Searching for New Scripts: Gender Roles in Memory of Departure

Abstract

This article focuses on gender performativity in Abdulrazak Gurnah's debut novel Memory of Departure (1987). Like all of Gurnah's oeuvre, this novel is underpinned by Muslim codes of conduct, which demands that the production of meaning be unraveled from this starting point. The ambiguity of social constructions of gender that sexualize relations of domination are highlighted in this novel, which renders Muslim men more visible as gendered subjects.

Keywords::

• Muslim
• scapegoat
• Abdulrazak Gurnah
• honor
• masculinity

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Corrigendum

Notes

ORCID

Felicity Hand http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3766-6266

Notes

¹ The characters are listed in chronological order. Dottie, the eponymous heroine of Gurnah's third novel is the only character who bears no resemblance to Hassan Omar, although as a non-white Briton she may have suggested the character of Maryam in The Last Gift.

² In Paradise, Mohammed Abdalla and “Uncle” Aziz, respectively, fit these roles. The boy Yusuf occupies a more fluid gender role like Hassan Omar.

³ The first section of the novel abounds in verbal violence. Just to give three examples: Hassan's father calls his son a “dirty little murderer” and his wife a “snivelling bitch” (Memory 17). The men in the bar threaten Hassan: “You fuck off home before I stuff your little penis in your mouth” (52).

⁴ The following words could easily have been spoken by Hassan Omar: “That strangeness intensified the sense of a life left behind, of people casually and thoughtlessly abandoned, a place and a way of being lost to me forever, as it seemed at the time. When I began to write, it was that lost life that I wrote about, the lost place and what I remembered of it” (“Writing Place” 26).

⁵ For a discussion of gender, ethnic, and religious issues in current Zanzibari society, see Keshodkar.

⁶ Consider, for example, Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), Sekoni, Sagoe, Egbo, and Joe Golder in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965), and, more recently, Azaro in Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991).

⁷ Hassan's role as scapegoat constitutes an intriguing foreshadowing of Saleh Omar in By the Sea (see Hand).

⁸ Maria Cristina Paganoni suggests that this phrase could be translated as “dark-skinned Arabs,” underlining the newly acquired foreignness of the Swahili people of mixed Arab-African descent after the Zanzibari Revolution (167).

⁹ I am fully aware of the many varied voices in Islam, such as Shia, Sunni, Ismaili, Sufi, and other esoteric currents, but I have not attempted to deal with them as it is beyond the scope of this article. My argument is that in this novel, Gurnah is describing a general, popular, lived-in sense of Islamic conduct. I am grateful to Farhad Khoyratty for his advice on this point.

¹⁰ For a detailed analysis of the causes and effects of the Zanzibari Revolution, see Othman and Sheriff and Ferguson.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Felicity Hand

Felicity Hand is senior lecturer in the English Department of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has published articles in Wasafiri and Research in African Literatures. She is the head of the research group Ratnakara (http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/ratnakara) and the editor of the new electronic journal Indi@logs. Spanish Journal of India Studies (http://revistes.uab.cat/indialogs).