The Unconscious of the City: Conflicts in the Diaspora Community and Multicultural Education in Brick Lane

Abstract

The age of migration and travel brought about various types of diaspora communities worldwide. Diasporas have been thought to easily adjust to and be assimilated into a new culture as cultural translators, while their communities can be spaces where new hybrid identities are created. Nowadays diaspora writers tend to return to the idea of territoriality instead of transnational migration and travel, and give more weight to the space where the immigrants have settled. Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) focuses on the space and the specific geography of a Bangladeshi diaspora community located in the East End of London. London has had two faces: progress and regression, and there have always been hidden, isolated, and poverty-stricken ghettos in London, where immigrants from the former colonies of the British Empire flooded in. And these underprivileged immigrants have been trapped inside these ghettoes and repressed into the Unconscious of the City, which someday might erupt. Ali represents the Brick Lane diaspora community as one such group of immigrants and makes it a geographical and psychological space, using Nazneen as a center of consciousness. Ali tells about the migration and settlement of the first generation, and the identity and belonging of the second generation. Chanu tries to move up the social ladder through education, but fails. Karim, who was born in England, fights against white racism while searching for identity lost in the encounter between two cultures. Ali uses the year of 2001 as the background of this novel to show that the immigrants in Brick Lane suffer from disappointment, frustration, drug addiction, gangs, identity conflict, generational conflict among themselves, as well as hypocrisy, indifference, racism, hate crime, and Islamophobia from white people. Brick Lane represents the space of the Unconscious of the City. Ali filters this sensitive story through Nazneen’s innocent and compassionate perspective. Within Nazneen’s story, Ali warns cautiously about the possible imminent explosion of the Unconscious of the City.