ABSTRACT
This chapter finally engages with aspects of (the English) language, concentrating on two British Asian novels: Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987) and Monica Ali’s bestseller Brick Lane (2004). Eventually, in this chapter, it is the mother figure herself and the question of maternal subjectivity that take centre stage as most theories and fictional representations of mothering are written from the perspective of the child. So this chapter asks how the maternal voice can be expressed. The texts will be read against the background of Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” (1977) to argue that both novels develop strategies based on concepts of maternal subjectivity in order to appropriate English as a mother tongue in an effort to disrupt the naturalised equation between language and belonging. At the same time, the chapter explores how such an appropriation affects the metaphorical use of the maternal and discerns the various forms of diasporic dwelling. Further emphasis is given to the question of how British Asian texts strategically perform mothering to write themselves into a new matrix for British diasporic writing.
