Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion

Felicity Hand (Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 7.2.3.03: South Africa and other Southern Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2005

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s seventh novel Desertion explores questions of loyalty, constancy, courage and simple human kindness, woven around tropes of loss and abandonment. Part I of the novel opens with the sensational arrival of the mzungu (southern, central and eastern African term for “person of foreign descent”), Martin Pearce, in a small East African town in 1899, having been abandoned by his Somali guides on the way to the coast. Fate has it that he is found by a dukawallah (a shopkeeper in Kenya and some other parts of eastern Africa), Hassanali, who takes him in as common humanity and the tenets of Islam require. Pearce turns out to be an amateur historian and linguist, who, rescued …

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1671 words

Citation: Hand, Felicity. "Desertion". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 June 2011 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=19205, accessed 24 November 2024.]

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