1South Asian diasporic novels expose a geographic diversity, which reveals a proliferation of urban images. Cities are brought to the fore as places of transformation. For example, in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988), the meticulous charting of London juxtaposed with the depictions of Dhaka illuminates how the diasporic subject undergoes remapping and relocation. Ghosh’s unnamed narrator constantly oscillates between the two cities, between ‘home’ and ‘away’. Ghosh exposes the fragmented condition of the diasporic self who is torn between the reality of a place and its fantasized images. But on the other hand, walking in London and Dhaka is what makes the narrator able to build his identity. The novel points out the transformative power of cities and shows how individuals are affected by their environment. In this regard, Monica Ali’s debut novel, Brick Lane (2003), stands out as an even more striking example for, with its title alone, it turns the city into a main character. Here, the urban space not only shapes the individual but also reveals the communal stakes of the diaspora. In this novel, which caused controversy because of the image it gives of the Bangladeshi community, it is not just London, but also Dhaka which is depicted as a crucible where identities are reshaped. ‘Brick Lane’ is more than the longest street of Tower Hamlets. It is to be taken as an icon of England, as an epitome of a New Britain which has the colours of the diaspora.

2Born in Dhaka and educated in England, Monica Ali belongs to the protean literary landscape of this Indian diaspora. Unlike writers of the second generation immigrant, such as Hanif Kureishi, she is not English ‘born and bred’ but remains in an in-between. The coexistence of the Bangladeshi and English cultures gives her a double perspective on the world. In an essay entitled ‘Where I’m coming from’, she highlights how her personal experience of the diaspora shaped her writing:

How can I write about a community to which I do not truly belong? Perhaps, the answer is I can write about it because I do not truly belong. Growing up with an English mother and a Bengali father means never being an insider. Standing neither behind a closed door, nor in the thick of things, but rather in the shadow of the doorway, is a good place from which to observe. Good training, I feel, for life as a writer.

3From this privileged place, she throws light on the ambiguities and tensions in the migrant’s life which is imbued with both nostalgia and excitement. On the other hand, she gives the reader to hear the verb ‘to die’, in diaspora. In fact, the novel hinges around the threats of the uprooting experience. When the characters are displaced, a part of them dies. Such is the fate of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi village girl who is sent to London to marry Chanu. The young girl has to leave her beloved village of Gouripur for the concrete brick coloured reality of Tower Hamlets in the English metropolis. She is literally displaced, and is, above all, linguistically isolated. Nazneen’s everyday routine is interrupted by letters from her sister Hasina, who eloped to Dhaka with her lover. So, images of the Golden Bengal of her childhood are juxtaposed with snapshots of Dhaka, and collide with the bricks of Bangla Town. The reader then follows several destinies, and is given to see the different reactions to the diasporic disease, called the ‘Going Home Syndrome’.

4Ali’s diasporic city is a place where the characters are metaphorically imprisoned and suffer. The urban space she describes pins down the difficulty of adjusting, and thus counterpoints Homi Bhabha’s approach of the city as ‘the space in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out’ (243). In fact the generation gap in the novel makes it harder to translate the differences between history and language as ‘a kind of solidarity’ (244), Ali questions the diasporic subject and challenges the notion of belonging. Hence her narrative is filled with characters dealing with displacement, and negotiating relocation who, in other words, ‘seek a place in the world’ (264). They are driven by an urge to belong and to put down roots. When they fail, it results in an outburst of tragic feelings. But I will show that this is counterbalanced in Ali’s novel. In fact, the migrant is ‘translated’ (29) to borrow Rushdie’s terminology, but also transplanted. This organic aspect of migration is highlighted by the etymology of the word diaspora, in which the Greek spora means seed. So, trying to redefine home Monica Ali questions how well the immigrant adapts to a new environment. For what does it really mean to go back home when you’ve never been there in the first place, or when your home has changed?

5Ali’s characters mostly appear as wounded creatures. They seem to be doomed by disappointments, as epitomized by Nazneen’s life, which is burdened by an overwhelming sense of boredom. As Vijay Mishra has shown, diasporic writing is pervaded with sadness, melancholy and mourning (1). Ali gives a vivid example of such feelings with ‘the Going Home Syndrome’ diagnosed by Dr Azad. The whole immigrant community, including himself, is afflicted by this disease. ‘They don’t ever really leave home. Their bodies are here but their hearts are back there. And anyway, look how they live: just recreating the villages here’, he explains (32). Dr Azad crystallizes in medical terms the failure of integration and the wounds of dislocation. Yet, the disease he describes does not have physiological implications. It is rather a form of homesickness which leads people to transpose realities. Nonetheless, this disease of the mind gives way to visible symptoms. In migrant literature, food is often used to signal difficulties in adaptation. Nazneen’s relation to food is very similar to Ashima Ganguli’s cravings in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Food brings comfort and pleasure, and arouses her senses as shown in the following example: ‘Just the rice would be enough for her. But fresh coriander made her swoon for the chicken. The deeply oily aubergine beckoned lasciviously. She wanted to stick her tongue in the velvety dhal’ (127, emphasis mine). The echo in - s brings to the fore the sensuousness of eating. Besides, the choice of adjectives highlights how the texture of the food can be seen as a way to physically reconnect with the mother culture. Nazneen also uses food as a way to express herself. She does not eat in front of her husband to show ‘self-denial’, and looks for ‘solace in midnight meals’ (77). Besides, it is worth noting that she does not remember her journey to England. On the other hand, ‘all she remembered now was being given breakfast, a bowl of cornflakes which had broken some sort of threshold and released a serving of tears. She had borne everything but this strange breakfast’ (342). Nazneen is introduced to her new country by Western food, which is here reduced to the archetypal breakfast made of cornflakes. Eating this foreign food is a sort of initiation as suggested by the image of the threshold. She has transgressed food codes and will have to adapt. Here, the example of the yoghurt is also relevant. ‘Amma used to make yoghurt: thick and sweet and warm. Nothing like these plastic pots from the plastic English cows. But still’ (77). Nazneen telescopes the English cows with the industry of milk, and reduces everything to plastic. Yet, the final emphasis on ‘but still’ counterbalances her criticism, and hints at her progressive adaptation.

6If food helps to signal degrees of adaptation to the new country, Chanu’s fat belly only reveals his great failure to adapt. He may even be taken as the control patient for this study, for he stands for the archetypal alienated diasporic subject who never fits in. Unlike Nazneen who never wanted to go England, Chanu left Bangladesh full of ambitions to become a ‘Big Man’. He saw England as a Promised Land, where he could achieve success, but his hopes were thwarted, and he ‘had to fight: racism, ignorance, poverty, all of that’ (320). Throughout the novel he is described as a man of words, always reading or quoting from a book, but above all, always making plans. The energy he puts in finding equipments for his plans strongly contrasts with his general inertia. He lives through modality with when and if, waiting for things to happen. The most striking example of his inability to act appears when he learns about Hasina’s hardship in Dhaka. He declares that ‘something must be done’ (351). But this is followed by a typographic pause, which suggests that nothing will be done. Furthermore, his speech distils a growing feeling of persecution: ‘These people didn’t know the difference between me, who stepped off an aeroplane with a degree certificate, and the peasants who jumped off the boat possessing only the lice on their heads’ (34). The tragic feeling that pervades Chanu’s life oozes through the narrative. The sentence ‘To be an immigrant is to live a tragedy’ reverberates in the text as a tragic chorus. ‘This is the tragedy. When you expect to be so-called integrated. But you will never get the same treatment. Never’ (247). The final nominal sentence ‘never’ emphasises the impression of a dead-end. Chanu, Nazneen, and Dr Azad look for a place to fit in. They are somehow lost in migration, and their life is full of uncertainties. This precariousness is conveyed by an aesthetic of impermanence, which is embodied by Nazneen and Chanu’s apartment and its cracked walls.

She should have bought plants and tended and loved them. All those years ago she should have bought seeds. […] She should have thrown away the wardrobe, or at least painted it. She should have plastered the wall and painted that too. She should have put Chanu’s certificates on the wall. But she had left everything undone.
For so many years, all the permanent fixtures of her life had felt so temporary. There was no reason to change anything, no time to grow anything. And now, somehow, it felt too late. (342)

7Nazneen has not really settled so far. It is worth underlining here the trope of seeds. It seems as if, still mourning for her village life, Nazneen could not put down roots in Brick Lane yet. On the other hand, the anaphoric use of ‘she should have’ encapsulates the tension between her present and her former self.

8Diaspora then implies a form of struggle but is also, to borrow Satendra Nandan’s words, ‘about transmuting realities and transforming one’s sense of identity’ (54). Those afflicted by the Going Home Syndrome not only fail to transmute realities, but also cling to their identity. In recreating little villages, they try to preserve their communal identity. So, the Bengal Tigers movement appears as the utmost manifestation of this desire for a communal identity. Their first meeting reveals their will to protect their ‘local ummah’ and to support ‘the global ummah’1 (241) as well. ‘The denunciation of intolerance, discrimination and abuse’ (15), as Esterino Adami puts it, are key-parameters of the diasporic writing. But Ali adopts a slightly different stance. On the one hand, she tackles the issue of racist violence with the Bengal Tigers, and the effects of September 11^th on the South Asian community living in Great Britain. But on the other, she displaces the focus, and highlights a longing for roots. Thus Karim who embodies the spirit of the Bengal Tigers seeks authenticity, the ‘real thing’ (385), to use his own words. His feelings for Nazneen are rooted in the impression that she is an authentic girl from the village. This aspect of their relationship is thoroughly explored by Alistair Cormack who concludes that ‘for Karim… Nazneen represents the imaginary stability of homeland’ (705). He has never been to Bangladesh, stammers when he speaks Bengali, and yet, he looks for traces of himself in this culture. In fact, his physical transformation throughout the novel underscores his identity crisis. In the middle of the novel, he starts growing a beard. Then, he gives up his Western clothes for Panjabi pajama and a skullcap. This new appearance conveys his claim of a renewed identity, for Karim sees in clothes a way to be a part of his father’s tradition. Besides, it is worth underlining that his desire for Bangladesh is reminiscent of the sense of loss experienced by Chanu for example. The London-born subject seems as bereaved as the immigrant. In fact, when Nazneen finds out that Karim has never been to Bangladesh, she feels sorry, ‘as if she had casually asked about a relative, not knowing that he had died’ (347). This anecdote prompts the reader to see Bangladesh as a parent figure that the second-generation immigrants have to relate to somehow.

9What is more, Chanu’s attempts to re-read history from the Bangladeshi’s point of view is similar to Karim’s involvement in the Bengal Tigers, for they both try to give a voice to their community. Throughout the novel, Chanu, who incidentally studies in ‘the subsection on Race, Ethnicity and Identity’ (38), tries to balance the colonial history. He justifies his desire to go back home by glorifying the past of his country:

‘You see’, said Chanu, still supine, holding his book above his face, ‘all these people here who look at us like peasants know nothing of history […] In the sixteenth century, Bengal was called the Paradise of Nation. These are our roots. Do they teach these things in the school here? […] If you have a history, you see, you have a pride.’ (185)

10He thus points out to the necessity to know one’s past to build one’s identity. The immigrant faces the problem of handing down his tradition to an isolated generation, far from the home country, far from the elders. Chanu’s project of a mobile library conjures up the image of migrating with one’s culture, and reveals the fragility of the migrant’s identity. Chanu wants to provide Bengali books to the estate, but is aware that it will be complicated. As the library never gets into motion, Chanu constantly fails to relocate himself in England. That is why he finds comfort in a ‘Bangladesh of the mind’, in a prelapsarian Bengal which is home to the happiest people in the world. This idealized image of the home country is counterbalanced by Shahana who reduces Bangladesh to the place where you have ‘to brush your teeth with a twig’ (398). Shahana does not long for roots, for she has not been uprooted in the first place. Bangladesh is no home to her and she even rejects her parents’ culture. She crystallizes the anguish of the second generation immigrant as suggested by the tragic chorus ‘I didn’t ask to be born here’ (181). Shahana sees Bangladesh as a foreign country in which she has no interest:

Shahana did not want to listen to Bengali classical music. Her written Bengali was shocking. She wanted to wear jeans. She hated her kameez and spoiled her entire wardrobe by pouring paint on them. If she could choose between baked beans and dhal it was no contest. When Bangladesh was mentioned she pulled a face (…) Shahana did not care. Shahana did not want to go back home. (180)

11The anaphorical structure here emphasizes the girl’s refusal of origins. What is more, clothes here again are used as a way to defend one’s identity. In Hanif Kureishi’s Borderline, Amina progressively gives up her traditional clothes for jeans and T. Shirts. The playwright thus symbolizes her emancipation from the parent culture, and from the communal identity. Clothes are given as visible signs of hybridity. Shahana who hates her traditional clothes takes advantage of her father’s distraction to wear her tight jeans (327). With this metonymic reference to the Western culture, Ali brings to the fore the idea of transgression. When Shahana wears jeans not only is she making a statement but she is also opposing her father’s authority. Besides, the bag she prepared to run away only contains ‘a nightdress, a pair of shoes, jeans and a T-shirt’ (216) which represent the very essence of the person she wants to be, that is to say, a girl like any other English girls. As far as Chanu is concerned, ‘already the rot is beginning’ (182). So that’s why he engages in a process of re-culturation to fight back hybridization. Teaching Tagore and speaking Bengali to his daughters he expects to make them fit to go back home.

12The gap between generations is even wider when it comes to language. The immigrants’ children speak English, when their parents speak Bengali, and sometimes forbid English at home. Nazneen has learned English mainly thanks to her daughters: ‘it was the girls who taught her. Without lessons, textbooks or Razia’s “key phrases”. Their method was simple: they demanded to be understood’ (194). Here, her family appears as a microcosm of society. The difficulty of communication between generations symbolizes how crucial language is to fit in. The episode when Shahana corrects her father’s English is revealing of such tensions:

‘What is the wrong with you?’ shouted Chanu, speaking in English. ‘Do you mean, ’ said Shahana, ‘what is wrong with you?’ She blew at her fringe. ‘Not “the wrong.”’ He gasped hard as if she had punched him in the stomach. (201)

13His gasp seems to re-enact everything he has endured so far: ‘racism, ignorance, poverty, all of that’ (320). His failure to master the English language deflates the image of an ‘educated man’ he is so proud of. Chanu appears vulnerable, and his distress in front of his daughter illustrates that linguistic integration is an essential part of the migrant’s experience. Moreover, this passage is highly ironical in perspective with Chanu’s objection to Nazneen’s desire to learn English. ‘Where’s the need anyway?’ (37), he told her.

14When Nazneen settles in London, she only knows two words of English: ‘sorry and thank you’. Her linguistic isolation allows the narrator to stress how her diasporic imagination works, for she relies more on images than on words. In the first part of the novel, Nazneen is homesick, and wants to go back home. The bricks and concrete of London shatter her rural self. The urban space fuels her desire for home.

You can spread your soul over a paddy field, you can whisper to a mango tree, you can feel the earth beneath your toe and know that this is the place, the place where it begins and ends. But what can you tell to a pile of bricks? (87)

15The city lacks soul and meaning. It also disconnects people from their surrounding and from nature. Besides, Brick Lane is first described as a dead-end as suggested by the signs ‘No smoking, no eating, no drinking’ (64) which draw Nazneen’s attention. The beginning of the novel is then saturated with a claustrophobic atmosphere. Images of tombs and boxes proliferate in Nazneen’s imagination and give her the impression of being ‘trapped inside (a) concrete slab of entombed humanity’ (76). The wardrobe in her bedroom, or even her bath, convey the threat of seclusion: ‘She imagined the plaster breaking and falling into the bath, coating her in white dust’ (263). To escape from her urban prison and from Fate, she conjures up scenes in Gouripur and juxtaposes realities. Nazneen appears as the archetypal migrant. Her Going Home Syndrome becomes visible in the way she is torn between the folktales of her village and the dullness of her new life. When the village is mentioned, the anecdotes are interspersed with mysterious or magic details. On the other hand, her life in London is only a down-to-earth repetition of daily tasks as illustrated by the following nominal sentence: ‘Regular prayers, regular housework, regular visits with Razia’ (51). The absence of verb in addition to the anaphoric structure underlines the monotony of her everyday life. So she closes her eyes to find shelter in Gouripur. When she thinks of home, it is always to re-enact moments of her childhood. Time seems to have crystallized.

And she drifted off where she wanted to be, in Gouripur tracing letters in the dirt with a stick while Hasina danced around her on her six-year-old feet. In Gouripur, in her dreams, she was always a girl and Hasina was always six. (45)

16Nazneen’s nostalgia is very different from Chanu’s, for she misses the happiness of her childhood, and most of all, she misses her sister.

17As the novel progresses, Nazneen takes control of her life and defies her fate. Karim, her young lover, may be seen as the catalyst for her transformation. He becomes the mirror in which she is able to see who she wants to be, or rather who she is not. Life does no longer seem contained within the walls of her apartment. For instance, Karim’s compassion for children in Bangladesh awakens her feelings about people’s life beyond the estate. This new awareness she has of the world is furthermore strengthened by what she learns from her sister. As the novel unravels, she becomes more and more active as underscored by the shift in syntactical forms. The recurrent passive epitomized by ‘she’d been sent away to London’ (18) is replaced by the active form, ‘she will not be on the plane’ (437). The transformation is even more enhanced by the direct speech ‘I can’t go’ (478). Nazneen takes control of her life and starts living in the present rather than in the past. She has to react because ‘there (is) no escape’ (437). Her situation here mirrors her sister’s, but while Hasina writes, ‘I do not know which way to go’ (434), Nazneen has made up her mind. It is at this point that she breaks off with her childhood. She finally chooses not to endure. Brick Lane is what Michael Perfect has termed ‘a multicultural Bildungsroman’ (109). Yet, it is more than the story of immigrants trying to come to terms with their integration, it is also the coming of age of a woman. The way the novel interlocks the two issues of being a migrant and being a woman is one of the recurring themes tackled by criticism. In this regard the film adaptation is highly interesting for it really underscores the emancipation of Nazneen. When the film starts, the claustrophobic feeling that burdens Nazneen is conveyed by the zoom out effect on her building, concluding the opening credits. The estate is given a labyrinth quality and resembles boxes piled on one another. As the film progresses, the city appears as a more open space, and Nazneen’s empowerment is reflected by her running after her daughter at night. Because she is able to put down roots in her new country, Nazneen crystallizes the potential growth of the diasporic subject. Images of the village progressively desert her reverie and dreams. ‘The village was leaving her… she began to rely on a different kind of memory. The memory of things she knew but no longer saw’ (217). This distance which anchors her even more in the reality of Bangla Town enables her to grasp the paradox of home. First, Dhaka is not her home, and then Dhaka fills her with fear. ‘She smelled disaster, and for the first time it occurred to her that it was not only Shahana she would have to worry about if they ever went to Dhaka’ (256). While Chanu sees a city with a glorious past and universities where he would be a Big Man, Nazneen sees a dangerous place where her sister fails to be happy. ‘Hasina was in Dhaka but the city of her letters was an ugly place, full of dangers’ (426). Hasina’s letters which interrupt the narrative provide a subtext in which the image of Dhaka is debunked. Along with the terrible things she and her friends endure, Hasina tells her sister about how fashion reached Bangladesh with the visit of Miss India, and how everyone sings ‘Barbie Girl’ (225). Dhaka not only appears corrupted, but also transformed to some extent by the Western culture. Ali puts the stress on the yearning to go back home and on the impossibility to go back because home no longer exists. Aware of the pitfalls of the dream of going home, Nazneen decides to stay, for after all, London is convenient:

When she thought of Gouripur now, she thought about the inconvenience. To live without a flushing toilet, to abandon her two sinks (kitchen and bathroom), to make a fire for the oven instead of turning a knob—would these be trades worth making? (78)

18When she stands by her daughter’s desk, in a way, she adopts her point of view. What she sees is a picture of England: ‘A cracked mug bearing a picture of a thatch-roofed cottage and a mouse in trousers leaning on the gatepost’ (438). The nominal sentence endows the vision with a fragmentary quality. What she sees is only one representation of England, but there is much more to be discovered. Nazneen finally achieves both a sense of place and a sense of freedom. ‘She felt the breeze against her skin, the warmth of the sun against her eyelids, the hair that tickled her cheek.’ (491) At the end of the novel she appears to be free from the city and from the constrainments of her life. Yet, as epitomized by the ‘cracked mug’, her new self may still bear the scars of adaptation. Her recurrent dream of being an ice-skater, ‘a fairy-tale creature, a Hindu goddess’ (93) finally comes true when she goes ice e-skating in her sari. Razia’s concluding sentence, ‘This is England. You can do whatever you like’ (492) resonates like an optimistic note and draws the attention of the reader on the fact that migrating is maybe not so much about belonging, but about inhabiting.

19 To conclude, Monica Ali gives a moving account of ‘the tragedy of the immigrants’, and yet stresses that the ‘going home syndrome’ is a paradox. The immigrant’s position is uncomfortable, for it is constantly a matter of bridging the gaps between cultures and languages. Trying to come to terms with dualities, here and there, then and now, generations confront each other to locate where they belong. As brilliantly shown by Avtar Brah, home is never easy to define:

Where is home? On the one hand, ‘home’ is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense it is a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of ‘origin’. On the other hand, home is also the lived experience of a locality. (192)

20Nazneen deeply experiences this duality of home. But as Ali chooses to observe the migrant’s condition through diversity following many different characters, she also throws into relief other aspects of home. As Razia smartly points it out, ‘If everything back home is so damn wonderful, what are all these crazy people doing queuing up for visa?’ (427). Ali demonstrates that home is not always where you live, and sometimes it is not even where you think it is. So, England which is presented as a terra incognita for Nazneen turns out to be her land of possibilities and of challenges. Then, accepting differences to negotiate identity seems to be the answer, for as Amitav Ghosh puts it, ‘to be different in a world of difference is irrevocably to belong’.