User:Daina maria/sandbox

Brick Lane - Gender Stereotype--Daina maria (talk) 07:27, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Bangladesh is a traditional, conservative, and largely Islamic society; a patriarchal and patrilineal society where socio cultural values, norms and traditions have sanctioned the segregation of the sexes and a strict gender-based division of labor. Gender in Bangladesh is key factor in defining social roles, responsibilities, and power relationships within the family. Men are the main wage earners and decision makers. Gender roles have been highly regulated within public and private spheres of influence. Analysis of norms and behaviour related to gender, power relationships and sexuality shows that they are embedded in the social constructs of masculinity and strong desire to control of women's sexuality. Women's roles are meant to be private and controlled, and not public and expressive. Women perform almost exclusively in the “informal” domestic sectors of society and their work remain invisible in the marketplace, while men dominate the formal sectors and has open access to all public spheres of society.

Ali's novel is fiercely feminist in a truly subtle, insightful, complex way that moves beyond surface conclusions and is more applicable to the reality of women's experiences.

Ali addresses the issues of gender roles in Islam, as well as the differences between genders and generations for both Eastern and Western cultures. Nazneen – the main character in the book was pronounced dead by the old midwife who arrived a few minutes after her birth. It wasn't until her aunt Mumtaz dropped her by mistake that she began to show some signs of life. Nazneen's mother Rupban was told that she could take the baby to the hospital. Rupban decided to leave Nazneen to her fate. Nazneen grew up listening to her mother tell the story of How You Were Left to Your Fate. We follow the protagonist Nazneen from her rural Bangladeshi village to London where she has gone from teenager to married woman. She spends the early part of her life taking whatever life gives her without complaining, including an arranged marriage to a man nearly twice her age. Her husband Chanu describes her as a simple, unspoiled village girl. She overhears him telling someone that she is not beautiful on the phone.

The novel chronicles the life of Nazneen. It provides a rich narrative of the joys and difficulties of her new life, magnificently situating it within wider descriptions of the Bangladeshi migrant community in London that traces its fears, tensions, and aspirations. A particularly important element of the novel is the juxtaposition of Nazneen’s life in London with that of her sister, Hasina, who has remained in Bangladesh. Through a series of letters, we see how Hasina’s life becomes increasingly difficult after she leaves her violent husband, migrates from her village to Dhaka, infringes prevailing gender norms, and eventually loses her job in a garment factory when she is accused of behaving in a “lewd manner”.

Ali offers a subtle understanding of the inequalities between men and women- and young and old- throughout the world. Nazneen relates that her beautiful young sister was immediately judged for her looks; “The older women began to say, even before she turned eleven, that such beauty could have no earthly purpose but trouble… it was a fact that being beautiful brought hardship”. This emphasizes the double standards placed on Muslim women, and the prejudice of elderly against the young. Ali speaks more directly through her characters about the gap between the East and the West, like in this speech by Chanu: “I’m 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 children who don’t know what their identity is. I’m talking about the feelings of alienation engendered by a society where racism is prevalent. I’m talking about the terrific struggle to preserve one’s sanity while striving to achieve the best for one’s family”. Chanu stresses the complexity of being an Easterner in a Western world. Ali addresses these complicated identity issues in the larger context of clashing cultures as well as providing the Western reader with a mirror in which to gauge their own stereotypes and prejudices.

We see a change in Nazneen almost immediately. She doesn’t leave the flat after arriving in England, as she’s so scared. She doesn’t speak the language, she doesn’t know her way about, and she doesn’t understand the currency. The walls of the flat are prison bars, and the flat is her cage. Nazneen says at one stage that she’s lucky to have married Chanu – her arranged husband – as he doesn’t beat her. This is where we start to see the reality of life. The difference in culture. The difference in religion. We are happy if our partners remember our anniversary; Nazneen is happy because Chanu doesn’t beat her. The clash of cultures is always brought to the surface in the book.

Nazneen realises she’s not at home any longer. And things would never be the same.

Nazneen is surrounded by other Bangladeshi wives in Tower Hamlet Estates, who gather regularly to gossip and discuss stories of the woman who jumped off a building ("You have to bear in mind she had no children. This is after twelve years of marriage...It is worst thing, for any woman"). Or the neighbor's sixteen year old daughter who was shipped off to Bangladesh to be married ("She begged them to let her stay and take her exams...Anyway, the brother has gone bad, and they wanted to save the daughter. So there it is. Now she can't run off for a love marriage.") Or of their friend Amina, who asked for a divorce ("I saw her with a split lip. And one time she had her arm in a sling. He must have gone too far this time...Not only that, he has another wife that he forgot to mention for the past eleven years!"). It is through these interspersed stories that we realize how complicated these forms of suffering really are. The divorces, beatings and affairs become scandalous gossip for the women of Tower Hamlets, who become the judge and jury for their fellow women, serving the "silent treatment" for those who transgress the boundaries of social norms. Ali's novel features no simple characters, but intricate paradoxes. How can women find their voices and independence while their very natures are defined by patriarchal system in which they have been raised and become accustomed to? How do women simultaneously suffer within as well as uphold these oppressive structures?

After the tattoo woman (as Nazneen call her) becomes ill (she hears it off a neighbour that she’s taken to hospital) it gives Nazneen the strength to go out. For the first time since arriving and marrying Chanu she leaves the flat. And for the first time she meets her newest friend – England.

Nazneen lives by the mantra, "What could not be changed must be borne. And since nothing could be changed, everything must be borne." Her entire existence in London becomes a series of counteracting forces- what she wills to do, and that which she must silently suffer. Her rage at her ugly husband, her monotonous housework, her separation from her sister Hasina, and her isolated life in England, where she is not allowed to go out ("Personally, I don't mind if you go out but these people are so ignorant. What can you do?” says her husband) slowly simmer and emerge.

Nazneen for years, keeps house, cares for her husband, and bears children, just as a girl from the village is supposed to do. But gradually she is transformed by her experience, and begins to question whether fate controls her or whether she has a hand in her own destiny.

Though set in today's multicultural London, fraught with race riots, post 9/11 hate crimes, drugs, gangs, and Islamic fundamentalism, Brick Lane also paints portraits of Nazneen's rural upbringing in Bangladesh as well as the globalized Bangladesh of today, as catalogued by Nazneen's sister Hasina's letters discussing "Brittany Spears".

As we progress and the story unfolds, we see a very different Nazneen to the Nazneen we read earlier in the book. That sweet, innocent and helpless creature isn’t how you’d think of Nazneen after seeing her at later stages of the book.

As the pages keep turning and novel progresses, we see character of Nazneen developing personality of its own in contradictory to Islamic gender stereotype. Nazneen taking sewing of clothes to earn money to meet basic home needs and paying the debts of her husband presents a valid alternative to stereotyped femininity.

Ali's novel is one of silence, both the silencing (of women as well as the silence of the community. Nazneen never directly asks a question, or states her desires, and as a result, Chanu's "no's" are to questions barely asked and never heard, resulting in a perpetual maintenance of the status quo. What becomes unavoidably apparent in Brick Lane is the gaping black hole of a gap between the number of words women dare to utter out loud (especially to their husbands) and those that are forever locked up in their own minds.

This silence is most pervasive surrounding Hasina's letters from Bangladesh. Having eloped at the age of sixteen, Hasina is soon forced to flee from her abusive husband, and over the course of the novel, is raped by her landlord, exploited by her factory co-workers, and forced into prostitution. None of this is given a tangible name. Hasina's letters beg her sister not to be angry, claiming that everything must have been her own fault. Her suffering is hidden behind code words and the subtle naming-but-not-naming of rape and prostitution. When telling her husband of Hasina's problems, Nazneen too is unable to name the injustices. "When she spoke of rape she named it in the village way, Hasina was robbed of her nakhphool...and the selling of her body she did not name, saying only my sister had to stay alive."

Nazneen cannot choose between the love she comes to feel for her husband, whom she deems as a kind man because "he had not beaten her yet" and the desire to "to get up from the table and walk out of the door and never see him again." She is torn between accepting her fate, as she has been taught from birth, and the passionate self-agency she is slowly discovering in her daily life.

As a Muslim woman, relatively confined to her household quarters, Nazneen is acquainted to an intriguing character Karim – he is the Muslim Nazneen lusts after. By now, she’s lost a child, had two girls, and been married for 16 years.

Motherhood is a catalyst -- Nazneen's daughters chafe against their father's traditions and pride -- and to her own amazement, Nazneen falls in love with a young man in the community. It is this self-agency that leads Nazneen into an affair with young, handsome Karim. Rather than becoming a tale of condemning passion, Ali explores Nazneen’s emerging independence and sexuality with all of the appropriate emotions: pleasure, shame, guilt, happiness. What is so convincing about Nazneen’s actions, and in fact the novel as a whole, is the intricacy of these emotions. Ali neither condones nor condemns any of her characters’ actions, merely providing a p l a t f o r m for them to take place. This in and of itself becomes political and feminist, as most of the issues that Ali chooses to explore: sexuality, adultery, sexual assault, drugs, and exploitation are not only avoided, but actively silenced within the South Asian diasporic community.

Nazneen discovers both the complexity that comes with free choice and the depth of her attachment to her husband, her daughters, and her new world. While Nazneen journeys along her path of self-realization, her sister, Hasina, rushes headlong at her life, first making a "love marriage," then fleeing her violent husband. Woven through the novel, Hasina's letters from Dhaka recount a worldof overwhelming adversity. Shaped, yet not bound, by their landscapes and memories, both sisters struggle to dream -- and live -- beyond the rules prescribed for them.

We see Nazneen’s character changing so drastically, Nazneen became confident and mature with the experiences and we witness a different person altogether.

Even though her characters may uphold social norms, and follow the patterns of silence and shame surrounding rape and sexual desire, Ali’s novel certainly does not. Through the complementary stories of Nazneen and Hasina, Ali refuses to sidestep the suffering of women. In fact, it is precisely Ali’s subversive approach—using the internalized language of patriarchy that many women are fluent in—that makes Brick Lane such a stunning novel, and one sure to challenge the stereotype of the submissive South Asian wife.

We can see in the final part of the story that Nazneen's character develop and see her making some difficult decisions and breaking the stereotype prevailing in the house or we say within the community at broader aspect. Towards the end of the novel she fights against her ingrained idea that "fate will decide" and becomes more active in her choices. Also, I couldn't help but feel totally endeared to Chanu, the philosophizing husband who could cook better than his wife. One of my favourite lines is when Nazneen says "From the very beginning to the very end, we didn't see things. What we did - we made each other up."

Nazneen decides to take decision for herself and her daughters against stereotyped norms and comes forth as an inspiration. Men, Women, of the same or different race as Nazneen, are the same as her. Because Nazneen is us. She might have different skin colour, but she’s just like us. And we’re just like her.