Anti/Post/Neocolonial Continuities in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novels

Colonial rule has ended in its formal political shape, but its effects continue to define how people in former colonies remember, narrate and live their lives. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction is one of the most powerful records of this continuation and his two novels Afterlives (2020) and Admiring Silence (1996) bring it into clear view. In the existing scholarship, anti-, post- and neocolonial elements are usually discussed separately as if they belong to three different periods. Our research argues otherwise: in A.Gurnah’s novels these three are not stages following one another, but parts of one structure working at the same time. The study combines close textual analysis with a small quantitative observation of silence-related words in Admiring Silence, and applies the postcolonial framework of F. Fanon, E. Said, A. Memmi and A. Césaire together with M. Bakhtin’s chronotope, dialogism and polyphony. We aim to demonstrate three things: that Afterlives spiritually and narratively continues Paradise; that renaming, suppression of native identity, language and silence operate as common technologies of dislocation across both novels; and that the namelessness of the narrator in Admiring Silence is supported by the lexical dominance of silence-words and works as a deliberate refusal of colonial classification.

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