An Archive of Bones: Abdulrazak Gurnah, German Colonization, and the Material Temporalities of Genocide

Abstract Is there a political-ecological arrangement that can explain the perpetual futurity of genocide? How to account for the human body in the larger Earthly distribution of matter, when we notice that we, too, are food for other animals? And what does that do to our conception of mass murder in this time-less, creaturely grind? This paper hazards a response to these questions through reading Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels set in German East Africa, namely Paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020). Gurnah suggests that the sheer human violence that plagues us now is anything but contemporary or ‘human,’ and it can only be as ancient and intra-active as the matter we inhabit. To argue this, I’ll work with three conjectures: first, that matters (in Gurnah’s work) are not merely acted upon, but rather they are actants with an agency that breaches the boundary between humans and non-humans; second, that temporalities of violence do not begin and end in human-constructed time; and third, that affliction and resistance can travel beyond the contours of our wounds and wills, precisely through the matter that it touches on its way.