LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 22:2 February 2022
ISSN 1930-2940

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Freeing the Self from the Burden of a “Paralyzing Misery”:
A Psychoanalytic Study of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart (2017)

Sabri Mohammad and Noor Abu Madi


Courtesy: amazon.com

Abstract

This paper focuses on analyzing the development of the psychological status of the self under harsh, paralyzing, and hurtful incidents in one’s familial relationship and life. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel, Gravel Heart (2017), will be the main fictional work of this study. It will depict the life of Salim, the main protagonist, who has gone through many hardships that has primarily affected his psychological and mental development as a child, teenager, and an adult. This is due to many uncertainties that occurred between his parents while he was growing up either at home in Zanzibar, or abroad during his studies in England. The psychological status of Salim will be analyzed depending on Sigmund Freud’s lectures on Psychoanalysis. It will be utilized to discuss the mental processes that Salim went through when he was exposed to painful situations in his life.

Keywords: Abdulrazak Gurnah; Gravel Heart; Psychoanalysis; Sigmund Freud; The Unconscious; Symptoms; Trauma.

I. Introduction

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Tanzanian novelist, who has written many novels describing the diasporic lives of the immigrants and the displaced after the period of colonization. He is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. Some of Gurnah’s fiction are Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Paradise (1994), The Last Gift (2011), Gravel Heart (2017), and Afterlives (2020). Although he has left his homeland at an early age, it was a source of inspiration for him to talk about various themes related to alienation and displacement in his fiction. His homeland, culture, and memories have been present in all of his writings. In his essay, “Writing Place" (2004), Gurnah expresses that “I was writing from memory, and how vivid and overwhelming that memory was… That strangeness intensified the sense of a life left behind, of people casually and thoughtlessly abandoned, a place and a way of being lost to me forever, as it seemed at the time. When I began to write, it was that lost life that I wrote about, the lost place and what I remembered of it” (26, 2004).

Gravel Heart (2017), Gurnah’s nineth novel, will be the main novel to be discussed in this paper. This novel revolves around the life of Salim. Gurnah includes many incidents that has affected the psyche of Salim beginning from the familial problems between his parents to the dramatic changes that occurred in Zanzibar. He shows us how all of these hardships in Salim’s life have affected his well-being and his connectedness to this world. The feeling of estrangement and displacement is accompanying him wherever he goes or settles. This is apparent in the protagonist’s life either in Zanzibar or later in England. This novel reflects the human weakness in front of harsh and uncontrollable circumstances. As Gurnah puts it in a conversation about the theme he implies in his novel Gravel Heart: “I would have said that Gravel Heart was also, and in an important way, about power and its capacity to distort the intimate reaches of relationships” (Mohani 4, 2019). Gurnah transforms various historical and real incidents from Zanzibar into his fiction presenting to his reader a representation of the lives of the displaced and the alienated. Gurnah’s systematic way of writing fiction, where he includes the historical alongside with the fictional to introduce a representation of a dilemma, compels well with Stephen Greenblatt’s idea on the production of the aesthetic. Greenblatt, in his essay “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” intensifies on the idea that the “aesthetic is not an alternative realm but a way of intensifying the single realm we all inhabit” (6-7). Therefore, fiction is a vital tool in the representation of reality.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Sabri Mohammad
Master’s Degree in English Literature and Criticism

Noor Abu Madi
Master in English Literature and Criticism
Full-time Lecturer
Language Center, The Hashemite University
Zarqa-Jordan
noorb@hu.edu.jo
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