Mattering~with

Those who tire easily of saltwater struggle with Abdulrazak Gurnah's writing too. Not that the briny matter is visible everywhere in Gurnah necessarily; it is easy, in fact, to lose sight of it in the compulsive meanders of his raconteurs. But the dampness follows us around every bend, muddies the dust of the East African interior and the concrete of urban England on every page, until it errs its way back into colonial and migrational environments. The saltwater builds houses, fills up rooms and exposes its furniture to mould, evokes and erodes memories of the slave trade, drifts the migrant across the seas and enters their worst nightmares in the pang of mob violence, like a mirage that strangles the horizon of arrival. It is, maybe, for this ubiquitousness that water lingers on as the one unreadable element in Gurnah's imagination. This book follows this somewhat counterintuitive logic, for it aims to de-emphasise a state of alterity in Abdulrazak Gurnah's writing as part of the Indian Ocean's cultural politics and instead approach his literary geographies as sites of material porosity, where history is understood in the dynamic interface of human and nonhuman matters. The rationale of this project is to untie literary analysis from a predictable system of meaning-making of the Indian Ocean as if it is a series of material and cultural codes somewhere out there. Gurnah's work helps achieve this liquescent critique by weaving oceanic geopolitics with something closest to a liquid style of storytelling and a solvent imagination. During a prolific literary career that spans more than three decades and eleven novels, Gurnah has maintained an abiding interest in the imbrication of littoral and land zones and the effect of proliferation of biopolitical technologies associated with various iterations of colonial and postcolonial bordering, including partitioning, arbitrary detention, deportation and expulsion. The continuum of coasts and interiors in Gurnah's work undermines the racist-military imaginary that conceived of coasts as places of civilisation, however secondary to European culture, and the interior as the deep, dark heart of the African continent.