Abdulrazak Gurnah
By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the story of two refugees from Zanzibar whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways.
The novel opens with Saleh Omar’s arrival in a foggy coastal town in England. He has fled his home to seek asylum in England. An anomaly because he is older than most asylum seekers, he is initially sent to a detention center. He carries a fake passport in the name of Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, and he pretends he cannot speak English. Rachel, a social worker specializing in immigration cases, takes an interest in his case. She contacts Latif Mahmud, originally from Zanzibar, to act as translator. Latif Mahmud, who just happens to be the son of Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, is a professor of literature in a London university. He is curious to know who has taken on his father’s identity.
After Saleh Omar reveals to Rachel he is fluent in English, she contacts Latif Mahmud to tell him his translation services are no longer needed. But Latif Mahmud decides he wants to meet this elderly refugee from Zanzibar to discover why he assumed the identity of his father. The two finally meet and unravel the complex story of the tangled relationship between Saleh Omar and Latif Mahmud’s family. They are initially distrustful of each other and share different versions of the past through extended flashbacks. Eventually, their versions coalesce, with each filling gaps in the other’s story.
Much of the novel takes the form of stories recalling the past. Saleh Omar shares his stories with Rachel and then with Latif Mahmud. It is through these stories he becomes a character in his own tale. He describes his initial success in his furniture business, his marriage, his incarceration, his release after many years, and his eventual escape from his homeland. Latif Mahmud has his own story to tell of his family life, a scholarship to study in East Germany, and his escape to England.
The novel moves at a slow pace with leaps backward and forward in time. What emerges from the story is the strong sense of displacement experienced by both characters. Although Latif Mahmud is a successful author and university professor and although Saleh Omar is settled comfortably in his new surroundings, neither one feels at home. The two come together because of a shared history in a country that spit them out and because of shared feelings of displacement in a foreign land.
Abdulrazak Gurnah conveys the complexity of his characters’ psychologies and their feelings of rootlessness with sensitivity and compassion. He probes delicately into the psychology of refugees clinging to the stories of their former lives as a means of remembering who they are and where they came from while simultaneously struggling to make sense of their new lives in an alien land.