Where the Heart Is: The Concept of “Home” in Leila Aboulela’s Short Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In most of her works, Leila Aboulela focuses on Sudanese characters in the diaspora. Her protagonists are usually young Sudanese migrants who had left home in search of a better life abroad, or to escape a desperate reality at home. In this journey, they live in a constant state of exile: the new abode fails to become home, and they are left existing in a state of suspension between the new reality and a past they are emotionally and spiritually stuck in. This paper tackles the concept of home in its actual and virtual manifestations through the lives of her short stories protagonists, their quest for one’s identity and keeping (or losing) it when confronting the other. The female characters are found to be more solid than their male counterparts in their nostalgia and attachment to the original home and its values. This enabled them to keep the fabric of their identity intact. When confronting the other, or when engaging in a relationship, “things do not fall apart” in this encounter. In fact, the other has to compromise to be accepted. This contrasts with the male characters, who are easily assimilated in the new environment, but not without a faint sense of guilt and a fair share of self-deception.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".