Abdul’s Reviews > By the Sea > Status Update

A question gnawed at me: why did Gurnah avoid writing about the massacre of the Omanis in Zanzibar, when the characters were in the thick of that political turmoil when it happened? Was it ethical restraint? Was it to reinforce unspeakable memory?

I'm interested if he tackles head on the subject of Arab/Omani share of the blame for the slave trade in other books, considering he shows the African's share in Paradise.

"I have taught myself not to speak of the years which followed, although I have forgotten little of them. The years were written in the language of the body, and it is not a language I can speak with words. Sometimes I see photographs of people in distress, and the image of their misery and pain echoes in my body and makes me ache with them. And the same image teaches me to suppress the memory of my oppression..."

"[They] were no more Omani than I was, except that they had an ancestor who was born there. They did not even look any different from the rest of us, perhaps slightly paler or slightly darker, perhaps their hair was slightly straighter of slightly curlier. Their crime was the ignoble history of Oman in these parts, and that was not a connection they were allowed to give up. In other respects they were indigenes..."

"There was nothing gay in what they did or sought to do. They coveted his grace and his effortless, supple beauty, and muttered to him as he strolled by, offering him money and gifts and transparent predatory smiles... They never left him alone, the looks, the comments, the casual touch, all were suggestive, something between a cruel game and a calculated stalking exercise."

2/2

"...even the most skinless civilised European, but I had not expected to see so much black black black on a page like that... It made me feel hated, suddenly weak with a kind of terror at such associations. This is the house I live in, I thought, a language which barks and scorns at me behind every third corner."

1/2

A black immigrant poetry teacher checks the dictionary: "So I looked up black, and quailed: blackhearted, blackbrowed, blacklist, blackguard, blackmail, Black Maria, black market, black sheep. Entry after entry like that, so that by the time I finished reading through them all I felt despicable and disheartened, smeared by the torrent of vituperation. Of course I knew about the construction of black as other..."