Minor Literature Between Collective and Individual Voice in Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons (2019)

Abstract

This study aims at probing into the heated debate about whether minor literature deals exclusively with communal concerns or it manifests an individual value. Minor writers discuss various themes related to their transnational identities, belonging issues, displacement, and alienation. However, in recent years, scholars claim that these writers are becoming more comfortable in their host countries. Thus, this comfort appears in the themes they tackle which are more likely to reflect postmigrant realities of individuals’ everyday experiences. In Britain, minority writers have gained an increasing attention for their literary production which showcases skill and creativity. The Arab Muslim British writer Leila Aboulela occupies an important position in the British literary canon. Through her latest novel Bird Summons (2019), this study will investigate whether minor literature is solely a representation of political, collective experiences or it is an individual expression of minority writers. The thesis will deal with collective concerns that Aboulela’s characters express such as, frustrations of displacement, the empowering aspects of Islam, and food as an ethnic solidarity. This study will also explore the individual aspects in the novel embodied in the ambivalence of motherhood and the anxiety of age. The thesis shows that Aboulela is a minority writer whose work reveals the possibility of combining the collective and the individual concerns in minority literature.