The Attachment to Woman’s Virtue in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion (2005)

Abstract

By the mid-nineteenth century up to 1910, stories of a love affair between a European colonial and a native woman were missing in European settler writing. The point is that these stories were not allowed any more. The reasons for which they were no longer allowed and the way the European imperialists and the colonized people viewed these interracial romances were among the things which motivated Abdulrazak Gurnah to write Desertion (2005). In this novel, he explores the love relationship between a British colonial, Martin Pearce, and a Zanzibari woman, Rehana Zakariya, and how this affair was determinant in the failure of Amin and Jamila’s romance. One may wonder whether Rehana’s bad reputation is simply due to the fact that she was in love with a European man. One may also wonder whether Jamila’s tarnished name is only caused by the fact that she is Rehana’s granddaughter. From a cultural and postcolonial perspective, the paper will deal with Woman’s Virtue in Gurnah’s Desertion. Based on postcolonialism, racism and culture as theories, the study will analyze, on the one hand, the way the two main female protagonists in Desertion are viewed in their community and, on the other hand, the sad end of the love relationship between Amin and Jamila.