Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Author of nine novels and Booker-man prize nominated, Abdulrazak Gurnah is best known for his contribution to postcolonial migration literature. By the Sea (2001), The Last Gift (2011), and Gravel Heart (2017) recount stories of immigration in a realistic fashion. Both the form and content of these characters’ stories of integration into British society fail to challenge the Orientalist stereotypes. These stories, kept at times intact, and at times altered, are based on the characters’ experience of geopolitical issues of their homeland as well as England. According to Rushdie, “[I]t may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity” (Imaginary Homelands), implying that the stories of the past (un)intentionally fade. However, these stories and their audience matter in Gurnah’s fiction, as noted by one of the characters, “I wonder if it could ever be true, […] when you could look around you and have no story to tell” (The Last Gift 213). Based on Dominic Head’s investigation of the relationship between form and content in postcolonial literature and the compatibility of realism to the narration of “hybridized cultural forms”, this study concludes that these stories do not get the opportunity to be juxtaposed with the British narratives, and thus cannot become a piece of discourse par excellence.