Writing Wider Worlds: The Role of Relation in Abdulrazak Gurnahs Fiction

Tina Steiner
Research in African Literatures, Volume 41, Number 3, Fall 2010, pp. 124-135 (Article)
Published by Indiana University Press

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Writing Wider Worlds: The Role of Relation in Abdulrazak Gurnahs Fiction

TINA STEINER

University of Stellenbosch tsteiner@sun.ac.za

ABSTRACT
Abdulrazak Gurnahs fiction offers an opportunity to engage with the heterogeneity of East African coastal regions and their place within the Indian Ocean World, which Gurnah traces through an imaginary geography of transregional/transnational movements and encounters. This article offers a reading of Gurnahs fiction and in particular his latest novel, Desertion (2005), through the lens of theories of relation as formulated by Martin Buber and douard Glissant in order to highlight the importance of encounters across various boundaries. I argue that Gurnahs fiction, against the backdrop of colonial and nationalist ways of mapping, seeks to re-define Africa through glimpses of relational spaces that escape the dystopic politics of exclusion and violence caused by nationalism and notions of ethnicity. Consciousness of self is only possible if it is experienced

by contrast. I use I only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person, for it
(Benveniste 224)

implies that reciprocally I becomes you in the address.

We may come nearer the answer to the question what [human beings are] when we come to see [them] as the eternal meeting of the One with the Other.
(BuBer 205)

he fiction of Zanzibari-born writer Abdulrazak Gurnah1 traces in nuanced and often harrowing detail the ways in which people are or become entrapped. From minute psychological character study to family dynamics,

RESEARCHINAFRICANLITERATURES,Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2010). 2010

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national politics of postindependence East Africa and stories of empire and diaspora, his work investigates the intersections of micro- and macro-level constrictions bearing down on his characters. In his novels we find a whole range of hierarchies of domination, not just along the well-investigated axes of colonial oppression, but along multiple intersections on the Swahili coast with its complex interactions between African, Indian, Arabic, German and British forms of oppression (Hofmeyr 15). Offering counternarratives to myths of nation, land, and language, Gurnahs fiction points out precisely the lack of freedom such discourses and politics can produce. Like a red thread running through his fiction, in particular his four latest novels, Paradise (1994), Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), and Desertion (2005), Gurnah draws on the history of interbreeding and conflicts between various groups that have occurred in Zanzibar and Tanzania, before and after independence in order to destabilize notions of nationalism and filiation and point towards a history of criss-crossing relations along the Indian Ocean coast and beyond (Bardolph 84).2 The idea of intersectionality, of relations, resonates with recent historiography of the Indian Ocean that seeks to establish it as a complex network (see Kearney; Mitchell) that can only be understood by examining the component parts from which it is constructed and not by separating human history into studies of them and us (McPherson 1). The Indian Ocean region is thus characterized as a series of long-distance interlocking maritime exchange systems between Malays, Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and Africans, and later including the Portuguese, Dutch, and English (Mitchell 99). Gurnah writes of these encounters in his novel By the Sea:
For centuries, intrepid traders and sailors, most of them barbarous and poor no doubt, made the annual journey to that stretch of coast on the eastern side of the continent, which had cusped so long ago to receive the musim winds. They brought with them their goods and their God and their way of looking at the world, their stories and their songs and prayers. And they brought their hungers and greeds, their fantasies and lies and hatreds, leaving some among their numbers behind for whole life-times and taking what they could buy, trade or snatch away with them, including people they bought or kidnapped and sold into labour and degradation in their own lands. (15)

In drawing readers attention to the entangled histories of East Africa, his fiction stresses the links between traders, seafarers, and locals. It also speaks of the complex negotiations such encounters by the sea entailed in terms of the trading of goods, the interchange of ideas, and the mingling of languages, cultures, and faiths. Gurnah captures this history pithily when he writes after all that time, the people who lived on that coast hardly knew who they were (By the Sea 15). Re-orienting East Africa in the Indian Ocean world where encounters have taken place for centuries, Gurnahs narratives insist on moments of relation, of small voices affirming hospitality within the violent and hostile contexts of colonial and imperialist onslaught and the exclusionary rhetoric of new African nationalisms. In contrast to an imaginary that defines Africa in national and ethnic terms, Gurnah aptly points out that Africa needs to be imagined as an intercultural and interlinguistic space of geographical proximity, if it is to accommodate a politics of relation rather than one of exclusion. This message becomes particularly

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pertinent when one considers the recent xenophobic attacks on African refugees in South Africa.3 Vanessa Barolsky, a researcher in the democracy and governance unit of the Human Sciences Research Council, comments on the interconnection between acts of violence and the perceived threat of the illegal outsider to the authentic citizens of the nation state:
Crucially, it was the figure of the refugee fleeing from war, who, as Hannah Arendt argued, had lost all other qualities and specific relationshipsexcept that they were human, which brought these contradictions to light, namely that in the modern age, the human rights that we believe are our rights as human beings only have effect if we are citizens of a nation state. The human loosened from these ties finds herself at the boundaries of the community and in this position of marginalisation is vulnerable to the most extraordinary violence. (Barolsky)

Migration and displacement, as Gurnahs fiction insists, are common occurrences in Southern Africa and across the globe, and therefore it becomes imperative to see others in relation to ourselves, to perceive their right of abode even if they cannot claim national belonging. However, as Barolsky quoting Hannah Arendt points out, it is precisely the humanity of the stranger that becomes questionable once the status of citizenship is indefinable. This view is corroborated by David Farriers insightful discussion on the figure of the refugee and asylum seeker in Gurnahs novel By the Sea, where he asserts that in the current immigration climate, hospitality is an increasingly conditional provision, the retraction of which equates to the retraction of the recognition of the humanity of the new arrival (122; emphasis in original). The refusal to recognize the humanity of the other and the terrible consequences of this denial is at the heart of Gurnahs fiction, where the carefully delineated juxtapositions between hostility and pockets of hospitality gesture towards alternative spaces where relation becomes a possibility. It is noteworthy that Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutus response to the violent attacks on refugees in South Africa emphasizes such relation: [During Apartheid] other Africans welcomed South Africans as refugees, and allowed liberation movements to have bases in their territories, even if it meant those countries were going to be attacked by the then South African Defence Force (Tutu in Please, Please Stop ). Tutu here evokes a documented relational history in order to demand an ethical intervention in this conflict. I argue that even if there are no prior established relationships between people, an ethics has to acknowledge that every human being has obligations to every other human being, irrespective of origin or social categories. Levinas reminds us: To be in relation with the other face to face is to be unable to kill (qtd. in Butler 138). While fiction does not bring the reader face to face, I agree with Kwame Anthony Appiahs contention that conversations across boundaries of identitywhether national, religious, or something elsebegin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own (85). In order to make this argument, I rely mainly on the work of Martin Buber, the Austrian-born Jewish philosopher, and douard Glissant, the Martinican-born French-Caribbean writer and literary critic, who both, though in different ways, examine the centrality of relation in human

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identity formation and its purchase for an understanding of a politics and poetics of accommodation and hospitality. The lack of freedom experienced by Gurnahs characters can be linked to what Glissant refers to as root identity and its predatory effects (Glissant 20). Root identity, Glissant explains, rests on the violence of filiation, of a genealogy going back to a founding myth or origin (143). It lays claim to legitimacy that allows a community to proclaim its entitlement to the possession of a land, which becomes a territory and has to be preserved by being projected onto other territories, making their conquest legitimate (14344). This conception of identity rests on the idea of the autonomous self and of territory that then sets in motion the thought of other and of voyage (144):
The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they [Deleuze and Guatteri] propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome maintains therefore the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other. (11)

This paper traces the rare gestures of intimate, affective moments between characters who manage to build relation where it is least expected, and I argue that the narratives offer glimpses of rhizomatic alternatives to the dystopic narratives of inhospitable root identity for which Gurnahs fiction is perhaps better known. Against the universalisms of both colonial dominance and African nationalisms, Gurnah narrates stories that speak of relationality with the Other. Glissant defines the alternative to root identity as identity of relation, which is not linked to a creation of the world but to the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures (144). Relational identity thus is produced in the chaotic network of Relation without a sense of entitlement to filiation or projected territory, but rather sees land as a place where one gives-on-and-with rather than grasps (144). I contend that Gurnahs narratives locate freedom not in isolation as freedom from something or somebody, but as freedom for the otherthe other or stranger who lays claim on our life and who demands encounter. Moments of freedom occur in Gurnahs texts when individual characters through the experience of rapport, empathy or love recognize their links to each other despite and often in the face of their asymmetrical positioning. For example, in Paradise (1994), Yusuf, the main character, is treated with violence and neglect throughout the narrative, but his happiest moments happen on the trade journey into the interior with one of the last Arab-led caravans, where his relative freedom becomes possible through the gruff rapport between the merchants. As Jacqueline Bardolph points out: [T]he nomadic freedom of roots is here allied to a calm pleasure in the peaceful coexistence of men from diverse origins (78). In those inexplicable relations where people quite unexpectedly relinquish the monologic terrain of subject-object relations in favor of dialogic intersubjectivity, moments of freedom become possible.

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Intersubjectivity, as I use it in this paper, is defined as an understanding of consciousness where relationships are ontologically primary. All individuated subjects co-emerge, or co-arise, as a result of a field of relationships. Here intersubjectivity precedes subjectivity4 (De Quincey 6). It is noteworthy that even though intersubjectivity happens through participation and mutuality it does not rest on agreement or sameness, rather it embraces the exploration of differences. It is thus not about consensual validation but more about seeing the world and others bound up in relation with the self (De Quincey 5). Appiah makes a similar point when he stresses that engagement with the experience and ideas of others is valuable in itself, even if it does not lead to consensus about anything (85). Intersubjectivity, or what Glissant refers to as identity of relation, on the level of individual consciousness has emerged from the work of Martin Buber during the 1930s, which recognized and theorized the importance of the I-Thou relationship and its ethical implications: The entanglement in a manifold We, when known in an actual way, wards off the temptation of the thought of sovereignty: [we are] placed in a narrowly creaturely position. But [we are] enabled to recognise that this is [our] genuine width; for being bound means being bound up in relation (80). Buber makes a steep claim in the quote above: thoughts of sovereignty have no place in genuine relational encounters. Like Glissant with his description, quoted above, of relational space as a space where one gives-on-and-with, Buber insists that human beings have two responses available to the world: to relate to what is present either as an object (I-it relationship) or as another responsible being (I-Thou relationship) (De Quincey 12). This links to Glissants thoughts about root identity and identity of relation. To relate to what is present as an object is inherent in identity as root, whereas to relate to what is present as you constructs identity as relation. The former is about control, the latter lies in wait for equality. It goes without saying that moments of equality are rare in Gurnahs narratives, but where they occur it is precisely because of a recognition of relation. Gurnahs narrative engagement with the Indian Ocean world where encounters take place and taken place for centuries has shaped his investment in narratives that allow glimpses of the small voices that affirm hospitality and relation within the context of hierarchies of domination steeped in violence and hostility. In this paper I argue that Gurnahs portrayal of such polyglot translocal links reiterates his firm belief in writing a wider world (Nasta 362). It is for this reason that his narratives question postindependence nationalist identity politics that so often rely on projecting a precolonial homogeneity. He describes these myths of rooted identity as crude fictions of a reality that speaks much more of relation:
Crude, because they simplify the true complexity and difficulties of negotiations that had to take place for what were, in many cases, unstable societies to live alongside each other. And you couldnt get anything much more complicated than the coast of East Africa where I grew up. . . . On the other hand the idea of a pre-colonial homogeneity comes in very useful politicallyto a nationalist or to new African governments which say, Everyone who is not like me or like us is a stranger, is marginal to the real political, authentic citizen. Many African societies have used this as a way of expelling and tormenting. In Uganda for example, with Idi Amin, and in Zanzibar. So the idea of who belongs then becomes one that is made into an essentialist question. One is made into a certain kind of African so when you ask the question What is an African?

TINASTEINER 129 and African becomes somebody who looks like me. Not someone who has some kind of citizen rights to the place. (qtd. in Nasta 360)

Against this essentialised definition, Gurnahs fiction imagines Africa in terms of relation. In a moving passage in By the Sea, seven-year-old Saleh, one of the protagonists, describes his first encounter with a map of Africa and the Indian Ocean:
As [the teachers] story developed, he began to draw a map on the blackboard with a piece of white chalk: the coast of North Africa which then bulged out and tucked in and then slid down to the Cape of Good Hope. As he drew, he spoke, naming places, sometimes in full sometimes in passing. Sinuously north to the jut of the Ruvuma delta, the cusp of our stretch of coast, the Horn of Africa, then the Red Sea coast to Suez, the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, India, the Malay peninsula and then all the way to China. He stopped there and smiled. (37)

Saleh recalls this moment of the unbroken chalk line as pivotal in his later passion for maps, which not only chart relation or spur the imagination with the names of far away places but also, in a more sinister way, serve as instruments to equate geography with biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map (By the Sea 35). Here we see how geographical mapping can be harnessed by colonial and national perceptions of rooted territory as well as by rhizomatic visions of relation (like the teachers in the quote above). Gurnahs ability to draw attention to the ways in which these kinds of maps have shaped perceptions of Africa also influences his critical writing. In his capacity as editor of the two Heinemann volumes of Essays on African Writing (1993), Gurnah argues that African literature needs to include writers of Arab, Indian, and European ethnic origin: If African writing was neglectful of women, its commentators were also neglectful of its racismsevident in the exclusions of South African and North African writers from African literature (Essays 2: xii). Gurnah remarks that the inclusion of essays on Assia Djebar and Tahar Ben Jelloun from Algeria and Morocco, respectively, serve to bring them more prominently to the attention of readers of African writing (vi). Their writing is relatively unknown in discussion on African literature due to the implicit subheading for African literature as writing from south of the Sahara, though their relative neglect is also just as much to do with the ambivalent cultural affiliations of North African societies (vi). What Gurnah so aptly points out is the fact that African itself is a term existing in the realm of intercultural and interlinguistic space, especially on the coast. Gurnahs fiction centers on arrivals and departures: the coming of a stranger elicits, more often than not, hostility but the narratives are also full of rare glimpses of hospitality, of welcome without imposing conditionsbecause, as Derrida reminds us: Pure hospitality consists in welcoming whoever arrives before imposing any conditions on him, before knowing and asking anything at all, be it a name or an identity paper (Principle of Hospitality 7). The figure of the migrant who is in every respect part of a place, but who neither feel[s] part of a place, nor [is] regarded as being part of a place allows for these explorations of

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hospitality and hostility (Nasta 352). In his last four novels, Gurnah charts the devastating effects of root identity and moments of freedom, where people perceive each other not as objects but as equal participants in an encounter. In Desertion, we witness two similar but also very different acts of hospitality towards the stranger, which I analyze in order to contrast root identity with identity of relation. The narrative starts in the 1890s and introduces the main characters. Very briefly, there is Hassanali, the timid but generous shopkeeper, who lives on the edge of a town somewhere on the coast south of Mombasa with his lively and kind wife Malika and his sister Rehana, whom he looks after as the closest male relative, since their parents died. Gurnah sketches their parents courtship in detail, because their father Zachariya came from Calicut in India on the musim and their mother, Zubeyda, was a Mswahili from Mombasa. The bravery of their father in getting married to an African woman against social taboos is attributed to his conception of Islam as a transnational universalism and to his ability to speak Kiswahili with astonishing fluency (Gurnah repeatedly points to the pivotal role of language5 in a politics of hospitality that seeks relation):
Their father had always said that he was a Muslim living among Muslims, and that was enough for him. Where he was born or came from was neither here nor there, they all lived in the house of God, dar-al-Islam, which stretched across mountains and forests, deserts and oceans. . . . His Kiswahili was quite perfect. People used to say that if you were to listen to him with your eyes shut, you would not take him for anything other than a born and bred Mvita, a man of Mombasa. (62)

Zachariyas going native, as the Indian community derisively calls his marriage, results in disapproval and ostracization. Rehana remembers as a child being called chotara, which means bastard (67). The ties with India and the Indian community are thus severed and the family regards itself as East African. When Hassanali takes over the shop after their fathers death, a guest arrives and the ties with India are renewed. Hassanali reports to Rehana that Azad, a young Indian trader, has arrived in town and that he comes from the same village in India where their father came from. Rehana finds it hard to share Hassanalis enthusiasm when their father who was the only Indian among them, had wanted nothing to do with it, and the only Indians they knew treated them with disdain (68). But Hassanali insists that in a way they were related and that meant he was obliged to be trustworthy in his dealings (61). After many Friday lunches and consultations at the shop, Azad proposes to Rehana and Hassanali urges her to accept, not least because she is twenty-two, old for a woman to be unmarried (72). She stifles her reservations and rejoices in Azads company until the next musim, when he decides to travel back to India to make sure he gets his share of the trade profit. From this trip he never returns: He had abandoned them, abandoned her, and gone back to his Indian life laughing at her love and her hunger, chuckling at their gullibility (78). Rehana becomes bitter as time passes, and resentful towards Hassanali, whose faith in filiation, roots and community blinded him to the risk of inviting Azad into their lives. What Gurnah highlights here is the threat of community identification and filiation when it overrides all else. Derrida comments on this duality of community as both threat and promise: If by community one implies, as is often the case, a harmonious group, consensus, fundamental

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agreement beneath the phenomena of discord or war, then I dont believe in it very much and I sense in it as much threat as promise (qtd. in Caputo 107). In Desertion, Gurnah dismantles notions of rootedness and harmony that underlie the concept of community. Caputo describes how Derrida stresses that the very notion of community rests on nationalist identitarianism, which tries to prevent the other from crossing over our borders . . . from disturbing our language, culture, religion and public institutions. They could not be more inhospitable to the coming of the other (Caputo 106). Rehana and Hassanali of course in a way knew this already, when having grown up under the disapproving stares and hurtful words from the Indian community toward their mixed family. The text suggests that Hassanali was tempted by thoughts of restoring their Indian roots through Azads friendship. Gurnah quickly dismantles such nostalgic longing, not least by showing that Rehana has little authority over the decisions that men take and that make her into the vehicle to bring about such restoration. Amina Mama asserts that women are often seen as the bearers and upholders of traditions and customs, as reservoirs of culture (54). Gurnah exposes this view through the narrative of the second guest, in which Rehana becomes her own decision maker in defiance of local and colonial patriarchy. Again it is Hassanali who brings the second guest home. This time, it is an Englishman, Martin Pearce, who stumbles out of the desert at crack of dawn and collapses at Hassanalis feet, dehydrated and starving, covered in wounds. Hassanali, once sure that this is not a ghost, gets help to carry the man home and puts him down in the yard on their eating mat. Rehana reproaches him for offering their hospitality; this is clearly linked to her experience with Azad. But Hassanali insists: You cant expect me to leave a suffering son of Adam out there when we can offer him kindness and care (12). This time, aware that he cannot claim common roots with his guest, Hassanali instead draws on relation to stress common humanity. Proud but also a bit scared to have his own mzungu, Hassanali muses: Guests were always exciting, especially for the first few days. Everything was a happy confusion and everyone had a good time for a while. He loved it. But this guest was a different thing altogether. A European, mzungu. What were they going to do with a European? Where were they going to put him? What were they going to feed him? How were they to speak to him? (22). Rehana feeds Pearce and they get the local bonesetter to have a look at him. In the afternoon the colonial district officer arrives to take Pearce away and in the process insults their hospitality by suggesting they have robbed their guest of his possessions. Rehana contrasts the two white men: The sick man, somehow, had not struck her as mzungu, but was more like complication and confusion, a token of Hassanalis ineptitude with life. The one with the boots and the whip was the snarling figure from the stories, the destroyer of nations (57). As soon as Pearce has regained his strength, he insists on visiting Hassanali to thank him and to apologize for the rudeness of the district commissioner. A friendship develops, not least because Pearce can speak Arabic and thus communication is possible: Mashaallah, mashaallah, the old men said, marvelling at Martins Arabic. He loved the way his halting knowledge of the language had always won him friends in his travels, and now here too (104). A politics of hospitality includes the willingness to speak the others language, for to speak, even a little, accords the interlocutor with the importance and dignity that is so

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often denied when one engages with the other not as a thou, as Buber puts it. In contrast, Glissant points out that Relation is spoken multilingually. Going beyond the impositions of economic forces and cultural pressures, Relation rightfully opposes the totalitarianism of any monolingual attempt (19). In her discussion of Gurnahs novels Paradise (1994) and Admiring Silence (1996), Bardolph comments on how Gurnah insists on the translations and modes of coexistence of many languages, how he brings to light the many intermarriages through generations that render notions of purity and authenticity ludicrous (84). However, despite this insistence, his narratives acknowledge the immense power notions of authenticity and purity carry in the postcolonial world. Martin stays for lunch and, because Rehanas Arabic is much better than her brothers, mostly talks to her. It is then that they fall in love. Gurnah purposefully creates a similar plotline, where the guest becomes a suitor. The narrator of the novel interrupts the plot to explain how unlikely their relationship was at that time: I dont know how it would have happened. The unlikeliness of it defeats me. . . . Perhaps she was more reckless or courageous or wilful than I imagine her. Azads abandonment had made her stubborn, less sensitive to what others thought best for her, slightly more indifferent to opinion (118). Rehana takes her life firmly into her hands and reshapes her identity in the search for the freedom to be allowed to have a relationship with Martin.6 She visits Martin at the commissioners house on her own, breaking taboos of decorum and female virtue, and they become a couple, move to Mombasa, and live together for several years, before Martin goes back to England and she bears their daughter, Asmah. Jamila, Rehanas granddaughter muses: It must have been impossible for both of them. She was a brave, battling person to go as far as she did. Thats what I think now as I try to picture her. Someone who can sit still and return a stare (239). The novel then proceeds to tell how this encounter between Rehana and Martin reverberates with tragic consequences through three generations and across continents. Again the tragedy can be understood as the terror of the root: the transgressive history of the relationship between Rehana and Martin marks their daughter Asmah and her daughter Jamila as genealogically corrupt and suspect (Jones 39). Their prejudiced community reads their identity through their mixed ancestry and therefore they occupy a position of liminality. Whereas Rehanas transgression is self-determined, her daughter and granddaughter are already inserted into otherness without having a choice in the matter. Like Rehana, Martin consciously chooses to cross-cultural boundaries. Martin, described by the district commissioner as an anti-Empire wallah (84), opts out of the idiom of his own colonizing culture. Through this character, Gurnah writes what Leela Gandhi calls the minor narratives of crosscultural collaboration (6). Martin and Rehana construct an unusual home for themselves, a home that is not recognized as valid by their respective communities. Moreover, it is a temporary home, not granted continuity. Gurnah nonetheless accords this home the promise of what Derrida calls an open quasi community (qtd. in Caputo 121), not based on national affiliation or ancestry but on a politics of hospitality and relation. According to Gandhi, a politics in which the self is drawn toward difference foregrounds those invisible affective gestures that refuse alignment along the secure axes of filiation to seek expression outside, if not against, possessive communities of belonging (10). Gurnah captures such a

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small affective gesture when Martin first returns to express his gratitude for the help Hassanali had offered him: He turned towards the shop, and when his eyes became used to the gloom, he saw the shopkeeper on his feet, shoulders hunched, braced for misuse. Martin raised his hand in greeting and the shopkeeper saluted back. Martin reached across the merchandise and offered his hand, and he saw a smile appear on the shopkeepers face before he reached forward and grasped it (103; emphasis added). When Hassanali realizes that his mzungu is indeed different from the district commissioner, his fear dissolves into friendship and it is then that he invites Martin again into their home. Hassanalis hospitality together with Martins openness to accept this gift speaks of a community countering social exclusion. These pockets of open-handed welcome (112) capture the hope for social transformation in the otherwise dystopic narratives. Gurnahs narratives only ever allow for glimpses, for moments of relation that slip out of the characters fingers, who despite their most admirable efforts cannot hold on to them. In contrasting the arrivals of two strangers in Desertion, we see how how Gurnahs awareness of the complexity of the Indian Ocean world underwrites a narrative suspicious of group identity conceived through the universalisms of race, culture, or national filiation. Instead, Gurnah shows how such identities produce exclusion and violence (in particularly gendered forms). When asked in an interview about the role of literature as politics, Gurnah answers cryptically it should be about what cannot easily be said (Nasta 362). What cannot easily be expressed are precisely those risky gestures towards the other, the hospitality towards the stranger that insists on affective relationships across political boundaries. It is in this spirit of affirming relation that Martin attempts to shape his encounters with Rehana and Hassanali and we can hear an echo of this affirmation when he first beholds the Indian Ocean: Lovely, Pearce said softly. The sea (44). Gurnahs narratives vividly draw the devastating effects of an identity politics of exclusion while at the same time showing readers that pockets of relation are possible, where boundaries of identity are crossed, whether they are national, religious, or any other kind. His fiction therefore can be read as careful palimpsests of relation that constitute history and culture as myriad inscriptions. In this way, Gurnahs fiction confirms Stuart Halls contention that transverse linkages between and across nation-state frontiers and the global/local inter-relationships . . . cannot be read off against a nation-state template where subject formation is linked to roots and the emerging nation (qtd. in Seel 22). In writing wider worlds where rhizomatic narrative connections force the readers to identify with all that is different in order to discover a common humanity, Gurnah points towards an ethics of relation that underpins the imaginary of Africa as a hospitable space. NOTES

1. Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in 1948 in Zanzibar, Tanzania, teaches literature and sociology at the University of Kent in the UK. He is the author of numerous novels: Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Paradise (1994, short-listed for the Booker Prize), Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), and, most recently, Desertion (2005). He has also edited an important collection of critical essays in two volumes: Essays on African Writing (1993). Gurnah uses the term wider world in an interview with Sushila Nasta when he discusses Walcotts writing: More importantly he makes it clear that you cannot reduce peoples humanity by simply putting them on this side

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or that, white or black or somewhere in between. I like very much the sense of his being a world writer, a writer who sees himself as belonging to a wider world. In the past, there was always a kind of hierarchy, so what was meant by world was Europe. The world that Walcott is thinking of, or even people like Salman Rushdie or Caryl Philipps and others, is not that world (Nasta 362). 2. Bardolph further remarks that there is no idealisation of a precolonial past, as Gurnah mentions the slave-dealing days, nor of more recent times when he reminds the reader of the forced marriages of the 80s or the custom of paying debts by giving away a member of ones family (84). 3. The article in the Sunday Independent on 18 May 2008 reads as follows: Hundreds of people fled their homes in Thokoza, Tembisa and Katlehong, seeking refuge at local police stations, as violence and looting aimed at foreigners spread during the weekend from Johannesburgs Alexandra and Diepsloot to East Rand Townships (Gordin). The headline of the Cape Times on 26 May 2008: 20,000 city foreigners displaced by violence (Powell). 4. In contrast to intersubjectivity, DeQuincey defines subjectivity as an isolated, independent, self-sufficient locus of experience. Classically this is the Cartesian ego, wholly private, and independent of all reality external to it (De Quincey 4). 5. See my article Navigating Multilingually for a more extensive discussion of the role of language in encounters across the Indian Ocean. 6. Glissant describes the will to identity as the search for freedom within particular surroundings (20).

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