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To Love the Orientalist: Leila Aboulela's The Translator 1

Brendan Smyth

Early in Leila Aboulelas The Translator, as Sammar and Yasmin leave Raes

flat, Sammar remarks that Rae is sort of familiar, like people from back home [Sudan]

(21). Yasmin replies, Hes an orientalist. Its an occupational hazard (21). Sammar is

uncomfortable with Orientalism: [She] did not like the word orientalist. Orientalists

were bad people who distorted the image of the Arabs and Islam. Something from school

history or literature, she could not remember. Maybe modern orientalists were different

(22). Despite Sammars evident discomfort, this moment strikes me as hopeful. Sammar

holds out the possibility that cross-cultural relationships can exist which do not suppress

difference perhaps the Orientalist can be redeemed. In this paper, I explore how

Aboulelas representations of Rae ultimately subvert conventional Orientalist notions of

masculinity. To do this, I examine how Aboulelas novel challenges Western traditions of

Orientalism and romance, and also engages with Aboulelas own Sudanese Islamic

literary tradition.

Writing about womens narratives in the postcolonial Arab world, Miriam Cooke

argues:

Women who have learned as feminists to form principled and strategic

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I wish to thank the reviewers of this paper for their helpful comments and suggestions. A revised and extended

version of this paper is forthcoming from the Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality.

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initiate new forms of conversations across what were previously thought to

It is in light of Cookes claims that I explore The Translator, a love story about a

Sudanese woman named Sammar who works in Scotland as a translator of Islamic texts

for Rae Isles, a Scottish expert on Middle Eastern Studies. Sammar and Rae fall in love,

but before they can marry, Sammar wants Rae to convert to Islam. Aboulela represents

Sammar as a woman who must balance religious and national loyalties with her love for

Rae, and who must initiate and sustain a conversation between East and West, Scotland

and Sudan. In doing so, Aboulela enagages in what Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and

Helen Tiffin call writing back (6), disrupting and destabilizing hegemonic and

repressive Orientalist narratives of masculinity.

To understand how Orientalist discourse works, especially how it forms and

sustains hegemonic notions of masculinity, I want to turn for a moment Edward Saids

Orientalism. Said argues:

Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for
dealing with the Orient dealing with it by making statements about it,
authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it:
in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and
having authority over the Orient. (3)

Said continues: [Orientalism] is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to

understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a

manifestly different ... world (12). Orientalism, then, is a discourse which enables the

West to create, to manipulate, and to control the Orient. The language Said uses

dominate, authority, ruling, authorizing are familiar words in terms of studies

on masculinity. Hegemonic notions of masculinity are intertwined with notions of power

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and dominance over the feminized Other. Orientalism then, can be understood as a

discourse informed by notions of Western masculinity in which the West is strong,

upright, rational, male, while the Orient is weak, passive, irrational, female

(Orientalism 13738). Said recognizes the long-standing relationship between academia,

intellectuals and Orientalism; while he acknowledges the fact that scholars may be

motivated by a genuine will to understand the Other, many academics, however, play an

instrumental role in constructing and sustaining conceptions of the Orient which serve to

authorize and justify Western geo-political policies.

It is against the background of Saids work on Orientalism that we are to

understand Aboulelas representation of Rae Isles; Rae participates in an academic area

of study which is complicit in constructing the West and the Orient in gendered terms. As

a well-respected scholar in his field, Rae is an empowered, mobile, highly masculine

figure. His opinions on Middle Eastern issues are sought by various media outlets, and

his book The Illusion of an Islamic Threat (5) - receives positive reviews. At several

points in the novel, Sammar remarks that Rae teaches her things about Islam that she

doesnt know (93).

However, Raes subject position, at the beginning of the novel, is one of

detachment. Rae himself tells Sammar, I believed the best I could do, what I owed a

place and people who had deep meaning for me, was to be objective, detached. In the

middle of all the prejudice and hypocrisy, I wanted to be one of the few who was saying

what was reasonable and right (128). Rae feels that his detachment from socio-cultural

contexts authorizes him to make objective, or right, knowledge claims about other

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cultures. Raes claim to detached, unprejudiced knowledge reflects Orientalist

justifications for authorizing representations of the Other.

However, Sammar has the strength to confront Raes Orientalist position. She

tells Rae, Dont you realise how much you hurt me saying objective and detached, like

you are above all of this, above me, looking down... (128). Her point is that Raes

professed detachment and objectivity is in fact an illusion. Rae is not able to remain apart

from socio-cultural contexts. Instead, Raes Orientalist masculinity is tied to his position

of privilege and status as a white, European academic, whose intellectual virility allows

him to authorize, to know, to understand, to have power over, the Orient.

Just as Sammar confronts Raes professed objectivity, Aboulelas representations

of Rae work to subvert this notion of masculinity and power. The first thing that troubles

the notion of Rae as Orientalist is the fact that he needs a translator. He needs Sammar to

help him make sense of, to help him read, the Orient. Sammar sees her job as a translator

as moulding Arabic into English, trying to be transparent like a pane of glass not

obscuring the meaning of any word (167). She strives for transparency, yet her presence

is always already mediating Raes access to the texts he studies. According to Lawrence

Venuti:

The aim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, the
recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale
domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self-conscious projects,
where translation serves an appropriation of cultures for domestic agendas,
cultural, economic, political. (1819)

Venuti argues that the ideal of transparency in translation actually masks a violent

domestication and erasure of difference. As an alternative to domesticating translations,

Venuti proposes a practice of foreignizing translation that signifies the difference of the

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foreign text, yet only by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language

(20). Venuti suggests that through the preservation of cultural difference, Foreignizing

translation in English can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism,

cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations

(20). Sammars appeal to transparency then, if read as an intended transparency for the

target-language audience, might suggest that she is involved in domesticating the texts.

However, Sammar wants to resist obscuring the meanings of the Arabic words. In other

words, she refuses to allow their meanings to be appropriated into the ready-made

categories of Orientalist discourse. Sammars translations are not limited to matters of

vocabulary. For Sammar, understanding a text, particularly sacred texts, requires

engaging with and preserving the cultural context and integrity of those texts, a position

which challenges the detachment and objectivity prized by Orientalist academic

discourse.

Another way the novels representation of Rae challenges Orientalist notions of

Western masculinity is through Raes illness. Rae is not a physically strong person.

Where Western notions of intellectual activity have traditionally associated the masculine

with the disembodied mind, Raes intellect is imprisoned within a frail, deteriorating

body. His conversations with Sammar and his academic work are both interrupted either

by violent coughing fits or by his hospitalization. While Rae may claim to be objective,

rational, disengaged, in reality, his bodys emphatic announcement of its presence reveals

these Orientalist notions as illusions. Raes illness then, is emblematic of a specific

hegemonic notion of masculinity in crisis.

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Raes struggle with his own sense of masculinity also emerges in his dreams.

Recounting his dream, Rae tells Sammar, I was in a big house with many rooms. It was

almost like a mansion. I was hiding because outside the house I had been followed,

chased for days. I carried a sword in my hand and there was blood on it, my enemies

blood, but I myself, my clothes and my hands were clean and I was proud of that (95).

He continues:

I went into a room full of smoke, a lot of smoke but when I checked there
was no fire. When I left the room, the handle of my sword broke. I held it
broken in my hands and knew that it could never be mended, it could never
be reliable again. This was a terrible loss, I dont know why, but I had this
feeling of deep loss because I had to go on without the sword. (95)

The phallic imagery of the broken sword implies broken masculinity. The blood suggests

that the particular conception of masculinity in the dream is one of violence and

domination, the loss of which Rae mourns. The dream suggests that Rae will no longer be

able to authorize truth claims about the Other. There are also strong resonances in this

dream with the notion of jihad as an internal spiritual struggle. We can read this dream as

suggestive of the way Rae struggles with the notion of conversion to Islam. Raes clothes

are clean, as he has so far been able to remain disengaged from professing any religious

commitments. However, the loss of the sword signals that this disengagement is no

longer sustainable. The central thrust of the dream reinforces the notion that hegemonic

Orientalist articulations of masculinity are no longer available to Rae.

I now want to turn to the way Aboulelas novel engages with both Western and

Eastern literary traditions and their respective representations of Orientalism and

masculinity. Aboulela rewrites these discourses to open up new conversations and spaces

for female agency and cross-cultural, transnational contact. One of the texts with which

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The Translator engages is Tayeb Salihs Season of Migration to the North, which itself is

a writing-back to Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness. In Salihs novel, the colonized

subject (Mustapha) voyages to Europe on a mission of postcolonial revenge against

Western imperialism and greed, a mission which Edward Said argues is ultimately futile

and trapped in the binary opposition between East and West (Power, Politics and

Culture 11011).

Aboulela acknowledges her literary debt to Salihs novel by using a quotation

from Season of Migration to the North to introduce Part II of The Translator. Aboulelas

project, as Stephan Guth understands it, is to acknowledge and privilege an Arabic

literary tradition within which she sees herself participating (6). Indeed, the similarities

between Aboulelas novel and Salihs are many. Both narrate the journeys of Sudanese

subjects to Britain, reversing the Eurocentric point of view of imperial travel narratives.

Both narrate the return of the Sudanese subject to Sudan. And both narrate intimate

relationships between Western and Eastern subjects.

However, Sammars journey provides an alternative to the discourse of Orientalist

masculinity that manifests itself in Mustaphas sexual conquests. Aboulelas characters,

rather than capitulating to the dominant competing discourses of Orientalism and what

Geoffrey Nash identifies as Islamism (28), negotiate a new vision by rejecting the

imposition of over-determined Orientalist subjectivities. The novel carefully subverts the

authority invested in Orientalist masculinity, knowledge and power. At the same time,

both Rae and Sammar reject the position of the young terrorists whose manifesto Sammar

translates. Sammar claims that the spelling mistakes and stains on their written manifesto

are pathetic, and that the manifesto itself gives a sense of people overwhelmed (28).

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By rejecting the binary oppositions offered by both Orientalist discourse and the rhetoric

of terrorist groups, Aboulelas characters articulate an alternative vision.

Guth draws attention to the fact that Aboulelas novel, while it challenges

Western literary and discursive traditions, also makes sure to distance itself from the

rhetoric of what Western reviewers would call Islamic fundamentalism (14) . The

rhetoric of moderation and seriousness employed in reviews of the novel situates the

text within the boundaries of acceptable public discourse, as opposed to narratives which

are labeled strident or fundamentalist or apologies for terrorism. While the

rhetoric of moderation may be used by reviewers to avoid discussion of the root causes of

protest and social unrest in the Middle East, it seems that Aboulela wants to narrate a

genuinely viable alternative to the reductive discourse of a clash of civilizations.

Aboulela is aware of her text as a disruption of not only the male Arab literary

tradition, but also to the tradition of English romance, acknowledging Jane Eyre as a

model. Aboulela gently disrupts and subverts some of the conventions of those narratives.

She complicates the standard romance narrative by making the heterosexual romantic

liaison contingent upon a successful integration of the desires, or perceived desires, of the

man, the woman and god. However, Aboulela does not so much insert religious

convention into the romance narrative as she recodifies the religious dilemmas already

inherent in Western narratives. Aboulela explains:

I was often asked Why should Rae convert, why should religion be an
obstacle etc. etc? In my answer I would then fall back on Jane Eyre and say
From an Islamic point of view, why cant Mr. Rochester be married to both
Bertha and Jane? In the same way that I, as a Muslim reader, respect and
empathize with Janes very Christian dilemma, I want Western/Christian
readers to respect and empathize with Sammars very Muslim dilemma.
(qtd. in Stotesbury 31)

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In other words, the presence of Islam in The Translator forces us to examine how

Western romance narratives are already encoded within Christian religious conventions.

The relationship between Rae and Sammar also challenges Western narratives

which, according to Gayatri Spivak involve White men ... saving brown women from

brown men (284). According to this tradition, Rae ought to save Sammar from her

backwards, primitive culture. However, The Translator refuses to be reduced in this

way. In fact, the novel reverses the conventional rescue narrative and asserts a story in

which a brown woman saves a white man from white masculinity. Sammars soup

restores Raes health, and Sammar tells Rae that conversion to Islam would be good for

you, it will make you stronger (89). Sammar does not need a white man to save her.

Instead, she saves Rae, both physically and spiritually. Raes conversion ascribes agency

firmly in the hands of what the West would consider the Other. It signals that he is

willing to explore an engaged subjectivity as a man who understands not just as a

disembodied intellect, but as an embodied believer.

It might help to shed light on Raes conversion if we remember that Aboulela is

effectively writing-back to the West. In an essay where she reflects upon her own writing

practice, Aboulela says, To prove that Khartoum is nicer than London, more beautiful

than Edinburgh ... I dont think so. Not to prove, but to express, to show that it is a valid

place, a valid way of life beyond the stereotypical images of famine and war, not a

backward place to be written off (Moving Away from Accuracy 204). Aboulelas

project is not to negate Scottish or English or Western values, but rather to assert the

validity of her own Sudanese and Islamic worldview. Her choice of the word express

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rather than prove to describe her intentions reveals a distrust of oppositional rhetoric

and argumentation.

Raes conversion also serves as a narrative antidote to the popular notion that

Muslim societies must convert or be converted to democracy or to Western notions of

freedom and of secular humanism. However, within the larger social context of Western

neo-imperialism and globalization, Raes conversion expresses the value of Islam as a

worldview that offers a promise of social justice and resistance. Sammar tells Rae that

The first believers were mostly women and slaves (126), positioning Islam as a religion

of the oppressed. Sammar and Rae explicitly identify Islam as a religion which offers the

potential for liberation and dignity. Indeed, Rae tells Sammar, What I regret most ... is

that I used to write things like Islam gives dignity to those who otherwise would not

have dignity in their lives, as if I didnt need dignity myself (200). Rae realizes that

Islam offers a space for agency for those who have hitherto been denied one. By

converting to Islam, Rae rejects the patriarchal authority previously invested in his

Orientalist identity, and embraces a masculinity of the oppressed, of the marginalized.

The concept of Islam and the sacred that Aboulela articulates in her novel is one

that challenges both Orientalist and patriarchal Islamist notions of religious experience.

The notion of the sacred that Sammar embraces is one that allows her to articulate her

experience in the world and sustains her agency in the face of hegemonic patriarchal

Western and Eastern narratives. This is a notion of the sacred that infuses and

complements daily life, marking and making time for praying and tea (The

Translator 137). It is a notion of the sacred which emphasizes a mindful approach to

lived experience. Raes conversion demonstrates his commitment to lived experience

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over abstract textual knowledge, and articulates a version of masculinity attuned to a

mindful awareness of ones place in the world. His acknowledgement that he too needs

the dignity that Islam confers emphasizes the way that patriarchal discourses not only

suppress women and marginalized Others, but also do damage to men in positions of

privilege and power.

Aboulelas depiction of Islam as a foundation for social justice opposes Western

imperial discourses which depict Islam as a backward, barbaric religion of extremists and

terrorists. Her use of Islam also provides an alternative narrative to those articulations of

resistance which appeal to secular or humanist values. As Cooke writes, Juxtaposing

religious observance, however defined, with political activism in the public realm, [Arab

women writers] claim simultaneous and contradictory belongings even as they resist

globalization, nationalism, Islamization, and the patriarchal system that pervades them

all (121). Aboulelas narrative articulates a resistance to the patriarchal models offered

by both Islamization and Orientalism, while maintaining a liberatory role for Islam. The

relationship between Sammar and Rae provides a model for cross-cultural exchange,

conversation, love and translation that resists the stagnant binaries of East and West, the

residual ideologies of colonialism.

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Bibliography

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---. The Translator. Oxford: Heinemann, 2001.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and

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Guth, Stephan. Usurping/ Appropriating/ Joining or Secretly Undermining the Secular

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Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing

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Stotesbury, John. Genre and Islam in Recent Anglophone Romantic Fiction. Refracting

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