Troubling Expectations: The Burden of a BAME Writer
Monica Ali’s story of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi immigrant adjusting to life in the east end, was met with great critical acclaim. Brick Lane was the first novel of this brown, Bangladeshi-born writer. It jettisoned her onto Granta’s best young novelists list and quickly established her as one to watch. Writing in The Guardian, Natasha Walter concluded that this is ‘the kind of novel that surprises one with its depth and dash; it is a novel that will last.’ Ali’s subsequent novels, however, have often, as Walter says of one, ‘underwhelmed’ critics. According to Walter, in Brick Lane Ali had ‘found her own voice’. In other novels, however, she speaks ‘with a completely different accent’. Brick Lane clearly established some sort of expectation amongst the critical community, and I think that expectation needs investigating.
I recently finished Alentejo Blue. The story is loose - the book, a series of deftly rendered character studies contained by a single village in Portugal. Paths cross, but not for any especial narrative purpose. Much of it reads like a masterclass in first imagining and then committing character to paper. It is gentle, much like the pace of the village it brings to life.
It is not like Brick Lane. It is not set in east London or Britain at all. It does not deal with the cultural confusion and struggle of an immigrant experience. It does not have a protagonist, let alone one who shares Ali’s cultural and racial heritage. On the front cover of (my edition of) the novel is a single quote of praise…from the Daily Mail. Brick Lane boasts quotes from the Sunday Times and The Observer. The brow has been lowered, apparently.
Natasha Walter also reviewed Alentejo Blue (again, in The Guardian). She takes Brick Lane as her starting point, writing that:
“ ‘Brick Lane’ introduced us to a young Bengali woman’s consciousness; here the first point of view is that of an old Portuguese peasant, talking in the way that old European peasants do in young English writers’ minds: “I am old and I am calm, he thought ... It is the passing of desire.” The further you go in ‘Alentejo Blue’ the further you seem to get from ‘Brick Lane’…[G]iven the expectations we already have of Ali, it’s hard not to find this book a let-down…All the characters bow off too hurriedly, little sketches that never get fleshed out, people glimpsed from a train that is moving too quickly through a strange landscape. Even if you enjoy the ride, you can’t help wishing that Monica Ali had chosen to write about somewhere she knew better, or wanted to know better.”
I say fair enough to a couple of Walter’s grievances. The Portuguese peasant is not one of the stronger characters, and is, I agree, a little typical of an English romanticised portrait of the parochial, pastoral foreigner. And true, if you were looking for another Brick Lane, no doubt you would feel disorientated by the setting, style, and patchwork story of Alentejo Blue. But amidst the more specific criticisms there hang some vague and yet telling comments. What are these ‘expectations we already have of Ali’? Why, as a writer of fiction – of made-up people, made-up stories, made up worlds – ought Ali have written of ‘somewhere she knew better’?
It strikes me that ‘somewhere’ is Brick Lane, and that Brick Lane is being co-opted as a euphemism for Ali’s racial and cultural identity. The much debated principle of ‘write what you know’ is, it would seem, not up for debate if you’re a writer of the BAME community. Ali explains,
“If you’re a writer of colour you’re only supposed to write about what people imagine to be your self. And that self is not an imaginative, creative, artistic, or intellectual self. That self might be labelled as “Asian writer,” or “Bangladeshi writer” or “BAME writer,” but it is never labelled simply “writer”—that would be the true privilege.”
To suggest that a BAME author write only what they know is surely segregational. It is an attempt to impose a restriction on creativity, and akin to a deprivation of freedom. To fixate upon the identity politics and the ‘other’ experience of a BAME author is virtually fetishistic; non-BAME authors are not saddled with the responsibility of speaking for a cause, for representing their kind. It is a mercy that one cannot colonise another’s imagination. It is a shame that, according to some, a BAME writer ought only imagine within their own racial, cultural sphere (assuming that is so readily defined).
By all means be disappointed with a book that didn’t meet your expectations, but ask yourself where those expectations came from.