An Interview with Leila Aboulela

Leila Aboulela is an acclaimed Sudanese writer who currently resides in Abu Dhabi. Writing is her main career, and she also cares for her two young children. The daughter of a Sudanese man and an Egyptian woman, Aboulela was born in Cairo in 1964 but grew up in Khartoum.1 Egypt and Sudan were both colonized by Britain yet had very different experiences of colonial occupation, illustrated by the fact that Sudan was governed under joint British and Egyptian rule between 1899 and 1955. As Aboulela's writing is shaped by these experiences, it is useful to consider her work in its socio-historical context. Edward Said famously opens the main body of Orientalism (31–36) with a depiction of Egypt's colonization under the leadership of such politicians as Arthur James Balfour and Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer (known as Over-Baring). However, it is important to realize that, notwithstanding its long-standing cultural and physical domination by Britain, Egypt achieved its independence relatively early, in 1922, and had a period of defiant pan-Arabism under Nasser in the 1950s, before succumbing to its position as what is now often regarded as a client state of America under the quasi-dictatorship of President Mubarak (Meijer 1–11, McDermott 147). In contrast, one of the defining moments of Sudan's colonial history was the Battle of Omdurman (1898), in which a small Anglo-Egyptian force, led by Lord Kitchener, in just one day killed at least ten thousand dervish followers of the religious leader known as the Mahdi. This rout is described even by such imperialist apologists as Niall Ferguson as “the acme of imperial overkill” (267). Recent Sudanese history has been marked by ferocious civil wars between the powerful northern Arab Muslims, the subjugated southern African Christians, the Communists, and the sharia-endorsing religious parties (O’Ballance vii–viii). Now it is the genocide in the western region of Darfur, the discovery and exploitation of oil resources, and the designation of Sudan as a state assisting international terrorism that receive the most critical attention (O’Ballance 123, 205, Flint and De Waal 126–34, Collins 16). More recently, the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has drawn considerable attention for becoming the world's first sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes in Darfur. However, Aboulela writes that she wishes to counter these “stereotypical images of famine and war” by depicting Sudan as “a valid place” in her writing (“Accuracy” 204). Finally, it should be noted that Egypt has had long cultural and migratory interaction with the Muslim Arab people of northern Sudan (Fabos 3–46); Aboulela, with her dual parentage, is more aware than most of this shared heritage.