The question in the title that summarizes the discussion in this chapter is related to the tight relationship of ideology and translation in Leila Aboulela’s novel The Translator. Among the many definitions of the word ideology which relate to translation, the one foregrounded by André Lefevere, “the conceptual grid that consists of opinions and attitudes acceptable in a certain society at a certain time and through which readers and translators approach texts,”1 will set the stage for my attempt to respond to the title’s question. As we know, the remapping of another culture and language through translation could lead as much to the forwarding of conservative ideas under new garbs as to the renewal of a culture through new values, all of these forms of ideology under various guises. Leila Aboulela’s The Translator hovers over both possibilities. I would like to thread through the complex texture of The Translator, to show that it could be deemed as much an ideological2 novel as a “translational text.” Here an ideological novel would resist the permeability of its values on a new soil, going as far as to push for a domestication strategy, reshaping the new culture the protagonist now inhabits as she did the old one. Translational texts, however, according to Waïl Hassan,
emphasize the complexity of cultural and linguistic negotiation and their ideological investments, show the limits of translation, and construct new models of identity based on cultural exchange and mutual transformation.3
Hassan adds to his definition of translational literature: “Instead of conforming to the dominant representations of self and other in the target culture, which would confirm the discursive and ideological norms, as in hegemonic translation, translational literature seeks to change those norms.”4 Thus, one can wonder if The Translator is a translational novel as defined by Hassan. I will argue that it is a translational text—progressive and conservative aspects of translation all rolled up into one—in that it shows thevarious shades of openness and prejudices existing in individuals addressing each other across cultures, nations, languages and faiths through the lens of translation. I will argue that the recognition of the Other, however limited, nonetheless ultimately allows for some kind of transformation in Aboulela’s novel, since the culture being translated here is considered a minority culture from a Western point of view.
Nonetheless, I will suggest that The Translator is also part ideological novel, since it pushes for the recognition of Islam as the solution not only for first- or second-generation immigrants who, like Sammar, face discrimination regarding race, class, and sex, but also for non-Muslim white Europeans—particularly since the novel specifically explains and reflects upon points of doctrine that a Muslim would necessarily know. These aspects of the novel show how ideology seeks to translate the Other into the values of the self, which then vies for hegemony. However, in doing so, Aboulela not only subverts the now-conventional plot of multiculturalism, deflating the expectations of the Western reader by foregoing a hybrid identity, but also reverses the usual domestication strategy of translation, which traditionally almost always applied Western values to a foreign text-culture.
Leila Aboulela was born in Khartoum, Sudan, but did graduate studies at the London School of Economics. Her protagonist, Sammar, born in the UK, is less educated than her author, but nonetheless aware of language issues, since she translates for a European specialist of the Middle East at the University of Aberdeen. At the beginning of the novel, she reflects on her two visits to Khartoum, the first one at seven, to meet the cousin she would marry, Tariq, and the second time, as a young wife who travels to Sudan with her young son to repatriate Tariq’s body after his accidental death. Back in England, Sammar falls into a depression which lasts for years. She is haunted by memories of Khartoum, where her deceased parents and husband were born. When Sammar emerges, two things happen: She finds solace in her renewed Islamic faith and its rituals and garb, and she finds work as a translator, both remarkable symbols of her rebirth as a culturally divided being. Indeed, the constant to-and-fro between Arabic and English that her translation job requires pushes Sammar to realize that she has absorbed English culture while closing off large areas of her existence to this absorption. By then, Sammar explains her resistance to the British-Western culture through her reaffirmed Muslim faith, which she comes to consider as the solid center of her diasporic culture. She falls in love with the atheist Rae Isles, a Middle East specialist and her boss at the University of Aberdeen, himself a translated man. Her love will only heighten her sense of the boundaries between cultures, whose main opposition for her lies in their secular/religious poles.
Seeing no outcome for her love—Islam requiring Muslim women to marry within their faith—Sammar asks Rae to convert to Islam. His first answer is a stern refusal, since his work is predicated on an objective, secular, outsider’s stance. Sammar then travels to Cairo, working briefly as interpreterin university-sponsored interviews with a group of radical Islamists. From Cairo she reaches Khartoum, where she lives with the extended family of her deceased husband. Rae’s refusal to convert, and Sammar’s despair at ever marrying him, eventually convince her to send the University of Aberdeen a letter cancelling her appointment as a translator, thus cancelling her prospects. A season later in Khartoum, she receives a letter from one of Rae’s colleagues, who, acting as a middleman in the traditional Muslim fashion, asks her to marry Rae, now Muslim. The novel ends with Rae arriving in Khartoum to marry Sammar. The new couple will live in Aberdeen with Sammar’s son.
Although Sammar does not seem to problematize her social function, she has clearly become a translator in several aspects of her life. However, her translation job, coupled with her nostalgia for Sudan and its culture, have had an unforeseen impact on her private life: She slowly consolidates her own set of values, recognizing the anchor that is her faith.
As Tina Steiner remarks in “Strategic Nostalgia, Islam and Cultural Translation in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Coloured Lights,” the “contrast between a present of dislocation and memories of a better past allows Aboulela to use nostalgia as a tool to criticize Western culture and as a defence mechanism against acculturation.”5 However, Steiner contends, “once the critique of the West is established in the narrative,” a “transnational vision of Islam” replaces the old nostalgia,6 thus deflating the expectations of the Western reader. By the same token, Aboulela translates a certain Muslim experience for her non-Muslim readers, discussing her faith in ways that appear both traditional and new from the point of view of the receiver-culture.7 For instance, Aboulela’s restorative nostalgia, a “return to the original stasis,” says Steiner, using Boym’s term, aims “to reconstruct emblems and rituals of home and homeland”8 in order to counter emotional displacement and alienation. Sammar’s re-enactment of rituals, her traditional garb and her attempt at converting Rae are presented as signs of return to the origin. However that origin has been metonymically displaced: it is not the land of her ancestors, Sudan, but rather a “spiritual home,” Islam. Thus Aboulela deflates the received idea that a religion, especially Islam, is linked to a particular region of the globe,9 while maintaining traditional rituals alive in the daily life of the UK. Indeed, says Rae, Sammar’s boss and the object of her love:
No one writing in the fifties and sixties predicted Islam would play such a significant part in the politics of the area. Even Fanon, whom I have always admired, had no insight into the religious feelings of the North Africans he wrote about. He never made the link between Islam and anti-colonialism.10
One must agree with Steiner that the “transnational vision of Islam” is what supersedes the nostalgia for Sudan when Sammar is in the UK. In fact, much of this old nostalgia for Sudan, her attachment to her parent’s nationality, is dampened upon Sammar’s return to Khartoum without her first husband. It facilitates the translation of Sammar from one continent to another because Sammar’s stability now resides in religion.
This harsh transition is made all the more vivid as the most lyrical passages of the novel have to do with the remembrance of luscious sensory aspects of Khartoum superimposed upon the drab, cold and lonely reality of Aberdeen in the winter. Although Khartoum, its colours, textures and tastes, its landscapes, its dark night skies and its rich family life elicit much poetic appreciation from Sammar upon her return, her actual stay amounts to a sobering experience. Indeed, in her deceased husband’s family, she is not wanted as a widow without work prospects. Also there hovers the accusation that Sammar is somehow responsible for the death of her mother-inlaw’s only son, Tariq. Thus, though Sammar is better educated than all her in-laws, she willingly becomes the maid of her aunt and mother-in-law, to atone for the loss of Tariq. Caught between the indifference or hostility of the two worlds she knows, Sammar turns to Islam for comfort, especially as, being a widow, she feels without a purpose, exiled.
Steiner discusses The Translator (1999) as one of the first texts “to present an inquiry into the role of religion, more specifically Islam, in literary migrant identity politics.”11 Indeed, Aboulela emphasizes the availability of the Qu’ran, as well as of the Muslim communities, especially, contends Steiner, in “the several references to the significance of prayer (both communal and private) and its potential to offer reassurance as well as a ritualized daily structure to the otherwise disoriented characters.”12 Steiner emphasizes the positive aspect of the translation of the “Islamist discourse into women’s narratives” as these narratives “open up a supplementary space of daily transitions and negotiations of self and identity”13 for marginalized African women. Says Steiner, “In faith, nostalgia is fulfilled, not by offering a geographical sense of belonging to a particular location, but by stilling this longing for home in a spiritual sense […] from longing to belonging.”14
Steiner further argues that Aboulela translates Boym’s other category of nostalgia, “restorative nostalgia,” which she deems negative since it focuses on stasis, into a tool “of criticism and resistance to a Western environment”15
by migrant women who are traditionally abjected. Hence, as Tamar Steinitz explains, “the representation of Islam as a form of personal salvation and empowerment, [an] alternative to Western secularism and its concomitant values of liberty and humanism, which are shown as empty rhetoric.”16
Although, according to Steiner, Aboulela’s fiction uses “religion as a site of translocal identity formation, which offers her characters the possibility of resisting the hegemonic pressures of assimilating into a secular present in Britain,”17 it seems that even Islam is not sufficient to give Sammar a sense of purpose, as critics (Hassan as well as Steiner) have noted. Sammaracknowledges her dire need to give purpose to her life by marrying Rae Isles: “She had been given the chance and she had not been able to substitute her country for him, anything for him.”18 The carrying across cultures implicit in her work as a translator, then, does not suffice to erase the old nostalgia, nor does her strong faith. Sammar seemingly also requires Rae’s mediation; she needs Rae to act as an interpreter between his secularized West and her faithful Orient.
Christina Phillips contends that the religious theme in The Translato r makes it an ideological novel, a work of fiction that seeks, according to Suleiman’s words, “to persuade [its] readers of the ‘correctness’ of a particular way of interpreting the world.”19 Indeed, says Phillips, “Firmly grounded in an Islamic worldview, The Translator very clearly depends on what Susan Suleiman calls a doctrinal intertext, an extra-diegetic frame of reference, that ‘puts in their proper place the systems represented by the characters and thereby determines the course of the narrative.’”20 Phillips discusses the various givens that make The Translator an ideological novel, and yet which subvert the structure of conventional Western narratives:
Rae’s conversion is not challenged but presented as natural. Within the narrative logic of the novel, human love is thus contingent upon divine submission. And Aboulela effects an appropriation and adjustment of the popular romantic love story as it frequently appears in Western literature. Subordinating this time-honoured formula to Islam enables a devaluation of the structure of the Western romance and posits in its place love and marriage within a framework of religious belief.21
Thus, according to Philips, the conventional romance plot is being subverted by an ideological subplot, the necessary conversion of Rae for the fulfillment of Sammar’s and his love.22
Philips concludes that despite its strong ideological bias, The Translator shows intrinsic literary qualities—first through what she calls, on the formal level, its “lyrical language,” which “creates the impression of ambiguity”—; second, through its “irrelevant details […] aspects of the narrative that do not contribute”23 to its overarching ideological theme. They concur, on the thematic level, to soften its ideological content. Tamar Steinitz, in “Back Home: Translation, Conversion, Domestication in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator ” shares that point of view:
The central metaphor of translation seems paradoxical: the only successful act of translation in the novel is a religious conversion into Islam, and is linked with the untranslatability of the core of Islam itself. [Her]essay shows how the […] rewriting of a secular Westerner into Islamic faith problematizes and reworks notions of equivalence, transparency, invisibility and domestication dominant in Anglo-American models of translation.24
Steinitz also suggests that “the popular representation of the translator as a neutral cultural mediator is subverted,” since Aboulela’s fictions “translate Islam for the Western reader while making an argument against the translation of Muslims into a Western value system.”25 Thus, says Steinitz,
Aboulela, addressing the reader in English, employing the rhetoric of translation in her work, and referring to her own role as a translator, undermines the culturally conditioned expectations these terms raise and challenges Western paradigms of translation.26
As I have contended in the introduction, translation can be both conservative and progressive, depending on whether one adopts a hegemonic stance and endeavors to translate the other culture into one’s own (domestication), or adopts a hospitable one, welcoming the other into one’s culture by making space for it (foreignization). However, this stance, which purports to be ethical, is complicated by a culture’s political situation, that is, as the case is here, by standing at the periphery, on the margins, as a minority group. Interestingly, Aboulela’s Sammar clearly adopts a hegemonic stance to translate the traditionally hegemonic, secularized white Other into her own minority-status culture, a shifting of positions that does deflate Westerners’ expectations, as it reverses the treatment the West has traditionally granted the Orient. Moreover, her persona is a woman who can be considered doubly minoritized, as a feminine voice of African descent and of Islamic faith. In this shift of perspective, The Translator is clearly translational.
Yet Aboulela’s stance displays some conservative traits that are worrying in their singling out of a plural reality, one that is at its core hegemonic and non-translational. Steinitz remarks that Sammar “repeatedly encounters difficulty, and at times the impossibility, of adequately translating political and cultural texts.”27 Indeed, Sammar translates the texts mechanically, concentrating on the form, to the point of at times annulling the content, and, as we will see, this trait is also found in her study of the Qu’ran. In fact, contend Wail Hassan and Nadia Butt as summarized by Steinitz, The Translator is “a novel that appears to put translation at its center, but at the same time, to reject the possibility of translation. […] Aboulela […] rejects hybridization and withdraws into an Islamic ideology of singleness and separation.” Steinitz contends that “Rae’s conversion—perhaps the single successful act of translation in the novel—is revealed as a rewriting, by a divine translator, of Western liberal secularism into Islamic faith.”28 Thus the singularity of the faithful female Muslim seems for Aboulela to be untranslatable intoa universal experience of modernity, which would require shedding one’s ethnic, religious, or, for that matter, gender purity. However, Sammar, who is to marry an educated white man, does take part in this global modernity, as she works in a Western secular university with Rae. Rae himself, once he returns from Khartoum a convert to Islam, might very well lose his job as a Western specialist of Middle Eastern politics, as his much-praised distance from the culture can be considered as good as lost.
In “From Heterotopia to Home,” Alexandra W. Schultheis suggests that “the longing for the timelessness and ahistoricism of ‘home’ [is a] refuge from the flow of History abroad.”29 This longing dissipates, she says, as the socio-political context comes into focus. This explanation, along the lines of Tina Steiner, who contends that nostalgia for the country of origin disappears as it is replaced by a pan-Islamic faith, might justify the need for some form of stasis, here synonym of stability. Indeed, the dire need for some form of stability as a result of exile would push Sammar towards a deeper involvement with Islamic faith, seen as ahistorical and acontextual in that it can be practiced everywhere, an anchor, a non-translation of sorts, since translation has to do with context, and, inevitably, ideology. The various ritual daily practices of Islam could then be seen as a way to stop the flow of time, to offer some resistance to being translated. Thus Schultheis contends that Aboulela uses
the romance genre not to grapple with the disorientations of the uncanny—in Babbha’s terms, to “speak to the unhomely” condition of the modern world or to expose the “awkward, ambivalent, unwelcome truth of empire’s lie”—but to assuage its discomforts through a return to what is seemingly Heimlich.30
That Heimlich would then correspond at times to a resistance to translation, what Tania Steiner could consider as restorative nostalgia. We will later see that it could also correspond to translation, when meaning is stabilized. I will further argue that the romance plot being superseded by religion (Rae’s conversion to Islam, but also the power of Islam to anchor Sammar), Islam becomes the Heimlich, manifested in Sammar and Rae’s destiny to become a married Islamic couple: the ultimate reunion which acts as a non-translation, though a translation—that of Rae—took place.
Schultheis, who relies on Foucault for her definition of heterotopia,31
contends moreover that universities in the Western world (for example, Aberdeen in Aboulela’s The Translator ) come to function in Tayeb Salih’s Seasons and Aboulela’s The Translator as heterotopias:
The university would seem to be an exemplary heterotopia in Foucault’s terms because of the way in which it both reflects dominant ideologies and ideally offers some critical distance from them. The university in the novels [Tayeb Salih’s Seasons and Aboulela’s The Translator] servesas a key both to imperial expansion and to individual agency, yet does so from the postcolonial subject’s rather than the colonizer’s perspective. This shift from an imperial to a postcolonial viewpoint reverses Foucault’s terms, rendering the university and its British setting the heterotopic mirror of the space in which the elites operate in the postcolonial nation as well as the European society of which these foreign-born students are not quite a part. The novels effect a further transvaluation of these terms by tracing the gradual transformation of the heterotopic space into home
(emphasis mine)32
If Schultheis’s hypothesis holds true, then there is some slow, unwitting process of translation for Sammar. Indeed the heterotopia that is the University of Aberdeen where both Sammar and Rae work, and which also becomes a home of the mind, functions as a quasi-translation. It sets the context for the incoming translation from exile to home, providing the grounds for the transformation by bringing together opposites, allowing a reflection on seemingly irreconcilable spaces and concepts, thus allowing for various other translations.
Schultheis nonetheless contends that even though Sammar wants the Heimlich, wants to quickly recreate a home to assuage the traumas of living in-between worlds, the uncanny erupts here and there, and the easy resolution to the romance plot by the sudden and unexpected conversion of Rae to Islam should not deter us from the lurking Unheimlich, the untranslated: “We should be wary of romantic conclusions based on the denial of the uncanny.”33 Schultheis contends that reading against this “dream of perfect translation of the sacred,”34 against the idealized claims of romance and translation, enables the uncanny to emerge at the moment of alienation to identify the relations of ruling that shape conditions of ordinary existence at the British university and in Sudan.”35 She notes that even though the end fulfills the expectations of the genre (they marry and are to live happily in the UK), it fails to address the problems of the postcolonial nation of Sudan, and leaves out the necessary imperfection of translation. Schultheis further notes that “the transformation of heterotopia into home […] facilitated by the contact with Rae, […] far from being an idealized public sphere of knowledge and dialogue [as a university should be], is notable for its awkward moments, petty politics, superficial tolerance of difference, and false claims of objectivity,” as the central difficulty of the romance, claims Schultheis, is “the conflict between the secular (ostensibly objective) knowledge and religious conviction.”36
Schultheis also suggests that Rae’s decision to write textbooks instead of concentrating on current affairs signals his buying into the corporate university. The voyage to the mythical city of Omdurman, Sudan, before they leave, to Schultheis, signals both a nostalgia for pre-colonial Sudan and “the final collapse of Sudanese resistance to British encroachment.”37Thus one can wonder if the success of the love story between Sammar and Rae, against rather formidable odds, tolls the bell of the various possible translations at work. Waïl Hassan, in “Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” was the first critic to remind the reader that Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel, Season of Migration to the North, is the ur-text of The Translator, published more than three decades later. Hassan situates the latter work in the context of the Islamic resurgence, which was, in Hassan’s words, “to fill the void left by the failure of Arab secular ideologies of modernity.”38
Hassan thus summarizes the convergences in Aboulela’s and her Sudanese predecessor’s works: “Like Salih, Aboulela is preoccupied with migration between North and South, cultural perceptions and stereotypes, and the possibilities of building bridges between former colonizer and colonized.”39
However, divergences between the two authors abound, and the younger, female writer proves to be much more conservative. Though Aboulela took on Salih’s challenge that a later generation of women, “(as part of his critique of patriarchal norms in Arab culture) […] articulate an alternative vision,” says Hassan, ironically, “she repudiates some of the fundamental tenets of Salih’s […] project, especially his progressive stance on gender and political agency.”40 However Hassan contends that in effect, Aboulela’s fiction completes the project of Salih’s. Whereas his are narratives of failure, hers are narratives of redemption and fulfillment, not through a particular socio-political system but through Islamic faith. While Salih’s work reflects the disappointments of the 1960s and 70s, Aboulela’s materializes the slogan of the Islamist movement that emerged in the mid-1970s: “Islam is the solution.”41
Except, one should hasten to add, that Sammar’s brand of Islam purports to be a non-political, though a peaceful, one. By making of her religion only a private space, even when praying with a group of women, by refusing to see the ideological aspect of Islam, of every religion for that matter, Sammar conflates the traditional gender politics (keeping the feminine in the private, domestic, sphere) and her practice of religion. Though it is an understandable position because a traditional one, it reflects her neutral positioning, her inability to see the political in her work as a translator, a potentially dangerous eliding of all its ideological aspects. Just as she worries less about the ideological aspects of her translations, Sammar chooses the women’s group at the mosque which repeats the hadiths and the suras instead of choosing to study with the group of women who interpret them, naturalizing the various roles of her gender within Islam instead of questioning them through interpretation. As Steinitz concludes:
The Islamism Aboulela promotes is a personal matter of faith, focused on and defined by the private sphere. It involves a withdrawal into the domestic sphere and a disavowal of personal freedom that can be seen as regressive.42
Hence, though in this first, far from obvious sense, The Translator is a translational novel, as it interprets for a postnational context Salih’s novel, translating his Arab secularism into pan-Islamism and fighting Western assimilation. This is a would-be non-political but ideologically conservative pan-Islamism, especially as it concerns the problematic gender politics. As Steinitz contends ironically: “Unlike her protagonists, Aboulela engages in a cultural project that is public, ideological and therefore political.”43
Indeed, one point about which most critics are mum is Aboulela’s translating Tayeb Salih’s imagined feminism into a conservative brand of cancelling women’s agency through a personal faith that is not willing to review its own construction, especially as it relates to gender-sex. Aboulela describes an educated Sammar who would gladly have married a much older man, illiterate and polygamist to boot, on her second visit to Khartoum, had her aunt and mother-in-law not forbidden it. Ironically, that same Sudanese aunt, claiming Sammar, being educated, could provide for herself and her young son, thus knocked some sense into her much younger, UK-educated niece and daughter-in-law. It is certainly one instance where Aboulela revises the Muslim traditions.
Another disturbing passage concerns Aboulela’s repeated insistence of form, at the expense of content: It centers around Sammar’s frequentation of the mosque after Tariq’s death; here Sammar chooses to avoid the group of women who discuss the Qu’ran, claiming she does not know her own opinions, and she joins a group that repeats the suras and hadiths without having to interpret them. Yet it is the same Sammar who asks much older, more educated and in all likelihood richer Rae to marry her, an act which clearly shows her feminine agency and her knowledge of power relations. Again and again, though Sammar claims to be interested only in the domestic, private affairs—a traditional woman’s role—she endorses choices which demonstrate her awareness of the nexus of power in sex-gender relations.
Yet, says Steiner: “These discourses which stress the subjugation and patriarchal control of women, do not find much room in her fiction. Instead she portrays her characters’ spirituality as a liberating force, which affords them the room to construct transnational identities as Muslim women.”44
Indeed, they do work in the UK, and do have access to universities and programmes which would not be available to women in several Islamic countries. What remains unspoken is a certain freedom afforded even to marginalized women in the Western world which would not always be available in the Islamic world.
Sammar proves time and again that she is a good reader of texts, people and situations, though she interprets her faith as one which forbids independent, critical thinking. And what we must consider as a faith-based ideology is approved, throughout the novel, by Aboulela as the humble, correct way to behave for Islamic women. Though Sammar works on political texts, as we have seen, she does not comment on their content, but rather on the violence of forcing one language into another, which points to the relativeuntranslatability of cultures. There is one political text, much discussed by the critics, upon which Sammar comments, though only on its singular extra-textual elements. It is a short text produced by Islamist terrorists, but the fearsome content is nullified by its form, from the point of view of Sammar; grammatical mistakes as well as a bean-and-oil stain on the paper void the threat. Sammar typically reads the form of the message, annulling the contents through context—the ignorance, the poverty, the vulnerability of the so-called terrorists being to her more pathetic than tragic.
Hassan reminds us that translation needs constant travelling between source and target languages, interpretations that are zooming in on historical context, which is situated, yet always incomplete. By contrast, argues Hassan,
divine translation negates human agency, interrupts history, and supersedes all worldly affiliations—the very definition of a miracle. Conversion does not acknowledge doubleness, for it posits a clean break with the past, or with the original, and claims to transport the convert to a realm beyond history.45
Rae’s conversion is precisely presented as the opposite of a translation from one religious world to another. Sammar’s narrative voice shows her prayer to be the driving force behind it, and Rae agrees that his conversion is nothing short of miraculous. Generally, Sammar is not troubled by the role she plays within the networks of power and knowledge she inhabits, since all the circumstances of her life, including her choices, she believes, can be explained by Allah’s will:
She had been lucky. There was a demand for translating Arabic into English, not much competition. Her fate is etched out by a law that gave her a British passport, a point in time when the demand for people to translate Arabic into English was bigger than the supply. ‘No,’ she reminded herself, ‘that is not the real truth. My fate was etched out by Allah Almighty, if and who I will marry, what I eat, the work I find, my health, the day I will die are as He alone wants them to be.46
The version of Islam propagated in Aboulela’s fiction—and this is where she differs radically from her Sudanese predecessor, Salih—involves a negation of personal freedom, since it is presented as incompatible with Islam. It suggests abandoning individual and political agency in favor of an all-encompassing notion of predetermination.47
Nonetheless, Hassan himself contends that The Translator is a translational novel on several levels. Aboulela’s characters show, says Hassan “the limits of translation, and construct new models of identity based on culturalexchange and mutual transformation.”48 I recall here Hassan’s definition of a translational text in order to better answer the question in the title:
Translation here has two components: linguistic transfer, which is the subject of frequent and open reflections by the characters, and the cultural mediation between disparate political discourses and ideological worldviews. […] Those translational aspects of the novel coalesce around the question of the relationship between translation and conversion that defines the novel’s ideological project.49
According to Hassan, the novel’s translational project is a success: “this new kind of literature,”50 notes Hassan, has broken through a prejudicial barrier and conveyed or translated an experience that cannot be contained within the dominant stereotypes. Translation, contends Hassan, works as “a paradigm for cross cultural encounters that anticipates and pre-empts the confirmation of stereotype, exposes the structures of racism and Islamophobia, and posits consensual relationships.” Hence, despite the fact that, according to Hassan, “Islamic identity in Aboulela’s fiction takes precedence over […] cultural, ethnic and national identities,”51—to which we could add gender identities—Aboulela’s project succeeds in opening a dialogue between cultures, and can thus be called translational.
1. Andre Lefevere, “Translation Practice(s) and the Circulation of Cultural Capital: Some Aeneids in English,” Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, eds. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), 48.
2. Of course texts always bear some ideology, blatant or embedded. So do translations, always already partial. See Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko, Translation and Power (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), xviii, about that partiality. Thus, when I label a position as ideological, I refer to a higher ideological content.
3. Waïl Hassan, “Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 41, no. 2 (2008): 304. Here is more of Hassan’s definition of a translational novel: “I have proposed that a class of texts that may be called ‘translational literature’ aims specifically at foregrounding, staging, and problematizing the act of translation within formal, thematic, linguistic, and discursive registers. Translational texts emphasize the complexity of cultural and linguistic negotiation and their ideological investments, show the limits of translation, and construct new models of identity based on cultural exchange and mutual transformation.” Hassan, “Aboulela and Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” 306.
4. Ibid., 306.
5. Tina Steiner, “Strategic Nostalgia, Islam and Cultural Translation in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Coloured Lights,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 20, no. 2 (2008): 13.
6. Ibid., 8. She continues, “Boym argues in The Future of Nostalgia that nostalgia is not just a longing for a place, but also ‘a rebellion against the modern idea oftime, the time of history and progress’” (14). A traditional way of structuring time (with rituals) that stands in direct opposition to modern “commodified time,” it defamiliarizes the cityscape, asserting the vivid sensual and spiritual texture of another time, another location.
7. Both traditional and new: the fact that she discusses Islam in detail, as well as the feelings associated with Sammar’s daily practice appears new in fiction.
8. Steiner, “Strategic Nostalgia,” 15.
9. This idea was more common at the time of publication, in 1999.
10. Leila Aboulela, The Translator (New York: Black Cat, 1999).
11. Steiner , “Strategic Nostalgia,” 9.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 15.
14. Ibid., 16.
15. Ibid.
16. Tamar Steinitz, “Back Home: Translation, Conversion and Domestication in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator,” Interventions 15, no. 3 (2013): 367.
17. Steiner, “Strategic Nostalgia,” 7.
18. Aboulela, The Translator, 179.
19. Susan Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1.
20. Suleiman in Christina Phillips, “An Exploration of the Religious Content and Literary Value of Leila Aboulela’s Novel The Translator,” Wasafiri 27, no. 1 (2012): 67.
21. Ibid.
22. In fact, a few critics (Nadia Butt, for instance) have noted that the most obvious translation in the novel is that of Rae’s conversion.
23. Phillips, “An Exploration,” 71.
24. Steinitz, “Back Home,” 365.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 365–366. Steinitz reminds the reader that Aboulela herself engages in a cultural project that is public, ideological, and therefore political, even as her protagonist eschews any political sense to her work and life choices.
27. Ibid., 367.
28. Ibid., 368.
29. Alexandra W. Schultheis, “From Heterotopia to Home: The University and the Politics of Postcoloniality in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Leila Aboulela’s The Translator,” in Africa Writing Europe: Opposition, Juxta-position, Entanglement, eds. Christina Angelfors and Maria Olaussen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 188.
30. Ibid., 196.
31. Ibid., 189. Here is Schultheis’s rendering of Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and of its mirror effect: “In ‘Of Other Spaces,’ Foucault, writing from an explicitly European perspective, argues that we in the West can best understand the relations governing our current historical epoch through the heterotopias that reflect to / upon the ostensibly ‘real’, its potential and failures. He concludes with the suggestion that colonies might function as exemplary heterotopias of compensation whose ‘role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled.’ As a space that produces both ‘mythic and real contestations of the space in which we live,’ heterotopia offers a reflected image of ruling relations of power that is also an imagined projection. We might expect the distance between the (ex-) colony and the imperial centre, then, to reveal the contours of global relations of ruling for many of the world’s citizen.” Schultheis is borrowing her reworking of heterotopia in part to Laura Rice, who uses the concept “asa way of capturing these complexities because of the way in which heterotopia intervenes in dualistic narratives of margin and centre. As Rice notes, heterotopia destabilizes the ‘reality/utopia dyad’ and ‘foreground[s] the representational foundation upon which we construct what we commonly think of as reality.’”
32. Ibid., 201.
33. Ibid., 207.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 208.
36. Ibid., 210–211.
37. Ibid.
38. Hassan, “Aboulela and Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” 298.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 299.
41. Ibid., 300.
42. Steinitz, “Back Home,” 379.
43. Ibid., 380.
44. Steiner, “Strategic Nostalgia,” 18.
45. Hassan, “Aboulela and Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” 309.
46. Aboulela, The Translator, 64–65.
47. Hassan, “Aboulela and Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” 304.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 305.
50. Ibid., 317.
51. Ibid., 312.
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