Negotiating Identity and Belonging in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise

Abstract

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994) presents a complex exploration of identity and belonging within the socio-cultural and political landscape of East Africa on the eve of European colonial expansion. This paper examines the ways in which individual identity is shaped and continually negotiated through displacement, commercial bondage, spatial confinement, cultural hierarchy, and emerging colonial power structures. The study focuses on Yusuf’s transformation from a young boy surrendered into rehani (pawnship) to an alienated young man confronted with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing social and political order. Drawing upon Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and the ‘Third Space’, Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, Frantz Fanon’s analysis of psychological alienation, and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the paper investigates the intersection of identity, power, space, and belonging in the novel. Particular attention is given to Uncle Aziz’s garden as a symbolic space of confinement and to the trading expedition as a site where cultural hierarchies and processes of ‘othering’ are reproduced. The study further considers the arrival of German colonial forces and Yusuf’s final decision to follow the colonial army as a manifestation of constrained agency rather than genuine liberation. The paper argues that Gurnah destabilizes idealized notions of pre-colonial Africa by revealing the internal structures of exploitation that preceded and intersected with European imperialism. Ultimately, Paradise portrays identity and belonging as precarious, contested, and continuously negotiated within overlapping systems of economic, cultural, and political domination.