love story

this is a paper, written in response to leila aboulela's the translator. my professor apparently liked it so much she read it aloud to my class. so i figured since half the world has alread heard it i might as well put it up here.



The translator, they call her. And what does she translate? Arabic into English, home into exile, love into guilt. She is a wanderer trapped in a series of exiles, prisons of guilt wherever she is.

I found the book strange, the characters different than the usual. There were no abusive fathers, no raging husbands, only Sammar and her guilt, of a husband whose death is somehow her fault and a son she can't love because of the pain he brings her.

This is a love story, of a woman who falls in love with a foreigner, in a time and place where she is a foreigner. In a sort of guilty, naive way, I loved that it was happy, that they ended up together. I read those pages time after time. But more than a love story, it was a story of religion, of rules and cultures and lines in the sand. I don't understand the end, I don't understand Rae's sudden conversion... it didn't make sense to me. It would have made sense to me that he converted for her, because he loved her, but it seemed like he was serious about it. And i didn't believe him. I was conflicted- wanting desperately for them to be together, for a happy ending just this once, but also wanting them to rebel, wanting them to break the mold of their cultures and love each other anyway. I wanted her to love him regardless, to accept him with his doubts and his thoughts and his wonderings. I wanted him to refuse the black and white terms of her question, to tell her that he was searching for god and for truth and that he loved her, and that that should be enough. I wanted that to be enough. I wanted their relationship to be love and truth and acceptance and mistakes and doubts, something human. And his conversion, her insistence upon it, his bending to her, seemed unreal to me, fake.

And I wish, in Islam, as I wish in all religions, that we could accept each other, and our questions and our doubts and our wanderings. I wish that religion would let us be human, with mistakes, with forgiveness, with trial and error, with searching. I wish the terms didn't have to be so black and white, heaven and hell, saved or not. People are complex, people are piles of questions, I don’t think I could ever explain what it is to be human in words. And how, how do we presume to describe any sort of real or imagined god, with our language, in our words, how do we presume to think that any god worth thinking about could ever fit in a book? I didn't want Rae to convert, I didn't want Sammar to back down on her principles, I wanted them to form a new religion, their own religion, a human religion—of everything they both clearly believe in, without a name. I am tired of everything having a name.

I feel like I shouldn’t be writing this. It is her religion, now their religion, and I have no right to question it, but this is how I feel. There are so many lines, so many boxes and we are all stored in an attic, in the box labeled Muslim or Christian or whatever else we call ourselves. And it’s not my place to say that any of that is wrong, I would never presume to do so. But I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that we fit into boxes, and I don’t believe that God does. And I understand Sammar; I understand devotion and I understand her religious and cultural principles. But I don’t understand the labels, the ultimatums, the black and white of it all. All she requires of him is that he takes her label, her name—can’t he believe in the principles that she does without having to say the same words in the same language that she does? That world is not my world; I guess it’s just something I have to accept.

I believe in things. I believe in right and wrong, I believe in choices. I just can’t believe that everything has to have a name.