White-washed Minarets and Slimy Gutters

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels map a distinctive East African coastal space interlinked with the Indian Ocean littoral through travel, trade and culture. This article considers the form given to that expression of space, through examining ways in which the author’s structural and formal choices relate to his writing of the Indian Ocean. Drawing on the Lefebvrean distinction between representations of space and representational space, this paper argues that the way in which Indian Ocean space is represented discursively in Gurnah’s fiction is crucially linked to its representationality. This involves an exploration of the space of the literary text itself: the interrelationship between the space of and in narrative. The article will outline three instances of the ways in which the narratives are spatially inflected: the centrality of travel to the represented space and Gurnah’s engagement with problems of perspective; narrative authority and the ways in which this is mediated through multiple narrative voices; and the gaps in the history of the Indian Ocean, gaps refracted through thematic and formal silences in the novels. It focuses on an early and a later novel, Memory of Departure and By the Sea, while also drawing on Dottie, Pilgrims Way and Desertion

Aesthetics · Art · Geography · Indian ocean · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Visual arts · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature · Geology · Oceanography

• Destabilized Identities and the Question of London in Abdulrazak Gurnah's by the Sea

  Open Access•Abdullah F Al-Badarneh, Carly J Wassel•GEMA Online Journal of Language…•2024

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