12 - 18 July 2001
Issue No.542
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542 |
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Halal fiction
Coloured Lights, Leila Aboulela, Edinburgh: Polygon, 2001. pp196
The Translator, Leila Aboulela, Edinburgh: Polygon, 1999. pp184Islamic-informed writing has contributed in recent years to rethinking such notions as resistance, modernity and gender, but it has rarely contributed anything that could be critically acclaimed to the literary scene. Leila Aboulela, a young Sudanese novelist, is setting the record straight. Her novel, The Translator, and short stories, Coloured Lights -- written in English and published in Scotland -- give a taste of what it is like to be a brilliant writer with a sophisticated commitment to an Islamic worldview. To say this does not mean that Aboulela deals only with "Islamically correct" characters. There are pork-eating and whiskey-drinking Muslims in her fiction; what makes her writing "Islamic" is not religious correctness or didacticism. Rather, it is a certain narrative logic where faith and rituals become moving modes of living.
Leila Aboulela
Leila Aboulela was born in Cairo in 1964 of an Egyptian mother and a Sudanese father. She was brought up and educated in the Sudan, graduating from the University of Khartoum with a degree in economics. Then she enrolled at the London School of Economics to study statistics, followed by a decade living in Scotland with her husband and children. She is presently living in Indonesia where her husband works as a petroleum engineer. Confined at home with children, and, feeling somewhat depressed in the climate of the northern hemisphere, she took up creative writing. She won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000 for her short story, "The Museum." Her novel, The Translator, was listed for a number of prestigious prizes, and it has been acclaimed by no less a writer than the prominent South African novelist, J M Coetzee, who called it a "story of love and faith all the more moving for the restraint with which it is written." It was dubbed by The Muslim News "the first halal novel written in English." Jamal Mohamed Ibrahim, Sudan's ambassador in London, saw in it "a dialogue of civilizations" in contrast to Tayeb Salih's novel Season of Migration to the North, which depicts "the clash of civilizations."
Aboulela is remarkable in the way she draws her characters realistically, capturing the details of their everyday lives, the mechanisms of their thoughts and the features of their psychological make-up. Most of her characters are Sudanese or Egyptians living abroad and experiencing cultural alienation, exacerbated occasionally by racism. A sense of exile and dislocation haunts even the most successful among them. Faith and the sense of community provide integrity and belonging, yet not all of them opt to undertake this path. The literary achievement of Aboulela lies in presenting an incident or a character in order to indicate a bigger picture. Hers is the poetics of synecdoche where the part points towards the whole.
By setting her fiction in foreign locations, Aboulela inevitably charges her works with that perennial conflict commonly known as "East versus West." However, Aboulela's "season of migration to the north" is radically different from that of her compatriot Tayeb Salih, for in his novel of that name he shows -- through the exploits and tragedy of his protagonist Mustafa Sa'eed -- the impossibility of achieving a meaningful rapport between the colonised and the coloniser, between North and South. While Aboulela's protagonists also suffer in a culture that is by no means colour-blind, the author makes it possible to join South to North under the emblem of a universal quest, that of Islamic humanism.
What captivates in the fiction of Aboulela is her meshing of a lyrical style with a realistic presentation, all enveloped with a certain undefined sadness. Her fiction exudes melancholy even when endings are happy. This sense of irretrievable loss is often contrasted to the superficial gaiety of the external world. Nowhere is this opposition more focused than in the short story "Coloured Lights," after which the recent collection is named. As the protagonist travels in a bus in London during the Christmas season, observing the holiday decorations and coloured lights, she recalls the multi-coloured lights back home in the Sudan and her brother, Taha, who had been killed by an electric current on his wedding day as he was trying to arrange the lights for the celebration.
"The haphazard worn strings of lights that had been hired out for years to house after wedding house" were the culprits when Taha, the bridegroom, carelessly touched "a bare live wire." A melodramatic incident indeed, yet it also invites contemplation on the fragility of life and the unbearable randomness of being.
This accidental death has many parallels everywhere in the developing world, where safety and maintenance are often the least of concerns. The incident, however, is elaborated by the author to depict life in Khartoum, and how this tragic death affected family relationships. "Out of a sense of duty," the parents of the bridegroom proposed that the intended marry one of Taha's brothers instead. She ends up, however, marrying a cousin. The very sight of her ignites the family's sorrow at the loss of their son. In Taha's memory, the father builds a school in their village since "the best charity for the dead is something continuous that goes on yielding benefit over time." The literary mastery in this story lies in the stream of consciousness of the protagonist, Taha's sister, and her recall of time past and of distant people in the context of festive London. The reader does not guess in the beginning why the lights carry such an emotional charge, only gradually discovering the link. The art of Aboulela resides in her setting mental divagations within realistic registers. The last two stories in the collection that aspire to be allegorical, and are set in the future, are less successful than the rest, as they lack the paradoxical twists so typical of Aboulela.
Untimely death also looms darkly in The Translator where a wife, rather than a sister, copes with the tragedy of loss and the memory of the dead. Sammar, the female protagonist in the novel, has lost her husband in a car accident in Scotland where the pair had come from the Sudan to pursue their graduate studies. Again, the randomness of life and death is implied in the accident. The novel explores the complexity of the relationship between the widow, now turned translator in a Scottish university, and her in-laws, as well as her struggle against depression. Psychological veracity is a refreshing dimension in the narration: Sammar is by no means a stock character, and she is not a model widow devoted to her only son. She wishes that her son had died instead of her husband, and she admits the need to remarry even when the suitor is an already married, old acquaintance. On the other hand, Sammar's mother-in-law cannot understand how Sammar could possibly consider such a matrimonial partner. She blames her daughter-in-law for the car accident, as the young wife had wanted her husband to buy a car. The commonly accepted attitudes and poses are shed and replaced by authentic responses to a harrowing experience.
The novel opens with the interaction of Sammar with her friends and colleagues at the Scottish university where she works, having left her son with her in- laws in Khartoum. She recalls in flashbacks her earlier life in Scotland with her husband. Recollections of communal solidarity when her husband died, daily exchanges with other non-Arab Muslims and impressions of a mixed bag of people and acquaintances constitute Sammar's social universe. Her own cultivated reflections illuminate the actions, while also betraying the emotional deprivation of an unfulfilled woman. The desert within her and the cold about her correspond to each other.
The male protagonist of The Translator, Rae, is a leftist professor specializing in Middle Eastern politics for whom Sammar translates Arabic documents and research material. The professional relation between Sammar and Rae soon turns into mutual affection based on intellectual affinity. Rae has been married twice and divorced twice; he tells her of his first marriage to a spoilt girl which produced a still-born child and his second that produced a daughter. As Rae is older than Sammar, his confessional and autobiographical account gives the trajectory of a left-wing British intellectual from the sixties to the nineties, while at the same time the reader witnesses the soldering of souls as each narrates his or her life story. Yet the difference in culture and especially in faith remains an obstacle to the consummation of their love. The critical moment comes when Sammar, before her departure on an assignment in Egypt, proposes marriage and thus Rae's conversion. Rae responds by asking her to "get out." She leaves, not only for the conference and interview project, but also for good. She decides to go back to her home country and live there despite the difficult economic and social conditions. There, she has a sense of being at home even if she is not fulfilled. As time passes, Sammar gives up hope of ever hearing from Rae or even hearing about him, as her close friend, his Pakistani secretary, has moved from Aberdeen to Qatar.
However, one day a letter arrives from a Palestinian friend of Rae's informing Sammar that he has converted to Islam and wishes to propose to her. Though this unexpected reversal is unconvincing, it is prepared for by the fact that Sammar has gradually recognised that her wanting Rae to convert is strictly egotistical. Consequently, she relinquishes such motives and prays for him to convert for the salvation and peace of his soul, and not in order to be an eligible husband for her. She wants him to discover -- for his own good -- God and His words, as well as Islam and its glory. The ending of the novel constitutes a contemporary use of the classical deus ex machina, for Rae's conversion is somewhat contrived, given his previously secular profile and his harsh reaction when Sammar proposes marriage in the midst of their earlier Platonic love affair.
The Translator is a novel that can be enjoyed on many levels. Like American author Toni Morrison's use of highly melodramatic action refined by a resonant style, Aboulela delves into issues of race, class and gender while simultaneously touching the recesses of her reader's mind. Like Achebe's works, Aboulela's fiction can be read in courses of literature, anthropology, politics, religion or cultural studies. Her most significant contribution in my opinion is her insight into the limits of dominant thought patterns. Aboulela makes Rae say: "Even Fanon, who I have always admired, had no insight into the religious feelings of the North Africans he wrote about"; and she makes Sammar wonder: "Did he teach his students that the difference between Western liberalism and Islam was that the centre of one was freedom and of the other justice?" Perhaps the most striking lesson this novel teaches us is that in a world made up of the uprooted, and of migrants, exiles and refugees -- in our deterritorialised world -- the intellectual and spiritual can overcome physical fragmentation; and as the text expresses it at one point: "all the splinters inside her coming together."
Whether in fact such healing is possible in the real world is another story. Probabilities aside, Aboulela highlights the inner harmony that the sacred provides in a chaotic, commodity- oriented world. The sacred that Aboulela espouses is neither an abstraction, nor a dogma, nor is it empty rituals. Rather, it is the struggle within against the incontinence of desire and the need to grasp the essence of the religious experience. The fiction's voice is unmistakably that of a woman articulating the lived experience and the unlived dreams of a segment of society that has often been condemned to silence or made to succumb to patriarchy. Leila Aboulela delights us by the individual tone she adopts while merging in the fold of the community, showing us that there is plenty of room for an Arab- Islamic womanism that is not at all a replica of Western feminisms.
Reviewed by Ferial J Ghazoul
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