Her English-language novels are populated by characters who are practising Muslims grappling with cultural displacement or finding their identity in a foreign country. The Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela, who wrote her award-winning book Lyrics Alley while residing in Abu Dhabi, will appear at the Sharjah International Book Fair to share her experiences, inspirations and future works.
Born in Cairo, Aboulela has lived in Sudan, Britain, Indonesia, the UAE and Qatar. "When I was 12, my mother went to get her doctorate at the London School of Economics. I was proud of her, and my father for supporting her – but it made me realise that we were a little unconventional," says Aboulela, the recipient of the first Caine Prize for African Writing. "On returning, my mother became the only woman demographer in Sudan and later the first female dean of the Khartoum branch of Cairo University."
Aboulela never aspired to become a writer – she read statistics in university and began writing after she got married and moved to Aberdeen in Scotland, where she attended creative writing workshops. "I first got published in Scotland. The Translator, my first novel, was set mostly in Aberdeen, as were many of my first stories later published under the title Coloured Lights," she says.
Lyrics Alley, the Fiction Winner of the 2011 Scottish Book Awards, is set in 1950s Sudan and is inspired by the life of her uncle, the poet Hassan Awad Aboulela, and recounts the tragic accident that left him bedridden at the age of 18, and his aborted romance. But what spurred her to write the novel was her return to Khartoum in 2006, after 17 years away.
"I eagerly visited places that were dear to me and met with up with family and friends. At one gathering, my aunt Hajjah Rahma Aboulela [her father's sister] recited the first poem my uncle wrote and I was captivated. This was the trigger for Lyrics Alley. I immersed myself in the Sudan of the 1950s."
Interestingly, the central character, Nur, is used as a metaphor for 1950s Sudan. "It was a time of optimism, with independence just around the corner. The youth were being educated to take over from British officials. Sadly, post-independence was characterised by coup after coup and incompetent military dictatorships. My father's generation saw their dreams crash as the country slipped into famine and civil wars. In that way, Nur's accident and dashed hopes came to mirror the country's history," explains Aboulela.
Born to an Egyptian mother and a Sudanese father, Aboulela constantly straddled multiple identities as life took her to various countries and diverse cultures. How did she deal with a mixed identity and culture shock? "Mixed identity means making an effort to maintain balance and deal with confusions because you can see situations from more than one viewpoint. What should be 'the best of both worlds' can sometimes become a problem of not being able to belong wholly to either community; your loyalties are always questioned. Culture shock is transient, it cannot last."
She says "the misrepresentation of Islam in the western media fuels my desire to express my faith in my words and present fictional worlds that reflect a Muslim vision", and adds: "My ambition is to put practising Muslims in English literary fiction, to write novels that are infused with Muslim aesthetics in the same way that many of the western classics were formed by a Christian ethos."
Aboulela has fond memories of Abu Dhabi. "I remember visiting the Sheikh Zayed mosque while it was being constructed and anticipating its opening. And it was especially exciting to see the UAE becoming the literary hub of the Arab World. I was lucky to attend the first Emirates Literature Festival as well as the first Abu Dhabi Book Fair."
• Leila Aboulela speaks at the Book Forum at the Sharjah International Book Fair, Sharjah Expo Centre, on Friday at 8.30pm. Visit www.sharjahbookfair.com
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