Silence as a Trope that Individualizes and Equalizes Characters in Selected Works of Abdulrazak Gurnah

Silence, as a narrative strategy, plays a socio-political role by conveying the personal paralysis and helplessness that discriminated groups suffer in their attempt to evoke the truths about their traumatic pasts. It also propels individuals into seeking solace away from the familiar spaces of ‘home’ as they know it, which results in sojourns that may be adventurous. This paper critically examines how silence as a trope individualizes and equalizes characters in selected novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah. The study focused on four novels selected purposively. The paper examines silence as it manifests in the form of distortion, marginalization, exclusion from the public domain, voicing (and lack of it), trivialization, racism, ‘ethnicization’, and other forms of discrimination that speak to the traumas that accompany the identity of the Zanzibari Arab community depicted in the selected novels. From the analysis, it is concluded that silences foreground those identities that result from the interaction between the Zanzibari Arabs and the world. Hence, an examination of silence as a narrative trope in Gurnah’s novels helps to precisely track the traumas that are responsible for the characters’ adventures.