Review: Bird Summons, Leila Aboulela
By Iljas Baker
Mild spoiler warning
Leila Aboulela lives and writes in Aberdeen Scotland, but was born in Cairo and brought up in Khartoum. She has won numerous awards both for her novels and her short stories and has been longlisted for the Orange Prize three times. One of Aboulela’s stated purposes as a writer is to make Islam more familiar to her readers. Her aim is not just to address the usual stereotypes but rather “in going deep, not just looking at ‘Muslim’ as a cultural or political identity but something close to the centre, something that transcends but doesn’t deny gender, nationality, class and race … my characters do not necessarily behave as ‘good’ Muslims; they are not ideals or role models. They are … flawed characters trying to practise their faith or make sense of God’s will, in difficult circumstances.” Her books give a very positive view of the religion, which she portrays as empowering and genuinely helping the faithful to find meaning in life and to navigate the difficulties of displacement or the challenges of living as a member of an ethnic minority in Britain.
Her first novel, The Translator, focused on a Sudanese Muslim widow who falls in love with a non-Muslim Scottish academic for whom she had been translating Arabic texts and sensitively and convincingly deals with her struggle between being true to her religion and being true to her feelings of love for a non-Muslim. Her second, Minaret, is a sophisticated study of a young Sudanese woman who had to flee with her secular family to London when the country’s political regime abruptly changed. In London, she becomes impoverished and discovers that Islam is not what she thought it was and ultimately it brings immense value to her life. Lyrics Alley, Aboulela’s third novel, focuses on a rich Sudanese family and shifts between Khartoum and Cairo exploring the relationship between tradition and modernity. In the Kindness of Enemies, her fourth novel, she focused with insight and compassion on the devastating effects of the United Kingdom’s counter terrorism strategy, but also strongly criticized political Islam and praised a more Sufistic approach to Islam.
Bird Summons, her fifth novel, is somewhat of a stylistic although not thematic departure for Aboulela introducing as it does elements of magical realism into her writing. The story is organized around a journey motif with the physical journey made by three members of the Arabic Speaking Muslim Women’s Group mirroring the psychological journeys of the three women undertaking it.
Outwardly, the purpose of the visit is to visit the grave of British Muslim convert Lady Evelyn (Zainab) Cobbold, the first British woman to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, someone who was “of this soil and of their faith, [someone] for whom this island was an inherited rather than adopted home.” Lady Evelyn was the daughter of the 7th Earl of Dunmore and Lady Gertrude Coke. She formally converted to Islam in 1915 and is buried facing Mecca on the Glencarron estate in Wester Ross in the Scottish Highlands. The more important purpose of the journey is to take the women out of their usual environment and give them an opportunity to evaluate their lives, make important decisions and discover new selves. The youngest is the beautiful Iman, a refugee from the civil war in Syria who speaks little English and is living in the United Kingdom because of her husband, an overseas student there. He later divorces her at the insistence of his wealthy father who is his only source of money leaving her homeless and impoverished and wondering how she’ll survive. Having been married twice before and still childless, she realizes that apart from her beauty she has nothing and desperately needs to change this through some kind of personal transformation rather than becoming dependent on another male. The oldest is Salma a qualified doctor from an Egyptian university who married a Scottish convert who was working in Egypt and returned with him to Scotland. Her Egyptian medical degree was not enough to allow her to practice medicine in the United Kingdom and as she twice failed the medical qualifying exam in the United Kingdom she has ended up to her great dissatisfaction working as a massage therapist in a hospital. She wants more out of life, especially her self-respect, but never feels really integrated into British society. She even fears a growing distance between her and her more integrated children and is teetering on the verge of being digitally seduced by a now very successful and wealthy ex-fiancé, Amir, who studied medicine with her in Cairo. In between is Moni, a Sudanese by birth, who was a successful banker until she gave birth to a profoundly handicapped child to whom she now devotes her life and in the process rejects her husband, Murtada, who is completely alienated from his handicapped son and now wants the family to move with him to Saudi Arabia where he has been offered a very lucrative position. Moni refuses on the basis that her child will not get the kind of help he is getting in the United Kingdom. Her refusal is likely to end her marriage.
Along the way to Lady Evelyn’s grave they stay at a holiday cottage that is part of a complex that includes a converted monastery. It is in this setting, which is in the middle of a loch, that the author attempts to inject a sense of mystery and magical realism into her, up to this point, realistic narrative. Iman meets a hoopoe, a bird that is mentioned in the Qur’an as King Solomon’s messenger and which plays the role of the guide in Attar’s Sufi fable “The Conference of the Birds”. The hoopoe appears to Iman initially warning her not to stay at the holiday cottage for too long and telling her that only one of the three women would reach Lady Evelyne’s grave but not telling her which one, only that she would be “the one who is least distracted. The one who has learnt that to keep going it’s best not to look right or left.” Answers to Iman’s questions are in the form of teaching stories, some of which are drawn from Celtic mythology or folklore and there are stories within stories (somewhat tediously mirroring “One Thousand and One Nights”). Moni meets a mysterious young boy called Adam (also the name of her son), who never speaks but to whom she is drawn to in a motherly way. She plays with him and talks to him in a way that she can’t with her own son. And while out jogging Salma starts running after a mysterious man who might or might not be her ex-fiancé Amir and who inspires her to exert herself in an uncharacteristic way, but she never manages to catch up with him.
Later in the story all three of them meet the hoopoe who helps them escape from one of the monastery buildings they have become trapped in. He helps them confront their problems and offers guidance but leaves them to make their own choices.
Although the magical realism elements in the novel are designed to express emotions that are normally repressed in the characters’ everyday lives allowing them and the reader to get a sense of other possibilities, at times they are confusing and they can be irritating too because they seem artificial and not organically integrated into the text in the way that one finds in the novels of say Gabriel Garcia Marquez or in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Moreover, having the hoopoe tell Celtic tales is simply jarring for anyone familiar with the hoopoe in the Islamic tradition. It’s a cute idea but an unnecessary flourish that only makes the hoopoe storytelling episodes seem bloated.
Aboulela’s psychological portraits are her real strength as a writer. Here she is describing the lives of Moni, her husband, Murtada, and their son Adam who has cerebral palsy:
The more they slept apart – she with Adam and Murtada on his own – the more they disliked each other. Murtada was not comfortable with Adam and she could not forgive him for this. Just the sight of Adam depressed Murtada. He would gaze at him with bewilderment and dismay. Murtada wanted a cure, he wanted state-of-the-art surgery and strong medication. It took him time to admit that nothing could be done. When he did accept this fact, after an inner tussle and genuine agony, he wrote Adam off. He shelved him. We must go on and live our lives as fully as possible, he said to Moni. We must have other children. We must be happy. We cannot let his condition rule us. All this fell on deaf ears.
Her lyricism too is a pleasure to read:
At close range, the sea was a moving world; the water cold and grand. Iman felt small in front of it. Not weak but limited. What did she know? She knew that every creature came from water, she knew that rivers poured into seas but never, in turn, became salty. She knew that fishes spoke. In their own language, they praised and glorified their Creator, they gave thanks and their hummed prayers were a blessing to the world.
The one who eventually makes it to Lady Cobbold’s grave gets a vision of her future and the futures of the other two women reflected in a copper plaque mounted on the gravestone. Whether these visions turn out to be true she realizes is beside the point because all three of them “had come not to see the end but to save the present” and we are left feeling confident that all three will somehow manage to do that.
Despite the failed experiment with magical realism, the novel is a pleasure to read and to reflect on and reinforces the impression that Aboulela is one of the best writers currently writing in English.
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Iljas Baker was born in Scotland and is a graduate of the universities of Strathclyde, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He now lives in Nonthaburi, Thailand and teaches at Mahidol University International College in the Division of Social Science. He writes poems, essays and book reviews usually on Islamic themes.