Abstract
In previous chapters, I discussed the manifold cultural presences and historical processes that shaped the eastern African coast, as well as how colonialism and its aftermaths transformed the region’s intercommunal relations. These transformations also created exile as a condition in which many African writers live and from which they write. In this chapter, I examine the ideological and cultural structures that characterize the exilic experience, and specifically the exilic experience of an eastern African Muslim in England. I explore perceptions of Islam in exile and the shifting and situational relationship between Islam and blackness, and especially how this relationship is reconfigured across national spaces, from “home” to England. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrim’s Way (1988) is a de facto sequel to his first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), not because of the continuity of characters or plots, but because Pilgrim’s Way resumes the thematic trajectory initiated in Memory of Departure.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams.
—Aeschylus
The novel is the aesthetic form of the displaced.
—Carlos Fuentes
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Notes
Edward Said, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals,” in The Edward Said Reader, eds. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 375.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 5.
This comes from George Steiners essay “Our Homeland, the Text,” Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4–25.
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) 177.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Pilgrims Way (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988) 10.
Eva Hoffman, “New Nomads,” in Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity Language, and Loss, ed. André Aciman (New York: New Press, 1997), 44.
Simon Lewis, “Impossible Domestic Situations: Questions of Identity and Nationalism in the Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah and M. G. Vassanji,” Thamryis 6, no. 2 (Autumn 1999), 217.
Oliver Roy, Globalized Islam: A Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 124.
C. L. R. James, “Africans and Afro-Caribbeans: A Personal View,” in Writing Black Britain, ed. James Proctor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 62.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1965) 7.
George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 34.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1960/2009).
Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: Le Découverte, 2002), 202.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 211.
James Proctor, ed., Writing Black Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 96.
See Talal Asad’s essay “Multiculturalism and British Identity in the Wake of the Rushdie Affair,” Politics and Society 18, no. 4 (1990): 455–480.
Hall’s essay is in Race, Culture, and Difference, eds. A. Rattansi and J. Donald (London: Sage Press, 1992), 252–60.
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© 2011 Emad Mirmotahari
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Mirmotahari, E. (2011). Situational Identities. In: Islam in the Eastern African Novel. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119291_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119291_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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