Swahili Transmodernity and the Indian Ocean Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Ethic of Community in By the Sea, Desertion, and Gravel Heart

Abstract

This paper attempts an analysis of Zanzibar-born author Abdulrazak Gurnah’s works as an exposition of a Swahili transmodernity that operates through “Western Indian Ocean”1 influences, transmissions, and movements. This analysis follows Isabel Hofmyer’s interpretation of the Indian Ocean as “method”2, and extends the argument to read the Ocean as a method of relation, and in fact, as the condition of relation. This understanding of the Indian Ocean itself as the very condition of relation places emphasis on the endurance of local(ised) knowledges and their communal creation. Communal creativity implies that “local” littoral knowledges are necessarily and always already in relation with other world knowledges without losing the imperative and urgent power of their own cultural systems. This investigative axis borrows from Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of transmodernity 3 as the critical cultivation of transnational and transversal ties between peripheral/negated modernities and the creation of pluriversal knowledges that challenge the arrogating narratives of hegemonic modernities. The paper explores how Swahili transmodernity does not rely on the avowal of a singular, autonomous Swahili identity or modernity, but is an inherently capacious engagement both with other “peripheral” modernities as well as with the hegemonies of European and Arab modernities. The
spatial and cultural coordinates of the Indian Ocean, in this sense, signify the resistive gesture of Swahili transmodernity, figuring it as an alternative apprehension of the world in time and history. The second interrelated axis of investigation deals with how Gurnah’s peripheralisation of “Modernity” perceives the Oceanic condition in terms of “mahali”. “Mahali”, in the Swahili language, is the noun class denominating place, space, and location, implying additionally the “time” inhabited by a space or place. I assess the Indian Ocean in Gurnah’s works as a simultaneous embodiment of all three aspects of mahali: as a definite material heaving place of transferred knowledges; as an indefinite imagined space of cultural transaction and translation; and as the inhabitation of the time of
an alternative modernity. More specifically, I consider how these ideas are explored in By the Sea, Desertion, and his most recent novel, Gravel Heart. All three novels, characteristic of his oeuvre, portray movement: across seas, in time, and through periods of political change. The critical register, however, remains stubbornly “coastal”, where the Indian Ocean operates as a method of activating and relating multiple and cross-cutting histories, such as those of empire, trade, migration, and exile. My particular interest in this paper therefore lies in how the Western Indian Ocean is not only the operating metaphor of these texts, but also the space of a dynamic transmodern modality—a mode of being the world through the Ocean— articulating, at the same time, a surviving vernacular of Swahili community.

1. In a lecture titled “In Postcolonial Waters”, delivered at Nottingham Trent University in September 2013, Gurnah uses this particular term, recalibrating the terrain of coastal East Africa in terms of the littoral space of the Western Indian Ocean.

2. Hofmyer, Isabel. “The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, vol. 32, no. 3, 2012, pp. 584-590.

3. Dussel, Enrique. “Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of the Philosophy of Liberation.” TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the LusoHispanic World, vol. 1, no.3, 2012, pp. 28-59.