Brick Lane

“There is another kind of labor we perform, and if we withdraw it that will be a discomfort only for the men….A man cannot live without water. He cannot live without it, but he can bear the thought of no water. A man can live without sex. He can live without it, but he cannot bear the thought of no sex. This is my suggestion…That’s how the women in my village got themselves a new well.” 

Mrs. Islam reveals to Nazneen her understanding of the inner feminine wisdom at work in the patriarchal society. She is telling her new friend an anecdote about how the women in the village were told by a prostitute that the only way they would get water for their village is by withholding sex until the well was dug. This anecdote tells a great deal about Mrs. Islam, who uses all sorts of feminine manipulations to amass money and power.

“If you think you are powerless, then you are. Everything will within you, where God put it. If your husband does not do what is required, think what you yourself have left undone.”  

This quotation is the key to Mrs. Islam’s insight into how a Muslim woman gains power. This statement is the key to the journey of developing the feminine power: the inner probing to determine what needs to be done. Yet, as a younger woman, Nazneen has to learn to apply this wisdom to obtain direct power.

“If you are strong, you withstand the storm. Can you see? The storm comes and everything is blurred. But all that is build on a solid foundation has only to stand fast and wait for the storm to pass. Do you see?” 

Dr. Azad describes the snow globes that he collects. This quote follows Nazneen’s observation of Tariq, who was brought up without the strong cultural foundation that her husband instilled in her daughters, and her impression that his “bones had been removed from his body.”

“Get on the train of repentance sister, before it leaves your station.”

This quotation is repeated like a chant through the novel’s narrative. It begins when Nazneen crosses the threshold into politics. The first instance is through the secretary at the entrance to Nazneen’s first community meeting. The quote provides insight into the Muslim character, and how repentance is a prerequisite to Muslim activism.

“Many people looked at the palace, as if they were waiting for it to do something. Nazneen looked back at the building. It was big and white and, as far as she could see, extraordinary only in its size. The railings she found impressive but the house was only big. Its face was very plain. Two pillars (in themselves plain) sat at the main doorway, but there was little else in the way of decoration. If she were the queen she would tear it down and build a new house, not this flat-roofed block but something elegant and spirited, with minarets and spires, domes and mosaics, a beautiful garden instead of this bare forecourt. Something like the Taj Mahal.” 

This is a significant quotation revealing the difference between Eastern and Western architecture. The comparison between the Taj Mahal, known as the lover’s palace, and Buckingham Palace is a poignant distinction between the sacred geometry imbedded in the spiritual palaces of the East vs. the hard angles of British royalty.

“Nazneen plucked a blade of grass. She cut it along the ridge with her thumbnail and curled the ends one way and the other to form two spirals. She tossed it away. We are no more than this, she thought. Each life is no more than a blade of grass on this lawn.” 

This quote reveals Nazneen’s elevated state of mind in which she feels part of the whole. This state is the result of her falling in love with Karim. The two spirals she makes with the blades represent two evolving energies coming together.

“If her life was ever out of her hands, it was now. She had submitted to her father and married her husband; she had submitted to her husband. And now she gave herself up to a power greater than these two, and she felt herself helpless before it. When the thought crept into her mind that that the power was inside her, that she was creator, she dismissed it as conceited. How could such a weak woman unleash a force so strong? She gave in to fate and not to herself.”  

This is a significant quote revealing the evolution of Nazneen’s understanding of fate. She understands now that submission to a man, whether it be a lover or her husband or an employer, is something different from the surrender to a higher power. In surrendering to a person, she loses her autonomy; in surrendering to a higher power, she gains autonomy. In dismissing the idea that she is the creator of this power determining her life course, she is enlarging her understanding of the spirit/body connection.

“It was as if the conflagration of her bouts with Karim had cast a special light on everything, a dawn light after a life lived in twilight. It was if she had been born deficient and only now been gifted with the missing sense.” 

This is Nazneen’s feeling of the new dawn, the rebirth that she feels in her sexual awakening. The “missing sense” is the higher power connecting mind and spirit in the body, enhancing her powers of perception.

“She did her work and she discovered that work in itself, performed with a desire for perfection, was capable of giving satisfaction. She cleaned the flat, and even wiping the floor after the toilet had flooded was not so tiresome if it was done with a song on the lips and in the heart.” 

This is the joy of everyday life that Nazneen has discovered in her sexual awakening. It also relates to her innate wisdom about the importance of grounding a spiritual transformation in daily work.

“It’s like being in a race, where one man runs without hindrance, and you must run with your arms tied behind your back, a blindfold on, hot coals beneath you, and, and….He thought for a while and his cheeks moved this way and that. “And your legs cut off,” he finished, and indicated with a chopping motion to the knee the exact location of the severance.” 

This is a poignant allegory that Chanu uses to explain the dependency created under imperialism where high import duties in developed countries protected local markets and raw materials were extracted from the colonies without permitting local production, thereby forcing the local population to import manufactured goods. Chanu is using his own body to this system of dependency in the former colonies.

“I don’t know Shahana. Sometimes I look back and I am shocked. Every day of my life I have prepared for success, worked for it, waited for it, and you don’t notice     how the days pass until nearly a lifetime has finished. Then it hits you—the thing you have been waiting for has already gone by. And it was going in the other direction. It’s like I’ve been waiting on the wrong side of the road for a bus that was already full.”

This is one of Chanu’s most poignant statements. He is speaking from the heart about how his dreams died. It stops short of being a wise statement because he doesn’t realize that joy is in being fully present in one’s own life, whatever that life may be.

“Only a short time ago it had seemed that she worried unnecessarily about everything. Now it was clear that she had not worried enough. She was back on the tightrope that stretched between her husband and her children, and this time the wind was high and tormenting.” 

This quotation reveals the character’s understanding of the need to regain the balance through the necessity of external demands. There was still danger ahead, but the return to her grounding by balancing this opposition will create the opportunity for a breakthrough.

“The horror came to her now. She vomited over the clothes she had washed. She was stunned. As if she had just not gained consciousness and discovered a corpse on the floor, a bloody dagger in her hand.” 

This is a key passage revealing what happens to Nazneen after the passion died down from her sexual adventure. Again, this connection between the emotions and the body is powerful. The horror is the realization that her old self is gone and she killed it.

“God tests us,” she said. Don’t you know life is a test? Some He tests with riches and good fortune. Many men have failed such a test. And they will be judged. Others He tests with illness or poverty, or with jinn who come in the shape of men—or of husbands.” 

Rupban, who visits Nazneen in a dream, sums up her fatalistic attitude imposed on her daughter. Life is a test awaiting judgment. No matter what you circumstances, rich or poor, it is up to the individual to make the most of it. The addition of “husbands” refers to the female condition of experiencing fate through their men. This is the condition that Nazneen’s mother succumbed to in death but one that Nazneen is challenged to surmount.

“For years she had felt she must not relax. If she relaxed, things would fall apart. Only the constant vigilance and planning, the low-level, unremarked and unrewarded activity of a woman, kept the household from crumbling.” 

Nazneen experiences a disorderly apartment after recovering from her illness. She experiences satisfaction with the mess because all of her fears of things falling apart if she surrendered had been faced. She realizes now that life in the household goes on without her constant female vigilance. This is a liberating feeling.

“For so many years, all the permanent fixtures of her life had felt so temporary. There was no reason to change anything, no time to grow anything. And now, somehow, it felt too late. 

This quotation details the “Going Home Syndrome” which afflicts the immigrant. They can never fully inhabit their life in their new country because part of them is always projecting towards home. These sentiments show signs of the mourning Nazneen will need to pass through in order to create a new life.

“From time to time it occurred to her that Chanu, who had gone back to the taxi driving early in the morning, might arrive home and find them in this compromising domesticity. The thought of it left her indifferent. He comes, he doesn’t come, she said to herself. By this attitude she was vaguely shocked and nearly thrilled, for it seemed at once wanton and sublime, the first real stoicism she had shown in the course of her Fate.” 

This reveals that Nazneen’s former indifference and passivity have now been transformed to a centeredness and inner balance. Her indifference to her husband catching her and her lover in a “compromising domesticity” reveals her inner power. It is perhaps the most important quotation from the book in what it reveals about the difference between fate and destiny, as well as stoicism and passivity.

“The worst thing was she did not know what would happen. What was the point in fearing this and that, if only this and not that would happen?” 

This quotation reveals Nazneen’s surrender into the moment and her detachment regarding outcome in entering the liberating state of uncertainty. The opposites are presented here logically through the syntax of “this” and “that” and Nazneen not giving into the fear that she doesn’t know what will happen.

“These secret things will kill us.” 

Hasina’s short statement from a September 2001 letter hints at what has been driving the two sister’s correspondence at the center of the novel’s plot. Although she asks her    sister if she has a secret, this statement reveals that Hasina is projecting. Hasina is the one who holds the secret.

“And she felt misery rise like steam from Chanu at her side, and knew that he was lost in his own private torment; Race, Class, and Short Theses did not touch him there.” 

This is a very evocative description of Chanu’s defeat. His big moment prepared through a ritual that included putting on his double-breasted suit and preparing his speech, had come to nothing. The rising of steam creates an image of the hot air going out of him. He had reached a pinnacle of defeat where he had to get out of his mind and into his body, where words cannot penetrate. This comedown prepares him for entering the third space of compromise with his wife.

“Is this true?” He weighed each word. “It’s a question I like very much. A student of philosophy must inquire all the time: Is this the real nature of the world? But so must a student of physics, of history, of literature even and art, for only art which is true is worthy of the name...Whenever we are told something, before we receive it into our minds and hearts, we must put it to the test. We open a book, we turn a newspaper page, we allow the television and the radio to come into our homes. All the things we are told every day—are they true? 

Coming at the climax of the novel, this quotation is significant in summing up Chanu’s finest moment of intellectualization. His statement reaches a place of poetic irony, poignant because it unintentional. In speaking in circles about the truth, he is actually making a point of avoiding facing the truth of his wife’s infidelity. His wife is actually confronting him with what she heard about Dr. Azad giving him money for the plane tickets, but in placing her request for truth into the lofty realm of intellectualization he is avoiding the truth of what he feels the need to escape.

“All this, and more. Because it is possible for a man to lie to himself. And a woman, too.” Chanu looked away from her. He spoke to his coat. “A heart says this and that, it shouts and makes a big scene. But put to the test and sometimes you will find it out for what it is: a big and hollow noise. When you find something so strongly that it can’t be questioned, you have to ask yourself—is this true?” 

This is the second part of the quote in which Chanu admits he has been lying to himself. He reveals this truth to his wife in the only way he can, through the third person. He is relaying a message that the strength of their relationship is beyond his intellectual ability and then speaks of the ``true” versus “truth.” He seems to be relating that their physical and emotional connection can withstand the passions of the heart. This statement is significant in that it is his last before Nazneen takes the action that will lead to the resolution.

“He lifts me up inside. It's the difference between… I don’t know. It’s like you’re watching television in black and white and someone comes along and switches on the colors.” 

Nazneen says this to her friend Razia, finally revealing her feelings and disclosing her secret. This is a key statement of value for a character who has evolved from her upbringing and into an acceptance of her deep emotional core accessed by the eroticism experienced with her lover. This statement precisely reveals how an erotic connection enhances daily life.