The poetics of memory, postmemory, and oblivion in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel Afterlives fills traumatic historical gaps, focusing on the atrocities perpetrated by German colonialism in East Africa. Gurnah revisits the region’s turbulent history on a collective and intimate level as he portrays the precarious and contradictory existences of the Askari, native African soldiers employed in the German colonial army. This essay investigates the dynamic relationships between the characters and their positioning within specific historical contexts. It employs a multifaceted approach by examining these connections through the lens of memory studies. The analysis is focused on trauma, drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of multidirectional memory and postmemory. Afterlives articulates a poetics of memory, exploring the analogies and connections between colonialism and the Holocaust and the mechanisms of transgenerational traumatic remembrance. By focusing on the destiny of the victims, Gurnah activates a number of historical and emotional resonances encompassing memory, postmemory, and oblivion.