Translating silence, transmitting faith: Personal and cultural understanding in Leila Aboulelas The Translator

The protagonist in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator moves into contested and controversial territory through a new and shifting state of engagement – one might say entanglement – with Western culture. Far from capitulating to cultural domination, the protagonist dances with it, ultimately taking the lead in a creative process of forming a new hybrid vocabulary of experience and meaning. This process in Aboulela’s novel is examined with reference to feminist and postcolonial criticism and a comparison to traditional storytelling tropes, including that of the romance and the heroic cycle as described by Joseph Campbell. One Arthurian legend, that of the Fisher King, provides a comparison and a pathway to understanding the subtle transformation of the East/West relationship in Aboulela’s novel.