1Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel Paradise (1994) takes place in East Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, a moment of major political change marked by the reinforcement of European colonial presence and the decline of the caravan trade, in the region corresponding to present-day Tanzania. During this period of change, the zone of encounter in which the novel is set is in turmoil, but this is hardly a new phenomenon. As David Callahan observes about Paradise: “The east coast of Africa and its interior are represented as zones of constant interaction between peoples who have arrived from varying locations: Arabs […], Indians, Africans, all are so implicated historically with each other that there appears to be little sense of any time when that was not the case” (Callahan 2000, 58). To the groups Callahan lists, one should add Europeans, a collective appellation that comprises, in the case of the regions traversed by Yusuf and the other characters, mainly the British, the Belgians and the Germans. The setting of the novel is thus characteristically a contact zone, that is, in Mary Louise Pratt’s now classic definition in her book Imperial Eyes: “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992, 6). Historically, the coastal area of Zanzibar was such a “contact zone” long before there was a European presence (see Samuelson 2012).

2The main perspective on this world is that of Yusuf, a twelve-year-old boy at the start of the novel, who by the end of the narrative has reached the age of seventeen or more. The Bildungsroman genre may be seen as a literary strategy to evoke history through embodied experience, from a child’s point of view, in such a way that the global reader is bound to empathize. In a comparable spirit of embodiment, the historians of empire Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, advocate for historical research that focuses on “the ways in which the development of global empires have been entwined historically with bodies in contact: that is, bodies not just involved in intimate personal, sexual, or social relations but bodies in motion, bodies in subjection, bodies in struggle, bodies in action”; Ballantyne and Burton hope this will lead to “insights into the place of gendered bodies and embodied subjectivities in empire building” (Ballantyne and Burton 2005, 8; 12). Their interest in agency is part of a concern to shift the focus onto actors of history who often remain invisible and anonymous. In Paradise, Gurnah also brings attention to Yusuf’s situation, and of others around him, who are not only part of the rise and fall of empires and other networks of power, but also – through forms of bondage such as the system of rehani and slavery – a part of it that is ancient, complex, and from a Western perspective, deranging.

3The notion of “bodies in contact” used by historians Ballantyne and Burton encapsulates both the body as such, in its corporeality, that is to say, “the fact of existing as a physical body” (Cambridge Dictionary online), and its mobility and agency, its ability to move, encounter, and make choices. In the same vein, but from a literary viewpoint, Jaine Chemmachery and Bhawana Jain, in Mobility and Corporeality, propose to “probe how the narration of mobile bodies [in Anglophone literature] may produce new subjectivities and relationalities” (2021, 12–13). In this article, I undertake a similar questioning of the relation between corporeality and mobility and examine to what extent, in Paradise, bodies in contact with other bodies, placed in situations of mobility and encounter, evolve and change. More specifically, is mobility a factor of empowerment for these embodied subjects (Chemmachery and Jain 2021, 16)? I will consider the most striking forms of mobility linked to the body and start by examining the mobile body, particularly in its relation to the train that takes Yusuf and others away from home. I will then analyse the power of beautiful and grotesque bodies to bring about change. In a last section, I will consider the organic body as body politic.

The embodied subject, the train, and (im)mobility

5The perspective of Yusuf as a boy – in the opening words of the novel, “the boy first” (1) – is primarily a phenomenological one: the world is apprehended through bodily sensations rather than intellect. He thus appears as an embodied subject, a concept Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed into a philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that the embodied subject is central to any world view: “The term ‘world’ is here not just a manner of speaking: it means that ‘mental’ or cultural life borrows its structures from natural life and that the thinking subject must be grounded upon the embodied subject” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 199). For all the prevalence of the perception of the subject in the making of a worldview, however, the historical context plays an equally important part, since, as Merleau-Ponty observes, “history only exists for a subject who lives through it and a subject only exists as historically situated” (177). Therefore, the embodied subject is also a historical subject: Yusuf is a perceptive boy and a rehani – that is a pledge, a mortgage (Courtois 2025, 455), a slave-ransom (Deckard 2011, 183) – in the early days of European colonialism in East Africa; in other words, a human being who, by contract (and because of his age), is effectively not free of his movements.

6Yusuf lives in Kawa, where his parents moved four years before the narrative starts, his father in search of a new business. Their shift, triggered by the hope of a better life and socio-economic mobility, was largely determined by the presence of the railway line: “They came to Kawa because it had become a boom town when the Germans had used it as a depot for the railway line they were building to the highlands of the interior. But the boom passed quickly, and the trains now only stopped to take on wood and water” (5). Tim Cresswell points out that the train, in the modern Western world, is usually considered a symbol of technology and progress (2006, 4), but here it has a more ambiguous function. This ambiguity can be linked to the distinction between movement and mobility that Cresswell establishes: movement “describes the idea of an act of displacement that allows people to move between locations,” whereas mobility is seen as “socially produced motion […] imbued with meaning and power” (3–4). The description of the brief economic boom clearly indicates that there is no durable benefit or development, no social mobility for the local inhabitants, even the business-minded ones, to be derived from the passage of the railroad, now that Kawa is only a location for the train drivers to reload on the basic commodities necessary to the functioning of the engine. I argue that while there is the technical potential for movement, the train remains largely foreign to the labouring class in Paradise, as they have no bodily experience of mobility.

7In Kawa, Yusuf likes to spend time with older boys who tell him about their families:

Their parents worked as vibarua, labouring for the Germans on the line-construction gangs, doing piece-work at the railhead, or portering for travellers and traders. They were only ever paid for the work they did, and at times there was no work. Yusuf had heard the boys say that the Germans hanged people if they did not work hard enough. If they were too young to hang, they cut their stones off. The Germans were afraid of nothing. (6–7)

9Once placed under Aziz’s authority, Yusuf becomes a train traveller himself. His train journeys go in two different directions: first from his hometown in Kawa to the coast, to Aziz’s town and house; then back to the interior, via Kawa; when the train stops in Kawa Yusuf stays still “on the floor of the carriage, in case someone should see him and embarrass his parents” (56), ashamed as he is of being a rehani. The train’s movement in the two opposite directions – to the coast, inland – signals the main directions in Yusuf’s life, either toward Aziz’s house or away from it on the trade routes the merchant uses. But on these journeys, as rehani, Yusuf is detained by the merchant, like the other goods Aziz trades in.

10Yusuf’s perspective on Aziz as a child changes when they get on the train: “He wiped his tears away and began to study his uncle. He was to have many opportunities for doing so, but this was the first time since he had known his uncle that he could look him full in the face” (18). What follows is a description of Aziz, as observed by Yusuf, having abandoned his usual composed posture and dozing, showing a harsh expression, a squat face, and “a small rounded pot-belly” (18). In his study of the face as a site of meaning, Cédric Courtois considers that in this scene, Yusuf’s “perception precedes interpretation or verbalisation […], through sustained visual attention,” leading to “an ethical moment in which Yusuf encounters his ‘uncle’ not as a distant authority but as a human being whose corporeality is exposed” (2025, 452–53). Courtois concludes that “[b]y intertwining perception, embodiment, and ethical responsiveness, Gurnah demonstrates how vulnerability is not inherent to a character but arises in the relational space between seeing and being seen” (453). To add to Courtois’s analysis of the dynamics of visuality and reversed vulnerability, I will shift the focus away from the body’s visuality toward its mobility, in relation to space. Spatially, what enables this visionary moment to happen for Yusuf is the fact that the two characters have moved away from the small town of Kawa and have removed themselves from that space of social rituals and economic activity. They are now in the enclosed space of the train, which acts as what Michel Foucault called heterotopias, that is “something like counter sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (1986, 24). Thus, Aziz no longer is the “carefully cultivated public persona” but is exposed as “a vulnerable being,” while Yusuf experiences a “perceptual awakening,” as demonstrated by Courtois (2025, 453; emphasis in the original). Foucault further observes that “Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time – which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies” (1986, 26). Time is suspended during the train journey: “As [Yusuf] watched he saw [Uncle Aziz’s] belly rise and fall with his breathing and once he saw a ripple of movement across it” (18). The micro-mobility of the body, with the light “ripple of movement” across the stomach, contrasts with the spectacular movement of the train, and shifts the focus instead onto elemental, profound breathing, similar to that of a baby. Paradoxically, what brings change to Yusuf’s perspective is not the train itself, but the space that train creates for the minute observation of infra-corporeal activity.

11The counterpoint to this moment of day-time vision on the train is the dream, or nightmare that Yusuf has during the same journey, the first of many dreams: “He dreamt that his mother was a one-eyed dog he had once seen crushed under the wheels of a train” (19). Yusuf fears his mother’s death and her loss, which effectively happens with his departure from Kawa, as he will never see her again. In this dream, the train is a lethal hazard, the instrument of her death, while the one-eyed dog embodies both physical injury and the status of a pariah. When Yusuf later stays at the shop with Khalil, real dogs come to threaten him at night, “panting” and “growling with fury” (27) while he feels defenceless. Khalil chases them away but they haunt Yusuf in subsequent dreams; leaving Kawa leads Yusuf to having more dreams, as if his visionary gift increased as he actually becomes more exposed to danger.

12The train is central to the process whereby Yusuf’s world starts opening and taking shape, mainly through the changes of perspective the train enables, rather than some form of social mobility, as there seems to be little hope of change. Yet, change appears during his journeys in other ways, as Yusuf learns to quietly navigate contacts with others who are drawn by his beauty, and as grotesque bodies rowdily disrupt the existing order of things.

Beautiful and grotesque bodies as factors of change

13Many characters in Paradise exclaim at Yusuf’s remarkable beauty, calling him a “beautiful boy” (44; 52; 67; 117; 186; 205) and – from the Mistress – “an angel of god” (211). This echoes the way Yusuf’s namesake in the Koran is compared to “a gracious angel” (Koran 12:31). But it also hints at Yusuf’s status as an object of desire, in the eyes of men as well as women, from Ma Ajuza to the Mistress. After Yusuf sets out on “The Journey to the Interior,”

The porters told Yusuf that the mnyapara would be tupping him before the journey was much advanced. ‘He likes you, but who wouldn’t like such a beautiful boy? Your mother must have been visited by an angel.’
‘You’ve found yourself a husband, pretty one!’ Simba Mwene said, laughter rolling out of him as he made a lovelorn face for the benefit of the company. (117)

14As Mohammed Irfan Ul Haq and Rasleena Thakur point out, these comments are marked by a language of masculinity located at “the intersection of passivity (words like ‘beautiful,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘angel’) and masculinity (‘tupping’; a direct reference to sodomy, ‘husband,’ ‘laughter’)” (2025, 13), which reflects how Yusuf could easily fall prey to sodomy. This may be the reason why he makes nothing of his natural beauty, as Hamid observes: “‘If anyone mentions his beauty, he goes away or changes the subject’” (102). Additionally, while Yusuf’s beauty provides him with a charm, an aura that facilitates his journeys in life, it also turns him into a pawn that Aziz uses strategically (Kearney 2012, 132); to quote Sharae Deckard: “Instead of fighting Chatu, Aziz placates him through the flattery of Yusuf” (2010, 16). Later on, when Yusuf is drawn to Amina, he discovers her history of exploitation and comes to the underlying realization, in this economy of human bodies, “that he himself is one of the commodities of exchange, treated by his masters as an eroticized, but emasculated possession. He is the object of desire, the ‘beautiful young boy,’ but not permitted to express desire for another” (Deckard 2010, 20). Thus, despite his beauty, and because of his status, Yusuf is prevented from moving freely. Gurnah offers another perspective on Yusuf’s sexual vulnerability by resorting to parody, as in the passage quoted above when Simba Mwene makes “a lovelorn face for the benefit of the company” (117); his parody of love is also a warning that Yusuf may be the object of sexual appetite. Yusuf learns from his predicament: in “The Gates of Flame,” when the mnyapara, who is also occasionally protective of Yusuf, warns him about sitting with the porters who might “teach [him] evil” (134), Yusuf deftly manages the men’s sexual advances – “Sometimes a hand stroked his thigh, but he knew to avoid sitting next to it after that” (135). Through this form of micromobility, which is “part of both communication and sociability” (Fortunati and Taipale 2017, 564), Yusuf expresses his emotions, “the fundamental movement to convey change” (565) and positions himself within the group in such a way as to avoid putting himself at risk. This subtle but meaningful strategy contrasts with more striking behaviours.

15The down-to-earth functioning of organic bodies is largely represented in the narrative, in a way that can disrupt the established order. The basic feeding cycle of the organic body – eating, digesting, and defecating – is a recurring motif that is turned into a grotesque process and contrasts with Yusuf’s visionary and melancholy perspective. Several critics (Malak 2005, 63; Mirmotahari 2011, 31; Samuelson 2012, 12–13) have argued that Gurnah’s mode of narration is dialogic, not only through the diversity of social speech types and of languages, and Bakhtinian heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1994), but also as a representational mode. I will further argue that the grotesque body also plays an important part in this dialogic process.

16Obscenities abound in Paradise, but the champion in terms of obscenity may be the “half-Greek and half-Indian man called Bachus” (53), a truck driver encountered in the section entitled “The Mountain Town.” The fact that the truck-driver is from mixed background places him in an in-between social space that gives him a certain liberty. It can be noted that the name of Bachus in Paradise is spelt with a single c, as in a variation on Bacchus, the Latin name of the Greek god Dionysus. Bacchus the god is “associated with wine, with the release of mass emotion, and with a fertility cult” (Radice 1973, 105), and this novelistic Bachus can certainly be said to be similarly uninhibited: “Out of his mouth issued an unstoppable stream of obscenities, delivered with a mild voice and an unsmiling face. In between he sang snatches of love songs and puffed at a biri” (53–54). Bachus’s foul language evokes in quick succession pornographic images of zoophilia (“you goatfuckers,” 54), anal sex (“I’d love nothing better than to sit here and stroke your anuses all day, but I’ve got other loads to pick up, bob,” 54), coprophilia (“stop sniffing each other’s shit,” 54), casual sex (“If a maharaja hears me sing he’d offer his favourite piece of meat to me for a night,” 54), prostitution (“Come behind the wall here and give me a massage. I’ll give you five anna,” 54), and fellatio (“‘Come and suck my cock,’ he would say, clutching his crotch,” 54). His obscene logorrhoea evokes images of the body that defy the rules of propriety, whether religious or not, and particularly in a Swahili context, and that contrast with Bachus’s voice level and facial expression. To follow Malek Chebel’s ideas about the “infra-language” of obscenities as a form of “corp-orality,” Bachus’s language derives its effectiveness more from external qualities of coloration and rhythm; his obscenity is a form of boasting that does not match his real actions (Chebel 2013, 98). In this respect, Bachus’s laughable obscenities are different from those proffered by Mohammed Abdalla, which echo his sexual habits – “He had a reputation as a merciless sodomizer and could often be seen absent-mindedly stroking his loins” (46–47). In contrast, the sexual activity evoked by Bachus is simultaneously obscene (and, alternately, ob-scene, “off stage”) but also first and foremost verbal, and the effect of this corp-orality is to liberate language by challenging the existing social order – indeed, the porters are duly impressed: “Using such language in front of the merchant!” (54). Bachus’s language is transgressive in more than one way.

17Bachus’s speech represents the grotesque body in a solo performance, but it is also found in dialogic performances between conflicting narrative voices and characters (Samuelson 2012, 13). This is the case in “The Mountain Town,” when Hamid and Kalasinga, the Sikh mechanic, have verbal jousts about their respective religion. One of Hamid’s favourite insults is related to Sikhs’ hair, which they keep long in reverence of their guru, the equivalent of their God: “I hear that kalasingas have long hair growing out of their arses. I heard a story of a kalasinga who plucked one of those out and tied up someone who was annoying him” (75). Displacing the long hair from the Sikhs’ heads to their backsides is an insult to them and a bathetic profanity to their guru, debasing him – and his followers – by shifting the focus from the most respectable to the lowest part of the body. In the process, Hamid turns Kalasinga – whose official name is Harbans Singh (74) – into a type, “kalasingas,” as he makes up a fable about them to tease his friend. Altogether, the narrative dynamic is a characteristic process of carnivalesque reversal and truths, as described by Bakhtin:

All the symbols of the carnival idiom are filled with this pathos of change and renewal, with the sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities. We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the “inside out” (à l’envers), of the “turnabout,” of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings. (1987, 11)

18Kalasinga is depicted as a joyous, life-loving Rabelaisian character: while he talks, he is “farting contentedly without any sign of embarrassment” (78), and at night Yusuf make sures “to keep out of range of Kalasinga’s wind” (79). When Kalasinga starts to “tell stories of his sexual adventures [h]is emphasis was on the ridiculous” (86) and his aim is to make Hamid laugh. The “strident counter-Qur’anic voice of the Sikh mechanic” (Malak 2005, 63) when he proposes to translate the Koran into Kiswahili to show the “stupid natives […] how intolerant [their] Allah is” (85), is another source of ridicule, as Kalasinga neither speaks Kiswahili nor reads Arabic. Kalasinga’s self-consciously ridiculous pretentions are extravagant and meant to provoke vital laughter.

19It is worth noting that the two larger-than-life characters I have focused on here, Bachus and Kalasinga, are respectively a truck driver and a mechanic. Both are associated with motorized mobility and a form of modernity which is not necessarily synonymous with orderly social progress but, on the contrary, with forms of upsetting and challenging the existing order. These characters embody forms of grotesque irreverence partly based on competing cultures, religions and languages inherited from “the entangled histories of East Africa” (Steiner 2010, 125). These spectacles entertain other characters (as well as the reader) while contributing to “break fossilized assumptions about identity” (Murray 2013, 152), paving the way for change and renewal. To Bakhtin, the function of the carnivalesque-grotesque form is “to consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted” (1987, 34). Even though this carnivalesque polyphony does not yet lead to a desirable “new order of things” (34) in Paradise, it is a first step towards a change in the characters’ perspective. Effectively, Kalasinga changes Yusuf’s life by teaching him, apart from writing, about mechanics:

He learned many other things too. How to change tyres and clean cars. How to charge a battery and rub down rust. Kalasinga explained to him the mysteries of the engine, and Yusuf grasped something of this but was happier watching him magically coax the tangle of pipes and bolts into life”. (103)

20While Yusuf is mesmerized by the “mysteries” and “magic” of the engine and the amazing possibilities it opens up, these mechanical skills also give him a glimpse of the modern world, far removed from the old system of caravan trade and human commodities. Cresswell argues that mobility plays a role in nurturing “people’s geographical imaginations, [which] inform […] all manner of […] people with the ability to mould the world we live in. They escape their bonds of individual dreams and aspirations and become social. They become political” (Cresswell 2006, 21). Here magic is what enchants Yusuf’s imagination, as Kalasinga “coax[es] the tangle of pipes and bolts into life,” and the whole learning process is a liberating one. But this will not be enough to emancipate Yusuf from the old socio-economic system, in the same way as the reversal effect of carnival is only temporary.

Corporeality, the body politic, and (dis)empowerment

21As seen in the previous sections, minor forms of mobility of the body and the playfulness of the grotesque body are ways to initiate change, to set things in motion. However, on a more sombre note, the body also reflects several important factors that impede social mobility. In this part I argue that various forms of embodiment illustrate the disempowerment of subaltern characters in the novel, that is the process “to deprive of power, authority, or influence;” to “make weak, ineffectual, or unimportant” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). I will successively examine how bodies journeying along the caravan route are confronted with an organic hell that bodes ill; how the bodies of Europeans represent an impressive threat for the local people; and how human excrement, as an extended metaphor throughout the novel, culminates in the final scene of defeat for Yusuf.

22Aziz’s trade expedition, in “The Journey to the Interior” and “The Gates of Flame,” turns into a nightmare. Deckard establishes a correlation between advances into the interior and physical hardships: “The deeper Aziz’s caravan penetrates into the tropical interior, the more the landscape is infernalized: thorns and plants tear their flesh, strange ailments torment them, their bodies succumb to delirium and ooze black blood” (2010, 13). The natural environment inflicts misery on the men’s bodies and flesh:

By the third day, the afflicted men were desperately ill and others were showing signs of decline. The worst ones could neither eat nor prevent their bodies from evacuating. Their fellows carried their stinking bodies in turn, ignoring their delirious groans as much as was possible and trying to evade the black blood that oozed out of them. On the steep inclines the men could only move a few feet at a time, dragging their burdens on hands and knees. On the fourth day two of the men died. […] All of them were now tormented by festering sores, which the insects dug deep into to lay their eggs and draw fresh blood. (151)

23The disorders that affect the men mean that they no longer control their bodies, which involuntarily release sickly bodily fluids – “black blood” and pus – as well as excrement. The visible “signs of decline” in health for the worst ones weigh on the whole group, who physically move downward to slowly climb “steep inclines […] on hands and knees,” in a position of regression and extreme weakness. Language is replaced by the “delirious groans” of pain of the feverish sick ones, in another sign of regression. The mosquitoes that earlier on were “stinging [the men] with such violence that some of their victims cried out with pain and exasperation” (150) have now taken over the men’s bodies and use them as their habitat, to reproduce and feed themselves. Human flesh is thus exploited by animals as well as men. The men’s “festering sores” reveal the putrefaction of their flesh, and death decimates the group. The expedition turns into a nightmare and the landscape the men advance in inflicts on them gruesome tortures that are evocative of hell, another way of undercutting what the title of the novel seems to announce.

24The sick and dying bodies are an organic metaphor of the sick body politic the microcosm of the caravan trade represents, a situation which culminates in the attack launched by Chatu’s men, soon after the caravan arrives in the village (158). The analogy between the political body and the human body is found in many cultural traditions, in theological, philosophical, and political literature, and the body politic represented in Paradise relies on such analogies and images. Judith Schlanger analyses how the body politic image hinges on organicity (1971, 42–45): the organism (be it human or other) is central to apprehending reality (here, of being sick to death in the forest), while also attributing meaning and direction to what is happening – thus Simba Mwene, one of the leaders of the expedition: “We’ll be out of this hell by tomorrow…” (152), and later, Mohammed Abdalla: “we should leave before we all rot in this hell” (174). Schlanger further argues that there are two types of organisms: an inferior one, which is the elementary form of life – here the men’s sores, their sick blood and stinking smell – and a superior one, which is the human being as person, spirit, subjectivity and destiny (Schlanger 1971, 116). However, in the case of this journey, there is no lofty vision to aspire to; the only hope Aziz’s men can have is to escape alive. The body politic they embody is one that has been sickened and has now been made rotten by the ruthlessness of the regional trades over time. A point has been reached where, as a sultan announces: “Your caravan trade is finished” (176).

25In contrast to the caravan, “the Europeans” – that is, the German colonisers – embody a new, different kind of political organicity. To the traders who have crossed paths with them, they are endowed with magical powers:

The traders spoke of the Europeans with amazement, awed by their ferocity and ruthlessness. They take the best land without paying a bead, force the people to work for them by one trick or another, eat anything and everything however tough or putrid. Their appetite has no limit or decency, like a plague of locusts. Taxes for this, taxes for that, otherwise prison for the offender, or the lash, or even hanging. […] They wear clothes which are made of metal but do not chafe their bodies, and they can go for days without sleep or water. Their spit is poisonous. Wallahi, I swear to you. It burns the flesh if it splashes you. The only way to kill one of them is to stab him under the left armpit, nowhere else will do the job, but that is almost impossible because they wear heavy protection there. (72)

26The traders had reasons to fear the ruthlessness of the Europeans; the Germans at the time were in the process of reinforcing their control over the part of East Africa south of a line going through Kilimanjaro in a manner that was “between a militaristic and a civilian approach to colonising” (Haustein 2023, 18). What is significant in this passage is how the narrative reflects experienced political brutality – land dispossession, forced labour, enforced taxation, repressive punishment, death penalty – mixed with an awe for the formidable corporality of the Europeans: they are reputedly endowed with extraordinary powers when it comes to basic bodily functions such as eating, drinking, sleeping. Their appetite is compared to that of locusts, an image linked to the story of the punishment of Egyptians that is found both in the Koran (7:133) and in the Bible (Exodus 10:12–19). The Europeans’ spit is as venomous as that of snakes (to which they are explicitly compared further on in the conversation), echoing the Biblical snake that embodies evil and causes man’s fall in Genesis. But the most remarkable of their attributes is their garments “which are made of metal,” and thus make them look invincible. This legend draws on the same imagery as the dream of Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible, which Daniel, a prophet and interpreter of dreams, is called upon to decipher. In his dream, Nebuchadnezzar has a vision of himself, all covered in metal: “This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass. His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay” (Daniel 2:31–32; original emphasis). Daniel interprets the dream as heralding the sequence of kingdoms that will follow Nebuchadnezzar’s and submit to the principle that all earthly kingdoms fall (Daniel 2:36–45). In contrast to this biblical story, the bodies of the Europeans in the traders’ stories do not have feet of clay and they wear protection on their only weak spot – “under the left armpit” – so they seem indestructible. Their organic body is so closely associated to metal that, according to hearsay, not only do they wear metal, but they incorporate it – “they can eat metal” (120; 170) and “the German has a head of iron” (140) – even though this is considered by some, like Kalasinga, as mere stories (87). Whether perceived as fact or legend, the stories that are told, which result from the process of encounter in the contact zone of German East Africa, illustrate, on the one hand, the dual focus on the individual body and on the political destiny of the organic community it is a member of, and on the other, the fear of a new political order that is brutal. However, the appearance of the German officer, who embodies government and colonial power, reveals weaknesses: “His smile was a fixed grimace of deformity. His teeth were exposed, as if the tightly stretched flesh on his face had begun to rot and slough off round his mouth. It was the face of a cadaver, and Yusuf was shocked by its ugliness and its look of cruelty” (245). The officer, with his death mask and rotting flesh, already embodies the further putrefaction and corruption of colonial society, and the horror of the political order to come.

27A recurrent bodily image which can be put in relation to the body politic of the new political regime that has started moving in and the dreadful future it announces is the excremental function of the organic body. I shall analyse excrement as an extended and variable metaphor for fear, humiliation, shame, and servitude. When he is about to leave with Aziz, Yusuf feels “the momentary urge to go to the toilet” and “sudden damp fear” (16); his body expresses his visceral feelings of anxiety at the perspective of departure. Later on, Yusuf is scared by roaming dogs which fill him with terror and shame (26) and haunt his dreams; one night, as he is facing a group of dogs, he loses control of his bowel movement: “Without premeditation or warning his bowels opened” (27). The visceral reaction of his body is one that animals also have when terrified: “when Uncle Aziz’s train marched into town animals stampeded and evacuated themselves” (3). However, his bodily response means more than the fear he experiences, as Khalil reminds him later when questioning him about his ability as a seer: “‘Don’t forget I saw you shitting yourself over mangy dogs that are scared of flies, and you saw something in them’” (194). It may be argued that what Yusuf foresees in the dogs, beyond their immediate threat, which Khalil belittles, is an image of the brutality of the forthcoming era.

28The early scene of Yusuf evacuating involuntarily when facing the dogs introduces the motif of shit, which reappears in the penultimate paragraph of the narrative, when Yusuf sees the dogs again, so that the novel is framed by the triangular themes of Yusuf, dogs and excrement:

Just beyond the shade of the sufi tree, he found several piles of excrement, which the dogs were already nibbling at. The dogs glanced suspiciously at him, and watched him out of the corners of their eyes. Their bodies shifted slightly to shield their food from his covetous gaze. He looked for a moment in astonishment, surprised at this squalid recognition. The dogs had known a shit-eater when they saw one. (247)

29In his analysis of Yusuf’s vulnerability, Courtois emphasizes the dynamic of this scene: “Grotesque and abject imagery project his social and bodily precarity outward, while the anthropomorphised dogs invert the human-animal hierarchy to bring to the fore his degraded status;” “Caught between humanity and animality, he exists in a liminal sphere” (2025, 450–51). Fully aware of his abject condition now, Yusuf decides to leave the world of the merchant. Beyond the focus on Yusuf’s destiny, it is worth examining the resonance of the scene of the dog’s coprophagia.

30To rephrase more coarsely what is happening, the dogs are literally “eating shit” – human excrement left by the camp of askari led by a German officer. This formulation resonates with metaphorical usages of the same phrase elsewhere in the novel – “to eat shit” in the figurative sense of undergoing humiliation or defeat (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). After the European has arrived in Chatu’s country, the merchant’s men start taunting Chatu: “The big man is here now […]. He’ll make you eat shit, you thief” (169). Soon after, the interpreter between Chatu and the European confirms this, addressing Chatu: “But right now if you don’t do what he says he’ll make you eat shit” (171). In this usage, the scatological phrase has a metaphorical sense, indicating humiliation and defeat through an image of forced coprophagia. Similarly, in reference to the recently arrived coloniser, Mohammed Abdalla echoes and elaborates on the same image soon after: “But there will be no more journey now the European dogs are everywhere. By the time they’ve finished us they will have fucked us up every hole in our bodies. Fucked us beyond recognition. We’ll be worse than the shit they make us eat” (186). In Abdalla’s words, the Europeans are animalized into dogs, a common insult used against one’s enemies, but also an image that resonates with what Yusuf saw earlier in the roaming dogs, although he did not comment on his vision. In many cultures, excrements are considered as charged with strength, with a biological power that, once evacuated, may be recuperated, so coprophagia is a way to regenerate that strength (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1982, 425). Here, the (European) dogs forcing the colonised to eat excrements may be read as an image of the colonizer regenerating by proxy on every source of strength they can use. Added to the act of forced coprophagia, Abdalla’s vivid metaphoric usage of rape (“they will have fucked us up every hole in our bodies,” 186), which anticipates the colonisers’ acts of “robbing or despoiling or carrying away [persons] by force” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary), promises political change to the point of annihilation for these men. Unlike Yusuf, who sees in the dogs’ expression his “squalid recognition” as a shit-eater (247), thus marking “his own internalised degradation as he faces them” (Courtois 2025, 450), Abdalla, a man embodying masculinity and power (Houlden 2023, 92), is not ready to identify with defeat and rejects the envisioned image of the future colonised subjects – they will be “beyond recognition,” a negation of their former selves.

31The shame of degradation that is expressed through the images of excrement in Yusuf’s visions is recycled in scatological humour through the metonymic image of the anus. When Yusuf was twelve, he used to kiss his Uncle Aziz’s hand as a manifestation of respect. When he first meets Khalil, Khalil warns him about his state of subjection: “Sooner or later you got to learn to kiss the man’s arse. Seyyid, seyyid, not Uncle, Uncle. Come on, you say it after me, seyyid” (32). With the lexical substitution – from literally kissing Uncle Aziz’s hand to figuratively “kissing his arse” – Khalil expresses the abjection of having to be submissive to a master, but also, through the semi-modal form “have to” expressing obligation, the apparent absence of an alternative. Yusuf first ironically compares himself to Khalil – “They were the same now, […] both freely in the service of the merchant. Kissers of hands” (244) – before he decides to escape the “abjectness” (244) of serving Aziz which Khalil manages to justify for himself. By the end of the novel, Yusuf knows that there is no freedom for them and ironically reverts to the initial image of “kissers of hands,” which, the reader understands, reads as a polite euphemism for self-deprecating but politically conscious “kissers of arses.” Yusuf has gained a critical perspective on his situation as rehani that determines his decision to leave the old order behind him. Nina Berman considers that “Yusuf’s choice may have provided him with agency and potential improvement of his situation” (Berman 2013, 52), but there is nothing less certain.

32Movement is a factor of change in Paradise: the perspective of the embodied, historical subject changes as mobility is increased by the railroad in the developing colonial regime; performances by grotesque bodies signal possible alternatives to the existing order while micro-mobility is a way for Yusuf to preserve his integrity. However, several scenes involving the organic body, which echo one another in a network of extended metaphors, build up into a system of signs indicating that the body politic of the era is sick and brutal. At the end of the novel, Yusuf’s body remains fundamentally in bondage, as he moves from rehani of the seyyid to a future as askari of the German coloniser, and “Paradise is clearly not a liberationist text” (Schwerdt 1997, 92). Ultimately, despite mobility and shifts in perspective, Yusuf’s disempowerment is reconfigured but most likely unchanged.