Hauptseminar Travelling Cultures Dozentin: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Kylie CraneAnglophonie – FB06 – Universität Mainz Presentation: Maída Hernández Lara,Sommersemester 2016 Anna Papapaschalis, Matteo Anelli

Leila Aboulela – The TranslatorGuided Reading Session on 12.05.2016

1.

In the previous session, we discussed extensively about the definition of the traveller. As we were analysing the reason for the travel, we suggested they were people in search for something new or different. Do you think this applies to Sammar, too? If not, is she a traveller in the end or is she something else? In answering the question, you may want to consider the following passage:

Like members of the European underclass striving for upward mobility, the postcolonial, black migrant, too, becomes trapped in what Bourdieu dubs the dilemma of ‘parvenus’ – the uneasy, in-between people, who have to choose between conforming to or ostentatiously rebelling against the mores of the upper class to which they aspire (Bourdieu 1984:95). If the parvenu is a social upstart with newly acquired wealth or education, who does not quite properly exhibit the exquisitely instinctive style of inherited behaviour, then in their attempts to become citizens, migrants, Leila Aboulela among them, are quintessential parvenus. This point has been made quite poignantly by Zygmunt Bauman, who says that “wherever they come and dearly wish to stay, the nomads find themselves to be parvenus. Parvenu, arriviste; someone already in, but not quite of, the place” (1997: 72; emphasis in original).

Brenda Cooper (2006) Look Who’s Talking?, The Translator, 12:2, 325

2.

In the back cover of my edition of Aboulela’s novel, it says: “Aboulela is a wonderfully poetic writer... It is a pleasure to read a novel so full of feeling and yet so serene” (The Guardian UK). At what extent do you agree? Is Sammar serene? Or rather the uneasiness Cooper talks about includes suffering?

…the physical agony written onto [Sammar’s] body is the result of her attempts to negotiate between her two worlds – Khartoum and Aberdeen, which she identifies with, respectively, a Muslim way of seeing the world and the secular worldview all around her. […] Her invisible mark of pain and mourning, which is hidden from Rae, is “like her hair and the skin on her arms, it could only be imagined” (Aboulela 1999:4). It is not fortuitous that this pain is described in terms of Muslim dress codes – that it is compared to her hair for example, which is hidden by her headscarf, the hijab, as part of the saturation of Islam in this novel. These different universes, secular and Muslim, are unreconciled, untranslated from one to the other.

Ibid.: 326

Can we assert that two cultures meeting each other do not simply encounter but also produce the painful need for some kind of negotiation, in which one of the two cultures must be put aside?