englishness

The term ‘multiculturalism’ deals with the ideology of racial, cultural and ethnic diversity usually under one umbrella such as a school, neighborhood, city or a nation at all. Today’s leading example is the U.S.A without any doubt which is resembled to a ‘salad bowl’ with its specialty of including people from almost every nationality. But besides the U.S.A, with its colonial past; Britain also leads the term ‘multicultural’. By the way, many people have a very superficial view of racism like the English do. They all see it as a belief that one race is superior to another. More or less, racism is the concept that one’s race determines one’s identity. In other words, one’s character, values, culture are determined not by his/her acceptance with mind but by ‘blood’. Thus, the spread of racism caused the destruction of individual’s self-confidence in his/her own mind. Because they all started to see themselves as the ‘outsiders’ or the ‘others’ in the society they accept as their homes. So, they began to seek the ways of gaining a sense of ‘identity’. But is that the only way to get an identity by trying to be a member of a group or are there any other ways that make one ‘accepted’?

            Before searching for a certain answer of that question, we have to take a deep look over the term identity, its effects on people actually, on the ones who live in a society in which they are not accepted and abused at all. Our concern here is of course, the second and third generations of the first immigrants who came to Britain as a result of its colonial past or their dreaming it as a land to where ‘‘if only they make their way, they will never remain poor’’ (Lahiri 204). By that aspect, it reminds us all the well known ‘American Dream’. Anyway, these immigrants never felt like at home in Britain neither their children have the sense of being a ‘British’ still. And that is the point from where ‘identity crisis’ emerges. Identity can be defined simply as ‘the essence of a self-conscious person that makes him or her unique not only in the country he/she lives but on the whole universe’. But unfortunately, when the term comes to discrimination, it does not count for something at all…

            That discrimination starts at schools from childhood. Because they are ‘colored’ they are seen as different from the other children, from the white ones. Usually, it is started by an adult; by the teacher himself. As Hanif Kureishi whose nationality in heritage is Pakistani says; ‘‘At school, one teacher always spoke to me in a ‘Peter Sellers’ Indian accent. Another refused to call me by my name, calling me Pakistani Pete instead’’ (Kureishi 73). That ‘seen apart’ is later taken over by the children, by their classmates who are in origin White Anglo Saxons. Although these children are so little to become aware of the racial differences between them and their ‘colored’ friends, the adults around them like their parents or teachers make them also feel by this way; feel like they are superior to them. The sense of ‘pride’ strikes its roots in these little brains from childhood and leading them to be grown as racists. Andrea Levy who is a Jamaican in origin also shared the same discrimination with Hanif Kureishi when she was a child. In her article; ‘This is My England’ she says; ‘‘They asked – oh, they asked all the time. ‘Where are you from?’ was as constant a noise as a ticking clock. But if I answered ‘Jamaica’, lips would curl or tongues would tut’’ (Levy 2). Apart from that, she also tells the changing attitudes of the whites towards the ones coming from a well known superior country, explicitly in terms of her childhood remembrance; ‘‘America was a great place to come from. I remember a white American girl coming to school…Everyone wanted to be her friend. To see her toys, to hear her parents’ wonderful accent, to try their food with an ‘Ooohh isn’t it lovely’ ’’ (Levy 2).

            As we see from the first hand experiences of both writers, that ‘sense of loss’ is disposed in their minds, in their lives  at a very early age even if they accept Britain as their mother country. ‘‘I was educated to be English. Alongside me- learning, watching, eating and playing- were white children. But those white children would never hate to grow up to question whether they were English or not’’ (Levy 2). Taken apart from a group caused them be ashamed of their origins even of their parents, families and their cultural heritage. ‘‘I was embarrassed that my parents were not English. One of the reasons was that no one around me was interested in the country my parents came from. To them, it was just a place full of ‘inferior black people’ ’’ (Levy 2). ‘‘I wanted just to fit in and be part of everything that was around me, and these strange parents were holding me back’’ (Levy 2). ‘‘From the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self. I was ashamed. It was a curse and I wanted to get rid of it. I wanted to be like everyone else’’ (Kureishi 73).

            However; with the increasing numbers of new comers to the mother country; Britain, they started to gain the confidence in themselves again. Becoming more in majority made them feel like a part of something, feel like being accepted as they used to be. Thus, they started to be curious about their origins, their cultures and anything traditional in their home lands although they all hated once. ‘‘Along with this immigration – this safety in numbers- came a new interest for me in the country my parents had left. I was gaining a fledgling sense of pride in having a Jamaican heritage’’ (Levy 3). While trying to be a part of something, they continued to face with difficulties. In every research back to their origins, there was something missing, something lost, uncertain which caused them turn to the beginning where they left all racial thoughts behind; again the same feeling of belonging or unbelonging- where to belong? ‘‘It is hard for anyone to research their genealogy; but it is even harder (though not impossible) for someone with my background. Most of the records are incomplete or unavailable at best; destroyed or non-existent at worst’’ (Levy 3).

            Identity crisis rose from discrimination or racism, what you wish to call as, went on making ‘colored’ people’s lives harder and harder. As an adult, there are far more issues they have to deal with than as a child. Making friends, getting a job in a white dominated society are the next steps of their survival. In our world, having friendships and being social can be seen very natural as beings living in a society in which discrimination is not so much apparent as it is in Britain. But for a Pakistani, an Indian an Asian or even for all colored ones living with the ‘others’, having white friends and keeping that friendships for so long is something very hard. Because anybody who is not English is ‘black’ for the whites. And being a ‘black’ means that you are inferior, you are ignorant, you are dirty and ‘‘less than human so worthy of abuse and violence’’ (Kureishi 76). How can you be friends with a black who is not seen as an individual with mind, who is not at the same ‘status’ with you, at all? ‘‘A hierarchy of power relationships is being revealed; the superior white (superior in social and human terms) is surrounded by inferior creatures, the black and the dog; who share more or less the same status’’ (Lee 1). How can you be friends with a white who sees you as uncivilized and brutal not as a pure human being with mind, with a life, a past and a future? ‘‘I’d hardly known anyone for more than eight years, and certainly not their parents. People came and went. These was much false intimacy and force friendship. People didn’t take responsibility for each other’’ (Kureishi 85).

            However; there is a possibility of ‘friendship’ with the whites as we see in the movie ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’. For the possibility of that friendship, the most essential thing as shown in the movie is money. Money means power on something, over somebody. That means, if you have money, if you hold the power, you can have white friends but from working class, lower class at all. Racism again comes forward… Rich colored one starts to behave in a racial way. He tries to be superior to the white by holding money in his hand as power. Actually, for this time he wants to play the role of ‘white master’.

            ‘‘Omar: I want big money. I’m not gonna be beat down by this country. When we                                                 

               were at school, you kicked me all round the place. And what are you doing now?                     

               Washing my floor. That’s how I like it. Now get to work. Get to work I said. Or  

               you’re fired!’’ (My Beautiful Laundrette).

            ‘‘Salim: (To Johnny.) These people. What a waste of life. They’re filthy and ignorant.  

               They’re just nothing. But they abuse people. (To Omar.) Our people. (To Johnny.)

               All over England, Asians, as you call us, are beaten, burnt to death. Always we are  

               intimidated. What these scum need is a taste of their own piss’’ (My Beautiful  

               Laundrette). By looking at these quotations from the movie, we have to take into consideration the friendship between Omar and Johnny. There is no possibility of a pure relationship. They both have an intimacy towards each other. But neither Omar nor Johnny can think of without their racist backgrounds. One always reminds the other who the master is. And the other shows his racist side coming from his origin in every opportunity that he finds.

            ‘‘Johnny: Aren’t you giving ammunition to your enemies doing this kind

              of…unscrewing? To people who say Pakis just comes here to hustle other people’s

              lives and jobs and houses.

           ‘‘Nasser: But we’re professional businessman. Not professional Pakistanis. … (My

              Beautiful Laundrette). Anyway, their friendship turns into a homosexual relationship which also shows the absurdity and impossibility of that pure white-black intimacy.

            Besides the hardship in relationships, there is a far more important issue to talk about; problems in working area. There is always an available job for a white but not for the others. In other terms, if there is a job opportunity, it is to be given to a white initially before the ‘colored’ one. Is not discrimination as apparent as it is in every area of life? ‘‘One example was 25-year-old Sohan Lal, who was forced out of a job at a foundry in Derbyshire when 200 of his white colleagues went on strike in protest at his appointment. The workers complained that an agreement with the management of the foundry, whereby no more Asians would be employed if white labor were available, had been breached when Lal, the sixth Asian was employed. – He said; ‘I am a British citizen and I thought when I came here it would count for something, but apparently, it is not so’ ’’ (Lahiri 208). As another example stands for it; ‘‘One Indian who tried to obtain a job in the car industry was told that employment was only open to union members, but when he attempted to obtain a union card, he was refused’’ (Lahiri 208).

            While giving the reasons of second or third generations of the first immigrants’ having a sense of ‘loss identity’ in the country they believed that they belong to, I put aside the most essential effect of these causes on them. More than discrimination but less than not having an identity; ‘alienation’ which is a kind of social schizophrenia bores to several important issues, I have given as reasons above, still forms the basis of these second or third generation writers’ works. ‘‘…Writers who are giving voice to the experiences of their own generation of people; often born in the United Kingdom but still without a clear sense of home either in Britain or back in the islands’’ (Nasta 50). The sense of alienation caused a kind of loneliness in the lives of them. Like one’s feeling alone in the crowd… That sense of loneliness is much clearer in Samuel Selvon’s novels and in the characters of his ‘Londoners’. At the beginning of The Lonely Londoners, the atmosphere of Selvon’s city is described; ‘‘as if it is not London at all but some strange place on another planet’’ (Selvon 23). And the protagonist of the novel; Moses feels that solitude deeply. ‘‘…when you go down a little you bounce up a misery and pathos and a kind of frightening-what? He don’t have the right word, but he have the right feeling in his heart’’ (Selvon 142).

            That sense of something ‘missing’ captured the whole life of these people. And they will always ask themselves the question ‘why’ until the world accepts the term free will. These people whether Pakistani, Indian or Jamaican are to be judged as individuals and that prejudice one’s being whom from one’s belonging where is a corruption- a corruption what Nazi Germany did. But if it continues, we will come to the saying that it is not a nation based on freedom and independence at all.

Monica Ali’s Brick Lane as a novel and film

Lost in Translation

 

          ‘‘Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only at the beginning, when we’re absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand.’’

                                                                                                                                                                               Ivan Turgenev

 

          Monica Ali is the daughter of Bangladeshi parents who came to England at the age of three. She studied at Oxford University and became known with her first striking novel Brick Lane which was shortlisted for 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and later made into a film and released in 2007. In her novel, she tells the story of a Bangladeshi family who explores the British immigrant experience in a specific area of East London. Though the novel seems breathtaking with its interconnected plot switches from one country to the other, the film version seems most likely lost in translation.

          The novel takes its start with the troubled birth of the central character, Nazneen in what is then known as East Pakistan. Just after a short prologue, the novel takes its shape through the events after Nazneen’s arranged marriage at the age of sixteen to a forty year old man who ‘‘had a face like a frog’’ (Ali 17).She is casted out of the life she is used to and bound to in the countryside of Bangladesh and sent away to England in where her husband, Chanu has a job and life. ‘‘As Nazneen grew she heard many times this story of How You Were Left To Your Fate’’ and also taught that ‘‘fighting against one’s fate can weaken the blood’’ (15). That is why she silently submits to the superior power of fate over her life in a London flat. Luckily, she finds other Bangladeshis living in there that will help her feel little or less like at home. However, Chanu accuses the other immigrants of being uneducated, illiterate and uncultured. So, he does not approve of Nazneen’s close relationship with these people that he thinks ‘below’.

          Although the marriage of them is not a love marriage, at least ‘‘he was kind and gentle’’ (22) towards her until she has heard that he simply accepts her as a ‘‘good worker. Cleaning and cooking and all that’’. ‘‘What had she imagined? That he was in love with her?’’(23). The answer was easy, it was nothing beyond an arranged marriage and it would not be ever. Though even a while she thought as a foolish girl, she then opened her eyes to the harsh reality of her new life. It was totally different from the times she used to be the ‘good’ daughter of her family in which she was too happy with her young sister Hasina.

          However, the life has not given Hasina what she has expected like Nazneen. She has eloped in a ‘love’ marriage but later she has been disowned by her husband. Anyway, Hasina whose fate at home in Dhaka changes throughout the fifteen years has been Nazneen’s only contact with ‘home’ through the letters they write to each other during the novel. With the exchange of these letters, Ali tries to show us simultaneous lives of two sisters, one at home, the other in London, both similarities and contrasts of their fates as the second sex like all the other Bangladeshi women who totally have no power on their written fates in the societies they live in.

          Ali draws Nazneen’s life sensitively by showing her as a regular prayer, regular housewife, regular wife to her husband and a regular friend to Razia. She has kept her silence, obedience and her calmness. After a while, she has realized that she even has a regular motto; ‘‘If you say so husband. She began to answer him like this. She meant to say something else by it: sometimes that she disagreed, sometimes that she didn’t understand or that he was talking rubbish, sometimes that he was mad. But he heard it only as, If you say so’’ (99).  Ali focuses on every single minute details of Nazneen’s life just to make us observe these minute changes simultaneously that takes place in the developing relationship of Nazneen and Chanu as a result of their daily challenges. On the other hand, there stands Hasina’s life which is far more dramatic. Because of the ‘crime’ that their marriage has, she desperately waits for the time that will come and her husband’s mother will lover her like a daughter. The only thing she says in her letters is her husband’s patience and calmness towards her. ‘‘Everything good between us now. I do not let my tongue make trouble for it as my husband say’’ (25). Both women accept the ways their lives shaped in and obviously do question neither the reasons of nor the circumstances surrounding their mother’s suicide when they were children. ‘‘Nazneen listened, breathing quietly and hoping that if they forgot about her they might reveal the source of their woes. It was something to do with being a woman; of that much she was sure. When she was a woman she would find out’’ (103).

          Moreover, Ali shows us all the details of Nazneen’s life to make us visualize better in order to understand her dilemmas, her sorrows and even her happiness. Through these details, we see her untidy little apartment better, hear Chanu’s excuses, complains and boasts better and feel Nazneen’s confusions and anger with her life better while she is acting the role given to her as a submissive and obedient wife by cutting Chanu’s corns and nose hair thinking about some little rebellious acts. She puts hot chilies in his sandwiches, puts unwashed socks to his drawer, cuts him when she tends his corns, even though she is pregnant, she does not eat anything at mealtimes with him, ‘‘but for him she would not. She showed her self-restraint like this. Her self-denial. She wanted to make it visible. It became a habit, then a pleasure (…)’’ (77). These ‘‘domestic guerilla actions’’ (100) of Nazneen have come to an end when her first child is born. Although her whole world suddenly and totally changes with this newcomer, she has had the feeling of loss and meaningless during her pregnancy. ‘‘She looked at her stomach that hid her feet and forced her to lean back to counter its weight. She looked and she saw that she was trapped inside this body, inside this room, inside this flat, inside this concrete slab of entombed humanity’’ (76). However, the coming of baby either makes her feel in a different way or keeps her busy. Unfortunately, the baby becomes ill, taken to the hospital but at last desperately leaves them. Though the death of the little baby is painful for them both emotionally and psychologically, it lets the relationship between Nazneen and Chanu go one step further. Chanu turns into a man who is so thoughtful and caring towards her which makes Nazneen feel herself closer to him with the pain of his son in her heart. ‘‘Abba did not choose so badly. This was not a bad man. There were many bad men in the world, but this was not one of them. She could love him. Perhaps she did already’’ (120). ‘‘Her irritation with her husband, instead of growing as steadily as it had for three years, began to subside. For the first time she felt he was not so different. At his core, he was same as her’’ (121).

          On the other hand, Hasina struggles alone to support herself in Dhaka and Nazneen feels herself so powerless to help her younger sister. ‘‘It was her place to sit and wait. Even if the tornado was heading directly towards her. For her, there was nothing else to be done. Nothing else that God wanted her to do’’ (101-102). The only thing she can do is enduring her life stuck in a culture in which she feels she has no value while Hasina is an object of torture and abuse in Dhaka. ‘‘Hasina was working, but Hasina had no choice. If she had a husband or a father…’’ (125). Even though Hasina has been living in bad circumstances, Nazneen learns it in time by herself through Hasina’s letters that her sister is nothing but a whore who is just living for the survival of her tomorrow. ‘‘How to write? What to tell? Sister I have bring shame on self. I tell you what happen. If you write to me even in spite you know what I have done it not because I trick you to think I am good person’’ (165). However, as their mother says, ‘‘If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men’’ (80).

          Though he seems basically like a good man, Chanu, in fact, neither considers Hasina nor cares about her troubles of survival. Furthermore, he even forces his daughters who are born after the following years of the death of their son, Raqib to memorize long passages of traditional poetry because of the fact that he is an educated man who studied English literature in contrast to the other immigrants and beats them when they fail. Because Chanu is a man who is tied to the old values of his culture, he is insistent about her daughters’ faithfulness to their original culture in which he feels himself so comfortable. ‘‘I am talking about the clash between Western values and our own. I’m talking about the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one’s identity and heritage. I’m talking about the children who don’t know what their identity is’’ (113). However, what he has been talking about is something so much different from the culture that the daughters experience with their friends at school. So, rebellions are inevitable for the girls and even for Nazneen who in time starts to feel like something inside her is slowly going away. ‘‘Fact: we live in a Western society. Fact: our children will act more and more like Westerners. Fact: that is no bad thing’’ (113). Strikingly, Nazneen finds herself taking her own decisions by achieving a kind of personal happiness, in other words a love affair with Karim who is a young radical. It has been kept as a secret from Nazneen’s husband and daughters. ‘‘It was as if the conflagration of her bouts with Karim has cast a special light on everything, a dawn life after a life lived in twilight. It was as if she had been born deficient and only now been gifted the missing sense’’ (301). Though Nazneen’s adultery seems dishonest towards her, even more or less, kind husband, it is stressed as revenge against the society in which they are stuck. By this way, it should be regarded as a teaching experience.

          Ali creates the life of Nazneen with every single detail to make the reader see the process of her ‘growth’. Without being companied by Chanu, her attending to the meetings of a group of activists who are on the purpose of defending their culture by the attacks of September 11, is an unbelievable decision taken by her, all alone. And her love affair with another man also can be accepted as the turning point of her life which is believed to be controlled by her fate written when she is born. With all these details, the reader also sees her acceptance of a new culture, the rebirth, the transformation and the new Nazneen. That is exactly what Brick Lane shows step by step; the story of an immigrant family in transition with its first and second generations and the story of a woman’s slowly turning into an individual.

          On the other hand, Monica Ali’s prize winning 2003 novel’s film adaptation made by Sarah Gavron and was released in 2007. In contrast to the controversy of the novel, the film is safer and more accessible to a broader audience and it has ‘partially’ succeeded in visualizing a Muslim woman who lacks of courage to stand up for her own ideals, ideas, desires and expectations from her own life. The other characters are also examined with great care and consideration but they are not given so much importance apart from a soft dissatisfaction with their life stuck in one single surrounding during the 9/11 tensions.

          The film starts with the appearance of Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) on the scene who is now 33, a wife and a mother struggling to find her place in the world. Different from the prologue of Ali’s novel, Gavron jumps into the life of Nazneen with her husband and two daughters by disregarding her life before and until the death of her little baby in the film. Just a photo of the baby in frame is shown to make the audience be aware of his existence once. Also, Nazneen’s life before her marriage with her younger sister and her mother’s suicide is shown with flashbacks in snatches. So, through these flashbacks the audience learns that Nazneen is sold off to an old man named Chanu (Satish Kaushik) after her mother’s suicide and sent off to London to be a proper, obedient Muslim wife and caring mother to two daughters, Bibi and Shahana(Lana Rahman, Naeema Begum). 

          Set in a proper part of East London where the streets signs are both in English and Bengali, where the market and curry shops only appeal to South Asian immigrants, Brick Lane portrays the melodramatic life of a lonely woman in that crowd who shares the rest of her life with an older man that usually starts his speeches by quoting from Thackeray and the Brontes. Chanu comes to the stage as an arrogant, dumb man who believes in the possibilities of upward mobility in British system as a result of his high expectations of a promotion. However, he is crossed when a white colleague of him gets the expected promotion. After this fail, Chanu quits his job and starts to look for other alternatives to support his family what actually ends up with nonsensical and unrealistic opportunities like future in soap business. He even goes one step further by borrowing money from the usurer neighbor, Mrs. Islam to buy a computer with the awkward aim of connecting with the world.

          Anyway, Nazneen starts to work at home by sewing both to support the income of the family and to pay the debt of her husband to Mrs. Islam. And actually, that is how Karim (Christopher Simpson) comes into the life of Nazneen and ours by showing up with a pair of jeans for Nazneen to sew that followed by regular visits. Though Nazneen’s new job threatens the patriarchal power of her husband, she never gives up it which is accepted as one of the little but important signs of gaining her individuality apart from her insistence to learn English. However, the real reason slowly starts to take its place in her mind then in her heart. She lets her desperate situation replaced by passion, desire, excitement and the dreams of another sort of existence, not much about the sense of acceptance but more about love. Actually, in the novel the glimpses of an expected love affair is started to be seen slowly within lines. But in the film, the audience sees what is going through their minds with the help of the scene in which Karim puts his hand to the opal glass of the door when he leaves the apartment and Nazneen also places her hand against it, too, their hands are together but not touching. Though we do not so much pity on Chanu in the novel because of that love affair and her wife’s adultery, Gavron makes the audience feel sorry for him as a result of her showing this figure far more sympathetic than he is in the novel. 

          Nazneen’s oldest daughter Shahana is possibly the most convincing character who is both caring and arrogant about her parents’ damaged relationship and lack of communication. And strikingly, she is the only character who makes Nazneen’s pen friendship with Hasina who is an off-screen character seem believably concrete by performing as a mirror figure of her absence. Furthermore, she is also the first one who feels something is going on between her mother and the younger man.

          In contrast to the differences written above, Gavron places the 9/11 subplot into the script agreeably by using this event to confuse Nazneen’s mind much more than before. She desperately feels lost between her lover who has turned into a young activist and her demanding husband while she is stuck within her dreams of childhood with Hasina.

          However, much of the struggle in translating the striking power of the novel upon the screen most likely comes up from the modest characteristic of Nazneen. Because her struggles and dilemmas are mostly internal as a result of her inability of voicing what is in her mind. With the help of some voice-overs and the long-lasting, slow motion scenes of the discontent surrounded household, Gavron lets the audience create some insight but while doing that she lacks of depending her rebellion on a justified and logical reason. But Chatterjee’s performance as Nazneen can also be seen less persuasive than Nazneen in the novel. She   successfully reflects the weakness of Nazneen but her inability of acting out the internal struggle and rebellion of Nazneen makes some of the shortcomings of the script even worse. Anyway, by softening the controversy of the novel, Brick Lane does not succeed so much as a film even lost in translation.