Abstract
This article attends to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea as a critique of the normative understanding of the border as having a singular, prohibitive function for the refugee, and reads it as a call to register the border as a moving and permeable formation. What I call oceanic border thinking conveys Gurnah’s insight into the imbrication of littoral and land zones, and the effect of the proliferation of biopolitical technologies associated with various iterations of colonial and postcolonial bordering, including partitioning, arbitrary detention, deportation, and expulsion. The border’s liquidity — the elemental property of water — captures the valence of By the Sea’s oceanic border imaginary, which, in turn, challenges overdetermined readings of the border as attached primarily to land, and the reduction of the refugee to a presentist conception of race or nationality. The liquidity of borders, here, is not meant to suggest a state of extremity, crisis, or morbidity of Indian Ocean polities; rather, it suggests an approach to Gurnah’s oceanic writing as a process of world-making across waters in tandem with the biopolitical technologies that reoriented lives in shifting geopolitical territories. Oceanic border thinking enables one’s sense of the world not only in water but onwards into the land, whether in Africa, England, or continental Europe. Transferrable and dissident, this method helps with the exploration of how cartographic, literary, and imaginative conceptions of the border, as observed from water, bear the potential to trouble easy categorizations of borders and the histories associated with them.
Keywords
How strange are borders?
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) gives a panoramic view of bordering practices in the Indian Ocean world in the second half of the twentieth century through the memories of Gurnah’s co-narrators — Saleh Omar, a former furniture dealer, and Latif Mahmoud, a literary studies professor — who arrive in England separately as refugees from Zanzibar during the 1980s and 1990s. Seeking asylum gives something of a frame story to the vast theatre of action between the historical events that drive these characters from their native Eastern African coast to the suburban ennui of an English seaside town, where they meet again. A good deal of scholarly emphasis has thus far circled around the moment of encounter between Saleh Omar and British border politics. David Farrier conceives of By the Sea as a site for the provisional legal systems that can change the definition of refuge in the link between hospitality and sovereignty, where “the moment of the stranger’s arrival at the border becomes a contest between the stranger’s right to access and the host’s right to deny it” (Farrier, 2008: 125). The novel also becomes a space in which refugee characters live out the affective impacts of the border’s disciplinary power. Liam Connell argues that the border’s “strangeness” uncovers “the limits of Omar’s experience” and his homegrown conception of where he is in the world. Border-crossing instigates “a kind of rebirth in which fresh, unknown, ‘terrors’ will rebuild his sense of what is normal or comfortable” (2021: 36). The border is and does exactly what Farrier and Connell suggest; it is as much an alienating barrier as it is a statement on the state’s political extremities and its outlawed subjects.
What interests me nonetheless is the global temporality of the border project: I wish to locate the violence of the border not so much as a discrete event in metropolitan time, but rather as the result of long historical processes stretched across colonial and postcolonial politics. The refugee’s estrangement at the border recycles a Eurocentric, humanitarian idiom, fortified by influential thinkers on both the left (like Zygmunt Bauman’s Strangers at Our Door), and the right (such as David Miller’s Strangers in Our Midst). The discourse on the responsibilities of the state in refugee management has somehow normalized the “stranger” as an interchangeable metaphor for the refugee and the violence of the border as an alienating event that befalls the unsuspecting refugee. It thus risks underestimating displaced people’s historical consciousness about the constant political flux that makes and unmakes borders across multiple, often overlapping, temporalities.
After all, are borders so strange to refugees? Refugees as strangers to borders presupposes an unworldliness, a way of operating outside of national boundaries until the moment of arriving at the border, suggesting an a priori conception of the border, where the refugee stands before it, crosses it, defies it, and so on. The border is therefore conceived of as an occasion that beleaguers bordered subjectivity, a rude political awakening that violates the refugee’s geopolitical innocence. This perspective limits the idea of the border to imperial technologies that manufacture the boundaries of the nation-state and disregard the degrees to which refugees can cognize and manipulate the artifice and authority of borders. Critical border studies have suggested that the history of the border is always entangled with the history of migration; as Thomas Nail argues, borders are “kinetic” for being “under constant contestation and transformation by a number of different types of counter- and antiborder practices that rise and fall through history” (2016: 13). In this context, one productive way of reading By the Sea is to appraise it as an act of remembering the fluidity of Indian Ocean zones before and after Islamic and European colonization, and the subsequent establishment of Eastern African borders during the period of decolonization in the 1960s. To think about borders and refugees across this extensive stretch is to acknowledge first that refugees are made as the result of histories of struggle and colonial competition rather than at the border; and second, that the borders comprises the refugees’ lived experiences before seeking asylum, not only as interiorized disciplinary apparatus, but as a species of knowledge that mobilizes its own navigational properties.
I attend to By the Sea as a critique of the normative understanding of the border as having a singular, prohibitive, function for the refugee, and read it as a call to register the border as a moving and permeable formation. What I call oceanic border thinking conveys Gurnah’s insight into the imbrication of littoral and land zones, and the effect of the proliferation of biopolitical technologies associated with various iterations of colonial and postcolonial bordering, including partitioning, arbitrary detention, deportation, and expulsion. The border’s liquidity — the elemental property of water — captures the valence of By the Sea’s oceanic border imaginary, which, in turn, challenges overdetermined readings of the border as attached primarily to land, and the reduction of the refugee to a presentist conception of race or nationality. The liquidity of borders, here, is not meant to suggest a state of extremity, crisis, or morbidity of Indian Ocean polities; rather it suggests an approach Gurnah’s oceanic writing as a process of world-making across waters in tandem with the biopolitical technologies that reoriented lives in shifting geopolitical territories. Oceanic border thinking enables one’s sense of the world not only in water but onwards into the land, whether in Africa, England, and continental Europe. Transferrable and dissident, this method helps with the exploration of how cartographic, literary, and imaginative conceptions of the border, as observed from water, bear the potential to trouble easy categorizations of borders and the histories associated with them.
I am inspired by Philip Steinberg’s and Kimberley Peters’s emphasis on the necessary change in our perception of temporality, once we start untying events from terrestrial histories and see them also in relation to the ocean and its “dynamic materiality of incessant movement and transformation” (2015: 255). One limitation of land-based geopolitical conceptualizations is that they are “reliant on a linear trajectory of time that stabilises history into material strata and immaterial epochs that can be neatly bordered, bounded, and contained — marking one material layer and social era from another” (2015: 255). This approach puts into conversation Indian Ocean studies and refugee scholarship — two dominant modes of reading Gurnah’s work, in which one mode is often executed at the expense of another. By the Sea shows a long durée of the dynamic ways that life in the Indian Ocean has mutated in relation to the competition of imperial powers over resources and capital, and of the subsequent formation of Tanzania following the merging of Tanganyika and the Zanzibar Archipelago in the early 1960s. Instead of a linear trajectory between the place to flee and the place to arrive, Gurnah offers a global view of refugee mobility across a myriad of intersecting border politics. My reading is cognate with Sandro Mezzadra’s and Brett Neilson’s call for considering “the mutations of labor, space, time, law, power, and citizenship that accompany the proliferation of borders” (2013: 7). Thinking about the border’s malleable biopolitical techniques can help us see “how the regulatory functions and symbolic power of the border test the barrier between sovereignty and more flexible forms of global governance” (2013: 8). By the Sea creates a remarkably vast fictional space that renders visible this mobile link between the state in its colonial, postcolonial, and imperialist formations, and its exclusionary effect for the refugee.
The three parts of the novel, “Relics”, “Latif”, and “Silences”, roughly correspond to three phases of global border regimes, including the Indian Ocean trade prior to the partitioning of Eastern Africa by European powers, the Cold War renarrated through an African decolonial lens, and the postcolonial nation-state project into the contemporary era of the “refugee crisis”. Caught between these border temporalities, By the Sea’s refugee narrators occupy subject positions from the border with a certain anxiety about the ways that colonial and postcolonial borders have conditioned their lives long before seeking asylum. Gurnah opens up a space for what Walter Mignolo calls “border thinking” as feeling and acting in the world — a form of “world sensing” in Global South citizens that stems from inhabiting “borders of the modern/colonial world, epistemic and ontological borders” (2013: 136-7). Border thinking accommodates “delinking” as a condition of decoloniality during which historically bordered individuals “become epistemically disobedient, and think and do decolonially, dwelling and thinking in the borders of local histories confronting global designs” (2013: 137). To “delink” is to carry a local understanding of the world that stands outside the epistemological boundaries, reinforced by global hegemons, and to choose to refuse the possibilities that these epistemes offer as the only available options. This view helps with considering the border as a form of knowing in surplus of its function as an interlacing set of technologies for deterrence, and troubles the conception of the refugee as merely a subject to be acted upon. I want to suggest that Gurnah’s writing operates from a border thinking endowed with an oceanic mobility which can trouble conceptual and material boundaries that underlie epistemic assumptions that make up the world. By decentring the linearity of metropolitan temporality that governs border regimes, Gurnah’s oceanic border thinkers insist on the provinciality of the European conception of border, and gesture towards the possibilities of making and unmaking the globe by refugees as decolonial cosmopolites.
Two views from the border
By the Sea opens in the mid-1990s, with Saleh Omar’s voice speaking from his apartment with “a distant view, a mere smear of ocean if you stood on tiptoe”, in an unnamed town near London (2001: 153). His ruminations over his oppressive apartment life, provided by a refugee agency, takes him back to when he arrives in Gatwick Airport in Sussex without an entry visa under the alias Rajab Shaaban. Saleh’s arrival at the airport and his subsequent interrogation confirm what he anticipates about the realities of the “global order” and its penchant to preserve colonial boundaries (Kumavie, 2021: 4). He reaches the border with an attitude of playful dissent and a stratagem to partially offset its exclusionary power. As advised by the people smuggler who procured him the flight tickets, he pretends that he does not understand English at all. Saleh’s feigned muteness enhances the dramatic irony of his imperious eloquence, disclosed like a private joke to the reader, and his sophisticated appreciation of global border-crossing from his vantage point of Zanzibar, an island with a significant economic and cultural pedigree in the Indian Ocean world.
Saleh is passed on to Kevin Edelman, a border officer, who informs him that he will be deported on the next flight to Zanzibar. Recognizing the urgency of the matter, Saleh breaks his silence: “‘Refugee,’ I said. ‘Asylum’” (2001: 9). The refugee’s enunciation amounts to a performative speech act, in Judith Butler’s formulation, “with the power to produce or materialize subjectivating effects [… within] the cultural configuration of power [that] organizes these normative and productive operations of subject-constitution” (1993: 70). Saleh reiterates his speech act as if to enact a border subjectivity that deserves protection under current border regimes: “‘Refugee,’ I repeated. ‘Asylum.’ I glanced up as I said this, and started to say it a third time” (2001: 9). Edelman stresses that Saleh must heed his concern and return to Zanzibar, citing with some conflicted sympathy that his own parents were refugees from the Soviet Block, but they were Europeans and therefore “part of the family” (2001: 12). Saleh’s skin colour and now irritating silence emboldens the officer: “You don’t belong here, you don’t value any of the things we value, you haven’t paid for them through generations, and we don’t want you here” (2001: 12). Saleh’s former job as a businessman who sold antique objects to English settlers has equipped him with knowledge about the exchange value that governs border transactions. His take on colonial looting, complicit as he is, sets him apart from his fellow European refugees. He thinks to himself: “But the whole world had paid for Europe’s values already. […] Think of me as one of those objects that Europe took away with her” (2001: 12). The self-identification with the empire’s coveted trade recalls David Farrier’s formulation of the asylum seeker’s request “as a contest or split […] between a word that merely looks forward to the consequences of its enunciation and an action that is performed by virtue of the word” (2011: 7). The elongated wait between the claim (the word) and the officer’s delayed response (consequences), dramatically intensified between Saleh’s wilful silence and Edelman’s ranting lectures on European values, adds to Saleh’s desperation. Farrier writes,
“to request asylum necessarily requires the speaker to identify himself/herself as the object of sovereignty’s desire — the citizen’s ‘dark reflection’ who gives material presence to the ban. The speaker is made to internalize the conditionality expressed in their claim: to claim asylum is, in this sense, to internalize a sense of the self as fetish” (2011: 7).
It is desiring admission into the world across the border that regenerates the asylum seeker’s identity as a placeholder for this fetishized attachment. The poetics of seeking asylum here renders this internalization only partial. Saleh’s humorous recount and the situational irony of the moment parries the mirroring effect that aims to reconstitute him as merely an asylum seeker, reduced to the sovereign’s projection of its dark side on the other.
This scene mediates the border through the experience of two refugees with different political compositions. Saleh’s silent contention about his place in Europe signals a subaltern knowledge of global mobility akin to what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “problem of asymmetric ignorance” between the Western and the colonial subject (2011: 28). The conversation between the European and the African refugees at the nation-state’s literal border lays bare the racial logic of population management that underwrites bordering practices by classifying refugees into those who can adapt and contribute to the host nation’s economy and those who are likely to exploit it. Edelman’s partial sympathy compounds the conception of the border as always and exclusively in the service of the state, and the refugee as necessarily an anti-border agent. Gurnah, in Chris Rumford’s terms, sets in dialogue the experience of two characters who exercise “seeing like a border” with distinct and diverging political contingencies, as opposed to “seeing like a state” that imagines “borders as lines of securitised defence” (2012: 897). “Seeing like a border” underscores the border as a plural and relational construct. Far from an easy equivalent to the troubles of the subaltern and the marginal, the border may indeed become a project for those seeking to manipulate it to their own advantage, hence the urgency of “taking into account perspectives from those at, on, or shaping the border” (2012: 897). Edelman, himself a border subject and a former refugee, obscures and reinforces border technologies. His tacit account of a borderless Europe for Europeans, and a seamless belonging in England as a former refugee from Eastern Europe, carries a convenient omission, precisely in the service of enabling the current xenophobic logic of the border.
The plurality of views from the border helps loosen the binary of acceptance/denial of refugees and instead attends to the consequences of the stratification and financialization of asylum-seeking at the border. Edelman’s unreflective posture links the legacies of postcolonial bordering to the economic logic of asylum in neoliberal politics. The event that has left Saleh desperate enough to flee his homeland is the Zanzibar election crisis of 1995, the first multi-party election after the revolution, commonly believed to have been rigged in favour of the pro-African Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). Lucky for Saleh, as a “cheap way of showing stern disapproval”, Britain decided to grant asylum to the small number of Zanzibaris under duress who could afford the air fare to England (2001: 10). The reluctance to welcome the 65-year-old refugee assumes the flipside of this performative hospitality in the process of the neoliberal shift in refugee policies under New Labour in Britain during the 1990s, where acceptance of asylum seekers was no longer a matter of “rights” but one of productivity (Sales, 2002: 459). Saleh’s apparent inability to speak English adds to the suspicion that he will be a burden, an “underserving” refugee, unable to carry his weight: “No one will give you a job. You’ll be lonely and miserable and poor, and when you fall ill there’ll be no one here to look after you. […] This is a young man’s game, this asylum business, because it is really just looking for jobs and prosperity in Europe and all that, isn’t it?” (2001: 11). “This asylum business” flips the border officer’s sympathies with the refugee towards a political economy, focused on the repercussions of hospitality for the state, rather than the ramifications of inhospitality for the refugee. Edelman demands to inspect Saleh’s belongings, including a mahogany box of incense — ud-al-qamari — that Saleh carries with him as a relic of the global trade route in the Indian Ocean that predates the unilateral dominance of imperial forces and the exclusionary border politics of nation-states. The incident triggers Saleh’s memory about his childhood education at a colonial school, where he learned Zanzibar’s history through the British hegemonic pedagogy that only allowed one imperial grand narrative, while delegitimizing varied local histories as a “different category of knowledge” with little power to contest an “orderly accumulation of the real knowledge they brought us” (2001: 18).
Saleh’s meandering narrative renders a “decolonial epistemic perspective”, through which world history is told by a knowledge-bearer from the Indian Ocean (Grosfoguel, 2007: 212). He recounts how he came to the possession of the incense as a gift from a dubious Persian merchant from Bahrain. This dive into the memory of trade challenges the presentist understanding of asylum-seeking by opening up the history of human flow and commerce in the Indian Ocean world. The relationship between the refugee and the prized object, once acquired and owned by a trader who travelled as far east as Bangkok, situates the encounter in continuity with a historical access to the world “that troubles the categories sustaining subjectivity and mastery” at the border (Samuelson, 2013: 83). Saleh’s memory of cross-border oceanic journeys demands attention to the possibilities of unregulated mobility within the Indian Ocean — west towards the Persian Gulf and east towards East Asia — in contrast with the militarist and racist logic of the English border where Saleh is now narrating from. Stories about how this box of incense came to Saleh’s possession re-centre the often-neglected mass of water that surrounds land borders, giving rise to a peripatetic and cross-regional conceptualization of the world, born only when the world-making agency of the ocean is acknowledged. Gurnah’s “most explicitly coastal novel”, Meg Samuelson writes, “articulates a state of contiguity to the sea [that] is equally expressive of the sea’s compositional agency. The sea is not simply there in this fiction. More than ubiquitous backdrop, it pushes insistently to the fore as the medium through which a particular worldliness has been achieved” (2023: 363). This cross-border oceanic knowledge of mobility further inverts the encounter between the gatekeeping refugee who dispossesses another refugee of his humble belongings and the refugee who once gained his wealth by selling antique objects to British settlers. The irony is lost on the border officer. The confiscation of ud-al-qamari ruptures Saleh’s sentimental ties to “the luggage from a life departed, the provisions of my after-life” (2001: 31). The rift between Saleh and Edelman as England’s two separate categories of refugees is now complete: Kevin Edelman, the bawab of Europe, and the gatekeeper to the orchards in the family courtyard, the same gate which had released the hordes that went out to consume the world and to which we have come sliming up to beg admittance. Refugee. Asylum-seeker. Mercy. (2001: 31)
Saleh’s sophisticated understanding of the border challenges the presumed universality of the singular and linear version of history, of the “world divided into a timeless, monolithic ‘premodern’ Global South, and a history-making, world-making ‘modern’ Global North” (Datta, 2019: 3). The real gift of Gurnah’s narrative is that the refugee’s account of the world from below is by no means conclusive or expedient; rather, it remains fluid in the dialogue between the border subject and various adaptations of border regimes as colonial and postcolonial governments introduce new iterations of oceanic borders.
Postcolonial borderscapes and new biopolitical technologies
However silent, Saleh’s resolute position on his right to enter Europe upsets the apparent solidity of the nation-state and modern citizenship and instead rethinks it in terms of the liquidity of these categories across the Indian Ocean world. Unlike Edelman he can fathom an alternative form of belonging that is not confined to borders which are governed and guarded by mutually exclusive nation-states. This epistemic disobedience is informed by his historical consciousness of the fluidity of borders before the drawing of the political map of Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1885, and the following Anglo-German agreement in 1886, which resulted in partitioning Eastern Africa into “spheres of influence”. The agreement secured Britain’s rule over the southern inland territories, while German East Africa claimed the northern interior and, following a lease from the Sultan of Zanzibar, over the coastal strip in 1888. Saleh’s border thinking — his ability to reach into an oceanic memory that goes beyond the devastating effects of the imperial “scramble” for Africa and its rampaging bordering practices — troubles the continuity of what Phillips and Sharman have called the “durable diversity in the Indian Ocean international system” characterized by the relative stability between “Islamic empires’ primarily terrestrial orientation in contrast to the Europeans’ mainly maritime ambitions” (2015: 43). In this border imaginary, sovereign authority was legitimately shared, rather than segregated by distinctly marked territories.
These imbricating littoral and terrestrial zones and their epistemic diversity are created by the monsoonal wind, “musim”, that starts blowing in November northeast across the Indian Ocean from the Arabian coast towards Zanzibar, and southwest from Zanzibar starting from May each year (Pearson, 2003: 20). The ensuing oceanic currents carried over sailors and their cosmos from various parts of Asia, Africa, and the Persian Gulf: “They brought with them their goods and their God and their way of looking at the world, their stories and their songs and prayers, and just a glimpse of the learning which was the jewel of their endeavours” (2001: 15). This pluralistic world created by the oceanic flow comes to an end by the bordering practices involved in the struggle for African independence. A new iteration of Eastern African borders emerged in tandem with the making of African nation-states during the decolonial era, mandated by the “freezing” of borders by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in their inaugural meeting in Addis Ababa in 1963. OAU’s charter ruled that changing colonial borders was out of the question and demanded respect for the territorial integrity of independent nation-states (Ayissi, 2009: 132).
The nation-state project disrupts geo-temporalities that have shaped lives and livelihoods in the Indian Ocean. Zanzibar’s coastal communities suffer the consequences of the merging of Tanganyika and the Zanzibar Archipelago in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanzania. Treating Zanzibar as a land mass in continuity with Tanganyika, and not as a vibrant oceanic node, changes the social contours of its vibrant cosmopolitan world, wrought over centuries of trade across the Indian Ocean. Saleh laments the chaos that insular map-making has brought about for Zanzibaris; among its “many deprivations inflicted on those towns by the sea was the prohibition of the musim trade”. The new sovereign nation of Tanzania quickly draws up its own “complete maps” disregarding Zanzibar’s seascapes, which have been so integral to its imaginative and material constitution. Precolonial trade histories, sanctioned by a social contract of the free flow of people and mobilized by water, are now curtailed by the terrestrial limits of postcolonial border territories:
[t]hose scattered little towns by the sea along the African coast found themselves part of huge territories stretching for hundreds of miles into the interior. […] The last months of the year would no longer see crowds of sailing ships lying plank to plank in the harbour, the sea between them glistening with slicks of their waste, or the streets thronged with Somalis or Suri Arabs or Sindhis, buying and selling and breaking into incomprehensible fights. (2001: 15-16)
Unification means rapid geopolitical changes, which, in effect, sabotages cultural ecosystems with long pedigrees and transforms landscapes of functional human geography at a distressing speed. Foregrounding land over water in border imaginary goes hand in hand with heralding a cohesive national identity, tied to the firm continuity of land mass, and seemingly invulnerable to the now-foreign influence that the ocean brings to Zanzibar’s shores every year.
At the same time, Tanzania’s postcolonial borderscapes had repercussions for managing dissent and ethno-national conflict in both the mainland and the Zanzibar archipelago. The 1963 Zanzibar Revolution got off to a chilling start for the minority, but politically powerful, Arab population, during which thousands of Arab Zanzibaris were massacred, raped, maimed, or abducted (Wilson, 2013: 47). Under President Julius Nyerere, Tanzania ramped up biopolitical measures on the inside with detention centres, and on the outside with deportation mandates. Alongside its Eastern African neighbours, Somalia, Sudan, and to a lesser extent Kenya, the then-Tanganyika had already legalized detention without trial under the Preventive Detention Act in 1962, a year after obtaining independence. The new nation-state set up detention camps to pre-empt sabotaging acts by those who were deemed threatening to its one-party system, under the logic that the detainment of the dissident body guaranteed Tanzania’s sovereign project. Reportedly, the internees of the Act were told that they were detained for their own “security and the security of the nation” (Magoti, 2019: 81). There was a longer, colonial genealogy to this Act. Detention without trial was inherited from the colonial administration of the early 1920s, when the British introduced deportation ordinances in Tanganyika. The Deportation Ordinance of 1921 gave the governor the power to detain anybody and deport them from one part of the territory to another, if satisfied that their conduct compromised the territory’s order. This was followed by the Expulsion of Undesirable Persons Ordinance of 1930 that enabled the governor to expel any person who was deemed disagreeable to moral conduct. The two ordinances compounded each other in the fraught political climate of the 1960s, as the expulsion of undesirable persons also involved the detention of expellees who were waiting for the completion of the expulsion procedure (Magoti, 2019: 83).
Saleh’s exposure to Tanzania’s bordering practices recalls Hannah Arendt’s cogent argument in making the link between the rise of totalitarianism and exercising the laws that facilitate the denationalization of citizens, as the sovereign power resorts to “the weapon of denaturalization” (1950: 279). These laws set in motion new border technologies of deracination, deterritorialization, and arbitrary and indefinite detention. In the final part of the novel, “Silences”, Saleh recounts how he fell victim to both of these laws. In 1967, he is summoned by the Party headquarters to appear in a summary court for an inquiry about the terms of acquisition of his house. The day after his trial he is arrested and incarcerated in a local prison for a few weeks, where he and his fellow inmates are visited once by the “President of the Republic” — a reference to Abeid Karume, head of the short-lived government of the People’s Republic of Zanzibar — only to be lectured about the “need for unity and hard work, the motto inscribed under the national arms” (2001: 219). Saleh is then transferred to an island whose Arab population has been forcefully evacuated by the Republic, and is now turned into a detention centre. Hollowing out territories of their population to repurpose them as “offshore” detention centres is part of the development of a new border imaginary that expands from Zanzibar outwards to the entire archipelago. Having spent months on the island as a prisoner, Saleh is subsequently relocated to three detention centres with forced labour for the next eleven years, until he is offered notional amnesty by the state of Tanzania in a celebratory gesture to mark the nation’s victory over neighbouring Uganda in 1979; the decree, however, stipulates three conditions that effectively strip him of his citizenship: he must have served half of his sentence although he never knows how long the full sentence was; he cannot get out of detention and return to his community in Zanzibar until a third country offers him asylum; and he will not be allowed a passport. This makes him a refugee in his own country. Saleh laments: “since no one had expected to be released and so had not negotiated entry into any other country, all those about to be released under this condition had to wait until they could show that they had received an entry visa to somewhere” (2001: 234). In a cruel irony, it is precisely the partial citizenship of the new nation that renders him stateless, as the condition for the release of detainees is to flee the country. At last, prompted by the United Nations, the United Arab Emirates granted all detainees asylum in 1980.
Saleh’s subjugation under shifting postcolonial borderscapes continues into the bureaucratic paradigm of security of the European nations-states, in the “specifc spatio-temporal dimensions of the coloniality of asylum law, which operates through the mutual workings of refugee allocation and deportation, and within a complex intersection of asylum, labour and illegality” (Picozza, 2021: 66). Between 1980 and 1995, Saleh lives and trades in his old shop, managing a dignified livelihood by selling groceries. This relatively peaceful period is interrupted when Hassan (Latif’s brother) returns to Zanzibar — claiming that Saleh owes him a loan and threatening to sue him legally — at which point Saleh procures a fake passport and a one-way ticket to England. As if destined to be caught in the life cycle of a perpetual refugee, Saleh’s arrival coincides with the movement towards criminalizing asylum and the proliferation of detention centres in the UK. The rapid growth in immigration detention was mobilized by the broadening of the category of the “unauthorized” arrivals, variously termed as “irregular”, “undocumented”, or “illegal” since the 1990s. This deliberately vague demarcation allowed Western governments to detain refugees motivated by a wide range of social, economic, and political factors, for increasingly longer periods. Widespread, and at times indefinite, detention is analogous to the placing of foreigners “in ‘extra-legal’ locations like Guantanamo Bay, or in offshore processing centres. In both instances aliens have been placed in legal categories that are said to put them (and only them) beyond fundamental rights protection contained in either domestic constitutions or international treaties” (Wilsher, 2012: 209).
Repositioned in the murky legal language of asylum, Saleh is dispatched to a privately-run detention centre, a cold and bare structure in the countryside that houses 22 single male refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Saleh’s description of the detention centre evokes a lockless jail, walled by a harsh and inhospitable climate, with the function of containing and excluding rather than assisting with the transition from stateless person to future citizen. The detainees are kept away in a warehouse with a former commercial function, in a state of limbo: “The sheds that accommodated us could once just as easily have contained sacks of cereals or bags of cement or some other valuable commodity that needed to be kept secure and out of the rain. Now they contained us, a casual and valueless nuisance that had to be kept in restraint” (2001: 43). Keeping refugees “secure” and “in restraint” by reinforcing their sense of dispensability and the state’s lack of responsibility towards their safety is key to ensuring refugee management. Securitizing the refugee’s body flags the ever-shrinking spatial buffer between Global North citizens and what Arjun Appadurai has termed the “fear of small numbers”, the angst that feeds the “virulent nationalism” aggravated by the unravelling “solidity of the ties between space, place and identity” (2006: 24). Saleh recalls: “The man in the office took away our money and our papers, and told us we could take a walk in the countryside if we needed exercise, so long as we stayed within sight of the camp, in case we got lost. ‘If you got lost, there’d be no one to come and find you,’ he said, ‘and it gets cold out there at night, and some of you lads aren’t used to that’” (2001: 43). Whether an empty threat or not, this comment signals how casually the detention facility can afford to lose the refugee’s body, now relegated to a mere detainee, and held like a disposable object. As Lucinda Newns argues, the language devaluing the refugee can be read as a gesture towards the shift from the post-war migration in the Commonwealth to “European Union-era asylum migration”. While the Commonwealth tended to regard migrants as “valued commodities” in the service of an economy that needed labour, the new rhetoric of asylum-seeking positions such new migrants as fundamentally worthless (2015: 513).
By the Sea’s first part, “Relics”, comes to an end with Saleh’s confession to Rachel — the legal advisor for a refugee organization in charge of finding him permanent accommodation — but only upon hearing that the agency has contacted a scholar from the University of London to assist them as an interpreter. He blurts out: “I don’t think I need an interpreter”, interrupting Rachel’s thoughts on how this “expert on your area” might help Saleh make himself understood. When questioned by the exasperated Rachel why he has refused to speak English all along, Saleh quips “I prefer not to”, a quote from Herman Melville’s famous short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” (2001: 65). The bookish reference, which escapes the refugee advocate, implies Saleh’s gradual withdrawal into passivity in the face of the proliferation of borders and their attendant biopolitical technologies. By repossessing the disobedience to speak out of turn and mimicking the assumed cultural mastery of his inhospitable hosts, Saleh reclaims his “discounted body” at yet another institution of the border, where “to be alive is always and already to breach boundaries or to be exposed to the risk of the outside entering the inside” (Mbembe, 2019: 11). Breaking silence stands for something other than a strategy of the cunning asylum seeker; it is Saleh’s attempt to recover the waned sense of being in the world, a place usurped iteratively and incrementally by shifting colonial and postcolonial geopolitics.
The Cold War’s third way and the global refugee
The second part of the novel, “Latif”, is narrated by the volunteer interpreter who presents under the alias Latif Mahmoud, also a refugee from Zanzibar. Latif, meaning “subtle” in Arabic, brings a perspective of forced migration into the picture from a heightened period of Pan-Africanist activity during the Cold War, when postcolonial nations struggled against the “new scramble for Africa” by the United States and the Soviet Union (Jackson, 2010: 231). Latif is the son of Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, a Public Works Department clerk, whose name was appropriated by Saleh Omar after he flees Tanzania. It turns out that both Latif’s father and Saleh were conned by Hussein, an affectatious Persian merchant from Bahrain, in the early 1960s. Hussein convinces Rajab to insure his cargo in one season of trade by pawning his house; secretly Hussein gives Rajab’s house’s deed to Saleh in exchange for the money that he owes Saleh. Hussein defaults on his debt and disappears from the scene but only after seducing Hassan, Rajab’s son and Latif’s brother, who follows Hussein into the ocean during the next musim. Saleh confiscates Rajab’s house and its belongings, including an ebony table. Still in his early teens, Latif visits Saleh’s home to reclaim the table, only to be spurned with insincere courtesy. In Latif’s memory, this event is integral to a circular movement that brings the characters together again in the empire’s centre, both as refugees: “it’s as if I went on from Saleh Omar’s house and right out of the country, and through the years I have been finding my way to his other house by the sea” (2001: 104). Later, he accepts a scholarship from the new Tanzanian government to study dentistry in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), under a scheme that sponsors male students from socialist-leaning African countries. His journey to the “East” in 1966 is made possible by the GDR’s initiative starting from the late 1950s to attract students from African countries to promote the global advance of socialism and decolonization.
Sending students to the GDR was a part of the Tanzanian project of self-determination that “significantly overlapped and intersected with larger global dynamics surrounding the end of empire and the attempted imposition of a bipolar world order” (Lal, 2015: 28). The scheme peaked after the unification of Tanganyika and Zanzibar to become the United Republic of Tanzania; the GDR’s focus on Tanzania aimed to spread socialism — in its Marxist-Leninist variety, as opposed to China’s Maoism — from Zanzibar to the mainland (Burton, 2019: 68). The Cold War provides the context for Latif’s account of his reluctant stay in the GDR and his subsequent attempt to seek refuge in England. Himself a postcolonial scholar, Latif scrutinizes the academic oversight that reduces the Cold War to a bipolar conflict in the Northern hemisphere. He is sceptical of the Eurocentric scholarly view that diminishes the struggle of African postcolonial states to “footnotes to a text concerning other protagonists” in favour of their ideological alignment with the USA, the USSR, or China (Popescu, 2012: 38). As an Arab from Zanzibar, which has recently joined the mainland, Latif adds the perspective from the border to the dominant narratives of the African nation-state and the ordering of the world between Soviet expansionism and the West’s politics of containment. Latif’s vantage point of Zanzibar’s shifting borders attenuates “the narrative and psychological force that nationness brings to bear on cultural production and political projection”; instead, it highlights the “ambivalence of the ‘nation’ as a narrative strategy” (Bhabha, 1994: 201). With a degree of distance from both Tanzanian nationalist sentiments and the grand narratives on either side of the Iron Curtain, Latif observes the political developments in Africa that led to his own departure. His story, radically different from Saleh’s, signifies that borders are lived out differently, and that being a refugee is as much a process of remembering as it is a legal status in motion in various political discourses. It also points to the ways that colonial and postcolonial border imaginaries can clash and intersect, manufacturing and compounding new forms of displacement and expulsion.
In essayistic passages that mimic academic prose, Latif reflects on Tanzania’s gradual ideological alignment with the Eastern Bloc, galvanized by the “swelling chorus of discontent with the United States across Africa” after the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese Pan-African leader, becomes a matter of public knowledge. This anti-capitalist sentiment is aggravated further in the spirit of global solidarity with the Civil Rights Movement, and the United States’s circumspect attitude to financing “development projects which our President thought essential to national progress” (2001: 106). The power vacuum invites the Eastern Bloc to wield increasing influence: “The People’s Republic of China agreed to provide finance. The Soviet Union offered arms credit. The German Democratic Republic offered training in management and scientific skills” (2001: 107). Disappointed in Americans, Tanzania’s first President, Julius Nyerere, ramps up these developments by building his own African variant of Maoist Marxism, officially announced as ujamaa (meaning in Swahili, familyhood) in Arusha Declaration (1967). In a half-mocking tone, Latif broods over Nyerere’s agenda in steering the young nation away from capitalism and communism and their respective “spheres of influence”: “He made the speeches, he issued decrees, and then he wrote the books to explain how all this would end up with our humanity enhanced” (2001: 107).
In Dresden, Latif finds himself in the company of African students who, in one way or another, grapple with this complex geopolitical dynamic. The GDR’s authorities confiscate Latif’s passport upon arrival and house him in a dormitory designated for male students from across the continent, “darkies of one hue or another, all from Africa” (2001: 114). There is an element of refusal in the African students’ boisterous conduct, intensified by an Afropolitan consciousness, the lived experience that “African states are pure (and, what is more, recent) inventions” (Mbembe, 2020: 60). Their wilful intractability is rooted not so much in the Pan-Africanist orientations of their respective nation-states, but in the shared, if multiracial and polyvalent, history of decolonization that has shaped their generation. Pondering how this knowledge troubles GDR’s neocolonial ambitions in moulding bright African minds into communist sympathizers, Latif wonders if “we knew that we were beggar pawns in somebody else’s plans, captured and delivered there. Held there. Perhaps the scorn was like the prisoner’s sly refusal of the gaoler’s authority, stopping short of insurrection” (2001: 115). The diasporic experience fashioned under ideological repression mediates Latif’s fellow students’ “transnational self-styling and cultural liminality” that underlies a sense of “African worldliness, or global entanglement (Balakrishnan, 2018: 576). Against the unapologetic racism of German students, Latif grows close to his roommate, Ali, who seems to have a deeper understanding of African independence movements in the context of the global politics of the Cold War. Born in France to educated parents, Ali’s life takes a sharp turn in 1960 after Ahmed Sekou Toure’s “acrimonious independence for Guinea” (2001: 120). In a “burst of post-colonial shame”, Ali’s father returns to his country and is soon imprisoned by Toure’s regimes, leaving a fearful Ali with no choice but to arrive in East Germany on a scholarship as the only option to leave the country (2001: 120). Ali’s studies in the GDR provide a legal route to conditional safety, in some contrast to the gradual illegalization of migration by European states after the Cold War, when forced migration started to be seen as a security issue on a par with the defence of state sovereignty and territorial integrity (Hammerstad, 2014: 266).
Couched in Ali’s account and in multiple other refugee stories by secondary characters, Gurnah’s global view of asylum posits that the shifting conceptions of the legitimacy of forced migration do not realistically correspond with the degrees of coercion that the displaced person experiences. Refugees seek protection from their nation-states in various ways, including those who arrive under precarious visa schemes, such as university admissions — as was the case of Gurnah himself in the late 1960s (2001: n.p.). By the Sea shows that border regimes — as disparate as those of Eastern Europe during the Cold War and pre-revolution Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean — spill into one another and disturb the clear-cut boundaries of citizenship and statelessness, as well as of legal and illegalized migration on a global level. This appreciation of the undecidability of borders allows the refugee to afford epistemic disobedience to a sense of history underwritten by land-based nation-states, by seeing through the façade of the legality of mobility and by exposing the intrinsic porousness of borders. Observing the situation like a refugee from the border, Gurnah furnishes a certain “epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of the outside created from the inside; and as such, it is always a decolonial project” (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 206). This complicates the current discourse of the “refugee crisis”, which limits forced migration to the “tidal” waves of South-North movement, and represents the legitimate refugee as a visibly abject other without visas “at the door”.
By imbricating multiple temporalities of displacement, By the Sea suggests that the “refugee” is not by default just another name for a person of colour stranded at the border; rather, refuge is sought as the result of the violence of states, and it only becomes a “crisis” when the hostility of one’s country is matched by the cruelty of the host nation-state. In Dresden, Latif crosses paths with ethnic German refugees, who were expelled after World War II from Czechoslovakia. Elleke, a jaded middle-aged woman, and her son, Jan, have been Latif’s pen pals from the time that he lived in Zanzibar, when they faked the identity of a young woman who, Latif fancies, is romantically interested in him. After apologizing for the practical joke, Elleke discloses the story of growing up in the border town of Most, then a part of Austria, before residing in Kenya as a settler coffee farmer in her youth. To Latif’s surprised question about why Kenya, Elleke responds wryly, “‘We were European. We could go anywhere in the world we wanted’” (2001: 131). The family’s entitled globe-trotting comes to a sharp end as Germany transitions from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism under Hitler. Fearing that they would be interned by the British during World War II, Elleke and her parents return to Most, which by then has been recognized as part of the ethnic German-speaking zone of Sudetenland by the Nazis.
Regained by Czechoslovakia immediately after World War II, Most became the site of mass expulsion of German ethnic people. Itself reeling from a war unprecedented in its destruction, Dresden hosted a great number of refugees from several Eastern and Central European regions, after the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, in which the Allies agreed on shifting Germany’s eastern border to reduce its size and deporting German ethnics who lived outside this new border. Elleke recalls her extended family’s plight: “‘They were all expelled after the war […] Germans were expelled from everywhere, from the Sudeten, from Silesia, from East Prussia. Millions of them. Dresden was a pile of rubble with thousands of refugees crawling over it’” (2001: 137). The image of “refugees crawling all over” a ruined Dresden evokes the flight from the advancing Red Army and the retributive violence in the newly liberated states of Poland and Czechoslovakia against Germans in 1946 and 1947 (Gibney and Hansen, 2005: 182). Despite the Allies’ declaration at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 that the operation would be “orderly and humane”, the expulsion of Germans re-enlivened some of the most inhumane technologies of ethnic cleansing, surpassed only by the sheer barbarism of the Holocaust. Early on in his important study on the subject, the historian R. M. Douglas portrays the scale of state operation and the anguish of German refugees:
Tens and possibly hundreds of thousands lost their lives through ill-treatment, starvation, and disease while detained in camps before their departure—often, like Auschwitz I, the same concentration camps used by the Germans during the Second World War. Many more perished on expulsion trains, locked in freight wagons without food, water, or heating during journeys to Germany that sometimes took weeks; or died by the roadside while being driven on foot to the borders. (2012: 1)
As Douglas’s chilling description suggests, the deployment of extreme state apparatuses — in this case, concentration camps and expulsion trains — is but a predictable bedfellow for extreme bordering practices, not only in Africa or for African people, but across a war-ravaged Europe. By incorporating the plight of German refugees, preceding Saleh’s by around a decade, Latif’s narrative globalizes the refugee problem in the context of the possibility of genocidal state violence and the repercussions of calamitous military conflict. This experiential affinity generates a certain care between Elleke, Jan, and Latif, who decides to flee the GDR with Jan out of a sense of camaraderie: “I knew before we set out that Jan planned to escape, and I joined him because he was my friend” (2001: 137). While for Elleke and Jan, the imperative is to relate the experience of crossing borders — from Dresden to Most, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Zagreb, Graz, and finally Munich in West Germany — for Latif, seeking asylum occurs less as a matter of necessity and more from an impulse to redress a historical injury by defying the Cold War borders. He reminisces, “We travelled on money he and Elleke had saved, until we reached the German border when we announced ourselves as refugees from GDR” (2001: 137). Having reached the GDR’s borders, seeking asylum in England proves relatively uncomplicated, as migrants from East to West Europe during the Cold War were regarded as political refugees irrespective of their individual motives (Fassmann and Munz, 1994: 527). Contrary to Saleh’s, and indicating a different era of refugee policy, Latif’s asylum case does not need smugglers and cunning device to succeed. Neither does it end in airport interrogation and detention centres.
This is the only point in Latif’s narrative that his tone eases, as if remembering fondly a formative moment of being welcomed with hospitality: “I told the immigration official who interviewed me that I wanted to travel on to England, and he smiled and arranged for me to receive a one-off subsistence payment which paid for my rail ticket to Hamburg” (2001: 137). Latif’s journey continues on a boat to Plymouth, where he claims asylum at the harbour’s police station, only to be accommodated respectfully:
“I am a refugee,” I said. “From GDR.” “From where?” he asked, turning his grizzled head slightly to give me the full benefit of his left ear, as if to be sure to catch the elusive word I had muttered. “From East Germany,” I said. (2001: 138)
It is worth noticing Latif’s journey in the North Sea, and his informal admission into England on the dockside. Despite his similar identity composition to Saleh, both being black Muslim men from Zanzibar, Latif’s treatment at the UK border is radically different from Saleh’s, not least because of an implicit narrative of escape from communism which overshadows his African roots. The very speech act that gets Saleh into so much trouble — “I am a refugee” — is key to Latif’s acceptance. The difference lies in the way that this announcement of asylum is qualified — “from GDR” — and in Latif’s savvy manipulation of the border regime’s implicit hierarchies of refugee identities.
Latif’s subtle humour and his distinct journey — in land and across waters — to refuge breaks away from the official discourse of one “regular” form of forced mobility that conveniently fits the paradigm of life at immanent risk and at the mercy of the host’s hospitality. What we have, instead, is the elastic nature of the European border and the malleability of national identity. By juxtaposing the stories of his two principal, and a few other minor, refugee characters, Gurnah insists that borders are porous and kinetic. They are psychologized, negotiated, and resisted, as much as they are stopped at or overcome. Borders leak, circulate, and move in continuity with their power to limit, detain, and repel. By the Sea allows an appreciation of the complex historical conditions in which borders develop from the Indian Ocean world, and outward into the farthest geographies, with overlapping oceanic temporalities that loiter in the memories of refugees as they struggle to cross European land borders. This is not to diminish the shock of the border’s materiality or belittle its racist bureaucracy, but to bring attention to the duration of the border as a known threat to refugees. Gurnah’s refugees know borders. They live the border’s impacts and feel its lingering weight long before and after coming into physical contact with it. Gurnah distils and dispels the (neo)colonial imaginary which always contends with new borderscapes in order to sustain its failing agenda for as long as possible, through various ways of forcing, undermining, and repurposing geopolitical boundaries. By the Sea registers the persistence of borders as part of a literary imagination that remains precisely as such — at sea — and often mute and invisible from the terrestrial centre. In Gurnah’s capacious imagination, refugees are not just strangers at the border; they are world-weary but worldly, knowing, and global.
