Monica Ali Brick Lane - Riassunto Letteratura e cultura inglese II PDF

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Brick Lane - Monica Ali Monica Ali (born 20 October 1967) is a Bangladeshi-born British writer and novelist. In 2003, she was selected as one of the "Best of Young British Novelists" by Granta magazine based on her unpublished manuscript; her debut novel, Brick Lane, was published later that year. The book was very well-received by critics and fans as it won the New York Times Award as one of the top 10 books of the year. The book was also listed for the Man Booker prize. The book has been adapted to a full-feature film as of 2007. Summary The novel centers around the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi immigrant who has married Chanu Ahmed, a man years her senior, in a loveless arranged marriage. She relocates to London to start her new married life with her husband. Nazneen is born under a fated sign that her mother, Rupban, connects to endurance by means of passive acceptance. This stoic belief dramatically sets apart Nazneen’s from her sister Hasia, a free spirit who follows her passion. Nazneen meets many people of Bangladeshi origin during her arrival, and learns of new traditions as well as the struggles of maintaining her own old traditions. However, as the years pass on, Nazneen becomes increasingly frustrated with Chanu and his lack of decisiveness as well as his unwillingness to allow her to travel alone, as part of his religious beliefs. At the age of 18, Nazneen prepares her first dinner party for Dr. Azad, a friend of her husband, Chanu, a Bengali immigrant who has lived in London for decades. She is distracted from her preparations by a letter from Hasina , who has news of her passionate marriage to her teenage boyfriend, with whom she fled the village. As the hour of the dinner party draws near, visitors keep Nazneen from her wifely duties to gossip about a “fallen woman” who just plunged to her death. She settles into the routine of the young wife of a Bengali immigrant, cutting away the debris with her husband’s corns, putting up with his snores, and cleaning the cluttered space defining the boundaries of daily life. With no space made for her arrival, she finds her center through meditating every afternoon. In contrast, her husband has a framed certificate from the Center for Meditation and the Healing and that he proudly shows his new wife, but she never sees him open the Koran, from which she receives solace. She realizes he is unhappy and is projecting his hopes onto the future rather than taking pleasure in daily life. Nazneen gives birth to Raqib. At this stage, Chanu begins to get frightened that his son will be exposed to western corruptions like drugs and alcohol, and he states that will move back to Bangladesh with his family soon to avoid this from happening. However, Raqib dies as a child and Nazneen and Chanu heal their relationship as a result. Many years earlier, Nazneen’s mother Rupban’s body was discovered leaning low over the sacks of rice, staked through the heart by a spear. The mystery surrounding the literal piercing of their mother’s heart drives the plot. As a youth, Nazneen never questioned the details of her death: why she was wearing her best sari, though it wasn’t a holiday, and why her aunt Mumtaz never spoke to her father afterwards. Nazneen also maintains contact with her outcast sister, Hasina, who ran away with a man to Dhaka in a love marriage. In her letters, Hasina describes her life working in a factory and then later as a prostitute. Hasina's letters talk about the hardships in Dhaka as she describes the political climate that prevailed between 1988 and 2001 which was a time of upheavals and change. Hasina runs away from her first husband, works in a garment factory, and is soon fired because of a jealous woman's lies. Hasina then works as a cook for a while, after which she tries selling handmade crafts. After searching in vain for another sewing job, Hasina works as a prostitute and then marries a former

client who soon tires of her. After a period of homelessness, Hasina finally ends up in a home for destitute women where she stays until she is rescued by "Lovely" Begum, a woman with a different set of problems. Lovely is married to Jameshed "James" Rashid, and she is mainly concerned about her looks (she is a former beauty queen) and about keeping up with women who are even wealthier than she is. Like all the other women in the novel, Lovely thinks she would have gone further in life had it not been for her marriage. Through descriptions of characters and events, Hasina's letters bring to light issues of real social concern in Bangladesh; environmental pollution, mob violence, child labor, child trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and domestic violence. Through Hasina's letters, the reader also learns about changes taking place in Nazneen's life. She and Chanu have two girls, Shahana and Bibi. Chanu drifts from job to job, and both he and Nazneen fall into brief periods of depression. Chanu has not changed, and blames his failures on racism. Chanu also constantly rants about the terrible things the Western world has done to the developing world and to Muslims. A friendship with the jovial Razia is an importantpart of Nazneen’s development. The two women build a solid friendship through the fusing of their opposite characters, with humorous Razia buffering Nazneen’s fatalism. A release from the persistent tension of Nazneen’s struggle to make a new lifeis reading letters from her sister, who has constant news of the ups and downs of her passionate affairs. Nazneen cherishes the letters as a window to another world, a world of desire forbidden to her as a dutiful wife in an arranged marriage. The narrative reaches January 2001. Chanu comes home with a computer and a sewing machine, tools of technology that give him and his wife an entry into the wider world. Yet, this bounty has come at a steep price as Nazneen learns from Razia that they will never be able to escape Mrs. Islam, who loaned him the money. As she is torn between saving money for her sister and paying the debt to a usurer, a solution appears when her husband starts bringing sewing home. Soon, Chanu says he has a new job driving a taxi and a new middleman appears through the door. This is Karim, and he becomes a karmic force in Nazneen’s life when they become lovers. Nazneen herself gives birth to two daughters, Shahana and Bibi. Chanu still has not completely changed his ways and continuously vents his anger out at the way that Bangladeshi’s and Muslims are treated in the community. Chanu begins to get more and more worried about the escalating drug use in the community and becomes more determined than ever to return to Bangladesh. In order to get the money for this, he takes work as a cab driver, allows Nazneen to work, and borrows money from wealthy Mrs. Islam. Chanu finds his escape from the debt in his plans to return home. Meanwhile, Nazneen gains power through outwardly experiencing the tension opposites as the eroticism dynamism of her love affair. Karim is gaining a reputation as a community leader and activist. He becomes Nazneen’s political teacher, extending her awareness of herself to the outer world. This inner development leads her to confront her husband about his debt, thereby taking over the responsibility. Following September 11, 2011. A march against the Mullahs is planned for October 27, the same day of Nazneen and Chanu’s plane tickets to Dhaka. While Chanu is intent on escaping the truth of his wife’s affair, Nazneen is faced with the truth about her mother’s death through her sister’s revelation of the secret surrounding Rupban’s death. This letter is like a talisman that changes her life, giving her the strength to confront her husband’s debt, her lover, husband, and runaway daughter–all in a 24-hour period before her scheduled departure. This enactment of personal power gives her an authentic freedom along with a wise new understanding of her sister. Their opposite paths to love have met in the middle, along with the shared truth of how their mother had fallen.

In the end Dr. Azad gives Chanu the rest of the money they need for the trip, but Nazneen tells Chanu at the last moment that she and the girls can't go. For Chanu, "the pull of the land is stronger than the pull of blood," and he tells Nazneen he can't stay. Nazneen stays in London and she survives with the help of Razia. The women establish a sewing business with some of their other friends and they make a good living catering mainly to white women who will pay high prices for Bangladeshi/Indian-style clothing. The novel ends with a surprise trip for Nazneen. Nazneen's daughters and Razia take her to an ice-skating rink for the first time, where she will be free to skate, they tell her, even in her sari. Analisi In the second part of the novel Monica Ali continues to evoke, stroke-by-stroke, Nazneen’s growing confidence and subtle transformation from submissive, subordinate wife to someone who has begun to find her voice. She now has two daughters and is more settled into life in London. Conversely, it is Chanu, previously confident and full of grandiose plans, who begins to change and retreat. After failing to be promoted, he finds work as a taxi driver out of sheer necessity. He increasingly uses the internet to gain access to a virtual ‘entire world’. Chanu is drifting into an abyss of disillusionment. He is adamant that his daughters only speak Bengali at home and makes them recite the national anthem of Bangladesh. He begins to manifest signs of the ‘going home syndrome’ to which he has previously been so vehemently opposed. Chanu’s displacement is even more evident when he decides to take his family on a day trip to central London, which despite living in England for over thirty years he has never seen. Chanu’s parameters are not much wider than his wife’s. When a passer-by obligingly takes a photo of the family and then asks where they are from, he states: ‘we are from Bangladesh’. His mind is lodged in the space of his much-yearnedfor Bangladesh and he feels little sense of being British. Ali poignantly describes Nazneen shaving her legs in anticipation of her first major sexual encounter with Karim and an affair ensues in the same stifled interior of the flat. She sees Karim as her ice-skating partner, the antithesis of Chanu who craved her to be still and silent. Karim will, she hopes, help her to ‘skate through life’ and ‘spin, spin, spin’. Brick Lane attempts to translate religious insights and religious experience to non-religious readers. Brick Lane dramatizes the process of transformation that necessarily attends mutual engagement across cultural and religious frontiers. Through a process of transformation in culture, belief or sense of selfhood “we become people able to understand one another”. Brick Lane exposes the intricate manner in which political conflicts are masked as religious in order to gain wider resonance, and how non-western religious identities are subsequently cast as harbingers of “cultural annihilation” for countries that host immigrant populations. Samuel Huntington’s (1997) infamous prediction of a “clash of civilizations”. The novel humorously depicts the impact of such displays of racist bigotry on Chanu’s open-minded secularism on the occasions when girls in full hijab passed him on the street, Chanu “became agitated at this display of peasant ignorance” (219) and his own daughters were allowed to go out in their skirts. Nazneen’s experience also offers an example of what Stuart Hall has identified as “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (2002, 30): an attempt to negotiate the meaning of communal identity, and its local and global ramifications, by drawing on experiential, affective dimensions of belonging. We live in a “postsecular” world, Craig Calhoun (2008) has argued, where the term “postsecular” registers the awareness that religious belief is not something to be overcome, but rather a force to be continually contended with. To ignore such a reality would only impoverish any potential dialogue that would attend cosmopolitan encounters. For this reason, rather than demarcating the line between irrational religion and secular reason, Brick Lane invites the attentive reader to expand her/his thinking about the kind of pluralism that should mark 21st-century experience.

RELIGIONE In Brick Lane, faith exposes ethics as a challenging means of engaging transpersonally through the pragmatics of “care”, rather than living according to fixed precepts and religious dogma. Brick Lane shows us that the very experience of religion is not unitary, and members of religious communities do not share the same approach to questions of belief. NARRATORE The novel is written in a third-person narrative voice, which shifts from an omniscient perspective to free indirect speech that at times apparently offers access to Nazneen’s inner thoughts. For this reason, Brick Lane’s realism has been read as providing a point of entry for the western reader into the inaccessible world of Muslim immigrant women’s experience. TV The TV acts like a portal transporting Nazneen into other worlds. A charming metaphor unfolds as she is mesmerised by the fluid movement of the ice skater, who glides through life unencumbered, in control of her elegant physique and in perfect harmony with her partner. She is derided by her husband for her mispronunciation - ‘ice-eskating’ – and he comments that failure to grasp the language ‘is a common problem for Bengalis’. She clumsily seeks to emulate the ice skater, trying to renegotiate her body in new forms as if trying to rid herself of the shackle that is her room, home and husband. Her efforts end in failure, but this marks a first real attempt to spin, to move, to find a way to be alive again. Television and the Internet feature prominently in the novel. They introduce fragments of the outside world into Nazneen’s private family life. Nazneen is shocked as she discovers the war in Chechnya, learns about orphans, and occupiers, about Intifada and Hamas. Nazneen Ali builds up the layers of Nazneen’s character, the shock of being in a new country, the trauma of losing her first child, her escapism through dreams of a romanticised childhood homeland, her sister’s letters that represent paper fragments of ‘home’, the meticulous cooking of authentic, tasty Bengali food, her tolerance of Chanu’s garrulous wrangling and her gradual adjustment as a wife and mother. Nazneen is slowly redrawing the faint map of her existence with bolder lines. At night, when she has a chance to dream, she reverts ‘back’ to an idyllic lush Bangladesh where there is light, space, limitless nature and the freedom to roam. She prefers to lose herself in memories and dreams of an earlier life that was so abruptly taken away from her. In Brick Lane, Nazneen is the selfless carer, and the dedicated servant of God and of patriarchal authority, in both her husband’s and her young lover’s eyes. Nazneen eventually subverts this stereotype as a result of her shifting appreciation of the claims of caring relationship. This shift in Nazneen’s perception challenges secularist assumptions that “a” religion is unitary and dramatizes the fact that there are multiple ways of experiencing religion – and indeed of being religious. The challenge of social and political science is to investigate and understand these different forms of religiosity. Nazneen at first seeks to achieve emotional disengagement through a strict discipline of prayer and absolute surrender to her household chores: “Regular prayer, regular housework, regular visits with Razia. She told her mind to be still. She told her heart, do not beat with fear, do not beat with desire”. The rhythmic repetition of the word “regular” here emphasizes the dulling effect of mechanically executed gestures. Emotions challenge human responsiveness, and thus a patriarchal

politics that preaches female passive acceptance of male authority is necessarily a politics which seeks to numb women’s desire and their capacities for emotional engagement. quasi-epiphanic moment towards the end of the novel, while she is chopping chillies in her kitchen and accidentally rubs her eye: Suddenly her entire being lit up with anger. I will decide what to do. I will say what happens to me. I will be the one. A charge ran through her body and she cried out again, this time out of sheer exhilaration. (Nazneen refuses to greet pain with her habitual stoic acceptance of suffering. The burning sensation provokes an equally ferocious resistance in response.Nazneen’s resolution to be the one who decides what will happen to her does not mean that she has finally adopted the moral code of the egocentric individual subject who seeks to control her surroundings through independent and unencumbered choice. Rather, this scene dramatizes what Sevenhiujsen describes as the “unity of hand, head and heart” that characterizes the sentient actor. The symbolic unity of “hand, head and heart” proposes a model of a sentient actor who acknowledges that “there is not just one way to know a social situation” and that, consequently, “it is important to become acquainted with the many ways in which different social agents interpret a situation and act in it” (61). Whereas according to a liberal morality of rights the solution to Nazneen’s predicament – social exclusion and patriarchal oppression – would be with an emphasis on independence, autonomy and self-interest, the ethics that Nazneen develops is not one that emanates from a western sense of rights and duties. Rather, it is more appropriately expressed in the vocabulary of caring responsibility towards those intimately related to her. The ethics of care that Nazneen develops is located in a mixture of judging with care and taking care of. She prays piously to God to save her son, yet reconsiders her approach to prayer as a conscious act of engagement with the words she recites: she had never fully engaged in them. For Nazneen, attempting to hold the family together feels “like walking through a field of snakes” (Ali 2003, 168). She struggles to negotiate a balance between her daughters’ embarrassed anger on the one hand and Chanu’s demands for respect on the other. “Nazneen’s decision not to return to Bangladesh is not made on account of the attractiveness of life in England so much as the fear of the sorts of horrors described by her sister”. Nazneen gradually develops her responsibility towardsher daughters. When Nazneen finally rejects Karim as a lover and as a potential husband she tries to explain herself with the following words: “I wasn’t me, and you weren’t you. Nazneen is portrayed as pious and adulterous, nostalgic towards her past and located in her present, both naive and independent Chanu , Chanu is not from Sylhet. He presents himself as a minority within a minority, suggesting his alienation from a community he perceives to be regressive, parochial and overly religious. An aspirational immigrant, Chanu purports to be highly educated and has framed certificates to prove it. He represents the Bangladeshi immigrant who is brimming with optimism about carving a great, solid future, only to have his dreams consistently thwarted. He idealistically talks about creating a ‘mobile’ library, which would ‘bring the great world of literature to this humble estate’ and by doing so would open the eyes of the Sylhetis who seem voluntarily castrated from the rest of the world Chanu not only feels embarrassed by fellow Muslims, but he also feels misrepresented by the English and misunderstood by his daughters. He launches a bitter attack against the British education his daughters receive at school, railing against western historiography’s use of the term “Dark Ages”, which he believes is racist and an intentional falsification of historical truth:“It was the Golden Age of Islam, the height of civilization. Don’t forget it. Take pride or all is lost.” Chanu’s anti-colonial rhetoric remains incomprehensible to his daughter, Shahana, whose experiences as a teenage girl growing up in multicultural London Shahana’s stock response to her

parents’ land of origin and its cultural and religious traditions is comically captured when she warns her younger sister Bibi against their father’s grand dream of return to native soil: When the imam speaks, it is not the word of God. Does he speak ...