4. Class otherness
If Shadia is the underprivileged character in terms of her origin and gender, then Bryan is the margins regarding his class status. We sense this on the first pages. We are informed he always wears the same shirt, a fact Shadia notices compulsively, as though she has a necessity to constantly remind herself of it. While this is not yet an alarming sign for her, his bad English pronunciation10F is a sufficient signal for his lower class. She herself cannot but comment that she has a better pronunciation than him. We learn his parents are indeed poor towards the end. His mother sells lollipops; his father works as a jointer. Whereas, the narrator informs us, ‘Fareed hired people like that to work on the house. Ordered them about.’ (109)
Unlike him, Shadia is the child of a renowned gynaecologist. He married another woman, but her mother had a sufficiently luxurious position, being a woman in Muslim society, to opt for upbringing her six daughters alone; incidentally, all now with eminent professions and of repute in the city. In order to secure them even more, she married them to honourable men of the local elite. Shadia she engages to Fareed, heir to on owner of a 7Up franchise and a paper factory with a monopoly on handkerchiefs.
Aboulela’s humour is subtle, yet acutely aware of reality. Although Fareed’s mother and his sisters comprise the wedding arrangement along with the large newly-built house, this same arrangement includes Shadia’s postgraduate studies. Her mother is fully conscious of her threatened social position and warns her to have education as a counterbalance and a safeguard for the riches she will get from her husband.
Let us leave aside the awareness of poverty awaiting Shadia’s family (unless they manipulate with caution), and concentrate instead on the fact that she is a member of the local elite, and is also privileged as opposed to many emigrants or temporary residents in Scotland. As Ahmad claims
Most individuals are really not free to fashion themselves anew with each passing day … only the privileged can live a life of constant mobility and surplus pleasure … Most migrants tend to be poor and experience displacement not as cultural plenitude but as torment. (1997, 373)
In ‘cold’ Scotland she is not forced to work in order to pay for her postgraduate studies. Instead, she can enjoy and remember the pool at the club she used to frequent with her sisters where they drank lemonade and were served by waiters in white. Not to mention the engagement with Fareed at the Hilton with five hundred guests. Her discourse is far from disqualified and silenced. Some of the true subalterns of this story are probably the waiters at the pool or the workers Fareed orders about, and Bryan’s parents. ‘In Khartoum, [Shadia] never mixed with people like that.’ (106)
Even secured in this respect, she bears in mind her economic situation. She is aware she is wasting a lot of finances because of her studies and meticulously calculates the money she has spent, while at home only ‘the sterling [is] enough to keep a family alive’. (103) In Khartoum, we find out, she ‘allowed’ Fareed to pay her bills and saved her money to purchase presents for her mother. Fareed too is worried about his money, although he has an abundance of it. He is quite thrifty with his means when he builds his new house and wants all the bathrooms to be painted in one colour to get a discount. Eagleton is right to state:
It is not in the end questions of language, skin colour or identity, but of commodity prices, raw materials, labour markets, military alliances and political forces, which shape the relations between rich and poor nations. (1996, 205)
I will add the relations between rich and poor people, as well. Postmodernism (Lyotard for instance) proclaims the end of all metanarratives, but as Ahmad claims, ‘the most meta- of all metanarratives … the creeping annexation of the globe for the dominance of capital … has met … with stunning success.’ (1997, 364) This being true, Shadia is among those who profit from the dominance of capital. Her wealth (Fareed’s factories) is what will emancipate her into elite, not knowledge and by no means Bryan.
Finally, a question arises whether Shadia would have left Bryan if he were a rich representative of the First world, with royal pronunciation and, say, a villa in Spain and a Rolls Royce to counterbalance the colossal house Fareed is building and his Mercedes. Is she discriminating more in terms of class than colonialism? She probably is. Aboulela herself states ‘protection is a woman’s right from an Islamic point of view’ (2007) and it, therefore, follows that it is normal for Shadia to seek an economically protected life. However, in such a case, the wealthy Bryan would have posed a lesser threat to her identity and would have been less interesting for us.
5. Gender otherness
‘“Femininity” is as important a discursive field … as “religion.”’ (Spivak 1988, 215) Religion, in addition, plays an important role in dispersing the concept of femininity. If we believe Aboulela, then we shall accept that, ‘A woman, in Sudanese/African/Arab culture, is considered to be more attractive if she is quiet, soft-spoken, not opinionated, not selfish, not forward, and the list goes on!’ (2007)
A part of this belief is reflected in Shadia’s upbringing. She knows her rules. ‘It was not difficult to please people. Agree with them, never dominate the conversation, be economical with the truth.’ (111) At home she is considerably more marginalised than in Scotland. Fareed indeed phones regularly for advice on how to furnish the new house, but he always ‘discusses’ with her once he has already decided on his own.
When she disagrees, he still respects his own decisions more. Neither is he interested in her knowledge, but considers himself modern and ‘liberal’ since he allows her to study abroad.
A more serious aspect of femininity in Sudan is what Cicely Hamilton calls ‘marriage as women’s compulsory trade, a ceremony which marks their entry as wives and later mothers into the sexual economy of a patriarchal society’ (in Whitlock 1995, 351). We discover that
Fareed was a package that came with the 7Up franchise, the paper factory, the big house he was building, his sisters and widowed mother. Shadia was going to marry them all. She was going to be happy and make her mother happy. Her mother deserved happiness after the misfortunes of her life. (103)
In this case the initiator of Shadia into female production and the propagator of patriarchy is an egotistic and selfish mother who behaves like a child and constantly victimises herself. ‘No one suffers like I suffer,’ she says indulging in self-pity. (105) Shadia and her sisters live their mother’s dream: because she did not continue her education, they all have to have high education.
She secretly visits her father and is fascinated by his wildness and her stepmother who has fewer worries than her mother. As she gets more familiar with Bryan, she distances herself from the strong influence of her mother and identifies with the traitor in the family, the exile, the nomad – the father who escaped. Subconsciously she constantly thinks about the other parent. When she enters the museum of Africa she expects to see what she misses about her home, and among the things listed are ‘[p]eople like her father’.
6. Diasporic otherness
Derrida states ‘what is proper to a culture, is not to be identical to itself … not to be able to … take the form of a subject only … in the difference with itself“ (1992, 9-10) This difference is the most palpable for our heroine now she is relocated to a culturally foreign ground. A problem, in addition, is that she is dislocated from her generic culture. She is doomed to, as Derrida would say, an eternal ‘double genitive’ (10)
Displacement is a traumatic event. Dislocated from one community, international students in this story seek protection in another group. They are always together, always a ‘collection’, ‘collective fear’ and ‘collective silence’, and the Nigerian who committed suicide is a ‘brother’. They stick together as though the group will protect them and give them a feeling of belonging. In their behaviour and their whispering and giggling they resemble high school teenagers, insecure in their identity, who prefer to identify themselves as a group since they will not feel threatened in this way.
It is quite amusing then that these same people, to whom Shadia clings so tightly before she befriends Bryan, she later avoids. It is easy, under different conditions, at home and on a secure ground, to consider these same people intruders. With Asafa, though he is from a neighbouring country, they meet thrillingly in Scotland, while at home they could have been enemies.11F
Faith in the homeland is also delusive. Even if they return home time will not stay for them, ‘they’re in for a shock because their countries will have moved on,’ Aboulela warns us. She confesses: ‘This is what I fight against. I don’t want to get stuck. I don’t want to be nostalgic for the past.’ (in Sethi 2005) Liminal diasporic others do not belong anywhere. They are idiorrhythmics who are unaware that they are in fact cenobites, in the words of Milorad Pavić.
‘The foreigner’s friends … could only be those who feel foreign to themselves.’ (Кристева 2005, 261) Shadia, the ‘cynical stranger’, has an even greater need of the company of Bryan, the ‘stranger believer’, but ‘does not expect anything’ from that company. (247) That company jeopardises her identity too much.
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10. It is said in the United Kingdom that one’s class can be discerned as soon as one opens their mouth. The dialects there are more class based than geographically based.
11. Spivak reproaches African Americans when she states ‘Diasporic Blacks … Produce a certain kind of idiom of resistance; but [in] the Third World at large, … You won’t be able to dissolve everything into Black against White, as there is also Black against Black, Brown against Brown, and so on.’ (1990, 65) After all, Darfur is an adequate current example.