East Bengal writes to East London

When one reviewer after another refused the temptation to knock her off a hastily constructed pedestal. And, now of course, when bookmakers too have joined the party and announced her the favourite to walk off with the Booker Prize next month.

For the record, Brick Lane is that good. It is a Dickensian examination of the Sylheti immigrant’s little world in London’s East End. In capturing the rhythm and idiom of the New Lonely Londoner’s hesitant adaptation to his/her new home, it’s a deserving addition to that bookshelf teeming with works by writers like George Lamming, Sam Selvon and Hanif Kureishi.

Like them, Ali opens up the universe a little more for the latest wave of migrants to urban England’s council estates; like them, she turns the mirror on the mother country, reflecting through the new inhabitant’s gaze changes in English society; and like them, she vaults beyond the narrow spatial confines of her characters to grasp the big themes of literature, of identity, of the forever changing equilibrium between tradition and modernity, of the constant tabulation of duty against personal rights.

An entrancing stillness propels this 413-page novel about young Nazneen’s relocation to London’s Tower Hamlets from a village in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh district. She must negotiate co-existence with a bumbling, overbearing — though well-meaning — husband.

She must expand her English vocabulary beyond sorry and thank you and her vision of London beyond the view from her tiny flat. She must learn to arbitrate between her husband’s back-to-Bengali-roots orthodoxy and her daughters’ desire to melt into English teenage-dom.

And she will learn to assert her self-sufficiency, she will begin to acknowledge feminist stirrings. She will start to envision herself as part of a larger matrix defined as much by the socio-cultural coefficients of Brick Lane as by incidents in Palestine and New York.

Little wonder then that Ali, at 35, is uneasy about being neatly slotted as a South Asian writer. Recently, a controversy was clumsily crafted when her publicist refused an interview to a literary journalist of South Asian origin writing for a London daily, saying that the neat racial pairing would pigeonhole her, whereas Ali ‘‘would like to be seen as a writer who is naturally concerned about issues surrounding race, but who could also just like to be seen and judged as an interesting writer too’’.

Clearly, it is not just the immigrant characters in her fiction who are trying to forge identities beyond the stamps on their passports; immigrant writers too show unease about facile slotting. Ali’s publicist’s reasoning is too crude to be taken serious note of, but the unease resonates in, for instance, Jhumpa Lahiri’s interviews. Even before the question, who are they writing for, is asked, they appear to be mustering a response. In that sense, they are different from previous novelists examining the immigrant condition.

For Selvon and Lamming, for instance, relocation to London from their Trinidad and Barbados homes offered a chance to forge a deeper Caribbean identity. In detailing the cold, bewildered lives of West Indians new to London, they got the measure of a common identity. For them, and for their readers back home in farflung islands, this geographical remove was almost necessary to understand what it meant to be West Indian, as opposed to merely Trinidadian or Jamaican.

For someone like Kureishi, he too with his mixed parentage, the South Asian heritage is certainly to be tapped, but he makes no pretensions about his ability to interpret it for a global readership — he is clearly British, there are no ambiguities, only eclectic cultural mixes.

Ali and Lahiri inhabit an in-between world. Their narratives straddle both the new country and the old, they demand fluency in both worlds, never mind that this is easier attempted than achieved. In Brick Lane, for instance, Nazneen’s self-growth is helped along with letters from her sister Hasina, adrift in Dhaka’s chaotic streets. These letters, in fact, highlight breaks in Ali’s narrative and rhythm. They simply don’t ring true in their construction or content. Similarly, Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies collapsed whenever she sought to confine herself solely to Bengal landscapes.

It is perhaps inevitable, this seeming ease in evoking the acquired home and difficulty in scripting the remembered land. After what has famously been termed a century of movement, home for millions is in many places at one time, located as much in aspiration as in nostalgia. It is happening within countries, with internal migration, it is happening across international boundaries. Slotting fictional chroniclers of this migration, these mapmakers of unequally shared cultural spaces, will never be simple.