Article attached that needs to be summarized.

PLEASE READ THE ARTICLE, CAREFULLY, USE DIRECT AND INDIRECT QUOTES FROM IT TO PRODUCE YOU PRECIS DOCUMENT. 

Reminder on How to Construct Your Submission

A précis is a one-page, single-spaced summary which is useful in doing research.  For example, if a student has a five-page reading list, it can be difficult to come back to item number 16 and remember what was in the book or article, but with a summary, students can easily see and remember what they have read and how they have reacted to it.  It can be used as a giant note card, and, with the bibliographic information (in proper format) at the top of the paper, it can be shuffled in with other précis in alphabetical order, chronological order, or any other order, just the way a note card can.

Since some theses are never directly stated, the students must be ready to think, to categorize and synthesize, and to state the implied thesis in their own words.

Students should pay special attention to any divisions that the author has seen fit to use, usually indicated by captions.  This categorization is important to summarizing the information and maintaining the appropriate relationships among ideas.

The level of generality and specificity is determined by the amount of information that can fit into the one-page format.  For example, a 700-page book would be summarized at a greater level of generality than would a 17-page article.  

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C O M M O N W E A L T H
L I T E R A T U R E
C O M M O N W E A L T H
L I T E R A T U R E

THE JOURNAL OF

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
2014, Vol. 49(3) 315 –331

© The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0021989414536421

jcl.sagepub.com

Epistolary craft and the
literary field

Rachel Bower
University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract
This essay examines the epistolary craft of Monica Ali’s bestselling first novel, Brick Lane (2003),
drawing on tools offered by Pierre Bourdieu’s model of the literary field. On one hand, the
novel’s relation with its source texts, and attempt to forge an adequate literary material for
banglabhashi (Bengali speaking) and oral narratives, signals a rejection of economic profit and
pursuit of symbolic capital. On the other, Ali faces the overwhelming market demand for an
accessible, marketable and saleable ‘big book’ for the English-language reader. The lack of fit
between the spontaneous spoken language of the material that Ali attempts to present and
the epistolary conventions that she uses, is subordinated to the need to conform with market
requirements, masking what is a more challenging literary work than critics have allowed for.
The ambition to present non-written and non-anglophone elements through English-language
epistolarity therefore remains latent in the novel, but is ultimately traduced to the logic of the
field of anglophone trade-publishing.

Keywords
Craft, epistolary, field, letters, Monica Ali, novel, Pierre Bourdieu, world literature

Sister I have not know what to tell and this is how no letter is coming before. Now I have
news. In morning soon as husband go out for work I go away to Dhaka. Our landlady
Mrs Kashem is only person who know about it. She say it is not good decision but she help
anyway. She say it is better get beaten by own husband than beating by stranger. But
those stranger not saying at same time they love me. If they beat they do in all honesty. (Ali,
2003: 46)1

So writes Hasina in Monica Ali’s hugely celebrated first novel, Brick Lane (2003), in a
letter from Dhaka, to her sister Nazneen in London. The novel narrates the experiences

Corresponding author:
Rachel Bower, University of Cambridge, Clare College, Trinity Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1TL, UK.
Email: reb59@cam.ac.uk

536421 JCL0010.1177/0021989414536421The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureBower
research-article2014

Article

mailto:reb59@cam.ac.uk

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F0021989414536421&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2014-05-26

316 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3)

of the two sisters: Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who moves to London for an arranged
marriage; and her sister Hasina, whose sections of letters from Bangladesh are inter-
spersed with the third person narrative and letters from London. Although it is extremely
unlikely that either sister can speak or write English, both sets of letters are presented in
English: Nazneen’s in standard English, and Hasina’s in the perplexing broken English
seen above. Both women work in the garment industry, and the novel draws on an emer-
gent tradition of recording the experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants through oral tes-
timony, drawing heavily on Naila Kabeer’s sociological study, The Power to Choose
(2000). Brick Lane was eagerly anticipated before it was published, and Ali received a
significant advance for the novel, whilst the judges of Granta’s Best of Young British
Novelists Award “unhesitatingly” shortlisted it “long before it was published” (Jack,
2003: par. 3). Upon publication, the novel was shortlisted for almost every major literary
prize and it rapidly achieved remarkable levels of sales.2

Although, prior to the publication of Brick Lane, Ali was a newcomer to the literary
field with very little economic or symbolic capital, it is clear that the UK publisher,
Doubleday, spotted the novel as a “big book”: a term borrowed from the industry by
John B. Thompson to describe the potential best-sellers sought by trade publishers in
order to increase sales and grow business in an “essentially static” market (2010: 188).
There is no doubt that the success of the novel owes much to the “Brick Lane” brand,
and that its marketability, success and controversy was connected to its “setting in an
area that was undergoing a dramatic transformation, a fact that the book’s publishers
exploited by deciding to title it Brick Lane” (Brouillette, 2009: 445). The financial
advance, sales figures, literary prizes, celebratory reviews and later adaption of Ali’s
novel for film all, quite straightforwardly, mark the novel’s commercial success and
popularity with a general reading public. Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory provides us with
useful tools with which we can begin to analyse this success.3 Literary critics have
increasingly turned to Bourdieu’s model of the literary field to develop a mode of criti-
cal practice that hopes to overcome the opposition between “texts and contexts”
(Ekelund, 1995: 17).4 Because, as Jarad Zimbler and others have shown, position-
takings in the field are always a “function of form”, our analysis of a literary work “will
be hampered without the simultaneous study of its contexts (literary and social) and its
formal characteristics” (Zimbler, 2009: 615).

The production of Brick Lane is best described as a position-taking in what Bourdieu
describes as the “subfield of large-scale production”: a pole of the field of literary pro-
duction in which the logic is essentially governed by the pursuit of economic capital. The
logic of this field coincides with the fundamental principles of the field of power and the
economic field, and therefore takes its principle of hierarchization “from indices of com-
mercial success (such as print runs, the number of performances of plays, etc.)” (1996:
217). Pre-eminence in the field belongs to authors “who are known and recognised by
the ‘general public’”, but, unlike the reverse-economy of the wider field of literary pro-
duction, which is governed by the “ultimate values of ‘disinterestedness’” (1993: 79), the
subfield of large-scale production “finds itself symbolically excluded and discredited”
(1996: 217; emphasis in original). The opposing pole of the field is described by Bourdieu
as the “subfield of restricted production” (1996: 217): a field in which “producers have
only other producers for clients”, where authors “make no concessions to the demand of

Bower 317

the ‘general public’” and which “excludes the quest for profit” (1996: 217). Although
Ali’s book cannot be described as commercial in the strongest sense, in that its wide-
spread public recognition comes not only from economic profit, but also from literary
prizes, reviews and literary criticism, its mainstream symbolic consecration nonetheless
serves its position-taking as a large-scale, “big-book”. Alongside the novel’s public suc-
cess, local business leaders in Tower Hamlets loudly protested against the book and film
by portraying Ali as a mercenary outsider, illegitimately making money by misrepresent-
ing a community to which she does not belong.

Against this backdrop, it is perhaps surprising that the epistolary craft of Brick Lane
seems to provide evidence for a strong relationship between the novel’s literary tech-
niques and conventions, and an emergent tradition of Bangladeshi oral history narra-
tives: narratives which are mostly published by small, independent and academic
publishers, sometimes supported by Arts grants, with low levels of sales and narrow
coverage and reviews. As we shall see, the epistolary techniques and conventions in the
novel appear to be used to attempt to forge a literary material which can adequately
present some of these Bangladeshi oral testimonies to an English-language reader. This
attempted position-taking shows no obvious regard for the pursuit of economic capital,
and instead reflects Ali’s allegiance to the political and ethical value of her sources in
the research and composition of her novel: the obligation to reject racism, to oppose a
majority politics, to create a correspondence between the Bangladeshi and the English,
the oral and the written, and ultimately to craft a literary voice for the subaltern
experience.

A closer look at the epistolary craft of the novel then, begins to reveal quite a different
set of relations and source texts to the ones that are usually mentioned in commentaries
on Brick Lane. Until now, the texts most often drawn on are those which relate most
obviously to its geographical setting. Literary precedents include Syed Manzurul Islam’s
short story collection, The Mapmakers of Spitalfields (1997) and Farrukh Dhondy’s
young adult books, including East End at Your Feet (1976). Sarah Brouillette also high-
lights Tarquin Hall’s Salaam Brick Lane (2005) and Rachel Lichtenstein’s On Brick Lane
(2007) as texts which “capitalized on the controversy over Monica Ali’s Brick Lane”
(2009: 433). Although these texts obviously relate to Brick Lane, particularly in the con-
text of marketing, audience, and sales, they do not bear on the craft of the novel as sig-
nificantly as the emergent tradition of Bangladeshi oral history.

What seems evident then, in the final text of Brick Lane, are the effects of a simulta-
neous position-taking at opposing poles of the field of literary production. On one hand,
we have the novel’s pursuit of symbolic capital (and the ethical demands made on Ali)
signalled by the novel’s relations with its source texts and its attempt to craft an ade-
quate literary narrative for the banglabhashi (Bengali speaking) and the oral; and on the
other, its assimilation into the logic of the field of large-scale production, as a big book
which must be accessible, marketable and saleable to the English-language reader (only
five chapters were complete when Ali signed up to Doubleday). Ali’s apparent attempt
to create a genuine encounter between Bengali and English, between oral sources and a
written text, is ultimately traduced to the demand for a particular brand of “feel good”
cosmopolitanism. Although a consideration of epistolary craft shows the way in which
the novel reaches beyond the middlebrow anglophone reader which its superficial

318 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3)

packaging seems designed to target, my reading shows that it does not forge a material
that is adequate to the transnational and cross-linguistic encounter to which it seems to
aspire.

It is worth pausing here, to remember that epistolary language, by definition, is cen-
tred on the relationship between the writer and addressee: what we can call the “I–you”
grammar of the epistolary form. Indeed, as Janet Gurkin Altman asserts, it is largely the
presence of the addressee which “distinguishes the letter from other first-person forms”
(1982: 87). The addressee is called upon to respond, so that writing a letter becomes “an
attempt to draw that you into becoming the I of a new statement” (Altman, 1982: 122;
emphasis is original). In the case of Brick Lane, as with several other novels using letters
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this epistolary characteristic is
employed to connect letter writers across linguistic and national divides, and to produce
an obligation to reciprocate, as can be seen in literary works as various as John Berger’s
From A to X (2008), J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990), Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique
Land (1992), and Ahdaf Souief’s The Map of Love (1999).

Although the letters in Brick Lane initially appear to be a device to connect two
banglabhashi sisters (on the level of the story), we shall see how its epistolary language
and techniques are, in fact, geared to target an anglophone implied reader. The attempt to
present the banglabhashi and the oral through English-language letters seems to reflect
an affinity with one of the ideals underpinning Goethe’s thinly sketched concept of
Weltliteratur: the belief in the productivity of forging connections across linguistic dif-
ferences. Or, in Erich Auerbach’s well-known reformulation, humanity as “the product
of fruitful intercourse between its members” (Auerbach, 1952: 2). Whilst I am not sug-
gesting that this “fruitful intercourse” is, by any means, a stable core of the much-debated
concept of Weltliteratur, it is perhaps significant that the concept of encounter evoked
here seems to have such close structural affinities with the encounter sedimented in epis-
tolary language, in its I–you grammar.

The letters in Brick Lane have received little attention from critics. The few comments
that have been directed at Hasina’s letters tend to broadly accept the assumptions that
have historically accompanied the reception of epistolary narratives, viewing the letter as
a transparent window onto the soul of the letter writer. Hasina’s letters are often cited as
evidence of her “helplessness” and the way in which she primarily functions as a stereo-
type of an oppressed, uneducated Muslim woman (Hiddleston, 2005; Perfect, 2008;
Sandhu, 2003), and readers tend to assume that the letters offer an enticing insight into
the intimate world of two Bangladeshi women. Some critics mistakenly describe the
language of Hasina’s letters as a “pidgin” English (Chakrabarti, 2004; Sandhu, 2003),
and there is even a tendency to assume that Hasina is “illiterate” or “semi-literate”
(Cormack, 2006; Mullen, 2004), when the narrative repeatedly describes Hasina’s writ-
ing process, from Nazneen’s concern about her sister’s uncharacteristically hurried
“scrawl” (37), to Hasina’s frequent references to her own writing process (47; 121; 128;
129; 134; 137; 142). Ali’s decision to use an epistolary narrative to allow the sisters to (i)
tell their stories and (ii) stay in touch, requires a level of literacy to maintain verisimili-
tude, and the constitutively written nature of the epistolary form would be seriously
(albeit interestingly) strained if it were obliged to smoothly contain the experiences of an
illiterate character.

Bower 319

The presumption of illiteracy is perhaps a result of approaching the novel through the-
matic lenses of sexuality and gender. For example, Jane Hiddleston suggests that Ali “sets
out to depict the mistreatment of women in Bangladesh, but she also displays prevalent
assumptions concerning their ability to understand and express their position” (2005: 63).
Although Hiddleston, like other critics, is right to be suspicious of a narrative that purports
to provide an account of a subaltern woman for the anglophone reader, such readings over-
look what might be described as a more fundamental problem. This “problem” is a result
of the novel’s more ambitious attempt to craft a narrative which can adequately contain the
experiences of a banglabhashi letter writer and the spoken testimonies of the novel’s source
texts through the use of a constitutively written, anglophone form. The next part of this
essay analyses this attempted position-taking and shows how it produces Hasina’s appar-
ently spontaneous, unmediated account of life in Bangladesh (particularly through her bro-
ken English and stress on writing to the moment). The final part of the essay shows how the
resultant spontaneity effect ironically plasters over the fractures created by Ali’s attempt to
create a realistic account of a poor Bengali garment worker through a written anglophone
literary form designed for (and eagerly consumed by) the UK and US markets.

Across seven seas and thirteen rivers

The initial reception of Brick Lane can be largely divided into two camps: those who
celebrated and defended the novel’s insight into the lives of Bangladeshis living on Brick
Lane in London, and those who were angered by the novel’s inaccurate representation of
the people living there. Although Doubleday’s preference for “Brick Lane” is well-
known, few have considered the hermeneutic implications of the publisher’s move to
push this title over Ali’s original, “Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers”.5 Ali’s provisional
title draws on the “seven seas and thirteen rivers” of Bengali folktales: a mythical body
of water that leads to a faraway place. The aspirations of the novel are sedimented in this
original title. Ali appears to take the “seven seas” reference directly from Kabeer’s The
Power to Choose, a study which she acknowledges at the back of her novel (415), and
which, as Michael Perfect (2008) has shown, influences the content of the published nar-
rative. Kabeer names her sixth chapter “Across seven seas and thirteen rivers” (2000:
193–229), and adds a footnote to describe how the phrase

comes from a collection of Bengali children’s stories called Thakur Ma-er Jhuli. It is the way
that a lot of stories which deal with distant lands with a mythical quality begin: Once there was
a prince who lived in a far off land, “seven seas and thirteen rivers” away. (2000: 193, n1)

Kabeer’s words are almost exactly reproduced in Ali’s novel, in Hasina’s first letter to
her sister:

You remember those story we hear as children begin like this. “Once there was prince who lived in
far off land seven seas and thirteen rivers away.” That is how I think of you. But as princess. (19)

As is often the case, Ali converts the standard English of Kabeer’s prose into Hasina’s
broken English: in this instance by superficially altering some of the written markers (the

320 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3)

punctuation and quotation marks), and deleting the articles preceding “prince” and “far
off land”. In Kabeer’s study, the “seven seas” reference becomes a metaphor for the dis-
tance between migrant workers in Dhaka and London, and this signals the importance of
the phrase beyond its folktale provenance. Indeed, the “seven seas” reference runs as a
thread throughout twentieth century attempts to record and describe the history of
Bangladeshi migration to Britain. Caroline Adams’ Across Seven Seas and Thirteen
Rivers: Life Stories of Pioneer Sylhetti Settlers in Britain (1987) is the most obvious
example.6 Adams was a community worker at a Brick Lane youth project from 1974, and
her book is a collection of first person recorded testimonies from banglabhashi men who
migrated to the UK in the early twentieth century after serving on Merchant Navy ships.
Adams’ collection, published by a group who seeks to “promote the creative writings of
ordinary people”, stresses the need to preserve human stories that would otherwise be
forgotten, and the centrality of colonial military and trade expansion to patterns of
Bangladeshi settlement in the UK.7 The interviewees themselves emphasize the need “to
tell the history of people like us” (Ali, quoted in Adams, 1987: 93), and these “seven
seas” testimonies are closely aligned with the borough of Tower Hamlets, the setting of
Ali’s novel. It is no accident then, that the majority of oral history projects and academic
research into Bangladeshi migration to the UK have focused on Tower Hamlets, the bor-
ough increasingly referred to as “Banglatown”, which holds a powerful place in the
Bangladeshi imagination.8

Adams’ Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers opens and closes with a repeated,
intertextual reference to the seven seas metaphor, by including a translated verse from
Abdus Salique’s “Trade Union”:

We were called from a distant land,

Counting the waves of

Thirteen rivers and seven seas

With hopes for a better life. (Salique, quoted in Adams, 1987: i; 211)

Adams cites Salique’s use of the “seven seas” metaphor in a song that he wrote to make
the Trade Union movement “popular” in the “Bengali community” (Salique, 2006: par.
8). Salique pushes the metaphor beyond Bengali folklore and two centuries of sea trade
and migration, towards a project of forging a collective Bengali identity and rejecting
racism. The song has been described by some as a protest song against the racist attacks
on the Bengali community in Brick Lane in 1978, which included the killing of Altab Ali.
Interestingly however, Salique spearheaded the campaign against Ali’s Brick Lane and
against the filming of the adapted novel in 2006, arguing that Ali should not write about
the area because of her distance from it, stating that she “has imagined ideas about us in
her head. She is not one of us” (Salique, quoted in Lea and Lewis, 2006: par. 5–6).
Salique, the Chair of the Brick Lane Traders’ Association at the time of the novel’s pub-
lication, positions Ali as an outsider capitalizing on the gentrification of the area, taking
us back to Doubleday’s decision to make the geographical setting of the novel central to
their branding and marketing campaign. However, this brand is not only one which local
traders were keen to protect (Brouillette, 2009), but is also deeply connected to two

Bower 321

centuries of Bangladeshi migration and settlement in the UK. Salique’s use of the seven
seas image, and his labour rights and anti-racist campaign work reveal some of the con-
tradictions surrounding the reception of Brick Lane. This complicated situation means
that although Ali’s literary project correlates with many of the concerns of Salique and
his supporters, particularly in its championing of Bangladeshi oral narratives through
literary prose, this is compromised by the logic of the book field in which it is sold, mar-
keted and read.

Nevertheless, traces of this project remain sedimented in the composition of Brick
Lane. Although the “seven seas” ex-seamen of Adams’ collection who migrated to
Britain in the 1920s and 1930s appear to have little in common with Ali’s female garment
workers, on closer inspection it becomes clear that their first person narratives are similar
in structure, tone and register. The distance and connection symbolized by the “seven
seas” metaphor finds a formal home in the epistolary narrative. It is not only Ali’s origi-
nal title then, but also her use of epistolary techniques and conventions that reveals her
allegiance to her source texts.

Kabeer’s study, on which Ali draws so heavily, observes the difference between the
first-person testimonies told “by women workers” about themselves and third person
“narratives about the women workers” from a range of sources like “journalists, trade
unionists, feminist activists and employers” (2000: viii–ix; emphasis in original). Kabeer
stresses the importance of preserving the narratives of living individuals, rather than
relying only on the “remarkably homogenous” image of the “average” Third World
worker which underpins the third-person explanations (Kabeer, 2000: x). Given Ali’s
intimate knowledge and extensive use of Kabeer’s study, it is unlikely that her preserva-
tion of the first person voices from Kabeer’s interviews is accidental. The prevalent criti-
cal assumption that Hasina has very little agency ignores the fact that her first person
voice remains intact throughout, and that for Hasina, as with other epistolary narrators,
writing is acting. The first person “I” of epistolary narratives intersects with the accept-
ance of a writing “self”: of the importance of individual agency, and the rights and
responsibilities of this individual.

As the narrator of her own story, Hasina describes the experiences of those around
her, echoing the words, phrases, and stories told by the women in Kabeer’s study: some
of whom take up factory work for “economic reasons”, and others who took up garment
work because of “some specific adversity in their lives” (Kabeer, 2000: 117; 100). Ali’s
use of the latter material from Kabeer’s study leaves her novel vulnerable to the criticism
that, as Perfect argues, she selects the worst of the Dhaka narratives to emphasize the
benefits of multicultural London (2008: 119). It is true that Ali draws heavily on the
testimonies of “Shefali”: a woman that Kabeer describes as having “precarious auton-
omy” who was “more literally on her own than any other woman in our sample” (2000:
156–7), and there are undeniable parallels between the life trajectories of Hasina and
Shefali. Yet, paradoxically, the moments when Ali’s and Kabeer’s narratives seem almost
indistinguishable (which threaten to collapse the boundary between Hasina and Shefali),
actually reveal how far Ali sculpts the experiences reported in Kabeer’s study for her
literary endeavour.

Both women receive proposals of marriage, and Hasina’s response mirrors Shefali’s
very closely:

322 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3)

Despite her protestations — “I told him, I am a street woman, I have nothing in the world. I am
all I have. I can give you nothing” — he proposed to her through her landlord and she finally
accepted. (Kabeer, 2000: 106).

I speak to Ahmed again. Again he is pressing. I tell him this. I am a low woman. I am nothing.
I have nothing. I am all that I have. I can give you nothing.

Still he insist. I do not know what to do. (140)

Despite the obvious similarities in lexicon and tone, the differences between the two
accounts remain illuminating. Shefali’s words are embedded within Kabeer’s analysis,
whereas Hasina’s words, characteristically for the epistolary narrative, lack a frame nar-
rator. Hasina therefore retains her authoritative position as storyteller, whilst Shefali’s
story is absorbed into Kabeer’s telling. The effect of this is amplified by Hasina’s reso-
lute stress on the present tense of the experience (“I speak to Ahmed … I tell him this”),
which collapses the temporal difference between her recollection and experience of this
event, whereas Shefali recounts the experience retrospectively for her interlocutor (“I
told him”). Hasina’s letter here attempts to consolidate numerous temporal moments (the
moments of the experience, the telling and the various readings) into a single present
tense, which leaves the letter without a conclusion, as seen in Hasina’s uncertain appeal
to her reader: “I do not know what to do.” (140). In contrast, Kabeer intervenes as narra-
tor to resolve the situation for the reader: “she finally accepted”.

The use of the first person epistolary narrative as the sole vehicle for Hasina’s experi-
ences seems to signal an attempt to allow her to tell her own story, in her own voice, as
a woman. Hasina uses her letters to refuse compliance, narrate her experiences, advise
her sister and quietly question authority. Indeed, it could well be this that leads to her
difficulties and her dismissal from the factory, rather than these events being the conse-
quence of her naivety and passivity, as is usually suggested.

The twin institutions of postal exchange and the garment trade which anchor Brick
Lane’s narrative support this reading. The correspondence between London and Dhaka
is, historically speaking, a by-product of a postal network that was developed to serve
international trade and capitalist expansion. Given the important role that postal com-
munications continue to play in Bangladesh, “where alternative communications, espe-
cially in rural areas, are nearly absent” (Bangladesh Post, 1999: 1), Hasina is also a
subject taking full advantage of the means accessible to her. More substantively how-
ever, understanding the formative impact of the expansion of the textile trade on the
narrative traditions emerging from this expansion provides us with a keener insight into
the project of the novel. In other words, Ali’s decision to use letters is not incidental, but
central to an understanding of the novel’s portrayal of the experience of migration
between Bangladesh and East London. Although Ali’s novel did not produce a version of
the “seven seas” migration narrative that was acceptable to prominent members of the
Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets, an examination of its epistolary material
begins to reveal how its narrative is closer to the vision contained in Salique’s song than
we might expect.

Strangely however, Hasina’s language and consistent use of the present tense seems
to court an impression of immediacy and spontaneity which strains against the idea that

Bower 323

she is capable of acting in a logical and considered manner. This chimes with the novel’s
justification of the difference between the sisters’ letters:

Whenever she got a letter from Hasina, for the next couple of days she imagined herself an
independent woman too. The letters were long and detailed. Nazneen composed and recomposed
her replies until the grammar was satisfactory, all errors expunged along with any vital signs.
But Hasina kicked aside all such constraints: her letters were full of mistakes and bursting with
life. Nazneen threaded herself between the words, allowed them to spool her across seven seas
to Dhaka, where she worked alongside her sister. (76)

The narrator here suggests that the stylistic differences between Nazneen and Hasina’s
letters are explicable by reference to their differing writing methods and personalities,
rather than their literacy or knowledge of English. If we are to believe the narrator, the
language of Hasina’s letters is intended to convey a sense of spontaneity and energy,
rather than give an impression of her naivety and lack of sophistication in her use of
language. This plot-based justification is rather unconvincing in accounting for the extent
of the differences between the two sets of letters, which critics have puzzled over, but
helps us to understand Ali’s attempt to harness epistolary conventions as means of trans-
mitting not only the first person aspect of the testimonies in Kabeer’s study, but also to
capture their orality. This justification combines with Hasina’s stress on the present tense
and apparently unedited style in order to create an impression of a letter writer (in the
famous words of Samuel Richardson) “writing, to the moment”: “I thinking of you sister
and I think of you now. Oil is run low and I must save for tomorrow. I kiss you and I turn
out the light.” (129).9

The anglophone trade book field: Undermining the “seven
seas” project

I have argued that the impulse underpinning the narrative project of Brick Lane is to
rework the oral testimonies that have been used to record the history of Bangladeshi expe-
rience and to present these in literary prose: primarily by preserving the first person voices
of the testimonies using epistolary techniques and conventions, and by attempting to cap-
ture the orality of the testimonies by capitalizing on the apparent immediacy of epistolary
writing. I have suggested that this shows how Hasina is a character with agency, and that
the novel attempts to incorporate a range of experiences described by the migrants and
workers of the oral testimonies. Our focus, therefore, should move away from a discus-
sion of whether the narrative provides an accurate representation of a community in
London, and towards the adequacy of the literary material for containing the experiences
of Bangladeshi migration and diaspora. In the remainder of this essay then, I turn to the
way in which the novel’s use of epistolary techniques and conventions strains against, and
ultimately undermines, the project outlined here. It is my contention that this is the result
of an attempt to simultaneously meet the demands of Bangladeshi narrative traditions and
the large-scale field of production in which the novel was composed, published, and sold.
More specifically, the tensions between the spoken narratives of the source texts, Hasina’s
banglabhashi narrative and the anglophone epistolarity of the published novel remain

324 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3)

unacknowledged, and this leaves the limitations of epistolary techniques and conventions
unexamined. This also leads readers and critics either to a celebration of the authentic
insight the book provides, or to a critique of the stereotypes produced, rather than forcing
a reconsideration of the adequacy of its literary material for its postcolonial subject matter.
Although Brick Lane successfully preserves the carcasses of the first person testimonies
from Kabeer’s study, this does not automatically lead to a narrative which can satisfacto-
rily contain the experiences of the individuals represented by the writing “I”.

As noted above, the rendering of Hasina’s epistolary style appears to be designed to
convey a sense of spontaneity and spoken language. This echoes recent claims for the
epistolary form, where, for example, Tony Jackson suggests that “in a continuum from
writing on one end to speech on an opposite end, the personal letter exemplifies the writ-
ing that is most like speech” (2009: 30). Jackson’s suggestion that the diegetic stress of
literary letters makes them closer to speech is seductive. Diegesis is certainly important
to the creation of epistolary meaning, and this can be seen in specific uses of epistolary
material within the novel. The reader is shown copies of Hasina’s letters rather than told
her story in Brick Lane, and the frequency, handwriting and length of these letters tells
Nazneen much about Hasina’s circumstances. To take a single example, the brevity and
scrawl of Hasina’s abruptly truncated note amplifies the threat implicit within its content:
“Sometimes I make him lose patience without I mean to. He comes soon to home and I
getting ready for him now. God bless you. Hasina” (37). Nevertheless, the epistolary
diegesis of this note, and its accompanying impression of Hasina “writing, to the
moment”, does not render her account any less mediated, or indeed any closer to speech,
even taking into account the oral sources underpinning the letters. Given the persistence
of a critical tradition that views literary letters as windows onto the soul, it should per-
haps not go without saying that although Hasina’s letters produce meaning through epis-
tolary diegesis and the impression of spontaneity, her letters remain highly mediated
accounts which are recoverable as an anglophone epistolary narrative only through
authorial acts of translation.

Orality and epistolarity do not fit smoothly together and this poses a major challenge
to the novel’s attempt to incorporate the spontaneous spoken language of Kabeer’s testi-
monies in a constitutively written form. Oral and epistolary exchanges are differentiated
by the time-lags between acts of correspondence, the differential level of absence
between participants, and by the distinctive syntax of oral and written language. Further,
as the above letter shows, Hasina remains heavily dependent on telling her story, even
whilst showing is important to its meaning. This creates an additional difficulty in Brick
Lane, which attempts to present the told stories of oral testimonies to a new literary read-
ership, through a form that constantly strains towards showing. The impulse to provide
Hasina with a narrative through which she can tell her own story in her own voice is
paramount, and the literary re-telling of these stories could even be considered to be the
primary function of Ali’s narrative, but these are ironically always presented through the
heavily diegetic epistolary form. Whilst testimonies can of course be conversational and
dialogic, the primary function of the genre in this instance remains at odds with that of
the epistle: the former presents itself for recording as a complete (and primarily mono-
logic) story, whereas the latter is structured to elicit a reply and has dialogue at its core
(it is, in a sense, half a story).

Bower 325

The jarring juxtaposition of speech and writing structures in Hasina’s letters
become more obvious when we compare these to her source text. Kabeer reports that
Shefali said:

[1] I used to dress better before, but you know something about my character. [2] I used to be
bad that way. [3] Someone would call me to him and give me something and I would do what
he wanted. [4] But I prefer the way I live now to the way I did then. [5] If I can’t eat properly,
or if I only eat one meal a day, I would still prefer to live this way. (Shefali, quoted in Kabeer,
2000: 106)

It is immediately obvious that this passage contains many linguistic properties that are
characteristic of spontaneous spoken language. The simple co-ordination of clauses
through “and” is particularly clear in [3], and the conjunctions “but” and “or” also fre-
quently hold simple clauses together. As we would expect, deictics play a central role in
signalling the relationship between chunks of syntax, so that “I”, “before”, “then”, “that”,
“now”, “this” become particularly prominent. The intercalated clause of [5] and repeti-
tion of simple grammatical structures (which produce the anaphora in “I used to” [1 and
2]) highlight the speech rhythm which relies heavily on the repetition of the pronoun “I”
at the beginning of phrases, rather than depending on the punctuation of the sentence
(which is a unit that has to be superimposed onto speech). A small quantity of informa-
tion is allotted by the speaker to each short clause or phrase, and the limited range of
vocabulary, and dependence on fixed lexical phrases (“way I live”, “dress better”, “eat
properly”), are all typical of the syntax of spontaneous spoken speech.

This is not to say anything surprising or unexpected about the above passage: these
characteristics are exactly what we might expect to find in a transcript of an oral inter-
view. These findings, however, usefully illuminate the relative ambiguity of Hasina’s
letters.

The letter by Hasina below draws directly on Morgina’s description of factory work,
as quoted in Kabeer’s study:

[6] I have been working for three years and I like it. [7] I don’t like it at home. [8] In the factory,
everyone is working and even if there is no conversation, the day passes quite well. [9] At home
there is nothing, no hard work, only cooking and cleaning so I don’t like it there. [10] It is quiet
and lonely at home. [11] In the factory there are more people and we are all working together.
(Morgina, quoted in Kabeer, 2000: 113)

[12] Working is like cure. [13] Some find it curse I meaning Renu. [14] But I do not. [15] Sewing
pass the day and I sit with friends. [16] As actual fact it bring true friendship and true love.
(124)

Again, we see how Morgina’s testimony is structured by a series of intercalated clauses
(particularly in 8 and 9) in a temporal sequence, in contrast with the short sentences of
Ali’s reworked version. The lexical and phrasal repetition (particularly repeating “work-
ing”, “in the factory” and “at home”) that mark Morgina’s spoken account and demarcate
the units of meaning (which have been punctuated and transcribed as sentences), are
simply subordinated to the sentence in Ali’s version. Hasina’s words are therefore placed

326 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3)

in a series of sentences, rather than clauses, producing the staccato effect that is so typical
of her writing.

This becomes clearer if we briefly turn back to Hasina’s first letter to her sister. Hasina
opens this letter:

[17] Our cousin Ahmed have given me your address praise God. [18] I hear of marriage and
pray many time on your wedding day I pray now also. (18)

Hasina omits the commas which would appear in a standard grammatical rendering of
these sentences, but does not replace them with any sense of a spoken rhythm. This is
combined with the omission of conjunctions, pronouns and articles, to produce the short,
clipped style that is characteristic of her prose, but that is not typical of the structures of
spontaneous spoken speech. Instead, this gives a sense of a broken written language,
where the punctuation that was integral to the sense of the sentence has been removed,
rather than producing a rendering of the alternative structures of spoken prose. This
forces the unit of the sentence onto what appears to be language that would resist this
structure, and therefore creates letters which are underpinned by rhythms that are atypi-
cal of either speech or writing. There are, of course, many ways in which typical speech
and writing might occur and it is not my intention to prescribe the way in which Hasina’s
voice ought to be crafted. Nevertheless, even if Hasina’s letters give an initial sense of
“orality”, their language remains only thinly differentiated from the lexicon and gram-
mar of standard English.

To take an example from slightly later in the letter, Hasina writes:

[19] Even we have nothing I happy. [20] We have love. [21] Love is happiness. [22] Sometime I
feel to run and jump like goat. [23] This is how we do on way to school. (19)

Each sentence builds on the next, accumulating meaning without the repetition we saw
so clearly in Shefali’s oral response [1–5]. There is a distinct lack of coordination between
clauses, which are instead punctuated with full stops and presented to the reader in arti-
ficial sentences. These sentences pull against the impression of speech that the broken
written grammar is presumably supposed to create. For example, the apparent deletion of
“and” between [20] and [21], leads to the deletion of an unstressed syllable that would
otherwise make the language much more typical of the rhythms of plausible speech
patterns.

[20] We have love. [21] Love is happiness.

The double stress (marked by italics above), and repetition of “love”, between [20] and
[21] makes the sentences awkward to articulate verbally. Problematically however, this
rhythmical analysis of course remains dependent on an assumption that the letters are
written in English, which we know is impossible within the context of the novel’s plot,
and which brings us to the heart of the problem.

Hasina’s letters attempt to represent anglophone, spoken Bangladeshi testimonies and
a banglabhashi written narrative to an anglophone reader. In other words, Brick Lane

Bower 327

selects a constitutively written and anglophone literary form (anglophone epistolarity) in
its attempt to realistically contain both the oral, anglophone testimonies of several indi-
viduals (mostly from Kabeer’s account, but inflected by other Bangladeshi oral histories)
and the written, banglabhashi narrative of a woman living and working in Dhaka (penned
by Hasina). In essence, Ali is asking a single narrative voice to contain English and
Bengali, at the same time as the oral and the written. The various aspects of this project
work against each other: for example, we cannot simultaneously read English and
Bengali, and therefore the narrative requires us to accept that more than one language is
being represented through one. Hasina’s letters must therefore represent English and
Bengali through English, and writing and orality through the structures of writing.

This puts considerable pressure on the epistolary form. Of course, this is where the
potential of the literary letter could emerge most clearly. We need only to think of the
many brilliantly inventive English-language representations of the speech of non-
anglophone characters in twentieth century literature, to recognize that it is such moments
which push authors to negotiate new ways of writing and seeing: which demand a new
literary material. In fact, to expose the impossibility of simultaneously containing differ-
ent languages and mediums whilst insisting on the need for cross-linguistic and transna-
tional communication is to push the literary epistle into terrain in which the “real” letter
begins to flounder. (In a “real” correspondence the anglophone reader would either have
to accept non-communication with Hasina or the letters would have to be translated in
advance of the reading.) And yet, unfortunately this is where the potential of Ali’s narra-
tive breaks down. Whilst some reviewers describe the language of Hasina’s letters as a
“pidgin” English, which would indeed speak to a process of creating a new language (or
in this case a renewed literary material) in the contact between the anglophone and
banglabhashi, in reality Hasina’s letters do not seem to be made up of a pidgin language
at all. My analysis thus far has shown how Hasina’s letters seem to rely upon the (only
superficially broken) lexicon and the grammar of standard written English, unlike pidgin
languages which are widely acknowledged to “have a recognizable structure of their own
independent of the substrate and superstrate languages involved in the original contact”
(Romaine, 1988: 13). Pidgins are typically “contact” languages: reduced languages that
develop when there is a need for verbal communication between two groups of people
who have no language in common, often for developing trade (see Holm, 2000: 4–5).
Although pidgin languages “have no native speakers” (Mühlhäusler, 1986: 5) they are
not impoverished forms of the superstrate language as Europeans usually assumed dur-
ing colonial encounters. If Hasina’s letters were written in pidgin, we would expect them
to rely heavily on English lexicon (the superstrate language), whilst substantially reflect-
ing the form and morphology of Bengali (the substrate language).

There is little evidence to suggest that Hasina’s letters might represent an actually
existing pidgin. The major recognized pidgin languages that developed in South Asia
were not English-based but were the Portuguese-based Indo Portuguese and Sri Lanka
CP. Although many South Asian lascars who originated from the Sylhet District, like
those in Adams’ book, would have come into contact with the complex English-based
Chinese PE trade pidgin that developed on the coast of China (Holm, 2000: xvi), it is
very unlikely that someone of Hasina’s background would have come into contact
with this trade language. Syntactically, the distance of Hasina’s idiosyncratic

328 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3)

language from pidgin English is even clearer. It doesn’t appear to be based on any
repeatable norms of “meaning, pronunciation and grammar” as pidgins are (Holm,
2000: 5), but rather seems to be an ad hoc and rather eccentric solution to a very com-
plex individual communication problem, within and without the novel. Ali’s predica-
ment, where her banglabhashi character must communicate with an anglophone
reader, mirrors the linguistic crisis and “urgent need for communication” that neces-
sitated the development of pidgin languages (Holm, 2000: 1; Todd, 1990: 1–2), but
without the reciprocal process of language formation that took place in this linguistic
encounter.

It is revealing that a crisis of comprehension is not generated by the epistolary
exchange between a writer and reader who have no language in common. Instead, this
encounter produces a language that appears to be designed solely for the reader, and
inflected little by the supposed language of composition. In other words, the invention
of the superficial “pidgin” language of Hasina’s letters is necessitated entirely by the
encounter with the anglophone reader, and leads not to a new language, or reciprocal
exchange, but instead converts the banglabhashi voice into a voice for consumption by
the anglophone reader. The representation of Hasina’s language in a form that is not
problematized by its impossibility produces a consumable style and a curiously stable
veneer of verisimilitude. The reader is not required to question her own use of language
in order to correspond with Hasina, and Ali’s use of epistolary techniques and conven-
tions emerges intact.

Hasina’s superficial “pidgin” language and “writing, to the moment” problematically
support the suspension of disbelief required for the reader to accept Hasina’s letters as an
authentic account of subaltern experience. The narrative hides the translation processes
involved in bringing these letters to the English-speaking reader, and the more conven-
tional interventions of the epistolary editor (which include ordering, editing, transcribing
and framing the papers for the reader). Whilst self-consciousness is not an adequate
substitute for new or different modes of writing, Ali’s novel does not reflect on the limi-
tations of her literary material or offer an alternative. This closes down the possibility of
uncomfortably experiencing the difficulties of the attempt to share the experiences of an
individual in a radically different linguistic and cultural context, collapsing the novel’s
evident aspiration to generate a fruitful encounter of world literature.

Thus, whilst epistolary conventions are used as an appropriate means of presenting
aspects of the history of Bangladeshi migration, the attempt to incorporate the oral
and the banglabhashi is ultimately subordinated to the demand to produce an acces-
sible, marketable and profitable English-language book. This brings us back to the
highly celebrated insight into Bangladeshi culture in London that the novel was sup-
posed to provide, even whilst the literary institutions that celebrated this insight (pub-
lishers, booksellers, reviewers) created the very pressures that have prevented the
novel from pushing beyond a monologic account designed for the field of large-scale
production, towards an uncomfortable, dialogic material which is more true to its
sources. It is not enough to say that the novel relies on cultural stereotypes, but is
more substantially the result of an inadequate interrogation of epistolary techniques
and conventions as means of producing an appropriate literary material through which
to represent postcolonial experience. This does not mean that Hasina is helpless or

Bower 329

peripheral to the novel, but that the narrative does not push the reader towards ques-
tioning her or his own knowledge of the world through encountering Hasina’s letters.
The tensions between the material that Ali attempts to present and the epistolary con-
ventions that she uses (and therefore the limitations of the epistolary form itself) are
subordinated to the need to conform to market requirements, thus masking what is a
more challenging narrative than critics have allowed for. The ambition to present non-
written and non-anglophone elements through English-language epistolarity there-
fore remains latent in Brick Lane but is never fully realized. Sadly, this means that the
epistolary form does not live up to its inheritance of the seven seas metaphor, and
instead remains tied to producing a portrait of “Brick Lane” for the anglophone reader
of Doubleday’s “big book”.

Funding

The author is grateful to the AHRC for supporting her doctoral research.

Notes

1. Subsequent references are to this edition of Brick Lane (2003) and will be cited parentheti-
cally by page number in the text.

2. As of 16 June 2012, UK sales of the hardback edition of Brick Lane (2003) amounted to
£1,145,045.17 (108,190 copies), whilst the paperback (2004 edition) sales had reached
£4,237,940.62 (667,145 copies). Figures provided by Nielsen BookScan. UK Sales data from
the TCM panel of bookshops, internet and other retailers.

3. I am grateful to Jarad Zimbler for highlighting the usefulness of Bourdieu’s subfields for
my argument. I am also grateful to Jarad, and to Ben Etherington, for the care and honesty
with which they have read and commented on this essay, which has undoubtedly made it
stronger.

4. Also see Zimbler (2009: 617, n2). Although the issue of political capital is relevant to the pre-
sent article, the field of anglophone trade publishing does not require us to adapt Bourdieu’s
dualistic model to incorporate a third principle of ‘political art’ (Zimbler, 2009: 599–620) or
‘political capital’ (Hockx, 2011: 53), with the urgency that the South African (Zimbler, 2009),
and Chinese (Hockx, 2011) literary fields arguably demand. Although more work is needed
to adapt Bourdieu’s model to take proper account of the complexity of production in the field
of anglophone trade publishing, the tools offered by Bourdieu’s account of the subfields of
large-scale, and restricted production, are adequate for examining the position-taking of Ali’s
novel in this article.

5. On Doubleday’s preference see Marianne Velmans (then publishing director of Doubleday),
cited in David Smith’s article (2003).

6. All future references to “seven seas and thirteen rivers” are abbreviated to “seven seas”.
7. The book is published by THAP: a member of the national Federation of Worker Writers and

Community Publishers (FWWCP).
8. Bengali oral history projects include the Swadhinata Trust’s “Tower Hamlets Bengali

Heritage Trail”, the Bengali Workers’ Association Oral History Project and the Sylheti Social
History Group (with whom Yousuf Choudhury published one of the most influential accounts
of Bangladeshi migration, The Roots and Tales of the Bangladeshi Settlers, 1993).

9. See Richardson’s long letters to Lady Bradshaigh, 8 December 1753 and 14 February 1754
(1964: 257; 289).

330 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3)

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