“It Began with Naming Things”: Mzungus and Other European Colonizers in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

ABSTRACT

To trouble internalist narratives of Europe, it is necessary to consider the “external” vectors that went into its making. This paper reads Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020) as representing a telling instance of such decentering, which warrants particular attention due to the mass mainstream visibility guaranteed by the author’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021. It takes the novel’s tracing of German colonialism as particularly instructive, because German colonial ventures have long remained in the peripheral vision of examinations of European colonialism more broadly, in anglophone postcolonial studies and literary representation. This prompts the article’s intervention in making this other European colonialism its focus. Via an examination of two facets of the novel’s engagement of knowledge-making – naming and recording – I argue that it enacts subversive interruptions of colonial epistemologies. The narrative’s delineating of the journeys of two characters from the colonial “periphery” of East Africa to the colonial “centre” of Germany sees these external Others becoming internal Others on European soil, and requires readers to think German colonialism with what came after. I propose, finally, that in (re)naming and (re)reading archives against the grain, the novel configures ambivalent alternatives to eurocentric knowledge-making, delineating the contours of what colonial archives excise, and gesturing toward what literary fiction can do to sketch flickering presences into some of those absences.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue for their helpful input, as well as participants of the MA seminar “Germany and Colonialism”, whose insightful comments were germane to my consideration of the novel.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. African soldiers who fought for the colonial forces, for more on which see Moyd. In the context of their representation in Afterlives, see Branach-Kallas.

2. The prose also sometimes incorporates German words. My analysis focuses on Kiswahili interjections, but the occasional use of German is compatible with the argument I develop about the novel’s projection of distance onto “external” naming practices.

3. These examples serve gestural purposes; an overview of the configuration of German colonialism in canonical postcolonial studies is beyond the scope of the current paper.

4. I take Schilling’s hyphenated “post-colonial” here as indicating an exclusively temporal sense of being after colonialism. Elsewhere in this paper, “postcolonial” is understood rather as entailing a critical grappling with the varied aftermath and ongoing repercussions of colonialism.

5. See also Amir Jeraj, “Abdulrazak Gurnah on Afterlives and Colonial Hypocrisy,” The London Magazine (blog), January 20, 2021, https://thelondonmagazine.org/essay-abdulrazak-gurnah-on-afterlives-and-colonial-hypocrisy/.

6. “Mzungu” is a common Kiswahili word for white people or Europeans. Usually translated as meaning “wanderer,” it “derives from the Kiswahili verb kuzunga which means ‘to go around’” (Spitzer 568).

7. The use of Indigenous languages within English-language prose has a long history, and its political significance was knowingly made use of in some of the postcolonial canon’s landmark works. In taking on this estranging naming practice for the naming of the colonizer subject position within my own argument, I hope to decenter invisible norms of eurocentrically derived naming practices, and that my analysis might maintain some of the inverted othering insisted upon by the novels in question. I do this from the position of an mzungu.

8. These carriers were often conscripted against their will, as also described in the novel. Gurnah has, on several occasions when speaking about the novel, indicated that a man he thought of as his grandfather had been conscripted in this way and forced to act as a carrier for the German troops.

9. On Husen, see Bechhaus-Gerst.

10. On the askari in Afterlives, see Branach-Kallas.

11. The relation of colonialism, histories of enslavement, and the Holocaust is the subject of significant discussion amongst activists and scholars. Thinkers including Hannah Arendt and Mahmood Mamdani have delineated some of the ways in which discourses and technologies of colonial rule can be understood as part of the genealogy of Nazi policies (articulations that constitute further refutations of “internalist” narratives of Europe), while Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory is frequently invoked as a means to think such histories together (Rothberg). It is not within the scope of this article to do justice to these complex issues. For readings that try to tackle some of these relationships in Afterlives, see Pujolràs-Noguer and Maricocchi. Esther Pujolràs-Noguer’s reading places the story of Uncle Ilyas in an unresolved present: “The story of the lost Ilyas, the askari and Holocaust victim who resides in a traumatized collective memory, is awaiting resolution” (389). Rita Maricocchi points to how Ilyas’ engagement with the archives “resists a ‘compartmentalization’ of German history and reveals how Holocaust memories and the memories of German colonialism inform each other” (8).

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Lucy Gasser

Lucy Gasser is junior professor for English Literary and Cultural Studies in Global Contexts at Osnabrück University. She completed her undergraduate and Masters degrees at the University of Cape Town, was a doctoral fellow with the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam, and a visiting researcher at Delhi University.