Aboulela Research Articles

Voicing marginality: disability in Leila Aboulela's Lyrics Alley

ABSTRACTThe field of Disability Studies, through globally recognized, rarely takes African fiction as material for analysis. Aboulela's Lyrics Alley [(2010). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson] offers an opportunity not only for testing the some of the key notions in the discipline, but also for exploring how the literary mode can be presented as an enabling tool for countering marginalization. Loosely based on a true story, the novel traces the life-changing experiences of a young man rendered quadriplegic through a diving accident. The approach of the paper is to examine how Aboulela problematizes the conception of disability as a marginal space, through highlighting how this space potentially becomes one that allows for fresh ways of reading masculinity, nationalism and poetic creativity. Through such an approach, it becomes evident that the portrayal of disability in the novel is a statement against what Tobin Siebers calls the ideology of ability. In the novel, poetry becomes a medium for countering the silencing of the disabled body, challenging hegemonic masculinities, as well as a way of articulating nationalist sentiment.

Seeking Freedom in the “Third Space” of Diaspora: Muslim Women's Identity in Aboulela's Minaret and Janmohamed's Love in a Headscarf

Muslim societies, and especially Muslim women, have often received fetishized attention in (neo-)Orientalist literature. However, opening up spaces for the voices of Muslim women especially those wearing the hijab is long overdue. Therefore, the representation of diasporic Muslim women and their multiple identities in Leila Aboulela's Minaret1 and Shelina Janmohamed's Love in a Headscarf2 is of paramount importance. These two texts show how, face to face with possibilities and pitfalls of diaspora, Muslim women negotiate and prioritize Islamic identity in the metropolis. While immigrant Muslim men are racked with somewhat unacknowledged exilic anxieties, the challenge and possibility of Muslim women largely concern gender and religion. For a group of Muslim women, the West facilitates a critical interrogation of their feeling of identity vacillation and creates a useful framework for thinking about their religious observances, which eventually helps them conceptualize and articulate their sense of belonging. For many others, it provides a third space in which they can confidently engage in a reinterpretation of the Islamic texts and thus reclaim an identity which liberates them from culturally enacted practices of their countries of origin.

Humanising Islam's Message and Messenger in Postcolonial Literature

Recent postcolonial novels have touched on Islamic faith and the Prophet, presenting a humanised image of Islam and Muḥammad. Such fiction has succeeded in writing back to Orientalist dehumanisation of the Other and stereotypes of Muslims as well as writing against fundamentalist reactionary appropriation of Islam. Leila Aboulela in The Translator (1999) interprets Islam literally and metaphorically to non-Muslims in a fictional romance that takes the protagonists from Scotland to Sudan. Assia Djebar in Loin de Médine (1991) deals with the beginnings of Islam in Arabia. This historical novel concentrates on women's voices that have been marginalised or dropped altogether from accounts by male historians. Salim Bachi in Le Silence de Mahomet (2008), narrates the advent of Islam through multiple points of view: by two wives of the Prophet, Khadīja and ʿĀʾisha, as well as by two influential men, the Prophet's companion Abū Bakr and the military leader Khālid b. al-Walīd. This polyphonic novel allows the complexity and diversity of worldviews to be juxtaposed and intertwined. The three novels offer fresh humane portraits of iconic figures and of Islam's message while simultaneously highlighting human frailty and splendour.

English

Leila Aboulela’s novel, Minaret (2005), provides authentic and rich content to explore the Muslim Arab woman’s struggle over creating a modern yet religiously traditional identity. The conceptual framework of Victor Turner’s liminality and Homi Bhabha’s hybridity and the third space are applied in order to frame the analysis of this struggle and to show that the veil is a metaphor for the Arab woman’s positive and negative experiences. In Minare t, the protagonist, Najwa, experiences a sense of in-betweenness or liminality through crises, transitions, and resolutions of secular and religious lives. The different hybrid identities and efforts Najwa makes to come to terms with her developing Muslim identity is discussed, particularly through her and the women around her who choose to wear the veil and modest, rather than revealing, clothing. Together, these form our analysis of the Muslim Arab woman’s struggle to be Muslim through wearing the veil while living in Britain. The veil in this novel is furthermore symbolic of traditional Islamic culture and represents the struggle to be religiously faithful despite being surrounded by non-Muslims or non-practising Muslims. This then provides the means of understanding individual mobility, empowerment, and agency through which liminality is successfully negotiated in order to achieve a hybrid identity of Eastern and Western cultures. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/GEMA-2014-1403-16

Counter-Orientalism: Retranslating the “Invisible Arab” in Leila Aboulela's The Translator and Lyrics Alley

Retranslation is a foundational postcolonial metaphor that might highlight the new horizons of transcultural and transnational relations and their political backdrop. By the same token, Arab—British migrant narratives are of special relevancy to both translation and cultural studies, since migrant identity and writing are closely associated with the politics of translation, rewriting, relocation, and cross-cultural pollination. This contribution explores the role of counter-discourses in general and counter-Orientalism in particular in the contemporary fiction of one of Arab—British writers. In particular, the article focuses on the textual representations of invisible Arab men and women and the East—West cultural exchange in the writing of the Sudanese feminist and Scottish immigrant Leila Aboulela (1964-). Drawing on the counter-traditional concept of translation as engagement rather than transfer, this article attempts to spotlight the aesthetic and political parameters of cultural translation in Arab—British literature represented by Leila Aboulela'sThe Translator(1999) andLyrics Alley(2010). Many studies have examined the (mis)representation of Arabs in Western Orientalist narratives, but very few have probed how Arab émigrés have deftly attempted to engage with Orientalist narratives by restructuring new identities and critically hybridizing unexampled cultural models. In other words, counter-Orientalism implies appropriating Orientalist stereotypes of space, history, identity, and gender in counter-narratives that seek to demythologize and therefore de-Orientalize Arab subjects.

Back Home

The Sudanese-born author Leila Aboulela describes the position of the non-western Anglophone writer as a translator by default, moving ‘back and forth’ between languages and cultures. This essay argues that Aboulela's novel The Translator (1999) calls into question conceptualizations of translation that grow out of western religious and philosophical traditions. The central metaphor of translation seems paradoxical: the only successful act of translation in the novel is a religious conversion into Islam, and is linked with the untranslatability of the core of Islam itself. The essay shows how this process, the rewriting of a secular westerner into Islamic faith, problematizes and reworks notions of equivalence, transparency, invisibility and domestication dominant in Anglo-American models of translation. Moreover, when The Translator is considered in relation to Aboulela's other works, the popular representation of the translator as a neutral cultural mediator is subverted: this author–translator's task is not to facilitate bilateral cultural exchange, but to act as an ideological agent of cultural change. Her works translate Islam for the western reader while making an argument against the translation of Muslims into a western value system. Thus Aboulela, addressing the reader in English, employing the rhetoric of translation in her work, and referring to her own role as translator, undermines the culturally conditioned expectations these terms raise and challenges western paradigms of translation.

The Muslim “Who Has Faith” in Leila Aboulela's Novels Minaret (2005) And Lyrics Alley (2009)

This essay analyses Leila Aboulela's narrative techniques when depicting a Muslim “who has faith” in her two most recent novels. In Minaret she presents religion as a source of strength for her female narrator-protagonist but also suggests that Muslim women of faith should adopt a quietist retreat from public life in order to nourish their spiritual life. In Lyrics Alley, by contrast, the male Muslim “who has faith” represents superiority in spirituality and intellectual accomplishment as well as knowledge of the orthodox form of Islam. While Aboulela may be reacting to the kind of journalism in the British media that portrays distorted facts about Muslims and links Islam with violence, the form of her religion that she advocates is not modulated by her life in Britain. She misunderstands British culture and does not present understanding of the long-standing forces behind the recent eruptions in Arab states, in which women have figured.

(Un)Holy Alliances

This article examines the tenor of Islamic spirituality in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999). By contrasting my analysis with those studies that lay excessive emphasis on the novel as symbolic of an East versus West theory, as well as a conflict between colonial and postcolonial societies, religions, and cultures, I argue that the novel is equally, if not more, about the spiritual faith of an ordinary Muslim woman grappling with emotional and psychological grief. Using several recent theories on Islamic feminism, including Saba Mahmood’s conceptualization of feminism beyond the predictable rubric of politics and activism, this paper emphasizes an appreciation of those aspects of Islam that translate into a Muslim’s daily life on a spiritual level. Typically divested of political activism or cultural conflicts, these aspects facilitate a genuine acknowledgement of the religion as a spiritual yet usable presence in the organization of quotidian issues, as seen in Aboulela’s novel.

Teaching Leila Aboulela in the context of other authors across cultures: creative writing, the Third Culture Kid phenomenon and Africana womanism

This essay discusses creative writing and critical pedagogical insights gleaned from teaching Leila Aboulela’s fiction in the context of other authors across cultures at the college level in the USA and the UAE, specifically at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the American University of Sharjah. It situates Aboulela’s largely transnational fiction in relation to Africana womanism, the third culture kid phenomenon and its use as a tool for religious and cultural competency in an increasingly polarized post 9/11 world. It also addresses Aboulela’s transgressive stance against the boundaries of gender, class, race, body-ability, and religion, among other factors, in a colonial and postcolonial setting. Works by Aboulela, which are considered in this essay, include “Majed” from her collection Colored Lights (2001) and the novels The Translator (1999), Minaret (2005), and Lyrics Alley (2010).

ISLAMIC INDIVIDUALISM AND THE LOGIC OF THE NARRATIVE

Leila Aboulela is a prize-winning British-Sudanese author, who has made waves in the mainstream literary market by bringing an Islamic worldview to bear in her novels and short stories. Her main novels to date are The Translator (1999), Minaret (2005) and Lyrics Alley (2010). Aboulela currently lives in Doha, but arrived in the United Kingdom in December 2010 to promote Lyrics Alley. I took this opportunity to interview her about her position as a Muslim writer, and about the implications of writing Islam into the novel.

Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This essay examines the notion of “translational writing” – literary texts which bear the traces of multiple languages, foregrounding and dramatizing the processes of translation of which they are both product and representation – through detailed examination of two recent novels set in London: Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005), and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). Both novels are narrated by their female protagonists, whose movement between linguistic planes defines a distinctively feminized, translingual identity. Each works to destabilize the assumed relationship between language and national belonging, in part by recasting London as a space of translation: a city of immigrants defined by its polyglossia, and a node in a deterritorialized transnational linguistic order. Yet, while both novels explore the possibilities, risks, and limitations of a life lived between languages, they also demonstrate that translational literature, like translation theory, offers no consensus on the practice of translation. Their divergent conclusions – about the relationship between languages, about the nature and purposes of translation, about the connections between language and truth – reveal much about the complexities of translational writing.

Leila Aboulela's The Translator

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Shortlisted for Orange Prize 1999 and the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award 2000. 2. Coetzee comments on The Translator: ‘A story of love and faith all the more moving for the restraint with which it is written’ (The Translator, flyleaf). Ferial Ghazoul Ghazoul , Ferial. ‘Halal Fiction’ . Al-Ahram Weekly Online 542 12–18 July 2001 < http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/542/bo4.htm > . [Google Scholar], a respected critic and editor of the bilingual literary journal Alif, writes: ‘[Leila Aboulela's] novel, The Translator, and short stories, Coloured Lights … give a taste of what it is like to be a brilliant writer with a sophisticated commitment to an Islamic worldview’ (‘Halal Fiction’). Another reviewer, Joanne McEwan McEwan , Joanne. Review . Islam Online , 6 Dec. 2001 < http://198.65.147.194/English/Crisis/BookReviews/article3.SHTML > . [Google Scholar], writes: ‘How far non-Muslims are able to digest this point will be interesting to see. But the reviews have been a success to date’ (Islam Online, 6 Dec. 2001). This is not to say that the novel has escaped criticism; see Guth, ‘Appropriating, or Secretly Undermining the Secular Literary Heritage?’ 80–82. But the majority of the evidence points to a positive reception by readers and reviewers. 3. In fact, many believe in literature's power to move people and influence behaviour. It is precisely this capacity of literature that moved T S Eliot to call for literary criticism from ‘a definite ethical and theological standpoint’ in his famous essay, ‘Religion and Literature’, and that is behind censorship laws across the world today. 4. ‘Moderate’ here in opposition to fundamental, though both terms are value-laden. 5. ‘Sammar’ means ‘conversations with friends late at night’; ‘Rae’ resembles ra'y, which means ‘opinion’. Sammar is pronounced ‘summer’ by English speakers, its semantics, observes Hassan, obscured by its passage into a different cultural context (306). 6. Beardsley's aesthetic theory is intended to provide the work of American New Criticism with a more secure philosophical grounding. See Alan Singer and Allen Dunn (211). 7. See front cover of 2008 reprint.

Minaret di Leila Aboulela: dall'esilio a una nuova casa?

In recent years, a new literary genre appears to have emerged. It is characterized by the unmistakable voices of writers of Muslim origin who explore, often from a multifaceted perspective, the intricate relationship between their own and British culture, focusing too on the tangled experience of leaving their homeland and of being received by the Western society barely known to them. Sudanese writer, Leila Aboulela, is part of this new literary tradition. In her second novel, Minaret (2005), she employs an ironic, lyrical, and absorbing narrative to depict the fascinating and highly problematic intercultural relationship between Najwa, the heroine, and the other characters, and most significantly between the girl herself and London. The English capital is at the same time a dangerous and cruel stranger who amplifies the geographical and cultural sense of alienation felt by Najwa, and a kind of partner in crime, in which Najwa loses herself only to finally recover her own identity, the spiritual dimension she had long lost, and much sought-after peace of mind.In this essay, we investigate this at times difficult relationship to explore how the cultures that Najwa and London represent – respectively, Eastern and Western – combine and interweave, thus creating a liminal space where a new identity of compromise and dialogue is possible.

Leila Aboulela, Religion, and the Challenge of the Novel

Leila Aboulela, Religion, and the Challenge of the Novel

Muslim Romance in Diaspora: Leila Aboulela’s “Minaret” (2005) and the Ethics of Reading in the West

The inclination of theorizing literary works published in the Diaspora and in the post-colonial period, that has been observed recently tends to turn the investigation of the main components of literary works into a side task. Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela’s work can be considered one of the examples of such pieces of work. The novel is based on existential alternatives which are experienced by Sudanese women living with Muslim values in western society. The ambiguous norms in the Minaret by Aboulela are examined in the light of Andrew Gibson’s critical reception and receptivity.

Memories, Dreams and Reflections

Leila Aboulela A Link to the Wider World Leila Aboulela was born in 1964 and grew up in Khartoum. Her novel, The Translator, was published to critical acclaim in 1999 and longlisted for the Orange ...

A new generation of African writers: migration, material culture & language

There is a new interest among publishers in New York and London in books by writers of African origin. These authors have often grown up or passed their early adult years out of Africa. The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded in London 2007 to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's 'Half of a Yellow Sun', and the Caine Prize for African Writing has introduced new writers such as Leila Aboulela, Biyi Bandele and Chimamanda Adichie herself to agents and publishers. This examination of the extraordinary work which has recently appeared is therefore very timely. Migration is a central theme of much African fiction written in English. Here, Brenda Cooper tracks the journeys undertaken by a new generation of African writers, their protagonists and the solid objects that populate their fiction, to depict the material realities of their multiple worlds and languages. The book explores the uses to which the English language is put in order to understand these worlds. It demonstrates how these writers have contested the dominance of colonising metaphors. The writers' challenge is to find an English that can effectively express their many lives, languages and identities. BRENDA COOPER is Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town. South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press (PB)

The politics of ‘translation’ in African postcolonial literature: Olaudah Equiano, Ayi Kwei Armah, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tayeb Salih and Leila Aboulela

The essay examines the discourse of African self-rehabilitation and African self-translation by focusing on the politics of translation within African postcolonial literature. It begins by expounding on different aspects of the concept of translation within cultural studies. It then proceeds to elucidate its argument with selected examples from the work of African writers Olaudah Equiano, Ayi Kwei Armah, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tayeb Salih and Leila Aboulela. It argues that each of these writers has taken up the ideological responsibility of African reclamation and self-representation by producing narratives and characters that affirm an ongoing desire for African self-reconstruction. It concludes by arguing that the project of African self-translation which is discussed in the work of the selected writers is part of a general discourse of African cultural and political re-presentation, which has been articulated forcibly particularly from the historical moment of African independence.

An Interview with Leila Aboulela

Leila Aboulela is an acclaimed Sudanese writer who currently resides in Abu Dhabi. Writing is her main career, and she also cares for her two young children. The daughter of a Sudanese man and an Egyptian woman, Aboulela was born in Cairo in 1964 but grew up in Khartoum.1 Egypt and Sudan were both colonized by Britain yet had very different experiences of colonial occupation, illustrated by the fact that Sudan was governed under joint British and Egyptian rule between 1899 and 1955. As Aboulela's writing is shaped by these experiences, it is useful to consider her work in its socio-historical context. Edward Said famously opens the main body of Orientalism (31–36) with a depiction of Egypt's colonization under the leadership of such politicians as Arthur James Balfour and Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer (known as Over-Baring). However, it is important to realize that, notwithstanding its long-standing cultural and physical domination by Britain, Egypt achieved its independence relatively early, in 1922, and had a period of defiant pan-Arabism under Nasser in the 1950s, before succumbing to its position as what is now often regarded as a client state of America under the quasi-dictatorship of President Mubarak (Meijer 1–11, McDermott 147). In contrast, one of the defining moments of Sudan's colonial history was the Battle of Omdurman (1898), in which a small Anglo-Egyptian force, led by Lord Kitchener, in just one day killed at least ten thousand dervish followers of the religious leader known as the Mahdi. This rout is described even by such imperialist apologists as Niall Ferguson as “the acme of imperial overkill” (267). Recent Sudanese history has been marked by ferocious civil wars between the powerful northern Arab Muslims, the subjugated southern African Christians, the Communists, and the sharia-endorsing religious parties (O’Ballance vii–viii). Now it is the genocide in the western region of Darfur, the discovery and exploitation of oil resources, and the designation of Sudan as a state assisting international terrorism that receive the most critical attention (O’Ballance 123, 205, Flint and De Waal 126–34, Collins 16). More recently, the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has drawn considerable attention for becoming the world's first sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes in Darfur. However, Aboulela writes that she wishes to counter these “stereotypical images of famine and war” by depicting Sudan as “a valid place” in her writing (“Accuracy” 204). Finally, it should be noted that Egypt has had long cultural and migratory interaction with the Muslim Arab people of northern Sudan (Fabos 3–46); Aboulela, with her dual parentage, is more aware than most of this shared heritage.

Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction

Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction