Abstract
When migrants move from their homeland to a new country, they carry their memories, beliefs, traditions, feelings of belonging with them. Arab Anglophone literature is a genre that deals with the distresses and difficulties of the Arab and African migrants, including cross-cultural conflicts and western perceptions and misconceptions of their identity, which lead to feelings of dislocation, alienation, and depression. The works of the Sudanese feminist and Scottish migrant, Leila Aboulela (1964- ), is part of the growing corpus of Anglophone Arab fiction. Most of her works explore the complex cultural perceptions between east and west in migration. In this discussion, I elect to interrogate Aboulela’s, winning prize short story, “The Museum” (1999), where the Sudanese female protagonist, in Aberdeen, is torn between her expectations of integrating and improving her life and her feelings of isolation and strangeness in the host country. Thus, through a psychosocial analytic approach, the paper engages the concepts “identity”, “acculturation”, and “integration” to use these as tools to examine the east-west encounter in a migration experience. In so doing, the study elucidates the following issues: to what extent does Shadia, as a migrant, strive to adjust to the new culture in the receiving country? And how the hostility and misconception of the west to her African identity negatively affect her psychological well-being?
Highlights
The migration researches have a long history in negotiating cross-cultural encounter and social psychology
The individual experiences a loss of cultural identity, alienation and acculturative stress that further add to the sense of failure, loss and poor self-esteem (2004, p. 133)
Leila Aboulela's “The Museum” (1999), provides an authentic model of crosscultural encounter, highlighting two important issues: first, the “integration” strategy adopted by Shadia, the Sudanese female protagonist, as a way to cope with the new culture of the receiving land, second, the feelings of alienation resulting from the misleading European vision of the African culture exhibited in the western museum, which leads to a sense of “deculturation”
Summary
The migration researches have a long history in negotiating cross-cultural encounter and social psychology. In some cases, some migrants in the post-migration stage experience various anxieties during their attempts of adjustment to the culture of the new land due to several reasons. Considering these intricacies and drawing on psychological studies on migration, the study focuses on the impact of the cultural clash and misleading image of the west to Africa on the psych of the Sudanese female migrant, in Leila Aboulela’s “The Museum”, in two main settings; the Aberdeen University and the African museum. The paper is organized as follows: The first part defines the acculturation process with a brief outline of the primary concepts that structure this study namely ‘identity’ and ‘integration’, which offer a framework to the analysis of the protagonist’s migration experience. The study answers the following: what did the protagonist, Shadia, as a migrant, attempt to integrate into the western society? And how did the hostility and misconception of the west to her African identity leads to psychological injuries?
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