The Going Home Syndrome in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Autor: Lauret, Sabine
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Popis: Born in Dhaka and educated in England, Monica Ali writes from what Homi K. Bhabha defined as an interstitial space in The Location of Culture. In her debut novel, Brick Lane (2003), Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi girl is married off to Chanu, a man nearly twice her age who tries to be a ‘Big Man’ in London. She does not speak English and knows nothing of the city. Images of the Golden Bengal collide with the bricks of Bangla Town. Through Nazneen’s eyes, the reader witnesses the shaping of a multicultural community in a context of social and racial unrest. This paper aims at showing how Monica Ali challenges the notion of belonging. She illustrates with her different characters how the diasporic prism distorts reality. The account she gives of the immigrants’ life is moving and exposes the paradox of the yearning for the home country. What is it to be home? What does it mean to go back home when home is a country you have never seen before? The métissage of a new identity thus implies the creation of an ‘imaginary homeland’ to use Rushdie’s words, or rather of an imaginary borderland.
Databáze: OpenAIRE