Brick Lane

As 20th-century British text by an immigrant woman writer, Brick Lane is particularly poignant in its treatment of self and national identity–and is pertinent to contemporary crises. None of the questions of what it means to be British and of foreign “invasion” are new, however: they are central to Britain’s imperial history and began long before that. They are embedded in the plays, the poems, and the stories on the syllabus.

This article in the NYT highlights some of the questions surrounding Brexit and the history preceding it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/opinion/englands-last-gasp-of-empire.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=

Yet, Daniel Defoe in the eighteenth century already debunked the idea of an inherent British identity. In 1701 Defoe composed his poem A True-Born Englishman in response to attacks on King William III, born in the Hague and brought to England as king during the Glorious Revolution (1688). The English viewed William with suspicion and he was the subject of many written attacks, in particular John Tutchin’s The Foreigners (1700). In this fragment of Defoe’s poem, the poet argues that there is no such thing as unadulterated English blood

And here begins our ancient pedigree,
That so exalts our poor nobility:
’Tis that from some French trooper they derive,
Who with the Norman bastard did arrive;
The trophies of the families appear,
Some show the sword, the bow, and some the spear,
Which their great ancestor, forsooth, did wear.
These in the herald’s register remain,
Their noble mean extraction to explain,
Yet who the hero was, no man can tell,
Whether a drummer or a colonel:
The silent record blushes to reveal
Their undescended dark original.
But grant the best, how came the change to pass,
A true-born Englishman of Norman race?
A Turkish horse can show more history,
To prove his well-descended family.
Conquest, as by the moderns it is expressed,
May give a title to the lands possessed:
But that the longest sword should be so civil
To make a Frenchman English, that’s the devil.
These are the heroes that despise the Dutch,
And rail at new-come foreigners so much,
Forgetting that themselves are all derived
From the most scoundrel race that ever lived;
A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,
Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns,
The Pict and painted Briton, treacherous Scot,
By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;
Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains,
Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed
From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed.
And lest by Length of time it be pretended
The climate may this modern breed ha’ mended,
Wise Providence, to keep us where we are,
Mixes us daily with exceeding care.
We have been Europe’s sink, the jakes where she
Voids all her offal outcast progeny. (157−95)

The history of the geographical Brick Lane:

Like any number of mercantile areas in London, Brick Lane, the setting for Monica Ali’s novel, has seen waves of immigrant settlements. In the seventeenth century, because of the deep wells beneath it, it was the site for a brewery established by Joseph Truman. The brewery is still there but from a visitor’s perspective it is a site for hipster industry.

In the seventeenth century, a fruit and vegetable market grew around the brewery and then French Huguenots settled in the area which became a base for the weaving industry.

In the nineteenth century the area saw waves of Irish and Jews immigrants. By the later twentieth century, it had become a base for the Bangladeshi community, which thrives there today. The main street and those off it, as Ali describes in her novel, display the arts and industry of a people who have made Brick Lane home. The special talents of the women are everywhere apparent, as are the different languages and religions.