When people ask me about my rather unhealthy reading habits (by people I mean mainly girls in Bumble), they tend to ask me whether I read fiction or non-fiction more. Of course, I’d flex the shit out of that and tell them that I read both with a douse of foreign language books thrown in between. Stay with me, because I do have a point here. I would say that at times you learn more from reading fiction than you do non-fiction. Non-fiction can provide you practical knowledge; Fiction can give you the empathy and understanding of the issue at hand.
About three books ago, I finished reading Phillip Legrain’s Immigrants: Why your country needs them. It is a comprehensive exploration of the immigration issue which has plagues many countries (especially the more developed ones) on a high level. Yes, we get to have a glimpse of some of the migrants who Legrain had interviewed but these glimpse are admittedly too short and lacks the detail to give us the full understanding of the situation.
I’m not saying that Ali’s Brick Lane gave us the full picture, but it does bridge the gap where non-fiction is unable to: the vivid end to end details of the life of migrants — from the marriage matchmaking, the early years of being a stranger in a strange land, the discriminations and the failed ambitions. Through the perspective of Nazneen, we see the trials of a Muslim Bangladeshi woman in a country where their privileges as migrants are few.
From Bengal fields to Brick Lane
Coming from the second wealthiest family in the village, Nazneen’s family has a lot of pull. She’s not immune to the type of marriages that subcontinental families would set up for their children though, but she practically put the blindfolds on when her parents offered her to a man who lives in prestigious England. She almost regretted her choice when she saw the photo of the elder man with the frog-like face who would soon be her husband, Chanu.
Bangladeshi women are often domestically shackled. Seeing a Benglali woman working for her family is equivalent of seeing the failure of the family — if the husband cannot provide for all the household, then the family’s not doing very well. Nazneen would not make friends with anybody outside of her small circle of Bangladeshi friends: Razia, the rather liberal Bengali wife and Mrs Islam, the know-it-all old woman who we later find out, was a ruthless loan shark.
Chanu works as a civil servant in London, perpetually unhappy with his position and always seeking for promotion through his own personal network, Dr Azad, the melancholic doctor who might pass a good word or two to his superior. When Nazneen fell pregnant and gave birth to Raqib, and lost him after a few month, something broke in the fibre of the family. Nazneen would later birth two more daughters, one more rebellious than the other, and Chanu, who was really fed up of his job (so he says), quit his job and start his life of drifting from one temporary thing to the next, but largely remaining unemployed.
Throughout the years, Nazneen would receive letters from her sister Hasina who ran away for a love marriage when she was younger. It seems that being attractive as a woman in Bangladesh was more of a curse than a blessing. It was difficult for Hasina when her marriage did not pan out, being rendered a black sheep by the women in her factory and ultimately, selling her body to get by.
The trials and tribulations of the diaspora
Nazneen’s journey would be one that most immigrants would be familiar to: first, dealing with the language barrier, next to build a social network which you can equally gain and lose from, and then raising children who’d take the roots from your country of birth while they inevitably plant their own roots in their country of birth.
I remembered what it was being an immigrant. It definitely wasn’t easy. I had the privilege of learning English before I got to Australia, and even then it was a struggle. I only started speaking the way I wanted to speak when I hit about twenty years old. For Nazneen, who was barred access from learning English by her husband, she had to manage life through a bubble. As a wife, she was also barred from working lest it makes the family look impoverished, which it already was. Life isn’t so easy as a Bengal woman living in the mother country.
It is easy enough to read Brick Lane through the feminist lens through Chanu, the ever useless husband. This guy is so useless it makes your grandma’s appendix look like a vital organ. In Chanu, we see the ambitions of the migrant: to be respected by the natives on his capabilities and knowledge of English literature, even more so than being a capable provider for his family. After having left his work, Chanu was perpetually unemployed, though he would have been able to take low-skilled employment if he had chosen to. But his pride got in the way of things.
It is this same pride to be better than the English, which impacts the traditions set up as the Bengali husband role. Chanu as the husband was to be the provider of the family, yet he failed to do so from his pride, unable to attain promotion and the job he seeks for. The two conflicting sides only drew blood to the family. When the family income failed, Chanu had to resort to Mrs Islam to take out a practically irreparable loan.
It is only when Nazneen started to work as a seamstress that the family situation improved, as she was able to alleviate the family’s financial burdens. Just as Muhammad Yunus would have been award the Noble Peace Prize in 2006 for providing credit to micro-borrowers, so would Nazneen benefit in upskilling herself and becoming almost the breadwinner of the family, thus taking charge of the power dynamics of the family.
Yet, there is still something bothering her. Something unsatisfied until the arrival of Karim, who had lent here some space of reprieve:
“And 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 pretended not to hear, but it got louder. She made bargains with it.”
Nazneen’s repression would eventually lead to her retaliation, succumbing to sexual temptation with the younger Karim.
A shit ton of bricks laid out in Brick Lane
Brick Lane is a real place in London where migrants have settled, mixed in with other cultures and their own and trying to adopt the British way of life. In some ways, it reminds me of N-W by Zadie Smith where the mix of cultures become an interesting melting pot in the metropolis. However, Ali uses the concept of bricks in multiple ways — as a symbol for space, and as a means for construction.
For Nazneen, the bricks in her home is confinement, a prison that at the same time keeps her safe but separates her from assimilation outside. Thus, the bricks can be a symbol of self-repression, where the possibilities for growth are improbable, and the confines of culture (or at least defined by herself and her husband) becomes an insurmountable obstacle. But overtime, these values decay, though one might find it too late to change things.
“She looked across the brickwork, flaking beneath the windowsill, black within the cracks like dirt caught beneath the fingernails. She had spent nearly half her life here and she wondered if she would die here as well.”
Razia, who had to break her bones to work for her family also has a similar viewpoint:
“What you want me to do? Kill my own self, working, working and working, for you to spend it all on penny-thing here, penny-thing there and nothing to show at the end? I am working for bricks. When I am gone to dust, they will be standing.”
We can see the brickwork is also the laws and systems in place which keeps the migrants in the cycle of dependence to their meagre incomes, unable to move, unable to grow. In Bangladesh, the bricks serve another purpose: to exclude instead of to confine. When Hasina lost her job, she looked at the factory with disdain, as she had lost the safety of her income and means for livelihood.
“If it possible to hate bricks I hating them. This factory have ruin me.”
The pursuit of happyness
If you watched the Will Smith movie (or read the OG book), you’d know that I misspelt that deliberately. Brick Lane as Ali’s debut is as strong as Smith’s debut White Teeth. And like White Teeth, it is a strong yet imperfect book. It has the colour of subcontinental literature, which might dwell on the details to the danger of being overwritten, but we can argue that these details matter. There is a lull in the middle of the book, especially during the parts when Nazneen joined the Islamist group the Bengal Tigers, led by Karim, where the book gets a little convoluted, unsure of where it’s heading.
Brick Lane is another addition to the migrant writing that’s been stockpiling over the last couple of decades in British literature. While this merits another article, I don’t think that this is a bad thing at all. Migrant stories are crucial to make general readers understand the plights experienced by the new arrivals. We can read about immigration in the news, or books written by experts such as Legrain, but it is fiction which lends the flavour to the meat. It is not the seasoning, it is the essence.
I live in a country where Bangladeshi migrants are prevalent, packing themselves like sardines into buses to get to their place of work. Even at a glimpse, we can see the migrant life is not an easy one. I often see them carrying their groceries over kilometres, sharing a room with at least four others and remits 80% their salaries to their families overseas. It is easy to sneer, and even easier yet to forget that their lives are more difficult, more treacherous and far more precarious. Brick Lane is a reminder for us to be kinder to the ones who look different in the streets.
