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Monica Ali, Brick Lane (2002)
Notes &
Extracts
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Bibliographical details: Monica Ali, Brick Lane (London: Doubleday [Black Swan] 2003, 2004), 491pp.
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| The following passages in quotation constitute a set of notes & extracts made for purposes of study and teaching. As such, they are necessarily incomplete and cannot reflect every reader’s sense of the special emphasis of the text. |
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Mrs. Azad continued. “Listen, when I’m in Bangladesh I put on a sari and cover my head and all that. But here I go out to work. I work with white girls and I’m just one of them. If I want to come home and eat curry, that’s my business. Some women spend ten, twenty years here and they sit in the kitchen grinding spices all day and learn only two words of English.”She looked at Nazneen who focused on Raqib. “They go around covered from head to toe, in their little walking prisons, and when someone calls to them in the street they are upset. The society is racist. The society is all wrong. Everything should change for them. They don’t have to change one thing. That”, she said, stabbing the air, “is the tragedy.” [...] “Each one has his own tragedy”, said Chanu at last. [114] |
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| Chanu smiled, his fat cheeks dimpled. His eyes darted here and there, looking for an escape route from this inappropriate face. He explained as if to a child. “All this time they thought I was rich. Why should I stay her in this foreign land, if it did not make me rich? I let them think it. It suited them and it suited me. Actually, I told them some things that were not true, have never been true. made myself a big man. Here I am only a small man, but there ....” The smile vanished. “I could be big. Big Man. That’s how it happened.” He signed and placed his hands atop his stomach. “So, when the begging letters came and I blame left and I blame right, when what I should be blaming is this, right here.” He moved his hands up over his chest, to show how his heart, his pride, had betrayed him. [133] |
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[...] Nazneen thought of Hasina. She thought of Hasina in the garment factory, how happy she had been. Her stepmother came into mind, a young woman with a large nose ring, thick gold bands on her ankles. She came to the compound and she slept in Abba’s sleeping quarters. She came suddenly and went, and no more was ever said of her. She left no impression other than a young woman with a jewelled nose ring and gold ankle bracelets. Where did she go? Where was she sent? How long before the bracelets were melted down and spent? How long before she came to be where Hasina had also been? [230] |
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| Nazneen thought about it now, as she undressed. The eternal three-way torture of daughter-father-daughter. How they locked themselves apart at this very close distance. Bibi, silently seeking approval, always hungry. Chanu, quivering with his own needs, always offended. Shahana, simmering in - worst of all things - perpetual embarrassment, implacably angry. It was like walking through a field of snakes. Nazneen was worried at every step. [204] |
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Out of the bedroom she was - in starts - afraid and defiant. If ever her life was out of her hands, it was now . She had submitted to her father and married her husband; she had submitted to her husband. And now she gave herself up to a power greater than these two. [299] and she felt herself helpless before it. When the thought crept into her mind that the power was inside her, that she was its creator, she dismissed it as conceited. how couls such a weak woman unleash so strong a force? She gave in to fate and not to herself.
[...]
Sometimes she fell into a state of bottomless anxiety [...] But much of the time she felt good. She spent more time talking to her daughetrs, and they surprised her with their intelligence, their wit and their artless sensitivity. She served her husband and she found that he was a caring husband, a man of integrity, educated, and equipt with with a pleasing thirst for knowledge. She did her workd and she discovered that work in itself, performed with a desire for perfetion, was capable of giving satisfaction. She cleaned the flat and even wiping the floor after the toilet had flooded was not so tiresome if it was done with a song on the lips and in the heart. It was as if the conflagration of her bouts with Karim had cast a special light on everything, a dawn light after a life lived in twilight. It was is if she had been born deficient and only now been gifted with the missing sense. [301] |
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As she cleaned the bathroom the next day, Nazneen thought of Hasina. Fate, it seemed, had turned Hasina’s life around and around, tosssed and twisted it like a baby rat, naked and blind, in the jaws of a dog. And yet Hasina did not see it. She examined the bite marks on her body, and for each one she held herself [340] accountable. This is where I savaged myself, here and here and here.
She dusted off the sewing machine and settled down to work. Chahu, who seemd to have slipped out of the work habit, fussed around.
“She must not overdo it”, he said. Whenever he wanted to emphasise her fragility, he put her at this linguistic remove.
“She will not overdo it”, muttered Nazneen. I’ve already overdone it, she thought to herself.
“She is still under doctor’s orders.”
Whatever I have done is done. this thought came to her, as frash and stunning as the greatest of scientific breakthroughs, or ecstatic revelations.
[340-41]
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ENG312C2 -
University of Ulster |