|
|
 Re: الروائية العالمية ( ليلى أبو العلا ) ستُضيء أبو ظبي في أمسية (26) فبراير في النادي السود (Re: bent-elassied)
|
مقابله مع ليلي ابو العلا
عام 2005
Leila Aboulela has the world at her fingertips. She clutches a handbag patterned with a map of Africa, where she was born, in Khartoum in 1964, daughter of Sudan's first-ever female demographer. The handbag doesn't squeeze in the numerous other places that shape her peripatetic life and work - Egypt, Jakarta, Dubai, London, Aberdeen. Her softly spoken yet animated, articulate conversation, like her writing, hopscotches between these countries and cultures, full of laughter at the ironies of her life and peppered with anecdotes. Its resting point is always her Islamic faith.
Her fiction grows out of an acute sense of geographical and cultural displacement and has won praise from Ben Okri and JM Coetzee, from her story 'The Museum', which won the first ever Caine Prize for African Writing, to her first novel, The Translator, longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Her second novel, Minaret (Bloomsbury, £12.99), charts the 'coming down in the world' of Najwa, an aristocratic Sudanese woman forced into exile in Britain by a military coup. The narrative flicks between Najwa's prominence in Eighties Khartoum society and her present existence as a silent, invisible figure, 'moving in the background'.
Aboulela offers a very different portrayal of Muslim women in London from that in Monica Ali's Brick Lane. Rather than yearning to embrace Western culture, Aboulela's women seek solace in their growing religious identity.
What does religion mean to her? 'My faith was started off by my grandmother and mother and so I always saw it as a very private, personal thing,' she says. 'At the same time, they were very progressive. My grandmother studied medicine in the Forties, which was very rare in Egypt, and my mother was a university professor, so my idea of religion wasn't about a woman not working or having to dress in a certain way; it was more to do with the faith.'
It was only in Britain, where she came to study for her PhD, that she began to feel able to express her faith. 'I grew up in a very westernised environment and went to a private, American school. But my personality was shy and quiet and I wanted to wear the hijab but didn't have the courage, as I knew my friends would talk me out of it.' In London, her anonymity helped: 'I didn't know anybody. It was 1989 and the word "Muslim" wasn't even really used in Britain at the time; you were either black or Asian. So then I felt very free to wear the hijab.'
So there's more freedom for Muslim women to be religious in Britain? 'Oh, definitely. But then you have to decide what you are going to do with all this freedom,' she says with a laugh. 'You can do what you like, So being religious is one of the things I chose.'
Why was that? 'I already had the inclination but the atmosphere wasn't conducive to it growing. In Britain, I had the accessibility of the mosque, and the trauma of seeing that one life had ended and another one was taking its place. This made me understand the process of rebirth.'
The novel is coloured by Najwa's sudden traumatic displacement from all the places and people familiar to her. 'There is this sense of alienation, that there is only you and God. That's what religion teaches, that life is a temporary thing which is going to dissolve one day.' For Aboulela, a personal, religious identity provides more stability than national identity. 'I can carry [religion] with me wherever I go, whereas the other things can easily be taken away from me.'
This sense of one life ending and another taking its place first impelled her to start writing. 'I needed to express myself. I was 24 years old and stuck in a strange place, with two boisterous little boys, and my husband was working offshore on the oilrigs. It was a life for which I wasn't prepared.' She speaks of the '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.'
Does Aboulela feel that the increased visibility of Islam in the West has benefited her writing? 'It doesn't change what I write, but the more writers tackle minority issues, the easier it becomes for others to join in because people are more informed. If this book had been published in 1987, people wouldn't have known what it was about.' She believes that the media portrayal of Islam is 'getting more sophisticated and more diverse'. Rather than exoticising it, she aims 'to make Islam more familiar to the reader'.
Daughter of an Egyptian mother and Sudanese father, Aboulela has always been attuned to cultural nuances. 'I was always very aware of the differences between people. When I came to Britain, I was interested in life around me. A lot of Sudanese people just keep themselves to themselves. And now, with satellite dishes, it's even worse because they only watch their own television stations. They're going to get stuck in a time warp, and even if they go back to their own countries, they're in for a shock because their countries will have moved on.'
Najwa's yearning for the past is powerfully distilled throughout the novel. 'I circle back, regress, a scratched record, a stutter.'
'In a way, the book represents my fears,' Aboulela explains. 'This is what I fight against. I don't want to get stuck. I don't want to be nostalgic for the past. I know it's pointless, especially as I've got children. They've grown up here and are British, so I have to be British too or else they will leave me behind.'
|
|
 
|
|
|
|
bent-elassied
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست