Rough translation: reviewing Leila Aboulela (2018) Elsewhere Home
Saturday, 7 Jul 2018, 07:46
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Edited by Steve Bamlett, Saturday, 7 Jul 2018, 07:56
Rough translation:
reviewing Leila Aboulela (2018) Elsewhere
Home London, Telegram
In ‘Pages of Fruit’, the last story in this collection,
Aboulela’s narrator goes to the Edinburgh International Book Festival to meet
an author of whom she is an avid reader and fan-letter writer. The result is
disappointment: ‘You’ve never read a single word I’ve written.’ (203).
This examination of the relations of power and relative
empathy of reader and writer – not always to the advantage of the ‘writer’, in
as much as this is an adopted persona or role – is very central to this most
sensitive of writers about the role of written text in the interactions between
people. Reading is an activity in which her characters engage very fully and
which become part of their development. Although the same can be said of Austen
and Flaubert, in both reading is the source of error – a way of
over-interpreting the world writing represents in favour of a more sober
reality to which readers become subjected – of a power beyond the reader to
which the latter cannot aspire. Not so Aboulela, whose fiction has championed
sensitive reading as an access portal to the world sometimes more reliable than
that won by writers. This is the theme of her wonderful early novel, The
Translator, in which the control of idiom is very much in the hands of a reader
who inhabits text, sometimes more fully than an author. Seeking validation to
stay with the writer she translates, her narrator …:
learnt then, the, the meaning of
his kindness. That he knew she was heavy with other loyalties, full to the brim
with distant places, voices in a language that was not his own.
The world of the reader in ‘Pages of Fruit’ too is a fuller
world than its bearer acknowledges and richer in meanings than the ‘writer’ is
capable of appreciating: “‘This is the Authors Tent’, you said moving away not
to join a group or to be claimed by someone else.” (203)
I am reading Aboulela’s current short story collection as a
self-preparation of myself to visit the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Although I don’t intend to copy the
enthusiasm of the character above and to press into the ‘Authors Tent’ uninvited, I wonder if Aboulela had
witnessed the scene she recounts at Edinburgh and the view of authors as
self-enclosed units it betrays in that persona at its worst as one contemptuous
of the readers who make the authorship possible: like the children who
presented later to this author, now a children’s writer, ‘all over the place,
pretty noisy, shoving their books under your nose, elbowing each other out of
the way.’ (211) This can be a pretty accurate description even of we adult
readers in the book-signing queues at Edinburgh but Aboulela’s delight in that
perception shines through.
But Aboulela holds readers in honour nevertheless, as do all
true great contemporary writers (one thinks immediately of Ali Smith). The
relationship between reader and writer in Aboulela is very like that between
lovers or partners or married couples – full of dissonance and difference at
the very moment they interact and co-develop either towards a fuller relationship
or to complete co-severance. This theme is at its most beautiful in Lyrics Alley, a favourite novel but lies
throughout these lovely stories, even the early ones like ‘Coloured Lights’. But
my favourite amongst her stories is that most deep of examinations of what it
means to be able to read: ‘Farida’s Eyes:’
It started with the writing on
the blackboard becoming hazy and crumbly, eventually just a tangle of white
threads. … Farida could not read them. (50)
As Ali Smith also demonstrates in her great novels, readers
are the stuff of authorship and it truly belongs only in those moments when common
humanity ‘reads ’ each other for better or worse, whatever the difference of
languages, contextual reference, or translating interpretation, hence her
empathy for short or partially sighted readers – people whose inner lives we
find it difficult to understand and harder to write or author, like ‘The
Ostrich’ who memorises Andalusian Islamic poetry, in this volume, or the
kebab-shop boy’s inner life (132) which
we no more penetrate than we would think of intruding upon him when he is ‘sitting
on the loo’ (132) or Hamid’s blindness (‘he couldn’t see her properly because
he didn’t have his glasses on’) to his convert Scottish wife’s desire to read
Islamic texts in Arabic (114).
The most beautiful moments of cross-reading error in this
volume concern the dilemma of migration, in which there are variant ways to
misunderstand not only comparative cultures but also changes in these cultures
over time. Locked in response to a racism they are not meant to notice (93),
some of Aboulela’s Egyptian migrants fail to see the value of their lost
culture or even more interestingly that that lost culture changes more quickly
than their view of it frozen in whatever form it takes in resistance to racism.
Look at that beautifully sensitive reading for instance of class as a barrier
to reading in, ‘The Aromatherapist’s Husband’.
Thank you Leila Aboulela. I promise not to intrude into the
Authors Tent in August though.
Rough translation: reviewing Leila Aboulela (2018) Elsewhere Home
Rough translation: reviewing Leila Aboulela (2018) Elsewhere Home London, Telegram
In ‘Pages of Fruit’, the last story in this collection, Aboulela’s narrator goes to the Edinburgh International Book Festival to meet an author of whom she is an avid reader and fan-letter writer. The result is disappointment: ‘You’ve never read a single word I’ve written.’ (203).
This examination of the relations of power and relative empathy of reader and writer – not always to the advantage of the ‘writer’, in as much as this is an adopted persona or role – is very central to this most sensitive of writers about the role of written text in the interactions between people. Reading is an activity in which her characters engage very fully and which become part of their development. Although the same can be said of Austen and Flaubert, in both reading is the source of error – a way of over-interpreting the world writing represents in favour of a more sober reality to which readers become subjected – of a power beyond the reader to which the latter cannot aspire. Not so Aboulela, whose fiction has championed sensitive reading as an access portal to the world sometimes more reliable than that won by writers. This is the theme of her wonderful early novel, The Translator, in which the control of idiom is very much in the hands of a reader who inhabits text, sometimes more fully than an author. Seeking validation to stay with the writer she translates, her narrator …:
learnt then, the, the meaning of his kindness. That he knew she was heavy with other loyalties, full to the brim with distant places, voices in a language that was not his own.
The world of the reader in ‘Pages of Fruit’ too is a fuller world than its bearer acknowledges and richer in meanings than the ‘writer’ is capable of appreciating: “‘This is the Authors Tent’, you said moving away not to join a group or to be claimed by someone else.” (203)
I am reading Aboulela’s current short story collection as a self-preparation of myself to visit the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Although I don’t intend to copy the enthusiasm of the character above and to press into the ‘Authors Tent’ uninvited, I wonder if Aboulela had witnessed the scene she recounts at Edinburgh and the view of authors as self-enclosed units it betrays in that persona at its worst as one contemptuous of the readers who make the authorship possible: like the children who presented later to this author, now a children’s writer, ‘all over the place, pretty noisy, shoving their books under your nose, elbowing each other out of the way.’ (211) This can be a pretty accurate description even of we adult readers in the book-signing queues at Edinburgh but Aboulela’s delight in that perception shines through.
But Aboulela holds readers in honour nevertheless, as do all true great contemporary writers (one thinks immediately of Ali Smith). The relationship between reader and writer in Aboulela is very like that between lovers or partners or married couples – full of dissonance and difference at the very moment they interact and co-develop either towards a fuller relationship or to complete co-severance. This theme is at its most beautiful in Lyrics Alley, a favourite novel but lies throughout these lovely stories, even the early ones like ‘Coloured Lights’. But my favourite amongst her stories is that most deep of examinations of what it means to be able to read: ‘Farida’s Eyes:’
It started with the writing on the blackboard becoming hazy and crumbly, eventually just a tangle of white threads. … Farida could not read them. (50)
As Ali Smith also demonstrates in her great novels, readers are the stuff of authorship and it truly belongs only in those moments when common humanity ‘reads ’ each other for better or worse, whatever the difference of languages, contextual reference, or translating interpretation, hence her empathy for short or partially sighted readers – people whose inner lives we find it difficult to understand and harder to write or author, like ‘The Ostrich’ who memorises Andalusian Islamic poetry, in this volume, or the kebab-shop boy’s inner life (132) which we no more penetrate than we would think of intruding upon him when he is ‘sitting on the loo’ (132) or Hamid’s blindness (‘he couldn’t see her properly because he didn’t have his glasses on’) to his convert Scottish wife’s desire to read Islamic texts in Arabic (114).
The most beautiful moments of cross-reading error in this volume concern the dilemma of migration, in which there are variant ways to misunderstand not only comparative cultures but also changes in these cultures over time. Locked in response to a racism they are not meant to notice (93), some of Aboulela’s Egyptian migrants fail to see the value of their lost culture or even more interestingly that that lost culture changes more quickly than their view of it frozen in whatever form it takes in resistance to racism. Look at that beautifully sensitive reading for instance of class as a barrier to reading in, ‘The Aromatherapist’s Husband’.
Thank you Leila Aboulela. I promise not to intrude into the Authors Tent in August though.
Steve