Elsewhere,
Home
by Leila
Aboulela
published by Telegram, an
imprint of Saqi Books, London
ISBN:
978-1846592119
eISBN: 978
-1846592126
pbk, 224pp, £8.99
Kindle £5.99
/ $7.97
review by Susannah Tarbush, London
In 2000 the
Sudanese short-story writer, novelist and playwright Leila Aboulela became the first-ever
winner of the newly-inaugurated Caine Prize for African Writing, for her short
story “The Museum”.
In his speech at the award ceremony, the chair of the judges, Nigerian
poet and novelist Ben Okri, described the story as “moving, gentle, ironic, quietly angry and beautifully
written".
As this new collection of Aboulela's short stories shows, the qualities that Okri identified have been sustained throughout the substantial body of short fiction she has produced in the two decades since winning the Caine Prize. .
As this new collection of Aboulela's short stories shows, the qualities that Okri identified have been sustained throughout the substantial body of short fiction she has produced in the two decades since winning the Caine Prize. .
In 2001 Aboulela’s first
collection of short stories, Coloured
Lights, was published by Scottish publisher Polygon. It was shortlisted for
the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award.
Since
then, her stories have appeared in numerous publications
and anthologies, and publication of a second collection has been long overdue. The publication by Telegram of such a collection, Elsewhere,
Home, is much to be welcomed.
Even before publication the collection was longlisted in the fiction category of the People’s Book Prize. It subsequently won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award, open to authors of Scottish descent or residing in Scotland," or whose writing deals with "the work or life of a Scot or with a Scottish question, event or situation."
Even before publication the collection was longlisted in the fiction category of the People’s Book Prize. It subsequently won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award, open to authors of Scottish descent or residing in Scotland," or whose writing deals with "the work or life of a Scot or with a Scottish question, event or situation."
Aboulela was
among the first contemporary authors in the UK to write from a Muslim
perspective. She grew up in Sudan and has had much experience of living in both Muslim and
non-Muslim societies. She was living in the Scottish oil city of Aberdeen when she wrote Coloured Lights, and then lived
in Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar before returning to Aberdeen where she now lives.
Leila Aboulela pictured by Simon Hollington at the 2005 Edinburgh International Book Festival
The 13-stories
in Elsewhere, Home span Aboulela’s writing career. They
include six stories from Coloured
Lights, among them “The Museum”. These early stories have stood the test of time, and are more relevant than ever at a time when multiculturalism is being challenged, the extreme right is on the rise in the West, and Muslims feel under increasing pressure.
One of the more
recent stories, “Farida’s Eyes” was
first published in 2012 in Banipal issue 44, which focused on 12
Women Writers. Farida is a pupil at a school run by nuns. She realises her
eyesight is deteriorating, and her teacher, Sister Carlotta, tells her that she
must be fitted with glasses. While Farida’s
mother is in favour of this, her father is against, both on grounds of cost and
because “she will look ugly in
glasses!”
Several
stories are linked to Sudan. In “Something
Old, Something New” a Scottish convert to Islam
travels to Khartoum to marry a divorced woman he had met in Edinburgh at the
Sudanese restaurant at which she worked. The wedding arrangements are
interrupted by the theft of his passport and camera, and a family bereavement.
But after the low-key marriage ceremony he is suddenly bowled over by the
sensual beauty of his wife. He wants to tell her so “but the words, any words, wouldn’t come. He was stilled, choked by a kind of brightness.”
The stories often
expose misunderstandings between cultures or generations. In “Summer Maze” Nadia and her mother Lateefa, Egyptian immigrants to the
UK, are on their annual visit to Cairo. There is a gulf in understanding between
them. Nadia, who has lost the ability to speak the Arabic she babbled as a
baby, is embarrassed by her mother’s
continuing pronouncing of the English “p” as “b”. Lateefa, on the other hand, has long hoped that her daughter would marry her cousin
Khalid, and is devastated to find he is now engaged. It is his fiancée who introduces Nadia to literature by
Egyptian authors translated into English, and through reading such books Nadia
finds access to her mother’s
world.
In “The Aromatherapist’s Husband” Elaine is a whimsical free spirit, who practises alternative
therapies and consults fortune tellers. Her welder husband Adam is plodding and
practical, and unable to keep up with a wife who believes in angels and dreams
of working at Mother Theresa’s orphanage
in Calcutta.
A recent
story, “Pages of Fruit”, is addressed in the second person by the female narrator to the woman author she had for years put on a pedestal and with whom she longed to strike up a
friendship. Like the narrator, the idolised author is an African from a highly
educated family: “Your story was a bridge to a
world I had left behind after marriage and migration.” The narrator used to send letters to the writer, with no reply. Encountering the author years later in Abu Dhabi, where her husband’s work has taken him, the
narrator sees her in a more realistic way and is somehow freed. The story may be met with a wry smile from certain readers who encounter a much-admired writer in real life, say at a literary event or festival.
The central figure in “Expecting to Give” is a lonely and depressed expectant mother whose husband Saif is working on a platform in the North Sea. She suffers sickness, and cravings, especially for tomatoes, and longs for the return of her husband She had been a social worker back in her own country, but her job applications in her new city of residence have been rejected. An incident in a kebab shop leads her to a confrontation with a mother pushing a toddler in a pushchair.
Despite her output of short fiction, Leila Aboulela is probably best known as an award-winning novelist. Her debut novel The Translator was published by Polygon
in 1999. It
was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction, as were the two novels that followed: Minaret (Bloomsbury, 2005) and Lyrics Alley (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010). Her fourth novel The Kindness of Enemies was published by W&N in 2015. Her fifth novel Bird Summons is due to be published by W&N on 7 March.
Elsewhere, Home shows that in addition to being an outstanding novelist, Aboulela is an exceptional short story writer. The collection is surely destined to widen her
readership and reputation yet further.
