Migrant Lives Caught Between Cultures and Continents
Sharmila Narayana
AFTERLIVES by Abdulrazak Gurnah Bloomsbury Publishing, New Delhi, 2020, 273 pp., 499.00
February 2022, volume 46, No 2

Afterlives is the latest publication from Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2021. The Nobel Committee has very aptly remarked that Gurnah is being awarded for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents (The New York Times). His novels predominantly focus on the themes of displacement, colonization, migration, identity and slavery. In the article titled ‘Writing and Place’, published in 2004, Gurnah explains that it was his own hardships, anxiety, state terror and humiliation, as he migrated from Zanzibar to UK, that became prominent themes in his works (Erik Falk).

The novel is set in the background of the German occupation of East Africa, the Maji Maji Uprising against the Germans and the First World War, in the beginning of the 20th century. It explores the impact of European colonialism, the violence and racism perpetrated by the Germans. The story is narrated in the third person, occasionally interspersed with conversations in the first person.

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