Worldmaking from the South and “By the Sea” in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Fiction

Abstract

MEG SAMUELSON is associate professor at the University of Adelaide and associate professor extraordinary at Stellenbosch University. She works in the oceanic humanities and with literatures of the south, and is particularly interested in relating African, Indian Ocean, and other southern situations to planetary thought. She has published widely in these and related fields, including the recent Claiming the City in South African Literature (Routledge, 2021). The recent recognition extended to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction by the Nobel Prize in Literature is cause for celebration: this understated yet profound oeuvre is finally finding the wider readership that it deserves. In locating its work “in the gulf between cultures and continents,” however, the motivation for the award overlooks its distinctive coastal orientation (“Abdulrazak Gurnah: Facts”; my emphasis). This orientation is both critical to Gurnah’s worldmaking from the south and perplexing to north-centered frameworks. That the premier global literary prize has thus far been presented to only fifteen writers from the south over its entire history of more than 120 years is illustrative of the myopic and distorting nature of these frameworks. This is not a new concern, though it remains a persistent one. This essay does not rehearse again the complaints it has elicited, besides to note the methodological importance of attending to the alternative lenses afforded by Gurnah’s fiction. Instead of tracing north-south or center-periphery axes, his novels home in on coastal situations that center the south and offer notably complicated perspectives on “the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee” (“Abdulrazak Gurnah: Facts”)—as well as on the world at large. Littoral locations feature prominently across Gurnah’s oeuvre (see Moorthy; Samuelson, “Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Fictions” and “Coastal Form”). One of the novels emphasizes them in its title, By the Sea, and this phrase recurs repeatedly across the oeuvre. It refers at times to a generalized proximity to the ocean by which characters who have traversed the “gulf” between Africa and England are able to rehome themselves in the world. But the shore that acts as beacon to Gurnah’s worldmaking is more specifically what is described in By the Sea as “that stretch of coast on the eastern side of the continent,