Everything about Monica Ali totally explained
Monica Ali (born
October 20,
1967) is a British writer of
Bangladeshi origin. She is the author of
Brick Lane, her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the
Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2003. Ali was voted
Granta's Best of Young British Novelists on the basis of the unpublished manuscript.
Biography
Ali was born in
Dhaka,
Bangladesh to a Bangladeshi father and
English mother, moving to
Bolton, England at the age of three, where she was raised. She went to
Bolton School and then studied
Philosophy, Politics and Economics at
Wadham College,
Oxford. She lives in
south London with her husband, Simon, a
management consultant, and their two children, Felix and Shumi.
Brick Lane
Brick Lane — named after
Brick Lane, a street at the heart of
London's Bangladeshi community — follows the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who moves to
Tower Hamlets in London at the age of 18 — her English consisting of "sorry" and "thank you" — to marry an older man, Chanu, described by
The Observer"one of the novel's foremost
miracles: twice her age, with a face like a
frog, a tendency to quote
Hume and the boundless doomed
optimism of the self-improvement
junkie, he's both exasperating and, to the reader at least, enormously loveable." Geraldine Bedell wrote in
The Observer that the "most vivid image of the marriage is of her [Nazneen] cutting her husband's
corns, a task she seems required to perform with dreadful regularity. [Herhusband] is pompous and kindly, full of plans, none of which ever come to fruition, and then of resentment at Ignorant Types who don't promote him or understand his quotations from
Shakespeare or his
Open University race, ethnicity and class module".
Controversy
The novel caused controversy within the Bangladeshi community in Britain because of what they saw as the negative portrayal of people from the
Sylhet region, saying the novel made them appear uneducated and unsophisticated. Parts of the community are particularly opposed to plans by Ruby Films to film parts of the novel in the Brick Lane area, and have formed the "Campaign Against Monica Ali's Film Brick Lane."
The campaign is allegedly supported by
Germaine Greer, who has written that: "As British people know little and care less about the Bangladeshi people in their midst, their first appearance as characters in an English novel had the force of a defining caricature ... [S]ome of the Sylhetis of Brick Lane didn't recognise themselves.
Bengali Muslims smart under an Islamic prejudice that they're irreligious and disorderly, the impure among the pure, and here was a proto-Bengali writer with a Muslim name, portraying them as all of that and more." Greer's involvement has angered some within the British literary community.
Salman Rushdie has called it "philistine, sanctimonious, and disgraceful, but ... not unexpected".
Ali herself portrays the elders of the community as reluctant to face criticism of the youth:
"There were no gangs at all. The white press had made them up to give Bangladeshis a bad name..." (page 423)
Miscellaneous
Ali opposes the British government's attempt to introduce the
Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, something she writes about in her contribution to
Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays published by Penguin in November 2005.
Works
Further Information
Get more info on 'Monica Ali'.
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