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Searching for Room to Move Producing and Negotiating Space in Leila Aboulela’S Minaret*

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Searching for Room to Move Producing and Negotiating Space in Leila Aboulela’S Minaret* Searching for Room to Move Producing and Negotiating Space in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret* MARTA CARIELLO Regent’s Park Mosque and the Production of Space ’VE COME DOWN IN THE WORLD. I’ve slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn’t much room to move.”1 “I Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret (2005) opens with these words, spoken by Najwa, the young woman narrator: Already, the first two lines conjure up two of the fundamental themes articulated in the novel by the anglophone Sudanese writer: movement (“I’ve come down”), and space (“a place where the ceiling is low”). It is precisely the articula- tion of movement and space – movement producing space – that grounds * Previous version of this article was delivered as a paper at the XXIII AIA Con- ference 2007 “Migration of Forms / Forms of Migration,” held on 20–22 September 2007 at Università degli Studi di Bari and is now included in the Conference Pro- ceedings. 1 Leila Aboulela was born in Cairo in 1964, brought up in Khartoum, moved to England in her mid-twenties, and has since spent long periods of time living also in Scotland, Indonesia, and Dubai. Her first novel, The Translator (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1999), tells of the difficult and at times estranging love story between a young Sudan- ese widow working as a translator at a Scottish university and her local supervisor, a scholar of Middle East Studies and Third World politics. In 2001 Aboulela published a collection of short stories titled Coloured Lights (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2001), focusing on the Muslim immigrant experience in Britain; the short story “The Museum” made Aboulela the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. 340 MARTA CARIELLO ^ the negotiation of selfhood and identity fleshed out by Aboulela in her novel. Minaret tells the story of the forced migration of Najwa and her dis- membered family from a wealthy life in Khartoum to a difficult and humble existence in London, following the military coup of 1985 in Sudan. Within this context, Aboulela’s narrative marks the traumatic interruption of time – one life literally stops, replaced by a completely dif- ferent one – and a physical and spatial dislocation – Sudan replaced by England. Najwa will, in the end, and in an autobiographical echo of the writer’s own experience, find her own ‘place’ in a renewed spiritual identity. The final place of religion is itself inscribed in a topography of migra- tion and of unexpected maps; it is announced in the very first paragraph, in what constitutes a sort of prologue to the story and the flashbacks: I’ve come down in the world. I’ve slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn’t much room to move. Most of the time, I’m used to it. Most of the time, I’m good. I accept my sentence and do not brood or look back. But sometimes a shift makes me remember. Routine is ruffled and a new start makes me suddenly conscious of what I’ve become, standing in a street covered with autumn leaves. The trees in the park across the road are scrub- bed silver and brass. I look up and see the minaret of Regent’s Park mosque visible above the trees. I have never seen it so early in the morning in this vulnerable light. London is at its most beautiful in autumn.2 The London autumn, beautiful and potent with its falling leaves, offers an architecture that tells of movement, of newness, of different rhythms and temporalities: the minaret, clear and visible and reassuring as the ceiling of a house of sense and self that Leila Aboulela has chosen to declare in the very title of her book. Najwa looks up at the minaret that will host her survival. Religion as the place for identity formation is a very interesting and undoubtedly fundamental theme in Minaret; when Najwa decides to wear a headscarf, she gives material substantiation to her desire to settle into “another version of herself,”3 one that attracts her, she ponders, because she is “regal like [her] mother, mysterious. [With] the skill of concealing 2 Leila Aboulela, Minaret (London: Bloomsbury, 2005): 1. 3 Aboulela, Minaret, 246. .
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