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Monica Ali
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 Ali was voted Granta's Best of Young British Novelists on the basis of the unpublished manuscript.
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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 — 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 as "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 is both exasperating and, to the reader at least, enormously loveable."[1] 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. [Her husband] 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."[2]
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 did not recognise themselves. Bengali Muslims smart under an Islamic prejudice that they are 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."[3] Greer's involvement has angered some within the British literary community. Salman Rushdie has called it "philistine, sanctimonious, and disgraceful, but ... not unexpected."[3]
Activists told The Guardian they intended to burn copies of Ali's book during a rally to be held on July 30, but the demonstration passed without incident.[4]
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.
- Brick Lane. Doubleday, June 2003.
- Alentejo Blue. Doubleday, June 2006.
- ^ Lane, Harriet. "Ali's in Wonderland", The Observer, June 1, 2003.
- ^ Bedell, Geraldine. "Full of East End promise", The Observer, June 15, 2003.
- ^ a b Lewis, Paul. "'You sanctimonious philistine' - Rushdie v Greer, the sequel", The Guardian, July 29, 2006.
- ^ Cacciottolo, Mario. "Brick Lane protesters hurt over 'lies'", BBC News, July 31, 2006.