Transnational identities in the fiction of Monica Ali: In the Kitchen and Alentejo Blue

Abstract

Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen shows London as a cosmopolitan and postmodern city, a locus of transnational identities. Although this is not a new theme in contemporary English writing, in this novel the topic of migration is detached from the usual postcolonial loci that feature in “immigrant” or “diasporic” literature. In the novel Alentejo Blue, set in the South of Portugal, Monica Ali had already approached the question of migration from the point of view of the exiled citizen, whose situation is part of globalization processes outside of the normal push/pull (centre/periphery, east/west, north/south) conceptions of migration. The focus in the article is, thus, on the ways the new world order of economic globalization relates to the processes of immigration and the dispersal of a stable sense of individual and national identity.

Keywords:

• Monica Ali
• In the Kitchen
• Alentejo Blue
• transnationalism
• immigration

Notes

1. This perception is widespread, as is evident in the number of publications that have introduced the transnational and/or black British trend into their histories of British literature. For example, Patrick Parrinder (2006) writes about what he designates as “the novel of immigration”, which he views as being “now recognized as the most vital form of English fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (380). Volume 13 of The Oxford English Literary History is titled The Internationalization of English Literature,

2. The critical literature dealing with “immigrant literature” in English is extensive. See, for example, Lee (1995), Sauerberg (2001), Nasta (2002), Procter (2000, 2003), McLeod (2004), Ball (2006), Eckstein et al. (2008) and Michael Perfect (2014).

3. I agree with Michael Perfect that Brick Lane can be read “as a ‘multicultural Bildungsroman’ ” where “Ali employs stereotypes as counterpoints in order to further emphasise her protagonist’s final integration into contemporary multicultural London” (2014, 116).

4. This is well argued by Tournay-Theodotou (2012).

5. As Petra Tournay-Theodotou (2012) points out, “Gabe’s identity crisis and psycho-pathology reflect the identity crisis of the nation, which, like the hotel, has lost its sense of self” (16).

6. In Culture in a Liquid Modern World, Bauman (2011) goes back to this definition of “liquid modernity”, explaining it, more concisely, in the following terms: “I use the term ‘liquid modernity’ here for the currently existing shape of the modern condition, described by other authors as ‘postmodernity’, ‘late modernity’, ‘second’ or ‘hyper’ modernity. What makes modernity ‘liquid’, and thus justifies the choice of name, is its self-propelling, self-intensifying, compulsive and obsessive ‘modernization’, as a result of which, like liquid, none of the consecutive forms of social life is able to maintain its shape long” (11).

7. Some reviews focused on the fragmented character of the novel and its lack of plot. For example, Sean O’Brien (2006) says that “perhaps, it is a series of adjacent episodes rather than a fully orchestrated novel”. In the Guardian review, Natasha Walter (2006) expresses her disappointment with the novel in a similar way: “All the characters bow off too hurriedly, little sketches that never get fleshed out, people glimpsed from a train that is moving too quickly through a strange landscape”.

8. This is a fictional name. Although there is a village in Portugal with this name, it is located in another region, not in Alentejo, but in the District of Aveiro, in the central-northern area of the country.

9. In her review of the novel in The Nation, Nell Freudenberger (2006) draws a parallel between this chapter and the traditional polyphonic singing of Alentejo, the Cante Alentejano (which was recently inscribed in the lists of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, by UNESCO), saying: “The Alentejo is famous for its polyphonic choral groups, and the last chapter brings all the characters together to ‘sing’ their separate parts in unison, each narrating a section” (42).

10. Abortion was legalized in Portugal in 2007, and was a hot issue in the country around the time the novel was written.

11. In his analysis of In the Kitchen, Michael Perfect (2014) draws attention to the fact that this novel centres on a hotel, a place symbolically characterized by transience – a quality which, as the novel makes clear, extends to the impermanent jobs offered to the migrants it employs (133).