Leila Aboulela is considering one of the defining moments of her life. After growing up in the heat of Sudan, in 1990, she found herself surrounded by the cold granite of Aberdeen, Scotland. She had a two-week-old baby, a four-year-old son and her husband was working in the oil industry, offshore.
“It wasn’t easy,” she says. “I think the shock made me a writer.”
The upheaval certainly informed Aboulela's first novel, The Translator, which was published in 1999 and championed by enigmatic South African author J M Coetzee. She might have been on familiar territory – it is about a Sudanese mother living in Aberdeen – but it was her protagonist's courage and conviction that really struck home.
“Fiction provided me the space to explore the conflict between an old life and a new life, and I found it really interesting that immigrants I met didn’t really talk about these things,” she says. “They wanted to forget they were in a new place and instead tried to recreate familiar conditions in the old country. There was a lot of denial going on.”
Aboulela herself struggled to assimilate into a secular society, and she will further explore issues of migration, identity and religion in a special Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature session on Friday, entitled Culture Shock: Facing the Unknown.
The festival holds a special place in her heart. She went to the first in 2009, while living in UAE, as a member of the audience and has seen its profile and ambition grow with her own career. This will be her second visit as a renowned author. “Every time I go, it’s bigger, the programme is more varied and there are more Arab writers,” she says.
Now, Aboulela is herself surely one of the star attractions and her books are translated into Arabic – a source of pleasure and pride.
The most recent, 2015's The Kindness of Enemies, investigates the legacy of legendary 19th century warrior and Muslim leader Imam Shamil, and grew out of a radio play she wrote called The Lion of Chechnya. During another session at the festival, a different radio play of hers – Mystic Life – will be read on stage.
“I really enjoy writing for radio,” she says. “You can be more wordy, express thoughts and dreams and, of course, it costs nothing to move between centuries and locations.
"After The Lion of Chechnya, I realised that I wanted to say more about Imam Shamil. But it was such a leap to start a big historical novel like that, so I wrote something else instead, which became [2011 novel] Lyrics Alley. But once I did the research, it wasn't that hard – you follow what interests you, plot and character, and the history sits in the background."
The Kindness of Enemies takes place in two centuries, with present-day academic Natasha acting as a guide to Muslim tribes fighting in Russia, and refracting that back into the anxiety of young men being radicalised in Britain in the 21st century.
It is weighty stuff, but Aboulela’s novels always wear their politics lightly.
Are these issues of faith and culture more obvious now than when she arrived in Scotland more than 25 years ago?
“Well, the challenges Muslims face now are more in the open, and more dramatic because of terrorism,” she says. “But we still had the after-effects of the Lockerbie bombing in the late 1980s and then the First Gulf War, too, which did definitely increase anti-Muslim or Arab sentiment. They were sporadic incidents but you could feel the hostility held within. I’d say it’s not a new issue, it’s just more blatant.”
All the more reason why Aboulela’s thoughtful, perceptive and, happily, bestselling novels have become so important.
• Culture Shock, Facing the Unknown (3pm) and Penning the Past: When History Meets Fiction (6pm) are on Friday at Al Ras 1, InterContinental. The Kindness of Enemies is on Saturday at 5pm at Al Ras 2, InterContinental. Mystic Life: A Play Reading is on Sunday at 7pm at Al Ras 1, InterContinental
artslife@thenational.ae
