Swahili Histories and Texts in Abdulrazak Gurnah's<i>Paradise</i>

Mustafa, Fawzia

doi:10.1080/00138398.2015.1045158

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Velten and Büttner use the early German conventions I give in the bibliography, but in the body of my argument I follow the current conventions of Kiswahili spelling and naming. This means that Selim bin Abakari will be called Silimu bin Abakari in this article, or Silimu for short (Abakari 2015); Sleman bin Mwenyi Tshande becomes Selemani bin Mwenye Chande, or Chande for short (Mustafa 2015); and Mtoro bin Mwenyi Bakari becomes Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari or Mtoro Bakari for short (Wimmelbücker 2008, 4). Salvadori (see below) points to a similar problem with the suffix -ji/-jee attached to a name.…”

Section: East African Travelogues: Authors Texts and Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans

Wilkens¹

2021

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Travelogues are a rich medium through which to explore observations of everyday culture and rituals, perceptions of the world order, and narrative strategies of othering. In this paper, I turn my attention to travelogues written by East Africans (coastal Swahili Muslims, diasporic Shi’i and Parsi South Asians, and Christian Ugandans) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the authors come from different religious groupings, cultural-linguistic backgrounds and socio-economic milieus, they travel the same routes within East Africa and, occasionally, also to Europe or even as far as Siberia. I argue that the texts (including journals, retrospectives, and ethnographies) must be read as documents of East African cosmopolitanism. Mobility enables the authors to subvert the imperial world order by re-framing it narratively according to their own religious identity. This gives rise to reflections on humanity, equality and the beauty of knowledge, but not to the exclusion of racial and religious bigotry within and between the non-European communities in East Africa. In my analysis, I tease out narrative patterns, observational styles, and literary tropes present in the texts across religious boundaries. As all the texts were either commissioned by Europeans or edited by their translators before publication they do not document naively ‘authentic’ perspectives of East Africans, but reflect the complexities of communication within strict racial hierarchies. In concluding, I discuss the potential of religion to invert colonial centres and peripheries: European metropoles become places of exotic fascination while the familiar practices of co-religionists can turn the ‘hinterland’ into centres of learning.

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Section: East African Travelogues: Authors Texts and Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The novel reconstructs a local Swahili-Muslim perspective on precolonial and colonial life, based not least on Chande's description of the time. This includes an almost word-for-word narration of the ancestral sacrifice on an island in Lake Tanganyika I discussed earlier (Gurnah 1994, 146-48;Mustafa 2015).…”

Section: Entanglements Of Editorial Co-travellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans

Wilkens¹

2021

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Reframing colonial amnesia: German colonialism and multilingual memory in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

Maricocchi

2024

Atlantic Studies

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Fugitive Archives: Translation, Sea, and History in Indian Ocean Fiction

Rajbhandari

2022

Comparative Literature

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This article explores the representation of multilingual Indian Ocean pasts in novels by Amitav Ghosh and Abdulrazak Gurnah, two key contemporary postcolonial writers from the opposite shores of the ocean. It theorizes the historical impulse in the novels as anarchival drift, which refers to the self-conscious mode of rewriting the past that subjects the archive to the instability and fluidity of the sea. Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2006) and Gurnah’s Paradise (1994) both tell stories of forced displacements in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean; both rewrite colonial archives in order to depict cross-cultural interactions, employing various self-reflexive textual strategies that draw attention to the linguistic and archival mediations operating in those encounters. This article examines these textual moments alongside the novels’ archival sources—specifically, nineteenth-century colonial dictionaries and Swahili travelogues—to argue that the self-reflexivity results from the multiplicity of linguistic registers on which these texts operate, making visible the translative processes imbricated in transoceanic historical forces. While both novels appeal to the linguistic aspects of cross-cultural interactions, the article traces the divergent ways in which the semantic drift among languages stage the materiality and historicity of trans-oceanic encounters.

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Swahili Histories and Texts in Abdulrazak Gurnah'sParadise

Cited by 4 publications

References 15 publications

“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans

“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans

Reframing colonial amnesia: German colonialism and multilingual memory in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

Fugitive Archives: Translation, Sea, and History in Indian Ocean Fiction

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