Imagining Flight in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea

Against the background of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea (2001) this article takes issue with the politics of representation and the common labelling practises of refugees and asylum seekers in media in general and literature in particular. Through a thorough examination of the representation of flight, it is argued that Gurnah’s novel confronts the reader with a highly heterogeneous picture of refugee predicaments which counteracts with ‘easy’ stereotypical conceptions. Thus the novel manages to draw a more complex panorama of refugee stories that stirs the fine line between well known refugee imagery (with themes of loss and expatriation) and representations of modern identity in a multicultural nation-state.