Place and Identity in Leila Aboulela's Novel The Translator

Abstract

Leila Aboulela’s narratives explore among other things, the complexities of the daily life of religious Muslim women. Aboulela’s first novel The Translator (1990), is a story of a struggling Muslim female between passionate feelings and religious dedication in a setting full of grief and loss. The study aims at giving answers to questions about the depiction of the sense of belonging and religious affiliation and practice on a Muslim in a non-Muslim environment. The analytical descriptive approach is used to discuss The Translator based on post-colonial theory and its manifestation, diaspora. The researcher argues that ‘place as home’ has a significant role in The Translator, and that the novel creates a diasporic space in an attempt to describe a discourse in Islamic terms that permits the protagonist to find a home of highly unconventional image. It is also argued that religious faith is crucial in the formation of the protagonist’s identity, and the representations of this identity are deeply rooted in Muslims’ everyday lives. The researcher uses primary and secondary sources to collect and analyze the data. The researcher finds that Islam grants Sammar, the protagonist, a sense of belonging and empowers her to reshape her identity. In her attempt to transform feelings of displacement and dislocation through her Muslim faith, she manages also to transform the person that she loves.