Monica Ali’s 2003 novel Brick Lane was feted by the literary establishment but prompted protests on Brick Lane itself. In a now familiar pattern, such protests were generally regarded as reflecting a conflict between creative freedom and religious or cultural minority rights. In this article, the underlying assumptions of such an interpretation are challenged, suggesting that, in a context of racial and religious inequality, where access to the public sphere is unevenly distributed, the protests are better understood as symptomatic of a subordinate social position. The occlusion of social and historical context in the mainstream response to the protests is mirrored in the novel’s obscuring of the power relations between the Bangladeshi community it focuses on and wider British society. It is argued that, by focusing on the patriarchy of that community in isolation, the novel fosters a culturalism that allows it to be read as an allegory of a woman’s individual liberation from community oppression and her journey into the neutral space of an ‘inclusive’ multicultural Britain. The necessity of a collective politics of self-representation is thus elided.
Matthew Taylor , ‘Brickbats fly as community brands novel "despicable"’, Guardian(3 December 2003 ). See <http://www.gscuk.org> for more information on the Greater Sylhet Development and Welfare Council.
2.
Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: the Rushdie affair and its legacy( London, Atlantic Books, 2009), p. 169.
3.
Arifa Akbar, ‘Brick Lane rises up against filming of Ali’s novel’, Independent (22 July 2006); Richard Lea and Paul Lewis, ‘"Insulted" residents and traders threaten to halt filming of bestselling novel Brick Lane’, Guardian (18 July 2006).
4.
In December 2004, hundreds of Sikhs demonstrated against the play (whose title translates as ‘Dishonour’) outside Birmingham’s Repertory Theatre because of its depiction of sex abuse and murder in a Sikh gurdwara. The protestors reportedly attempted to storm the theatre and the decision was taken to close the play. In 2005-6, Muslims around the world staged protests against the publication of the cartoons. British Muslims demonstrated outside the Danish embassy in London; three of these men were later jailed for inciting murder and racial hatred, and a fourth for inciting racial hatred. The controversial Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, aimed to give equal protection to all faiths, bringing Muslims and other religious groups in line with Jews and Sikhs who were already covered by race hate laws. Opposition, largely on the grounds that the Bill would curtail ‘freedom of speech’ was substantial. In October 2005, the House of Lords defeated the government; the Bill was modified and eventually passed but in considerably weakened form.
5.
Akbar, ‘Brick Lane rises up against filming of Ali’s novel’, op. cit.
6.
Natasha Walter , ‘Citrus scent of inexorable desire’ , Guardian (14 June 2003), p. 26.
7.
I am aware that the focus of the Behztiprotest, for example, was specifically the play’s location in a Sikh temple and its use of sacred symbols. See Jasdev Rai Singh, ‘Behind Behzti’, Guardian (17 January 2005).
8.
Lisa Appignanesi, ed., Free Expression is No Offence (London, Penguin, 2005), p. 49.
9.
Polly Toynbee , ‘My right to offend a fool’, Guardian (10 June 2005), p. 27.
10.
See also Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism: a civic idea( Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007), pp. 70-1.
11.
Colin McCabe , ‘Interview: Hanif Kureishi on London’ , Critical Quarterly (Vol. 41, no. 3, 1999), pp. 37-56.
12.
Tariq Modood , Multicultural Politics: racism, ethnicity and Muslims in Britain (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 111.
13.
Ibid., pp. 112, 124, 103-12; Madeleine Bunting, ‘This is about real victims’, Guardian (11 December 2004).
14.
This binary construction also underpins much of Kureishi’s fiction. For a discussion of this, see, for example, Rehana Ahmed, ‘Occluding race in selected short fiction by Hanif Kureishi’, Wasafiri (Vol. 24, no. 2, June 2009), pp. 27-34.
15.
Modood, Multicultural Politics, op. cit., p. 134.
16.
Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, op. cit., pp. 173-4.
17.
Sean O.’Neill, ‘Asian leaders warn of violence against Brick Lane film’, The Times(22 July 2006), <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article690967.ece>.
18.
Modood alerts us to the danger of ‘the argument of internal differentiation and heterogeneity’ leading to ‘an infinite regress’ in which any sense of ‘groupness’, and ultimately the ‘social world’ itself, would disappear. Modood, Multiculturalism , op. cit., pp. 120-1.
19.
Monica Ali , Brick Lane (London, Doubleday, 2003), p. 210.
20.
Henri Lefebvre , The Production of Space ( Oxford, Blackwell, 1991), p. 97.
21.
Ibid., p. 27. While the film does not reproduce this scene as such, it does capture elements from it in a dispersed fashion; and, like the novel, it represents the Bangladeshi community largely in isolation from its wider context.
22.
Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi women and labour market decisions in London and Dhaka(London, Verso, 2000), pp. 216-7.
23.
Rehana Ahmed , ‘British Muslim masculinities and cultural resistance: Kenny Glenaan and Simon Beaufoy’s Yasmin’, Journal of Postcolonial Literature (Vol. 45, no. 3, September 2009), pp. 285-96.
24.
Kabeer, The Power to Choose, op. cit., especially chapter 7.
25.
‘One reason why women may have been protected from direct experiences of racist violence are the restrictions on their movements … This protection was not available to the men from the community since their need to work, their dealings with local authorities and their greater participation in the public life of the community all combined to take them out on the streets on a more routine basis and later into the evening.’ Kabeer, The Power to Choose, op. cit., p. 274.
26.
Ali, BrickLane, op. cit., p. 47.
27.
Ibid., p. 294.
28.
While there is very little sense of Karim as an exploited worker in the novel - or indeed in the film - Chanu does emerge as a victim of racial prejudice and discrimination to some extent in both. But even here, the narrative seems to withdraw from any overt suggestion of structural antagonism. The hint in the novel that Chanu got sacked from his council job remains just that and the sense of his subordination is constantly attenuated by his ineptitudes, which come to figure as cause. See especially ibid., pp. 109, 263, 265-6.
29.
Ibid., p. 407.
30.
Sarfraz Manzoor , ‘We’ve ditched race for religion’ , Guardian (11 January 2005); Sarfraz Manzoor, Don’t Call Me Asian, BBC Radio4, 11 January 2005.
31.
Halima Begum and John Eade, ‘All quiet on the eastern front? Bangladeshi reactions in Tower Hamlets’, in Tahir Abbas, ed., Muslim Britain: communities under pressure ( London, Zed Books, 2005), p. 187.
32.
Ali, Brick Lane, op. cit., p. 407. While the Islamic politics espoused by Karim and other young community members is implicitly dismissed in the film as well, here the viewer is not presented with a secularised alternative. As in the novel, however, there is a strong inference that Islam belongs in the private domain.
33.
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op. cit., p. 55.
34.
Ali, BrickLane, op. cit., pp. 208, 373.
35.
Ibid., p. 394.
36.
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op. cit., p. 81.
37.
Ali, BrickLane, op. cit., p. 396.
38.
Nazneen’s gaze frequently rests on the footwear of Razia, Mrs Islam, Karim, the Questioner and Chanu (ibid., pp. 20, 30, 45, 200, 284). In these instances, feet become detached from the whole person, or disembodied. Other instances of disembodiment also occur: Nazneen’s neighbour becomes a ‘bobb[ing]’ head, ‘bald and red with unknown rage’ (p. 42); a juggler that she watches in Covent Garden disappears into his smile and the waitress who serves her disappears into her ringed fingers (pp. 377, 379); Razia’s husband makes dolls and brings home the fragmented, broken bodies of the rejects (pp. 39, 76). The dismembered objects are re-membered not through contextualisation but through self-referral. The trope of the fragmented image is emblematised in the photos that are taken on the family outing to Buckingham Palace and St James’s Park. Of the photos, ‘a few shots were only blurs of colour’, and of the single photo of the four of them together, ‘nothing could be made out except the feet’ (pp. 244, 246). Despite its visuality, this trope is largely absent from the film.
39.
Ibid., p. 395.
40.
Graffiti too is an act of territorialisation involving the inscription of (lack of) ownership onto space. Typically, in Nazneen’s gaze, the graffiti on the community centre is aestheticised: the claims and counter-claims of the white working-class and their Muslim antagonists ‘[kaleidoscope] into a dense pattern of silver and green and peacock blue, wounded here and there with vermilion, the colour of mehindi on a bride’s feet’ (pp. 194, 230).
41.
Ibid., p. 398.
42.
Ibid., pp. 412-3.
43.
I use the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ to indicate an ideological construction of the social subject as an individual citizen and a refusal to recognise factors of gender, race, religion or ethnicity as constitutive of the subject. This individualising and equalising mechanism, which projects an appealing notion of ‘freedom for all’, is structural to capitalist economic and social formations. A liberal multiculturalism, then, reduces difference to skin colour or to a lifestyle choice (to eat curry, to wear a sari, to listen to bhangra music) and radical cultural difference is either co-opted into the normative culture or pushed beyond the boundaries of the ‘legitimate’ and denounced as ‘illiberal’, ‘irrational’, ‘barbaric’ or ‘fundamentalist’. See Slavoj Žižek ‘Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capital’, New Left Review (Vol. 1, no. 225, 1997), p. 37: ‘Liberal "tolerance" condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance - like the multitude of "ethnic cuisines" in a contemporary megalopolis; however, any "real" Other is instantly denounced for its "fundamentalism" … the "real Other" is by definition "patriarchal", "violent", never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs.’
44.
Sukhdev Sandhu , ‘Come hungry, leave edgy’, London Review of Books(Vol. 25, no. 19, 9 October 2003), p. 13; Walter, ‘Citrus scent of inexorable desire’, op. cit., p. 26.
45.
The film ends with a different image: Nazneen and her daughters lying in the freshly fallen snow outside their tower block shortly after Chanu’s departure. This more personalised focus echoes that of the film’s version of Nazneen’s search for the runaway Shahana which omits the riot scenes so that Tower Hamlets becomes a mere backdrop for mother and daughter. The ideological effect of the film’s ending, however, is similar to that of the book: the implication is that Nazneen and her daughters are now free to act; the snow is a tabula rasa on which they can make their individual mark.
46.
Diran Adebayo , ‘Interview: Monica Ali with Diran Adebayo’ , in Susheila Nasta, ed., Writing Across Worlds: contemporary writers talk (Abingdon , Routledge, 2004), pp. 350-1.
47.
See, for example, Evening Standard (4 March 2005 ), pp. 9, 13, 15.
48.
Geraldine Bedell, ‘Full of East End promise’, Observer (15 June 2003).
49.
Huggan, Graham , The Post-Colonial Exotic: marketing the margins (London, Routledge, 2001), pp. 157-8.
50.
Adebayo, ‘Interview: Monica Ali with Diran Adebayo’, op. cit., pp. 349, 351. Ali tells Adebayo in her interview: ‘I read London journalists saying, "It opened up a whole new world that I didn’t know about that was so fascinating" … I don’t actually think that’s why they enjoyed the book. I think the fact that people will be reading it in Polish and all those other languages does say something about the real reason why some people relate to it. I wrote it simply to tell those stories.’
51.
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op. cit., p. 98. Adebayo claims that much of the fiction produced in Britain by successful non-white writers is ‘once removed’ from contemporary black Britain either in space (set in places ‘exotic to the key western market’) or in time, attributing this tendency to his view that ‘[it’s] far easier for a reader to feel pity for a slave than to be moved by the story of twenty-first-century young black British males when it’s these same males she fears when she walks out on to the street’. He raises the question of whether a novel without ‘white lines of entry’ (such as his My Once Upon A Time) can have universal appeal. Diran Adebayo, ‘Diaspora chic’, Index on Censorship (Vol. 32, no. 2, 2003), pp. 215, 217. The success of Ali’s novel despite its immersion in a non-white community and absence of obvious ‘white lines of entry’ would suggest an affirmative answer. But while Brick Laneis not ‘once removed’ as Adebayo defines this term, its portrayal of Britain’s Bangladeshi inhabitants as discrete, ‘a world apart’, or indeed ‘once removed’, does, I think, enable the reader to enter into and enjoy another culture without feeling disorientated, displaced or implicated, and therefore to feel comfortably ‘moved’.
52.
See, for example, Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, op. cit., pp. 168-9.
53.
Ian Jack , ‘It’s only a novel …’ , Guardian (20 December 2003).
54.
Ibid.
55.
Reader’s posting in response to ‘Reality can bite back’, Guardian (5 August 2006), <http://books/guardian.co.uk>.
56.
Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 34-5.
57.
Modood, Multiculturalism , op. cit., pp. 39-40, 61, 106.
58.
Jack, ‘It’s only a novel …’, op. cit.
59.
Žižek, ‘Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capital’, op. cit., p. 49; Slavoj Žižek, ‘A leftist plea for "Eurocentrism"’, Critical Inquiry(24 Summer 1998), p. 1002.
60.
Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad , op. cit., p. 172.
61.
The social deprivation of Britain’s Muslim minority has been well documented. The Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities, published in 1997, highlighted the extent of the poverty of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. See Tariq Modood et al., Ethnic Minorities in Britain: diversity and disadvantage (London, Policy Studies Institute, 1997), p. 180. Seven years later, the report on Islamophobia by the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia sketched a very similar scenario: Pakistani and Bangladeshi people continue to suffer from higher rates of poor health and experience higher levels of unemployment than national averages; and three quarters of the communities’ children ‘live in households earning less than half the national average’. Further, Islamophobic anti-terrorism legislation has led to an increased experience of victimisation among Britain’s Muslims. According to statistics published by the Home Office on 12 December 2003, ‘[i]n 2002-03, there were 32,1000 searches under the Anti-Terrorism Act, 21,900 more than in the previous year and more than 30,000 above 1999-2000 levels. Resulting from 32,100 searches, just 380 people were arrested’. See Richard Stone, Islamophobia: issues, challenges, actions: a report by the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia (Stoke on Trent, Trentham Books Ltd, 2004), pp. 30, 38. For a discussion of British Asian masculinities, see Claire E. Alexander, The Asian Gang: ethnicity, identity, masculinity(Oxford, Berg, 2000), especially pp. 235-6.
62.
Modood, Multicultural Politics, op. cit., pp. 111-12. Ali obscures this unevenness, for example, when she asserts that those commentators who voiced support for the protestors against her novel because of a misguided ‘respect for minorities’ in fact ‘silenced’ other minority voices - those of Rushdie, Kaur Bhatti and herself - implying an uneasy equation between working-class British Bangladeshis and British Asian members of the literary establishment. See Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, op. cit., p. 170. This is suggestive of a claim to what Madeleine Bunting describes as ‘inverted victimhood’ in her insightful discussion of the campaign by English PEN against the proposals for legislation against incitement to religious hatred. See Bunting, ‘This is about real victims’, op. cit.
