Position of Women in Colonization. Tradition versus Western Culture. Nazneen Ahmed's Transition.

Postcolonialism is usually tied with anti-colonialism, decolonization, resistance to the colonialists' culture and desire for independence. Colonialists imposed their values, tradition and customs to those colonized. Thus, people of the colonized countries often felt caught between cultures. They did not know which language to speak or what culture to follow. In Brick Lane there are other postcolonial characteristics that need to be mentioned. Opposing male domination, liberation of women, feminism and the notion of diaspora are the prevalent ones. Robin Cohen describes diaspora as a community of people living together in a foreign country. They respect their home country, its tradition, language and customs, and there is always some form of loyalty towards it. It is an imaginary homeland, a kind of Utopia where they go to when things turn badly.1 This can be applied to Nazneen and her family. Growing up in Bangladesh Nazneen leads a carefree life until her mother commits suicide. Her father arranges her to marry a scholar from London. She leads her life complying to her mothers words that a woman must accept her fate for whatever it is. Strangely, her mother could not accept hers which was the reason for her suicide. Nazneen is described as a simple village girl not only by her husband Chanu but also by her lover Karim. Even though she lives in London, Nazneen leads a traditional life. She is a traditional wife, suppressed by her husband and caught in a loveless marriage drawing strength from the memory of her village life and the hope to return to her real home.

John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Diaspora and Identities; Manchester University Press, 2000

But, things do not go as planned. Nazneen soon discovers that life cannot be avoided and is forced to confront it. Due to her husbands resignation Nazneen takes on his role, being the one providing for the family. Her transition starts from that point on. Taking on sewing, she starts collaborating with a young man who is her boss. Traditionally she would not be alone with another man accept her relatives but now she is. Soon, the relationship grows and they fall in love. He too considers her to be a simple village girl, so unlike the London girls but that is not the case. As their relationship grows, so does Nazneen change her view of life. She starts trying on clothes London women wear and slowly departs from her tradition. Her two daughters are traditionally raised but encouraged to speak British and be a part of the British community. That eventually develops into her older daughters rebellion towards her father. By disrespecting him, Rukshana departs from tradition which states that women must obey men. Nazneens first born child was a boy but he died. On several occasions we are witness to her husbands indication that he is cursed with daughters. The traditional way of thinking depicted women not being equal to men. Men are better. If women were meant to have an opinion they would be men. But women have the power to control their destinies. They do not voice their objections but find a way around men and control them. Thus Nazneen does not have to comply with the strict rules of life. Women are depicted as having the power to harmonize two different cultures and making them one. When faced with difficulties Nazneen usually fled to her imaginary homeland. There she is carefree and one with nature. That slowly changes. A tree with falling leaves in London triggers a memory of her home. This indicates Nazneens new way of thinking. She starts associating London with home and slowly the imaginary world becomes reality. Her home no longer represents what it represented. Freedom, nature, and carefree living can all be achieved in London. Nazneen chases herself. Her transformed self. By chasing her sister and finally catching her daughter she catches herself and accepts what she has become.
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Nazneen is stronger than her husband. When need came, she was the one who started working, and she kept the family together smoothing her husbands relationship with her daughter. She had a lover but when proposed, she realized she is not the girl from the village. Karim only wanted her to be that girl so he would have the feeling of home. She became an independent woman. A woman who combined her tradition with the tradition of the West. Previously she never voiced her desires. She thought going home would be better, but soon she realized London is her home now. When her husband decided to return to Dhaka she stood up and said no. She became a woman who knows what she wants and is not afraid to say it. In the end she stayed in London with her daughters. In harmony with nature, traditions and a new way of thinking. Her apartment was crammed with furniture. Now it not. There is no furniture and her space has opened up. Nazneen is liberated from the restrains of tradition, culture and marriage. She makes her own tradition, chooses her own way of living and teaches her daughters a new message. A woman can and will control her destiny.

Karamehid Jasna

Self-realization of Nazneen Through Her Relationship With Two Male Figures in Her Life

At one point of the movie Brick Lane Nazneen remembers her mother saying there are two kinds of love: the kind that starts big and slowly wears away, that seem you can never use it up and then one day is finished; and the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand.2 This sentence is spoken closer to the end of the movie, but it sums up one very important aspect of the story of Nazneen's life, i.e. the fact that she reaches her selfrealization through the two kinds of love that she encounters in her life. The two men that are in the very center of Nazneens life are her husband Chanu and her young lover Karim. A mirror, one symbol that signifies so many things in this movie, also stands to represent these two men in Nazneen's life and how they are opposite to each other, but also the opposite ways in which they influence Nazneens life and the way in which her life with her husband is opposite to what she is growing to become through her relationship with Karim. Nazneens relationship with Karim stands for a woman that she is growing to become and her relationship with Chanu stands for the part of her personality that she is about to marginalize. Karim is young, attractive, exciting, successful in the given circumstances, and in a way the reflection of a life that she is about to embrace (although not with him eventually). On the other hand, Chanu, being her husband by an arranged marriage and portrayed as old, unattractive, useless, unfortunate, and traditional represents a life that she is leaving behind. In terms of their orientation in the sense of nationality,
2

Brick Lane. Dir. Sarah Gavron. Sony Pictures, 2007. Film.

Karim can be seen as being British-Bangladeshi, whereas Chanu is Bangladeshi-British or even completely Bangladeshi regardless of how hard he tries to be more British. This is why he cannot keep up with his life in London and eventually returns to Bangladesh. Karim is almost completely British despite his being Muslim and of Bangladeshi origin. The way in which Karim and Chanu are contrasted reflects how Nazneens life before the appearance of Karim is contrasted to her life after she had met him and started changing through her relationship with him together with other things that took place simultaneously and affected her life. From the moment Nazneen arrives to London she searches for her place in this new world but does not find it and, trapped within the four walls of her flat in Brick Lane, she constantly craves to return to Bangladesh and leave this new kind of life which she cannot get accustomed to. However, as she starts to develop and discovers this new way of life where she has the control, her mind starts to change. Nazneen grew up learning from her mother that a woman was left to her fate, but Nazneen rejects this view of life and takes her fate into her own hands. A simple, unspoiled, traditional village girl who accepts whatever life gives her without complaining starts growing to become a woman who wants to choose what she wants to take from her life. She gradually rejects her mothers belief that nothing can be changed so everything must be borne.3 She learns that there is the life outside the box in which women were seen as nothing more than personal property by their husbands and as outcasts by a populace of their host countries. Nazneens change begins when she starts to work and provide the money herself by sewing. At the same point in the movie she also meets Karim and she starts to open up emotionally and intellectually. Being a true
3

Brick Lane. Dir. Sarah Gavron. Sony Pictures, 2007. Film.

Bangladeshi at her arrival and traditional woman faithful to her husband no matter what he is like, Nazneen does not enter easily into sexual affair with another man, but as he comes over and over again to bring her materials for sewing the relationship starts to blossom. Karim helps her embrace this new way of life and she eventually ends up loving it even after her relationship with Karim is over. The reason for this is that the most important aspect of her relationship with Karim is not her newly discovered passion and feelings for a man, but her maturing as a woman and as a person and the sense of liberation that she finds by making her own choices. Even her relationship with Karim represents something that she chose herself which is completely contradictory to her marriage which was arranged. Therefore, in this sense Karim serves only as means for Nazneen's learning how she can make her own choices. Through her relationship with Chanu, Nazneen holds on to what she was born to be: a traditional, obedient and submissive woman and no questions asked. Through her chosen relationship with Karim she grows to be an independent, self-reliant and open-minded woman. Nazneen does change remarkably, but by no means does she reject her culture, her heritage or her religion. She does not change from a traditional Bangladeshi woman to a British, but rather to an open-minded, self-reliant Bangladeshi woman who rejects anti-racist sympathies and believes in herself and in her chances in British society. For her, the assimilation into British society does not represent the loss of her propriety as a true Muslim woman. It is important to note that Nazneen is aware of her maturing and self-realization as an independent woman but Karim, who was maybe the most responsible for this change in her, does not see her as a person that she is. After they had made love for the first time he clearly reveals that he sees in her a girl from a village, the real thing, something no longer represents. This is why Karim cannot be more than just a moment in the process of
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Nazneens transition. However, it is ironic that Chanu who is almost truly traditional man seems to be at somewhat understanding to this change in Nazneen and he manages to see her in this new light. Even at the point when he realizes that Nazneen has an affair with Karim he does not react as one would expect from a traditional man that he stands for. He does not even tell Nazneen, he only punishes her by revealing to her the real story of her sisters life. We only learn that he is aware of this affair when Nazneen faces Ms. Islam, the usurper who threatens to tell Chanu about her affair and when Nazneen stands up to her saying that her husband knows everything. This scene actually has a deeper meaning because it represents the kind of a person Nazneen has become capable to stand up for herself fearlessly and confront the oppression. At the end, Nazneen does not know yet what she wants, but she knows what she does not want. Later in the movie Karims extreme fundamentalism becomes more apparent and Nazneen probably realizes that she would have even less freedom with Karim than she did with Chanu and staying with Karim would make all her efforts and her change meaningless. She becomes aware of the fact that for Karim she represents only a sense of homeland and a traditional Bangladeshi woman that she is actually trying to grow out of. He would leave her no space for being an independent woman with her own identity. Despite the fact that Chanu and Karim are really opposite is so many ways, their idea of a woman is more or less the same. As Nazneen matures, she realizes that she was attracted by Karim because his fluent English, his clothes and his self-confidence gave the impression that he really had his own place in this foreign world despite being Bangladeshi. She realizes that the object of her desire was not really Karim, but this place in the world that he seemed to have and that all of them were seeking. His behavior towards her is contrasted to her relationship with Chanu who never even listens to what she thinks and it offers her in a way an insight in
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the world outside the one she knows and lives in. Nazneen in a way grows with Karim, but she eventually grow out of him and, at the same time, even outgrows him as a person. Recalling what Nazneens mother told her about the two kinds of love, we realize that what Nazneen and Chanu have is actually love, and it is this second kind of love which is eventually the one that is more important in life. It may not seem so at the beginning giving the fact that Chanu is portrayed as a real figure of fun and anything but lovable. However, as the story of the movie unfolds and the relationship between Nazneen and Chanu is seen more deeply, we start to think of him as almost tragic man, unfortunate and aware of his failings and flaws and the way his dreams just fell apart despite his constant efforts to make them come true. This Chanus downfall helps us to see the most important thing more clearly: the rise and blossoming of Nazneen.

Kalabid Azra

The Relationship of the Two Sisters in Brick Lane

One of the characteristics of Brick Lane the film is that it was first a novel before being made into an on screen film. The novel Brick Lane was written by Monica Ali a Bangladeshi herself. Namely, the movie deals with themes about the lives of immigrants in Londons Brick Lane mostly from Bangladesh, their trials and tribulations. Her origin plays an integral part in writing about the destinies of the characters in the film. Alis roots also extend to the relationship between the two sisters whose story the viewers learn at the beginning of the film but also throughout the movie in various scenes. The two sisters Nazeen and Hasina start their lives as innocent children in the countryside of Bangladesh. Everything changes for the sisters when their mother commits suicide, this was an event which would mark the two sisters lives because after their mothers departure Nazeen is sent off to marry a much older man in London, who later becomes her husband Chanu. It seems that the two sisters in their innocence had an exceptional love for one another when they were children. Many things change in their lives, when Nazeen moves to the street famous for its Sunday markets, Brick Lane and Hasina stays in Bangladesh. They try to reconnect with one another through the letters frequently written so that they can stay in touch at least on pen and paper. They seem to be feminine secrets only for the eyes of the two sisters and later Nazeen allows her eldest daughter to read them. The letters themselves seem to reflect the lyrical sense of femininity where men are not allowed to tread. A girls secretive world is reflected through the content of the letters. The letters Nazeen writes in an amusing way are never shown to the male characters in the film namely Chanu and Karim. Chanu only later in the film opens Nazeenns eyes to the content which her sister is writing to her. Nazeen misinterpreted many of the signs that were written by her sister.

Hasinas letters seem to express the hasty life she leads, as well as her inca pability to start a family and to settle down in one place and maybe even later to live a more fulfilled and quieter life. Her destiny seems to hurry her and circumstances do not allow her to return and to correct what she has done in her life or what she has written to her much quieter sister Nazeen. Nazeens life is much more reflected through the correspondence she writes to Hasina. Nazeens life is much more stable than her sisters. For one Nazeen before the sewing business was just a simple housewife caring about her family in every possible way. In a sense Nazeen reaches independence with the work she does, an independence she never had before. The numerous amount of letters which the two sisters exchange in the film reflect not only their lives but the lives of their families. Hasinas adventurous life and vividly drawn places she visits are a tad too rich to be narrated in the same style as Nazeens life. Hasina seems to write letters to Nazeen about her everyday reality interpreted in her simply written and rustic letters. Hasinas letters symbolize her character and Nazeen come to notice differences between what she thinks is Hasinas life and what Hasinas life really is. Nazeen seems to lead a life which is quite a contrast to the life of her sister. The realism in her life is seen, according to Alistair Cormack as the novels narrative voice unable fully to map the consciousness of the central character.4 As a sister Nazeen is constantly homesick for her homeland, for Bangladesh, her husband expresses a desire to return, not prepared to admit the discrepancy between his fantasies, built on an industrialized version of Bangladeshi identity, and what the Western reader takes to be the realities of contemporary Bangladesh revealed from Nazeens sister Hasina.5

Alistair, Cormack, Migration and the Politics of Narratice Form: Realism and thePostcolonial Subject in Brick Lane, University of Wiscosin, Madison, 2006, p. 697. 5 Ibid, p. 702.

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Hasinas character is portrayed through her style of writing which is in itself very unrefined at times direct and in many forms rudimentary. It is as though she is writing in a pidginized type of style which directly reflects her characters as a person. The confusion of Hasinas life and how her sister interprets what Hasina writes to her is a complicated part of Brick Lanes storyline. At first Nazeen is ignorant to what she thinks Hasina does for a living. She sees past the fact that Hasina was in a relationship with an abusing man, that later she worked selling her body, as a lady of the night. Her lifes choices reflect the shambles of what her life has become. When Nazeen finds out what her sisters life really is all she can do is fall into a delirium she cannot believe what happened to her sweet sibling, the one she left in Bangladesh. Their lives although so different, seem to evolve in completely different directions but again they have some similarities. The resemblance between their lives can be reflected in the choice of lovers. Even though the two sisters have different choices of lovers on the one hand, a violent one, and on the other a radical, the fact that they have lovers is significant. What is unfortunate for Hasina is that is unable to adapt to life and has a certain kind of naivety about her that does not allow her to face the disasters happening in her life. The way in which the two sisters use the English language has been hinted at in the above descriptions of the two sisters. The language that Nazeen uses is quite different than the one used by her Bengali sister, in Brick Lane, English does not appear to be remade but rather is used intact, as a novelistic lingua franca, and it is this that generates the effect of realism. There is an unavoidable irony in depicting Nazeens struggle with English entirely within that language.6 The way the narrator in the book makes a review of the storyline is from an outside view of events going inwards but still having some coherent access to the main characters thoughts. Hasina attempts to use a form of the Bengali language but a most primitive one. The question of whether the letters are representations and attempts to use English as a
6

Ibid, pp. 710-711.

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free translation contrasted with the not very grammatical use of the Bengali language. The distance between the two cultures is directly interpreted through attempts in using a foreign language versus the use of Bengali. The intertwining of the way these two languages are used to represent a significant point in terms of cultural mixing.7 It is no question, that the letters exchanged through the many years between two siblings had a great impact on both of them. It was an escape from a harsh world for both in one way or another. The theme of question of the power of men over these two women is great and has a huge influence on the way they carry themselves in this world. On the one side there is Nazeen a quiet women and obeying wife who caters not only to her husband (but mainly to him) but also to her two daughters. It is the oldest daughter that shows more strength than her mother. Shahana tells her mother to stand up for herself in making the decisions of the household, mainly the question of whether the family will move to Bangladesh. Nazeens husband Chanu is the head of the house and what he says goes. The women never really openly question masculine power except when Shahana openly rebels about her fathers ways. She is the only one who can stand up for herself and her father shows his disapproval when his temper gets the better of him. But the most important point to be made about the film is what Nazeens mother kept on saying that what cannot be changed must be borne. This idea keeps on going throughout the film and the book and it is what haunts Nazeen when her son dies as a baby. Monica Alis novel resonates so many themes from love, betrayal to finding ones place in the world. This novel is truly versatile in that it deals with the lives of people not originally from London and follows their trials and tribulations. On a much higher level the movie shows the complete contrasts but also many overlapping themes about how the sisters choose to live their lives and where their destiny chooses to take them, on a never ending journey. The person watching the film gets to see two views mainly feminine and their attitudes as well as the way these attitudes slowly seem to develop into strong feelings.
7

Ibid, p. 715.

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There is an abundant choice of ideas, symbols and items that were chosen in the process of making the film. As with many adaptations not everything represented in the book can be shown in the film naturally. The subjects from everyday life such as memories, different colors and images are shown in a impressing manner. The concentration is on besides the female characters their male counterparts whose perceptions and understandings contrast into a well tuned masterpiece.

Vrca Azra

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Works Cited

Brick Lane. Dir. Sarah Gavron. Sony Pictures, 2007. Film.

Cormack, Alistair. Migration and the Politics of Narratice Form: Realism and thePostcolonial Subject in Brick Lane, University of Wiscosin, Madison, 2006.

Islamal, Mohsin Jamal. Islam and Women: The Two Foes Reconciled in Monica Alis Brick Lane. MA thesis, The University of Oslo. Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, 2007.

McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism, Diaspora and Identities; Manchester University Press, 2000.

Mortada, Syeda Samara. The Notion of Women as Bearers of Culture in Monica Alis Brick Lane. BRAC University Journal, vol VII, no. 1&2, 2010, pp. 53-59

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