Female agency in Aboulela’s Minaret and River Spirit
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Abstract
This study examines the evolution of female agency in Leila Aboulela’s novels Minaret (2005) and River Spirit (2023) through a comparative reading of her protagonist Najwa in Minaret with Akuany (Zamzam) in the later novel. It explores how Aboulela constructs women’s empowerment across diverse cultural, temporal, and social alienating contexts. Her protagonists’ transformation shifts from a private spiritual sphere to more historically oriented form of resilience. Drawing on an intersectional postcolonial feminist framework, particularly the work of Gayatri Spivak, Saba Mahmood, and Saidiya Hartman, further expands the understanding of this development in Aboulela’s literary oeuvre. Her exploration of Muslim and African female agency moves from individual ethical self-formation towards a more expansive engagement with anticolonial history and political struggle. Aboulela depicts how women’s strategies of survival are shaped by overlapping systems of oppression such as colonialism, gender, patriarchy, and enslavement. In so doing, this study contributes to Aboulela scholarship by reading her female characters, Najwa and Akuany, across diasporic and historical contexts, tracing how this shift enables her to recover forms of agency that have been silenced and marginalized within diasporic, imperial, and patriarchal discourse.
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