This week, Monica Ali was behind the blue shutters of her second home in Portugal, relaxing with her family, as discontent among a vocal minority in London’s Bangladeshi community boiled over into an explicit threat to block filming of her successful first novel, Brick Lane.
The filmmakers have taken the threat seriously enough to abandon filming further scenes in Brick Lane itself. The narrow east London street has been one of the most diverse in the capital for centuries. It has been a sanctuary to successive waves of immigrants, including Huguenot silk weavers and Jewish refugees. It is where a Christian church became a synagogue and then a mosque. Now it is now lined with the curry houses, sweet shops and silk warehouses that have become tourist attractions.
The episode has echoes of earlier collisions between art and passionate belief, including the Christian pickets at each touring venue of Jerry Springer: The Opera, the cancellation by Birmingham Rep in central England of Gurpreet Bhatti’s play Behzti after pickets by local Sikhs and, the most notorious episode of all, the threat to the life of Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses.
The film company and Ali’s publishers say she is aware of the developments, but has chosen not to comment.
However, the link with earlier controversies was explicitly made in a letter to The Guardian signed by Rushdie, as well as Gillian Slovo, the South African-born novelist, writers Hari Kunzru and Hanif Kureishi — both London-born with mixed English and Asian families, like Ali — and Lisa Appignanesi, deputy president of the English branch of the writers’ association Pen.
”Though legitimate protest and expression of views is just fine, English Pen trusts that this time, should there be any concerted physical attempt to stop the production — as in the case of the play Behzti in Birmingham — the police, with the full backing of the United Kingdom’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport, will stand squarely behind the film, its author and the right to free imaginative expression,” they wrote.
The right to free imaginative expression has come off worst in many previous encounters.
Abdus Sadiqui, chairperson of Brick Lane Traders, owner of several businesses in the street and one of the most outspoken critics of the film, does not accept that argument.
”She says it is fiction, and the film will be fiction, but to me that is not true. She has targeted our Sylheti community, for some reason, why I don’t know, and she is saying things about us which are just not true.”
Unlike many of the critics, Sadiqui has read Brick Lane, in English and in Bengali. ”I have never met her, and I don’t want to. I don’t see she is one of us. If she was to come here now she would have no problem with me — I am a gentleman — but people here are furious and I do not think she would be safe.”
Ali’s parents met in the 1960s in England, where her father worked as an engineer, and settled in Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, where she was born in 1967 and where her white mother was so exotic, people came from miles to look at her.
They left a country convulsed by civil war when she was five and returned permanently to Bolton in northern England. Although both parents found adjusting to a greyer life in England difficult, she excelled at school and went on to take a philosophy, politics and economics degree at Oxford university.
She now lives mainly in Dulwich, south London — with her management consultant husband and two small children — and in the house in Portugal, which is the setting for her second novel, the title of which (Alentejo Blue) refers to the paint used locally on woodwork.
The success of her first book, a bittersweet story of a young Bengali woman moving to east London in an arranged marriage with a man twice her age, has become a publishing legend. On the basis of the first five chapters, she was proclaimed one of Granta magazine’s Best Young British Novelists, and then won a £300  000 publishing deal with Doubleday.
She had to scramble to acquire an agent in order to complete the contract. The book was a phenomenon, a critical and popular success shortlisted for all the major prizes, including the Booker, and winning several.
”She’s completely pleasant and easy to deal with, there’s absolutely no star bullshit about her at all,” said director Peter Florence.
He is dismayed, but not surprised, by the tumult over Brick Lane, which flared briefly when the book was published but is now raging again, fanned by the advance publicity for the film.
He said: ”It’s not remotely comparable with the reaction to The Satanic Verses, but there is the same feeling of people who haven’t read the book insisting that it does not say what they believe should be said, or that it does say what they regard as unspeakable. In a sense, if you come under fire from those conservative people, you must be doing something right.” — Â