Euryclea's Greeting: Literary and Linguistic Palimpsests in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Oeuvre

Abstract

TINA STEINER, the author of Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Literature (St. Jerome Publishing, 2009) and Convivial Worlds: Writing Relation from Africa (Routledge India, 2021), is a professor in the English department at Stellenbosch University. She coedited the bilingual travelogue of D. D. T. Jabavu, In India and East Africa / E-Indiya nase East Africa (Wits UP, 2019), and is part of the editorial collective of the journal Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies. My encounter with Kiswahili was as a native speaker born into it in our house in Malindi. Many people in Malindi spoke a smattering of Arabic as well, and some spoke it fluently. My father was a fluent speaker. My mother could not speak a word except the words that had somehow smuggled their way into Swahili. From other houses you could hear the sound of Kutchi or Somali, or the inflection of Kingazija. (Gurnah, “Learning” 28)