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| Leila Aboulela |
Snowflakes fall outside, the grey December day unfolding in a series of sirens and car horns. In her publisher’s offices high above London’s Covent Garden, the Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela is telling me about her uncle Hassan Awad, a celebrated poet whose verse was turned into popular song.
He’s the inspiration behind her latest novel, Lyrics Alley, a family saga set in 1950s Sudan. Tipped to take over his father’s business empire, Hassan was paralysed in a swimming accident while studying in Egypt, his dreams of a golden future dashed.
In the novel he is Nur, the brilliant son of Mahmoud Bey, patriarch of the powerful Abuzeid dynasty. As British rule nears its end in Sudan, the clash between traditional Islamic culture and the West takes centre stage.
Soraya, Nur’s sweetheart, is desperate to go to university but her father insists she marries instead; Waheeba, his mother, forces the genital mutilation of her stepdaughter, Ferial, despite the fact that female circumcision has been outlawed under the British.
Nur’s accident traumatises the family further. It’s only when Nur begins to assert himself as a poet that both his own spirit and the frayed bonds of his family begin to mend.
“The character of Nur was triggered by hearing my aunt Rahma, Hassan’s sister, reciting his first poem, Travel is the Cause”, Aboulela says. “It contains the line ‘In you, Egypt, are the causes of my injury. And in Sudan my burden and solace.’ I was captivated. Here was one writer addressing another across the passage of time. It was strong, it was good. I completely believed in him.”
The poem also resonated with Aboulela because of her double heritage. “I’m the daughter of a Sudanese man and an Egyptian woman. At one point in my youth my mum departed for Egypt because she was trying to draw the family back there. So the poem’s Egypt/Sudan dichotomy – something of that found its way into the Lyrics Alley storyline, too.”
Aboulela has always been attuned to cultural nuances. Born in Cairo in 1964, she grew up in Khartoum in a Westernised, middle-class family of businessmen and traders. She studied economics at Khartoum University, then statistics at the London School of Economics. She took a job teaching statistics but soon decided it wasn’t the career for her.
She started to write after a move to Aberdeen as a young married woman left her with an acute sense of geographical and cultural displacement.
“I needed to express myself. I was 24 years old and stuck in a strange place with two boisterous little boys and a husband working offshore as an engineer on the oil rigs. It was a life for which I wasn’t prepared.”
She speaks of a “shattering of confidence” on arriving in Britain. “There was the Gulf war and a lot in the papers criticising Islam and it used to hurt me. Now I’m hardened to these things.”
Aboulela’s fiction quickly won acclaim. An early story, The Museum (from the collection Coloured Lights), won the first Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000. The Translator, which draws on her disorientating experiences as a Muslim woman living in Scotland, was praised by JM Coetzee and longlisted for the Orange Prize.
Her 2005 novel, Minaret, which centres on a Western-oriented Muslim girl from Khartoum who moves to London and takes up the veil, was also longlisted for the Orange and the IMPAC Dublin Award.
These works provide a unique perspective on the life of a Muslim woman in Britain, while deftly evoking very different locations: icy, bleak Aberdeen; the teeming multiculturalism of London; the heat and conviviality of Khartoum. They allow readers to imagine something of what it must be like to live in the diaspora as an African – a dislocating experience where, despite having access to different identities, migrants can end up feeling they’re unable to lay full claim to any.
They have also been read by some critics and academics as being assertive of a certain kind of Muslim cultural identity in the West. Aboulelah is philosophical about this interpretation but says she’s always been more interested in writing about faith.
“Focusing on the politicised aspects of Islam is a distraction from the real thing. In my fiction, I want rather to try to show the state of mind and emotions of a person who has faith. I’m interested in going deep.”
Perhaps because of its non-Western setting, Lyrics Alley – of all her writing – makes this point most clearly. Aboulela writes with a tenderness and sensitivity to the fragility of life, and the unbearable randomness of fate. Her characters are not ideals or role models; they do not necessarily behave as ‘good’ Muslims.
As she puts it: “They are flawed, trying to practise their faith or make sense of God’s will in difficult circumstances.”
As our conversation draws to a close, she adjusts her headscarf, which is patterned with a global map – a nod, perhaps, towards the numerous places where she has spent her life, from Sudan, Egypt, London and Aberdeen to Indonesia and Dubai.
Although she went back to Sudan while writing Lyrics Alley, her affiliation to the country is conflicted.
“I feel very sad, looking back – in the 1950s, Sudan was just about to be independent, it had huge potential: mineral resources; the fertile land; the Nile. Men like my father, who studied abroad at Dublin’s Trinity College, were going to come back and modernise this new young country, but that dream was shattered. You think: ‘We’ve been given all this and, thanks to politics and bad government, we’ve made a mess of it’.”
Now she lives in Qatar, a migrant long-displaced from the continent in which she grew up.
“It still moves me,” she says. “I used to measure everything against the Khartoum I knew, wherever I was in the world – why is the day so short out here, why is the sun so small and weak? And those early years of my life in Sudan are still my bearing and measure. But I went in a different direction; that was my fate.”
Melissa de Villiers
• Lyrics Alley is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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