Substantive Gaps and Indian Ocean Entanglements: Reading Abdulrazak Gurnah

DELALI KUMAVIE is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Syracuse University. She is writing a book on aviation in global Black literature and culture. I first encountered Abdulrazak Gurnah when I read his novel Desertion (2005). The novel’s ungroundedness—that is, its attempt to fill in the silences and gaps of historical and personal narratives and memories with imagination—was unsettling. Because within this ungroundedness, I realized, was a meditation on the substantive gaps that writing attempts to fill. As Rashid, the narrator ofDesertion, writes a story that is filled with elisions, stitched together with what he knows and remembers, with letters from his brother Amin, and with his imagination, one soon comes to understand that this story is both possible and impossible because of the interplay between what is known and what is unknowable. Thus, Gurnah’s writing is an encounter with the considerable intersecting histories, inventions, and epistemes that crystallize at the site of the African continent—a continent that is both marked and haunted by the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and embedded in global economies of exchange and expropriation. Across Gurnah’s novels, it is the Indian Ocean littoral of the African continent, its islands, and its proximity to the Arab Gulf, Persia, and the Indian subcontinent that are the focus of stories about journeys, individual intimacies, and the changing nature of state power. It is here, within these stories, that Gurnah grapples with elisions, silences, and the unknowable. In this way his novels unravel narratives, experiences, and representations of Africa, which, as Achille Mbembe notes, emerges in the world as “incomplete, mutilated and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks in its quest for humankind” (1). With Gurnah as a guide, the journey through the history of the Indian Ocean littoral, its trades, its occupations, its colonization, its revolutions and expulsions, and its leaps toward a globalizing modernity all demand that we see