Immigrant songs

Week 30: By the Sea – Abdulrazak Gurnah
Recommended by: Nick Brown-Warr

Zanzibar is a majestic name, instantly conjuring up images of the exotic, appearing on maps only a short hop from 'Here Be Monsters'. At least that's how I've always imagined it, though I knew little about it other than its location off the African coast and the fact that Freddie Mercury was born there. Thanks to By the Sea, I can now say I know a little bit more.

This is the story of two Zanzibari men, their experiences abroad, and the shared history that it is slowly revealed that they share. We meet Saleh Omar, a man of sixty-odd years, upon his arrival in Britain as an asylum seeker. Following his journey through the immigration process, an alienating, dehumanising experience, his entry is approved and he is shipped off to a town on the south coast of England. And, sad to say, fifteen years down the line I can only believe that such experiences are now considerably less enjoyable than they were then. Stranger in a strange land, the key message Salah tells us is that for all of the dislocation he feels, he also feels safe.

We then meet Latif, another Zanzibari now living in England. However, that is in the future, what we instead find out is a little about his unhappy family life prompting his travels to the GDR. A callow, naive youth, he builds up strange relationships with fellow immigrants (born of necessity) and locals (born of curiosity) before he escapes to rock up on England's shores.

Brought together by Salah's caseworker, the two meet up in the present in the seaside town he now calls home. A dense tale of cruelty, oppression, pettiness and family rivalries unfolds as the two men share partial truths. As both narrators take pains to point out, these are incomplete, presumably to protect both themselves and their families. By turns coy and cynical, brave and barbarous, the two present a complex and unhappy picture of their lives; the harsh reality of island life then, the isolation of exile now. Carefully plotted and clearly written, Gurnah presents a critical snapshot of his homeland underpinned by an echo of the lyric, the sea's endless rhythm.