Other Afterlives

Abstract

It was a fortunate coincidence that while I was reading the exquisite and devastating oeuvre of Abdulrazak Gurnah and editing the cluster of articles on his fiction that appears in this issue, I was also preparing to give a talk at a conference on Toni Morrison at Princeton University (sitesofmemorysymposium.org/), held in conjunction with the opening of a small but revelatory exhibition of papers and artifacts drawn from her personal archive. Fortunate not because they happen to be fellow winners of the Nobel Prize for literature— even if Morrison was one of the previous awardees Gurnah said he admired as he jokingly told an interviewer at the Swedish Academy in April 2022 that “it’s great to join this team” (“Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nobel Prize in Literature”)—but because it provided an opportunity to take account of the unexpected parallels between their bodies of work. While upon first glance there might appear to be an ocean of difference between their styles as novelists, an infinite distance between the “small patch[es] of ground” they cover (“Abdulrazak Gurnah with Susheila Nasta” 354), they might be said to share a determination to “translate the historical into the personal,” as Morrison once phrased it (“Toni Morrison” 103), shifting our attention from the large-scale forces of slavery, war, colonialism, and migration to the intimacies of individual lives. There are methodological similarities too. Both start with memory, but not because their novels are driven by an autobiographical impulse.Morrison’s insistence on what she calls “the ruse of memory” in writing fiction is not meant to grant some absolute authority to the recollection of personal experience. Instead for her the term memory signals “a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was—that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way” (“Memory” 385). Likewise, Gurnah notes that for the migrant writer “it’s memory that becomes the source and your subject,” but “you don’t always remember accurately and you begin to recall things you didn’t even know you remembered,” with the result that “the stories take on a