1In the second chapter of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea, narrator Saleh Omar reflects on his situation as a refugee hosted in a flat by an organisation. Pondering on his relation to language, he ends up drawing on spatial imagery:

I find fear in the stealthy passage of time, as if all along I have been standing still, loitering in one place while everything had slid past […]. At those times I feel defeated by the overbearing weight of the nuances that place and describe everything I might say, as if a place already exists for them and a meaning has already been given to them before I utter them. […] Can an I ever speak of itself without making itself heroic, without making itself seem hemmed in, arguing against an unarguable, rancouring with an implacable? (Gurnah 2021a, 68)

2From the character’s reflection on his physical stasis, the passage progressively slides towards the limits of language, connecting readers with Saleh Omar’s unresolved position on several levels at once. Echoing Gurnah’s own ambivalences towards the places of his past and of his present, the narration of selfhood is inextricably connected to the writing of place, as the risk of an over-determination by place seems to be constantly looming. Place and language together constitute an implacable constraint – a reality ceaselessly imposing itself on the making of fiction – but they also appear to form an un-place-able signifier whose essentially ungraspable nature is sustained creatively by Gurnah’s multifaceted fictional worlds.

3Both this implacability and this un-placeability are expressed in a range of place metaphors and tropes, not only in Gurnah’s fiction but also in his non-fictional production, not least in the essay titled “Writing and Place.” Despite the tonality of its title, this particular essay does not so much engage with the theoretical underpinnings of the word “place” as it accounts for Gurnah’s personal positioning towards the politics and aesthetics of postcolonial literature and migration writing. The meaning ascribed to place remains unfathomable yet its unforgiving, pervasive presence transpires in Gurnah’s meditation, just like the haunting presence of Zanzibar, “a place and a way of being lost to [him] forever” (Gurnah 2004b, 26).

5Beyond such questionable legitimations, these two novels form a thematic continuum in light of Gurnah’s concerns with displacement, or singular experiences in which the sense of place is unsettled by mercenary intentions, colonial predation or the experience of exile. In Paradise, the trials of young protagonist Yusuf take the form of a journey through different places in colonial East Africa after he has been forced to leave home as a pawned servant (rehani). Through Yusuf’s trials and encounters, the narrative articulates multifaceted understandings of foreignness, exploration but also exploitation in and of place. By the Sea is set in a contemporary context, where Saleh Omar, who seeks asylum in England, is reminded of his native Zanzibar when Latif Mahmud, a man sent to him as a supposed “expert on [his] area,” (Gurnah 2021a, 65) happens to have close ties with him and with the place they both left. These novels are evidently different in plot, setting and voice – while the former is often categorized among Gurnah’s historical novels, the latter is part of a different group concerned with contemporary experiences of migration. Yet when compared, these two novels display the extent of Gurnah’s poetics of place across the themes of exile, mapping, agency and the predation over places, which is not restricted to the colonial paradigm of territorial conquest but also encompasses other forms of symbolical and material hold over places. Most evidently, these are novels whose titles are uncertain toponyms, each of which acts as an unplaceable of sorts. The tropes of a place “by the sea” or a “paradise,” which function metonymically across the novels, evoke places which are hard to reach or to locate, which resist cartography, yet which anxiously call for naming. Both novels seem to function through a teleological dynamic yet remain infused with a sense of impossibility, ironically sustaining a longing for place. While this operates at a narrative level, the paratexts of these novels might be received through an altogether different, neocolonial form of longing for place. Sharae Deckard has thus noted that Paradise was published at a time when Zanzibar was progressively becoming a “tourist paradise” – the novel’s appearance on the literary scene may have echoed a rhetoric of paradise that was tinged with exoticism (2009, 127). This is perhaps where the implacability of place also lies – in its persisting presence within receptions of the transnational text.

6This article first endeavours to uncover and situate the role of place in the reception of Gurnah’s fiction and in his nonfiction, by engaging with noteworthy concepts such as parochialism, displacement, and the opposition between embodied place and colonial “site” (Gurnah 2022b, 22). Looking more particularly at By the Sea and Paradise, one can suggest that the writing of place as an unplaceable signifier entails the destabilisation of physical and metaphorical boundaries, which allows the writer to shed light on enduring issues of agency and access to places. From such boundaries, these two texts open up pathways towards place consciousness, where metonymy, memory and the re-evaluation of cosmopolitanism nurture Gurnah’s creative engagement with the essential un-placeability of place.

Primacy and parochialism: unpicking the place of place

7Approaching the spatial poetics of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s work compels readers to engage with epistemologies of place – not only as representations or tropes within his novels, but also in the critical and political context in which his life and his works have evolved since the 1980s. This implies unsettling the epistemological hierarchies which might lead to seeing place as a given, or, as geographer Tim Cresswell terms it, “a word wrapped in common sense” (2004, 1). Gurnah’s non-fictional writing provides insight into his position of creative resistance against the simplification of place experiences.

8Without analysing the entire genealogy of Gurnah’s oeuvre, it seems essential to remember the time, place and language in which his fiction came to be published and has evolved since the 1980s and the 1990s, which saw the heyday of an Anglophone publishing apparatus famously termed the “postcolonial exotic” by Graham Huggan (2006). As a counterpoint to this external frame, an attentive reading of the positions Gurnah has expressed in his nonfiction with respect to the politics of place can perhaps best respond to any attempts at “placing” his work.

9From a marketing standpoint, Gurnah’s novels published in the 1990s seem to be no exception to the moment of opportunistic exoticisation identified by Huggan. In “Locating Abdulrazak Gurnah: Margins, Mainstreams, Mobilities,” Sally-Ann Murray notes, after Genette, how the appearance of his novels functions according to a “convergence of effects,” particularly in the choices made for the paratexts by the Bloomsbury publishing group. She points to how these paratexts are systematically connected with Gurnah’s native Zanzibar, which she claims is presented as “an ‘original’ topography-cum-foundational base from which to interpret his writing” (Murray 2022, 146). According to Murray, this “foundational base” is proposed by the publisher as “the appropriate frame of response,” manifested rather literally on the cover of the first Bloomsbury edition featuring a frame of emerald sea and palm leaves. This is despite the fact that Gurnah has ceaselessly endeavoured to re-frame this Zanzibari subtext within local and transnational contexts.

10While Huggan’s argument on the “postcolonial exotic” unpicks the politics of Booker Prize nominations in the 1980s and 1990s, the more recent awarding of the Nobel Prize to Gurnah raises similar questions regarding literary authority and the European legitimation of African literatures. In a lecture that took place in November 2025 at Stellenbosch University, where he and Gurnah were invited to speak, J.M. Coetzee commented that they were invited together “because [they] won a Swedish prize, a prize which carries more prestige in Africa than any imaginable African prize may carry,” a fact that Coetzee describes as “strange, disturbing, anomalous” but which testifies to a “present globalist universalist dispensation” in which global geopolitics play a significant part (Coetzee et.al., 2025, 29:34; 33:16).

In our own century, investigations of ethics and politics continue to be universalist in aspiration – to the detriment of place, considered merely parochial in scope. Treatments of logic and language often are still more place-blind, as if speaking and thinking were wholly unaffected by the locality in which they occur. (Casey 1996, xii; emphasis mine)

12While it seems perilous to assume that as an academic, Gurnah might have nurtured an interest in the “Spatial Turn” of the 1990s, his reclaiming of the parochial undoubtedly partakes of a critical engagement with the visibility of place experiences – one which seeks to distance itself from both the immediately post-colonial narratives of African nationalisms and the totalising narratives of the global which emerge in the late twentieth century. In Gurnah’s own words in “Writing and Place,” his vision of place is “firmly inflected by the particular” (Gurnah 2004b, 28). Whether in his essays or in his fiction, Gurnah has sought to dispel claims of universalism that would discount the material situatedness of place, as well as to complexify the fallacious localism constructed by publishers in the Global North.

13This fragile balance between a necessarily incomplete situatedness and an over-determination by national affiliation is particularly tangible when looking at Gurnah’s relation to migration, or, as he terms it, “[the] condition of being from one place and living in another” (Gurnah 2004b, 27). In Gurnah’s works, the attachment to place is thus often manifested through exilic affiliations. Describing Zanzibar, he tellingly calls it the “lost place” (26) to account for its recurrence in his fiction. Although he acknowledges that this question is “not new” (28), the writer chooses to engage with it through the prism of place rather than that of the nation or the lost “homeland,” to quote Rushdie’s famous essay (Rushdie 1982), thus placing the terms of the debate on what seems to be a more ontological level. Indeed, Gurnah has not merely read Rushdie but edited the Cambridge Companion dedicated to his work (Gurnah 2007). Because it situates the debate at the level of place, Gurnah’s essay echoes the words of philosopher Thomas Nail, who, in The Figure of the Migrant, claims that “place-bound membership in a society is assumed as primary; secondary is the movement back and forth between social points.” Nail further explains that in most societies,

a static place and membership are theorized first, and the migrant is the one who lacks both. Thus, more than any other political figure (citizen, foreigner, sovereign, etc.) the migrant is the one least defined by its being and place and more by its becoming and displacement: by its movement. (Nail 2015, 3; original emphasis)

14Questioning the discourse of primacy ascribed to place, Gurnah unsettles the very notion of a “static place and membership,” suggesting the fragility of contemporary assumptions which equate citizenship with place. This can be seen in his fiction through comparative devices which destabilise definitions of citizenship and belonging, and re-situate such assumptions in the long history of human displacement – in Paradise, one thinks of the intertextual reference to Salim bin Abakari’s late nineteenth-century Swahili story “Safari Yangu ya Urusi na ya Siberia” (in English, My Journey to Russia and Siberia), where the East African characters learn that there are Muslim communities in “Rusi” (Gurnah 2004a, 105). A similar effect is produced at the beginning of By the Sea, where the protagonist seeking asylum is made to face a UK officer whose own parents were Romanian refugees (Gurnah 2021a, 12).

15Unsettling epistemological primacy also implies upending the colonial discourse that shapes place along the lines of European mapping and surveying – moving from the “site” of colonial epistemology to the experience of embodied places. This is what Gurnah addresses in his essay “Learning to Read,” drawn from his interpretation of Keats’s poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” a text in which the poet’s first discovery of Homer is compared with “stout Cortez” gazing at the Pacific in a conquering stance. Examining Keats’s obliviousness to the “desire to possess, plunder and subdue,” made evident by the poet’s association of a literary discovery with colonial conquest, Gurnah observes that Keats’s vision testifies to a discourse where the “transformations and subjugations” of colonisation are only ever evoked to undermine colonised societies: “where such broken societies are present in a vision of the world, they are present as metaphors of decline and degeneration, or as sites where dilemmas of European sensibility are played out” (Gurnah 2022b, 22). Gurnah purposely avoids the word “place” the better to demonstrate the disembodied, cartographic perspective of the coloniser, constructing a one-dimensional “site.” Philosopher Edward Casey notes that “[s]ites may be bodiless – it entails a disembodied overview, a survey – but there can be no being-in-place except by being in a densely qualified place in concrete embodiment” (Casey 2011, 204).

16In both Paradise and By the Sea, places are nothing if not “densely qualified.” Within the depth of material existence and the meanders of memory, characters connect the particular history of their dwelling places with a genealogy of disorientations and displacements. The characters’ experiences also allow for a “densely qualified” language of place, in a pervasive metonymic system which Gurnah seems to relish and which he uses to unsettle readers’ expectations towards place. One recurring motif is that of the boundedness of place, revealing how the politics of access to place endures across colonial and post-colonial subjectivities.

“A right to places:” shifting boundaries

18Latif, one of the two leading protagonists in By the Sea, remembers going to study in the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s and being welcomed by Elleke, the mother of a German friend he had been offered to exchange letters with. As Elleke remembers her childhood in Kenya, Latif asks: “Why Kenya?,” provoking a reflection on the incentive for Europe’s colonial project as a whole:

You don’t mean why Kenya rather than another place. Because in that way it did not matter whether it was Kenya or another place. We were European. We could go anywhere in the world we wanted. […] Well, because we lived at a time when it seemed we had a right to do all that, a right to places that were only occupied by people with dark skins and frizzy hair. (Gurnah 2021a, 131)

19The idea of a “right to places” extends and exceeds the territorial aspect of the European colonial project – it suggests the pervasiveness of colonial ideology, beyond the materiality of resource extraction and the political scope of a right to the land or the territories. To Elleke, places like Kenya were not inhabited or lived in but rather “occupied,” an image which betrays the contamination of language by colonial discourse. A similar displacement of meaning can be found in Paradise. As merchants Hussein and Hamid discuss the growing European takeover in East Africa, their perception of land conquest morphs into a worrying three-dimensional vision:

‘I fear for the times ahead of us,’ Hussein said quietly, making Hamid sigh wearily. ‘Everything is in turmoil. These Europeans are very determined, and as they fight over the prosperity of the earth they will crush all of us. You’d be a fool to think they’re here to do anything that is good. It isn’t trade they’re after, but the land itself. And everything in it… us.’ (Gurnah 2004a, 86)

20Hussein’s imaginary moves from the flat surfaces of the “earth” and the “land” to the use of “in,” suggesting here again a destabilisation of form, while still emphasising the embodied reality of those who live in the colonised place. In Paradise, the image of a threshold enabling or preventing the access to place is at once spatial and temporal, as the narrative progressively gives more space to an awareness of German conquest and occupation, and Hussein’s cryptic mention of the “times ahead” acts as another threshold through which the characters fear to tread.

22The image of doors that need guarding finds its counterpart in By the Sea, where Saleh Omar evokes his own position as a refugee through the motif of doorkeeping. Commenting on the security guards he has observed at the entrance of a hotel, Saleh calls them “bawabs,” surprising Rachel, the social worker he regularly meets – they are, in his words “Doorkeepers, an indispensable article in any civilized and prosperous culture” (Gurnah 2021a, 201). The term appears again in his ironic definition of Kevin Edelman, the asylum officer at the airport, as the “bawab of Europe”:

Kevin Edelman, the bawab of Europe, and the gatekeeper to the orchards in the family courtyard, the same gate which had released the hordes that went out to consume the world and to which we have come sliming up to beg admittance. Refugee. Asylum-seeker. Mercy. (Gurnah 2021a, 31)

23The imagery of the “hordes” of foreigners evoked in Paradise is here widened to encompass both demonising visions of refugees from whom the nourishing “orchards” of Europe need protection, and the “hordes” of colonisers who have now become those supposedly in need of protection. This displaced meaning of gatekeeping ultimately gives way to the implacable pace of the final three words in the form of a plea – depending on who hears them, they can either facilitate or hinder the character’s entrance into this European fortress. Gurnah’s placement of boundaries at a symbolical and mythical level therefore makes it possible to broaden the scope of a supposed “right to places,” re-placing it within a long history of scattering and dispossession not only of place itself but of its unstable meanings.

24The motif of a colonial predation over place is not only revisited through time but also through different spaces and settings. Paradise and By the Sea play on scale to display the constant threats that loom not only over territories or nations but over houses – one notes for instance the unsettling hospitality unfolding in the first chapter of Paradise, where Yusuf’s father, who entertains a hotel project, has to welcome Aziz, and his mother has to provide a feast for the man who ultimately takes her son away. By the Sea also constructs a subplot around the predation of Latif’s house by Saleh, as a result of a complex machinery involving local politics. In both stories, Gurnah’s settings seem to articulate the ambivalence of hospitality identified by Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle – an ambivalence implying that the person who is welcomed can always potentially “becom[e] a hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 55).

25Facing this uncertain “right to places,” the characters develop strategies of resistance in the form of re-framings. In Paradise, Yusuf’s fascination for the walled garden in Aziz’s house is one such attempt at recreating boundaries, while Saleh Omar in By the Sea admits his fascination for “furniture and maps” (Gurnah 2021a, 19), objects which he describes at length on several occasions, as if attempting to re-constitute places metonymically. To Saleh, the creation of maps by colonial power “made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable” (Gurnah 2021a, 35). Albeit ambivalent in purpose and serving the colonial enterprise, maps remain his means of accessing places from his past.

26From the implacability of the colonial hold on place to the un-placeability characterising the refugee’s experience, the presence of place is made tangible in the narratives through the malleability of its boundaries. Gurnah’s suggestive writing of place contributes to what he claimed to be the role of fiction in his essay on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – to “liberate the reader into seeing affiliated networks of knowledge and meaning” (1993, 157). This “liberation” may in turn be the central incentive towards fostering a consciousness of place among his readers.

“Somewhere in the interior” or the fiction of place consciousness

27Gurnah’s fiction is from the onset a work of memory – not only the memory of (his) “departure,” to quote his eponymous debut novel, but an interrupted memory of place itself, which his fiction seems to be re-writing constantly, in the manner of a palimpsest. In the words of Latif in By the Sea, Gurnah’s own “land of memory” is a “dour place” (Gurnah 2021a, 86). In a talk published in the journal Crossings, Gurnah describes memory as the “writer’s hinterland” (2024, 9), once more evoking his craft with geographic imagery. While his consciousness of place unquestionably pertains to the inner workings of real and fabricated memory, place in his narratives also manifests as an exterior – through a strong attention to the materiality of experience, Gurnah seeks to nurture a sensitive awareness of places that are often unfamiliar to most of his readers, and in doing so, to question the interactions that make a place “other.”

28Paradise explicitly functions as a “journey to the interior,” as this is the title of one of its sections (Gurnah 2004, 93). As Gurnah plays with intertextuality, the combination of stories about distant places told and re-told by different voices acts as a chamber of echoes, building up a consciousness of alterity which is channelled by imaginaries of place. Yusuf’s experiences with Aziz’s caravan have been read by some as a response to Joseph Conrad’s depictions of a journey to the Congo (Jacobs 2009; Deandrea 2009), while others consider such a reading “Eurocentric,” if not mistaken (Hodapp 2015, 105). Whether or not it can be deemed to respond to Heart of Darkness, Paradise certainly writes back to the colonial tropes of discovery, survey and control, by de-multiplying these imaginaries of “other” places. Because the characters keep talking about places they have not experienced firsthand, places become storied, multi-layered and even multi-dimensional entities, rather than what Gurnah called the flat “sites” of the European colonial worldview (Gurnah 2022b, 22). This is particularly perceptible when Yusuf listens to the tales of Hamid and his wife, who take him in during the end of Aziz’s journey, or to the tales of passing merchants. In Yusuf’s eyes, these storied places are “magical”: “[he] listened to their tales of Mrima and Bagamoyo, and Mafia Island and Lamu, and Ajemi and Shams, and a hundred other magical places” (Gurnah 2004a, 104). As stories of places abound, such places almost seem to become another commodity exchanged between the men; yet just like the mysterious containers and bags transported by the seyyid, the contents of these places remain hidden from view and an object of speculation.

29When one of the men tells the story of his uncle who travelled and saw drunk villagers who were Muslims, in former regions of Russia and Uzbekistan, it is not only the likelihood of the event which is questioned but the reality of place itself: “You’re telling us tales, they cried. It can’t be true that such places exist” (Gurnah 2004a, 105). As James Hodapp has analysed, this story refers to a Swahili travel narrative by Salim bin Abakari (Hodapp 2015, 90); yet Gurnah’s text remains purposely ambiguous as to its veracity when the storyteller hesitates over place names: “‘Kaskas, he said at last, hesitantly. Then his uncle went down to the land of Shams and back all the way to Mombasa, he said quickly, before anyone could interrogate him further about names” (Gurnah 2004a 106). While it testifies to the persisting to-and-fro operated between real places and storytelling, this anxiety of naming also pervades Gurnah’s stylistic choices in the form of strategic re-scalings.

30A famous spatial metaphor is the one Gurnah uses in “Writing and Place” to describe the English language, which “came to [him] to seem a spacious and roomy house, accommodating writing and knowledge with heedless hospitality” (2004b, 27). As if by contrast with this capacious language, Gurnah’s references to place often seem to rely on ironic re-scalings and forms of downsizing. In Paradise, the smallness of place seems to be associated with stasis, contrasting with the vast “interior” which Aziz and his men travel through. For instance, Yusuf’s birth town is described as the “small town of Kawa” (Gurnah 2004a, 5), a place where his parents struggle for survival, while Khalil, Yusuf’s partner in misfortune, tells him that he “lived in a small town south of here, a poor place” (230). In By the Sea, the word “place” is also regularly associated by Saleh Omar with the adjectives “small” or “little.” This is used as a way of writing back to colonial geographies and emphasising their persistence, for instance when Saleh recalls that “[t]here was still Suez to come, the inhumanities of Congo and Uganda, and other bitter blood-lettings in small places” (Gurnah 2021a, 18). This contempt is also internalized, for instance when Saleh recalls feeling with Hussein, the Persian merchant, a “sense of mutual difference from the place where we were – the puny, ragged, small place where we were” (Gurnah 2021a, 160).

31By replacing place names with those dismissive epithets, Gurnah’s narrators convey the ambivalence of place perceptions in colonial and post-colonial subjectivities. By the Sea extends this purposeful vagueness to the word “area,” used by Rachel, the social worker, when she tells Saleh Omar about an interpreter they have found for him – “someone at the University of London who is an expert on [his] area” (Gurnah 2021a, 65). Over several pages, Saleh’s internal monologue conveys his reception of this term, as if trying to ward off the contempt signified in a single word through an outpouring of language. Upon hearing the name of the “expert” and finding out he knows him, Saleh exclaims: “So he was the expert on our area! Mashaallah, that was something, not a stranger who came to summarise us, but one of our own” (Gurnah 2021a, 67). The change in pronouns, from “your” to “my area” to “our area” indicates a movement in the character’s self-positioning – he is no longer the only stranger from that “area,” but instead re-creates a common sense of place, an ambivalent form of place kinship. This kinship informs Gurnah’s poetics of place and his perception of Eurocentric critical concepts such as cosmopolitanism – a concept he repurposes and challenges in his writing of East African communalities.

32In a talk at Princeton University in January 2025, Gurnah discusses his vision of the local in connection to the word “cosmopolitanism,” which he defines as an “interest” in other cultures beyond one’s native affiliations, and “an idea that […] has the west as the core place” (Gurnah 2025, 48:27). Gurnah suggests reconsidering the word through a common consciousness of the Global South, one which transcends the Eurocentric figure of the cosmopolitan and offers perspectives of communality beyond that “core place.” For Christian Moraru, cosmopolitanism is often associated with a form of “utopianism” or even “a-topianism” (Moraru 2015, 42, emphasis mine) – a placelessness that connotes the detached stance of the urban European intellectual, moving effortlessly between places. Given the long and multifaceted history of the term, reading Gurnah’s historical novels through the lens of cosmopolitanism may prove perilous, as Shanty Moorthy points out. Considering the early-twentieth century East African societies of Paradise or Desertion as cosmopolitan indeed runs the risk not only of anachronism but of a certain “condescension,” by making “the recent present [of non-Western societies] coincid[e] with the past of a now more advanced West” (Moorthy 2010, 91).

33Yet, where Gurnah’s fiction engages most tellingly with the Eurocentric connotations of cosmopolitanism is precisely when the East African encounters he describes are re-situated in relation to contemporary migrations. In By the Sea, the story of Saleh Omar’s detention at an English airport slowly gives way to the history, but also to his own personal memories, of the musim, a seasonal moment of trade causing intercultural exchange. Saleh sold furniture – he remembers selling a beautiful ebony table to a Persian merchant called Hussein, whom he had befriended despite their differences in culture and language. Upon selling the table, Saleh suspected immoral behaviour on Hussein’s part and reflects retrospectively:

These are difficult things to know, and miserable matters to talk about, but they are the currency of daily commerce in a small town and it would be false not to speak about them. […] None of it was my affair, though in such a small place it was impossible not to know about such things. (Gurnah 2021a, 31)

34Here again, the categories of distance and size are called upon by Gurnah; yet here, the images of the “small town” and “small place” serve the purpose of placing events more than locations. Far from an idealized or privileged vision of cosmopolitanism, Saleh’s selective account re-situates local feuds within ambivalent situations of intercultural coexistence – this is where the concept of the “parochial,” discussed above, appears to be woven into Gurnah’s writing of place and to counter the usual connotations of cosmopolitan discourse. In “Cosmopolitanism and the claims of Locality,” Simon Gikandi questions the concept in relation to “postcolonial cosmopolitanism,” that is, the lifestyle of diasporic subjects “deriving its legitimacy from the mastery of the culture of modern Europe” (2010, 23). In By the Sea, Gurnah chooses to create such a character – Latif, an academic, is a symbolical opposite to Saleh, the refugee who has to make his way in England through other means than intellectual work. To Gikandi, “the refugee is the Other of the cosmopolitan,” who has no choice but to “demarcate a zone of ethnicity and locality,” to make a place for themselves (26). Here, the consciousness of Latif and Saleh’s differences is pitted against the implacable presence of their common place, the “small place” they have both left – also called “[their] area” (Gurnah 2021a, 67; emphasis mine) – and forces Latif to reconsider his birthplace despite his unwillingness to engage with the past. The presence of place is then manifested as an undeniable, implacable discomfort to the character – “I feel worn out after all this time, after all these years of thinking about that time and that place,” Latif tells Saleh (Gurnah 2021a, 207). The narrative ultimately manifests this discomfort in a shared experience of Saleh’s small flat by the sea: after a long-awaited night of reckoning about the particular house in Zanzibar that binds their lives together, Latif stays overnight at Saleh’s. Surprisingly, the latter ultimately uses a plural pronoun in reference to the house they each lived in at different times: “It was strange, after so many years, to have someone sleeping near by. […] In that small space, I could hear his movements in the next room and it reminded me of living in our old house, and a little bit of being in prison […]” (Gurnah 2021a, 243; emphasis mine). Through such unsettling mechanisms of redistribution, By the Sea stages the complex spatio-temporal realities of migration – historically plural, ironically “parochial” and always ineluctably placed.

35Sharae Deckard argues that “[Gurnah’s] fiction is pervaded by a post-national malaise, which foregoes the possibility of communal resistance to oppressive state formations in order to concentrate on the experience of the alienated individual” (2009, 121). This accusation of individualism certainly echoes the limitations often identified in Eurocentric understandings of cosmopolitanism. Yet when reading Gurnah’s fiction on different scales, one finds that place consciousness opens to forms of “communal resistance” that function across narrative hegemonies of the global and the national, and suggest a place kinship through multiscale, affective and material forms of communality. Rather than an absence of relation to place – an “a-topianism,” in the words of Moraru (2015, 42) – Gurnah’s writing calls for sensible, situated re-readings of transnational place experiences, which, to quote Meg Samuelson, occur “from the South and by the sea” (Samuelson 2023) rather than with Europe at their core.

In praise of complexity

36In an interview with Abdulrazak Gurnah, Tina Steiner refers to Memory of Departure, where the protagonist Hassan has embarked as a crew member on a ship and writes in a letter that he “[hankers] for the feel of good, solid earth” (Gurnah 2021b, 187). When asked about this passage, Gurnah explains it as the character’s attempts at maintaining an uneasy balance, and extends this desire for balance to his fiction, concluding that “if you do have firmer ground then you lose the capacity for complexity” (Gurnah 2022a, 161).

37The un-placeability of Gurnah’s fictional places certainly partakes of this praise of complexity. By shedding light on multifarious experiences of place involving agency, predation, or boundedness, and doing so through strategies such as unnaming, downsizing, or storying, Gurnah’s poetics of place betrays the persisting presence of the concept within his imaginary, but also suggests ways of being and seeing through place as critical alternatives to colonial, national or globalising forms of belonging. While place remains an “implacable” reality that looms large in the burden of representation often set upon transnational writers by literary gatekeepers in the Global North, Gurnah’s conscious play with spatial concepts in his fiction as well as his nonfiction allows for multi-layered readings that foreclose the simplification of individual journeys into historical allegories. This, in turn, endows readers with significant agency and a renewed belief in the political powers of interpretation – as Saleh Omar terms it in By the Sea, places may remain “hard to reach and therefore beautiful because of that” (2021a, 38–39).