Tag-Archive for ◊ superiors ◊

Author:
• Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Monica Ali was born in 1967 to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother in Dhaka, which was at the time part of East Pakistan. Her parents moved to Bolton in England when she was three years old. Her father became a teacher at the Open University and her mother a counsellor.

Monica Ali attended Bolton Girls’ School, followed by Wadham College in Oxford, where she read Economics, Philosophy and Politics. Currently she lives in South London with her husband and two children.

Monica Ali was short-listed in 2003 for the Man Booker Prize for fiction, for the Guardian First Book Award and for the British Book Awards, Literary Fiction Award, for her first novel Brick Lane, published in June of the same year.

Brick Lane was followed by Alentejo Blue, set in Portugal and published in June 2006, followed by In The Kitchen, published in April 2009. Brick Lane was made into a film, which won a British drama film award in 2007.

The novel and the film created a controversy among the Bangladeshi community living in England because they didn’t recognise themselves in Monica Ali’s negative portrayal of the community as being uneducated, backward and rough, which was considered an insult. They claimed that the novel encouraged “pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes”.

Brick Lane is the story of the Bangladeshi Muslim community living post 9/11 in the East End of London but in particular, the story of Nazneen, her husband Chanu and Hasina, Nazneen’s good looking sister, who lives in Bangladesh and who was disowned by her family for eloping at the age of sixteen with her lover and marrying him. Hasina reveals her chaotic day to day life in Dhaka through a series of regular sweet, naïve and sometimes unintentionally funny, sometimes terribly sad letters sent to her sister in London in pidgin English.

Nazneen often goes back to her childhood in her little village in the countryside of Bangladesh, reminiscing about her happy, innocent and carefree childhood with her younger sister Hasina, which now contrasts with her miserable life in her council flat in a tall block in the London borough of Tower Hamlets.

Nazneen arrives in London at the age of eighteen, after an arranged marriage with Chanu, who is already established in London and who is unattractive and twice her age. She can’t speak English and has to adapt to her new life in a foreign country with a husband who, although basically kind-hearted, is frustrated for not being able to fulfil his dreams and carry his plans to fruition. He believes to be above most of the Bangladeshi community who are uneducated and lacking a great deal of culture.

Chanu resents the attitude of his superiors who fail to recognise his talent and ingenuity. He considers himself to be a gem in the rough and has a high opinion of himself which makes him a pompous, funny character despite his lucidity and his awareness of the conflict between the first and second generation immigrants, which, to his horror, was portrayed by his eldest daughter Shahana and which made him decide to repatriate his whole family back to Bangladesh.

The strong element of fate which is overwhelming in the novel is challenged, first by rebellious Hasina, who took her fate into her own hands by eloping with the man she loved and then by the submissive Nazneen who goes through different emotional conflicts: the never ending quest for fate and free will, her religious up-bringing and the cultural differences she faces by being a Muslim living in a secular big city.

She carried out small rebellious acts at the beginning of her marriage but her aspiration for autonomy started with her attraction to the handsome, young political enthusiast, Karim, which evolved into a physical and pecuniary independence and the discovery of her freedom of choice in a male dominated community.

The eighteen-year old, once subdued and obedient wife, matures into a forthright independent woman. She discovers her own force and will power, something she was unaware of. She will not be controlled by fate, she will take her own decisions, like not following her husband by going back home. She will remain in London, she will work and look after herself and her two daughters.

Nazneen believes in herself now and knows that she is capable of taking charge of her own destiny.

Brick Lane is a contemporary, and humane story, the characters are shown with all their complexities and are described realistically and in detail whether it’s Mrs Islam, the hypochondriac, evil and manipulative usurer, or Razia the friendly and strong will-powered neighbour, or Shahana, the refractory, provocative and westernised teenage-daughter, or the sweet second daughter, little Bibi who is even tempered, quiet and hard working.

Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is a post-colonial novel written with a great deal of compassion and optimistic hope.

If you enjoyed reading this article or found it useful, please consider donating the cost of a cup of coffee to help maintain the site...
Author:
• Saturday, March 01st, 2008

Yasmina Khadra is the pen-name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian ex-army officer who while still in the army used this pseudonym in order to avoid submitting his manuscripts for approval by the military censors, due to his notoriety which irritated his superiors. He was encouraged by his wife to work clandestinely by using her first two names, Yasmina Khadra.

He started writing his collection of stories “Houria” at the age of 17. Six more novels were published under his real name while in the army and before adopting his pen-name, Yasmina Khadra.

Mohammed Moulessehoul was born in Kenadsa in the Algerian Sahara in January 1955. His father joined the National Liberation Army in 1956 in the war against the French occupier. After Algeria’s independence in 1962, Mohammed Moulessehoul was sent by his father to cadet school to become an officer which also satisfied his mother’s wish.

After thirty six years in military service, Mohammed Moulessehoul decided to go into exile in France in 2001, and devoted his entire time to writing. He currently lives in Aix-En-Provence in the South of France.

Mohammed Moulessehoul received the Médaille d’Or from the Académie Française in 2001 and the Prix des Libraires in 2006. He was also awarded the trophy of Créateurs sans Frontières, presented to him on the 19th of February 2008 at the Quai d’Orsay, by the French minister of foreign affairs, Bernard Kouchner.

Some of Mohammed Moulessehoul’s books have been translated in 25 countries, but only a few books were translated from French into English : “In the Name of God” in 2000, “Wolf Dreams” in 2003, “Morituri” in 2003, “The Swallows of Kabul” in 2004 and “Double Blank in 2005.

He wrote several books about the civil war in Algeria and is today one of Algeria’s most important writers. The Swallows of Kabul has been a best seller, it will be made into a film and will be released soon in the cinemas.

The Swallows of Kabul is a parallel story of two doomed Afghani couples who have seen better days but now have to endure a hard life under the Taliban’s oppressive regime.

Mohsen Ramat and his wife Zunaira are well educated, they meet at university, he comes from a middle-class family of prosperous merchants and she is the daughter of a distinguished man. Mohsen is looking forward to a diplomatic career, and Zunaira’s ambition is to become a magistrate. She is a liberated feminist and a human rights activist when a student at university. All these dreams are shattered when the Taliban come to power. Mohsen’s family business is destroyed and Zunaira has to stay home because women under the Taliban ruling are not allowed to study, have a job or go out without wearing the burka, which Zunaira felt was stripping her of her identity and her freedom.

Atiq Shaukat an ex-mujahideen fighter from the Russian war, and now a part time jail keeper, lives with his wife Musarrat an ex-nurse who is suffering from a painful and terminal illness. He married her twenty years ago out of gratitude because she saved his life when he was severely wounded by the Russians during the war. He doesn’t love her and can’t bear the thought of coming back home to find her lying in her corner and him having to deal with the household chores.

Mohsen and Atiq have many things in common. The dissatisfaction of their gloomy life, the fear of the unknown, the boredom and the aimless and endless wandering in the streets of Kabul day after day, and the rejection of the intolerable situation the Taliban had led the country into. The two couples are deeply depressed and distraught by the frightening nightmare they are going through. They try to remain sane amongst all the insanity surrounding them caused by the Taliban’s repressive regime and the state of advanced decomposition in the city.

Mohsen releases his rage by joining a crowd stoning an adulterous woman to death. He always had a gentle nature, he felt horrified by his act, and couldn’t even believe that he was capable of such a deed. In order to unburden himself of such a heavy weight on his conscience, he had to confess to his wife what he had done: “I don’t know what came over me. It happened so fast. It was as if the crowd put a spell on me. I don’t recall gathering up the stones. I only remember that I couldn’t get rid of them, and an irresistible rage seemed to come into my arm… What frightens me and saddens me at the same time is that I didn’t even try to resist.”

Atiq doesn’t know what’s happening to him, he can no longer withstand the pitiless violence of the Taliban regime he genuinely believed in at the beginning. He feels claustrophobic in his prison cubby hole called an office. He feels disoriented and lost : “What’s happening to me? I can’t bear the dark, I can’t bear the light, I don’t like standing up or sitting down, I can’t tolerate old people or children, I hate it when anybody looks at me or touches me. In fact, I can hardly stand myself. Am I going stark raving mad?” “The prison world is getting Atiq down. During the last several weeks, he has devoted much consideration to his position as a jailer. The more he thinks about it, the less merit he finds in it, and even less nobility. This realization has put him in a state of constant rage.”

Zunaira loses her mind by becoming shockingly extreme in her attitude and behaviour towards her husband. She doesn’t want to see him any more because she holds him responsible for the shame she had to endure from a Taliban police agent in the street. She no longer respects him. In order to stop her husband arguing with her she pushes him violently, his head hit the wall, and he dies instantly.

Musarrat leads a tortured life without any hope of recovering from this long, mysterious and consuming disease. She decides in her own drastic and extreme way, to sacrifice herself in order to make her husband happy. She wants to substitute herself for the woman he fell in love with and who is sentenced to death. She tell her husband : “I’ve been inspired by the Lord : That woman is not going to die. She’ll be everything I couldn’t be for you. You have no idea how happy I am this morning. I’ll be more useful dead than alive. And at long last, you’re being offered a chance. I beg you not to ruin it. Listen to me, just this once…” She is a selfless, angelic figure amongst all the surrounding abominations.

Mohammed Moulessehoul in his powerful, realistically disturbing and traumatic, short but very dense story is able to convey the misery, injustice, suffocation and oppression of the devastated city of Kabul under the Taliban regime. He writes with great compassion about the complexity of human nature when faced with extreme hardship, absurd rulers and rules, and how extreme repression and senseless violence can bring people to the brink of helplessness and despair to the extent of losing their souls. They end up dying or raving mad.

Mohammed Moulessehoul in The Swallows of Kabul is writing about an Afghanistan that he has never visited. He says in one of his interviews that he understands the era of the Taliban very well.

“I understand that Taliban mentality very well. The landscape, the struggles, the hardness of life-all these are just like my homeland.” He points to the cover of his book: “Look at that photo (of a woman in a burka crossing a parched, desolate city scape) , that could be the Sahara village where I was born… I wanted to bring a new look from a Muslim on the tragedy of Afghanistan. And to bring to it a western perspective at the same time. When there are two perspectives there is a better chance of understanding.”

Understanding that it is extremism which is the cancer of Islam.