by Monica Ali
Work, home, life
Brick Lane doesn't quite live up to the - considerable - hype. I didn't enjoy it as much as, say, Zadie Smith's White Teeth. And it's not about Brick Lane.
Which is not to say this book is not worth reading. It is. In the context of the recent discussions in the Socialist Alliance about the Muslim community in Britain, it might be a good thing if it was widely read and discussed on the left.
This is a feminist novel, which follows the story of two sisters, separated in their teens and communicating only by letter. Nazeen submits to an arranged marriage and leaves Bangladesh for east London in 1985. Nazeen's sister, Hasina, runs off with a boy and ends up working in the clothing sweatshops of Dhaka, as a prostitute and then as a domestic servant.
About 150 pages in it became clear where this part of the book's structure came from - The power to choose an (over long and academicish) book by Naila Kabeer. Naila Keeber's book has an interesting fact in it - that the women garment workers in Bangladesh work in big factories and that, in contrast, the Bengali women workers of the East End work at home, where the outside world can be kept at bay by their menfolk. (There is a credit to Kabeer at the end of Brick Lane).
Hasina discovers both sides of sweatshop employment - the unpleasantness of factory life and the potentially liberating effect of modern wage work (as against village life). And in east London, Nazeen is bought a sewing machine by her husband, with money taken from the community's parasite-moneylender. Nazeen - because of language barriers and tradition - hardly ever travels more than a few hundred metres from her flat's front door.
And yet even Nazeen's badly paid homework gives her money and self-esteem. Through this work she meets a young Islamist, who acts as her 'middleman', and with whom she starts an affair.
The story comes to a climax as Nazeen's husband - who has had his hopes bashed out of him - prepares to take the family back to Bangladesh (something resisted by Nazeen's London-born daughters).
Does Nazeen go 'home'? Read the book and find out.
