ABSTRACT
In Nazneen, the central character of her novel Brick Lane, Monica Ali develops a rich first-person characterisation of one woman’s attempt to negotiate the tensions, dissonances and ambiguities in the relationships among culture, religion and gender (Ali 2003). Taught from the moment of birth that her life is in the hands of fate, Nazneen accepts the arrangements her father has made for her to marry a man twenty years her senior with a “face like a frog” whom she has only glimpsed in a photograph. From her village in rural Bangladesh she moves at the age of eighteen to a council flat in East London where she is isolated, housebound and, since she cannot speak English, entirely reliant on her husband for negotiating her limited contact with the English-speaking world. The Bangladeshi community she joins is caught between a wistful and nostalgic yearning for home, on the one hand, and, on the other, the desire for recognition, respect and a voice – in short, inclusion – within the broader political culture. Nazneen’s husband, Chanu, is similarly caught. The more his desire for recognition is frustrated the more he feels alienated both from the English culture from which he once hoped to gain respect and from the East London Bangladeshi community, which is riven with internal dissension, intergenerational conflict and hostility towards the dominant culture. Thus Chanu’s hopes for the future turn towards home. But home, which he left thirty years ago, is an idealisation.
