentioned in commentaries on Brick Lane. Until now, the texts most often drawn on are those which relate most obviously to its geographical setting. Literary precedents include Syed Manzurul Islam’s short story collection, The Mapmakers of Spitalfields (1997) and Farrukh Dhondy’s young adult books, including East End at Your Feet (1976). Sarah Brouillette also highlights Tarquin Hall’s Salaam Brick Lane (2005) and Rachel Lichtenstein’s On Brick Lane (2007) as texts which “capitalized on the controversy over Monica Ali’s Brick Lane” (2009: 433). Although these texts obviously relate to Brick Lane, particularly in the context of marketing, audience, and sales, they do not bear on the craft of the novel as significantly as the emergent tradition of Bangladeshi oral history.

What seems evident then, in the final text of Brick Lane, are the effects of a simultaneous position-taking at opposing poles of the field of literary production. On one hand, we have the novel’s pursuit of symbolic capital (and the ethical demands made on Ali) signalled by the novel’s relations with its source texts and its attempt to craft an adequate literary narrative for the banglabhashi (Bengali speaking) and the oral; and on the other, its assimilation into the logic of the field of large-scale production, as a big book which must be accessible, marketable and saleable to the English-language reader (only five chapters were complete when Ali signed up to Doubleday). Ali’s apparent attempt to create a genuine encounter between Bengali and English, between oral sources and a written text, is ultimately traduced to the demand for a particular brand of “feel good” cosmopolitanism. Although a consideration of epistolary craft shows the way in which the novel reaches beyond the middlebrow anglophone reader which its superficial packaging seems designed to target, my reading shows that it does not forge a material that is adequate to the transnational and cross-linguistic encounter to which it seems to aspire.

It is worth pausing here, to remember that epistolary language, by definition, is centred on the relationship between the writer and addressee: what we can call the “I–you” grammar of the epistolary form. Indeed, as Janet Gurkin Altman asserts, it is largely the presence of the addressee which “distinguishes the letter from other first-person forms” (1982: 87). The addressee is called upon to respond, so that writing a letter becomes “an attempt to draw that you into becoming the I of a new statement” (Altman, 1982: 122; emphasis is original). In the case of Brick Lane, as with several other novels using letters in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this epistolary characteristic is employed to connect letter writers across linguistic and national divides, and to produce an obligation to reciprocate, as can be seen in literary works as various as John Berger’s From A to X (2008), J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990), Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land (1992), and Ahdaf Souief’s The Map of Love (1999).

Although the letters in Brick Lane initially appear to be a device to connect two banglabhashi sisters (on the level of the story), we shall see how its epistolary language and techniques are, in fact, geared to target an anglophone implied reader. The attempt to present the banglabhashi and the oral through English-language letters seems to reflect an affinity with one of the ideals underpinning Goethe’s thinly sketched concept of Weltliteratur: the belief in the productivity of forging connections across linguistic differences. Or, in Erich Auerbach’s well-known reformulation, humanity as “the product of fruitful intercourse between its members” (Auerbach, 1952: 2). Whilst I am not suggesting that this “fruitful intercourse” is, by any means, a stable core of the much-debated concept of Weltliteratur, it is perhaps significant that the concept of encounter evoked here seems to have such close structural affinities with the encounter sedimented in epistolary language, in its I–you grammar.

The letters in Brick Lane have received little attention from critics. The few comments that have been directed at Hasina’s letters tend to broadly accept the assumptions that have historically accompanied the reception of epistolary narratives, viewing the letter as a transparent window onto the soul of the letter writer. Hasina’s letters are often cited as evidence of her “helplessness” and the way in which she primarily functions as a stereotype of an oppressed, uneducated Muslim woman (Hiddleston, 2005; Perfect, 2008; Sandhu, 2003), and readers tend to assume that the letters offer an enticing insight into the intimate world of two Bangladeshi women. Some critics mistakenly describe the language of Hasina’s letters as a “pidgin” English (Chakrabarti, 2004; Sandhu, 2003), and there is even a tendency to assume that Hasina is “illiterate” or “semi-literate” (Cormack, 2006; Mullen, 2004), when the narrative repeatedly describes Hasina’s writing process, from Nazneen’s concern about her sister’s uncharacteristically hurried “scrawl” (37), to Hasina’s frequent references to her own writing process (47; 121; 128; 129; 134; 137; 142). Ali’s decision to use an epistolary narrative to allow the sisters to (i) tell their stories and (ii) stay in touch, requires a level of literacy to maintain verisimilitude, and the constitutively written nature of the epistolary form would be seriously (albeit interestingly) strained if it were obliged to smoothly contain the experiences of an illiterate character.

The presumption of illiteracy is perhaps a result of approaching the novel through thematic lenses of sexuality and gender. For example, Jane Hiddleston suggests that Ali “sets out to depict the mistreatment of women in Bangladesh, but she also displays prevalent assumptions concerning their ability to understand and express their position” (2005: 63). Although Hiddleston, like other critics, is right to be suspicious of a narrative that purports to provide an account of a subaltern woman for the anglophone reader, such readings overlook what might be described as a more fundamental problem. This “problem” is a result of the novel’s more ambitious attempt to craft a narrative which can adequately contain the experiences of a banglabhashi letter writer and the spoken testimonies of the novel’s source texts through the use of a constitutively written, anglophone form. The next part of this essay analyses this attempted position-taking and shows how it produces Hasina’s apparently spontaneous, unmediated account of life in Bangladesh (particularly through her broken English and stress on writing to the moment). The final part of the essay shows how the resultant spontaneity effect ironically plasters over the fractures created by Ali’s attempt to create a realistic account of a poor Bengali garment worker through a written anglophone literary form designed for (and eagerly consumed by) the UK and US markets.

Across seven seas and thirteen rivers

The initial reception of Brick Lane can be largely divided into two camps: those who celebrated and defended the novel’s insight into the lives of Bangladeshis living on Brick Lane in London, and those who were angered by the novel’s inaccurate representation of the people living there. Although Doubleday’s preference for “Brick Lane” is well-known, few have considered the hermeneutic implications of the publisher’s move to push this title over Ali’s original, “Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers”. ⁵ Ali’s provisional title draws on the “seven seas and thirteen rivers” of Bengali folktales: a mythical body of water that leads to a faraway place. The aspirations of the novel are sedimented in this original title. Ali appears to take the “seven seas” reference directly from Kabeer’s The Power to Choose, a study which she acknowledges at the back of her novel (415), and which, as Michael Perfect (2008) has shown, influences the content of the published narrative. Kabeer names her sixth chapter “Across seven seas and thirteen rivers” (2000: 193–229), and adds a footnote to describe how the phrase

comes from a collection of Bengali children’s stories called Thakur Ma-er Jhuli. It is the way that a lot of stories which deal with distant lands with a mythical quality begin: Once there was a prince who lived in a far off land, “seven seas and thirteen rivers” away. (2000: 193, n1)

Kabeer’s words are almost exactly reproduced in Ali’s novel, in Hasina’s first letter to her sister:

You remember those story we hear as children begin like this. “Once there was prince who lived in far off land seven seas and thirteen rivers away.” That is how I think of you. But as princess. (19)

As is often the case, Ali converts the standard English of Kabeer’s prose into Hasina’s broken English: in this instance by superficially altering some of the written markers (the punctuation and quotation marks), and deleting the articles preceding “prince” and “far off land”. In Kabeer’s study, the “seven seas” reference becomes a metaphor for the distance between migrant workers in Dhaka and London, and this signals the importance of the phrase beyond its folktale provenance. Indeed, the “seven seas” reference runs as a thread throughout twentieth century attempts to record and describe the history of Bangladeshi migration to Britain. Caroline Adams’ Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers: Life Stories of Pioneer Sylhetti Settlers in Britain (1987) is the most obvious example. ⁶ Adams was a community worker at a Brick Lane youth project from 1974, and her book is a collection of first person recorded testimonies from banglabhashi men who migrated to the UK in the early twentieth century after serving on Merchant Navy ships. Adams’ collection, published by a group who seeks to “promote the creative writings of ordinary people”, stresses the need to preserve human stories that would otherwise be forgotten, and the centrality of colonial military and trade expansion to patterns of Bangladeshi settlement in the UK. ⁷ The interviewees themselves emphasize the need “to tell the history of people like us” (Ali, quoted in Adams, 1987: 93), and these “seven seas” testimonies are closely aligned with the borough of Tower Hamlets, the setting of Ali’s novel. It is no accident then, that the majority of oral history projects and academic research into Bangladeshi migration to the UK have focused on Tower Hamlets, the borough increasingly referred to as “Banglatown”, which holds a powerful place in the Bangladeshi imagination. ⁸

Adams’ Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers opens and closes with a repeated, intertextual reference to the seven seas metaphor, by including a translated verse from Abdus Salique’s “Trade Union”:

We were called from a distant land,

Counting the waves of

Thirteen rivers and seven seas

With hopes for a better life. (Salique, quoted in Adams, 1987: i; 211)

Adams cites Salique’s use of the “seven seas” metaphor in a song that he wrote to make the Trade Union movement “popular” in the “Bengali community” (Salique, 2006: par. 8). Salique pushes the metaphor beyond Bengali folklore and two centuries of sea trade and migration, towards a project of forging a collective Bengali identity and rejecting racism. The song has been described by some as a protest song against the racist attacks on the Bengali community in Brick Lane in 1978, which included the killing of Altab Ali. Interestingly however, Salique spearheaded the campaign against Ali’s Brick Lane and against the filming of the adapted novel in 2006, arguing that Ali should not write about the area because of her distance from it, stating that she “has imagined ideas about us in her head. She is not one of us” (Salique, quoted in Lea and Lewis, 2006: par. 5–6). Salique, the Chair of the Brick Lane Traders’ Association at the time of the novel’s publication, positions Ali as an outsider capitalizing on the gentrification of the area, taking us back to Doubleday’s decision to make the geographical setting of the novel central to their branding and marketing campaign. However, this brand is not only one which local traders were keen to protect (Brouillette, 2009), but is also deeply connected to two centuries of Bangladeshi migration and settlement in the UK. Salique’s use of the seven seas image, and his labour rights and anti-racist campaign work reveal some of the contradictions surrounding the reception of Brick Lane. This complicated situation means that although Ali’s literary project correlates with many of the concerns of Salique and his supporters, particularly in its championing of Bangladeshi oral narratives through literary prose, this is compromised by the logic of the book field in which it is sold, marketed and read.

Nevertheless, traces of this project remain sedimented in the composition of Brick Lane. Although the “seven seas” ex-seamen of Adams’ collection who migrated to Britain in the 1920s and 1930s appear to have little in common with Ali’s female garment workers, on closer inspection it becomes clear that their first person narratives are similar in structure, tone and register. The distance and connection symbolized by the “seven seas” metaphor finds a formal home in the epistolary narrative. It is not only Ali’s original title then, but also her use of epistolary techniques and conventions that reveals her allegiance to her source texts.

Kabeer’s study, on which Ali draws so heavily, observes the difference between the first-person testimonies told “by women workers” about themselves and third person “narratives about the women workers” from a range of sources like “journalists, trade unionists, feminist activists and employers” (2000: viii–ix; emphasis in original). Kabeer stresses the importance of preserving the narratives of living individuals, rather than relying only on the “remarkably homogenous” image of the “average” Third World worker which underpins the third-person explanations (Kabeer, 2000: x). Given Ali’s intimate knowledge and extensive use of Kabeer’s study, it is unlikely that her preservation of the first person voices from Kabeer’s interviews is accidental. The prevalent critical assumption that Hasina has very little agency ignores the fact that her first person voice remains intact throughout, and that for Hasina, as with other epistolary narrators, writing is acting. The first person “I” of epistolary narratives intersects with the acceptance of a writing “self”: of the importance of individual agency, and the rights and responsibilities of this individual.

As the narrator of her own story, Hasina describes the experiences of those around her, echoing the words, phrases, and stories told by the women in Kabeer’s study: some of whom take up factory work for “economic reasons”, and others who took up garment work because of “some specific adversity in their lives” (Kabeer, 2000: 117; 100). Ali’s use of the latter material from Kabeer’s study leaves her novel vulnerable to the criticism that, as Perfect argues, she selects the worst of the Dhaka narratives to emphasize the benefits of multicultural London (2008: 119). It is true that Ali draws heavily on the testimonies of “Shefali”: a woman that Kabeer describes as having “precarious autonomy” who was “more literally on her own than any other woman in our sample” (2000: 156–7), and there are undeniable parallels between the life trajectories of Hasina and Shefali. Yet, paradoxically, the moments when Ali’s and Kabeer’s narratives seem almost indistinguishable (which threaten to collapse the boundary between Hasina and Shefali), actually reveal how far Ali sculpts the experiences reported in Kabeer’s study for her literary endeavour.

Both women receive proposals of marriage, and Hasina’s response mirrors Shefali’s very closely:

Despite her protestations — “I told him, I am a street woman, I have nothing in the world. I am all I have. I can give you nothing” — he proposed to her through her landlord and she finally accepted. (Kabeer, 2000: 106).

I speak to Ahmed again. Again he is pressing. I tell him this. I am a low woman. I am nothing. I have nothing. I am all that I have. I can give you nothing.

Still he insist. I do not know what to do. (140)

Despite the obvious similarities in lexicon and tone, the differences between the two accounts remain illuminating. Shefali’s words are embedded within Kabeer’s analysis, whereas Hasina’s words, characteristically for the epistolary narrative, lack a frame narrator. Hasina therefore retains her authoritative position as storyteller, whilst Shefali’s story is absorbed into Kabeer’s telling. The effect of this is amplified by Hasina’s resolute stress on the present tense of the experience (“I speak to Ahmed … I tell him this”), which collapses the temporal difference between her recollection and experience of this event, whereas Shefali recounts the experience retrospectively for her interlocutor (“I told him”). Hasina’s letter here attempts to consolidate numerous temporal moments (the moments of the experience, the telling and the various readings) into a single present tense, which leaves the letter without a conclusion, as seen in Hasina’s uncertain appeal to her reader: “I do not know what to do.” (140). In contrast, Kabeer intervenes as narrator to resolve the situation for the reader: “she finally accepted”.

The use of the first person epistolary narrative as the sole vehicle for Hasina’s experiences seems to signal an attempt to allow her to tell her own story, in her own voice, as a woman. Hasina uses her letters to refuse compliance, narrate her experiences, advise her sister and quietly question authority. Indeed, it could well be this that leads to her difficulties and her dismissal from the factory, rather than these events being the consequence of her naivety and passivity, as is usually suggested.

The twin institutions of postal exchange and the garment trade which anchor Brick Lane’s narrative support this reading. The correspondence between London and Dhaka is, historically speaking, a by-product of a postal network that was developed to serve international trade and capitalist expansion. Given the important role that postal communications continue to play in Bangladesh, “where alternative communications, especially in rural areas, are nearly absent” (Bangladesh Post, 1999: 1), Hasina is also a subject taking full advantage of the means accessible to her. More substantively however, understanding the formative impact of the expansion of the textile trade on the narrative traditions emerging from this expansion provides us with a keener insight into the project of the novel. In other words, Ali’s decision to use letters is not incidental, but central to an understanding of the novel’s portrayal of the experience of migration between Bangladesh and East London. Although Ali’s novel did not produce a version of the “seven seas” migration narrative that was acceptable to prominent members of the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets, an examination of its epistolary material begins to reveal how its narrative is closer to the vision contained in Salique’s song than we might expect.

Strangely however, Hasina’s language and consistent use of the present tense seems to court an impression of immediacy and spontaneity which strains against the idea that she is capable of acting in a logical and considered manner. This chimes with the novel’s justification of the difference between the sisters’ letters:

Whenever she got a letter from Hasina, for the next couple of days she imagined herself an independent woman too. The letters were long and detailed. Nazneen composed and recomposed her replies until the grammar was satisfactory, all errors expunged along with any vital signs. But Hasina kicked aside all such constraints: her letters were full of mistakes and bursting with life. Nazneen threaded herself between the words, allowed them to spool her across seven seas to Dhaka, where she worked alongside her sister. (76)

The narrator here suggests that the stylistic differences between Nazneen and Hasina’s letters are explicable by reference to their differing writing methods and personalities, rather than their literacy or knowledge of English. If we are to believe the narrator, the language of Hasina’s letters is intended to convey a sense of spontaneity and energy, rather than give an impression of her naivety and lack of sophistication in her use of language. This plot-based justification is rather unconvincing in accounting for the extent of the differences between the two sets of letters, which critics have puzzled over, but helps us to understand Ali’s attempt to harness epistolary conventions as means of transmitting not only the first person aspect of the testimonies in Kabeer’s study, but also to capture their orality. This justification combines with Hasina’s stress on the present tense and apparently unedited style in order to create an impression of a letter writer (in the famous words of Samuel Richardson) “writing, to the moment”: “I thinking of you sister and I think of you now. Oil is run low and I must save for tomorrow. I kiss you and I turn out the light.” (129). ⁹

The anglophone trade book field: Undermining the “seven seas” project

I have argued that the impulse underpinning the narrative project of Brick Lane is to rework the oral testimonies that have been used to record the history of Bangladeshi experience and to present these in literary prose: primarily by preserving the first person voices of the testimonies using epistolary techniques and conventions, and by attempting to capture the orality of the testimonies by capitalizing on the apparent immediacy of epistolary writing. I have suggested that this shows how Hasina is a character with agency, and that the novel attempts to incorporate a range of experiences described by the migrants and workers of the oral testimonies. Our focus, therefore, should move away from a discussion of whether the narrative provides an accurate representation of a community in London, and towards the adequacy of the literary material for containing the experiences of Bangladeshi migration and diaspora. In the remainder of this essay then, I turn to the way in which the novel’s use of epistolary techniques and conventions strains against, and ultimately undermines, the project outlined here. It is my contention that this is the result of an attempt to simultaneously meet the demands of Bangladeshi narrative traditions and the large-scale field of production in which the novel was composed, published, and sold. More specifically, the tensions between the spoken narratives of the source texts, Hasina’s banglabhashi narrative and the anglophone epistolarity of the published novel remain unacknowledged, and this leaves the limitations of epistolary techniques and conventions unexamined. This also leads readers and critics either to a celebration of the authentic insight the book provides, or to a critique of the stereotypes produced, rather than forcing a reconsideration of the adequacy of its literary material for its postcolonial subject matter. Although Brick Lane successfully preserves the carcasses of the first person testimonies from Kabeer’s study, this does not automatically lead to a narrative which can satisfactorily contain the experiences of the individuals represented by the writing “I”.

As noted above, the rendering of Hasina’s epistolary style appears to be designed to convey a sense of spontaneity and spoken language. This echoes recent claims for the epistolary form, where, for example, Tony Jackson suggests that “in a continuum from writing on one end to speech on an opposite end, the personal letter exemplifies the writing that is most like speech” (2009: 30). Jackson’s suggestion that the diegetic stress of literary letters makes them closer to speech is seductive. Diegesis is certainly important to the creation of epistolary meaning, and this can be seen in specific uses of epistolary material within the novel. The reader is shown copies of Hasina’s letters rather than told her story in Brick Lane, and the frequency, handwriting and length of these letters tells Nazneen much about Hasina’s circumstances. To take a single example, the brevity and scrawl of Hasina’s abruptly truncated note amplifies the threat implicit within its content: “Sometimes I make him lose patience without I mean to. He comes soon to home and I getting ready for him now. God bless you. Hasina” (37). Nevertheless, the epistolary diegesis of this note, and its accompanying impression of Hasina “writing, to the moment”, does not render her account any less mediated, or indeed any closer to speech, even taking into account the oral sources underpinning the letters. Given the persistence of a critical tradition that views literary letters as windows onto the soul, it should perhaps not go without saying that although Hasina’s letters produce meaning through epistolary diegesis and the impression of spontaneity, her letters remain highly mediated accounts which are recoverable as an anglophone epistolary narrative only through authorial acts of translation.

Orality and epistolarity do not fit smoothly together and this poses a major challenge to the novel’s attempt to incorporate the spontaneous spoken language of Kabeer’s testimonies in a constitutively written form. Oral and epistolary exchanges are differentiated by the time-lags between acts of correspondence, the differential level of absence between participants, and by the distinctive syntax of oral and written language. Further, as the above letter shows, Hasina remains heavily dependent on telling her story, even whilst showing is important to its meaning. This creates an additional difficulty in Brick Lane, which attempts to present the told stories of oral testimonies to a new literary readership, through a form that constantly strains towards showing. The impulse to provide Hasina with a narrative through which she can tell her own story in her own voice is paramount, and the literary re-telling of these stories could even be considered to be the primary function of Ali’s narrative, but these are ironically always presented through the heavily diegetic epistolary form. Whilst testimonies can of course be conversational and dialogic, the primary function of the genre in this instance remains at odds with that of the epistle: the former presents itself for recording as a complete (and primarily monologic) story, whereas the latter is structured to elicit a reply and has dialogue at its core (it is, in a sense, half a story).

The jarring juxtaposition of speech and writing structures in Hasina’s letters become more obvious when we compare these to her source text. Kabeer reports that Shefali said:

[1] I used to dress better before, but you know something about my character. [2] I used to be bad that way. [3] Someone would call me to him and give me something and I would do what he wanted. [4] But I prefer the way I live now to the way I did then. [5] If I can’t eat properly, or if I only eat one meal a day, I would still prefer to live this way. (Shefali, quoted in Kabeer, 2000: 106)

It is immediately obvious that this passage contains many linguistic properties that are characteristic of spontaneous spoken language. The simple co-ordination of clauses through “and” is particularly clear in [3], and the conjunctions “but” and “or” also frequently hold simple clauses together. As we would expect, deictics play a central role in signalling the relationship between chunks of syntax, so that “I”, “before”, “then”, “that”, “now”, “this” become particularly prominent. The intercalated clause of [5] and repetition of simple grammatical structures (which produce the anaphora in “I used to” [1 and 2]) highlight the speech rhythm which relies heavily on the repetition of the pronoun “I” at the beginning of phrases, rather than depending on the punctuation of the sentence (which is a unit that has to be superimposed onto speech). A small quantity of information is allotted by the speaker to each short clause or phrase, and the limited range of vocabulary, and dependence on fixed lexical phrases (“way I live”, “dress better”, “eat properly”), are all typical of the syntax of spontaneous spoken speech.

This is not to say anything surprising or unexpected about the above passage: these characteristics are exactly what we might expect to find in a transcript of an oral interview. These findings, however, usefully illuminate the relative ambiguity of Hasina’s letters.

The letter by Hasina below draws directly on Morgina’s description of factory work, as quoted in Kabeer’s study:

[6] I have been working for three years and I like it. [7] I don’t like it at home. [8] In the factory, everyone is working and even if there is no conversation, the day passes quite well. [9] At home there is nothing, no hard work, only cooking and cleaning so I don’t like it there. [10] It is quiet and lonely at home. [11] In the factory there are more people and we are all working together. (Morgina, quoted in Kabeer, 2000: 113)

[12] Working is like cure. [13] Some find it curse I meaning Renu. [14] But I do not. [15] Sewing pass the day and I sit with friends. [16] As actual fact it bring true friendship and true love. (124)

Again, we see how Morgina’s testimony is structured by a series of intercalated clauses (particularly in 8 and 9) in a temporal sequence, in contrast with the short sentences of Ali’s reworked version. The lexical and phrasal repetition (particularly repeating “working”, “in the factory” and “at home”) that mark Morgina’s spoken account and demarcate the units of meaning (which have been punctuated and transcribed as sentences), are simply subordinated to the sentence in Ali’s version. Hasina’s words are therefore placed in a series of sentences, rather than clauses, producing the staccato effect that is so typical of her writing.

This becomes clearer if we briefly turn back to Hasina’s first letter to her sister. Hasina opens this letter:

[17] Our cousin Ahmed have given me your address praise God. [18] I hear of marriage and pray many time on your wedding day I pray now also. (18)

Hasina omits the commas which would appear in a standard grammatical rendering of these sentences, but does not replace them with any sense of a spoken rhythm. This is combined with the omission of conjunctions, pronouns and articles, to produce the short, clipped style that is characteristic of her prose, but that is not typical of the structures of spontaneous spoken speech. Instead, this gives a sense of a broken written language, where the punctuation that was integral to the sense of the sentence has been removed, rather than producing a rendering of the alternative structures of spoken prose. This forces the unit of the sentence onto what appears to be language that would resist this structure, and therefore creates letters which are underpinned by rhythms that are atypical of either speech or writing. There are, of course, many ways in which typical speech and writing might occur and it is not my intention to prescribe the way in which Hasina’s voice ought to be crafted. Nevertheless, even if Hasina’s letters give an initial sense of “orality”, their language remains only thinly differentiated from the lexicon and grammar of standard English.

To take an example from slightly later in the letter, Hasina writes:

[19] Even we have nothing I happy. [20] We have love. [21] Love is happiness. [22] Sometime I feel to run and jump like goat. [23] This is how we do on way to school. (19)

Each sentence builds on the next, accumulating meaning without the repetition we saw so clearly in Shefali’s oral response [1–5]. There is a distinct lack of coordination between clauses, which are instead punctuated with full stops and presented to the reader in artificial sentences. These sentences pull against the impression of speech that the broken written grammar is presumably supposed to create. For example, the apparent deletion of “and” between [20] and [21], leads to the deletion of an unstressed syllable that would otherwise make the language much more typical of the rhythms of plausible speech patterns.

[20] We have love. [21] Love is happiness.

The double stress (marked by italics above), and repetition of “love”, between [20] and [21] makes the sentences awkward to articulate verbally. Problematically however, this rhythmical analysis of course remains dependent on an assumption that the letters are written in English, which we know is impossible within the context of the novel’s plot, and which brings us to the heart of the problem.

Hasina’s letters attempt to represent anglophone, spoken Bangladeshi testimonies and a banglabhashi written narrative to an anglophone reader. In other words, Brick Lane selects a constitutively written and anglophone literary form (anglophone epistolarity) in its attempt to realistically contain both the oral, anglophone testimonies of several individuals (mostly from Kabeer’s account, but inflected by other Bangladeshi oral histories) and the written, banglabhashi narrative of a woman living and working in Dhaka (penned by Hasina). In essence, Ali is asking a single narrative voice to contain English and Bengali, at the same time as the oral and the written. The various aspects of this project work against each other: for example, we cannot simultaneously read English and Bengali, and therefore the narrative requires us to accept that more than one language is being represented through one. Hasina’s letters must therefore represent English and Bengali through English, and writing and orality through the structures of writing.

This puts considerable pressure on the epistolary form. Of course, this is where the potential of the literary letter could emerge most clearly. We need only to think of the many brilliantly inventive English-language representations of the speech of non-anglophone characters in twentieth century literature, to recognize that it is such moments which push authors to negotiate new ways of writing and seeing: which demand a new literary material. In fact, to expose the impossibility of simultaneously containing different languages and mediums whilst insisting on the need for cross-linguistic and transnational communication is to push the literary epistle into terrain in which the “real” letter begins to flounder. (In a “real” correspondence the anglophone reader would either have to accept non-communication with Hasina or the letters would have to be translated in advance of the reading.) And yet, unfortunately this is where the potential of Ali’s narrative breaks down. Whilst some reviewers describe the language of Hasina’s letters as a “pidgin” English, which would indeed speak to a process of creating a new language (or in this case a renewed literary material) in the contact between the anglophone and banglabhashi, in reality Hasina’s letters do not seem to be made up of a pidgin language at all. My analysis thus far has shown how Hasina’s letters seem to rely upon the (only superficially broken) lexicon and the grammar of standard written English, unlike pidgin languages which are widely acknowledged to “have a recognizable structure of their own independent of the substrate and superstrate languages involved in the original contact” (Romaine, 1988: 13). Pidgins are typically “contact” languages: reduced languages that develop when there is a need for verbal communication between two groups of people who have no language in common, often for developing trade (see Holm, 2000: 4–5). Although pidgin languages “have no native speakers” (Mühlhäusler, 1986: 5) they are not impoverished forms of the superstrate language as Europeans usually assumed during colonial encounters. If Hasina’s letters were written in pidgin, we would expect them to rely heavily on English lexicon (the superstrate language), whilst substantially reflecting the form and morphology of Bengali (the substrate language).

There is little evidence to suggest that Hasina’s letters might represent an actually existing pidgin. The major recognized pidgin languages that developed in South Asia were not English-based but were the Portuguese-based Indo Portuguese and Sri Lanka CP. Although many South Asian lascars who originated from the Sylhet District, like those in Adams’ book, would have come into contact with the complex English-based Chinese PE trade pidgin that developed on the coast of China (Holm, 2000: xvi), it is very unlikely that someone of Hasina’s background would have come into contact with this trade language. Syntactically, the distance of Hasina’s idiosyncratic language from pidgin English is even clearer. It doesn’t appear to be based on any repeatable norms of “meaning, pronunciation and grammar” as pidgins are (Holm, 2000: 5), but rather seems to be an ad hoc and rather eccentric solution to a very complex individual communication problem, within and without the novel. Ali’s predicament, where her banglabhashi character must communicate with an anglophone reader, mirrors the linguistic crisis and “urgent need for communication” that necessitated the development of pidgin languages (Holm, 2000: 1; Todd, 1990: 1–2), but without the reciprocal process of language formation that took place in this linguistic encounter.

It is revealing that a crisis of comprehension is not generated by the epistolary exchange between a writer and reader who have no language in common. Instead, this encounter produces a language that appears to be designed solely for the reader, and inflected little by the supposed language of composition. In other words, the invention of the superficial “pidgin” language of Hasina’s letters is necessitated entirely by the encounter with the anglophone reader, and leads not to a new language, or reciprocal exchange, but instead converts the banglabhashi voice into a voice for consumption by the anglophone reader. The representation of Hasina’s language in a form that is not problematized by its impossibility produces a consumable style and a curiously stable veneer of verisimilitude. The reader is not required to question her own use of language in order to correspond with Hasina, and Ali’s use of epistolary techniques and conventions emerges intact.

Hasina’s superficial “pidgin” language and “writing, to the moment” problematically support the suspension of disbelief required for the reader to accept Hasina’s letters as an authentic account of subaltern experience. The narrative hides the translation processes involved in bringing these letters to the English-speaking reader, and the more conventional interventions of the epistolary editor (which include ordering, editing, transcribing and framing the papers for the reader). Whilst self-consciousness is not an adequate substitute for new or different modes of writing, Ali’s novel does not reflect on the limitations of her literary material or offer an alternative. This closes down the possibility of uncomfortably experiencing the difficulties of the attempt to share the experiences of an individual in a radically different linguistic and cultural context, collapsing the novel’s evident aspiration to generate a fruitful encounter of world literature.

Thus, whilst epistolary conventions are used as an appropriate means of presenting aspects of the history of Bangladeshi migration, the attempt to incorporate the oral and the banglabhashi is ultimately subordinated to the demand to produce an accessible, marketable and profitable English-language book. This brings us back to the highly celebrated insight into Bangladeshi culture in London that the novel was supposed to provide, even whilst the literary institutions that celebrated this insight (publishers, booksellers, reviewers) created the very pressures that have prevented the novel from pushing beyond a monologic account designed for the field of large-scale production, towards an uncomfortable, dialogic material which is more true to its sources. It is not enough to say that the novel relies on cultural stereotypes, but is more substantially the result of an inadequate interrogation of epistolary techniques and conventions as means of producing an appropriate literary material through which to represent postcolonial experience. This does not mean that Hasina is helpless or peripheral to the novel, but that the narrative does not push the reader towards questioning her or his own knowledge of the world through encountering Hasina’s letters. The tensions between the material that Ali attempts to present and the epistolary conventions that she uses (and therefore the limitations of the epistolary form itself) are subordinated to the need to conform to market requirements, thus masking what is a more challenging narrative than critics have allowed for. The ambition to present non-written and non-anglophone elements through English-language epistolarity therefore remains latent in Brick Lane but is never fully realized. Sadly, this means that the epistolary form does not live up to its inheritance of the seven seas metaphor, and instead remains tied to producing a portrait of “Brick Lane” for the anglophone reader of Doubleday’s “big book”.