“Nor was there any role for you”: Unsettling canonical frames in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By The Sea (2001) and Gravel Heart (2017)

Abstract

In this paper, I consider By the Sea (2001) and Gravel Heart (2017) as examples of how the Zanzibari-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction unsettles the disempowering frames that his refugee and marginalised migrant characters encounter as they attempt to find new homes. To understand how Gurnah engages productively with his intertexts, this paper draws on work by Judith Butler to characterise Western canonical literature as frames, as well as Ankhi Mukherjee’s description of canonicity. What becomes apparent in my examination of the selected works is a trajectory in Gurnah’s authorial project from the simple rejection of frames towards new representations of refugees and marginalised migrants as fully ethical agents rather than emblematic victims. Thus, Gurnah’s work could be read as an exemplar of the narrative recalibration of the representation of migrants called for by scholars such as Loren B. Landau and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh.