Monica Ali,
Brick Lane,
Doubleday,
London, 2003.
Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women Workers and Labour Market Decisions, The University Press Limited, Dhaka 2001.
The two works under review include a piece of fiction and a factual research report on the choices women make in the labour market in Bangladesh. The books are bound together by more than the acknowledgement that Monica Ali makes to Naila Kabeer's work, from which she says she "drew inspiration."
Ali's Brick Lane has been one of those books about Southasia written in English and in the West that is much feted in its place of origin, but dismissed by native Southasian readers as sensationalised and pandering to Western notions and ideas. Both responses are over-determined. Perhaps the novel did not merit, on purely literary considerations, the kind of ovation it received in the overseas media, even being nominated for a Booker Prize. It seemed that Ali was being judged more on the merits of being from Bangladesh, a country that has stayed out of the sphere of Southasian writing in English. Also, her books represents a part of the discovery of multicultural London, which had been celebrated a few years previously by Zadie Smith in White Teeth. Written post 9-11, Brick Lane contained, for Western readers, valuable insights into both exapanding Islamisation and more conventional Islamic practices and beliefs.