Intertextuality and Postcolonial Identity in Abdlrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart and Desertion

Intertextuality is one of the central means by which postcolonial fiction relates to the literary inheritance of empire. This research examines how Abdulrazak Gurnah uses intertextuality in Gravel Heart (2017) and Desertion (2005) to construct postcolonial identity. The most influential precedent text in Gravel Heart is W. Shakespeare’s drama Measure for Measure and a similar Shakespearean grammar of justice, hypocrisy and silence shapes Desertion. Drawing on J. Kristeva, R. Barthes and G. Genette together with E. Said’s contrapuntal reading and M. Bakhtin’s notion of the unfinalizable character, it is arguable that Gurnah’s decisive intertextual move is the refusal of closure: he keeps W. Shakespeare’s ethical problems but refuses to impose the comic settlement. The study also analyses literary and cultural allusions: colonial, Islamic, oral-familial and hybrid as identity narratives and offers a small model of how time, place and personage together construct identity in A.Gurnah’s fiction.

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