A Resounding Silence: Gurnah’s Afterlives and Multidirectional Memory

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.