Poetics of Homeliness in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator

The study examines Leila Aboulela’s poetics of home in The Translator, through tracking the protagonist’s journey of rerouting and redefining the sense of homeliness, which has been disturbed by cultural exclusion in exile and social dislocation in the homeland. The protagonist’s encounters with the Western other are accentuated through displaying experiences of alienation and de-individualization. Henceforth, the ongoing analysis builds on the methodological intersection between Homi Bhabha’s conception of homeliness and Avtar Brah’s distinction between a ‘desire for home’ and a ‘homing desire’, which relies on the politics of discursive inclusion/exclusion. Herein, the unhomely, as inferred by Bhabha, is probed as a realm of reconsideration and a liberating detachment, whilst the sense of home is examined as rather induced and curbed in tandem with the immigrant’s surrounding social cohesion. Accordingly, a particular account is devoted to Aboulela’s poetics in ascending the ideology of return to the country of origin in framing home motifs. This research concludes that Aboulela’s narrative has, to a certain extent, eviscerated the oft-opted spatial-bound construction of the homely sense. The protagonist’s back-and-forth journey between Aberdeen and Sudan has been implemented as a rite of passage in the immigrants’ course towards the realization of homeliness.