Building oppressive proxies: Sudanese and Egyptian domestic place and the production of patriarchal femininity in Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley

Abstract

Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley disrupts the trend in much feminist literature to present women’s places and spaces as sites of revolt against patriarchal oppression. In the small places of the Abuzeid home, Lyrics Alley reveals that women’s places are not inherently emancipatory, and patriarchal behaviour is not exclusively observed in men. Through the socio-spatial dispersal of patriarchal power, homosocial domestic places, where women interact with other women, can produce femininities that oppress other women by actively advancing patriarchal concerns. In this essay, Lyrics Alley provides a cartography for socio-geographical enquiry to establish how space and place construct patriarchal women. My analyses of these literary spaces reveal the mechanisms by which patriarchal women are spatially produced, and may use space to oppress other women.

Introduction

The literary image of women gathered in African domestic places ¹ conjures strong associations of sisterhood and support. In works such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Onuora Nzekwu’s Highlife for Lizards (1965), female friends and relatives create strong bonds in hospitable cooking spaces and reception rooms. Whether or not these contexts are polygynous, the trope of women’s domestic places as potential sites of resistance to patriarchy makes frequent appearance in works of fiction as well as feminist criticism. Although this conception of women’s domestic places is not unfounded, it is misleading. The home, which comprises walls, rooms, hallways, furniture, and bodies, is the materialization of power made structural. Even the most safeguarded home may be susceptible to the larger patriarchal context within which it is located. In Lyrics Alley (2010/2012), acclaimed Sudanese novelist Leila Aboulela deploys her talent for creating detailed spatial microcosms that interrogate complex global geographical and cultural dynamics, including patriarchal systems of power. Through the interactions between co-wives Nabilah and Waheeba in their shared home, Lyrics Alley also confronts the reader with an uncomfortable figure to which literary scholarship prefers to turn a blind eye: the patriarchal woman. Just as all feminists need not be women, patriarchal behaviour is not exclusively observed in those of male gender or sex but, in particular contexts, especially small spaces, can also be perpetrated by women. In fact, the same woman can be a victim of patriarchal exploitation and also use patriarchal systems of power to her own advantage. As Deniz Kandiyoti argues, women that live in classic patriarchal systems often collude in “the reproduction of their own subordination” as these “interpersonal strategies” could maximize their own chances of survival and attainment of security (1988: 280). Through a spatial analysis of Lyrics Alley, my essay will show that women’s domestic places emerge not as inherently resistant to patriarchy, but as conducive to the production of patriarchal women. Through the lens of the home as the “nation writ small”, to use Susan Andrade’s turn of phrase (2010: 34), I examine the ways in which patriarchal women are produced by domestic places in Lyrics Alley in homosocial interactions, that is, non-sexual interactions between members of the same gender. My focus also extends to the ways in which patriarchal women may execute their oppression of other women through the manipulation and control of small spaces — such as the kitchen, the living room, and even the body as the most intimate home of the self.

The intersections between space and power were most memorably traced by pioneering spatial theorists such as Michel de Certeau (1984), Michel Foucault (1986), and Robert Sack (1992). The spatial manifestation of patriarchy in particular was the focus of feminist geographers such as Shirley Ardener (1981), Daphne Spain (1992), Gillian Rose (1993), Doreen Massey (1994), and Nancy Duncan (1996). Virginia Woolf explores patriarchal spaces in the world of literature much earlier in her essay A Room of One’s Own (1928/1989). In this long essay Woolf maps the impact of women’s lack of privacy and resources — here manifested spatially as a private sitting room — as impediments to their production of culture. More recently, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (2000) explores how social difference is established in the domestic places of Victorian literature. The ambiguity of small space is already evident in the contrast between Gilbert and Gubar’s study of domestic space as carceral and Woolf’s use of a private room as allegorical of socio-economic and creative freedom. As with these examples, small spaces in the context of women’s narratives are usually domestic in nature. In Anglo-American scholarship, the domestic is a private space associated with the feminine, and is considered a sanctuary as well as a place of entrapment and oppression.

Lyrics Alley is Aboulela’s fourth novel. Her work has been the subject of academic research for more than a decade, and she has received multiple literary prizes. She published her debut novel, The Translator, in 1999, and followed this with a collection of short stories titled Coloured Lights in 2001. Minaret and Lyrics Alley were published in 2005 and 2010, and her next novel, The Kindness of Enemies, appeared in 2015. Her latest novel, Bird Summons, came out in 2019. Lyrics Alley is set primarily in 1950s Umdurman ² and Cairo, when Sudan was still an Anglo-Egyptian province, but where negotiations toward independence were underway. As with Aboulela’s other texts, Lyrics Alley straddles disparate locations and produces a geo-cultural complexity that foregrounds how space shapes identity and narrative. Aboulela’s own life is reflected in the translocations and cultural nuance of Lyrics Alley. With an Egyptian mother and Sudanese father, Aboulela was born in Cairo and raised in Khartoum. After studying in London, she eventually moved to Aberdeen, where she lived for many years. (Aboulela et al., 2010: 80). More recently, Aboulela has also lived in Indonesia, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, then Doha, Qatar, before moving back to Aberdeen in 2012 (Butterworth 2019: 169). As with Aboulela’s other texts, Lyrics Alley reflects her hybrid cultural background and familiarity with socio-geographical difference. Lyrics Alley has generated scholarship on issues relating to the politics of translation, Arab-Islamic femininity, and diasporic identity. Ahmed Gamal and Abdel Wahab’s “Counter-Orientalism: Retranslating the ‘Invisible Arab’ in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Lyrics Alley” (2014) focuses on cultural translation and the de-Orientalizing of Arab-Islamic subjects. In “Voicing Marginality: Disability in Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley”, Ken Junior Lipenga discusses poetry as a means of giving voice to the disabled. In “Writing from the Margins of the Nation: Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley”, Yousef Awad argues that “Lyrics Alley can be perceived as Aboulela’s attempt to investigate, from the perspective of the less privileged, the history of Sudan and explore how the colonial era has tremendously influenced Sudan in the post-colonial era culturally, politically, economically, ideologically and socially” (2014: 69). Awad problematizes the role that smaller narratives play in shaping the national grand narrative. However, there has been no scholarship on Lyrics Alley that interrogates the production of patriarchal power in space and place, despite the fact that the novel is primarily shaped by national and transnational space as it figures within city spaces and domestic places.

In Lyrics Alley, Aboulela examines the regional complexities in the Sahel, which derives its name from the Arabic ساحل (sāḥil) or “coast”, signifying its position at the edge of the Sahara. The Sahel is a geographical marker of the religious and cultural divisions between North Africa and the rest of the continent. Aboulela presents the Sahel as a contact zone between different cultures and religions, where they influence and challenge one another directly. This counters the longstanding tradition of representing the Sahel as a physical border that manifests the separation of Arab-Islamic North Africa from the rest of the African continent. ³ The interactions across the Sahel are represented on a smaller scale in the home of Mahmoud Abuzeid, a successful Sudanese businessman. His two wives run separate households at opposite ends of their mansion in Umdurman. Mahmoud constantly negotiates between the younger, modern, Egyptian Nabilah and the older, conservative, Sudanese Hajjah Waheeba. Nabilah has two young children with Mahmoud and spends much of her time travelling with Mahmoud and appearing with him at business functions. Waheeba, on the other hand, remains in her side of the palace with extended family — her two sons are grown and live in other cities. Much of the narrative converges on Waheeba’s youngest son Nur, who is paralysed after an accident. He moves back in with his mother and attracts local poets and musicians into his orbit because of his poetry, much to his Sudanese family’s embarrassment. Nabilah and Waheeba’s character arcs manifest in the materiality of their homes: their furnishings and décor encapsulate their divergent femininities and nationalities. The narrative reaches its climax when, after an argument, Waheeba has Nabilah’s daughter, Ferial, lured over to her quarters. Against the wishes of Nabilah and Mahmoud, and without their knowledge, Waheeba has Ferial’s genital excision performed. Nabilah is furious and demands that Mahmoud divorce Waheeba. When he refuses, Nabilah moves back to Cairo to live with her mother Qadriyyah. Returning to her maternal home, in what she considers to be the modern other to Umdurman, Nabilah rejects her position as a mother and wife. Soraya, who is Mahmoud’s brother’s daughter and therefore the niece of both Nabilah and Waheeba, lives with her conservative older sister Fatma in their father’s house, but also moves between Nabilah and Waheeba’s households, as well as that of her sister Halima. In her interactions with these women’s domestic spaces Soraya develops a complex and nuanced identity. She longs to be modern and Egyptian like Nabilah, but Halima reminds her that it is her duty to conform to the wishes of her father. Soraya eventually graduates from the medical university and marries a progressive man. On their honeymoon Soraya pays a visit to Nabilah in Cairo, where Nabilah realizes the impact she had had on the young woman’s identity.

Although Aboulela problematizes the separation of Arab-Islamic North Africa from the rest of the continent, the subject of religious difference is subsumed into questions of ethnography and nationality. This is a significant political positioning, as religion forms an important part of the perceived separatism of Arab-Islamic North Africa. Instead, Aboulela presents religion as a lens through which to consider a national space, rather than as an inherently divisive or unifying mechanism. This stands in contrast to some of her other work, in which Islam can be presented as a liberating force. ⁴ In Lyrics Alley, religion only functions to underscore the ways in which Sudan has resisted the negative consequences of modernization. Ustaz Badr, who is Nur’s literature and theological tutor, notes that “in Sudan, the barriers between the human and spirit worlds [are] thin, or that there [are] cracks and transparencies through which that other, unknown world could, at times, be sensed” (Aboulela, 2010/2012: 60). ⁵ Islam therefore serves as a paradigm through which the reader comes to appreciate the magic of Sudan — its connections to tradition and an older world. Umdurman is located in north Sudan and is divided from the capital, Khartoum, by the Nile. Aboulela thus introduces the reader to the cities of her youth through the eyes of the multiple protagonists in Lyrics Alley, and uses these spatial narratives to explore questions of power and identity.

Scaling sexism: The Abuzeid home as microcosm

Lyrics Alley participates in the familiar postcolonial discourse of interrogating national and continental spatial relations. Dustin Crowley notes how spatial concerns shape African literature, as the “questions of African literary study have fundamentally geographic components, beginning with a history of colonialism and imperialism that were themselves thoroughly geographic endeavors” (2015: 2). Lyrics Alley explores these spatial concerns against the background of Sudan’s separation from Egypt, which dominates the relationships between Nabilah, Waheeba, and Mahmoud, and drives the events in the narrative. Lyrics Alley also participates in a larger literary practice of writing space as more than mere “setting” for a primarily temporal narrative. Literary criticism began paying attention to space as a key participant in shaping the narrative through the efforts of such scholars as Carl Malmgren (1985), Robert Tally (2013), and Dustin Crowley (2015). A spatial approach is particularly rewarding in the context of African literature, which is fraught with the geographical complexity described in Crowley’s formulation cited earlier. However, implied transnational dynamics introduce epistemological challenges, as Anglophone African literature and its study in Anglo-American scholarship is saturated with the asymmetrical power dynamic between the global south and global north. Most significantly, this dynamic was constructed by the violent process of colonial geographic expansion of the global north to the global south.

In Lyrics Alley, British-ruled Egypt represents the global north that finds its other in Sudan as the global south. The act of othering is a familiar aspect of colonial spatial organization in which the colonizer defines itself as superior (rational, moral, and civil) by projecting their opposite or other (irrational, immoral, and savage) onto the colonized nation. Othering made it easier to treat the oppressed people as subhuman and to consider their land “empty” and free to claim. The lives and spaces of colonized peoples were reduced to homogenizing narratives that failed to acknowledge individuals with particular experiences and identities. In his seminal critique of imperial discourse, Orientalism, Edward W. Said expresses outrage at the way the monolithic image of the Orient produced by Anglo-American thought obscured and even shaped the realities of the Orient. For Said, imperial “imaginative geography” creates arbitrary geographical distinctions that define some spaces as familiar and “ours” and other spaces as unfamiliar and “theirs” (1978/1987: 54). The homogenizing colonial spatial paradigm was undergirded by the invention of modern instruments of measurement and cartography. Even before the industrial revolution, technologies of scientific inquiry became what Michael Adas refers to as “measures of the overall level of development attained by non-Western cultures”, which served to shape the “ways in which European power was exercised” (1989: 3–4).William Reddy further argues that modern science inspired “mathematically expressed laws [that] apply uniformly across time and space” (2016: 327). In this way, modern instruments of measure inspired the illusion of objective truth, which in reality was only thinly disguised Eurocentric hegemony. The apparent objectivity of which science was capable remained inaccessible to art and representation, a problem illuminated by imperialism’s repeated failure to deal with cultural difference.

The global dynamics of colonial spatial organization are also recognisable at regional levels. Aboulela presents the Sahel as a contact space between these African “hemispheres”. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt describes a “contact zone” as “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (1992: 6). Aboulela’s representation of the Sahel as such a space of contact builds on Pratt’s image of the colonial encounter. The author presents readers with conflict between Egyptian and Sudanese characters who show varying levels of support for Sudanese independence from Anglo-Egyptian rule. The Sahel as a contact zone counters the longstanding tradition of representing the Sahel as a physical border that separates Arab-Islamic North Africa from rest of Africa. Cameroonian author Simon Njami summarizes the fallacy of these separate Africas in stating that such “revisionism […] seeks to negate the multiple influences fuelled by exchanges between the large Sahelian cities and their North African neighbours since the Middle Ages” (2007: 13). Aboulela reveals and interrogates the dichotomizing colonial spatial paradigm by unifying the global north and the global south in the Abuzeid household. Although they share a palace, the two wives live in entirely separate wings that represent Sudan and Egypt, and — as will be discussed — each considers the other wife’s section of the palace to be inferior to her own. Their mutual distaste for each other’s domestic space accurately reflects the two wives’ attitudes to each other’s home country. To Nabilah, “the Sudan was like the bottom of the sea, an exotic wilderness, soporific and away from the momentum of history. It was amazing but constricting, threatening to suck her in, to hold her down and drown her” (22). Nabilah considers Sudan a site of regression which, in personal terms, manifests as a feeling of isolation and disenfranchisement. Nabilah’s characterization of Sudan as “exotic”, “soporific”, and “constricting” makes it clear that Nabilah feels oppressed by Sudanese life. She calls to mind the imperialist spatial imagery in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902/1992), where Africa is an empty space devoid of meaning, specificity, civilization, and identity. To Nabilah, Sudan does not share a map with Egypt; instead, she considers it to be part of the sea, that empty space which separates nations and continents.

The same colonial spatial paradigm that Nabilah employs has created transnational imbalances that remained in place with the collapse of empire and weakening of the modern nation state. Lyrics Alley is set in the period where this shift is still in progress, but globalization is already evident in the enthusiasm with which Mahmoud Abuzeid builds his international business network — always accompanied by Nabilah, his wife from Egypt — which acts as the regional representation of the global north. Immanuel Wallerstein traces the global flows of capital in The Modern World-System, where he categorizes nations as core, semi-peripheral, or peripheral in accordance with their “complexity of economic activities, strength of the state machinery, cultural integrity, etc.” (1987: 349). ⁶ As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues in Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (1993), although the global north and the global south shape each other through mutual influence, epistemological power, and capital still accumulate in the global north, which continues to oppress the global south. In Lyrics Alley, it is in relation to the accumulation of power in the global north of Egypt that Nabilah rejects Sudan. To her, Egypt is the site of prosperity and progress, of “routine” and “a life of fresh air and energy, the natural bustle and order of civilised life” (22). In Nabilah’s imaginative geography, Cairo is her global north, her centre in Wallerstein’s sense, and Sudan is the “periphery” (37) — a locus of less complex economic and cultural activity. Since being a woman already marginalizes her in a patriarchal nation, the further displacement to the periphery makes her feel all the more disempowered. Waheeba, by contrast, has never left Sudan and, being illiterate in the 1950s, is not exposed to media that can provide her with ideas of a greater geography. When she asks her husband, Mahmoud, if Cambridge is in Egypt and whether England is further away than Egypt, he is angered at her display of “decay and ignorance” and her embodiment of the “stagnant past” (46). In the interactions between the two wives in the small spaces of the Abuzeid palace, the regional accumulation of power in the north is interrogated at scale.

Aboulela’s microcosm of the Sahel in the Abouzeid home is an innovative spatial instance of a familiar trope in African literature, in which a domestic plot manifests as national allegory. ⁷ In Aboulela’s writing, the allegory becomes spatial as the Abuzeid palace represents the Sahel, with the co-wives’ wings representing the regional roles of Egypt and Sudan. Examples of other works that engage the trope of national allegory include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1969), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965), and later texts such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2004). Small spaces such as the domicile can employ the mechanism of scale to represent and interrogate large spaces. Scale is commonly understood as the size of a space or place in relation to other spaces or places. As “the new postcolonial nation is a historically male constructed space” (Boehmer, 2004: 22), scale allows for the penetration of patriarchy within smaller spaces situated within the nation. In some scenarios, the nation at scale may create opportunities for resistance to patriarchal nationalism. For example, in The Nation Writ Small (2010), Susan Andrade illuminates a “writing back” to patriarchal nationalism as represented by male African writers. Andrade argues that the narrative of African nationalism is overwhelmingly male; women’s stories are decentralized and disregarded, despite the fact that nationhood is inextricably connected with the domestic spaces within which women typically operate. In Lyrics Alley, however, the small spaces of the Abuzeid home bring into conflict the patriarchal systems of power from both Egyptian and Sudanese contexts, and the mechanism of scale allows Nabilah and Waheeba to wield patriarchal power in small spaces.

African women in domestic space

Anglo-American scholarship generally approaches the domicile as a private space associated with womanhood and private sphere activities. However, the strict division between public and private fails when applied to well-defined, subject-centred contexts. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose argue that the division between the private as the “domestic haven of feminine grace” and the public as the “arena of aggressive masculine competition” is based on a conception of space as transparent (1994: 3–4). As such objectivity cannot be achieved, this paradigm has an implied subject that is “white, middle-class, masculine, and heterosexual” (1994: 4). Although fallacious cultural translation is a common problem when it comes to the application of Eurocentric discourses in reading African literatures, it also arises when African theoretical paradigms do not make sufficient allowance for difference and particularity. For the study of African women’s domestic spaces, there is a range of African feminist discourses to employ, including womanism, nego-feminism, stiwanism, Umoja, and motherism, yet none of these paradigms produce suitable readings of the Abuzeid palace. As Naomi Nkealah notes in both “Internal and External Crises Africa’s Feminism: Learning from Oral Narratives” (2016a) and “(West) African Feminisms and Their Challenges” (2016b), the insider/outsider logic of African feminisms leaves little room for diasporic, queer, and other divergent African identities. Similarly, Shirin Edwin evaluates various Islamic and African feminist paradigms to aid in her study of Islamic feminisms in northern Nigerian contexts, and finds none that take into account the particularities of African Islamic households (2016). To combat the problem of essentializing discourses, Adrienne Rich advises that theoretical paradigms be enriched with a “politics of location” that foregrounds the subject’s historical, geographical, and political position, and thereby the specificity of their experiential reality (1985: 210). As the Abuzeid home brings globalized Egyptian culture into contact with Islamic Sudanese conservatism, a detailed contextual approach is particularly important with regards to unpacking domestic space.

The complexity of the Abuzeid palace is already evident in its obvious incommensurability with dominant Anglo-American scholarly readings of the domestic as private space. In Lyrics Alley, Waheeba’s wing of the palace is ruled by Sudanese Islamic custom. Shampa Mazumdar and Sanjoy Mazumdar (2001) unpack the contextual division of the public and private in Islamic cultures. They argue that, while the home remains equated with the “private world of women”, and “the neighbourhood with the public domain of men”, private and public spaces are more accurately defined by their occupants (2001: 303). Interaction with members of the “opposite” sex is only allowed with siblings or parents. With the rest of the members of the opposite sex, with whom marriage is possible, interaction between men and women is restricted (2001: 304). Places are thus not inherently public or private according to their purpose but defined by their occupants at a moment in time. In the Arab-Islamic household, women are therefore often secluded from the outside world as well as from certain parts of the home. In Lyrics Alley, gendered spatial division manifests in the wives’ differing levels of access to various spaces. Whereas Nabilah travels around Cairo on her own to experience her favourite parts of the city, Waheeba, the bastion of Sudanese Arab-Islamic conservatism, remains in the Abuzeid saraya in Umdurman. Waheeba’s public space shrinks and grows depending on who enters which part of the house at any time.

Due to these different spatial idiosyncrasies of the Abuzeid home, the domestic space is divided according to gender as well as culturally specific polygynous domestic management. As a result of this, much of the interaction in the Abuzeid home is significantly homosocial. Homes influenced by Arab-Islamic tradition and those influenced by indigenous African tradition are both at least potentially polygamous, but polygamy is not inherently positive or negative. Like relationships between female siblings or friends, the relationships between co-wives can be either affirmative or oppressive homosocial relationships. Sociologist Merl Storr notes that “homosociality” commonly refers to “social relationships between members of the same sex” which are “non-sexual”, usually in male social contexts (2003: 39). The term was popularized by Jean Lipman-Blumen and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in sociology and cultural studies respectively (Storr, 2003: 40). Precious few critics, exceptions include Meredith Goldsmith (2010) and Katharine Binhammer (2006), have taken strides in applying the concept to literary analysis. There are three broad configurations of influence in homosocial relationships: women who further the interests of other women; women who appear to further the interests of other women, but in fact do not challenge the status quo; and women’s homosocial interactions that further the interests of men. The focus of this essay is on the final configuration. Patriarchal femininity in Lyrics Alley is executed in homosocial interactions that further the interests of men, and may actively counteract the interests of women. Although homosociality is not explicitly studied in African literature, relationships between women are nevertheless explored through lenses of kinship and friendship. According to Obioma Nnaemeka, African women writers often portray “the affirming and empowering friendship between women inside and outside of marriage” (1997: 170). Laura Dubek argues that in Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter, protagonist Ramatoulaye’s friendship with Aissatou provides the “emotional and material support each needs to define and assert themselves in a patriarchal society that encourages women to view each other as rivals for the attention and protection of men” (2001: 215). There is thus an expectation that women form a bond of solidarity when they occupy the same small spaces, thereby offering resistance to the oppressive forces in their context. However, as my findings will show, many small spaces, such as those in the Abuzeid home, construct relationships between women that are oppressive.

Although the patriarchal woman and homosocial relationships are not familiar terms in scholarship of African literature, there is precedent for the study of destructive women’s relationships in the field. Vuyiswa Ndabayakhe and Catherine Addison (2008) counter Nnaemeka’s assertion that co-wives can develop liberating homosocial relationships. In studying representations of polygamous marriages in a range of African fiction, the authors determine that positive relationships between co-wives are usually either absent or the inverse: co-wives often traumatize and oppress one another. As evidence, they cite homosocial relationships between co-wives in works including Es’kia Mphahlele’s Chirundu (1979), Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1976), Mariama Bâ’s Scarlet Song (1981), Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story (1991), and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1980). Positive relationships between co-wives are usually only present in the works of male authors, such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Onuora Nzekwu’s Highlife for Lizards (1965), but it should also be noted that these texts are set in largely precolonial villages outside of the influence of cultural transformation and urbanization. Dubek also offers views of oppressive and damaging female homosocial relationships in her study of The Joys of Motherhood and Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1981) and Scarlet Song. She shows that “while all women suffer in differing degrees from various forms of sexist oppression, racism and classism are evils often perpetuated by women, against women” (2001: 220). Although they do not term it as such, and do not acknowledge the existence of patriarchal women, the analyses provided by Dubek and Ndabayakhe and Addison are examples of female homosocial interactions that do not further the interests of women. In my study of the spatial construction of patriarchal femininities in Lyrics Alley, I focus only on homosocial domestic spaces and hegemonic femininities that are patriarchal. I thus use the term “patriarchal women”, which may appear paradoxical, to denote women who depend on a patriarchal system for their power. Where I refer to such women as “patriarchs by proxy”, I am alluding to the fact that they are performing the functions of a patriarch in the household by oppressing other women using patriarchal discourses. Matriarchs, on the other hand, have an authority that is rooted in their femininity rather than borrowed in spite of it. Although it is impossible to make generalized statements regarding the motivations of patriarchal women, their existence is arguably predicated on patriarchal contexts. Patriarchal space can thus construct patriarchal women, and enable them to oppress other women. ⁸

Waheeba and Nabilah’s homosocial interactions in the Abuzeid home also participate in nationalist patriarchal discourses that dominate domestic life at scale. Partha Chatterjee reads the intersection between gender and national identity through the lens of the gendered division between the public and private spheres, which he discusses as “the world” and “the home” (1986: 233). Where the nation is gendered male in political, economic, and other “worldly” discourses, the “interior” nation — the place of home, belonging and cohesion — is gendered female (1986: 233). Although this is a familiar trope in colonial narratives, where the nation-as-female was internally conquered and externally defended by male imperialists (Blunt and Rose, 1994: 10; Garuba, 2002: 87), Chatterjee also sees this as characteristic of postcolonial nation-states in their search for identity after and against colonialism. In problematizing the relationship between feminist and nationalist projects, R. Radhakrishnan (1992) and Elleke Boehmer (2004) both build on Chatterjee’s argument to assert that in postcolonial nations, where men drive the nationalist narrative in the external, political world, women are the “ahistorical signifier[s] of ‘interiority’” (Chatterjee, 1986: 84), where they act as “symbols or totems, as the bearers of tradition” (Boehmer, 2004: 22).

Aboulela reproduces and destabilizes gendered nationalist rhetoric in the socio-spatial construction of the femininities in Lyrics Alley. Nabilah, the globalized, travelling wife who has access to the global north, uses male power to belittle and disadvantage Waheeba, as the insular Sudanese wife who knows little of the world outside of the Abuzeid home. For example, when Waheeba’s son Nur is paralysed, Mahmoud invites Nabilah to travel to London with him to help care for Nur, as Nabilah is more accustomed to the external, male world. Rather than proposing that Waheeba as the mother of the injured boy travels to London instead, Nabilah only mentions to Mahmoud that Waheeba might “take offense” (144). By implying that Waheeba’s possible dissent is a matter of Waheeba’s pride rather than the despair of a grieving mother, Nabilah portrays her co-wife as proud and unaccepting of her husband’s will, which increases Mahmoud’s ire with Waheeba. Nabilah’s agenda is to amass more power for herself, here in the form of access to the global north, by choosing to speak negatively of her co-wife rather than to help her. Through the lens of Radhakrishnan’s characterization of the gendered inside/outside logic of patriarchal nationhood, Waheeba is the stagnant, female Sudanese interior, and Nabilah participates in the progressive, male exterior — Mahmoud’s future in a larger, globalized world. Nabilah is complicit in Mahmoud’s patriarchal control over Waheeba’s access to London and her injured child, and smiles at the knowledge that she has bested her co-wife (144).

This inside/outside logic of patriarchal nationalism is also represented at scale in the Abuzeid home by the fact that Nabilah, who in this context is the participant in globalized patriarchal nationalism, traverses Omdurman with her driver, walks in the gardens, and even visits Waheeba’s hoash (an open-roofed living space with traditional beds arranged in a rectangle as seating). Waheeba, the insular Sudanese wife, is never written in a context beyond her own hoash or Mahmoud’s private quarters. She only leaves the palace once in the novel, to pay a brief visit Nur in the hospital, and the journey is traumatic and confusing to her. Waheeba’s shortlived travels only serve to solidify her role as a symbol of the stagnant totem or Sudanese nationalist interior — the audience of history.

Of Angharaibs: The small place as the female patriarch’s weapon in Lyrics Alley

Nabilah considers the Sudanese domestic spatial arrangement of “angharaibs made of rope being the only furniture in a room, the intimacy and privacy of a bed laid out for public eyes and use” to be “a sign of primitiveness” (25). As earlier introduced, Nabilah’s disgust with Sudanese national space is primarily traced on her view of and interactions with Waheeba’s domestic space. She considers the Sudanese women to be primitive, unattractive, and crude (33). Nabilah transforms her own wing of the palace into a place she considers to be homely, that is, modern and elegant. Sudan — as Nabilah’s Conradian Congo — is empty for her until she assigns meaning to it. For her, meaningful place is Egyptian, so her process of what Tim Cresswell calls “place-making” (2004: 7) is the creation of an Egyptian microcosm:

Instead of a hoash, there was a shaded terrace with a wicker table and chairs where, in winter, she could sit and enjoy her afternoon tea, while watching Ferial ride her tricycle and Farouk kick a ball in the garden. Instead of the traditional beds lining the four walls of the sitting room, she had spacious armchairs, a settee, and, in pride of place, her gramophone. It was a proper room, a room to be proud of. (25)

Nabilah describes each element of her home in relation to its Sudanese other, thereby implying that Sudanese customs are primitive and her own are modern in relation. ⁹ In the foreign context of Sudan, Nabilah relies on her home to construct her femininity as hegemonic in conformance with Egyptian modernity. In Waheeba’s hoash, Nabilah notices with disdain the Sudanese spatial traits that she despises, and judges her co-wife to be accordingly primitive and “inferior” (171). Nabilah’s disdain for Sudan is projected onto Waheeba’s home, but the home itself appears to reject Nabilah’s Egyptian femininity as well. Waheeba and her female companions consider Nabilah to be lacking as a Sudanese wife; in relation to their patriarchally constructed definition of ideal Sudanese femininity, they reject Nabilah as a good partner for Mahmoud. She does not know how to massage her husband when he is ill (32), she fails to pay Waheeba the respect she deserves as the senior wife, and nor does she perform her duty of creating strong family bonds (176). When Waheeba and her women kin and companions confront Nabilah on her inability to meet these expectations as a wife, Nabilah leaves Waheeba’s quarters — physically rejecting the woman’s defence of Sudanese patriarchal custom. However, the very architecture of Waheeba’s wing of the palace undermines its Egyptian visitor. The high heels of Nabilah’s modern shoes cannot find solid purchase on Waheeba’s uneven earth floor (176). Consequently, Nabilah’s dramatic exit is humiliating, as she “totter[s]” inelegantly from the hoash (176). The space that Nabilah utilizes in her judgement of her co-wife as inferior is granted agency: it supports Waheeba’s defence of Sudanese patriarchal definitions of womanhood.

As with the co-wives’ domestic spaces, Aboulela also maps national culture onto the female characters’ bodies. In Lyrics Alley, bodies are a key place for the exercise and expression of national power and culture. As a home to her identity, a woman’s body can also be the site of patriarchal hegemonic femininity, which often manifests through body modification and specific sartorial requirements. Nabilah’s slim figure is dressed in clothes “modelled on the latest European fashions”, and her posture that of a “cinema star” (9). Meanwhile Waheeba represents Sudanese hegemonic femininity: she is “swathed” in her tobe, wears her hair in “traditional tight braids close to the head”, does not wear makeup, bears “tribal scars on her cheeks” (31), and has a full figure. Simidele Dosekun notes that women’s bodies are prime loci for the exercise of patriarchal power as they are “figured as symbols/embodiments of the moral standing of community, family and nation, yet simultaneously as morally weak and polluting; that women are constructed as the guardians of ‘tradition’” (2016: 2). Nabilah and Waheeba literally embody their respective national spaces. As a result, the female body is a central site of conflict that both Nabilah and Waheeba exploit in an attempt to exercise patriarchal control over one another.

This interrogation of Sudanese femininity and its relation to the global north also takes place at the site of Soraya’s body. As the niece of both Waheeba and Nabilah, Soraya looks for a female role model among her uncle’s wives in the absence of her own deceased mother. Soraya rejects the conservative Sudanese femininity that her sisters Fatma and Halima model for her. Instead, Soraya spends hours visiting Nabilah, the archetypical “Egyptian city lady” that is “everything that Soraya consider[s] modern”, to stare at the wedding photographs, flowers, ornaments, gramophone, and books and magazines in Nabilah’s home (9). She also admires Nabilah’s attire, appearance, posture, and manners (9). Despite Soraya’s longing to be just like Nabilah, Nabilah expresses her distaste regarding the Sudanese girl’s “sloppy” and “slouching” posture, and is frustrated by Soraya’s poor manners (25). Soraya’s sister Fatma, on the other hand, chastises her for wearing spectacles against her father’s wishes, demonstrating that Soraya’s need for an education is secondary to her duty to obey her father (155). In Soraya’s chaotic attempt to avoid a new arranged marriage and obtain a tertiary education in direct conflict with her father’s desires, she develops a naïve view of Nabilah’s Egyptian femininity as providing a measure of freedom from Sudanese patriarchy. She conflates Egyptian femininity with resistance to patriarchy due to her lack of knowledge of the particularities of Anglo-Egyptian systems of patriarchal power. To Nabilah, Soraya is too “sloppy” and Sudanese, but for the Sudanese women, Soraya commits the sin of challenging the Sudanese patriarchy. Soraya’s character represents a new generation of women who are coming to terms with the cultural shifts brought about by Sudan’s impending independence from Egypt.

The narratives of Waheeba, Nabilah, and Soraya to varying degrees participate in the nuanced interrogation of Arab-Islamic patriarchy that Aboulela performs in her work. To illustrate this aspect of her writing, in “Home as Love: Transcending Positionality in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator”, Ghadir K. Zannoun (2019) argues that Aboulela uses emotional discourse to construct a “double critique of both Arab society’s patriarchy and hegemonic place-based notions, such as difference and culture” (1). Aboulela reveals the complexities of geo-cultural constructions of power and identity in Soraya’s attempts and failure to mimic Nabilah’s patriarchal Egyptian femininity from her position within a Sudanese household, as well as within the new generation of educated young women in the soon to be independent Sudan. Cultural identity and Arab-Islamic patriarchy are further foregrounded by Nabilah and Waheeba’s patriarchal nationalist femininities as produced by their location within their own and each other’s domestic, urban and national spaces.

In Lyrics Alley, the most extreme manifestation of patriarchal nationalism on the female body occurs when the more insularly-minded Waheeba performs a female genital excision on her granddaughter Zeinab as well Nabilah’s daughter Ferial, against Nabilah and Mahmoud’s wishes. With the act of genital excision, Waheeba maps traditional, patriarchal Sudanese culture on Ferial and Zeinab’s bodies. The events are focalized by Nabilah, who is learning of the incident from her childminder:

While Nabilah was at the airport, Ferial was lured over to Waheeba’s quarters. She was told that Zeinab was having a party and that there would be sweets and many girls her age to play with. Indeed, it was a celebration of sorts for Zeinab, though it was kept low-key because Mahmoud had forbidden circumcision in his household since the procedure was declared illegal by the Anglo-Egyptian government. Clearly, his authority had been overridden by Waheeba, who insisted that her granddaughter [Zeinab] must follow tradition. (186; emphasis in original)

Waheeba uses her proximity to Nabilah in the shared Abuzeid space to gain enough knowledge to plan her granddaughter’s genital excision so as to coincide with Nabilah’s trip to the airport. She takes advantage of her proximity to her co-wife’s space to become acquainted with Nabilah’s movements and ensure her absence in the home. She does so in spite of the fact two systems of patriarchal authority — that of the Anglo-Egyptian government as well as of her husband — had forbidden the practice. Instead, she accepts only Sudanese patriarchal custom as true authority, and acts as the Sudanese patriarch by proxy. Waheeba is only able to do so by virtue of her own and Nabilah’s shared domestic space. In taking advantage of her status as Nabilah’s co-wife, Waheeba is able to access Ferial by virtue of proximity. She also violates Nabilah’s safety and privacy, manifested in her wing of the home, by mutilating Ferial’s body.

Through Waheeba’s patriarchal wielding of domestic space, Sudanese national culture is inscribed on Ferial’s body not only through the excision procedure, but also through the marks that her feet bear as a result of violent contact with the space — the child’s feet are injured when the pain of the procedure causes her to strain against the ropes of the bed on which she is laid. This is a result of Waheeba’s use of an aspect of her domestic space that Nabilah criticizes as a symbol of Sudanese primitiveness — the traditional rope bed — as an apparatus that assists in the excision procedure:

Waheeba held down [Ferial’s] upper body while her heels were tucked through the bed so that she wouldn’t kick the midwife. That was why there were now marks on her feet from the ropes that made up the base of the angharaib. (188)

Consequently, although Nabilah vacates the palace and returns to Egypt with Ferial, sharing a domestic space with Waheeba has forever scarred Ferial’s body — her Sudanese heritage will remain with her in Egypt. Allegorically, Ferial’s excision highlights the fact that Nabilah and her family are located in Sudanese territory. Although the Anglo-Egyptian government prohibits female genital excision and Sudan remains governed by its laws, Sudan is approaching independence and is strengthening its national identity. Although Nabilah rules the palace as Mahmoud’s preferred wife, the palace remains located within Sudan under Sudanese patriarchal rule. Waheeba’s act is therefore an assertion of patriarchal national identity at a time of political upheaval. She inscribes Sudanese patriarchal national identity on the most intimate small place that is Ferial’s body:

Waheeba herself had held the girls down one by one, gripping their knees apart. The deed was done and the procedure was irreversible. The slice of a knife, the tug and cutting away of flesh, and Ferial was someone else, one of them. She could never be like her mother again. (186)

This paragraph, also focalized by Nabilah, indicates the effect that Ferial’s excision has on her mother’s view of Ferial. Nabilah now sees Ferial as “one of them” — a Sudanese other. Nabilah carefully raised Ferial with Egyptian manners and appearances, and the girl’s fair skin, straight hair, and Cairene accent marked her as such. Waheeba, as a patriarchal woman, maps the national space onto the microspace of Ferial’s body, turning her into a mirror of Sudanese state authority and alienating her from her Egyptian mother. In Nabilah’s geo-ethnic paradigm, her daughter is doomed to a future of primitivism and ignorance.

Despite having agreed to the marriage that her mother arranged with Mahmoud, Nabilah blames her mother for Ferial’s genital excision in a dramatic confrontation: “‘Look, Mama,’ she said, swiping down Ferial’s underpants to the utmost confusion and bewilderment of the child. ‘Look what marrying me off to this retarded Sudanese has done to my daughter!’” (275). The vivid, emotive description of Nabilah’s revelation mirrors Aboulela’s visceral portrayal of the excision act. Aboulela describes the “slice of a knife, the tug and cutting away of flesh” and the girls’ related injuries in detail (186). These images evoke Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the grotesque as outlined in Rabelais and His World (1984), where the body acts as a mechanism for the subversion of authority by engaging the taboo. Achille Mbembe argues that in postcolonial contexts, the grotesque body can be read as an allegory of the enactment of state power (2001: 106). The use of the body as allegory demonstrates the dependency of state power on access to and control of the body, as well as the potential for the body to act as a site of revolt and resistance (106). Corinne Sandwith observes that the body as allegory of state authority can often be found in African texts where the family structure mirrors state authority, and “the violence of the domestic sphere and the violence of the state are rendered as reciprocal and mutually illuminating” (2016: 103).

Although Sudanese authority is not depicted as violent, the patriarchal structures of the state nevertheless penetrate the Abuzeid household, which, in turn, shapes Waheeba’s geo-ethnic hegemonic femininity. Both Waheeba’s need for revenge and her execution thereof are produced by patriarchal space. Her actions are motivated by the domestic patriarchal system that constructs her relationship with Nabilah as competitive. Waheeba’s position as the senior wife, and thereby her security, is compromised by the fact that Mahmoud only lives in Nabilah’s space. Waheeba also uses the national patriarchal context of Sudan to justify performing the excision. The procedure is described in visceral terms such as “gripped”, “slice”, “tug” and “cutting”, and the image of Waheeba physically holding the girls down casts her as a violent, oppressive figure. Ferial’s body as space is used as a tool in Waheeba’s patriarchal oppression of Ferial and Nabilah. Finally, Waheeba also leverages her proximity to Nabilah’s quarters to access Ferial in order to execute her plan. Whereas Nabilah holds a position of patriarchal power earlier in the text, Waheeba too exploits patriarchal norms to oppress her co-wife when the opportunity arises. Just as it does not attach to a particular gender, patriarchy also does not attach to either traditional or modern femininities or a particular character. Instead, it is produced by the power dynamics within and between specific places.

After her climactic encounter with Waheeba, Nabilah leaves Sudan and the toxic environment within the Abouzeid palace. She moves in with her mother in Cairo, never to reunite to return to Sudan. Here she gradually comes to resent and neglect her and Mahmoud’s children who only serve to remind her of Sudan and her former role as a Sudanese wife. She does, however, experience a brief moment of regret when is visited by Soraya, who has married a “progressive” husband that was “educated in Britain” (285). Soraya finally has the white wedding she had come to admire in the photographs in Nabilah’s home. In Nabilah’s absence, she asks the family’s “Egyptian and European friends” to help her organize the wedding (284). Nabilah is flattered by the admiration, and regrets not connecting with Soraya when she was younger due to Nabilah’s own “prejudices” about Soraya’s “unpolished manners, the fact that she did not address Nabilah formally and wore a tobe and chewed gum and laughed at the children” (286). Nabilah cries at the lost opportunity, as she could have been a “champion of progress” for women like Soraya in Sudan (286). However, it is clear from Soraya’s visit that despite her naive and hyperbolic idolization of Nabilah’s modern Egyptian femininity, and her incorrect assumption that it would lead her toward freedom from patriarchal oppression, she had still managed to evade much of both Nabilah and the Sudanese women’s patriarchal influence. During Soraya’s visit, Nabilah vaguely wonders whether it is appropriate for a young woman to separate from her husband during their honeymoon, but Soraya is comfortable and unhurried (285). Despite Soraya’s misguided idolization of Nabilah as a progressive woman who will lead her to freedom from patriarchal oppression, Soraya has not replicated Nabilah’s Egyptian patriarchal femininity. Although Soraya was largely shaped in the homes of her sisters Fatma and Halima and her aunts Waheeba and Nabilah, she crafts her own femininity in response to her university space and the emerging independent Sudan.

Conclusion

In Spatiality, Tally summarizes the spatiality of literature in its capacity to offer a “situating reference by which [readers] can orient themselves and understand the world in which they live” (2013: 2). Literature can also transport spaces and places by helping readers “get a sense of the worlds in which others have lived, currently live, or will live in times to come” (2013: 2). Lyrics Alley provides literary space as a tool for socio-geographical inquiry to determine how space can construct patriarchal women who oppress other women in homosocial contexts. Both Nabilah and Waheeba act as patriarchs by proxy in the Abuzeid home. Nabilah as female patriarch is produced by transnational spatial dynamics as well as the palace as a microcosm of these. She also uses space in her oppression of Waheeba by participating in this co-wife’s seclusion in the palace, and condemning Waheeba’s home and body as sites of inferior femininity. Waheeba reveals her own patriarchal behaviour when her homosocial circle of women reject Nabilah’s non-conformance with the patriarchal requirements of Sudanese womanhood, a fact which manifests in the way Waheeba’s space ejects Nabilah. Waheeba also utilizes the body-as-home as a mechanism of patriarchal oppression, and writes patriarchal Sudanese nationalism onto Ferial’s body in an act of female genital excision. The excision mobilizes Ferial’s body as Waheeba’s weapon against Nabilah, which drives Nabilah from the home and the country. These examples suggest that patriarchal femininity is produced by neither traditional, insular femininity nor modern, globalized femininity; it is shaped by and executed through small space. Women’s spaces are thus not inherently resistant to patriarchal penetration. This enquiry may aid in developing more critical approaches to studying women’s spaces, thus exposing those that are oppressive and creating new opportunities for truly emancipatory and resistant women’s spaces.