- 1 Among other examples of such intertextuality, Carré mentions that two dozen pages from the episode (...)
1In his 2013 conversation with Tina Steiner, Abdulrazak Gurnah developed the idea that the inclusion of intertextual references is a means of creating “a sense of a shared textuality” which “reintroduces us to each other as readers” (Gurnah 2013, 166). The intertextual inspiration for the journeys depicted in Paradise has been extensively studied by many critics, including Pietro Deandea, Fawzia Mustafa, and Nathalie Carré, revealing a variety of sources which therefore gesture towards diverse readers. In her 2021 article, Carré specifically showed how Gurnah made use of authentic travel narratives originally written in Kiswahili. These narratives, detailing the conditions of travel and the routes followed by traders and travellers in the late nineteenth century, are a direct source of inspiration1 recognizable by Kiswahili readers. Paradise also includes intertexts and structural echoes from the Koran and the Bible, from local and regional oral traditions, from Anglophone African literature and from European colonial narratives.
2Although the majority of intertextual references in Paradise can be traced to early Kiswahili prose texts, as shown by Hodapp and Carré, the intertext most frequently identified by the Anglophone readers is the novel’s response to Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Paradise operates a reorientation of Conrad’s colonial geography; in Heart of Darkness the narrator starts from the West coast and travels up the river Congo to reach central Africa where Kurtz, ivory and “the horror” (Conrad 2002, 178) are to be discovered; in Gurnah’s narrative, Uncle Aziz’s caravan starts from the East coast to trade in valuable materials and goods, and journeys towards the interior, where Yusuf is also distraught by the violence he witnesses and experiences. Gurnah’s variation on Conrad’s pattern does not only include a westward redirection of the journey, but also a radical change in point of view: while both stories present the consequences of colonial networks of trade, Paradise considers the variety of African points of view, while Conrad’s text had focused on the European ones.
3Despite its elaborate intertextual construction, the novel avoids giving an impression of artificiality by playing on the conventions of realism, which creates the illusion of immediately experiencing the material world. The materiality of trade is thematically central to the novel Paradise, which details the circulation of goods, porters and traders in the early twentieth-century East Africa. Objects in Gurnah’s novels have been shown by Sophy Kohler to work as “a medium through which the characters are able to speak about other things” (284), most notably about emotion and migration. Meg Samuelson analysed the precious and beautiful objects which are transferred and transported in By the Sea (2001), such as the mahogany casket, incense or the ebony table. She shows how these objects convey not only the cosmopolitan cultural background of the Indian Ocean and the Swahili coast, but also the hierarchical and predatory relationships of trade; in the contemporary, postcolonial world order, Gurnah presents a similar ambivalence towards things and territories, “simultaneously generous and rapacious” (Samuelson 2011, 84). Gurnah’s focus on materiality also appears to generate a series of major aesthetic and linguistic choices. The reader of Paradise is immersed in the material world of Yusuf, lexically first and foremost, by means of the infinite variety of goods and animals listed in the novel, among which are cloth, grain, tools, tobacco, spices, rhino horns, ivory, guns, gum; hyenas, dogs, lions, leopards, insects, locusts, crocodiles, and even peacocks. The perceived status of such non-human things and beings is subject to variation in the novel: the traders generally view them as commodities and goods to be profited from, but their materiality resists being reduced to their trading value as they are also shown to function independently from human networks.
4The materiality of things and animals is explored not only through the subjectivity of human sensory perception, but also through the attempted consideration of a modality of existence specific to non-human entities. For example, the echoing references to the “smelly rhino horns” (Gurnah 2004, 194), the “smells of hide and hoof” (45 and 70) and the “smells of magendo” (90) insist on the animal materials’ emission of a scent that contaminates adjacent spaces and people, rather than focusing on who can smell them. The materials’ agency is thus foregrounded, as the horns are not only tangible goods that can be smelled, but also odorous objects that transform the world around them. Those who come near them are influenced by their power. In his exploration of the world’s irreducible materiality, Gurnah shifts away from the picturesque or exotic tones and foregrounds certain qualities of things and animals that turn them into more than solid points of reference, more than reality effects or strategies of characterization. Not only is matter the object of trade, but it also has a form of agency. In this sense, Gurnah’s writing of the material world ties in with ecocritical explorations of the relationships between humans, their environment and the non-human more generally.
5To better grasp this issue of the agency of things and matter, it is useful to consider the concepts Jane Bennett developed in the essay Vibrant Matter, whose neo-materialist approach to social sciences and philosophy explores the notion of the vitality of matter. Bennett considers that “objects […] can become vibrant things with a certain effectivity of their own, a perhaps small but irreducible degree of independence from the words, images, and feelings they provoke in us” (2010, xvii). This article looks at that how the relationship between humans and the non-human cannot be limited to anthropomorphic structures of interpretation in Paradise, and how the novel challenges colonial dichotomies and hierarchies between humankind and the non-human. Commodities and animals are not merely passive objects around which human thought and action play out. In addition, the fact that slaves are often added to the lists of commodities that are traded also blurs the limits between categories. The practices of trade, slavery, indenture, rehani, and bartering performed in the novel prompt a postcolonial interrogation of human supremacy over bodies but also over matter, and an interrogation of classifications of humanity and the non-human, living beings and things, organic matter and lifeless substances. Conversely, colonial structures and narratives create strict hierarchies, both between colonizer and colonized, and between humanity and the non-human. In this sense, the novel’s focus on materiality develops into a commentary on the colonial worldview and offers an alternative approach, both aesthetically and ethically, which can be studied as both postcolonial and neo-materialist.
6The following section explores how Paradise invites the reader to recognize the symbolic interpretations of things and animals, and how such readings come to clash with the novel’s focus on materialist approaches. A third section considers how the human ability to engage with non-human entities leads to an ethical revaluation of hierarchies in the colonial context. Finally, I examine how such revaluations open up the possibilities of a more comprehensive access to the non-human.
- 2 This was shown by Ian Watt in his article “Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness”: “The (...)
7The symbolic interpretation of objects and commodities has been used to explain essential structures of exchange in canonical stories of trade, like Heart of Darkness.2 The symbolic dimension of the material world in Gurnah’s novels has been examined by Brenda Cooper in this light, focusing on the motif of the disputed ebony table in By the Sea. In this novel, two migrants from Tanzania, who share a painful past, meet in an English seaside town: Latif Mahmud, a 65-year-old asylum-seeker, and Saleh Omar, a respected poet and professor at the University of London. Saleh Omar indirectly blames Latif for causing his father’s financial ruin and the loss of their family home. Their discussion about an ebony table shows that the object is fraught with symbolic meaning; its “function as gift, as debt, as commodity, is malevolent and negative, carrying with it all kinds of histories about destruction of friendships and the corrosiveness of driving ambition” (Cooper 2008, 84).
8In Paradise, non-human elements retain symbolic meaning and play structural roles too. Animals often carry nonliteral significance in the novel. In the dialogues, the term “dog” is frequently used as an insult, which derives from the association of dogs to physical and metaphorical uncleanliness and to heathenism both in the Bible and in certain Muslim traditions. As explained by Sophia Menache, “hostile attitudes toward canines found in Christian and Jewish traditions were further compounded in the sociocultural and economic climate of Moslem civilization. […] Though useful dogs were socially tolerated, they remained unclean (nadjas) with respect to religious practice” (1997, 34). Out of frustration and anger, Mohammed Abdallah thus calls Marimbo’s guide “the dog” (Gurnah 2004, 152) while beating him furiously, in a moment of crisis when the caravan is helplessly trying to find a way out of a mosquito-infested area. Straightforwardly, these insults create an impression of local colour, suggesting a plausible orality in dialogue, as the dehumanizing insult is perceived as archetypal. More importantly, dogs recurrently play a part in Yusuf’s dreams. In the first occurrence, in the first chapter, Yusuf is dozing off on the train, sitting beside Uncle Aziz:
He dreamt that his mother was a one-eyed dog he had once seen crushed under the wheels of a train. Later he dreamt that he saw his cowardice glimmering in the moonlight, covered in the slime of its afterbirth. He knew it was his cowardice because someone standing in the shadows told him so, and he himself saw it breathing. (19)
9In this passage, dreams can be understood as a narrative strategy introducing a more critical and analytical approach to the story, suggesting a proleptic view of Yusuf’s trajectory. Within this short excerpt, two dreams are not only told, but also immediately explained and interpreted. First, Yusuf dreams of a one-eyed dog, which is explained realistically as an oneiric replaying of a visual memory, associating the train on which he is currently travelling to a scene from the past when he saw another train crushing a dog under its wheels. The unconscious association between this one-eyed dog and Yusuf’s mother is echoed in the way the second dream is told, as the expression “slime of its afterbirth” also includes the physical reality of childbirth and of the mother’s body. The dog is associated with deficiency: “one-eyed” presents the mother/dog as physically deficient as well as unable to see in the intellectual meaning of the word. This visual deficiency metaphorically refers to Yusuf’s mother’s lack of understanding of the situation. The elusive dream figure is also deficient morally; the term “cowardice” refers to the inability of both Yusuf and his mother to actively oppose his capture by Uncle Aziz. Thus, the novel seems to point in the direction of a symbolic reading of the story; in accordance with the oneiric ability to merge and dilute categories, Yusuf’s dreams give us partial access to the unconscious and implicit dimensions of the novel by offering material translations of abstract notions and, vice versa: moral interpretations of the material world.
- 3 This story appears in the 12th Surah, “Joseph”: “There are lessons in the story of Joseph and his b (...)
- 4 “‘Truthful Joseph! Tell us the meaning of seven fat cows being eaten by seven lean ones, seven gree (...)
10This suggestion that the novel should be interpreted in symbolic terms is also supported by the onomastics of “Yusuf,” on which Hussein insists by referring explicitly to the prophet Joseph: “God sent the other Yusuf as a prophet to the land of jinns and savages” (Gurnah 2004, 83). In the Bible and the Koran, Yusuf’s older brothers are so jealous of their father’s preference for him that they throw Yusuf into a well. Some traders later discover the boy in the well, and sell him as a slave in Egypt.3 In an echo from the Koranic story, Gurnah’s novel plays on the narrative connection between kinship, money and violence, as well as on the motif of the boy’s visionary gift. In the Koran, Yusuf’s ability to interpret dreams is noticed by his family, and later by his Egyptian owner. His gift is applied to the interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams, which helps Yusuf regain honour, power and freedom when his vision is useful to prevent the kingdom’s ruin.4 In Paradise, Yusuf the dreamer is compared by Muslim characters to the Prophet: Hussein explains the comparison to Kalasinga, specifying that “the other Yusuf” is “[the] prophet Yusuf who saved Egypt from famine” (Gurnah 2004, 83–84), thus presenting the boy in Paradise as the Yusuf of reference, while the Koranic character appears as secondary in their conversation. This episode also ties Yusuf the prophet to the material world (herds, crops, pests) and its management.
- 5 The motif of the four rivers in Eden appears in Genesis 2:10–14.
11Thus, the historical and literary intertexts seem to point us in the direction of a symbolic reading of the novel, in the sense that they refer to a body of religious and cultural discourses that are recognizable and allegorical. Many of the references to animals could be viewed through the lens of such intertextual notations and as part of the doxa. When the European conquest of the African territories is for instance compared to a “plague of locusts” (Gurnah 2004, 72), the reader is reminded of Exodus 10:14 and the eighth plague of Egypt. This aims at presenting colonization as a divine punishment, and the Europeans as pests. Similarly, the repeated comparison between Europeans and snakes (“their spit is poisonous,” 72; “snakes in disguise” 73; “stories about snakes and men eating metal” 87) immediately conjures up connotations associating them to evil, deceit, and malice. Apart from these references to the trope of Paradise Lost, Gurnah’s novel explores many other versions of paradise, ranging from Aziz’s enclosed garden, topographically organized like the Garden of Eden, with “water channels running off it in the four directions”5 (43), to the “waterfall haven” (77), a worldly space of beauty on the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro.
- 6 See Karl Marx’s Capital, volume I, chapter I, section 4, entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and (...)
12Another symbolic interpretation of goods in Paradise can be identified in their fetishization. This follows a trope of the colonial quest romance, in which the search for the holy grail is replaced with treasure hunting for valuable goods and materials, like diamonds or ivory, which are endowed with symbolic meaning. The historical and literary colonial frameworks are useful to understand Paradise: Gurnah refused to define his novel as “an attempt to rewrite Heart of Darkness” but he also expressed the idea that Conrad’s “ironical view of the whole enterprise of imperialism is useful to resonate against” (Bace 1994, n/p). In “An Outpost of Progress,” Conrad commented explicitly on the colonial capitalist fetishization of goods: the traders call their storehouse “the fetish” (Conrad 2002, 8), hinting at the fact that the value of ivory and of the objects it is traded for (rags and trinkets) does not depend on their inherent natures, nor on the efforts put into their production and collection. The focus is placed on the objects’ value for the traders, rather than on the providers or origins of these objects. In Marxist philosophy, commodity fetishism6 is shown to occur in capitalist societies as a form of reification, which falsely presents economic value as inherent to the objects rather than arising from a network of human labour, practical processes to produce the object and perceptions. In Paradise, Aziz’s attitude towards his goods exemplifies this entanglement of material and symbolical value, and of objective and subjective worth. In the most perilous moment of the journey, when the caravan is attacked and threatened by Chatu’s men, a moment of heightened danger for the traders and porters, Aziz seems to jeopardize their safety when he refuses to leave the goods in exchange for their lives: “if we are to have our lives we also demand our goods” (Gurnah 2004, 162). In the next sentence, his explanation appears more rational: “How far would we get if we were unable to trade?” he asks (162). Aziz does not really value the goods over human lives, but he knows that the goods are the material means of their survival, expressing a pragmatic necessity. Yet, by first confrontationally refusing to bargain, and explaining his reasons for doing so only afterwards, he provocatively reorders value systems by putting men second.
13In Paradise as in Conrad’s stories of trade, mysterious goods acquire a heightened aura of value. When discussing the secret stock of rhino horn kept in Hamid’s store for Aziz, Khalil enhances the aura of the goods and playfully mystifies Yusuf by using the vocabulary of magic and an intertextual reference to folklore: “‘Perhaps there’s a secret cellar where a jinn has stored gold and jewels for the seyyid,’ […]. And now our loudmouth Simba is going to fetch the treasure […]. Only he has the magic ring, only he knows the magic words that will open the thick brass doors” (Gurnah 2004, 188). The fetishization of the secret stock is enhanced because the material reason for the horn’s high value remains unknown. The rational link between value and meaning thus appears to be damaged:
- 7 “Rhino horn” in Kiswahili.
‘Why are vipusa7 so valuable? Yusuf asked. ‘What are they used for?’
Simba Mwene thought for a moment, and then gave up the possibility of constructing a reply. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Medicine, perhaps. Who knows the way of the world? All I know is that the Indian buys it, and I don’t care where he puts it after that. It can’t be that he eats it. I think it must be medicine.’ (190)
14Yusuf’s utilitarian question reveals the overseer’s lack of mastery and his ignorance of the underlying reasons for the goods’ value. However, this does not destabilize Simba Mwene’s belief in the magic of trade: while unable to rationally make a full argument, he formulates without conviction a plausible hypothesis. Using conventional phrasings like “Who knows” and “All I know is,” which are devoid of real meaning, he goes through the motions of rational conversation by suggesting the horn could have a medical use. Thus, he demonstrates the absurdity of trading in goods that are meaningless for the indigenous agents who never engage with such material things personally. This passage paradoxically presents the processes of trade as symbolically detached from the material world, thus questioning the link between goods – particularly animal raw materials – and human beings.
- 8 Nathalie Martinière has analysed Conrad’s representation of the objects linked to ivory in Heart of (...)
- 9 On the history of trading networks in the Indian Ocean, see Desai (2010) and Subramanian (2010).
15In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the European traders’ fascination for and fetishization of ivory is shown to be linguistic and fuelled by their almost religious attraction for the word ivory itself, rather than by the material itself: “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it” (2002, 125). This worship of the word ironically obfuscates the materiality of ivory and presents the desired material as a deity, both omnipresent and hidden. While building upon such images, Paradise presents a reconfiguration of colonial ethical categories. Stemming from a shift from the metaphorical and symbolic to a more literal and materialist approach, Gurnah’s novel takes into account the subjective perception of the men handling the goods and the agency of material things and animals. In many colonial romances, the ivory trade is presented as primarily deriving from European greed for rare and exotic raw materials which are fetishized and idealized by the European consumers,8 but Paradise refers to the long history of Arab Swahili traders9 and shows that this fetishization exceeds the context of European colonization.
16In Paradise, the Conradian motif of dissemination and fetishization of ivory or horn is reinvented and shown to rely specifically on the pervasive smell of the things. Not only are Gurnah’s numerous references to smells a “sensuous recreation of the world” and a way to develop “realistic immediacy,” as explained by Bardolph (79), but they literalize and materialize the connection between humans and the non-human. The characters are able to relate to the goods through their bodies’ sensory and physical capacities. The prominence of Yusuf’s sense of smell in the novel is revealing, as smell is generally less developed in humans than in animals, particularly dogs. Several scenes show him registering smells and engaging with his environment in that manner. Smells of food obsess him in the first pages when his mother is cooking. Body odours are actually smells of goods that the characters come in contact with: for example, Ma Ajuza “smelt of the tobacco she chewed” (Gurnah 2004, 31) and traders smell of merchandise, like “the smell of hide and hoofs” (70) or “an overwhelming smell of animal skins” (93). Aziz in particular is invariably presented as carrying around his person a unique and complex smell: “Uncle Aziz gave off a strange and unusual odour, a mixture of hide and perfume, and gums and spices, another less definable smell which made Yusuf think of danger” (3). The smell emanating from Aziz is understood by Yusuf as identity-defining, and by the reader as proleptic: Aziz is presented as grounded in the material world, literally embodying the objects of trade, but also as mysteriously powerful and elusive, which corresponds to his role both as trader and owner of rehani.
17Human subjectivity and sensory perception are complemented by the exploration of the bodies’ and objects’ own agency. In the very first paragraph of the novel, non-human grammatical subjects are associated with verbs of action, starting with banal associations of ideas, and then progressing towards more evocative images of the power of things: “flowers bloomed and died. Strange insects scuttled […] and writhed […]. The sun made distant trees tremble in the air and made houses shudder and heave for breath” (Gurnah 2004, 1). Here, the agency of the natural elements expresses more than a simple personification or an instance of pathetic fallacy: to use the words and concepts developed by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter, things have a specific vitality, i.e., “the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (2010, viii). In Paradise, rather than suggesting via pathetic fallacy that human traits are attributed to the natural environment, the agency of nature is presented as the material context of Yusuf’s life: the character’s own vitality is surrounded by innumerable other sources of action. Even the characters’ bodies, through their materiality, are viewed as actants, as appears for instance in the following passages: “the man bared his teeth in an involuntary snarl” (Gurnah 2004, 2) and “Without premeditation or warning his bowels opened” (27). Both quotes show how internal organs and usually unseen body parts reveal themselves unexpectedly; other sentences present the bodies’ nervous movements expressing unconscious psychological urges, for instance “Her body shivered and straightened with an involuntary charge when she caught sight of him” (30) and “their bodies leaning forward, straining and urgent” (59).
18In the same way as the critique of colonial hierarchies takes places through the postcolonial and decolonial recognition of a plurality of value systems, the anthropocentric approach to the relationship between humans and animals is challenged by considering a confrontation between species. In Paradise, such moments of interaction are observed between men and dogs. For instance, when the packs of dogs repeatedly threaten Yusuf at night, the dogs are first described as wolf-like, wild, predatory creatures: “Night after night they came, their eagerness growing clearer with the swelling moon” (Gurnah 2004, 26). However, when Khalil engages with them, throwing rocks and shouting to frighten them, the dogs are said to react like animals, a comparison that logically entails that the gap between species can be crossed and that dogs are not mere brutes: “The dogs turned and ran, whimpering and snapping at each other like frightened animals. For one long minute, Khalil stood in the moonlit yard shouting curses in Arabic at the fleeing dogs and waving a fist at them” (27; emphasis mine). Curses and insults paradoxically include the insulted party in the conversation, contrary to what inarticulate yells could effect: it seems that the dogs are perceived as interlocutors, even as they are rejected. Khalil is forced to engage verbally with the dogs, not only to defend himself against their predatory behaviour, but also to participate in a confrontation that creates an interaction between men and dogs.
19This proximity does not go as far as erasing the hierarchy between them, but the anthropocentric stance is interrogated. In the final pages of the novel, the sense of recognition between the dogs and Yusuf continues to be viewed as a debasement of his humanity by the character: “He looked for a moment in astonishment, surprized at this squalid recognition. The dogs had known a shit-eater when they saw one” (Gurnah 2004, 247). The next – and final – paragraph echoes almost word for word the initial dream sequence:
He saw again his cowardice glimmering in its afterbirth in the moonlight and remembered how he had seen it breathing. That was the birth of the first terror of his abandonment. Now, as he watched the obliviously degraded hunger of the dogs, he thought he knew what it would grow into. (247)
20In this crucial moment, the recognition and exchange of looks are highly ambivalent: this is the moment when Yusuf recognises his own debasement and failure in the dogs’ dirty hunger for excrements, but the text also presents the recognition as starting from the dogs’ point of view. The dog’s moment of realization that Yusuf is one of them is followed by Yusuf’s childhood dream-like vision, as if the primal association between humans and animals had essentially to do with childhood and the primitive stages of development. When observing the dogs’ acknowledgement of his own debased status, Yusuf is prompted to recall his earlier dream, again merging physical specifics of vitality (“birth,” “breathing,” “hunger,” “grow”) with devitalizing, noxious and possibly deathly concepts that have to do with abstractions and moral values (“cowardice,” “afterbirth,” “abandonment,” “degraded,” “obliviously”). In a temporally compressed instant, Yusuf is at once the abandoned child witnessing his mother’s cowardice in the form of a disgusting and radiant shape and the morally flawed young adult rehani whose physical vitality has led him to survive and behave submissively. The traumatic past (“That”) and the present uncertainty (“Now”) are conflated in this complex figuration of Yusuf’s self that is fragmented into several living forms, human and non-human.
- 10 As explained by Ida Hadjivayanis (2025), in Gurnah’s novels Paradise, Afterlives and Theft, “uncle” (...)
21In the context of slavery, the objectification of human beings, whether individually or in groups, follows the logic of commodification and leads to physical devitalization and dehumanization. The novel repurposes an idea presenting as an inevitable consequence of slavery the fact that the slaves are dispossessed of their bodies and of their vitality. It appears notably through the repetition of the Kiswahili expression “kifa urongo” (Gurnah 2004, 22, 23, 27, 31, 36, 179, and 230), which means, as explained in the text itself, the one who fakes death, or a living death. This expression is used by Khalil to define Yusuf’s lowly status and his true relationship to Aziz: “‘Listen to me, hey, kifa urongo. He ain’t your uncle.’ That was the name Khalil had for him in those days. Kifa urongo, living death” (Gurnah 2004, 23). Khalil’s impulse to call Yusuf “kifa urongo” aims at preparing Yusuf for the harshness of his status as rehani by diminishing his vitality and his emotional attachment to his captor, who was initially introduced to him as an “uncle” by his parents.10
- 11 Historians Kimambo, Maddow and Nyanto explain how the British integrated Zanzibar into their system (...)
22Several characters in Paradise are deprived of their freedom, either through Aziz’s practice of taking rehani like Yusuf, Khalil and Amina, who are kept as a guarantee until a debt has been paid back, or through actual slavery, like the gardener Mzee Hamdani. Not only are those taken as rehani dehumanized, but their traders also are tainted by this commodification of the human body. The moral rejection of slavery, placed in the context of the official European discourse for abolition,11 places the stain on the slavers; Hussein immediately considers how damaging narratives about the society of the African East coast could be, if written by Europeans in the future: “When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves” (Gurnah 2004, 87, also echoed by Aziz on page 132). The internalized moral discourse on slavery is also mentioned when Khalil explains the organisation of Aziz’s caravans to Yusuf: “He goes to the wild people and sells them all this merchandise and then he buys from them. He buys anything… except slaves, even before the government said it must stop. Trading in slaves is dangerous work, and not honourable” (Gurnah 2004, 34). This is presented as stemming from a widely-held belief in the peculiar dignity of humankind – and yet, Aziz’s hypocritical pretence of avoiding slavery is contradicted by his practice of taking people as rehani.
23The human dignity at stake here also seems to provide a powerful protection against the effects of slavery, as explained by Mzee Hamdani, who provocatively claims that, despite owning him, his mistress is powerless to deny him a sense of freedom. Hamdani proposes a redefinition of freedom and of slave ownership:
They offered me freedom as a gift. She did. Who told her she had it to offer? […] They can lock you up, put you in chains, abuse all your small longings, but freedom is not something they can take away. When they have finished with you, they are still as far away from owning you as they were on the day you were born. Do you understand me? This is the work I have been given to do, what can that one in there offer me that is freer than that? (Gurnah 2004, 224)
- 12 “Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblag (...)
24This critical approach to the very notion of slave ownership can initially be seen as an echo of the debates about the morality and legality of slavery conducted by European philosophers of the late eighteenth century. It is met with an initial questioning by Yusuf, who views Hamdani’s trust in the essential permanence of freedom as outdated: “Yusuf thought it was the talk of an old man. No doubt there was wisdom in it, but it was a wisdom of endurance and impotence, admirable in its way perhaps, but not while the bullies are still sitting on you and releasing their foul gases on you” (224). Yet, it is the physical labour of gardening, that is to say Hamdani’s agency and creative power on the material world, which invalidates Yusuf’s idea that Hamdani would be impotent. By refusing to be set free by his mistress, he also exercises his ownership of the garden, which he would otherwise have to leave. Thus, he reclaims as his own both his body and the physical labour performed for years. He is certainly deprived of any real choice, as freed slaves often found themselves without the means of creating a new life for themselves. However, Gurnah develops a set of images expressing this character’s essential link to the garden in ways that present his life as symbiotically connected to that of the plants he grows. Mzee Hamdani’s initial nickname of “vegetable man” (36) takes on new meaning, as does his reputation of being a saint who knows about herbs and natural cures: rather than endurance and impotence, the gardener’s life is characterized by a harmonious connection to his environment, both participating in the life of the garden, and being himself sustained by the garden. This bond between garden and gardener is taken to the point that they become a mutually dependent unit, which could be qualified as an “assemblage,” a concept which Bennett traces back to Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux12 and which she uses to characterize groupings of elements that develop a specific collective agency through their association. The human character is merging with the environment that nourishes him and that he tends to; the gardener’s refusal to be freed can only be understood from this non-human perspective: he takes part in a “life-matter binary” (Bennett 2010, 20), a confederation of the human and non-human, that sustains his life.
25The proximity between the human and the non-human leads to a poetic revaluation of man’s material status. In the first pages of the novel, the ontological separation between objects and subjects seems to be blurred, giving the reader the impression that human and non-human entities exist on an equal footing. Humans are shown to share some of the qualities of things in the initial scene at the train station:
The two Europeans were also waiting […]. The man was large, so tall that he had to lower his head […]. The woman stood further back in the shade […]. Where she looked lumpy and malleable, as if capable of taking another shape, he appeared carved out of a single piece of wood. […] As he watched, Yusuf saw the woman run her handkerchief over her lips, casually rubbing off flakes of dry skin. The man’s face was mottled with red […].
That year he left his home was also the year the woodworms infested the posts in the back porch. […] The woodworm left trails on the beams that were like the turned-up earth which marked the animal tunnels in the bed of the dry stream. The posts sounded soft and hollow whenever Yusuf hit them, and emitted tiny grainy spores of rot. When he grumbled for food his mother told him to eat the worms. (Gurnah 2004, 1–2)
26The materiality of the body of the Europeans, as observed by Yusuf, is of the same quality as the materiality of the wooden buildings. The competing references to hard and soft materials are distributed along the two paragraphs, in the form of solid pieces of wood and softer materials like flesh, cloth, earth, skin and even rot; both categories have to do with human bodies as well as with inanimate objects. The two types of matter are apparently opposed, hardness qualifying the man and softness the woman, but this clear-cut and somewhat stereotypical dichotomy is made more complex with a series of transformations that occur under Yusuf’s very eyes: what is solid becomes soft or brittle (“rubbing off flakes of dry skin”), what is soft changes shape (“lumpy and malleable, as if capable of taking another shape”), and what appears hard is revealed to be carved out (“posts sounded soft and hollow”). The images of dryness and erosion connect the materialities of skin, flesh, wood and earth, suggesting that the Europeans’ bodies are afflicted with the same deterioration as the buildings and the natural environment.
27This article has shown that Paradise offers a highly documented historical overview of the networks of trade and the circulation of men and goods in East Africa in the early decades of the twentieth century. The goods traded by Aziz have complex economic, social and political functions. The novel also observes how they exceed their commercial or technical values by interfering with human lives. While Paradise plays on the symbolic and metaphysical interpretations of the physical world, the novel also considers its essential materiality in the colonial context. Gurnah’s reconsideration of the relationships between humans and non-human entities challenges colonial hierarchies, both morally and poetically, as the book develops material imageries.
28The type of decentring operated by neo-materialists echoes the fact that Gurnah’s novel also recentres the narrative on the subaltern figure of those taken as rehani, and on the local, contextualized, and specific quality of the Swahili subjectivity. By directing attention towards the agency of the non-human and by showing the overlap between the experience of the human being and “thinghood,” (Bennett 2010, 4) the novel shifts our perception of centrality.
29This reflection on the place of humans in the material world leads to a dissipation of binaries and an affective and aesthetic openness to matter and opens new perspectives for political changes towards “a polity with more channels of communication between members,” (Bennett 2010, 104) and ecocriticism. The “old metaphoric dimension” (Braidotti 2009, 528), which uses animal bodies and behaviours as codes to decipher human realities, is replaced with a less anthropocentric approach and value system:
The main point, however, is for us to move on, beyond the empire of the sign, toward a neoliteral relation to animals, anomalies, and inorganic others. The old metaphoric dimension has been overridden by a new mode of relation. Animals are no longer the signifying system that props up humans’ self-projections and moral aspirations. Nor are they the keepers of the gates between species. They have, rather, started to be approached literally, as entities framed by code systems of their own. (Braidotti 2009, 528)
30Gurnah’s novel may not actively advocate this shift towards literalization, but Paradise lets us access the vitality of matter and animals in a decolonial context. The novel registers the experience of the individuals who notice the agency of the non-human world, and its capacity to deviate human trajectories.