To know what’s what: Forms of migrant knowing in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Abstract

Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane focuses on how claims to knowledge are made in relation to migrant subjectivity and the experience of migration. As the protagonist, Nazneen, an immigrant from Bangladesh who eventually comes into her own in London, develops, the text foregrounds the provisional and partial nature of self‐ and situational knowledge gleaned through everyday processes and operations. Self‐reflexive about the way knowledge is constructed, the text critiques hybridity as the only or ideal migrant condition through its often comic depiction of Chanu, Nazneen’s husband. This article suggests that Ali’s novel illustrates that recognition of the contingent nature of knowledge claims and the instability of knowledge are the necessary first steps towards an ethics of modest morality leading to larger social change.

Keywords:

• Monica Ali
• Brick Lane
• migrant writing
• knowledge
• postcolonial literature

Notes

1. Rushdie’s representation of the migrant condition in his fiction has generated considerable debate. Timothy Brennan has described his work as embodying a “convenient” cosmopolitanism that falls short of coming to grips with intransigent cultural differences (306). More recently, Rebecca Walkowitz has sought to emphasize the multiple workings of the “mix‐up” in his fiction to offer a more politicized understanding of his privileging of immigrant hybridity in culture and language. See Gikandi for an examination of Rushdie’s conflicted relationship with the idea of nation (190–224).

2. See Krishnaswamy, who notes that any consideration of the time‐space compression of globalization and global mobility would not be complete without taking into account “the power relations that produce different forms of temporal and spatial mobility” (10).

3. Attempts to recuperate the concept of hybridity towards more politically useful ends include Goldberg’s argument that “it is never just its transgression that marks racially imposed and racially conceived hybridity as attractive but the type of scandal it stands for, time and place specifically” (83).

4. Many in the Bangladeshi community in the UK reacted angrily to the novel, however, viewing its portrayal of this ethnic minority in London’s East End as derogatory and insulting. See, for example, Hiddleston.

5. See Cormack, who points to the tensions in the novel between the formal constraints of mimetic realism and the postcolonial notions of translation and hybridity as these relate to migrancy. While I take his point that the formal demands of realism in the novel produce an individualist subjectivity which ignores Nazneen as a public subject, I am inclined to read this as part of the novel’s stance against totalizing knowledge, its focus on the everyday, and its ethics of taking small steps despite the unknown, rather than strictly in terms of realism’s shortcomings.

6. David Dabydeen’s description of London in 1991 emphasizes the cultural segregation and lack of any kind of deep interaction between the inhabitants of different neighborhoods: “The city is a hive in this sense, but there are no inevitable passageways between one cell and another” (qtd in McLeod 159).