The Journal of Commonwealth

Literature
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Shapes and Shadows: (Un)veiling the Immigrant in Monica Ali's Brick Lane Jane
Hiddleston
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2005 40: 57 DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050665
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Shapes and Shadows

Shapes and Shadows: (Un)veiling the Immigrant

in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
Jane Hiddleston
University of Warwick, UK
Most of the flats that closed three sides of a square had net curtains and the life behind was all shapes and
shadows.1
Monica Ali’s Brick Lane burst into the public domain in the summer of 2003, generating both
enthusiastic critical acclaim and defensive anger. Praised by some for providing a much needed and
so far unprecedented portrait of the Bangladeshi community of London’s East End, the novel also
irritated some members of that community, who saw its portrayal of their lives as inaccurate and
derogatory. While some readers congratu- lated Ali for pulling back the curtains of the residences of
Tower Hamlets and depicting the injustices and dissatisfactions suffered by their inhabi- tants,
others were shocked by her boldness and offended by what they considered to be a gross
misrepresentation of Bengali culture in London. Included in Granta’s list of best young authors,
nominated for the US Award of the National Book Critics’ Circle, and short-listed for the Booker Prize,
Ali at the same time received a letter from the Greater Sylhet Development and Welfare council
condemning her depiction of Bangladeshis as backward and uneducated. This divided response to
Ali’s work reveals not only differences in readerly expectations and preconceptions regarding the
community in hand, but also a mire of uncertainties concerning the nature of literary representation,
in this particular case and more generally. This article will try to elucidate these uncertainties and
establish more clearly the nature and implications of Ali’s fictional experimentation in Brick Lane.
Both the responses cited above seem still to rely on some notion of literature as realist documen-
tation, but an alternative approach might focus instead on the difficulties of such a construction, on
the deceptive effects of the text’s rhetoric. The
Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications www.sagepublications.com (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi) Vol 40(1):57–72.
DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050665
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58 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

novel at times draws attention to its own artifice, rather than purporting to provide straightforward
knowledge about a community unfamiliar to many readers. I want to examine the fraught
relationship between these readings, and the novel’s ambivalent call to the reader to interpret it on
two seemingly incompatible levels.
Ali’s novel to a certain extent sets itself up as a fresh look behind the closed doors of a segregated
community positioned at the centre of the British capital. Situated at the heart of London, side by
side with the financial centre of the city, the geographical area around Brick Lane is nevertheless
still conceived as a segregated space for the underprivi- leged. Although this segregation, this sense
of separation from the rest of society, means that it is increasingly perceived as a tourist attraction,
the area is still associated with stereotypes and myths of backwardness, delinquency and social
nonconformity. Sukhdev Sandhu’s review of Brick Lane in The London Review of Books traces some
of the history of this exclusion, noting that from as early as the eighteenth century the area has
been “a home for those who have been pushed out of their homes”.2 It housed Huguenot refugees
escaping French persecution, followed by East European Jews fleeing the pogroms in 1882, and
immi- grants from Bangladesh, Malta, Cyprus, the Caribbean and Somalia have been settling there
for over two hundred years.3 The Bangladeshi com- munity is currently by far the largest of these
groups, in part due to an influx of migrant workers who arrived from Dhaka in the 1960s in the hope
of finding work in textile factories. As the area has become more and more densely populated by
Bangladeshis, and as these seemingly transient migrants become a more settled and permanent
population, Brick Lane has also become a site of cultural conflict, and the number of racist attacks
has continued to grow. In addition, the area has seen a sharp rise in radical Islam, as the community
seeks its own identity in an attempt to fight back against discrimination and prejudice. Brick Lane
has more recently been affected by rising (exoticist) consumerism, but it is still associated with
social deprivation and poorly maintained housing estates, the inhabitants of which struggle to keep
up with the boom in capitalist culture infiltrating nearby streets. One part of Ali’s endeavour consists
in puncturing the myths that circulate around this annexed region, and she seeks at once to
humanize the apparent “underclass” of its residents and to expose the preconceptions informing
popular images of the unfamiliar stranger within.
From this point of view, the early evocation of “shapes and shadows” in Brick Lane announces Ali’s
daring attempt to give form to the hazy figures that flicker behind the surface of persistent
stereotypes and mis- conceptions. Ali boldly looks behind the walls of an area thought to be
populated by migrants, living at once within and outside British society,
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Shapes and Shadows 59

and whose cultural practices continue to provoke bafflement and alarm. Discussion of the extent to
which the novel does actually reveal the sub- terranean existence of the real inhabitants of Brick
Lane, however, perhaps ignores the multi-layered nature of the project. First, the very notion of the
“shapes and shadows” draws attention to the haziness of the figures sketched by Ali. The image of
the net curtains plays on the notion of revelation or viewing, since they precisely allow the
inhabitant to see without being seen, and to frustrate the viewer’s desire to see. All we are offered
are murky silhouettes, and this partial veiling both provokes and eludes our quest for knowledge.
Furthermore, the use of this Platonic metaphor precisely reminds us that these characters are mere
forms or outlines, imperfect shadows that fail to reveal any under- lying truth. The evocation of
characters in these terms emphasizes the ways in which they are flawed, insubstantial imitations;
they are not real essences but forms carved out in language. Ali’s text is split, then, by this
contradiction between the hope for revelation on the one hand, and knowledge of the impossibility
of any complete unveiling on the other. She wants to illuminate a set of lives that have frequently
been forgotten and set aside, and the novel clearly seeks to uncover subjectivities that have so far
been deprived of a public voice. At the same time, however, the process of uncovering can itself be
read as a fictional construction created in discourse.
Secondly, Ali’s gesture of pulling back the curtains can be seen as the latest, modern version in a
series of endeavours to unveil the mysteries of an “Eastern” culture. Said’s Orientalism tracks the
history of this mythologization, locating across different forms of cultural production the Western
desire to know and appropriate the “Oriental” other.4 Said’s scope includes both the quest for
knowledge underpinning colonial occu- pation, and cultural narratives tracing the confusion of such
discoveries with subjective and aesthetic fantasies and desires. One common trope, moreover,
which resonates in particular with Ali, is that of unveiling, and of the penetration of interior space,
demonstrated perhaps most famously by Delacroix. The celebrated Femmes d’Alger dans leur
appartement was the product of the painter’s unorthodox penetration into the women’s quarters in
the house of one of the raïs during his travels in North Africa. First, the work is at once a revealing
depiction of a space conventionally shielded from the public gaze, and a somewhat fetishized
portrait of a subject already formed by Orientalist myths and stereotypes. It serves both to raise
questions about the nature of women’s existence cloistered in the harem, and to draw attention to
the traps of the representation process, as the painting plays on exoticist misrepresenta- tions and
the deceptive allure of the unfamiliar other. Secondly, however, the Delacroix painting then seems
to question its own endeavour, as the
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60 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

women are portrayed as distant and dreamy, immersed in another world to which we cannot gain
full access. The penetration of women’s private, interior space does not necessarily result in
concrete discovery or knowl- edge.
Ali’s Brick Lane undertakes a similar project insofar as it invites us to discover the occluded lives of
the disenfranchized while also, para- doxically, showing the pervasive influence of myth in our
apprehension of “Eastern” cultures. On one level, the text can be seen as an attempt to exhibit the
life-styles and customs of a community traditionally either hidden from view or depicted according
to popular stereotypes, and Ali sets out to inform her readers by portraying the supporters of radical
Islam (as if) from the inside. To a certain extent, indeed like Delacroix, Ali wants to expose the
suffering of an oppressed segment of society, and she also humanizes and provides a context for a
form of Islamic cultural practice that has perhaps recently generated more suspicion and more
myth-making than any other custom. Nevertheless, while Ali wants to destroy certain myths, her
own text testifies to the impossibility of ridding one’s narrative of any mythologizing tendencies, and
her text displays the traps and lures of the representation process itself. The novel can be read as a
quest for knowledge, for unveiling, but it simultaneously betrays its own shaky status as a fictional
construction that masks as much as it reveals.
The text can in this way be read on two levels. The first of these would be concerned with its
success or failure as an accurate depiction of the people living behind the curtains of the flats
situated around Brick Lane. Since the novel does name that community and is quite explicit about
its aims to unveil it, its treatment as a “realist” text seems justifi- able. The second level, however,
would emphasize not the accuracy of the representation but the text’s own use of rhetoric and its
self- exposure as a discourse among many alternative, available versions or myths. As Nicholas
Harrison points out in Postcolonial Criticism, both approaches are determined by a history of reading
conventions and practices.5 Harrison’s conclusion to his explorations of Conrad, Camus, Chraibi and
Djebar stresses how literary texts do not intrinsically call for the use of just one set of interpretative
strategies, and the under- standing of literature as a process of formal experimentation belongs to a
very particular reading community. In the context of Ali’s work, however, since critics have already
assessed its efficacy as a portrait of a particular social phenomenon, it might now be illuminating to
fore- ground precisely those tropes and devices that announce its status as an artificial construct.
Existing readings, that conceive the text either as uniquely revelatory or as grossly
misrepresentative, can be counter- posed with this awareness of its implications as a literary
experiment, a
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Shapes and Shadows 61

space where different discourses and rhetorical strategies are juxtaposed and realigned.
Brick Lane focuses on the trying life of its central character, Nazneen, born in Bangladesh, married
off at an early age to the overweight, frog- faced Chanu and shipped off to London to live with him in
Tower Hamlets. Ali concentrates in minute detail on the intricacies of Nazneen’s life, shut away from
the world with no freedom to make decisions of her own, and the narrative revels in its permeation
of the interior of the home, as well as in its dissection of her repressed longings. Agony and stupor
at the death of her first son are followed by the dull gnawing of routine domesticity, broken only by
seemingly ridiculous fan- tasies about ice-skating, learned from the competitions she avidly watches
on the television. Later on in the novel, Nazneen meets Karim, an activist for a local Islamic group,
whose seductive energy enthrals the housewife and leads her into an illicit affair. Through Nazneen’s
relation- ship with Karim, Ali explores the allure of the Islamic cause for charac- ters who desperately
need to reclaim a sense of self, and the text subtly juxtaposes depictions of hope with scattered
comments on racism, preju- dice, deprivation and social inequality. Noting also the conflicts between
Nazneen, Chanu and their daughters, the novel seems to want to provide insight into the frustration
and disorientation of a particular generation, caught between cultures and struggling to define itself
on its own terms, according to its own choices and beliefs.
Since the novel opens with the scene of Nazneen’s birth, one of the first issues Ali deals with is
cultural practice and custom back in Bangladesh. In a style at this point reminiscent of Rushdie’s
humorous exaggerations, Ali comically describes the mother Rupban’s surprise at the premature
arrival, and subsequent survival, of the tiny Nazneen, by infusing the narrative with fantastic
analogies and hints of unexplained customs or beliefs. Even in these opening pages, however, the
reader is forced to consider the implications and effects of common stereotypes or rhetorical tropes.
Ali already starts to plant images stemming from manufactured expectations regarding Bengali
culture and thought, and in so doing she immediately casts doubt over her own project of revel-
ation. One reviewer, Natasha Walter, complains in this context that Ali uses: “forgettable images.
Nazneen’s mother ‘had been ripening like a mango on a tree’. The midwife ‘was more desiccated
than an old coconut’”.6 From this point of view, Ali’s imagery seems somewhat stereotypical and
contrived, taking obvious, stock signifiers of an exotic Eastern culture and using them to caricature
the community of “foreign” characters evoked. Whether or not Ali intended to include such stereo-
types in order to provoke the reader, or indeed whether she absorbed them unwittingly and
reproduced them intact, remains in some sense
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62 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

open to question in this early scene. Most importantly, however, what is compelling about the
passage is that in depicting Nazneen’s origins in Bangladesh, Ali is precisely drawing attention to
Western assumptions and stereotypes, or at least to the ways in which popular images serve to
organize and shape our perceptions of Asian culture. A further example might be when Hamid
greets the birth of a daughter, as opposed to a son, with resolute indifference before Ali cuts to an
evocation of curry smells, and here the use of such stock images again provokes us into interrogat-
ing our preconceptions as readers approaching Bangladesh from the outside. Ali does herself
pinpoint this shaky, mythical perception of Bangladesh, when she comments in an interview on the
detachment of migrant families from their countries of origin and their continued use of fantastical
imagery to enrich their knowledge of what they left behind: “home, because it could never be
reached, became mythical: Tagore’s golden Bengal, a teasing counterpoint to our drab northern
milltown lives”.7 In the novel, Chanu teaches his daughter to recite Tagore’s poem, hoping to
familiarize her with her origins, but Shahana’s disengagement and mistrust highlight the
contrivance of using such imagery to re- establish links between the second generation and the
original culture of their “roots”.
Ali’s portrayal of Nazneen’s sister Hasina, and the transcription of her letters from Bangladesh, has
aroused similar critical concern. Many critics who praise the rest of Ali’s narrative struggle to accept
Hasina’s letters as a convincing indication of the suffering experienced as a result of defying one’s
parents in favour of a “love marriage” in Bangladesh. Written in broken English, the letters convey
Hasina’s growing despair, as her husband becomes violent, her marriage falls apart and she is
forced to seek work in a factory, even as a prostitute, and as a maid. Yet the style of the letters
emphasizes Hasina’s naivety and vulnerability, and seems on one level to reinforce prevalent
assumptions regarding the relentless subordination of women in postcolonial Islamic societies.8
Despite her attempts to speak out against the restrictions of tradition, Hasina is por- trayed as
bewildered, faltering, desperate to please and unsure of how to take control of her fate. In one
extract, we witness her husband’s search for perfection in his wife and Hasina’s apparent,
uncomprehending acquiescence:
You know my husband tell me this. First moment he see me it the perfect moment in his whole and entire life.
This is how he say. In his whole and entire life. He like to live it again and he planning to make it come again as
an actual fact. He have me sit in bed and put my hair in certain way over one shoulder. Sheet is smooth at one
end and crumple at other. I must tilt my face so or so. But light is never right. I hold head too tight or too loose.
It hard for him not to get angry he trying to make something perfect.
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Shapes and Shadows 63 Sometime he say my face have change and he tell me to change it back but
I soothe and he is quiet again.9
Passages such as this overstate Hasina’s pitiable condition, and the ten- tative, broken sentences
and grammatical confusion convey an imposs- ible helplessness. Moreover, many readers have
pointed out that both sisters speak Bengali, so it seems baffling that the letters should have been
written in this stilted, pidgin style, and the language only makes the letters seem “banal and
comic”.10 Hasina’s non-mastery of English unnecessarily overemphasizes her weakness, and adds a
certain con- trived drama to the conflict between the demanding Muslim husband and his wife. Even
worse, Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books comments that “at times, Hasina sounds
more like a travel writer from England than an oppressed woman from Bangladesh, especially when
she reports on the rickshaws in Dhaka painted with the face of Britney Spears”.11 This criticism
directly allies Ali’s use of dialect with Western stereotypes rather crassly informing conceptions of
the confrontation between East and West.
Once again, these reservations towards the letters are valid, and Hasina’s character is undoubtedly
a little unsubtle in its collusion with Western preconceptions of women’s subjugation under Islam.
Since Ali’s text is a work of literature, however, and since at other times the author deliberately
undermines mythologized depictions of “the Eastern other”, it is worth considering not only the
“accuracy” of the letters but also their implications as a literary device. Indeed, perhaps Ali’s text
can be read not as a “faithful” transcript of any “exemplary” letter-writing but rather as a forum
where myths circulating around both cultures are exposed in order to provoke the reader. The stock
images of Hasina’s letters are themselves testimony to the pervasiveness of such stereotypes in
Bangladesh as well as in Britain, and their inclusion in a novel such as this forces us to consider the
difficulty of attempting to free any represen- tation of cultural identity from their influence.
Consciously or not, Ali draws our attention to the ongoing entrenchment of popular misconcep- tions
in both countries, and to the role of prejudice in reinforcing patterns of inequality and oppression.
She sets out to depict the mistreatment of women in Bangladesh, but she also displays prevalent
assumptions con- cerning their ability to understand and express their position. Further- more, the
halting style in which the extracts are written feeds the anglophone reader’s expectations that
Hasina should be somehow “foreign”, or unable to express herself using rational or argumentative
language. The clumsiness and incoherence of her letters signifies her situ- ation outside the
dominant paradigms of Englishness, and it connotes a cultural frontier lingering in the mind of the
reader.
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64 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

Ali’s exploration of the “shapes and shadows” of Bengali culture and experience in this way consists
both in an unveiling of certain pervasive social and cultural structures and in a commentary on the
discourses informing our knowledge of those structures. Similarly, the author’s portrait of Nazneen’s
closeted existence in Tower Hamlets too raises the question of our deluded desire for unmediated
knowledge. On one level, Ali’s intricate examination of the details of Nazneen’s everyday life sets
out to traverse boundaries between public and private, and to provide the reader with knowledge
about the detailed customs of those ordinar- ily enclosed in their ghetto. The narrator elaborates
minutely on the material contents and physical attributes of the interior in an effort to convey the
intricacies of the scene behind the curtains. Sandhu judges the technique as “pointlessly accretive,
compendious”, and suggests that Ali is somewhat clumsy in her desire to describe each minute
detail of the flat’s unknown interior. Once again, however, another reading might emphasize how
the descriptions precisely draw our attention to the mechanics of revelation, of the deluded desire to
collect and accumulate noteworthy pieces of information.12 In one of the first scenes inside the flat,
for example, objects and decorations are precisely enumerated one by one:
There were three rugs: red and orange, green and purple, brown and blue. The carpet was yellow with a green
leaf design. One hundred per cent nylon and, Chanu said, very hard-wearing. The sofa and chairs were the
colour of dried cow dung, which was a practical colour. They had little sheaths of plastic on the headrests to
protect them from Chanu’s hair oil. There was a lot of furniture, more than Nazneen had seen in one room
before. Even if you took all the furniture in the compound, from every auntie and uncle’s ghar, it would not
match up to this one room. There was a low table with a glass centre and orange plastic legs, three little
wooden tables that stacked together, the big table they used for the evening meal, a bookcase, a corner
cupboard, a rack for newspapers, a trolley filled with files and folders, the sofa and armchairs, two footstools, six
dining chairs and a showcase. The walls were papered in yellow with brown squares and circles lining neatly up
and down. (p. 15)
The relentless piling up of details in this passage foregrounds the greedy quest for knowledge
subtending the attempt to enumerate and check the minutiae of the family’s existence. In a way
that recalls the detailed pro- fusion and ebullience of Balzac’s descriptions, or the eventual
eradication of any coherent image from Flaubert’s playful rhetorical experiments, the passage
finishes by reminding us of the ultimate meaninglessness of the disparate objects and decorations
piled up in front of our eyes. Both these apparently “realist” writers trouble their own processes of
representation by adding an excess of spurious detail that leads to the disintegration of
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Shapes and Shadows 65

any coherent image. Equally, Ali traces the intricate modulations of Nazneen’s fleeting reactions to
her environment, noting for example how, after looking around the room and observing the flaws in
the flat’s décor: “she looked and she saw that she was trapped inside this body, inside this room,
inside this flat, inside this concrete slab of entombed humanity” (p. 61). In this example, the drive to
unveil the changing inner musings of her sequestered heroine results in a simple metaphor imposed
upon the character by the narrator, rather than in genuine insight into the inacces- sible world of the
immigrant woman’s psyche.
In the process of drawing the reader into Nazneen’s consciousness, Ali also plays with narrative
perspective and self-consciously explores the mechanics of such an intrusion. If on the one hand she
is seeking to reveal Nazneen’s inner thoughts and to display the suppressed effects of her seclusion,
Ali at the same time constantly shifts her perspective so as to raise the question of who speaks for
whom. In the passages elucidating Nazneen’s private reflections, the perspective often switches
from that of an external narrator to free indirect discourse, giving the impression that the character
speaks for herself. Crafted metaphors, for example, are juxtaposed with more direct, unmediated
reactions. In one passage, Ali describes Nazneen’s ill-defined dissatisfaction, and shifts from the
position of an observant narrator to an apparent transcription of the character’s desperate thoughts:
There was this shapeless, nameless thing that crawled across her shoulders and nested in her hair and poisoned
her lungs, that made her both restless and listless. What do you want with me? she asked it. What do you want?
it hissed back. She asked it to leave her alone but it would not. She pre- tended not to hear, but it got louder.
She made bargains with it. No more eating in the middle of the night. No more dreaming of ice, and blades, and
spangles. No more missed prayers. No more gossip. No more dis- respect to my husband. She offered all these
things for it to leave her. It listened quietly, and then burrowed deeper into her internal organs. (p. 83)
Here, if at the beginning of the passage the image of the shapeless burden is clearly a literary
construction formed by the narrator, later on it becomes merely the indistinct trigger for Nazneen’s
confused demands upon herself. The shorter exigencies – “no more eating . . .” and so on – seem
more concrete manifestations of the character’s unease, neverthe- less introduced in the form of a
created metaphor. In flickering in and out of Nazneen’s thoughts in this way, Ali tentatively
endeavours to “give voice” to her character, but she also uses her narrator as a frame. She
oscillates between perspectives and registers as if to uncover the different layers of the text’s
construction and to dramatize the unsettled relation- ship between the character and the narrative
that gives her form.
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66 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

One of the most provocative aspects of Ali’s endeavour to uncover both the secrets of Nazneen’s
existence and the mechanics of its representation is her treatment of her relationship with radical
Islam. In tracing Nazneen’s growing interest in Karim and the Bengal Tigers, Ali succeeds in showing
how the religion itself is always apprehended through symbols, signs and stereotypes, whose
underlying substance is difficult to identify. First, the novel confronts myths associating radical Islam
with irrational fanaticism, and treats its proponents also as suffer- ing individuals with a plethora of
reasons for seeking a specific cause. Islam is currently seen by many in the West as a threat to
civilization and democracy, and therefore as an incomprehensible and foreign other encapsulating
all that Western society is not.13 Certainly the religion as a whole has mistakenly been aligned with
terrorism, and widespread ignor- ance has given rise to popular images of a fixed set of tenets,
promoting oppression and violence, at odds with principles of freedom and equality. Ali confronts
these stereotypes, and presents the characters’ anger not as a mythical, incomprehensible hatred of
the West but as a desperate reaction to their unequal status in that society. The Islamic group’s
meetings, for example, are hardly driven by the promotion of a focused set of beliefs but comprise a
series of chaotic ramblings, as different char- acters express varying ideas regarding the (shaky)
future of the organiz- ation. The motives of the speakers seem to be less a resistance to
“democracy” than the affirmation of some form of Muslim presence in a society that fails to
recognize their rights. Debates about the attacks on the World Trade Center, or sanctions in Iraq,
incite controversy and con- fusion rather than agreement for concrete action, and the participants
express a general sense of injustice through contradictory arguments. This presentation of the
evolution of the radical Islamist cause as an amalgamation of frustrations contradicts existing
judgements that condemn those apparently inimical to democracy as a principle. Notably, and this
is an argument also advocated in S. Sayyid’s analysis of A Funda- mental Fear, it is Western
hegemony and the marginalization of other cultures, rather than modernity itself, that sparks the
anger of the Islamist campaigners.14
For Nazneen, moreover, the return to Islam is neither a political nor a religious move but a symbol of
reassurance or hope. Early on in the novel, Islam seems significant for her not because of the
meaning of its tenets, nor because of its antipathy for Western society, but because it is a structure
that provides her with stability. Islam is a form or a signifier, connoting identity and certainty. When
apprehensive before Dr Azad comes for dinner, for example, Nazneen takes the Qu’ran down from
its shelf to remind herself of God’s watchful presence, until “the words calmed her stomach and she
was pleased. Even Dr Azad was nothing as
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Shapes and Shadows 67

to God. To God belongs all that the heavens and the earth contain” (p. 14). Here, the words
themselves comfort Nazneen, their rhythms offer solace as much or indeed more than their content.
Shortly after this moment, Ali notes that Nazneen does not always understand the words she recites,
but their echo itself resonates with soothing associations. She knows Islam through the sounds of its
signifiers rather than through its underlying truths.
As the novel progresses, the nature of Nazneen’s recourse to Islam changes, yet form continues to
take precedence over content. Evidently, her interest in the activist group, the Bengal Tigers, is
bound up with her fascination for Karim, its inspired leader. But in describing Nazneen’s increasing
attraction to the religion and the man, Ali continues to draw the reader’s attention to the symbols
and signs that structure her per- ception of both. After her first attendance at a meeting, Nazneen
begins to understand her indistinct and gnawing sense of unease in terms of religious oppression:
“she mistook the sad weight of longing in her stomach for sorrow, and she read in the night of
occupiers and orphans, of Intifada and Hamas” (p. 201). The Islamic cause gives shape and struc-
ture to the hazy dissatisfaction of her day-to-day existence. Similarly, Karim’s fervour seduces her
not because of the inherent substance of his words but because he exudes confidence and hope.
When listening to him pray, she attends less to the content of his speech than to his calm self-
assurance and the accompanying poise of his bodily movements (“in prayer he does not falter,
thought Nazneen. And she pleaded with herself to keep fast to the words” [p. 193]). Ali’s
descriptions of Karim, at times in free indirect discourse from the point of view of Nazneen, similarly
pick out symbolic details, such as his dress, his pose, the ways in which he chooses to present
himself, in order further to emphasize the signifi- cance of form. Charting in detail his jeans and
trainers, and later his switch to a panjabi-pyjama and a skullcap, Ali underlines the ways in which his
identity, and Nazneen’s interpretation of it, rely on these surface signifiers. Ali’s investigation of
radical Islam in London recalls Hanif Kureishi’s Black Album and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, but the
concentration on visual and rhetorical details, and Nazneen’s delectation of these, adds this formal
nuance to Shahid or Millat’s social and political questioning in the former novels.
Traces and signs of the distorting effects of the representation process unsettle depictions of both
resurgent Islamism and the intimate relation- ship between Nazneen and Karim. The novel at times
seeks to rescue its characters from overdetermination by entrenched stereotypes, but it also shows
how representations will persist in shaping our aspirations and desires. In warning her readers not to
misread Islam simply as an evil attack on Western democracy, Ali also reminds us that the visions of
the
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68 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

religion’s followers are equally informed by created images and symbols. Nazneen’s journey, then, is
perhaps one of progress towards a realization of this process. Having summoned the courage to
defy her husband, and refusing to accompany him back to Bangladesh, she also finally distances
herself from Karim and her former perception of him, and she admits: “I wasn’t me, and you weren’t
you. From the very beginning to the very end, we didn’t see things. What we did – we made each
other up” (p. 380). Her relationship with Karim in this sense relied on an image she had fabricated, a
constructed simulacrum, rather than on any (impossible) understanding of his substance.
Concomitantly, Karim created her char- acter as “an idea of home. An idea of himself that he found
in her”, and both lovers reshaped the other to suit his or her own private needs. While avoiding
these processes may well be impossible, and while the charac- ters’ desires are as a result no less
urgent, Ali purposefully exhibits the traps and lures of representation even in their apprehension of
one another. In searching for a cause, a symbol of future certainty and stability, Nazneen learns
instead about the constructed, artificial nature of such symbols.
While Ali’s novel offers a subtle indication of the myths circulating around our knowledge of
Bangladesh, of Islam, and indeed of her char- acters’ own personal desires, the structure of
contemporary racist thinking constitutes the most overt target and provides a more cutting political
context for the novel. It has been noted that Brick Lane spends surprisingly little time examining
racial hatred in London’s East End. Sandhu’s aforementioned lengthy review comments that while
Ali’s text displays the chaotic factionalism of resurgent Islam, the novel has dis- appointingly little to
say about the campaign of violence and intimidation against the Bangladeshis of Brick Lane. Closer
attention to Ali’s work does, however, reveal that an awareness of the rhetoric informing per-
ceptions of Bangladeshi immigrants and their position in British society clearly structures the
characters’ mental world. While Ali certainly refrains from cataloguing racist attacks, she does
demonstrate how popular misconceptions drive the broader political consciousness of the host
society and affect immigrants’ lives. It is through this analysis of common images, terms and
buzzwords that Ali critiques the racist environment in which her characters live.
One important example of Ali’s denunciation of racist rhetoric can be found in her references to the
media. It is through the television that the characters find out about the Muslim riots in Oldham, and
in describing such images, Ali focuses on the movement of the camera, its choice of different
settings, more than on the events themselves. The way in which the riots are reconstructed by the
moving image is as significant in fuelling stereotypes as the violence itself. A further example occurs
at the
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Shapes and Shadows 69

end of the novel, when local politicians and councillors tour the estate, followed by uncertain and
directionless television crews looking for a drugs scandal:
Television crews came in the afternoon. There was nothing to film, so they filmed each other. They returned
after dark and filmed the boys riding around in cars. They found the disused flats where the addicts gathered to
socialize with their addictions, and filmed the grotty mattresses and the bits of silver foil. It was a sensation. It
was on the local news. (p. 406)
In this passage, Ali notes how the cameramen initially find nothing to feed their suspicions, but
continue to seek evidence of poverty and delinquency until their expectations are fulfilled. Once
again, the photo- graphed images both create and prop up social and racial prejudices. Lastly, Ali
intermittently picks up on the hypocrisy and artifice of the terms informing debates on immigration,
such as “integration”, “assimi- lation”, “culture and religion” as opposed to “race” (p. 198). The sign,
in English and Bengali, warning “Vandals will be prosecuted” is also exposed as “pure rhetoric” (p.
194). Political debate, as well as social misperception, conceals an inadequate understanding of the
immigrant community at stake.
This reading of Brick Lane as an arena for the exposure of a variety of rhetorical figures and tropes
defines the work’s status as a literary experiment. Ali’s work of fiction exposes the workings of some
of the skewed discourses and images created by both British and Muslim com- munities about
themselves. On the one hand, though this is rarely made explicit in the novel, Ali reacts against the
traditional Muslim belief in the unmediated truth of the Qu’ran by exposing the rhetorical structures
shaping our understanding of Islam, and also of society, East and West, self and other. Radical
Muslims believe that the word of God is uncre- ated; literature and its exploration of multiple layers
and possibilities becomes an object of suspicion that poses a threat to this purity. Hanif Kureishi
pinpoints this distaste through the character Riaz, in The Black Album, who exhorts: “all fiction is, by
its very nature, a form of lying – a perversion of truth”.15 Furthermore, the furore generated by
Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses testifies even more disturbingly to the Islamic mistrust of literary
experimentation, since it was evidently Rushdie’s depiction of the religion as subject to endless
reinterpretation and rewriting that offended Muslim readers. The Satanic Verses explored how texts
offer a subjective slant, a constructed vision, rather than pure truth. Rushdie’s defence of his novel
in turn took the form of a renewed call for the intrin- sic value of literary experimentation, for an
understanding of the mediated nature of all discourses: “the novel has always been about the way
in which different languages quarrel, and about the shifting relations
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70 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

between them, which are relations of power”.16 Tying in with the work of Kureishi and Rushdie, Ali
too displays the constructed nature of all narratives in a challenge to any apparent demand for
truth. Her literary text foregrounds the role of artifice in shaping our understandings of religion and
cultural practice.
Even more notably, Ali challenges not only any tendency to mistake discourse for truth, but also
those literary critical assumptions that ally the author too closely with the community she seems to
represent in her work. The text subverts not only the search for religious truth, but also the demand
for a stable authorial figure painting the portrait of a com- munity of which she is unequivocally a
part. When approaching texts in particular by writers who do not belong to the traditional national
canon, readers perhaps rather too frequently take that author as a spokesperson for the “minority”
group to which they seem to belong and read the work as a testimony to the experiences of that
group. Such critical moves again assume that literature is necessarily realist, and they also contrive
an impossibly seamless relationship between author and textual construc- tion. As I suggested, this
tendency is perhaps particularly notable in the context of “minority literatures”, as, according to
Nicholas Harrison, “it is indeed ‘members’ of minority groups who are most liable to be read as
representative, that is, liable to stereotyping, and who find themselves unable to act as individuals
to the extent that their every action may be taken as typical of the type to which they find
themselves assigned”.17 Tying in with this, many critics of Ali’s Brick Lane have similarly been too
keen to define the author as a member of the community she depicts. On the other hand, other
readers maintain this sense of a direct link between author and textual world, but criticize Ali
because she herself has not shared the experiences of her heroine Nazneen.
Ali herself, however, reacts against what she terms “the tyranny of representation”, a phrase
inherited from C.L.R James, meaning “that when I speak, my brown skin is the dominant signifier”.18
Instead she stresses her own shady, marginal relationship with her text. She claims neither to write
as a Bangladeshi woman living in London’s East End (she lives in South London in any case), nor as
a distant observer, but from the periphery, occupying no fixed or specified position. Recalling once
more the metaphor of the “shapes and shadows”, Ali asserts that she stands “neither behind a
closed door nor in the thick of things, but rather in the shadow of the doorway”. She is an uncertain
and indistinct figure who tries not to voice her own experiences but to allow the text to speak for
itself. Her assumption of an uneasy position in the peripheral shadows of the text suggests that she
wants to efface herself behind the different discourses she puts into play. She has no determined
argument, no personal hold upon the work, but uses the space of fiction to exhibit and perform a
series of
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Shapes and Shadows 71

culturally and rhetorically produced figures. Furthermore, in effacing herself in this way, Ali is placing
the reader in an active position and forcing her to reflect on her own desires in relation to the text,
her desire for knowledge and insight, and her search for political or cultural critique.
Finally, it may seem surprising that a text that can justifiably be taken as a highly perceptive and
readable commentary on an under- represented community also unsettles its representational goals
by foregrounding its own artifice. Since the work has generated some controversy, however,
attention to its rhetorical strategies helps to elaborate its rather more complex relationship with its
social setting and its multi-layered construction as a fictional text. This emphasis on form and
rhetoric does not result in the dissociation of the work from any notion of an actual social world.
Brick Lane, in its exploration of discur- sive structures, is not entirely abstracted from the real Brick
Lane, and it does seek to offer insight into the lives of an existing group of immi- grants in the East
End. Nevertheless, parts of the novel draw attention to its very mediated position in relation to
those immigrants, and careful reading can bring out the illusions that structure our perception of the
unfamiliar other. From this point of view, the reader finishes less with an increased knowledge of the
experiences of an unfamiliar section of the British population than with a sense of unease towards
the sorts of discourse used to construct such knowledge. The novel is thus not a testi- mony offering
reliable information but a linguistic operation, and it forces us to reflect on the difficulties of
accessing its referent in an unmediated way. Its sketched outlines trace “shapes and shadows”, pro-
visional forms, rather than determinate individuals or incontrovertible truths.
NOTES
1 Monica Ali, Brick Lane. London: Doubleday, 2003, p. 12. All subsequent references to the text are to this
edition.
2 See Sukhdav Sandhu, “Come Hungry, Leave Edgy”, London Review of Books, 9 October 2003,
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n19/sand/01_.html.
3 For more background, see Charles Husband, “The Political Context of Muslim Communities’ Participation in
British Society”, Muslims in Europe, ed. Bernard Lewis and Dominique Schnapper, London and New York: Pinter,
1994, pp. 79–97.
4 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Harmonds- worth: Penguin, 1978.
5 See Nicholas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction, Cambridge: Polity,
2003.
6 Natasha Walter, “Citrus Scent of Inexorable Desire”, The Guardian, 14 June 2003,
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,975714,00.html.
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72 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

7 See Monica Ali, “Where I’m Coming From”, http://www.powells.com/from theauthor/ali.html.
8 Critics such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty have examined this phenomenon, whereby well-meaning
Western feminists equate Islam with oppression, and sexual segregation and the control of women are seen as
universal problems in countries such as India, Pakistan, Egypt, etc. Mohanty points out the risk that “a large
number of different, fragmented examples from a variety of countries also add up to a universal fact”. See
“Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”, in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial
Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993:
196–220 (p. 209). More recently, Sangeeta Ray has examined the mythologization precisely of Indian women in
En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narrative, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.
9 Monica Ali, Brick Lane, p. 143. 10 This is Sukhdav Sandhu’s description. 11 See Pankaj Mishra,
“Enigmas of Arrival”, The New York Review of Books,
18 December 2003, pp. 42–3 (p. 42). 12 Again, this is Sandhu’s evaluation. 13 For more on this, see
Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and
Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, London: Vintage, 1997. This perception of a division
between Islam and the West has become increasingly stark since the publication of Said’s study.
14 See S. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, London and New York:
Zed Books, 1997.
15 Hanif Kureishi, The Black Album, London: Faber, 1995, p. 182. 16 Salman Rushdie, “Is Nothing Sacred?”,
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism 1981–1991, London: Granta, 1991, pp. 415–29, p. 420. 17 Nicholas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism,
p. 100. 18 Monica Ali, “Where I’m Coming From”.
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