Brick Lane

"Shortlist"

"I thought Monica Ali was brilliant at getting under the skin of a Bangladeshi woman brought to England as part of an arranged marriage. There’s a spirit in her that wants to break out. In that sense it’s a very Western, Hollywood narrative of breaking out from constraint. I wasn’t quite sure about the communication with the sister in Bangladesh, which I didn’t feel quite worked. But I thought it was a fantastic read – a sweeping, Dickensian novel. Monica Ali has lived in Britain most of her life, middle-class and completely Western. But she is herself from a Bangladeshi background, and brings insights from that world. A lot of people say we will have problems integrating immigrant groups into British society, for instance because of their attitudes towards women – the purdah notion of not having contact between women and non-family men, and other traditions that we see as constraining and discouraging gender equality. But equally, I’ve heard it said many times that the great hope for improved integration in Britain are the young women who do well at school and go to university. But then they don’t want to marry the young men from their community. Nazneen, the protagonist of this novel, is an emblem of that. She breaks out and wants to take part in the fantastic freedoms and opportunities that British society offers. Absolutely. It would also be good to mention the other novels about these issues that I’ve read and learnt from. Andrea Levy’s Small Island is one, about the Caribbean experience. It’s particularly brilliant on what I call the original sin of immigration, which was the appalling way that we treated Caribbeans when they first came to Britain – exacerbated by the fact that they came with such high expectations, expecting to be embraced because they had invested part of their national identity in Britain. Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam is another great Dickensian novel that I enjoyed, about Pakistani life in the north of England. And I would also like to mention Zaiba Malik’s poignant memoir about growing up in Bradford, We Are a Muslim, Please . That every immigrant story is different. One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed about writing my own [forthcoming] book on post-war immigration is travelling around the country talking to people, and feeling that I’ve got a good excuse to ask anyone who is evidently not white British to tell me their story – which people generally like doing. Another human element is that we have tended – out of liberal guilt or minority victimhood – to write out the white side of the immigration story. Post-war, immigrants invariably went into the working class districts of Britain. These were pretty rough areas. Up to 20 or 30 years ago, Britain was a violent place for everyone. If you went out on a Friday night there would be punch-ups all around the country. There was a lot more violence everywhere, some of it was racist, and we shouldn’t forget that. But it was only one part of the story. The locals in these districts were often poorly educated, low status people within British society, who accommodated this massive and unrewarded change to their lives. They or their descendants get bad press but while some of them responded very badly, the critical mass of them responded pretty well. We have to appreciate the sense of displacement and loss that these people felt. I was talking to a group of people in Wolverhampton of Asian background – Sikhs and Hindus – who were pioneer, second and third generation immigrants. We talked about national identity, the importance of a national story that included everyone and what its contours might be. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter A woman came up to me afterwards – mid-twenties, a lawyer, educated in an elite university. She said that in her family they always felt gratitude towards her grandfather, who came to Britain with £10 in his pocket, did well and bequeathed his success to them. But thinking of the bigger story, she said: I now realise it wasn’t just my grandfather. What allowed my grandfather to do well was the opportunities that Britain provided him to flourish. With all its blemishes, faults and racism, she said, Britain has been a land of fantastic opportunity for me and my family, and we need to think of it that way. So it comes back to the notion of a national story, and the rather over-baggy identity that Britain inherited from the empire. I think we need to spell things out more, and have a positive British dream or story to tell. And that woman’s success is a part of that national story. But because we have this rather oblique notion of national identity, we don’t tell these stories of why this is still a good society, with opportunities to give to both native and newcomer. We should be telling those stories more."