Suspended Paradise: Survival and Storytelling in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

Esther  Pujolràs-Noguer

doi:http://doi.org/

Abstract

Afterlives, published in 2020 is, to date, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s latest novel. This article reads Afterlives as an exponent of the interruption-continuation framework that defines the Gurnahian oeuvre. The abrupt ending that assails the narrative flow of Paradise (1994) with its protagonist, young Yusuf, hiding from the sight of the arrival of the German Army finds its continuation in Hamza (Afterlives) who has volunteered to fight with the Germans in the First World War. As expressions of the same Lukácsian literary type, Yusuf’s and Hamza’s delicate beauty is a constant reminder of the fragility of a world that survives by mere acts of storytelling. Therefore, I claim that Afterlives must be inscribed in the larger interruption- continuation design of the storytelling community that characterizes the Indian Ocean and that is continuously re-narrating itself. The story of Hamza branches out, in a rhizomatic fashion, into the devastating story of colonialism in East Africa without losing its firm rootedness in the narrative architecture of One Thousand and One Nights. The lives that configure the narrative space of Afterlives are construed as a suspended paradise, elusive and evanescent, but imbued with an unmistaken vigor to survive or, as the title of the novel surmises, an inveterate urge to surmount death and oblivion.

Keywords

Abdulrazak Gurnah, displacement, Indian Ocean, postcolonial rhizome, storytelling, survival, trauma

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Kritika Kultura
Department of English
School of Humanities
Ateneo de Manila University

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Jan Baetens
Professor
Faculty of Arts
Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven (Belgium)

Joel David
Professor of Cultural Studies
Inha University (South Korea)

Michael Denning
Professor of American Studies and English
Department of English
Yale University (US)

Faruk
Faculty of Cultural Sciences
Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia)

Regenia Gagnier
Professor of English
University of Exeter (UK)

Leela Gandhi
John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English
Brown University (US)

Inderpal Grewal
Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies
Professor of South Asian Studies, Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies
Yale University (US)

Peter Horn
Professor Emeritus and Honorary Lifetime Fellow
University of Cape Town (South Africa)
Honorary Professor and Research Associate in German Studies
University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

Anette Horn
Professor of German Studies
University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

David Lloyd
Distinguished Professor of English
University of California, Riverside (US)

Bienvenido Lumbera
National Artist for Literature
Professor Emeritus
University of the Philippines

Rajeev S. Patke
Director of the Division of Humanities
Professor of Humanities
Yale NUS College (Singapore)

Vicente L. Rafael
Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History
University of Washington (US)

Vaidehi Ramanathan
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Davis (US)

Temario Rivera
Professorial Lecturer
Department of Political Science
University of the Philippines

E. San Juan, Jr.
Philippines Studies Center (US)

Neferti X.M. Tadiar
Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Barnard College (US)
Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Columbia University (US)

Antony Tatlow
Honorary Professor of Drama
Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)

Suspended Paradise: Survival and Storytelling in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

Esther Pujolràs-Noguer: Universitat de Lleida

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