By the Sea (2001) By Abdulrazak Gurnah

 

An activist friend of mine recently posted on the book By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gurnah, a native of Zanzibar, is a retired Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. I’ve just finished reading it.

Like most Americans, I suspect, all I knew about Zanzibar is that it is mentioned in the opening theme song of the Patty Duke Show. This lack of information about both the country as well as most African geography, complicated my read. So, like the main character, I accessed maps frequently, and then Wikipedia for historical summary.

By the Sea, fiction, is set in Zanzibar, Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika, a German colony, then a British protectorate), Kenya, East Germany (pre-unification), and the United Kingdom.

The story begins when a 65-year-old man born in Zanzibar arrives from Tanzania seeking refuge status in the UK.  He pretends to not know English and ends up at a refugee center where they will try to determine the legitimacy of his asylum request. His passport indicates his name is Rajab Shaaban Mahmud. He is assigned to a case worker named Rachel, the first friendly, non-bureaucratic person he has come across. Still, he won’t acknowledge that he knows how to speak English. Frustrated, Rachel contacts a professor in London who was an immigrant from Zanzibar years ago named Latif Mahmud, asking his assistance as a translator. After Shaaban hears the name of the translator, he confesses that he does know how to speak English. He tells her he knows the man’s name but seems hesitant to talk with him, quoting from Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby The Scrivener, “I would prefer not to.”

Rachel will persist, and once Latif has heard the refugee’s name he becomes interested in meeting him because Rajab Shaaban Mahmud is the name of his deceased father. Their eventual meeting confirms that the name on the passport Shaaban uses is stolen, his real name is Saleh Omar. They are in fact known to each other, with ugly family histories to rehash. These family dynamics are the heart and plot of the book.

There are multiple other aspects of this book that are interesting: one story is how the asylum system (UK not US) works; another is British colonial rule in East Africa and how its education worked to indoctrinate Africans; and an extensive overview of how independence when it came brought with it violence and corruption as warring factions fought each other for control; as well a first hand account of being an immigrant.

Recommendation: Yes