Stirring the cultural pot January 9, 2010

By REENA GURBAKSH

An author shares how issues of identity and cultural intersection inevitably form the backbone of her stories.

BY all accounts, it was a brilliant debut for a novice.

Monica Ali was famously named one of Britain’s top young novelists in 2003 based on her unpublished manuscript, and when Brick Lane was released later that same year, it ricocheted to the top of the best-seller lists in Britain and the United States, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

In 2007, the novel was adapted for an award-winning British drama film directed by Sarah Gavron.

Ali’s feat in her first outing was all the more commendable as she had no previous writing experience. She had worked in publishing, marketing and copywriting after studying Politics and Economics at Oxford and decided to write a book after the birth of her son, Felix, 10 years ago.

“He was a terrible sleeper and I developed insomnia. I had to do something with all those hours awake at night so I started writing,’’ she says.

The appeal of Ali’s page-turner is not unlike that of many other tales of wide-eyed Asian women who venture to Britain post marriage, only to find solitude in their home and hostility in a strange land.

But Brick Lane – named after a street in London’s East End which forms the heart of the city’s Bangladeshi community – offers much more than a cocktail of empathy, pity and rage.

Ali tells the immigrant experience through her heroine, Nasreen, who is submissive yet curious enough to have an affair with a younger man. This lends the tale that oft-missing dose of spice, controversy and realism.

“She’s feeling her way towards some measure of independence and the affair is part of that journey,’’ Ali says.

Also, interestingly, the affair garners sympathy votes for Nazreen’s self-absorbed and bungling husband, Chanu, who dreams of making enough money so that he can retire to his homeland. The grass, it seems, is not always greener in the West.

Ali herself is an immigrant: She was born in 1967 in Dhaka to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother and moved to Britain when she was three. They lived a poor life in Greater Manchester where she suffered her fair share of racism.

One would think that much of her own experience is weaved into Brick Lane, but the author says not: “Growing up between two cultures was good training for a future life as a writer – it makes you very observant. I did research for Brick Lane but, of course, my experience is very far from Nazreen’s. The job of a fiction writer is to imagine!’’

Suprisingly, her follow-up in 2006, Alentejo Blue, was a mellow collection of short stories set in a village in southern Portugal (where Ali and her husband and children spend most school holidays and summers) that stayed completely off the radar.

Ali’s newest offering, In The Kitchen, is in essence similar to Brick Lane: It is again set in London and explores the glorious mix of identities that live in pockets throughout the city. But whether this bustling, somewhat stuffy tale set in a hotel kitchen has the same recipe for success as her runaway debut remains to be seen.

Here, Ali answers questions about her new book and what inspires her writing.

In the Kitchen has been called the much-awaited follow-up toBrick Lane. Do you see your first and third books being more similar stylistically?

Alentejo Blue was a multi-stranded, multi-voiced narrative set in Portugal.In the Kitchen sticks to one perspective very closely, as did Brick Lane. But all three books are very different from each other in some ways, and also all three have similarities in that issues of cultural intersection, displacement, home, belonging and not belonging feature in one form or another. I didn’t plan it that way but I guess those will always be my interests and inevitably come through.

In the Kitchen is weaved around a crime. What inspired this book and did you intend for it to be much more than a whodunit?

It’s not a whodunit. The death which opens the book is very quickly established to be an accident. It is a why-did-it-happen, though. Readers have been telling me that although the case is closed, the tension lingers. Which is the way I would want it.

The death of the kitchen porter, which Gabriel, my protagonist, the executive head chef at the Imperial Hotel, tries to brush aside as an administrative nightmare, becomes, literally, a nightmare for him. And it opens him up to the other stories around him in the kitchen and to seeing his staff as individuals.

Tell us a little bit about how you researched the workings of a professional kitchen for the story.

I spent a year doing intensive research and several years before that reading around the subject. I spent time in five large London hotels interviewing everyone from the manager to the receptionist but mainly I hung out in the kitchens, waiting for people to be ready to talk to me and sometimes working alongside them.

I was most drawn to the kitchen because those places are like United Nation assemblies, with every different nationality down there. So they are a rich source of diverse stories. But, as my protagonist finds, while other people’s stories can be enriching, they can also be overwhelming and exhausting.

Kitchens are high pressure environments and perfect crucibles for dramatic confrontation. They are also rich in comedy, with all the tensions, misinterpretations and strong characters which abound.

Your first book made such an impact literally. How do you feel about Brick Lane still defining you as a writer six years on?

I feel very lucky that the stars aligned for my first book in such a way. I get feedback from readers from all over the world and that is very special. But it was a first novel and of course it had some weaknesses.

I know that I’ve grown as a writer and will always continue to challenge myself. I don’t feel held back in any way – I’m far too engaged with the serious business of writing to let any other considerations in.

Were you accused of portraying Britain’s Bangladeshi immigrant community negatively?

Actually, the British media attempted to create a storm out of very little. The so-called “controversy” centred on the filming of the movie. A handful of people objected. The media tried, in an irresponsible way, to inflate the situation.

All the national (British) newspapers carried stories, and so did the BBC news, about a planned demonstration. If there had been any feeling in the “community” it would have tapped into that. On the day of the demo there were more journalists there than protesters. Set that against over 1,000 local people turning up wanting to be extras in the movie!

I have had and continue to have a huge amount of support from people with a Bangladeshi heritage. But that doesn’t make a headline – it’s the wrong kind of story!

With two young children (son Felix is 10 and daughter, Shumi, eight) when and how do you find the time to write?

I write when they’re at school. And after they’ve gone to bed.

Who are some of your favourite authors?

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Flaubert, Zola, Austen.

Are you working on your next book?

I’m trying to but I’m on a book tour, so it’s a little tricky!

Turning up the heat March 2, 2008

By REENA GURBAKSH

After a decade as an author-cook show host, the woman eminently qualified to be a domestic goddess (though she denies being one) is still hot for getting her viewers to take the ladle to the saucepan.

IN all honesty, I couldn’t help but feel decidedly short-changed to have had to burn up the phone lines to speak to British celebrity cook and author Nigella Lawson.

As an avid fan of her deliciously successful TV cook shows, I had always imagined that if I were fortunate enough to land an opportunity to exchange culinary trivia with her, I would have liked it to be in her glorious kitchen. And over a steaming cup of English tea and a generous helping of, say, her famous chocolate lime cheesecake, which, to put in her own words, “demanded to be eaten with voluptuous and exquisite pleasure”.

‘I’m never going to be a size zero, nor do I want to be,’ says Nigella Lawson, seen here dipping into an ice-cream dessert on Nigella Express.

As her fans will know, this spontaneous Nigella-esque quote (which accompanies the cake recipe in her book Nigella Bites) is characteristic of her gushing tributes to the pleasures of eating as seen on her cook shows. That, along with generous doses of eye-batting, lip-smacking and finger-licking antics, has turned Lawson into television’s current culinary crumpet, a befitting term coined by British men’s magazine Esquirewhich decked her out in a tin foil dress for its November 2007 issue.

Unfortunately, none of that intoxicating gastronomic exotica oozed through the phone as she spoke about how her real mission was to promote home cooking while to be seen as a kitchen sex doll was just an inadvertent byproduct of being on TV.

“I think people tend to sexualise you at all times, when sometimes I feel that I really am not trying to be flirtatious or sexy. I’m just trying to talk enthusiastically about food. But on the other hand, I suppose I should also say that it’s a very nice problem to have,” says the 48-year-old literary graduate of Oxford University.

Still, one wonders just how unintentional the nymph image really is: She’s been photographed in a tight T-shirt with the words “English muffin” emblazoned across her chest, flirted with American TV talk show host Jay Leno as she cooked up a storm on his programme, and in the Esquireinterview, she spoke about her love for the lads on the Chelsea football team and how she wore high heels and suspenders to bed.

Lawson sizzles with her cooking skills … and sexy domestic goddess image.

Nevertheless, it is a well-known fact that Lawson, formerly a book reviewer and writer for British newspapers The Sunday Times and The Guardian, fell into the whole kitchen goddess thing quite by accident. She also wrote a food column for the British Vogue and a makeup column for The Times Magazine. In 1998, a friend’s misadventures in the kitchen prompted her to write her first book, How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food, followed by another, How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking, in 2000.

One thing led to another and in 2001, her first cooking series, Nigella Bites, was filmed in her home in London, before another, Forever Summer with Nigella, was made the following year. These two successful TV shows inspired cookbooks with similar titles. Next came the three-episode Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen. In 2004, the 13-part Nigella Feasts began to air on British television, and was followed by the publication of Feast: Food to Celebrate Life.

Lawson’s latest, Nigella Express, a show that’s simmering with ideas for good, fast food, was aired in Britain in September and will be televised on Discovery Travel & Living (Astro Channel 707) beginning Friday (see sidebar, “Speed cooking”, for more details). A book of the same name has also been published.

With all this under her apron, you’ll have to take her seriously when she says her passion is getting her viewers to take the ladle to the saucepan.

“There’s nothing that makes me feel cooking is only for the few. However, I do think a natural interest helps, because I’ve seen a lot of people cook when they don’t want to or people who’re too busy reading the newspaper while something is cooking. In terms of ability, I don’t think it is some great art that only the gifted can accomplish,” she says.

Photographed in a tin foil dress for Esquire magazine’s November 2007 issue.

The trick, according to Britain’s most celebrated kitchen goddess who has sold more than three million books and is reportedly worth £15mil (RM94.5mil) on her own, is to follow your taste buds.

“You really have to create your own repertoire that’s based on your genuine likes and dislikes. That’s what helps you find your voice in the kitchen,” Lawson advises.

Does taking control of the kitchen then transform a woman into a domestic goddess? Incidentally, when Lawson’s second book came out, it drew a lot of flak owing to the title which feminists said betrayed her sisterhood by advocating a 1950s Stepford wives-type of domesticity where women stood smiling by their stoves.

Lawson will be the first to laugh at this notion. “When I came up with the term, it was based on the premise that none of us are domestic goddesses, but we want a way of feeling we are. If you’ve seen this book, you can see that it was obviously meant to be an ironic joke.

“I’m not a domestic goddess in the sense that I’m a messy person, but I love cooking. You wouldn’t want to see me iron a shirt. I can just about iron a handkerchief or tea towel if I need to,” she quips.

A large part of her charm is that she doesn’t claim to be an expert at what she does – “I don’t want to run a restaurant. Home food is the history of people, and that’s what interests me. I chop carrots like an ordinary person, I don’t do it as a virtuoso performance,” says Lawson, who cultivated her culinary interests through her mother.

“I’m the eldest girl of a large, old-fashioned family so my mother had me at work from the age of six,” recalls the daughter of Britain’s one-time Chancellor of the Exchequer under the Thatcher government, Nigel Lawson.

Ultimately, she sees herself as any woman who enjoys cooking for her family and friends.

“I can’t help but feel that I have more in common with my viewers than many chefs. I cook at the end of the day after I’ve picked my children from school and done a day’s work. My favourite way of cooking is an informal supper ? I would be very nervous if I have to cook some formal, high-level dinner,” she says.

However, the fact that she does her cooking in front of millions of viewers across the globe also makes her a celebrity, how does she continue to brazenly devour her food while famous women chomp on celery sticks?

“Well, I know I’m never going to be a size zero, nor do I want to be,” says the mother of two children – daughter Cosima, 13, and son Bruno, 11 – with journalist John Diamond, her first husband, who died of cancer in 2001. (Years before that, both her mother and sister had succumbed to the disease, so one wonders if the chapter titled Comfort Food in Nigella Bites includes recipes that saw her through those dark days.)

The London-born presenter remarried in 2003. Her second husband, advertising tycoon and art collector Charles Saatchi, was quoted in the British press sometime back as saying that he loved his wife’s Marilyn Monroe-like hourglass figure. In the recent Esquire story, the curvaceous cook said: “I have friends whose husbands tut and complain if they’ve put on a bit of weight. I could never put up with that. It’s got to be total adoration or it’s never going to work for me.”

Lawson certainly has no hang-ups about her body: “I’ve got a small build but a lot of flesh on it, so if I eat less, I would probably be a smaller person. But one makes choices in life – I once heard (model-actress) Elizabeth Hurley say ‘You make a choice, either jeans or the cookie jar’. Well, she has chosen jeans and I’ve chosen the cookie jar and we’re both happy with our choices!”

So what would she dish up for someone famously not fond of food, say, Victoria Beckham, if she comes over for dinner?

“I think I would probably cook her something old-fashioned. I’d roast a chicken, probably with a bit of lemon and make a lovely salad. I always think people who diet a lot want something rich and chocolatey for dessert, so you’d have to bring that out. I think plain home-cooked food is what all people like to eat.”

The ones who have benefited most from her home-made gastronomic delights are obviously her children, who Lawson says are “a pleasure to cook for” but also her worst critics.

“From the moment they’re born you feed them, first from your body, then you cook for them. I love that, but children are also notoriously difficult to cook for,” says the woman who was recently misquoted by the British press as saying that she would not leave any of her fortune to her children. Lawson has posted a note on her official website to say that what she did in fact mean was that it was important for them to get a job and earn their own money.

As for her own plans for the future, Lawson intends to expand her Living Kitchen range of kitchenware and nifty gadgets and is working on developing a variety of multipurpose ingredients and mixes to make cooking easier.

“It’s still at the beginning stages, so the minute I know, I’ll have something to report,” she quips.

Does she harbour any plans to combine cooking with travelling, like many of her television counterparts?

“I’d love to but I have children and I couldn’t do it when they’re still at school,” says the dedicated mum. “I’d love to do a travel show at some stage, but I would say that won’t be an option for a good, long time.”

So until wanderlust takes over, it looks like Lawson is content with just doing what she does best – being television’s hostess with the mostest!