How Private Memory Intersects With and Informs Public History in Selected Works of Abdulrazak Gurnah

This paper explores how Private Memory intersects with the Public History of the Zanzibari Arab Community and employs the tropes of: Reverse Chronology and History as a way of using Fiction to represent and contextualize how they inform the discourse of identity formations and/or constructions of the Zanzibari Arab Community, especially in relation to the trauma that accompanies the latter’s migration. It is important to mention that the identities of the diasporic Zanzibari Arabs has suffered from the disruptions caused by colonialism and the coming of independence, both of which have left individual members of this community, as well as its entirety, with a traumatized memory of who they are.