Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction draws the readers’ attention to the entangled history of the Indian Ocean World and stresses the links between traders, seafarers and locals. This idea of intersectionality, of linkages, resonates with recent historiography of the Indian Ocean which seeks to establish it as a complex network (Kearney, 2004; Mitchell, 2005) that can only be understood “by examining the component parts from which it is constructed and not by separating human history into studies of ‘them’ and ‘us’” (McPherson, 1993: 1). The Indian Ocean region is thus characterised as a “series of long-distance interlocking maritime exchange systems” (Mitchell, 2005: 99).
Gurnah’s consciousness of growing up in a part of the Indian Ocean world where encounters happen and have happened for centuries has shaped his tenacious investment in narratives that insist on the small voices that affirm hospitality and freedom within the context of colonial and imperialist onslaught and its aftermath, steeped in violence and hostility. I argue that Gurnah’s portrayal of such unexpected polyglot translocal links reiterates his firm belief in a ‘wider world’, where, as he explains, people’s humanity cannot be reduced to “putting them on this side or that, white or black or somewhere in between” (Gurnah in Nasta, 2004: 362). Against the universalisms of both colonial dominance and new African nationalism, Gurnah narrates stories that speak of relationality with the Other. Drawing on examples from his novels, I will trace the concept of freedom in the crucible of the Indian Ocean World.