"HOME IN EXILE" IN LEILA ABOULELA'S FICTION

Abstract

According to Thomas Tweed (2006: 54), religion offers one way towards achieving this goal, by helping believers "make homes and cross boundaries" - in and through faith. While travelling in a London bus during the Christmas season and observing the holiday decorations with their extravagant display of "coloured lights", the protagonist recalls the coloured lights back home in the Sudan (Khartoum); more exactly, the tragic incident of an electrocution that killed her brother, Taha, on his wedding day. In The Translator, Sammar, for example, does not wish to remain in Sudan where, as a widow, her individual decision-making would be severely curtailed. [...]Aboulela presents Islam as a "trans-national" religion [to return to Ashcroft's term] that straddles East and West, a realignment which, to quote Tweed (2006:64), is "translocative and transtemporal". Stripped of her material assets, exile becomes a catalyst for Najwa's inner journey: a long, arduous journey from her cossetted life in her native Sudan to new challenges of being and belonging. [...]the protagonist's life becomes a reversal of the usual exilic story.

Headnote

Abstract: Postcolonial literature is becoming bolder in making visible previously marginalised longings for spiritual rootedness amidst social dislocation and rootlessness. The postcolonial subject 's search for spiritual belonging is shown to co-exist with the demands of late modernity, while traditional concepts of home are problematised to include home-in-faith. Based on select short stories and a novel by Leila Aboulela, this article addresses fictional representations of home and exile, of faith lost and found in the aftermath of major mass migrations to the North. It also challenges ossified perceptions of home as inescapably linked to a place of origin. I argue that, at the heart of various dislocations, there is the possibility of alternative forms of rootedness, with home-in-faith perceived as an antidote to a fractured life.

Keywords: dislocation, exile, home, spiritual rootedness

1. Introduction

Scottish-Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela has become well-known in the English-speaking world as a cultural translator of "otherness" for a mainly Western audience. Herself an emigrée, she is now famous for the nuanced and non-stereotypical ways in which - in her fictional works - she has represented immigration, dislocation, and related searches for identity and belonging. Intriguingly, she avoids the sense of alienation that usually accompanies such situations, for her characters have the capacity to meaningfully reinvent themselves in the host country, while still drawing on their old homelands for inspiration. I shall illustrate Aboulela's unusual depiction of what might be termed "alternative home" ("alternative rootedness"), by focusing on her best-known pieces so far: the short-story collection, Coloured Lights (2001) and the novel The Translator (1999), which have earned her prestigious prizes and wide recognition. I shall conclude by briefly pointing to her two other novels, Minaret (2005) and Lyrics Alley (2010).

But before I proceed, a few general comments on the notion of exilic identity as anchored in imagined "trans-national spaces". I shall use this term in the sense suggested by Bill Ashcroft (2010), for whom the "trans-national" is not simply a synonym for the "diasporic" (the latter term being generally used in a more limited, sociological sense). Instead, "trans-nation" is pointing to the complexity of the subjective, individual experiences of journeying, to the spaces "in-between the categories by which subjectivity is normally constituted" (Ashcroft 2010:73). There is an increasingly powerful conviction in current debates on diaspora regarding the fact that critics need to go beyond the various orthodox dichotomies, such as home versus exile, in order to embrace a lull and unbiased understanding of "otherness". Such an understanding also challenges mainstream perceptions of identity as firmly associated to fixed categories or social/ national spaces.

If detached from the fixed, stereotypical understandings of belonging, the experience of exile need not always necessarily result in diasporic people being permanently scarred by dislocation and loss; rather, diasporic processes get a chance to be "translated" into "rootedness" through unexpected interpretations of one's self. Furthermore, via such acts of cultural/ spiritual "translation" of life's challenges - as, for example, when drawing on one's creative capacity to re-invent oneself against all odds - individuals have the chance to discover a freshness of purpose and meaning amidst dislocation. According to Thomas Tweed (2006: 54), religion offers one way towards achieving this goal, by helping believers "make homes and cross boundaries" - in and through faith. This is an emotional/ spiritual journey whose final aim is that of building a mental space, a mental homeland, through a process that necessitates human inventiveness under extreme circumstances. It is an inventiveness that - as James Clifford (2000: 97) puts it - might require one "to rehook to one's tructure something that had either been blown off, forgotten, or had been taken off for tactical reasons", for example, certain aspects of tradition or religion. Such an orientation is particularly useful for making sense of recent writings that combine the theme of exile with religious articulations.

2. Fictional representations of home and exile

Aboulela's works - whether short-stories or novels - are coloured by a sense of melancholy, which inevitably accompanies dislocation in the diasporic experience. Yet, her fictional works simultaneously invoke the possibility of regaining some lost ground through re-assessing and re-inventing one's sense of identity and belonging, against all odds.

2.1 Home and exile in the Coloured Lights short-story collection

In Coloured Ligts (2001), Aboulela offers memorable representations of the exile's fractured identity when relating to people and situations in the host country. The experience of existential uncertainty is masterfully captured in the title story {Coloured Lights). While travelling in a London bus during the Christmas season and observing the holiday decorations with their extravagant display of "coloured lights", the protagonist recalls the coloured lights back home in the Sudan (Khartoum); more exactly, the tragic incident of an electrocution that killed her brother, Taha, on his wedding day. The symbolic value of this juxtaposition lies in the fact that, while in the normal course of things, multicoloured lights (like multiculturalism) suggest a positively coloured diversity of people and interests, in this story, they hint at mourning and loss: loss of the past, loss of a loved one far away. Although clearly mourning the death of her brother, the protagonist is also aware that her mourning is far deeper than that:

I was homesick, not only for my daughters or family, but sick with longing for the heat, the sweat and the water of the Nile. (1)

The theme of longing for the old country is present throughout the collection. In the story entitled The Ostrich, for example, the female protagonist, who now lives in London, feels like "a stranger suddenly appearing on the stage with no part to play, no lines to read" (45). The motif of traumatised life as "acting in the wrong play" is accompanied by another: the image of "life as hibernation". In the shortstory Souvenirs, when visiting Aberdeen, the protagonist "hibernates" (sleeps through the experience): "as if lost in the cold, [she] hibernated, slept and slept through the nights and large parts of the day" (18).

Although many of the short-stories in the collection touch on the suffering of exile and on the trauma of nostalgic recollection, Aboulela's handling of melancholy goes beyond the fixation on pain. In several short-stories, she points to wholesome usages of nostalgia, to what Svetlana Boym (2001:49) would refer to as "reflective nostalgia", which - in contrast to its self-obsessed, static and intolerant counter-part - is concerned with "the irrevocability of the past and human finitude [while reflecting on] new flexibility, not the re-establishment of stasis." In the short-story The Boy from the Kebab Shop, for example, Aboulela illustrates how reflective nostalgia can help diasporic people/ characters re-connect with their lost ground. The story abounds in images of succulent North African food, symbolic of spiritual nourishment and re-anchoring of one's self (through Islam). While the bittemess of Western dieting is shown to be a debilitating habit of mind, the female protagonist, Dina - through a new friend, "the boy from the kebab shop" - has the opportunity to re-articulate herself in the traditions (not only culinary) of "the succulent mystic life" (71) that she has left behind through emigration.

The central piece of the short-story collection is The Museum, which all by itself, in 2000 - before becoming part of the Coloured Lights collection (2001) - earned Aboulela the Caine Prize for African Writing. It is indeed the most complex story of all in that it offers a nuanced reflection on the trauma of dislocation, while at the same time, also suggesting a degree of relief through faith-based aspirations.

The story is set in Aberdeen and is focalised through Shadia, a graduate student from Khartoum, whose sense of strangeness, exclusion and insecurity in the host country is filtered through her interactions with a Scottish fellow-student, Bryan. The university is presented as a cold, inhospitable space for foreign students, who are expected unproblematically to conform to set ways of academic engagement. There seem to be two student bodies: the locals and the foreigners, "the ones who do well and the ones who would crawl and sweat and barely pass" (100). There is no possibility of negotiation - with knowledge production and assessment being based exclusively on rigid empirical systems - against a background of more or less explicit incidents of racism (101). As compared to some of the other foreign students, Shadia manages to get a better understanding of the Scottish academic scene through her budding, cross-cultural relationship with Bryan, who has an insider's knowledge of the system.

Although well-intentioned, the couple are challenged by the various clichés they harbour about each other's cultural backgrounds. In order to help the reader come to terms with "strangeness" in the novel, Aboulela makes use of a powerful metaphor, which will expose hidden assumptions of Western superiority in the colonial encounters of the past: a visit to the Scottish museum of African culture. While for Bryan, the various collections of tools and artefacts in the display cabinets are but naturalised traces of the past, for Shadia the soullessly and randomly juxtaposed objects are reminders that "this was Europe's vision, the clichés about Africa: cold and old" (115). She feels humiliated by the triumphalist displays of Scottish travellers' adventures in Africa (114-116). She also feels left out of the equation of history: the way the museum is organized excludes the complex histories of entire peoples and communities. She feels small in the museum and points out to Bryan:

They are telling you lies in this museum. Don't believe them. It's all wrong. It's not just jungles and antelopes, it's people. We have things like computers and cars ... (46)

Instead of bringing them closer to each other, the visit to the museum but emphasizes the unbridgeable, untranslatable cultural gap between them. Shadia now rejects Bryan, although he had expressed his desire to be close to her, immerse himself in Islam and accompany her on a pilgrimage to Mecca. However, even if the pilgrimage does not materialize in this short-story, Aboulela offers it to the reader's consideration as a potential, alternative space of inner re-articulation. The characters' spiritual aspiration is presented as a liberating force; this is a motif that will be pursued by Aboulela, in more depth, in her novels.

2.2 Home and exile in The Translator

In The Translator (1999), Aboulela offers an unusual reversal of power dynamics between her male and female protagonists, while also pursuing their spiritual trajectory more forcefully than in the short-stories. This is the story of Sammar and her husband, who arrive in Aberdeen as migrants propelled by professional interests. Sammar's aspiration for a better life in Britain, however, is stunted when her husband is killed in a tragic car accident. Although profoundly traumatized, she cannot face a return to her home-country, Sudan. Sammar attempts, rather, to locate herself in Abderdeen and works as an Arabic/ English translator for Rae Isles, a Scottish professor of Third World Studies. The title of the novel is significant in that it refers - beyond Sammar's occupation - to a more generalised exilic condition, described by H. K. Bhabha (1994:39) as a flux of "translation and negotiation". This is the story of a woman's barely surviving, later to transform, her socially sterile existence as a migrant.

Sammar's precarious life as a widowed translator in Aberdeen is encapsulated in the details of her daily life. After her husband's death, she started furiously to dismantle the home they had made together and is now living "in a room with nothing on the wall, nothing personal, no photographs, no books; just like a hospital room ... The whirlpool of grief sucking time" (15-16). Gaston Bachelard's "hostile space" comes to mind. For Bachelard (1969:5), the hostile space is embodied in the "comer", which is seen as "the most sordid of all havens, [a form that] tends to reject and restrain, even to hide life." Such is the place without texture or human touch in which the immigrant, Sammar, hides from the flow of life. Her entrapment in grief is also reflected in the way her senses relate to the weather, the colours and smells of the new country. In Scotland, she feels acutely uncomfortable with the misty weather and "the hostile water" (3) pouring from dark, heavy clouds. The author's insistence on the mono-colours of a wintry Scotland is symbolic of Sammar's mindscape, a mindscape emblematic of the migrants' "isolation and the obstacles they have to overcome to sustain day-to-day living" (Tolia-Kelly 2004:286).

This sense of being marginal, or outside of the flow of things, is all-pervasive. Her state of mind finds its resonant metaphor in the image of froth rising to the surface when boiling chicken:

It was granulated dirt the colour of peanuts, scum from the chicken that was better not eaten. Inside Sammar, there was froth like that. (7)

This is a vivid image of the existential pain tormenting those whom dislocation has "drained of the [world's] colours, striations, nuances, its very existence" (Hoffman 1989:107). It is precisely the effort of overcoming a sense of drabness, of "translating" dislocation into rootedness, that becomes the thrust of this novel. However, Sammar's trajectory is not one of easy assimilation into the new culture, but an inner journey steeped in the cultivation of her Muslim faith, as well as in her growing attachment to Rae Isles, the Middle East scholar for whom she works as a translator. Initially, the two life journeys run in parallel, but towards the end of the novel, they merge and culminate in Rae's conversion to Islam.

Religious practice becomes a mainstay in Sammar's life. During the time when her "grief was sucking time [...], the only thing she could rouse herself to do was pray the five prayers. They were the only challenge, the last touch with normality" (16). The references to praying are insistent in the novel:

... the certainty of the words brought unexpected tears, something deeper than happiness, all the splinters inside her coming together. (74)

Sammar is aware that, under her current circumstances, nothing but belief in a larger frame of reference could give her inner balance:

It now came as a relief, the reminder that there was something bigger than all this, above everything. Allah akbar. Allah akbar. (143)

for, "[t]o think otherwise was to slip down, to feel the world narrowing, dreary and tight" (73). For Sammar, identity is becoming more and more anchored in "the self-conscious adherence to the community of believers" (Harrow 1991:3) at her local Aberdeen mosque; the expressions of her faith being, at the same time, expressions of silent resistance and "counter-acculturation" (Nash 2002:30). Sammar's increasing sense of rootedness in Islam ensures a slow recovery of her capacity to open up in the aftermath of her husband's death. Drawing strength from her community of believers (8-9), she is now able to accept that not everyone is indifferent, or outrightly hostile, towards her. She becomes receptive to seeing Rae as someone who, unlike most Englishmen among whom she has lived and worked, does not interpret her as a "radical other"; on the contrary, he talks to her as if she had not lost anything, as if she were the same Sammar of a past time. By the same token, he too feels emotionally comfortable with her, in spite of what, on the surface, might have seemed insurmountable differences: "You make me feel safe. I feel safe with you" (64), he used to say. What draws Rae to Sammar is what he perceives to be her invisible rootedness (in faith), her inner strength against all odds. This is what, towards the end of the novel, finally mobilizes Rae to take stock of his own - up to now, unreflected - religious sensibility, an inner journey that will lead to the white man's conversion to Islam.

At this stage in the narrative, the reader has already been prepared to accept such an unexpected denouement: Aboulela has Sammar and Rae embroiled in successive, lengthy dialogues on sensitive cultural issues, ranging from the West's reductive perceptions of political and religious Islam to Rae's progressive stance against Orientalist prejudice and academic stereotyping of the "other". We thus enter Rae's own emotional journey as he navigates between Western and Muslim lifeworlds (his ideas being in opposition to mainstream British opinion on the Islamic "threat", 100). It is through such "like-yet-unlike" double perspectives that Sammar and Rae manage to recognize each other as fundamentally similar in their interpretations of modem life when seen through a spiritual lense.

It is through sustained intercultural dialogue - between West and Middle East, on matters both secular and spiritual, as Aboulela seems to suggests - that cultures can become intelligible to one another. The meeting of minds between Rae and Sammar is most eloquently evoked in Chapter 4, which takes place on Christmas Day, symbolically suggesting the barriers between (Rae's) Christian and (Sammar's) Muslim cultural backgrounds. Although not together in the same space - Rae is celebrating with his family, Sammar is alone in her "hospital room" at home - they are together in a very involved, lengthy telephone conversation. Rae phoning her on Christmas Day takes Sammar by surprise (37), suggesting to her that there is, in reality, no gulf between them. The conversation takes place with Sammar sitting on the staircase, which again, symbolically, suggests her coming out of isolation, out of the dark comer to which she had retreated:

She ran up the stairs that she had often taken at a time, dragging her grief. Now the staircase had a different aura, a different light... Where was she now, which country? ... Home and the past had come here and balanced, just for her. (41)

Sammar's "hostile space", her isolation in the stark "hospital room", is transformed from within, thus echoing Bachelard's reflections on space as moulded by the creative power of the mind (1969:141). Such a reading or interpretation may transform "the comer" into a "curved comer": "the curve that inhabits, inhabited geometry [... ], the space that can be grasped" (1969:146; XXXI), the nest, the shell, the home - to use again Bachelard's suggestive images. This signifies the beginning of Sammar's process of translating the suffering of exile into creative meaning. Her cultivation of her Muslim faith proceeds along with the cultivation of her relationship with Rae, who, in turn, is drawn by her patient, faith-inspired resilience.

This is a story of faith made stronger in the face of adversity, stronger through a determination that will also serve as a catalyst for Rae's later conversion to Islam. As Rae's Arab/English translator, Sammar is increasingly able to "translate" - the novel's title now acquires its frill significance - her own alienation into purposeful living. She reconstructs the mental space by "re-adjectivizing" her daily perceptions of English people's indifference/hostility into another set of insights, another set of "adjectives". She becomes fully conscious of her threadbare "hospital room": the ugly curtains, the faded bedspread, the scruffy shoes, frayed wools, the mouldy bread - all these are but external indicators of her state of mind. In shock, she tells herself: "I am not like this. I am better than this" (67), and proceeds to "rinse her life" (68) by throwing away everything that reminds her of her own self-neglect and isolation. With her mind so purified, she is able to relativize her culture shock and perceive the city and its inhabitants as familiar, or at least, as non-threatening:

Years ago, these streets were a maze of culture shocks. Things that jarred [men wearing earrings, women walking dogs, billboards, nightclubs housed in a former church]. Now, Sammar did not notice these things, did not gaze at them, alarmed, as she did years before. (70)

She has changed her attire to "wearing] a new coat, conscious of how clean it was ... [and] she felt like when she was young on the first day of the Eid, new dress, new socks, a new ribbon for her hair" (65). She gathers the courage to take driving lessons and is no longer tormented by nostalgia: "At night, she dreamt no longer of the past, but of the rain and grey colours of [Aberdeen]" (69).

However, Sammar's recovery is short-lived, because - upon sensing Rae's hesitation to commit to marriage according to Muslim precepts - she feels compelled to return to her home country, Sudan. Her departure, however, serves as a prelude to Rae's soul-searching, which will lead him to his own "leap of faith": from his secular, professional involvement with "other" cultures, to a more private commitment and immersion in faith. Such a struggle-in-denouement might be construed as Aboulela's drift into the romance genre. The point of the novel, nonetheless, remains convincing in its story of the capacity of the exiled to root herself in alien ground, by learning how to translate the suffering of dislocation into meaning, and, in the process, to inspire another (Rae) to find his own spiritual path.

The significance of the religious experience is a key element of Aboulela's fiction: "I can carry religion with me wherever I go, whereas the other things can easily be taken away" (Sethi 2005: n.p.). For her, Islam is a faith that is beyond the political, postcolonial discourse, a discourse that she acknowledges, but which does not paint the whole picture:

To me, faith is more than that, and, if modem-day, secular discourse does not have the language to explain it, then I have to make up this language or chart this new space. This is the biggest motivation I have to write. (Aboulela (2007: n.p)

Quiet and non-ostentatious, hers is an inner focus which is devoid of the purposes of political Islam. The religious sensibility supersedes any adherence to national identity affiliation. Aboulela's focus, therefore, is on "the complexities of faith-based subject positions" (Ball 2010:122), as she resists a typically western homogenization of any Muslim community. She is a writer finely attuned to the nuances of cultural difference, and although she endorses faith, her writing on the whole resists religious formulae, especially doctrines that would put her women characters under the severe control of patriarchal structures. In The Translator, Sammar, for example, does not wish to remain in Sudan where, as a widow, her individual decision-making would be severely curtailed.

Thus, Aboulela presents Islam as a "trans-national" religion [to return to Ashcroft's term] that straddles East and West, a realignment which, to quote Tweed (2006:64), is "translocative and transtemporal". Hers is a "textual resistance to the reductive notion of Islam as a religion of the Middle East. Instead, she locates it as a global faith that speaks to many different forms of cultural identity and experience" (Ball 2010:120). In The Translator, this is illustrated, symbolically, in Sammar's juxtaposing images of religious experiences in Aberdeen with religious experiences in Khartoum, a blending of locatedness with universalism: "Here in Scotland, she was learning more about her own religion; the world was one cohesive place" (108). Or, as Ball phrases it (2010:123), "faith is not necessarily fixed within a geographical space; it is a question of imagined geography."

3. Conclusion

After The Translator and Coloured Lights, works through which she succeeded to establish herself as one of the leading contemporary British writers, Leila Aboulela has continued, in her subsequent fictional works as well as on the public platform, to present exile-cum-dislocation in the light of faith. In Minaret (2005) and Lyrics Alley (2010), for example, she has continued to write sympathetically about people who have faith: "I have always wanted", she said, "to write about the challenges of practising one's faith in the modem secular world" (2007:n.p.). While, in The Translator, spirituality is somewhat circumscribed by the significance attached to Sammar's need for the security of marriage, in the later novel, Minaret, the protagonist, Najwa, pursues her faith despite the prospect of her living a solitary life. This is the story of another Sudanese immigrant to Britain, a young woman who is forced by a political coup in her home country to leave everything behind. Stripped of her material assets, exile becomes a catalyst for Najwa's inner journey: a long, arduous journey from her cossetted life in her native Sudan to new challenges of being and belonging. Thus, the protagonist's life becomes a reversal of the usual exilic story. Najwa is not one of the "wretched of the earth" in her home country (she comes from a privileged background); neither is hers a story of comfortable acculturation in Britain. Living in drastically denuded circumstances and disappointed by a love affair that left her suspended in uncertainty, she finds a spiritual home in her Islamic faith; paradoxically so, in a London mosque, far away from her home country. Aboulela's latest novel, Lyrics Alley - although its setting is not contemporary (pre-independence Sudan of the 1950s) - is also deeply preoccupied with issues of dislocation and faith; of how individual characters move between and across cultural and political lifeworlds, between modernity and tradition, patriotic duty and individual freedom, while retaining their faith and dignity in the face of political and personal upheaval.

For all the existing differences between them, Aboulela's short-stories and novels share a preoccupation with the religious dimension, which is a reality in the lives of many subjects, particularly those who experience forms of dislocation and loss. I have argued for the possibility of a nuanced understanding of home as a state of mind, that is, for Ashcroft's utopian concept of the "trans-national", which suggests going beyond the binaries of home/exile or reason/faith. By pointing to the unpredictable articulations in-between the categories by which subjectivity is normally constituted, the aim is to reveal alternative forms of rootedness, in which home-in-faith is perceived as an antidote to a fractured life. As faith-based trajectories, Aboulela's fictional works may pose a challenge to readers and critics alike: we are all challenged to review our various theoretical positions, most of which tend to view non-secular issues as conservative, or even suspect. The challenge lies in being tolerant of various forms of experience and in expanding our critical inquisitiveness beyond the established categories of the well-trodden, mainstream debates. In the current times of political and religious turbulence and intolerance, it is important to nurture the realm of involved affective responsiveness, including its religious dimension.

In my concluding remarks, let me also highlight the fact that - as in the case of writers like Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri, who also invoke religious tropes and themes - Leila Aboulela is not an adherent of religious essentialism, or fundamentalism. And, although deeply preoccupied with things religious, she cannot be accused of any retreat from modernity. While firm in her belief, Aboulela's faith is an expression of moderate Islam, which is alert to nuanced understandings of social complexity and global flows, being constructed around what is suggested as both a local and global mindscape, a kind of Islamic humanism. This mindscape suggests a "marriage between North and South" (Schultheiss 2009:205), an alternative modernity, in which Aboulela's position finds resonance with several theorists who have reflected on the integration of Islam into western critical enquiry, as suggested by, for example, Anouar Majid (2000) or Miriam Cooke (2000). Such an integration would encourage and enable the balancing of religious loyalties, specifically Islamic, with other allegiances, thus initiating new forms of conversation across cultural identities. These positions might involve moderate Islamic thought reaching out to a largely secular West, at the same time as we witness Western attempts to revisit the faith-reason dichotomy. Several prominent, Western-trained critics are increasingly concerned with the West's excessively bureaucratized secularism, a secularism that tends to marginalize and even demonize expressions of faith, especially the faith of "others". As Terry Eagleton (2009:141) suggests, the West is undergoing a profound collective identity crisis, as manifested in

the contradiction between the West's own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so [owing largely to] an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism.

The debate, accordingly, should not be between "faith" and "reason" (14148), but between faith-cum-reason and various forms of fundamentalism, whether religious or scientific. Or, as Roy Bhaskar (2000) reminds us, the debate should point to a synthesis of critical positions, towards a spiritualized humanism. As I have attempted to demonstrate, Leila Aboulela's works are a gentle nudge in this direction.

References

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Acknowledgement: The author wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the NRF (National Research Foundation, South Africa) towards the production of this article.