MONICA ALI

Monica Ali is angry. Praised to the skies for her first novel, Brick Lane, an international best-seller and this year’s literary sensation, she has just discovered the flip side to fame and fortune. An 18-page letter from a committee called the Greater Sylhet Welfare and Development Council, which claims to represent 500,000 Bangladeshi people in this country, has demanded her portrayal of the Bangladeshi community be withdrawn from circulation for “corrections”; and last week The Guardian newspaper repeated, without comment, parallels between Ali’s supposed offence with that of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. A clutch of literary luminaries from this year’s Booker Prize judges to Oxford professors have been wheeled out to draw the distinction between fiction and fact, but the damage is done.

It takes something as grave as a threat to life and liberty for any novel, however good, to become news, and sitting in the small South London café where we meet, Monica Ali is painfully aware of the demons of racism, intolerance, bigotry and spite which have leapt to attack her and her novel. A slim, shy, passionately intelligent young woman whose “awareness of difference” was fuelled by divisions in her mixed-race parentage (her father is Bengali, her mother English), she has already had some snide press comments over her wish not to be labelled as “the new Zadie Smith”. The Guardian’s behaviour is, however, something different.

“The thing that angers me is not the Greater Sylheti Welfare Council’s reaction – people are entitled to have their view of a piece of fiction, even if it’s believing that I’ve written a novel about alien life forms on Mars. What is utterly outrageous is the way a broadsheet newspaper chose to report this. It’s irresponsible journalism on so many levels. They have used the comparison with The Satanic Verses in that casual and utterly baseless manner. I have two small children. Don’t they realise it’s people’s lives they are playing with?”

Her fears, should the parallels with The Satanic Verses become closer, are understandable. Salman Rushdie had to live with bodyguards for a decade, in fear of his life, and his translators and publishers were also gravely affected. The GSWCD’s demand to Ali’s publisher, Doubleday, that they be allowed to “correct” her fictional portrayal of the Bengali community has a sinister precedent. Earlier this year, Ali was refused a visa for Bangladesh. Although she has said “I don’t feel the need for allegiances. To me, home is nowhere in particular,” it is clear that the portrayal of the reaction to her novel has appalled her.

“Bengali people in this country are very sensible, and will not be led into silly, irresponsible behaviour, but all it takes is one nutcase – every country and community has its nutcases – and it only takes one….” Her voice, strained from tiredness, cold and stress, fades away, and she says, “Words fail me.”

For Ali to say this is quite clearly horrible, not least because she is a writer who has given a voice to a minority whose life and customs have been veiled to the majority. The story of Nazneen’s arranged marriage to the pompous, frustrated Chanu, and her voyage from the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut to London’s Tower Hamlets, illicit love and intellectual freedom has struck a chord with readers all over the world – including countries which, unlike Britain, have no Bangladeshi immigrants. It is Chanu’s dismissal of his own countrymen that has caused offence. “Most of them have jumped ship”, he says in the novel. “They have menial job on the ship, doing donkey work or they stow away like little rats in the hold.” The GSWC’s complaints, which include the observation that some Bengali’s live in posh houses with swimming pools and that Chanu’s words will give white readers “the idea that Bengalis are uneducated and cannot read”, are ominous.

Ali is appalled at the “infantile” confusion between the views of a fictional character, and her own. Chanu is drawn with compassion and an assured comic touch that the GSWDC’s team of intellectuals have missed, despite reading it twice. She has not, she says, had this reaction from her many contacts in the Bangladeshi community.

“I’ve been getting so much positive feedback from Bangladeshis in this country and New York and all over the world when people came to my readings. I’ve had little Bengali grannies coming up and hugging me and saying they were so proud. The Newham Group of Asian Women invited me to speak at their general meeting in the East End, where I was cheered by 250 women; I’ve been asked to become a patron of the Attlee Foundation’s new Youth Centre, and the Bangladeshi Associations network for young Bengalis [check]. I’m totally mystified by this committee – which I’d not heard of before. I have documentary evidence that readers of all colours understand that Brick Lane is written with love and compassion, sympathy and empathy for all its characters. I checked with a yoiuth worker in the East End,and he told me, ‘If there were all this anger I’d be hearing it in the mosque and in the street.’”

Ali herself may live in the raffish end of Dulwich and eschew the society of literary London, but she attended a fee-paying secondary school in Bolton, Lancashire, and read PPE at Oxford. Her husband Simon Torrance, by whom she has a 4 year old son and 2 year old daughter, is a management consultant, and she worked for a small publisher, Verso, which is the kind of job many middle-class graduates aspire to getting. Yet it is clear that she does know what the less privileged members of the Bangladeshi community suffer – not least because her own father, after escaping from revolutionary Bangladesh when she was 4, had to do menial jobs in a factory despite being a respected academic engineer. Ali shops in the real-life Brick Lane, speaks with a soft Lancastrian accent and claims a network of contacts within the Bengali community – particularly its women, some of whom she thanks by name in her acknowledgements at the end of the novel. She researched Brick Lane’s dense fabric of social observation, but also drew on her own family memories, writing it late at night when unable to sleep because of her baby Felix’s wakefulness: it is, she says, “an old-fashioned family saga about the struggle between fate and free-will, endurance and self-help.”

Being door-stepped by the tabloid press and portrayed as a possible target for a fatwah never entered her mind while creating her fictional world, whose distinction from her own views are “totally crucial.” Brick Lane is suffused with comedy, warmth and hope despite the many sad and horrible things that happen to its characters – particularly Nazneen’s sister, who stays behind in Bangladesh. When I observe how powerfully optimistic its last line, in which Nazneen’s friend Razia says “This is England. You can do whatever you like,” Ali is quick to point out that this is just one character’s point of view, not her own. Her manner, which between her steely earnestness to make her point is humorous and diffident; at one point, discussing the sexism as well as the racism of the British Press she says, laughing, “I should never have got dressed up for the Booker Prize!”

Unable to grasp why, as an attractive mixed-race author she has attracted this gloating hostility from the liberal as well as the illiberal media, she has found it difficult to concentrate on writing her second novel for Doubleday. What Ali wants is “a quiet life in which to write and be at home with the kids”, yet she has just come back from visiting Calcutta for UNICEF, and is to be a guest editor on the Today Programme in the week before Christmas. She wants to talk about issues of race, and in her the media has found an ideal medium both to love and misrepresent.

“There is certainly racism in our society,” she says. “The truth is complex and diffuse. I wonder if this would happen, though, to a white writer writing about an unpleasant white character whom a white person complained about. What claims to representation, what credence would be given? The way this has been reported is infantilising a minority – as if we’re not as important. Can’t you see how ridiculous it is?”

True; but her novel has received so much attention precisely because its subject matter is novel, or new, to the white majority, I point out. She immediately acknowledges this.

“A writer from a minority does carry an extra expectation of being a cheerleader for that minority. That’s understandable. But I feel my duty is to tell the truth as I see it, not to be a mouthpiece or write a sociological study.

“If this committee is so concerned about Syleti welfare, why are they not raising real issues of concern, like over-crowding, unemployment and drug abuse? These are the pressing issues that I talk about in the book, but it’s as if it’s only in fiction that you can raise these issues, not in newspapers.”

The irony of what has happened does not escape her, and she tries to find “a grim consolation” in a situation in which the Committee’s attempt at censorship has only fuelled the fame of Brick Lane. Yet her novel needed no such help. Brick Lane has just been bought for film by Film Four, and although she did not (as many expected) win the Booker Prize, nor the Guardian First Book Award last week, her novel’s fame is growing with every passing week. Ali, whose initial reaction to the complaint was that it was “too silly to comment on” is discovering the hard way that fame and fortune can be a poisoned chalice in all societies, but especially when they come intertwined with talent, beauty, and race. One must hope that, after an extraordinary year, it does not become harder still.

The Sunday Times, December 2003