By the Sea begins as a compelling narrative and mystery of a man who arrives at Gatwick airport from Zanzibar without a visa and refuses to speak English, until the crucial moment where he is about to be deported and he utters the words that will change his trajectory.

Refugee. Asylum.

Old Scores Revisited

In trying to locate someone to translate for him, Latif is contacted and the two men realise there is a connection, a history that has perpetuated with major gaps on either side of their understanding, voids often filled by those wishing them ill.

Their story began by the sea and concerned a fragrance Ud-al-qamari, and would be retold far away where few understood the nature of their feuds and punishment, of corruption and power, petty rivalries over debts, possessions, and influences that could drive a man to flee for his life.

The man I obtained the ud-al-qamari from was a Persian trader from Bahrain who had come to our part of the world with the musim, the winds of the monsoons, he and thousands of other traders from Arabia, the Gulf, India and Sind, and the Horn of Africa. They had been doing this every year for at least a thousand years. In the last months of the year, the winds blow steadily across the Indian Ocean towards the coast of Africa, where the currents obligingly provide a channel to harbour. Then in the early months of the new year, the winds turn around and blow in the opposite direction, ready to speed the traders home.

Time Dismembers, Perceptions Unremembered

Told in three parts, the first two focus on each of these characters and their early life in Zanibar and something of their present, while the third part is a kind of oral storytelling as the two meet and their intertwined story is retold from start to finish until a different connection emerges, as they find themselves newly isolated in this place around people uninterested in their journey.

So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.

A drama of disappointment, self-deception and renewal, the novel explores both the double bind of the known culture that entraps, and the unknown culture that frees but isolates the individual, for their betterment, yet never quite attaining an imagined, desired status.

Like Admiring Silence, an excellent, astute read by an accomplished author.

Further reading

My review of Admiring Silence (1996)

Nobel Prize Interview with Abdulrazak Gurnah

Article Guardian on Winning the Nobel Prize

New York Times: Abdulrazak Gurnah Refuses to Be Boxed In: ‘I Represent Me’

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Author

Abdulrazak Gurnah was the Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 for

‘his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’,

He was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, arriving in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s. After the liberation from British colonial rule in December 1963 Zanzibar went through a revolution which led to oppression and persecution of citizens of Arab origin; massacres occurred. Gurnah belonged to the victimised ethnic group and after finishing school was forced to leave his family and flee the country, by then the newly formed Republic of Tanzania. He was eighteen years old. Not until 1984 was it possible for him to return to Zanzibar, allowing him to see his family shortly before the father’s death.

Themes of Refugee Disruption

Gurnah’s writing is from his time in exile but pertains to his relationship with the place he had left, which means that memory is of vital importance for the genesis of his work. 

The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work. His novels depict a culturally diversified East Africa. His dedication to truth and aversion to simplification are striking. It can make the work bleak and uncompromising, however he follows the fates of characters with great compassion and unbending commitment.

His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His most recent novel Theft (2025) is the story of the intertwined lives of three young people coming-of-age in postcolonial East Africa, selected as a book to look out for in 2025 by the Guardian, Observer, Irish Times and BBC.

Until his retirement he had been Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury, focusing principally on writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Salman Rushdie.