You can see it there – the street name in English and, I think, Bengali – the street brought to life in Monica Ali’s wonderful book. Brick Lane was a sensation, well reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, as well it should have been. Reading it, a reader not only felt the feelings, but also heard the voices and smelled the cooking smells of a crowded immigrant neighborhood in London’s East End.Well we went there today, expecting to see the veiled women, street food and crowded food markets that orient us in a neighborhood like the one we lived in as we read Brick Lane. But the book was published six years ago. And Nazneen, her sad husband, lover and daughters have surely moved on.
Gentrification has arrived – as surely as this old shop will soon be transformed into a web-connected, foam and half-caf coffee joint. As we walked the streets today, they were full of cool people in multiple earrings, tight skits, hip tee shirts and modern demeanor, and with the goods to satisfy them. Revealing, low cut short skirted dresses, funky feathered jewelry, pork pie hats and weird purses hung from stalls in side markets and on the Lane itself. Music was bluegrass and Hendrix and newer than that — nothing remotely ethnic. There are lots of curry and other ethnic restaurants but they have wine lists and chic fonts for their menus. And there are liquor stores.
I’m not sure precisely why I’m telling you this except to remind us to be grateful for gifts like this wonderful novel. Things have surely changed here on Brick Lane, but thanks to Monica Ali, her ear, her eyes and, especially, her heart and empathy and imagination, we have a lovely document of life as it was here just a decade ago. This immigrant literature, whether it’s Ali, or
Lahiri or H
enry Roth or Saul Bellow or
Amy Tan or
Betty Smith, provides historical scrapbooks as communities shift, or are displaced. So it’s nothing new; it’s just so dramatic to arrive on the Tube at a place so recently real to me and to see it, already, well past the point it lives in in my mind.