Migration and Its Discontents: Study of Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons
Eman Mahir Jaleel
English Department, College of Education for Women, Tikrit University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/Lang.8.11.11
Keywords: Bird Summons, identity crisis, immigration, Islamic spiritualism, Islamophobia, Leila Aboulela, refugees
Abstract
Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela has caught the attention of researchers and media people alike, for differing reasons, though there are a few common perspectives too among them. Their most common perspective is looking at the novel as an immigrant bildungsroman where the childlike immigrants come of age and try to assimilate themselves in a culture in which the hosts are generally hostile to their presence in their midst. The present study is a reading of Bird Summons from a postcolonial perspective. The research method employed was close reading of the text, and the objective of the present study was to interpret the selected text in view of the fictional representation of Muslim Arab diaspora, particularly in the UK. The finding of the research is that the plot, theme, and the narrative point of the novel are a veiled representation of migrants’ discontents with their condition in the new land, their loss of identity, and the issues they face in a foreign land, leaving everything behind, some of them even burning the boat, and feeling lost for lack of assimilation in the new society. The culturally shocked and emotionally unsettled immigrants then start looking all over thinking where they had gone wrong in their decision-making that they have to face such hardships, looking for similarities and differences in the two cultural milieus – the home culture and the host culture – and then learning to unlearn their own language. They realize that it is only the death of their birth identity which can redeem them to live a normal life. The significance of the present research lies in its contribution to the understanding of the neo-colonial, hegemonic social structures ever present in an erstwhile colonial centre, and the strategies of adjustment the diaspora population adopts to cope with the ensuing tensions.
References
Abdelrazek-Alsiefy, A. (2023). Fashionable Devout Egyptian Woman in Bird Summons (2019): Rethinking Post-Colonial Hybrid Identity. In Abdelrazek-Alsiefy, A. (2023), Modern Egyptian Women, Fashion and Faith (pp. 227-246), Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38665-7
Abdul-Jabbar, W.K. (2019). Anglophone Arab Literature in Diaspora: Living on the Fringes of Culture. In: Negotiating Diasporic Identity in Arab-Canadian Students. Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16283-2
Aboulela, Leila. (1999). The Translator. New York: Black Cat.
Aboulela, Leila. (2005). Minaret. New York: Black Cat.
Aboulela, Leila. (2010). Lyrics Alley. New York: Grove Press.
Aboulela, Leila. (2015). The Kindness of Enemies. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Aboulela, Leila. (2019). Bird Summons. Hachette UK.
Aboulela, Leila. (2000). ‘Travel is part of faith’. Wasafiri, 15(31): 41-42.
Aboulela, Leila. (2023). River Spirit. New York: Grove Press.
Abu-Shomar, A. (2020). Locating the intercultural discourse of Leila Aboulela’s The Translator; cultural compatibility, clash of civilization or a not-yet-told story? Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 61(1): 52-66. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2019.1645088
Aladylah, M. (2023). Together-in-Diaspora: Narratives of Spatial Identities in Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons. Forum for World Literature Studies, 15(2): 209-221.
Aldea, Eva, (2011). Magical Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial Literature. London & New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Al Maleh, Layla. (2009a). ‘Preliminary Material.’ In Layla Al Maleh (ed.), Arab Voice in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature (i-xii), Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Al Maleh, Layla. (2009b). ‘Anglophone Arab Literature: An overview’. In Layla AlMaleh (ed.), Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature (pp. 1-63), Amsterdam: Rodopi. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789042027190_002
Arkhagha, L., & Awad, Y. (2021). Faith, Identity and Magical Realism in Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons. Advances in Language and Literary Studies 12(4): 115-127. https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.12n.4.p.115
Attar, Farid ud-din. (1984). The Conference of the Birds. London: Penguin.
Awad, Y. (2012). The Arab Atlantic: Resistance, Diaspora, and Trans-cultural Dialogue in the Works of Arab British and Arab American Women Writers. Saarbrucken: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
Campbell, Charles. (2019). The captivity narrative and east-west understanding in Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies, 19(1): 53-70. https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes2000.19.1.3
Cosslet, R. L. (2019). Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela review: Lyrical examination of identity. The Guardian, Fri 12 Apr 2019. Retrieved 12 Sept. 2024.
De Souza, L. M. T. M., & Andreotti, V. D. O. (eds.) (2011). Postcolonial Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203156155
DeZelar-Tiedman, Christine, (February 2020). “Fiction.” LJ. P. 77.
Englund, L. (2023). Toward postmigrant realities in Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 58(1): 101-117. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989420927759
Funk, N. C., & Said, A. A. (2004). Islam and the West: Narratives of conflict and conflict transformation. International Journal of Peace Studies, 9(1): 1–28.
Geaves, Ron. (2006). ‘Learning the lessons from the neo-revivalist and Wahhabi movements: The counterattack of the new Sufi movements in the UK.’ In Jamal Malik and John Hinnells (eds.) (2006), Sufism in the West (142-159), London: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart & Gay, Paul Du. (1996). Questions of Cultural Identity. SAGE Publications. London, 1996.
Hassan, W. S. (2008). Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 41(2/3): 298-319. https://www.jstor.org/stable/stable/40267740
Ghazoul, Ferial. (2001). ‘Halal fiction.’ Al-Ahram Weekly, Online, 542: 12-18.
Mohammed, Rouwaida Jasim, and Lamiaa Ahmed Rasheed (2022). A Non-Western Representation of the Third World Women in Nadia Hashimi’s A House without Windows. Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume 6, Number 3. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol6no3.8
Parssinen, K. (2020). Writing as Spiritual Offering: A Conversation with Leila Aboulela. World Literature Today, Winter 2020.
Rasheed, L. A., & Hamad, R. A. (2021). The Representation of Refugees’ Crisis through the Lenses of Edward Said’s Orientalism: A Post-Colonial Study of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Journal of Language Studies, 5(1), 120-133.
Saleh, L., Saleh, S., & Al-Shboul, Y. (2024). Mystical and Archetypal Journeys in Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies (IJAES), 24(2): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes.v24i2.590
Sellman, J. (2018). A global postcolonial: Contemporary Arabic literature of migration to Europe. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 54(6), 751–765. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2018.1555207
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2004). The Hidden Casualties of War: Palestinian Women and the Second Intifada. The Indigenous Peoples' Journal of Law, Culture, & Resistance, 1(1), 67-82. https://www.jstor.org/stable/stable/45407128
Tahir, A. S. (2023). Postcolonial Identity Crisis in Selected Contemporary Novels. Journal of Language Studies, 6(4, 2), 70-79.
Viswanathan, S. (2020). Bird Summons. Booklist, January 1, 2020. Bird Summons, by Leila Aboulela. Booklist Online.
Wahab, A. G. A. (2014). Counter Orientalism: Retranslating the ‘Invisible Arab’ in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Lyrics Alley. Arab Studies Quarterly, 36(3): 220-241. DOI: 10.13169/arabstudquar.36.3.0220
Wolfe, Michael. (ed.) (1997). One Thousand Roads to Mecca. New York, NY: Grover Press.
