Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea: A Paradigmatic Novel on the Contemporary Diasporic Condition

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s postcolonial counter narratives show a wider world, whose multiple identities and overlapping landscapes reveal the hybrid subjects and complex geographies of globalisation. In his novels Gurnah represents the diasporic conditions of modernity, exploring the issues of belonging and unbelonging and the anxiety of alienation and loss. By the Sea (2001) portrays migrant characters revealing both rootlessness and nostalgia for their homeland, Zanzibar, and effectively investigates the motifs of displacement and memory. It is a paradigmatic novel dealing with the contemporary postcolonial condition, representing transnational movements as well as the double consciousness of diasporic subjects. Ethnic solidarity as well as storytelling provide the means to overcome loneliness and fear.