This week I read Assembly by Natasha Brown. Brown is a 31 year old author from London, England, and Assembly is her debut novel. England is a European country located in the United Kingdom. It is bordered by two of its fellow UK countries, Wales and Scotland.
Assembly is a study of the British class system, and a critique of the country’s relationship with race, and immigration. Brown’s unnamed narrator is a Black, British woman who works at a bank. She grew up with immigrant parents and is a role model to her younger sister, as she is Oxbridge (Cambridge and Oxford) educated, and has risen to a higher social and economic class than her family. She is a poignant observer, as she interacts with her coworkers, friends, and with her boyfriend, a White, upper-class man, who grew up with generational wealth and privilege.
In small vignettes, our protagonist is getting ready to attend her boyfriend’s parents’ anniversary party. A party that will be filled with English, high-society individuals, who are most definitely all White, and who think of her as the lucky arm-candy of her boyfriend, that is if they don’t mistake her as one of the waitstaff first. As the party approaches, she remembers and analyzes interactions with her co-workers and her general place in society.
She relays conversations with her mother, where all the updates are on people who have died. She says that receiving the updates felt like being on a roller-coaster, “the set-up and punchline structure [her mother] employed; making [her] remember knowing, invoking memories of a person, of a life, then unveiling the death”. It made her feel guilty, guilty to be British and to have health insurance, and to not be a true part of that community.
She also felt annoyance that these conversations only emphasized her Britishness, her otherness, while she could also only claim to be British as something that was “hyphenated or else parenthesized by the origins of those whose deaths [her] mother detailed over the phone”.
The pressure to succeed, to be the perfect child of immigrants, and to prove herself British-enough, is figuratively and literally killing her. After receiving a cancer diagnosis, she decides to take no action. She tells no one, lies to her boyfriend that it was all a false alarm, and decides to succumb to the slow and painful killing of her body. She feels that she “traded in [her] life for a slice of middle-class comfort”, taking on the opportunities that her parents and grandparents didn’t have. Her choice to be passive in the face of death, signifies how much she is mentally suffering in life. She dreads everyday at her job and sits with the constant fear of messing up.
She has no one in her life that understands her. Her boyfriend jokes about her white-collar job, tells her that she is the 1% and richer than him, dismissing his own generational wealth and social capital. Even her self-proclaimed feminist best friend considers money and marriage as the successful end-all-be-all. She doesn’t belong, not even in the country she was born in. She doesn’t see herself as a human, but as profit. She says she is “what we’ve always been to the empire: pure, fucking profit. A natural resource to exploit and exploit, and denigrate, and exploit”. She sees that her only choice is assimilation, to melt into “London’s multicultural soup”, no matter the cost.
At this party, the lines between her and her boyfriend are only made more clear. His acceptance of her gives her the credibility to be in that space, but she is seen as temporary by his family and their friends. She is his rebellion, adding to his liberal identity, but will ultimately end up as one line in his auto-biography. While she is alienated by the rich, white, party socialites, she is also seen as different from the Black service workers setting up the party. They heckle her, asking why they must work while she gets to dress up and relax.
This loneliness contributes to her choice to die, but she also finds her true purpose in death. She wonders, “why live? Why subject myself further to their reductive gaze…Why endure my own dehumanization”?
Through her participation in the economy she has earned savings, a pension, life insurance, things no one in her family has had before. She has “amassed a new opportunity” where she has “something to pass on”. Through this she feels that choosing complicity, choosing to die, is the only way that her suffering has been worth it, that if she can leave all of these things to her sister, so she doesn’t have to assimilate and work, but can choose happiness, than what she has been through has not been for nothing.
I found this nihilistic, scorching novel to be very moving. The way that Brown weaves large political and social constructs and theories into this stream-of-consciousness account gives a personal perspective on how the macro society and historic exploitation and degradation of others, especially immigrants, in Britain, affects the micro-moments of individual lives. It was emotional, open, and didn’t hold back, even as the main character analyzes how she must hold back and hide parts of herself every day. Though it was short, it packed a powerful, intellectual punch.
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