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ABSTRACT
Leila Aboulela, a devout Islamic writer, first read Jean Rhys’s fiction after she arrived in Scotland from Sudan in 1990 in her mid-twenties. She acknowledges that her writing is haunted by Rhys’s fiction, especially Voyage in the Dark. The influence of Voyage in the Dark (1934) is most marked in Aboulela’s second novel Minaret (2005). There her finely nuanced translations of the narrative logic of and motifs from Voyage in the Dark across historical, cultural and religious contexts point to shared concerns with the affective reach of female migration and the negotiation of vulnerability, faith and movement across and around racialized and gendered thresholds of propriety.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Parssinen, “Writing as Spiritual Offering,” 29. Aboulela is the author of five novels – The Translator (1999), Minaret (2005), Lyrics Alley (2011), The Kindness of Enemies (2015) and Bird Summons (2019) – and two collections of short stories – Coloured Lights (2001) and Elsewhere, Home (2018). Her fiction has won many accolades, among them the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000 for “The Museum”; three long-listings for the Orange Prize for Fiction, including for Minaret in 2006; Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards for Lyrics Alley; Saltire Fiction Book of the Year for Elsewhere, Home; and international reach through translations across fifteen languages.
2 In Rhys’s formative years in Dominica, “Creole” meant born in the Caribbean region. By the late 1950s, Rhys notes that “Creole” was becoming a Black identity (Rhys, Letters 1931-1966, 172).
3 Guardian, February 22, 2019.
4 Chambers, British Muslim Fictions, 112; Parssinen, “Writing as Spiritual Offering,” 29.
5 Seshagiri, “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix,” 487.
6 Chambers, British Muslim Fictions, 111.
7 Rashid, “Islamic Individualism,” 619–620.
8 Aboulela, “Moving Away from Accuracy,” 200.
9 Seshagiri, “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix,” 501.
10 Thomas, Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings, 73–96.
11 Moore, “Voyages Out and In,” 78. On Aboulela and immigrant fiction see also, in particular, Hassan, “Leila Aboulela,” Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 227–46, and Okuroglu Ozun, “Tracing a Narrative.” The characterization of immigrant fiction is drawn from Dimitru, “Reconstructing the ‘Hostile Space,’” 199, 197.
12 Thomas, Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings, 73–82. The quotation is from p. 73.
13 Hassan, “Leila Aboulela,” 300. In 1969 Salih’s novel was translated into English as Season of Migration to the North by Denys Johnson-Davies.
14 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 12, 26; Aboulela, Minaret, 179, 81. “[B]ackward fundamentalist” is Najwa’s recognition of the way Anwar sees women in Islamic dress.
15 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 27.
16 Aboulela, Minaret, 53.
17 Ibid., 276.
18 Ibid., 2.
19 Rhys, “Voyage Part IV (Original),” 389; Voyage in the Dark, 159.
20 Aboulela, Minaret, 276.
21 Ibid., 201.
22 Ibid., 237.
23 Rhys, Smile Please, 127.
24 Stolow and Meyer, “Enlightening Religion,” 121. Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 159.
25 Morey observes that the ending defies the “normative expectations” of “secular romance,” “den[ying] the reader the consolation either of ‘true romantic love’ or of enhanced social agency” (“‘Halal Fiction,’” 312).
26 Aboulela, Minaret, 1.
27 Gilmour, “Living between Languages,” 211.
28 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 9.
29 Aboulela, “Moving Away from Accuracy,” 204.
30 Another sign of Rhys’s influence on Aboulela’s The Translator is that like Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) the novel repoliticizes the narrative logic of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
31 Aboulela, Minaret, 143.
32 Gilmour, “Living between Languages,” 212.
33 Aboulela, Minaret, 1.
34 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 139.
35 Kavanagh, “Jean Rhys and God,” 275. O’Connor notes some of the religious allusions in Voyage in the Dark (Jean Rhys, 89–92). Savory writes of Rhys’s representation of a “bankrupt spiritual context” in Good Morning, Midnight and her more general “punctur[ing]” and “expos[ure]” of the “amorality of power and the sterile arrogance of easy moral judgements” (Jean Rhys, 110, 112).
36 Pinkerton, “Religion in Rhys,” 89, 98.
37 Hassan, “Leila Aboulela,” 313.
38 Moore, “Voyages Out and In,” 78.
39 Rhys, “Voyage Part IV (Original),” 388.
40 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 37.
41 Ibid., 56.
42 Ibid., 12, 15.
43 Thomas, Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings, 89.
44 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 54.
45 Aboulela, Minaret, 196.
46 Ibid., 14.
47 Ibid., 83.
48 Okuroglu Ozun, “Tracing a Narrative,” 81.
49 Ibid., 46.
50 Thomas, Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings, 81–84.
51 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 135.
52 Pinkerton, “Religion in Rhys,” 101–102.
53 See Pinkerton on virginity, 102-104, and Thomas on youth, Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings, 82.
54 Ibid., 2. The Khartoum of the novel also has an Arab Club. The American and the Arab Club point to a polarization among the Sudanese elite between Westernization and Arab affiliation. Sudan was governed jointly by Britain and Egypt from 1899–1956.
55 “Boogie Nights.” The thrill of the “groove” is also celebrated in another song played at the Club, “Oops Upside Your Head.”
56 “Brown Girl in a Ring.”
57 Aboulela, Minaret, 35, 132.
58 Ibid., 61.
59 Ibid., 1, 179, 240.
60 Ibid., 137.
61 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 19, 44, 74.
62 Jones, Dictionary of Saints, 155.
63 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 61.
64 Rhys, “Voyage Part IV (Original),” 386.
65 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 36–7.
66 Ibid., 37.
67 Ibid., 50, 127.
68 Ibid., 35. Pinkerton offers a finely grained analysis of the advertisements in “Rhys and God,” 102–103, as does Esty in Unseasonable Youth, 173–175. The sky features in Rhys’s representation of a natural Dominican sublime in the essay “Lost Island” (1931 or 1932). See Thomas, “Jean Rhys Writing,” 209.
69 Rhys, “Vienne,” 241, 197.
70 Rashid, “Islamic Individualism,” 619.
71 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 36.
72 “The chorus girl’s hostel” that Anna stayed at one year in London proselytizes and nags its sexualized guests by making them “come down to prayers every morning before breakfast.” Ibid., 18.
73 Ibid., 42, 36, 42.
74 Ibid., 22, 49.
75 Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 167–68.
76 Aboulela, Minaret, 31.
77 Washington Post, July 22, 2007.
78 While not recognizing Rhys’s influence on Aboulela’s representation of affective corporeality, Hewett offers an excellent account of Aboulela’s “[p]oetics of [e]mbodiment” (“Translating Desire,” 249).
79 Aboulela, Minaret, 134.
80 Ibid., 243, 241, 242.
81 Ibid., 243.
82 Ibid., 168. Anna runs into Maudie outside Selfridges at one point (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 136).
83 Aboulela, Minaret, 248, 128. Santesso argues that the Islamic dress allows Najwa to “hide those parts of her life and identity that shame her” (Disorientation, 94).
84 Aboulela, Minaret, 165–66.
85 Ibid., 233. Anwar will later marry his cousin, a union long desired by his family. Walter and Carl’s friend Joe pathologize Anna’s tropical lineage as being “too lush” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 46, 107).
86 Aboulela, Minaret, 80-81.
87 Chambers urges that Aboulela’s “espousal of a transcendental Ummah” is arguably “naïve and downplays the very real differences between different Muslim groups within an in any case divided Britain, let alone the wider world” (“Taste the Difference,” 126). Aboulela has been identified by critics as sympathetic to Sufi and Salifi doctrines. Hewett argues that Sammar’s “approach to Islam” in The Translator “accords with Sufi beliefs, which emphasise the individual’s personal experience of God … as opposed to theology and jurisprudence (“Translating Desire,” 255); Morey sees Aboulela as “endors[ing] types of female renunciation and doctrinal orthodoxy favoured by the stricter Salafi theology” (“‘Halal Fiction,’” 303).
88 Ibid., 21.
89 Hassan, “Leila Aboulela,” 311.
90 Their father is Sudanese and their mother Egyptian. Lamya was born in Sudan and Tamer in Oman; the family has lived in Sudan, Oman and Egypt.
91 He has a collection of tapes of Sunni televangelist Amr Khalid. Aboulela, Minaret, 99. He also has Sufi texts on his personal bookshelf.
92 Ibid., 100, 256.
93 Ibid., 220.
94 Vincent does not approve of Anna, thinking Walter has gone slumming by picking Anna up in Southsea, calling him a “dirty dog” for having done so. Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 74.
95 Ibid., 46. A slave list is part of what Gikandi highlights as “promiscuous record keep[ing]” of black “subjection” within archives of colonial slavery (“Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,” 83–84).
96 Recent readings of the scene in studies of Rhys’s place between modernism and postcolonialism highlight Anna’s identification with Maillotte Boyd as “risk[ing]” the “appropriation” of the enslaved woman’s “oppression.” Gasiorek, “(The Knocking),” 171. See also Brown, “Textual Entanglement,” 575–6. Gasiorek finds that the scene “is difficult to parse because it is elliptical” (172). Neither Gasiorek nor Brown consider the religious framing of the scene in relation to Anna’s gender formation.
97 On the inter-imperial scope of the story cycle and its thematics of translation see Doyle, “Shahrazad’s 1001 Mediations.” Hassan reads Najwa’s allusion to The Arabian Nights as “paradoxically and unreflectively conceived in Orientalist terms” (“Leila Aboulela,” 316).
98 Aboulela, Minaret, 215.
99 Gordon, “Introduction,” 5.
100 Hassan, “Leila Aboulela,” 315.
101 Quoted in Armstrong, “Mapping Sacred Space,” 23–26.
102 Abbas, “Leila Aboulela,” 446.
103 Hassan, “Leila Aboulela,” 313.
104 Chambers, “Leila Aboulela,” 114, 113.
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Sue Thomas
Sue Thomas is the author of several books including Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics (2022) and The Worlding of Jean Rhys (1999). She is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University in Melbourne.