On Brick Lane and Brick Lane

I was reminded of my reservations while attending a recent literary discussion entitled 'Old East End, New East End' which centred on the impact of immigration, and featured some of the area's most eloquent champions. Bordered by the City of London, Europe's financial behemoth, the East End - which includes the administrative districts of Tower Hamlets and Hackney - revolves around Brick Lane and the Port where for centuries successive waves of immigrants have landed.

At the discussion Sanchita Islam, a young writer and artist, painted vivid prose pictures of Brick Lane, a street laden with curry restaurants and fashionable drinking bars with the "fluttering of a flute, a tink tink, followed by a high-pitched voice and a tabla beat floating from a shop."

But her anthology of Bangladeshi diasporic writing, 'From Briarwood to Barishal to Brick Lane' and other works also capture some of the area's misery. She writes about Bangladeshi women trapped in dingy flats at the mercy of violent, repressive husbands, and the youth gangs spitting anger at authority and tradition, as well as the encroachment by London's moneyed classes keen to capture the 'experience': "The looming blocks, the sloping rooftops, the wonky windows and the crumble. Draw it all before the scrap heap is cleared away and the old lady kicked out of her hut. Draw it all before the dot coms and the men in suits clean up," she writes in 'Onion.'

Streams of immigrant dreamers have made their mark and left their ghosts in Brick Lane: Bengali lascars jumping ship in the early 1800s, Huguenot refugees escaping persecution in France, eastern European Jews fleeing the pogroms, Asians and Caribbeans invited in to solve the country's post-war labour shortage, and now Somalians running from conflict.

Sukhdev Sandhu, who read from his monumental 'London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City' at the discussion, describes it as a "holding area, a temporary interzone for immigrants who have not yet fully settled in England; whose lives are defined by their past their own or that of their parents but who wish to seize the future; who wish to become consumers rather than hunch-backed toilers." He adds in the 'London Review of Books' (LRB): "It's a slow and incomplete journey as far as many Bangladeshis are concerned."

The feeling that things are not quite right is a point made in a newly published study on the East End which concludes that during the last five decades white, working-class Eastenders have felt betrayed by their leaders' promises of better living standards and are resentful of immigrant families with whom they now have to compete for jobs, public services and housing.

However, Kate Gavron, one of the authors of 'The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict' study, writes in this month's 'Prospect' magazine that although white Eastenders "who had struggled to achieve the welfare state believed themselves to be taking second place to outsiders," Bangladeshi settlement in the East End 200,000 and rising with the 70,000 living in Tower Hamlets accepted as the largest concentration of immigrants in the UK - appears to be a great success. Bangladeshi girls are excelling in the schools, there are curry festivals, street parties where lampposts are painted red and green, Bengali street signs and, perhaps most permanently, there is a flourishing, localised artistic culture.

However, despite the artistic activity, the wider publishing world seems to have selected Monica Ali's 'Brick Lane' as the community's sole voice. Yet this over-hyped book, shortlisted for prizes even before publication, was dismissed by many Bangladeshis as misrepresentative and unsuitable as the outside world's gateway into their lives.

Sukhdev Sandhu described it as a "patchy but promising first novel, strongly indebted to its Black and Asian literary antecedents, more interested in character than it is in language or even in the area from which it derives its name." The author herself seems to have retreated from fiction and her forthcoming book 'Free Expression Is No Offence', is a political response to the government's controversial Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which she and other artists fear will outlaw the telling of religious jokes.

So who is being allowed to tell the world about the beauty and pathos of the Bangladeshi experience from within the fronds of fiction? Is the shadow of 'Brick Lane' blotting out other writers?

Sukhdev posits that Bangladeshis are becoming "slowly estranged from the ghetto they call home." He writes: "Walk around and you will notice that the sari stores have become designer furniture stores, the dress factories art galleries. Bangladeshis may be wilting into history."

If there has been a failure to set the literary world ablaze then time may be running out on this chapter in the lives of Bangladeshis living in the Britain as groups of Somalians, Kosovans, Russians and the cappuccino-guzzling new media and financial classes move in.

Perhaps the next generation of novelists and artists will have to express themselves elsewhere; to write in a new miasma of rootlessness alienated from not only their parents' birthplace but also their own. Perhaps this will be a good thing; perhaps it will allow them to escape the suffocating influences of Ali's 'Brick Lane' and the spread of Starbucks.

Sanchita, who is currently exploring the growing tensions between Bangladeshis and newly-arrived Somalian youths in the East End, believes that Bangladeshis will still be there in 30 years time and thinks many are now irretrievably stranded from their parents' homeland. At the 'Old East End, New East End' discussion one audience member accused Bangladeshis living in the East End of having "one foot in the airport" and no sense of "Britishness."

But in 'Gungi Blues', taken from her anthology, Sanchita writes about the problems faced by Bangladeshis returning to their parents' homeland:

"Bangladesh was like entering another world.
Alien, beautiful, grotesque, smelly and quite breathtaking all at once.
It wasn't a place I could relax, feel comfortable or warm.
It wasn't a place I could shout or take a walk to the corner shop.
It was just the place where my parents were born.
I was born in Manchester.
Bangladesh was a place to visit, to discover and learn but never to live.
To live there would mean our crumble.
Forced to hide behind white powder, tight lips, strained silence,
Or thin pretence we wouldn't know how."

So is all of this the source of my uneasiness about the East End? The feeling that a thousand voices, many dislocated and disappointed, are struggling to be heard. The knowledge of the East End's fractious past and anxious present. The fear that time may be running out before a new generation moves in to start its struggle.

Perhaps, or maybe it is because, as Sukhdev Sandhu puts it: "It's a cruel place today no less than it was two hundred years ago. With the narrowness of the streets, the crowded estates and the thinness of residents' walls, it is hard to insulate yourself from the dramas and catastrophes of the people who live near you."

David Sanderson is a correspondent with The London Times.