The Return of the Imperial Boomerang in By the Sea and Afterlives

Abstract

NASIA ANAM is assistant professor of English and the 2022–24 Joe Crowley Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is completing a book manuscript entitled “Muslim Heterotopias: Colonial Logics of Space in Literatures of Migration.” Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2001 novel, By the Sea, begins with the interrogation of a Zanzibari Muslim, Saleh Omar, who arrives with false papers at Gatwick Airport. Having escaped possible imprisonment in Zanzibar, he hides his knowledge of English culture and language, only responding with thewords refugee and asylum to questions about the purpose and circumstances of his travel. A contemporary reader may be inclined to anticipate anti-Islamic insinuations of terrorism from the suspicious border agent—a now routine expectation for manyMuslim travelers. But the events in the novel, publishedmonths before the attacks on the World Trade Center, begin well before the global post-9/11 border regime had become a quotidian aspect of international travel. By the Sea expands outward temporally and spatially from late-twentieth-century Britain to make the astonishing historical connections that distinguish Gurnah’s oeuvre, both in broad temporal sweeps and in minute interpersonal disputes. The hostility with which the border agent responds to Omar’s asylum request indexes a much longer history, reminding us that the twenty-first-century “crises” of mass refugee migration and Islamophobia in the Global North are mired in ideologies and institutions of subjugation whose origins can be traced back through hundreds of years of colonialism. Published two decades later, Gurnah’s most recent novel, Afterlives (2021), offers something of a prehistory of Omar’s predicament in By the Sea. It relates the story of two young Tanzanian soldiers, Hamza and Ilyas, recruited into the German colonial Schutztruppe—the military regiments that operated in the German East African colonies from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War I. Gurnah chronicles Hamza’s and Ilyas’s fates