Volume 74, Issue 1 - Thematic issue on “Abdulrazak Gurnah and German Colonialism”; Guest Editors: Lukas Lammers and Kai Wiegandt

This article discusses the representation of the colonising German in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction in relation to dominant historical and contemporary discourses about German colonialism, which remain a polarised issue. Considering Paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020) as case studies, it focuses on Gurnah’s fictional representations of German colonialists in Deutsch-Ostafrika and analyses Germany’s sparse acknowledgment of this brutal history. Furthermore, it explores how Gurnah connects this history with wider historical circuits both in the Indian Ocean World, Britain, Europe, and Germany. The article argues that Gurnah’s approach in Afterlives unmasks a German refusal to fully confront this past in public discourse in spite of archival documentation. The article will engage with wider intertextual connections that reveal the complexities in creative and fictional representations of East Africa’s colonial encounter with Germany. Through these modalities it will be argued that Gurnah animates in his novels the concept of the postcolonial, not as a temporal designator or theoretical construction, but as a critical-conceptual stance and reading practice.

In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels set in German East Africa, German colonialism is portrayed as violent, with administrators, military personnel, plantation overseers, and missionaries all engaging in acts of violence towards East Africans. Of these groups, the figure of the missionary is the most ambivalent, given that Christianity had both protective as well as culturally damaging functions in colonial spaces. This article provides a historical contextualisation of German missionary presence in German East Africa around 1900 and thereby productively complicates the role of missionaries and places them within the broader context of colonial violence in German East Africa. It examines the use of German within mission schools to contextualise the use of the German language in the novel as well as the ways in which missionaries were engaged in epistemic violence. In a third section, the article examines some of the ways in which German missionary societies contributed to the colonial revisionist movement – a movement that is described in the last chapter of Afterlives . This article reflects on how German missionary groups tried to keep their legacies alive in post-war Germany by creating memories of the former German colonies and thus provides context for the transnational and multilingual entanglements of the novel Afterlives .

Is there a political-ecological arrangement that can explain the perpetual futurity of genocide? How to account for the human body in the larger Earthly distribution of matter, when we notice that we, too, are food for other animals? And what does that do to our conception of mass murder in this time-less, creaturely grind? This paper hazards a response to these questions through reading Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels set in German East Africa, namely Paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020). Gurnah suggests that the sheer human violence that plagues us now is anything but contemporary or ‘human,’ and it can only be as ancient and intra-active as the matter we inhabit. To argue this, I’ll work with three conjectures: first, that matters (in Gurnah’s work) are not merely acted upon, but rather they are actants with an agency that breaches the boundary between humans and non-humans; second, that temporalities of violence do not begin and end in human-constructed time; and third, that affliction and resistance can travel beyond the contours of our wounds and wills, precisely through the matter that it touches on its way.

Within Abdulrazak Gurnah’s oeuvre, Afterlives is notable for its close attention to the impact of German colonialism in East Africa. Covering a period of roughly 70 years, from about 1900 to the 1970s, and moving between East Africa and Germany it explores some of the historical depth and cultural entanglements that shaped a culturally diverse region. This paper suggests that Afterlives can be seen as a commemorative event in its own right, one that effectively uses the outpouring of memories of World War I in particular as an effective foil to present, reconfigure, and connect different traumatic histories. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory it argues that the novel complicates hegemonic Western accounts by making four strands of traumatic memories, in Rothberg’s words, “bump up” against each other (2009, 2): memories of the two World Wars, memories of (especially German) colonialism, memories of slavery and indentured labour, and, less predictably, memories of the Holocaust. It is arguably the consistency with which these traumatic histories have been kept separate in dominant accounts that renders Gurnah’s retelling so compelling.

This paper argues that implication in German colonialism is a central concern in Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020). The novel suggests that German colonialism implicated in its crimes the colonized population and third parties who believed themselves mere bystanders – a process that standard accounts usually do not allow us to see since they are premised on the rigid positions of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. In the words of Michael Rothberg, on whose vocabulary developed in The Implicated Subject the paper draws, “the production of injustice and processes of victimization do not necessarily result from deliberate acts of evil or a particular will to violence, but rather from an accumulation of distinct, dispersed actions” (2019, 53). Gurnah’s focus on implication does not diminish the horror of German colonialism by putting part of the blame on the colonized. It sheds light on German colonialism’s more complicated mechanisms, on reasons for its lasting effects, and on the fact that these mechanisms took advantage of already existing forms of exploitation.