Migration and Its Discontents: Study of Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons

Abstract

Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela has caught the attention of researchers and media people alike, for differing reasons, though there are a few common perspectives too among them. Their most common perspective is looking at the novel as an immigrant bildungsroman where the childlike immigrants come of age and try to assimilate themselves in a culture in which the hosts are generally hostile to their presence in their midst. The present study is a reading of Bird Summons from a postcolonial perspective. The research method employed was close reading of the text, and the objective of the present study was to interpret the selected text in view of the fictional representation of Muslim Arab diaspora, particularly in the UK. The finding of the research is that the plot, theme, and the narrative point of the novel are a veiled representation of migrants’ discontents with their condition in the new land, their loss of identity, and the issues they face in a foreign land, leaving everything behind, some of them even burning the boat, and feeling lost for lack of assimilation in the new society. The culturally shocked and emotionally unsettled immigrants then start looking all over thinking where they had gone wrong in their decision-making that they have to face such hardships, looking for similarities and differences in the two cultural milieus – the home culture and the host culture – and then learning to unlearn their own language. They realize that it is only the death of their birth identity which can redeem them to live a normal life. The significance of the present research lies in its contribution to the understanding of the neo-colonial, hegemonic social structures ever present in an erstwhile colonial centre, and the strategies of adjustment the diaspora population adopts to cope with the ensuing tensions.