Shapes and Shadows: (Un)veiling the Immigrant in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Abstract

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 congratulated Ali for pulling back the curtains of the residences of Tower Hamlets and depicting the injustices and dissatisfactions suffered by their inhabitants, 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 documentation, but an alternative approach might focus instead on the difficulties of such a construction, on the deceptive effects of the text’s rhetoric. The Shapes and Shadows