IMPERIALISM AND THE CROSS-CULTURAL TEXT: REAPPROPRIATION, REHISTORICISATION AND RENARRATIVISATION IN ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’S GRAVEL HEART

Abstract

The novel has been subject to varied interpretative precepts as postulated by diverse critics and scholars. One such critic is Edward Said, who argues that the novel, as a European literary form, is inseparable from the ideological logic of imperialism. Africa, which has been on the receiving end of imperial aggression meted out by Europe, has witnessed its writers adopt the novel as a mode of expressing Africa’s historical and cultural reality. Consequently, Said identifies filiation and affiliation as two interpretative approaches for reading the novel. On the one hand, the filiative approach demands that a text should be treated as an extension of other texts that have preceded it based on English-cum-European literary canons, while, on the other, the affiliative approach proposes that literary texts should be read as products of the society that births them, and whose consequent interpretation should be devoid of literary, canonical and traditional leanings. Based on these, Said proposes Contrapuntality as a framework for reading the novel. This essay therefore applies this framework to the critical textual analysis of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart. The essay reveals that the African novel is a cross-cultural or postcolonial text that reappropriates, rehistoricises, and renarrativises Africa’s historical and cultural experiences hitherto denigrated and disappeared by European and Arab coloniality, and it advocates for a wider patronage of the contrapuntal framework due to its penchant for relegating universality and accentuating cultural particularity.