Writing Back to Empire: “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” and German Colonialism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Afterlives

This article discusses the representation of the colonising German in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction in relation to dominant historical and contemporary discourses about German colonialism, which remain a polarised issue. Considering paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020) as case studies, it focuses on Gurnah’s fictional representations of German colonialists in Deutsch-Ostafrika and analyses Germany’s sparse acknowledgment of this brutal history. Furthermore, it explores how Gurnah connects this history with wider historical circuits both in the Indian Ocean World, Britain, Europe, and Germany. The article argues that Gurnah’s approach in Afterlives unmasks a German refusal to fully confront this past in public discourse in spite of archival documentation. The article will engage with wider intertextual connections that reveal the complexities in creative and fictional representations of East Africa’s colonial encounter with Germany. Through these modalities it will be argued that Gurnah animates in his novels the concept of the postcolonial, not as a temporal designator or theoretical construction, but as a critical-conceptual stance and reading practice.