Valdivieso, S. M. (2011). The Paradise Within: Displacement, Memory and Nostalgia in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea. In Projections of Paradise (pp. 123-144). Brill.

Introduction

ABDULRAZAK GURNAH was born in 1948 in Zanzibar and moved to Britain in 1968. He is the author of seven novels, among them the Booker-shortlisted Paradise (1994), which is set in East Africa before the First World War and questions paradisiacal visions of Africa as it explores the displacement of young Yusuf, uprooted from his parents’ home to live as a domestic slave in the household of a wealthy merchant. When discussing his writing, Gurnah has described recollection as the writer’s hinterland and has insisted that travelling away from home intensifies one’s sense of a life and a way of being that are lost forever. Memory and displacement are crucial elements in his novels, several of which move between East Africa and Britain, presenting migrant characters whose uprooting is not assuaged by a sense of belonging in the old country. If nostalgia exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near in a pure harmonious vision, the memories of Gurnah’s migrants frequently debunk nostalgic visions of the past and the homeland. The present article explores the role of displacement, memory, and idealized constructions of the homeland in By the Sea (2001), the narrative of an elderly asylum-seeker in Britain in the 1990s who has ambivalent feelings towards his past life on his native island of Zanzibar. His homeland was occasionally a garden of love and delight, but it could also become a hell of hatred and disorder.