Irreducible Difference: Abdulrazak Gurnah as an Indian Ocean Writer

Although Abdulrazak Gurnah has long been a prominent postcolonial Anglophone writer, his recent award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 after publishing ten novels has brought his work and life unprecedented attention. While a comprehensive review of Gurnah's work is beyond the scope of this piece, what follows is a consideration of Gurnah as an Indian Ocean writer. Originally from Zanzibar, he escaped to Great Britain after the genocide against Arabs and South Asians in the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964. It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that his work touches on a dizzying array of postcolonial subjects including belonging, colonialism, displacement, memory, and migration set mainly on the shores of East Africa and Britain. Moving from one island to another, Gurnah and his work constantly negotiate the assemblages of sea, continent, and island. While the multifarious nature of Gurnah's work has been the basis of nearly universal praise and much analysis, categorizing them has been more difficult.For Gurnah, the question of categorization is particularly fraught territory because he transcends many categories. He is referred to as an African writer, a Black British writer, an Indian Ocean writer, an Afropolitan writer, a World Literature writer, and a postcolonial writer, among others. For example, Google refers to him as both a Tanzanian-British writer and a Tanzanian-born British writer even though he was born in Zanzibar before it became a part of Tanzania. In coming to terms with Gurnah's slippery subjectivity, I argue two points about his work and categorization as an Indian Ocean writer here. First, while we may find categorization an unsavory tool for oversimplifying authors and their work, categorization in literary studies is underutilized not overutilized. Second, I argue that even though Gurnah can inhabit the many categories mentioned above, some categories, such as Indian Ocean and Archipelagic, are more fitting than others, such as Tanzanian-British and African, not only because they align more seamlessly with the nature of his work but because they represent more flexible categories. I will particularly focus on how Gurnah fits in Indian Ocean studies and its emphasis on fluid notions of subjectivity and circulatory flows that align well with Gurnah's own representations of subjectivity, specifically in Memory of Departure (1987), Paradise (1994), and By the Sea (2001).Before proceeding to Gurnah's Indian Ocean bona fides, it is relevant to ask ourselves why it matters in which categories we place writers like Gurnah. Writers themselves are notoriously resistant to categorizations, particularly those from the non-Western world. Africanist critic Aaron Bady has referenced this trend about authors from Africa, like Gurnah, when noticing that they are "not particularly invested in being called 'African writers' " in large part because it sets limits on their relevance while Western authors are often cast as simply "writers," empowering them with universalism.1 Despite the way categorization can be mobilized to delimit the horizons of non-Western writers, it is also a powerful tool that impacts the scope of a writer's audience, the spaces in which a writer's work is available, and—perhaps most important for us—how this work gains or loses traction in academia via courses, conferences, special issues, and other ways in which texts and authors become the subject of lasting literary discourses. In other words, whether we like it or not, categorization is influential in determining the scope of texts' circulation, particularly in academia, and our focus should not be on bemoaning that obviously categorization cannot possibly encompass the complexity of literary texts and their authors but to appreciate categorization as an organizing principle for how we digest the increasingly enormous corpus of texts around the world. Therefore, we need to focus on doing it well by establishing an ethics of literary categorization, and while this article can't fully articulate that ethics here, it can participate in its imaginary. That is, too often popular and academic critics limit authors to singular categories rather than allowing them to coexist in a multitude of categories. As Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole put it to me: "Labelling is rarely the problem. It's being restricted to just one label. You're just one thing and can't be anything else."2 Thus, categorization is both essential and inherently fraught, so any attempt to categorize an author and their work must be inflected with the possibility of multiplicity.How then should we categorize Gurnah and his work? While Gurnah is from Zanzibar and his work frequently engages Zanzibar, it is also often set in England and continental East Africa. Moreover, all his works—with perhaps the exception of Dottie (1990)—take as their subject the movement of people into, out of, or within the Indian Ocean world. Even works such as his 2011 novel, The Last Gift, about two married pensioners in England is about the immigrant experience, specifically how they have coped with the ramifications of leaving East Africa decades earlier. Gurnah then is an Indian Ocean writer not because he entrenches his work in the geography of the Indian Ocean littoral but rather because just as Arab, South Asian, Indigenous African, and other identities, cultures, and languages swirl, slip, and circulate in a complex milieu, so do Gurnah's representations. As many scholars such as Alan Villiers, Gaurav Desai, Vilashini Cooppan, and others contend, the Indian Ocean comes into being as a subject through its focus on the circulation of people, ideas, and commodities via the physical routes propelled by trade winds and monsoons, as well as by the structures of religions and languages in a roughly defined geographic location. In this spirit, Gurnah's work is not national—Zanzibarian or Tanzanian or English—nor continental, as connections to non-Indian Ocean parts of East Africa are almost nonexistent in his work, but it is concerned with the large swatches of sea that connect the many shores of the Indian Ocean and beyond. In this way, Gurnah is an Indian Ocean writer, but more accurately his geography is expansive by encompassing the shore, the ocean, and the island from a perspective grounded in an Indian Ocean imaginary as the lens through which to understand the world. He queers the colonial gaze in which the colonized were viewed through a singular hegemonic Eurocentric lens by generating his own non-hegemonic Indian Ocean perspectives that take the Indian Ocean littoral as an interconnected global center through which we can better understand the world. This centering of the Indian Ocean creates a self-reflexive lens on the region as well as a way of seeing the rest of the world, especially England, with Indian Ocean eyes.While I certainly do not disagree with those who cast Gurnah as "one of the most prominent narrators of the Indian Ocean," I do want to stress two points to embellish on the notion of Gurnah as an Indian Ocean writer that inform this article going forward.3 The first is that the Indian Ocean itself does not constitute an inherently better center of study than African continental models for Gurnah and many others, but rather it offers an alternative framework to be combined with existing terracentric predispositions in the study of East Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. As Alexis Wick has succinctly pointed out, "The moral of maritime history should resist the geohistoricist instinct of replacing one objective space with another—because there is nothing less political or ideological in the notion of 'the sea' than there is in the notion of 'the nation-state.' "4 Here Wick cautions against supposing a positive value for the Oceanic simply because it avoids the nation as its primary unit and the continent as its locale. I understand the challenge of writing this in a journal devoted to the Indian Ocean as an emerging field, but it is relevant that we imagine Indian Ocean studies not as simply a replacement for terracentric models but as working in conjunction with them and others to allow us fuller understandings of the region.As important as it is to consider Gurnah as an Indian Ocean writer from a macro view, it is as important, and perhaps more so, to understand how he represents the region in his writing on a granular level. As a literary scholar, the way to do this is clear: close reading. Gurnah's oeuvre is too large to encompass entirely via close reading here, but I want to present what I think are representative parts of his novels Memory of Departure, Paradise, and By the Sea that indicate his construction of the region.Before being awarded the Nobel, Gurnah had not won any major awards and many, such as Tina Steiner and Maria Olaussen, argued that his work was being undervalued.5 His most celebrated novel was Paradise, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel's ending has garnered much attention for the way it crystallizes and condenses his oeuvre's perspective on the Indian Ocean world. In Paradise a young boy named Yusuf has been made a slave when his father uses him to pay debts to an Arab trader named Aziz. Yusuf works dutifully for the trader in various capacities including harrowing journeys to the interior of Tanganyika. Eventually, Yusuf finds his life under Aziz untenable in the final page of the novel: He Yusuf approached carefully, sniffing as if he expected the askaris to have left an acrid mark of their passage. . . . Just beyond the shade of the sufi tree, he found several piles of excrement, which the dogs were already eagerly nibbling at. The dogs glanced suspiciously at him, and watched him out of the corners of their eyes. Their bodies shifted slightly to shield their food from his covetous gaze. He looked for a moment in astonishment, surprised at this squalid recognition. The dogs had known a shit-eater when they saw one. . . . Now, as he watched the obliviously degraded hunger of the dogs, he thought he knew what it would grow into. The marching column was still visible when he heard a noise like the bolting of doors behind him in the garden. He glanced round quickly and then ran after the column with smarting eyes.6In this scene, Yusuf comes to understand his position in the pre- and early-European colonial world as a "shit eater," via the Arab slave trade (whose epicenter was Zanzibar) that existed in the region for hundreds of years before European colonialism. Yusuf understands "what it would grow into" if he remains and so he does the unthinkable: he joins the askari, in particular the notoriously brutal German Schutztruppe. This ending is shocking in numerous ways, including the evoking of feces eating, but what stands out is that Yusuf as an indigenous African chooses the foreign brutality of European colonialism (the non – Indian Ocean) over the familiar cross-section of the Arab world present for centuries in the Indian Ocean world. However, as Nina Berman has argued in "Yusuf's Choice," the scene also provides the protagonist with agency lacking elsewhere in the novel.7 In the diegeses of the story, we can perhaps dismiss this as the naivety of the character but in terms of Gurnah's discourse on the Indian Ocean, he holds no illusions that the machinations and circulations of Indian Ocean networks offer more hope than European colonialism. It is a damning critique to say the least. In this way, Gurnah is tracking a longue durée of proximity and familiarity between the many cultures of the Indian Ocean littoral, arguing that this familiarity has bred contempt, not solidarity, proposing, a la Wick above, that the network of the Indian Ocean is as inherently fraught as the continental.Paradise is temporally positioned to comment on the pre-European colonial Indian Ocean, but other Gurnah novels take this sense of familiarity breeding contempt rather than solidarity into the contemporary. In particular, Memory of Departure foregrounds the difficulties of the complex cultural milieu of the Indian Ocean. The main character of Memory of Departure muses: "With our history of the misuse and oppression of Africans by an alliance of Arabs, Indians and Europeans, it was naïve to expect that things would turn out differently. And even where distinctions were no longer visible to the naked eye, remnants of blood were always reflected in the division of the spoils of privilege. As the years passed, we bore with rising desperation the betrayal of the promise of freedom."8 In this passage, Gurnah addresses the genocide he survived as well as the disillusionment of the post-independence era in Zanzibar and East Africa in which the headiness of independence movements crashed into the reality of a population fractured by centuries of unequal power relations. Cultural and religious grudges from the pre-European colonial period of Paradise and before are not buried by an obscure past but manifest themselves tangibly as "remnants of blood" in the present. History for Gurnah, as many have formulated in the Indian Ocean and the Archipelagic, is not linear: the long past invades the living present constantly. Moreover, this incursion of the past in the present is not represented as a deep connection to a nostalgic past but rather as an imposition that keeps people from productively moving on together. The swirl of innumerable histories in the Indian Ocean is a difficult-to- escape prison that nearly all of Gurnah's characters attempt (and usually fail) to overcome, and yet is capable of generating positive new identities—Gurnah's itself being an example.Similarly, By the Sea suggests that the past cannot be confined to the past because it keeps emerging unexpectedly in the present to delimit possibilities. One of the main characters, Latif Mahmud, says, "I want to look forward, but I always find myself looking back, poking about in times so long ago and so diminished by other events since then, tyrant events that loom large over me and dictate every ordinary action. Yet when I look back I find some objects still gleam with malevolence and every memory draws blood."9 Again, we see Gurnah's characters unable to productively advance—"memory draws blood"—like Yusuf in Paradise and Zanzibar itself in Memory of Departure because the unresolved conflicts of history continue to emerge in the contemporary quotidian. In other words, because productive ways of living with difference have failed, Gurnah's characters often repeat and relive new versions of stories of alienation and exile, demonstrated in numerous works such as Desertion (2005), The Last Gift, and Memory of Departure in which two stories from different historical epochs mirror one another uncannily. For Gurnah, the Indian Ocean is constructed, torn down, and reconstructed ad nauseam with the strains of the unresolved "blood" remaining in each new imaginary.Gurnah's work often acts as a startling reality check concerning the cruelty and viciousness of the Indian Ocean littoral when many of us may imagine alternative geologies and histories as means to escape the epistemological brutality of Eurocentrism as we reach for potential forms of liberation. I don't think that Gurnah forecloses that liberation though. He clearly believes that the Indian Ocean is a worthwhile subject of study that is often ignored and misunderstood as his work attempts to recenter it in discourses of world literature and globalization clearly demonstrate. At the same time, Gurnah has shown time and again that he refuses to idealize the non-European and precolonial. Whether that is by portraying precolonial Africa not as an idyllic untouched space outside of time or by airing the dirty laundry of the many ethnic and religious conflicts of the Indian Ocean that cannot be blamed on Europe, Gurnah highlights the often-irreducible opacity of Indian Ocean societies. People may live in proximity, but they do not understand each other and cannot truly meld with one another in shared subjectivities, be that national, regional, or even Oceanic. Instead, for Gurnah, the Indian Ocean world is defined by irreducible difference and violent indigeneity, and it is the ability, most often expressed in his work as lacking, to live with overwhelming and permanent difference that defines life there. If one is looking for hope in Gurnah, it is to be found in the acceptance of difference—that we may not be able to understand each other or share subjectivity, but we can acknowledge each other's dignity. Fragmentation defines the Indian Ocean and rather than aping the illusory unity of continental ideologies such as Pan-Africanism, Gurnah argues for a simple acceptance of the reality of difference.While Gurnah aligns with most of the concerns of Indian Ocean studies, we would be overly restrictive to deny him categories such as African writer. This is true not only because of the ethics of literary categorization, a la Teju Cole, that I am trying to enact but also because Indian Ocean studies is very much in process. Even the term Indian Ocean studies does not entirely live up to its own standards as the moniker Indian anchors it to land, and that land does not represent many inhabitants of the region who are not of South Asian origin. In part, this is because the Indian Ocean is a British colonial construct, at least originally, that highlighted the centrality of India to the British Empire.10 This is to say that in Indian Ocean studies, as with many other area studies fields, we are the recipients of a flawed inheritance with which we are coming to terms (e.g., the new journal in which this article is published). These struggles of centuries of lived realities in the Indian Ocean littoral and more recently within the academy to imagine the Indian Ocean as an alternative framework are represented at length in the work of Gurnah. Therefore, while he is many other things, his constant struggles with the region mean that he is certainly an Indian Ocean writer.