A Poetics of Chaos: Spatial Metaphors in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Minaret

Abstract

While contemporary culture seems to valorize unbounded mobility as the cornerstone of a transnational and borderless world, both social and individual experience continue to be dominated by the impulse for borders and restrictions. Leila Aboulela explores this discrepancy by interrogating the spatial organization of social reality both to show the prevalence of border logic and to suggest pathways for resurgence. This paper examines how the deployment of spatial tropes in Aboulela’s early novels The Translator (1999) and Minaret (2006) is aimed at demonstrating that conceptions of space as orderly and static often serve to maintain certain power configurations. At the same time, these tropes counter the discursive drive for order by tapping into the potential for resistance that inhabits these hegemonic narratives of space. I argue that by mobilizing such tropes as border-crossing, journeying, and carnivalesque chaos, the texts in question advocate a more fluid and chaotic notion of space.