Narrating Migration and Belonging in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Works

Abstract

Migration and belonging have become defining themes of postcolonial literature, but they cannot be understood through theme alone. The way the story is told shapes how memory, identity and home are understood. This research analyses two of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels Pilgrims Way (1988) and By the Sea (2001) to demonstrate that in Gurnah’s fiction narrative form is not a neutral container but the very means by which migrant identity is constructed. We compare two narrative architectures: the single internal focalization of Pilgrims Way, where the storyworld is filtered through one consciousness; and the dual dialogic narration of By the Sea, where two personages tell incompatible accounts of one shared past. Drawing on M. Bal’s focalization, J. Phelan’s unreliable narration and M. Bakhtin’s dialogism, and supported by the postcolonial framework of E. Said and H.K. Bhabha, we show that Gurnah uses fragmentation, flashback, the unsent letter and silence to render displacement and that silence in particular operates as both trauma and strategic refusal.