Brick Lane

These two themes are intertwined. Desire is connected to beauty of natural life cycles and expressed as a yearning to return to one’s native land. Yet, on a deeper level, Brick Lane explores desire as an erotic power fueling personal and collective transformation. This theme is explored through the Hasina and Nazneen’s relationships. Hasina’s beauty makes her an object of desire, and yet she battles this notion of passivity by making her own rules and struggles to be proactive in her own life, even when it means shattering cultural norms of female dependency. In contrast, her lack of exterior beauty simplifies Nazneen’s life’s choices and she has to travel for the erotic experience that gives her more compassion for her sister.

Ultimately, in this novel, beauty and desire are inseparable from the attunement of the body with nature. The narrative paints a vivid picture of how the body contains memories of the connection to the organic world, made literal with the sisters’ rural village upbringing, lost in the Western world of accumulated objects.

The sense of community is strong in this novel. While community is a lifeline for the immigrants, polarization of Muslims arises from their longing for a global community, a unified Muslim people. Yet, the importance of this novel is the way it details how Muslim cultural norms inhibit women from rising to their full potential as equal partners. In its depiction of a woman’s passage through this polarization, a new potential for community is revealed through the physics of “entanglement”. There is a realistic appraisal of how grounded cultural activities integrating women and families are being shunted aside for a politicization mirroring of the post September 11 polarity of Western society.

There is a great reverence for wisdom in this book, though the characters have different approaches to obtaining this ideal. For Chanu, it is through academic knowledge gained through learning history and literature. For Nazneen, it is through lived experience and her faith bolstered by readings of the Koran. Yet, the importance of this novel is acute depiction of the wisdom of the erotic tension of opposites. We experience this through the body, as the protagonist combines her powers of observation with inner spirit to maintain her family balance. In this process, the fantasies of return to the homeland develop into the inner spirit which, together with her growing body awareness, establishes an inner/outer balance once she surrenders to her passion and allows a new vision of herself to emerge through opening herself up to erotic love.

Love in its many forms is a powerful theme propelling the narrative of Brick Lane. Hasina experiences the instability and uncertainty of erotic love many times. In contrast, her sister experiences a love that is cultivated through daily experience of partnership, the gradual surrender to physical and emotional intimacy made all the more important in an arranged marriage. Then there is the love of friendship revealed in the bond between Chanu and Dr. Azad, which Nazneen has difficulty in understanding until she experiences it with Razia. There is also the love of family that is revealed throughout the book, particularly the bond between sisters.