From darkness to faith: Muslim afterlife of Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret

Abstract

In the years following the publication of her debut novel The Translator (1999), Sudanese author Leila Aboulela has emerged as a renowned figure of British Muslim fiction. Scholarly efforts to situate Aboulela’s fiction within broader literary circles have often focused on the influence of prominent figures from Arab and African literatures. While these authors have undoubtedly influenced Aboulela’s literary vision, there is a notable yet underexplored influence of a Western female author whose work profoundly informs Aboulela’s oeuvre. Jean Rhys – whom Aboulela has described as a ‘haunting’ presence – casts a significant shadow over her fiction, particularly her novel Minaret. Juxtaposing the narratives of exile, dislocation, alienation and unbelonging in both novels, this study lays bare how Aboulela transforms Anna’s voyage in the darkness as a young Creole woman in England, to a story of Najwa’s finding light in the embrace of Islam as she negotiates loss, identity, faith and a sense of belonging in a secular Western society. Through such narrative reframing, Aboulela both foregrounds the gendered experience of dislocation as a shared narrative terrain, and also inscribes Muslim subjectivity into the landscape of contemporary British fiction.