Remembering Home After Empire: Postcolonial Memory, Material Privilege, and Diasporic Estrangement in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift and Desertion

Abstract

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction repeatedly returns to migration, exile, memory, colonial encounter, and the difficult search for belonging. This article offers a comparative reading of The Last Gift (2011) and Desertion (2005), focusing particularly on the relationship between material security and diasporic estrangement. While migration is frequently associated with the pursuit of economic stability and social mobility, Gurnah complicates this assumption by portraying characters whose relative security does not free them from the emotional and historical consequences of displacement. Material comfort, in these novels, cannot compensate for fractured memories, uncertain origins, inherited silences, or unequal colonial histories.

Drawing primarily on postcolonial theory and diaspora studies, the article examines how memory, nostalgia, cultural hybridity, colonial privilege, and family history shape the characters’ experiences of home and displacement. In The Last Gift, Abbas’s settled family life in Britain remains shadowed by his concealed past in Zanzibar and by the consequences of prolonged silence. In Desertion, intimate relationships unfold within structures of colonial inequality, demonstrating that affection and mobility cannot be separated from questions of race, power, privilege, and historical circumstance. Read together, the novels reveal that belonging cannot be measured simply through property, professional stability, citizenship, or economic achievement. Gurnah instead presents home as an unstable emotional and historical space continually reconstructed through memory and narration. The article argues that material security in these novels often makes unresolved displacement more visible rather than bringing it to an end. By bringing questions of material privilege into dialogue with memory and diasporic estrangement, the study contributes to critical discussions of Gurnah’s representation of migration and the continuing afterlives of empire