At the Margins: Silences in Abdulrazak Gurnah'sAdmiring SilenceandThe Last Gift

This paper offers a reading of Abdulrazak Gurnah's Admiring Silence (1996) alongside The Last Gift (2011) with the view to exploring the signification and significance of silence. Using narratology as the guiding framework, the paper investigates how the two novels use literary strategies to represent silence as a code of meaning and meaning making while simultaneously calling this process into question for both the reading audiences of the novel as well as the embedded audiences in the stories. Both novels show a marked degree of interest in the question of silence as one way through which migrants navigate the intersection of their present and past lives. The stories deploy narratorial unreliability and use of multiple focalizations as modes of engaging with the characters’ silence. An analysis of the significance of these strategies in the narratives opens up possibilities of appreciating the heterogeneity of the migrant experience as narrated in the two novels from different voice positions some of which paradoxically involve the silencing of that very experience.