Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion and the historical kaleidoscope of coastal East Africa

“…there was someone always looking on and adding fragment to someone else’s fragment, until sooner or later everything was found out…”[1]

What are stories to history? When do people narrate stories, for what purpose? Whose narration counts as a story and whose is a history? Which is a qasida and which is a poem? When we tell stories, whose stories are we telling? Is it a story of someone we know or someone we don’t but can understand, someone like us? Is it about someone we imagine to be totally an ‘other’? Or do we always tell stories about ourselves in one way or the other, either as characters in the story or as subjects moved by the story we are telling? When we tell stories that are ‘ours’ are they just ‘ours’ as such, or can they anybody else’s as fittingly as they could be our own? Stories have layers of history embedded in them, some that can be expounded by asking these above questions. To Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion, I pose not only these questions about the story that Desertion is, but also of the work and function that stories play within the novel.

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948, and much like characters from the novel grew up around the kaleidoscopic community of Muslims, Africans (Kiswahili speaking), Indians (Gujaratis, Bohras and others) in an island off the East African coast, in Zanzibar. The novel features several of the itinerant communities that inhabited the historical Indian Ocean world. One can trace several elements of Gurnah’s past in Hasanalli’s East African Asian identity, Rashid’s sense of alienation as a student of colour in postcolonial UK, and in Amin’s sense of horror at the paltry reality of ‘independence’. Therefore, as the story unfolds, one also discovers the historical predicaments that plagued Gurnah and his consciousness of home, belonging and exile. However, besides the autobiographical subtext that underscores Desertion, it also registers the communal relevance of these stories, that stories are formative, generative and constitutive of the kaleidoscopic community he describes.

I pursue the stories that circulate in Gurnah’s narrative prose. I try to make sense of the purposes they serve at two levels. On one hand, I see what they reveal about the characters and the environments in which they are embedded. What does a character telling a certain story convey about the reality that Desertion is about? On the other hand, I also see what role they play in Gurnah’s deployment of them, what his choices of specific stories mean. What are the narrative forms and the tropes he wants make visible as discursive authorities that inhabited this space? Gurnah chooses to use perspectival narrative style to convey the plot which allows for ‘stories’ to enter with performative roles in the novel’s cultural universe. For instance, he divides chapters according to the perspective from which an episode is being narrated, though at the end he reveals that it was Rashid who put together the whole story. As stories enter the novel’s fabric to seamlessly describe the inter and intracommunity exchanges, maintenance of orders and attitudes, they also become sites to enunciate the voices and the volitions of gendered and colonised subjects. Stories are thus, also registers of power, spatial dispersion of power that is gendered, social and colonial in modern East African — Asian society.

In this essay, I will explore how Gurnah’s inclusion of stories, storytelling and circulation of ‘gossip’ helps historicize and make material the abstract relations of power in ways that sometimes academic history cannot capture for want of ‘archival evidence.’ The speculative logic of a fictional work like Desertion offers key insights into the complex realities of colonial and postcolonial East-Africa that Bohra Muslims, Hindu Gujaratis, Malayali merchants, Kiswahili speaking people, Hadramis and Omani Arabs inhabited. Envisioning these material worlds can be augmented by representative, relational and fragmented anecdotes instead of a cohering and ordered narrative with stable and vertical sense of reality. Using stories as a narrative device within the larger meta-story, the novel, Gurnah is able to further reveal the intimate workings of political, of social and racializing frameworks in this kaleidoscopic environment.

I use the word ‘story’ as a category that captures three things. Firstly, the mythical, legendary or stock stories that circulate or are exchanged amongst the characters. Secondly, those that can also be called ‘gossip’ or ‘rumours’ intra-community exchanges of life-stories about people within broadly familiar social networks. And lastly, stories about the characters’ own selves narrated as memories or anecdotes. In one way or the other, I argue that all these kinds of stories in the novel perform two broad explicatory functions. On the one hand, they reveal the relational webs of power, and social practice in the coastal East-African society by letting stories uttered by characters pose as articulations of their selves and their imagined ‘others’[2]. On the other, the telling of a story also reveals the specific social planes and specific forms of sociality within which the tellings are embedded.

The nineteenth and twentieth century in East Africa witnessed a transformation of existing relations between social groups, mediated by but not entirely constructed by the colonizing European forces and the missionaries. However, this is not to say that the presence of these communities in the region can be attributed just to colonial imperative. What can be argued, however, is that colonial imperative positioned the groups in particular ways that produced a hierarchical arrangement in which African ‘natives’ were subjugated to the mercantilist and the service sector South Asians. However, the European was the furthest other, both despised, and also the object of cultural aspirations. Colonial narrative, though represented in the book, reflect the construction of these hierarchies that plagued postcolonial African politics which Gurnah must have been privy to. He delivers these hierarchical constructions through the stories that the multiple gradations of Europeans in Kenya tell, from Burton’s disgust, and Frederick Turner’s mediating, to Pearce Martin’s orientalist positions.

Take the anecdotal retelling of the ‘Masai massacre’ by Frederick Turner as an example of a story with immense revelatory potential. Neither is the category ‘European’ monolithic in this space, as characterized by Frederick Turner’s stories about the interaction of the Masai people with the Lutherans (German Protestants). Turner also makes sure he distinctly draws a line between colonisers like himself and the famous stories of Clive, Hastings and Thackeray[3]. Nor are the colonized a stable, monochromatic group of people. Turner identified the different types of Indians, the sweeping type from Zanzibar, the more ordered ones, and the crafty class of the lawyers (vakils) [4]. He also identified another class of colonized in the Abyssinians who endorse ‘slavery as a way of life’[5], or the interior natives, ‘further from civilization’ like the Masais[6]. Turner demarcates the Masai (the ‘wild beastly’) from those who embalm the saint Livingstone (surprised that they were capable of such knowledge), and both from Indians. Turner’s usage of tropes typically characterized as colonial discourse, find discursive re-articulation even in stories that characters Hasanalli, Rehana tell about the ‘stinking savage.[7]’ These gradations Turner identifies allows one to see not just the differential relationship of the colonised with the coloniser, but also those within the colonised people themselves.

Hasanalli and Rehana’s use of the civilisational rhetoric of the colonial discourse in expressing their anxieties about the ‘savage’ of the interiors, echoes Turners geo-cultural mapping but also registers the historical fabric of difference in which colonial discourse was encountered. There was an existing tension in African discourse that debated the hierarchy of Arab influenced coastal culture as superior to the interior highlands[8]. Many stories about the Omani Arabs, the fair skinned Arabs from the north[9], the Ismailis, the Bohras, the ‘servants of the colonial officer’ like vakils, and the whole class of Baluchi mercenaries like the Legbreaker Yahya[10], allows the retellings to make these specific relations of power visible. Within the circulating communities and practices of Islam too, there lay inherent differentiations and boundaries. Gurnah allows the circulation of the same stories to occur in both the communities, that of the British and that of the Kiswahili speaking, which allows for the transposition of the colonial encounter onto earlier histories. The stories about the plantation history, slave abolition and the Zanzibari Sultan’s Baluchi soldiers recur in both contexts (Hasanalli and Turner’s anecdotes), and reveal both, the historical differences and sameness of ideas and attitudes in this complex world of interactions[11]. These internal divisions are not merely historical details that Gurnah casually chooses to make clear. These concerns weigh back in, probably mirroring Gurnah’s own experience in the postcolonial metropole. For we see Rashid later silently registering the ‘civilisational difference’ he expected his Indian friends like Ramesh Rao to note between Africans and Indians[12].

In being told and through the form of telling the stories reflect the common purpose of articulating a self-construction of both the teller (the character) and of Gurnah himself, as the one who chose these particular stories. The didactic and the autobiographical subtext of the stories told within the novel make the reader aware of historically informed notions of what one is or should be and what one is not or should be. Stories become then a representational technology, a place-making device, geographically and socio-politically speaking. The use of stories within this fiction novel are helpful to locate people and their subjective experiences, in consciousness of time, epistemologies, socio-political hierarchy and geographical places. Stories mark spatial breaks between the coast and the interior[13]. Stories also mark temporal breaks, from ‘in those days’[14] to whatever the present is, which seems so unrecognizable to the later Rashid[15]. More importantly for subjects of mixed-race encounters like Zakariya and Zubeyda, stories uttered by their children, Hasanalli and Rehana become semantic signposts of historical crossroads that troubled political realities of postcolonial East Africa.

To describe Zakariya’s regard for Swahili culture, despite being an Indian, and his embracing of Zubeyda as ‘going native’, the infamous colonial trope finds new meaning and utility[16]. The story is again relevant when Jamila, a descendant of this couple, needed to be discredited. The idea of the ‘native’ here, raises many questions about indigeneity that plagued East African politics through postcolonial period, coinciding with Gurnah’s youth. From the expulsion of Asians from Uganda[17], and the anxieties over the ‘Indian’ merchant class in Tanzania as enemies of socialism[18], to Gurnah’s disillusionment with Nyerere’s oppressive socialist program, the usage of metaphors like ‘going native’ becomes particularly significant. It marks a speculative exploration of the possible historical antecedents to these antagonisms that plagued the postcolonial condition of East Africa, be it Kenya, Uganda or Tanzania. In fact, Gurnah as a Tanzanian seems to signal his critique of Nyerere’s socialism and ‘non-racialised’ identity of the national subject by highlighting the reality of racial difference in the historical experience of the ‘Africans’ in coastal East Africa[19]. The work profiles of the various characters in the book reflect some of perhaps Gurnah’s own anxieties stemming from the Ugandan and Tanzanian experiences. The Gujarati or mixed-race merchants, the middle-class intellectuals, the government service people like those working at the Customs are all what produces the anxiety that Brennan meticulously traces through cultural and economic conversations about indigeneity, rights and urban spatial claims in colonial and postcolonial Tanzania.

By constructing characters like Hasanalli, Gurnah reveals those caught between these frames, the liminal subjects of such intersecting antagonisms, and uses stories they tell to make sense of their troubled belonging. Hasanalli found an excitement in Azad’s companionship because of his ‘Indian’ roots[20].What might this mean? What kind of stories had Azad come with for Hasanalli to sense an affinity? This unspoken or undeclared affinity may reflect in both Gurnah perhaps own scepticism in accepting the ‘Africanness’ of such mixed-race people, as well as his diasporic lifestyle later. There are traces of this historical conundrum even in Gurnah’s subtle construction of Feisal and Nuru’s conversation about Jamila and how her mixed-race origins of multiple layers (Indian, African and European) posed a problem beyond chastity. Therefore, while the stories capture the plurality and multiplicity of East African social plane, they also unveil the complexity of the differences and inter-relationships. History’s push for an ordered narrative may obscure the messiness and the contradictions of these interactions, which is why fiction then becomes an exemplary (literally) model to reveal these historical realities.

The other interpretive utility of Desertion is the sociality that the contexts of telling reveal in the novel. The telling of stories occur in specific spaces, in social and cultural enclosures where meanings, experiences and interpretations are shared (or maybe even contested). For example, the banter exchanged between Rashid and his friend on their visit to Lake District highlight jokes about a common racialised experience; a diasporic banter, perhaps all too familiar to Gurnah himself. Then there also is familial banter. Family is also a site of telling to transmit, to didact and to empathize; stories of affairs, of achievements, of passions, of struggles, of lust, of scandals and of transgressions, between siblings, and from parents to children, and from children to extended networks of trust and kinship like aunts, cousins etc.[21]. Then there are some sites of telling with specific boundaries, labourer’s banter for example, filled with laughter and conversations of men without women[22]. Stories sustain certain socialities, their limits and their socio-cultural scope. And then it emerges, that an underlying subtext marks the novel. One that designates stories of the three kinds I listed above, particularly the first two, as recursively in the domain of ‘women’. Stories then come across as a gendered sociality, a recurring motif of ‘women’s spaces’. And their didactic purpose seems to entail particularly gendered concerns, of contradictory types, both inspiring agency as well as regulating women’s sexuality.

The novel seems to treat the circulation of stories as a particular feature of women’s domain, thereby suggesting that the historical sustenance of a large segment of social reality is dependent on the didactic transmission of stories within gendered spaces. Most women in the novel appear with a repertoire of ‘stories’ about them, and their pasts, of a particular kind, their exploits with the opposite sex. Be it Aunt Mariam’s ability to control the men in the family like Uncle Hamadi[23], and her expressive desires towards social networks and other men, or be it the transmitted legend of Rehana and her sexual ‘misadventures,’ or be it the popular trope of the bold ‘Goan women.[24]’ Transmitted stories circulate and generate multiple meanings, and give normative form to social practices while also offering spaces for contested and transgressive interpretations. In a society that Gurnah describes to be so visibly anxious of the racialised web of sexual encounters, stories enabled and defined both limits of propriety as well as the possibilities of transgressions. Jamila sought inspiration in Rehana’s ability to return men’s stare, as she imagined from her grandmother’s stories[25]. Rashid corrected Barbara Turner’s reduction of Rehana to her grandfather’s ‘native lover,’ an encounter made possible in the intersection of pathways of transmitted stories.[26] Jamila’s and her female ancestors’ stories are an episode that offers a window into some of the anxieties about property owning women, agentic women, and independently living women that Brennan’s book on TAIFA registers about the Manyema women in Tanzania[27]. Perhaps, the anxieties expressed by Amin’s mother Nuru when considering Amin and Jamila’s relationship were not merely marred by Jamila’s divorced past. Perhaps, Jamila’s great-grandmother, Zubeyda by marrying an Indian man, posed the problem of what Gurnah might have been aware of, that which transpired in Tanzania in the 1940s. African women’s interracial relationships were inherently deemed as ‘prostitution’ and ‘polluting’ to African lines of descent. It did not help that Rehana and Jamila herself were deserted and were beyond the racial boundaries of sexual normativity. Nuru uses the same word ‘chotara’ for Rehana, used for mixed race children in the Flowarose debate of the 1940s.[28] Gurnah therefore, through the lens of his own Tangyanikan history perhaps, constructs a shared fate of the East African coastal community and their gendered regulatory frameworks. These are visible or materialised in the stories that women circulated, about women, and men like Amin remained oblivious of, and disconcerted by except until his own romance is obstructed.

There also is the intrigue, common in descriptions of gendered spaces and their interiority through the male gaze. From Hasanalli eavesdropping, to the lurking eyes on women’s qasida telling, and to Zakariya preferring to be with women and not with the gossiping men of the town, there is an intrigue that Gurnah’s language registers regarding storytelling in women’s spaces[29]. However, the novel also records questioning of this segregation, when Amin reflects on whether there were perceptible differences in what his father described as ‘women’s gossip’ and what men discussed. Amin concluded that there was not much difference except the more malicious nature of men’s conversation, which Amin presumes ‘purely female inhabited spaces’ might mirror[30]. These snippets from the novel reflect on a deep historical question, where ‘privateness’ and ‘interiority’ of women’s spaces (in quotes because they can be debatable) and their archives shield many histories from embracing a feminist interpretation. Samia Khatun’s Australiama uses women’s stories, of dreams and of nostalgia, of marriage and of love as feminist archives of what she calls subjugated knowledges[31]. Marriage, sex, layered interracial encounters in colonial spaces, therefore, as subjects of storytelling are evocative sites for historical relations to become tangible.

Although the novel does not explicitly admit to a feminist narration, the presence of stories allows for feminist narrative universes to relay the experiences and consequences of ‘Desertion’ fraught particularly in a colonial and a postcolonial moment of modern East Africa. Intercontinentally situated stories of abandonment, sexual regulation, and layered marginalisation of women because of their bodily engagements are best expressed through the narrative device of stories within the meta narrative of this novel. One may end the novel asking if the subject of desertion was Rashid’s exile in the UK or was it Rehana and her female descendants’ iterative connections to abandonment. In either case, the pursuit of this story of abandonment, allowed Gurnah to explore the historical conditions in which such abandonment prompted more pronounced marginalisations and affective consequences.

Fiction where such spaces are not abstract formations but exemplified materialities, offer a profound site of engagement with the circulatory logics of storytelling and their gendered textures. When Zakariya related the legends of the Magic Horse and of Zubeyda and Harun Rashid to Rehana, that moment captures many historical fragments and cultural encounters coalescing in a single episode. On one hand, Zakariya idealised their mother Zubeyda as a prototype of the agentic force that Zubeyda from the legend represented as a builder of mosques, roads and water cisterns. On the other hand, this exchange locates their subjective self-construction in specific knowledge-relations of the Indian Ocean world’s Muslimness[32]. Just the way, Rashid says, that men talk dirty to assert their manliness. Stories then perform a self-fashioning function. The narrator, Rashid admits, ‘Some stories I am sure were his [his father, Zakariya’s] own invention[33].’ The truthfulness of them are always suspect, but stories are always consumed for their figurative meaning and relations rather than literal historical meaning.

To conclude, stories are a technological device in a work of fiction that can illustrate many historical possibilities. From the flow of knowledge worlds, the social sites of storytelling, to the strategies of self-construction and embedded autobiographical subtext of the author’s life, novels are fertile sites for historical engagement. One can pursue many stylistic aspects of the stories in the novel to make more sense of the pluralistic universe of the modern East African coast. However, the particular political and social reality of the colonial and the postcolonial encounter are registered in the novel through the specific ways in which the author particularly knows that history. The telling of a story, by a particular character, are an archive of social practice, social texture and an embedded relational, and aspirational ‘self’. Therefore, fiction performs the function of expressing complexity of historical truth or possibilities, with all their contradictions and disorderliness. Gurnah’s own subjective dilemma, of his conflicted notions of belonging, and consistent consciousness of ‘exile’ echo in the ways in which he constructs the colonial East African space for multiple cultural and political transactions to occur. While the novel may have been based in characters from specifically East Africa, the stories helped trace the wider networks of circulation and mobility that inhabited their imaginaries. Such scale of spectrum is ‘queer’ and must be allowed to remain so, without the urgent cogency of historical narrativisation[34]. Gurnah, along with many of his contemporaries, therefore, identify as postcolonial fiction author, refusing the area-studies paradigm, because stories disrupt the stability of area, of containment and of unity.

[1] Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion (New York : Pantheon Books, 3005) 189. Henceforth, all the unnamed citations are from the novel.

[2] I use East-Africa and not Kenya in particular, even though the story is based in Kenya. Gurnah’s novel had elements that spoke to an experience that transcended national borders, that reflected a historical moment that contemporary borders disrupt. It echoed a somewhat conjoined experience of coastal East-Africa in the 19th and 20th century.

[3] 32

[4] 37, 39

[5] 43

[6] 31

[7] 12, 14

[8] Brennan, Taifa, Chapter 4

[9] 16

[10] 24

[11] 22, 45

[12] 217

[13] 31

[14] In ch 1, and on 64 — ‘in the old days of antiquity’

[15] 150

[16] 62

[17] Mahmood Mamdani, “The Ugandan Asian Expulsion: Twenty Years After”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 6:3, (1993) 272.

[18] James Brennan, Taifa: Making Race and Nation in Urban Tanzania (Ohio, 2013) 5.

[19] Julius K. Nyerere, Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism, (Dar es Salaam, Oxford University Press: 1968) 95.

[20] 69

[21] 139

[22] 33

[23] 27–28

[24] 182

[25] 239

[26] 260

[27] Brennan, Taifa, 65.

[28] Brennan, Taifa, 132–135

[29] 64

[30] 159

[31] Samia Khatun, Australianama: A South Asian Odyssey in Australia, (University of Queensland Press, 2018) Chapter 7, 142.

[32] Khatun, Australianama, 8.

[33] 64

[34] Anjali Arondekar, Geeta Patel; “Area Impossible: Notes toward an Introduction” GLQ 1 April 2016; 22 (2): 151–171.