Abstract
Contrary to hegemonic Western representations of Muslim women as victims of Islam and Muslim men, Sudanese-Scottish Leila Aboulela’s The Translator depicts a Muslim woman, Sammar, whose sense of home and belonging is predicated on her romantic love for her late cousin and husband, Tarig. Therefore, after his death, she feels alienated from her home in Sudan and leaves for Aberdeen, Scotland, where she is ostracized because she is Muslim. While this Muslim identity proves indispensable for her survival and gradual healing, ultimate normalcy and belonging are restored when she reclaims the world of love and acceptance she has lost with Tarig’s death through a new relationship. The romantic love and the language she uses in this relationship allow Sammar to restore the sense of being and the belonging she had at home within the spaces she occupies in Aberdeen, ending her alienation and reclaiming her subjectivity. Using feminist theory and postcolonial theories of place and identity, as well as Lila Abu-Lughod’s notion of emotional discourse as a pragmatic act, this study investigates the novel’s depiction of place and identity as constructed entities embedded in emotion. This depiction, this study proposes, undermine various positionalities and binaries, such as self/other and east/west, allowing Aboulela to approach them more critically.
Highlights
Contrary to hegemonic Western representations of Muslim women as victims of Islam and Muslim men, Sudanese-Scottish Leila Aboulela’s The Translator depicts a Muslim woman, Sammar, whose sense of home and belonging is predicated on her romantic love for her late cousin and husband, Tarig
Postcolonial theory of place foregrounds the nonessentialist nature and interdependence of both place and subjectivity: Place the ‘place’ of the ‘subject’, throws light upon subjectivity itself, because whereas we might conceive subjectivity as a process, as Lacan has done, so the discourse of place is a process of continual dialect between subject and object . . . This was not a place which was there but a place which is in a continual process of being written
As Mohja Kahf argues, there are variations on the narrative representing the Muslim woman in Western culture, the core narrative is that she is a victim of an inherently oppressive Islam (Kahf 1999)
Summary
A sense of place that is grounded in emotions is in line with notions of place and identity as fluid, constructed entities, which is what the depiction of Sammar’s identity, subjectivity, and sense of place and belonging—all that constitutes her difference— confirm. As Mohja Kahf argues, there are variations on the narrative representing the Muslim woman in Western culture, the core narrative is that she is a victim of an inherently oppressive Islam (Kahf 1999) Having started upon her arrival in Sudan for the first time at the age of seven, Sammar’s love for Tarig becomes intrinsic to her sense of home, belonging, and even being. Does she still lack the love underlying her sense of place and being, but she is Othered for her Muslim identity, which turns her mourning for Tarig into depression and life in Aberdeen into an alienating exile Her previous employer rarely speaks to her, and when she does, it is only in response to Sammar’s difference. This ends her alienation and depression and manifests place’s embeddedness in language and social interaction
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