Home as Love: Transcending Positionality in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator

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.

Building oppressive proxies: Sudanese and Egyptian domestic place and the production of patriarchal femininity in Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley

“…The narratives of Waheeba, Nabilah, and Soraya to varying degrees participate in the nuanced interrogation of Arab-Islamic patriarchy that Aboulela performs in her work. To illustrate this aspect of her writing, in “Home as Love: Transcending Positionality in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator ”, Ghadir K. Zannoun (2019) argues that Aboulela uses emotional discourse to construct a “double critique of both Arab society’s patriarchy and hegemonic place-based notions, such as difference and culture” (1). Aboulela reveals the complexities of geo-cultural constructions of power and identity in Soraya’s attempts and failure to mimic Nabilah’s patriarchal Egyptian femininity from her position within a Sudanese household, as well as within the new generation of educated young women in the soon to be independent Sudan.…”