Remembering history and historicising memories lie behind Abdulrazak Gurnah’s art, much of which is based on a desire to recuperate the histories of the Swahili Coast or, more specifically, the people of his native Zanzibar. He draws on innovative ways of using memory as a tool for deconstructing historical narratives. The tension between the individual perception of history compared to collective consciousness is played out in Gurnah’s novels. He captures the sense of uprooting that exile etches on those people who are either obliged or voluntarily choose to abandon their homelands. His work has no doubt been greatly inspired by his own experience as an African migrant in 1960s Britain, which filters through the loneliness his characters suffer. Daud in Pilgrim’s Way (1988), the eponymous heroine of Dottie (1990), the narrator of Admiring Silence (1996), Saleh Omar and Latif Mahmud in By the Sea (2001), Rashid in Desertion (2005), and Salim in Gravel Heart (2017), all have first-hand experience of enduring racist attitudes.
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar, then a British colony, in 1948. After a traditional colonial education, he migrated to Britain three years after the 1964 revolution. He studied at Christ Church College, Canterbury, whose degrees were then awarded by the University of London. He lectured at the Bayero University Kano in Nigeria from 1980 to 1982 and was appointed professor at the University of Kent in 2004, where he was based until his retirement. Well established as an academic, a literary critic and a creative writer, and despite the positive reviews his books always obtain, his work has only recently received the critical attention it deserves. No doubt the award of the Nobel prize for literature in 2021 will stimulate further research into Gurnah’s œuvre.
Memory of Departure (1987) narrates a young man’s growth to maturity in a small East African town around the time of the Zanzibari Revolution. Hassan Omar’s memoir commences when he reaches the age of 15, traces his school years, his frustrated attempts to study abroad, his visit to his mother’s affluent brother in Nairobi in search of financial support, his budding romance with his cousin Salma, the betrayal of his uncle’s trust and his return home. The narrative ends with the letter he writes to his cousin Salma, on board ship en route to Madras, where he has found work as a medical orderly – the profession of the protagonist of Gurnah’s second novel, Pilgrim’s Way. In this debut novel, Gurnah introduces many of the issues he will return to in his later work. Two of the concerns that resonate throughout his novels are the heterogeneity of the East African coastal cultures and the excesses of Afrocentricity – illustrated by the immense hatred that the rest of Zanzibar felt towards the people of Arab descent, unleashed by the removal of the common enemy, the British. This critique of the irrational despotism of African nationalist discourses and in particular the post-revolutionary madness of Zanzibar is a constant feature of Gurnah’s later fiction (Gurnah 2001). Moreover, this novel, like most of Gurnah’s writing, is underpinned by Muslim cultural codes as his characters are influenced by the customs, behaviour, and worldviews of the part of East Africa where Islam is the dominant religion (Hand, 2010 & 2015).
Gurnah´s second novel, Pilgrim's Way may well have been inspired by the author´s own experience as a youthful Tanzanian student in late sixties Britain. Daud, who works as a hospital orderly in a thinly disguised Canterbury, home of Gurnah’s own university and great heritage site, incarnates the misrepresented black man, forced to live up to the stereotypes that decades of imperial historiography have burdened him with. He takes his literary vengeance in the endless letters he writes to Catherine, a white student nurse. Gurnah has endowed Daud, as he does many of his subsequent characters, with his own quandary as a writer, as suggested in an essay published in World Literature Today: “I was aware that I would be representing myself to readers who perhaps saw themselves as the normative, free from culture or ethnicity, free from difference” (2004: 28).
Similar racial tensions, questions of belonging, and the making of identity are addressed in Dottie, the story of a young black British girl. Only after a long, painful struggle to bring her family together, find herself a home and a niche in society, does Dottie feel able to trace her own roots. Early in the novel, an elderly black man Dottie frequently saw in the library and had unconsciously idealized as a kind of grandfather figure, dies. The absence of an obituary in the newspaper despite the fact that the man had been an eminent doctor proves that the past histories of Britain’s black population will only be unearthed and retrieved by black people themselves. In Dottie, Gurnah has created a determined young woman – to date this is the only novel to feature a sole female protagonist – who, like Daud, has to come to terms with the distrust and resentment of the white British population of the 1960s.
Paradise (1994), shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, is another bildingsroman; like Memory of Departure, it narrates the coming to maturity of a young boy. This time the novel is set at the turn of the twentieth century with Europeans just beginning to encroach on the East African coast. This is a novel that does not shy from telling the truth about Swahili involvement in the slave trade. Many of Gurnah’s novels, especially Memory of Departure and Paradise, show pre-independence Zanzibar, with its internal strifes and contradictions, to be a far cry from a harmonious, egalitarian Eden. The boy Yusuf is sold into slavery by his father as payment to the rich merchant Aziz. Yusuf comes to understand his position in the hybrid Swahili society where myth, storytelling, and religious identities jostle together. Gurnah has argued that post-colonial writing often falls into the trap of glossing over the fragmentations within indigenous cultures, in its concern to denounce European colonization and extol native resistance (2002). The ironically titled Paradise portrays Africa as a harsh place, both past and present. In Admiring Silence, a Zanzibari man marries an English woman and writes romantic tales of the Africa he remembers. Only when he returns to Zanzibar does he discover uncomfortable truths about his country and himself. As is true of all his novels, Gurnah is particularly interested in rejected characters and the psychological process of the migrant by which they construct their own identity. The Zanzibar that they were all obliged to forsake for educational or political reasons has evolved on its own terms and in no way resembles the country that they have cherished in their imaginations over the years. The reconstitution of traditions and of cultural boundaries is common to practically any culture and one of the strategies employed is through deception and lying. and the nameless narrator of Admiring Silence, together with Saleh Omar of Gurnah’s sixth novel, are possibly Gurnah’s most accomplished liars as they use deception to bridge the gap between form and substance, even though it is a false solution to the problem. The reinvention of the past may downplay the pre-immigrant circumstances, or may serve as cover-up of present ambivalences.
By the Sea begins in 1960 when Saleh Omar, aged thirty-one and the owner of a prosperous furniture business, is befriended by an unscrupulous Persian merchant, Hussein. Omar agrees to loan him a large sum of money, for which he is given a surprising document as security: the deeds to the house of Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, Hussein’s landlord. The merchant had himself loaned a similar sum of money to his landlord the previous year and had received the latter´s house as his security. As Omar suspects, Hussein never returns, and in due course he is obliged to claim repayment of the loan. Rajab Shaaban is enraged by what he sees as Omar´s double dealing. Shaaban’s wife, who is involved in an affair with a minister, orchestrates a campaign to discredit Omar and have him put into prison. He is sent to various detention camps and finally is released in 1979, eleven years later, following an amnesty. He manages to eke out a living in relative peace until Rajab Shaaban’s elder son, Hassan, who had run away with Hussein the merchant thirty years previously, returns determined to claim his father’s house from Omar. The thought of another prison sentence proves too much for the latter, who sees flight from Zanzibar as his only hope. He uses Rajab Shaaban´s birth certificate in order to obtain a passport, as his own had been confiscated. Omar, masquerading as Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, obtains political asylum in Britain and receives a visit from Latif Mahmud, curious about the man who has borrowed his father’s name. The novel ends with the two men, Omar and Mahmud, each coming to terms with the other’s version of their own family history and, by extension, with the conflicting narratives of Zanzibar’s post-revolutionary identity.
Desertion opens with the sensational arrival of the mzungu, Martin Pearce, in a small East African town in 1899, having been abandoned by his Somali guides on the way to the coast. Fate has it that he is found by a dukawallah, Hassanali, who takes him in as common humanity requires. Pearce, who is an amateur historian and linguist, returns to the shop to thank his benefactors for their kindness. The Englishman is captivated by Hassanali’s sister, Rehana, and the first part of the novel ends with a socially frowned upon love affair, that of a European and a “native woman”. Part II leaps forward to the momentous events leading up to Zanzibar’s independence and is centred on the ambitions and frustrations of Amin, Rashid and Farida, the children of two former radical school-teachers. Rashid, who turns out to be the narrator of the novel, busily swots for the entrance examination which will allow him to leave the island and study in a British university. Amin, the perfect son who excels in everything, opts to stay in Zanzibar and train to be a teacher. Fate, in the shape of his dressmaker sister, Farida, brings him in contact with Jamila, the granddaughter of Pearce and Rehana. Parental pressure acts as ruthlessly on Amin as social approval had on Pearce as both men desert their lovers. Part III focuses on Rashid’s life in England far away from the violence and mass slaughters following the overthrow of the new government in Zanzibar. He carves out a new, successful niche for himself, having completed his studies and settled down to academic life with an English wife. It is only when Grace, his wife, finally leaves him that he is drawn to confide in his older brother. Amin, in turn, makes Rashid repository of his most guarded secret, the unravelling of his love affair with Jamila. In the epilogue of the novel, entitled “A Continuation”, Rashid is able to piece all the jigsaw together and confront his own demons on a long overdue return to Zanzibar.
Gurnah’s eighth novel, The Last Gift (2011), reveals the failure of the main male character, Abbas, an elderly migrant Zanzibari now resident in England, to come to terms with a changing sociopolitical landscape together with newly acquired adult responsibilities which leads him to voluntary exile. Now in his sixties, Abbas is suddenly taken ill and the novel unravels his past life and the unexpected family cohesion that his illness and death bring about. In the opening section of the novel, which describes Abbas’s collapse in detail, the reader gradually discovers that he was formerly a merchant navy sailor and that he comes from the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa. As Abbas slowly wastes away in physical terms, he comes to terms with his own murky past and the East African coast is narrowed down to Zanzibar. The degeneration of his physical body - what starts as a diabetic crisis develops into a series of strokes – urges him to “come clean” and tell the truth that he has spent years hiding. As Gurnah has stated in an interview, “Places don’t live just where they are, they live within you” (Nair). On his deathbed, Abbas, who turns out to be the errant father of the narrator of Gurnah’s fifth novel Admiring Silence, discloses his shameful secret of the wife, Sharifa, and unborn child he had abandoned forty-four years previously. Curiously, his wife, Maryam’s attainment of personal agency comes about at the demise of her husband while his disclosure opens up the possibility of his children reclaiming their lost heritage, Zanzibar.
Gravel Heart, Gurnah’s ninth novel, to a certain degree rewrites Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, albeit with a less happy ending. The title of the novel is a direct quotation from Act IV Scene III, in which Duke Vicentio says to the convicted prisoner Bernadine “Unfit to live or die: O gravel heart!”. The reader is invited to decide who Bernadine’s Indoceanic counterpart is. The postcolonial reworking in a Muslim context of the exploitation of women underscores another of Gurnah’s projects, that is to shed light on the plight of women in certain Islamic societies where patriarchy subjects them not only to discursive but also to systematic physical violence.
The theme of displacement lies behind the quest of Salim, a young Zanzibari boy haunted by a family secret that ironically he is only able to unravel while living the life of a migrant in England. The author’s own experience and that of his many fictional characters thus resurfaces in this more complex but gripping narrative that, like many of Gurnah’s previous works, revisits the colonial past of East Africa. The mystery of his parents’ separation is revealed only when Salim is able to talk through the trauma with his father, again underlining the power of storytelling – or revealing unspeakable truths – as therapy. As Salim’s Indian girlfriend Billie says: “You have to talk about the things that cause you pain” (144). Gravel Heart is the author’s earnest plea to understand and forgive human failings by disclosing the corrupt intricacies of public and private life.
Afterlives (2020) is Gurnah’s tenth and his latest novel to date. It continues the narrative of Paradise at the point when Yusuf runs away to join the Schutztruppe as a native soldier, an askari. The lives of four major characters are intertwined in this novel. Khalifa, a Gujerati Muslim, becomes a clerk for the merchant Amur Biashara on the East African coast. Ilyas, kidnapped by an askari and finally sent to a German mission school, befriends Khalifa. Afiya, a young girl, brought up by a family that exploit her as a slave, is the sister of Ilyas, with whom she is finally reunited. The fourth character is Hamza, a young boy who we are told “had volunteered on impulse, fleeing what had seemed intolerable” (52), turns out to be a thinly disguised Yusuf from Paradise who, after undergoing a harsh time with the German army, ends up working for Nassor Biashara, the merchant’s son, and marries Afiya. Despite the neat linking up of the characters, they all undergo individual trials and tribulations, which highlight the changes that occur in their lives – the British replace the German colonial rulers after World War I and finally Tanzania becomes independent. The novelty of this novel is the engagement with the working through of various traumatic experiences and the characters’ resignation to their own ageing process, hence the title. In accordance with most of his previous novels, Gurnah provides the reader with an accurate timeline – in some cases it is the brief mention of a particular year – in others like By the Sea and Afterlives a more elaborate historical chronology is carefully woven through the narrative. The history of the East African coastal societies is thus relived and vitalized.
In Theft (2025), Gurnah’s latest novel to date and the first one penned after the Nobel Prize, he traces the lives of three young characters, Karim, Badar, and Fauzia, as they become adults and come to terms with both love and betrayal and expectations and disappointments in a rapidly changing Tanzania/ Zanzibar. The backdrop of the novel offers a postcolonial critique of rising global influences such as the increase of Western tourism and the dubious advantages of foreign aid. The intriguing title suggests how not just economic wealth, but opportunities, agency and even identities can easily be stolen from innocent victims.
Gurnah’s poised, reflexive prose steadily but unrelentlessly unfolds tales of cruelty and betrayals, failed hopes and disappointments. As he noted in his Nobel Prize Lecture, writing is a task that involves “regrets and grievances [that need] to be drawn out and considered” (2021). His works add more colourful threads to the tapestry of East African history and explore the power of memory and the role it plays in the construction of ourselves and our identities with brushstrokes of humour, pathos and sympathy. Gurnah’s rewriting of East African history “entails […] an acknowledgment of empire as Europe’s expanding shadow and, consequently, a postcolonial reconstruction of the past has to be formulated as a historical narrative embedded in dis-harmony” (Pujolràs-Noguer, 2015: 47). It is safe to say that the havoc wrought by colonialism – German as well as British – forms the backbone of many, if not all, of the novels. Gurnah uses the western secularized space to imagine Muslim identity on his own terms as, despite the focus on transnational human values such as kindness and generosity, his work needs to be read with its Muslim heritage in view. His narratives focus on Muslim men and their search for a new kind of masculinity while his women characters create for themselves new and highly contingent subject positions. Gurnah is thus a writer concerned with the evolution of gender categories and calls for new configurations of spaces in multiethnic, multicultural societies such as his native East Africa and contemporary Britain.
Works Cited
Branach-Kallas, Anna. “Askari, Colonial Encounters, and Postcolonial War Commemoration in Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 58, no. 4, 2022, pp. 468–81.
Datta, Sreya Mallika. “Swahili Transmodernity and the Indian Ocean: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Ethic of Community in By the Sea, Desertion, and Gravel Heart.” Postcolonial Text, vol. 14, no. 3 & 4, 2019.
Deckard, Sharae. “Paradise Rejected: Abdulrazak Gurnah and the Swahili World.” Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden, Routledge, 2014, pp. 104-30.
Gurnah, Abdulrazak. “An Idea of the Past.” Moving Worlds, vol. 2, no. 2, 2002. Reprinted in A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader, edited by Suman Gupta and David Johnson, Routledge, 2005, pp. 289-92.
---. “Fear and Loathing.” The Guardian, 22 May 2001.
---. “Writing Place.” World Literature Today, vol. 78, no. 2, May–Aug. 2004, pp. 26-28. Reprinted 8 Dec. 2021.
---. Nobel Prize lecture. NobelPrize.org, Nobel Prize Outreach AB, 2021.
Hand, Felicity. “Untangling Stories and Healing Rifts: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 41, no. 2, 2010, pp. 74-92.
---. “Searching for New Scripts: Gender Roles in Memory of Departure.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 56, no. 2, 2015, pp. 223-40.
---. “Gurnah’s Men: Rethinking Muslim Masculinities in the Indian Ocean World.” Kritika Kultura, no. 41, 2023, Article 9.
Haq, Mohammad Irfan Ul, and Rasleena Thakur. “A Critical Analysis of the Intersection between Masculinity and Sodomy in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novels.” Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2025, pp. 87-104.
Lavery, Charne. “Abdulrazak Gurnah’s African Ocean.” Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 91-126.
Matheka, Jacinta. “Banishment into Wilderness. The Trauma of Dispossession and Dislocation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart.” RiCOGNIZIONI. Rivista di lingue, letterature e culture moderne, vol. 11, no. 22, 2024, pp. 39-51.
Nair, Vijay. “In Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah.” 2005.
Pujolràs-Noguer, Esther. “Between Memory and Desire: The Historical Novel as a Shadow Genre in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion.” CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, vol. 45, no. 1, 2015, pp. 41-66.
---. “Suspended Paradise: Survival and Storytelling in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives.” Kritika Kultura, no. 41, 2023, Article 10.
---. “Tracing Lines in the Trauma of Displacement: Slavery in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Afterlives.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 138, no. 2, 2023, pp. 381-90.
Saribaş, Serap. “Immigrant Experiences and Silence in Gurnah’s The Last Gift.” Journal of Social, Humanities and Administrative Sciences, vol. 6, no. 32, 2020, pp. 1641-46.
Steiner, Tina, and Maria Olaussen, editors. English Studies in Africa. Critical Perspectives on Abdulrazak Gurnah, vol. 56, no. 1, 2013.
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Citation: Hand, Felicity. "Abdulrazak Gurnah". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 August 2012; last revised 03 October 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11741, accessed 19 September 2026.]
