Mapping the Post-War Migration,
Cross-Cultural Encounter, and Fluid Identity in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
Sahabuddin Ahamed
PhD Research
Scholar
Department of
English and Foreign Language
Guru Ghasidas
Vishwavidyalaya (Central University),
Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India
Abstract:
The post-war migration since the Second World War has been a global
phenomenon that retains an increased space of opportunity and challenge for the
migrants who cross national borders for the betterment of life in a host
country like Britain. Dispersed people from the Third worlds move to Britain
and find difficulty in assimilating themselves there— their identity crisis
happens. The mass migrants have transformed geographical, cultural, political,
and economic spaces of the host country through their cross-cultural
activities. Not only to get rid of their past and present traumatic
experiences, but also to fulfill their dreams, immigrants attempt to
assimilate, integrate, and acculturate themselves in a new society. Their
ontological existence and native cultural heritage find a niche in a host land,
and their longing for return home become an illusion as their fragmented selves
and lived experiences exist only in broken memories. Migrant discourse from
postcolonial theoretical perspective is often marked by fragmented and
dislocated identity and cultural hybridity that exist in a ‘third space’
constituted by a complex network of their performances and interactions.
Migrant peoples, from once colonized countries to the British metropolises,
affect the imperial cultures and simultaneously encounter discrimination, and
as a result of this, they are often stigmatized and marginalized. Not only by
embracing the discourses of modernity and globalization, but also by
challenging the dominant Eurocentric discourses and historical subjective
positions, contemporary migrant writers and their fictional characters escape
the burden of the British imperial legacy and their imposed selves through
their assertive and subversive counter-discourses that generate their new ethnic
identity that is very fluid, hybrid, and transnational. The paper is concerned
with how the interrelated phenomenon of contemporary post-war migration affects
the imperial British culture and move through an ambivalent possibility of
hybridized and multicultural Britain. It explores hybridized and ambivalent
Britishness of the post-war immigrant communities from the former British
colonies in Britain represented in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.
Keywords: Post-war migration, Fluid identity,
Cultural hybridity, Racism, Britishness
Introduction
“There is the emergence at the centre of the previously peripheral and
marginal. For the modern metropolitan figure is the migrant: she and he are the
active formulators of metropolitan aesthetics and life styles, reinventing the
languages and appropriating the streets of the master. This presence disturbs
the previous order.”— Chambers 23
Migration as a broad term, encompasses
certain aspects displacement, leaving, representing, combining, remembering,
assimilating, acculturating, adopting, and distancing in a multi-ethnic and
multi-cultural host society. It has become an antagonistic and interactive
phenomenon for the dispersed communities in a host country who encounter
exclusive cultural constructions, multiple discriminations, constant changing
scenarios, and cross-cultural interactions in the contexts of modernity and
globalization. Migrant subjects define and redefine themselves from diverse
ethno-cultural experiences with their shared cultural consciousness. They experience
divergent cultural exchanges and multiple routes. They represent allegorical
themes of displacement, cultural memory, suffering, adaptation, resistance, and
conflict to form and deform the built-up discursivity of traditionalism and
modernism and First and Third worlds. Unlike migration during the colonial
period, the post-war migration has been a way of global mobility and
interconnection in which a-political and de-historicized cultural artifacts
take place, and migrant minority communities articulate and rearticulate their
identity, culture, and ideology in a new society in a new fashion to find a
space, to fill the gap occupied by the hegemonic discourses of the First
worlds, and to celebrate a multicultural and transnational society. The process
of migration across wide geographical locations forms cultural hybridity and
transnational consciousness that mark the presence of pluralized, conflicting,
changeable, heterogeneous, and discontinuous cultural artefacts. Stuart Hall
argues that one’s cultural identity is “production” due to the his or her
multiple experiences of displacement, assimilation, alienation, acculturation,
negotiation, and relocation in time and space. In this context, cultural
identity is “never complete, always in process, and always constituted within”
(222).
Though migration has a long history, the
contemporary post-war migration offers a possibility of a new cross-cultural
scenario which is more transnational. It helps the migrants create a space of
their fluid identity and multicultural practices in their adopted societies.
With the rapid emergence of migratory artifacts, a new identity politics is
forged by the dislocated communities to mobilize their beliefs, customs, and
traditions and at the same time, destabilize the long-claimed authentic
discourses of the host countries. This paradoxical process continues through
representation and transformation of their identity, belonging, community,
culture, and language— solidarity and peripheral and a significant change from
binary opposition to cultural hybridity. Their utmost attempts are to represent
themselves and to be accepted by the new society, though this goal has long
been repressed by the hegemonic host culture — finding a way to reverse
historically the imposed position and stereotypical representation by the host
cultural superiority when they develop a ‘contact zone’ in the adopted society
through their experiences of multiple contrast, conflict, integration, and
accommodation.
Since the end of the Second World War, the
post-war migration in continuation from the former British colonies such as
African countries, India, China, South Asia, Caribbean, and Middle East
countries to Britain has been a matter of confluence and disjunction, and
migrants’ ultimate aims revolve around betterment of life, freedom, economic
and cultural development, and opportunity, and in turn, this phenomenon
relieves and reverse the past burden of the colonized subjects through their
contribution to and dialogic interactions with the imperial British culture—
undermining the long existence of its hegemonic discourses. Though they try to
adopt and immerse in the dominant British cultural environment, they confront
multiple discrimination and negative attitude from it. Their shared
consciousness is certainly marked by an inescapable link with their homeland
and past history in relation to the British imperialism. In an ever changing
and ever transmuting age, the post-war migration as a way of diverse
cross-cultural exchanges, global mobility, interconnectedness, and multiple
ties defies and disrupt the homogeneous and authentic cultural assumptions in
Britain and simultaneously construct a possibility of uncanny hybridized
British society brought about by black migrants contributions to and their cultural
practices. Through the discourse of contemporary migration literature written
by the writers in the colonial metropoles from the former colonies once
colonized by the British, one can find a complex web of cross-cultural influx
in Britain. These cross-cultural influxes include hybrid cultural sensibility,
multicultural Britain, globalized consciousness, era of multi-nationalism,
new-liberalism, post-colonial dimension, disjunction of rigid discourses,
blurring of boundaries between First and Third worlds, and transnational
activities.
With the break-up of the British Empire,
migrant people from the former colonies are oriented towards the metropolises
and they become successful in forming hybrid forms of English and multicultural
hub in Britain from the 1950s onwards. In doing so, migrants perform duality—
their former native cultural sensibility and new sense of host cultural
environment. Firstly, they are committed to their sense of past heritage,
collective consciousness, united ethnicity, recovery of lost traditions,
memories of homeland, and search for identity. Secondly, they are caught
between two different worlds— in a position of cultural difference and
diversity which is characterized by fluid, constructed, disjunction, impure —
always in process, transit, contest, shift, and fragmentation. The duality of
migrants’ perspectives is mainly found in their longing for the homeland of
origin, though distant both in time and space, and their real presence and
accommodation in new lands— belonging to displacement, alienation, and
discontinuity. They create their ‘imaginary homelands’ through the use of
imagination and memory from which they form something fictitious about their
past, cultural roots after being caught between two or more cultural locations—
feeling of neither here nor there— everywhere and nowhere. Their aspirations
and belongingness are based on perverse dream or illusion that only exists in
their fragmented memories. This dualistic function is paradoxically
contextualized in relation to dislocated individuals’ experiences in a host
society like Britain.
The Nationality Act of 1948 passed by the
British government gave them the opportunity of being a citizen in Britain.
Since then it has been the most natural destination for the migrants from the
developing countries. The migrant people got chanced to retrieve their hidden
history in contact with the mainstream host culture and tradition. But the
process is both fruitful and fearful for the growth and development of the
migrants and their relations with the host country. There are many assumptions
about hopeful such as acceptance and recognition of migrant presence and their
contributions to the adopted society, possibility of their better life style,
hybrid cultural expressions, positive foreign policies about global
citizenships and investments, negotiations among nation-states, and human
rights and international relations about them. The opposite factors behind it
are the breakdown of national identity and authentic nationalist discourses,
shift from monologic to dialogic cultural constructions, cultural mixity,
discrimination based on class, race, gender, and color, dominant canonical
status of literature, hegemonic ideology, and existing unequal power relation
in every discipline, different kinds of existing violence, and traumatic
experiences. Despite these facts, the migrant writers and their fictional
characters have become a part of mutual relationships with their host culture
and make a bridge between homeland and host land and beyond from their
negligible marginal status.
The trope of post-war migrancy has been the
most powerful metaphor to describe the contemporary black British and hybrid
identity as the writers from the former British colonies immigrated to Britain
and constructed and contribute to a new multicultural milieu. The migrant
writers contest the canonical status of the standard national literature of
Britain and its rigid nationalism with new, complex, and hybrid forms of
literary expressions which draw postcolonial impetus such as anti-colonial
resistance, decolonization, interstitial identity, multicultural metropole, and
decentralized discourse. Their hybrid sensibility is explored in their
extensive use of native literary forms along with the standard English such as
oral-story telling, folklore, local myths, ethnic identity, vernacular dialect,
allegorical representations of nation, and resistance. In this essay, Monica
Ali’s depiction of first-and second-generation immigrant characters and use of
vernacular Bengali dialect and standard English. This is the mechanisms of
responding to their stigmatized and marginalized position imposed by the past
imperialism and its legacy and the present discrimination, racism, and
violence, and to the standard version of categorized literary canons. The
contemporary changing scenario has helped immigrant writers to emerge as
prominent voices in several cases such as social, economic, political,
cultural, and literary fields by employing a kind of double perspective— as
both British and non-British and insider and outsider, thereby celebrating a
new hybrid cultural space in Britain.
Discussion
Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane
traces the experiences of Bangladeshi immigrant community living in Brick Lane,
an area in East London. It focuses on the first-and second-generation
working-class immigrants from Bangladesh and their tremendous impacts on the
British society who assume different roles in their migratory lives to stay
there and on their Britishness that becomes a part of the core Britishness in
contemporary multicultural Britain. It demonstrates the effects of ethnic
Bengali communities on the host country and the contamination of pure
Britishness. By remapping and renegotiating the complex, hybrid, and divergent
state of identity, belonging, ethnicity, community, culture, and language in
Britain, the novel redefines the concept of Britishness that problematizes and reconfigures
the notions of exclusive, fixed, and dominant Britishness. The fictional
characters go through the need of cultural assimilation, integration, adoption,
and multiculturalism as a survival strategy in the unfamiliar cultural
environment.
Nazneen, the main protagonist, finds herself
alienated and isolated in a foreign soil after her arrival to Britain. Her fragile
sense of living in Brick Lane is surrounded by other Bangladeshi Sylheti
immigrants with very little interactions with the wider world of London.
Dislocated from home country and undergoing unfamiliar circumstances and racial
and gender discrimination, she feels a
sense of loneliness, alienation, and marginalized position in a new land. As
she wanders through the streets of Brick Lane, she notices the difference
between the business district and the area of Tower Hamlets where she lives in—
marking cultural clash between white Londoners and black immigrants and rich
and poor neighbourhoods from a close proximity. As the narrator describes the
buildings, streets, and peoples’ clothes and racial behaviour that appear alien
to Nazneen because of her native cultural background, immigrant experience, and
her minority status that mark her out as outsider from the new cultural milieu:
“But now she slowed down and looked around
her. She looked up at a building as she passed. It was constructed almost
entirely of glass, with a few thin rivets of steel holding it together. The
entrance was like a glass fan, rotating slowly, sucking people in, wafting
others out. Inside, on a raised dais, a woman behind a glass desk crossed and
uncrossed her thin legs. . . . The next building and the one opposite were
white stone palaces. There were steps up to the entrances and colonnades across
the front. Men in dark suits trotted briskly up and down the steps, in pairs or
in threes. . . .Every person who brushed past her on the pavement, every back
she saw, was on a private, urgent mission to execute a precise and demanding
plan: to get a promotion today, . . . Nazneen, hobbling and halting, began to
be aware of herself. Without a coat, without a suit, without a white face, without
a destination.” (Ali 58).
In multicultural London, she finds herself as
a goddess in her distinct wearing of sari and think that she would behave like
a tolerable person and develop multicultural competence. She gains everything
by embracing the host culture and that happens when at the end of the novel she
decides not to return to Bangladesh with her husband Chanu, even though she had
longed for it all her life. On the contrary, Chanu does not fit himself with
the immigrant condition in London as he thinks it differently. Though he
initially celebrated the British way of life by appropriating its culture and
tradition, but his later realization and position in the host country from
postcolonial perspective represent the reverse of British imperialism as he is
satisfied in making money in the imperial nation which had once exploited his
native country and its people during the British Raj: “Mentally. Just taking
money out. And that is what I am doing now” (Ali 216). He has a naïve belief in
the past tradition and an anti-colonial view of London. Despite his praise for
humanism, security, and opportunity in the land, he discovers the hidden racism
there when his Open University degree from Dhaka is not accepted. Being unable
to adapt with a new cultural environment, he is totally disillusioned with
British society and his children, and finally he decides to come back to
Bangladesh.
In this novel, the neglected and unseen
socio-cultural space in Brick Lane is shifted and transformed than the space
that Nazneen experienced in her initial stay in London. While walking down the
streets of Brick Lane with her husband, she finds enormous transformation in
the area:
“The bright green and red pendants that
fluttered from the lamp-posts advertised the Bangla colours and basmati rice.
In the restaurant windows were clippings from newspapers and magazines with the
name of the restaurant highlighted in yellow or pink. There were smart places
with starched white tablecloths and multitudes of shining silver cutlery. . . .in
the other restaurants the greeters and waiters wore white, oil-marked shirts.
But in the smart ones they wore black. A very large potted fern or a blue and
white mosaic at the entrance indicated ultra-smart. You see, . . . .All this
money, money everywhere. Ten years ago there was no money here.’” (Ali 254-5)
This description demonstrates how migrants
become a part of a rigid cultural space and are no longer considered as
strangers. They have been a part of host cultural system that includes them.
Their activities are like parasite that contaminate and dismantle the pure and
hegemonic cultural practices— experiencing cultural contestation,
transformation, and accommodation. This becomes a postcolonial assumption that
undercuts the imperial colonial discourses, reshaping and appropriating
dominant notions of nation, culture, community, language, meaning, and power.
Another example of dismantling of authentic Englishness is seen in Brick Lane
when there is the use of minority language, ethnic distinction, and racial
insult in a fixed and pure sense of the English race, society, culture, and
language. The pure and static nationalist identity and culture are subverted
through the processes of disruption, contamination, and parasite:
“The windows were fixed with thick metal
grilles that had never been opened and notices were screwed to the brickwork
that read in English and Bengali: Vandals will be Prosecuted. This was
pure rhetoric. . . .Someone had written in careful flowing silver spray over
the wall, Pakis. And someone else, in less beautiful but confident black
letters, had added, Rule. The doors were open and two girls in hijab
went inside.” (Ali 238)
In contrast to Chanu, Mrs. Azad acts as a
mouthpiece of women’s empowerment who responds to Chanu’s odd patriarchal power
and his harsh invective against the younger generation. She leads a British way
of life as she wears short skirt, drink beer, and identify herself as a
Westernized Muslim woman. She challenges his assumptions regarding the status
of women and immigration condition: “Fact: we live in a Western society. Fact:
our children will act more and more like Westerners. Fact: that’s no bad thing.
My daughter is free to come and go.” (Ali 115).
Amid
ethno-racial and national tensions and lack of communication, and feeling of
alienation, Nazneen adapts herself with the host country as well as struggle to
maintain her past cultural heritage. When she hesitates to skate in a sari, her
friend Razia encourages her that “this is England. . . .You can do whatever you
like” (Ali 494). This discloses an emancipatory response to the traditional
Bangladeshi dress, and the Western boot represents cultural freedom, liberty,
and personal choice— marking Nazneen’s sense of empowerment and cultural
competence. Though having separated from her husband Chanu and lover Karim,
Nazneen is not unable to lead her daughter to the right path from where she is
abandoned and exploited. She experiences a new sense of freedom, independence,
and autonomy following the departure of her husband. Shahana, Nazneen’s
daughter act like a memsahib and speak in English fluently— her aspiration
towards the Westernization. The generational gap is found between the migrants,
though not fixed—there are similarities and differences with their descendants
through decades and across nations and cultures. In Ali’s novel, Chanu is
highly troubled by her daughters’ acts that their appearances are like more
English girls and does not know anything about their father’s country of
origin. They are born in England and live there. They learn their father’s
native land in their class from books and show no more desire to know anything
about their past roots. Alienated and frustrated Chanu finds his immigrant life
intolerable, disillusioned, and tragic, and finally leave London for
Bangladesh. Therefore, Ali’s novel brilliantly exposes the ways of forming
cross-cultural interactions in which migrant ethnicities and their cultural
identities are complex and hybrid and constructed, represented, transformed,
and negotiated in the British society.
Conclusion
To
sum up, Ali’s novel develops the idea of what Edward Said calls “contrapuntal”
in postcolonial frame that revisits the past imperial experience not in its
singular or dominant discursive ways but in its complicated, interdependent,
overlapping, and affiliative experiences and histories from where it uncovers
the hidden and invisible histories, voices, and social realities (18). Her
fictional characters attempt to destabilize the imperial metropolitan culture
and its fixed conception of Britishness through their efforts in contaminating
and appropriating English language and culture, producing transformative and
unstable cultural identities, resisting the imperial culture, and dismantling
any pure and authentic discourse. Migrant characters are not tied to any one
national identity but exist in multiple locations and a large number of
traditions and diverse experiences, disseminating like ‘free play’ of language.
They occupy a transnational space that is globally linking them across borders
through their discourses of multiple material and emotional belongings. Their
migratory condition is like that of Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘mestiza’
consciousness that provides cultural inclusivity, “hybrid progeny, a mutable,
more malleable species with a rich gene pool,” thereby creating transformation
in everyday lives, dismantling all boundaries, and formulating multicultural
and transnational consciousness for the migrants (77). It approaches through
its unstable nature of constant flux. Their cultural hybridity is a result of
ambivalent transplantation and exchange of cultural artefacts that is very
productive, destabilized, and hybrid in its every possible permutation. In Britain,
migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and émigrés take up in-between positions,
they destabilize dominant discourses by imitating the host culture and thereby
making a ‘third space.’ The constant gatherings of migrants create what
Benedict Anderson terms “imagined communities” that exists “not only by their
falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6). At
different places, spaces, and times in relation to different displacements and
attachments, the boundaries are re-sited and re-mapped. Britain as a First
world nation not only represents the process of cultural assimilation but also
cultural integration and acculturation consisting of blending of two or more
cultures, groups, and communities. It has been a desire of the migrants not
only to be accepted but also to be adopted and absorbed in a new society. There
has been a transition from cultural difference to “hybrid counter-energies” and
“imaginative geography and history” in which “the authoritative, compelling
image of empire…finds its opposite in the renewable, almost sporty
discontinuities of intellectual and secular impurities—mixed genres, unexpected
combinations of tradition and novelty” (Said 335).
Works Cited
Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. Black Swan,
2004.
Anderson,
Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Rev. ed. Verso, 2006.
Anzaldua,
Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Chambers,
Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. Routledge, 1994.
Hall,
Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity,
Community, Culture, Difference,
editedby Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 222-37.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism.
Vintage Books, 1994.