The global refugee: Oceanic border thinking in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea

Abstract

This article attends to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea as a critique of the normative understanding of the border as having a singular, prohibitive function for the refugee, and reads it as a call to register the border as a moving and permeable formation. What I call oceanic border thinking conveys Gurnah’s insight into the imbrication of littoral and land zones, and the effect of the proliferation of biopolitical technologies associated with various iterations of colonial and postcolonial bordering, including partitioning, arbitrary detention, deportation, and expulsion. The border’s liquidity — the elemental property of water — captures the valence of By the Sea’s oceanic border imaginary, which, in turn, challenges overdetermined readings of the border as attached primarily to land, and the reduction of the refugee to a presentist conception of race or nationality. The liquidity of borders, here, is not meant to suggest a state of extremity, crisis, or morbidity of Indian Ocean polities; rather, it suggests an approach to Gurnah’s oceanic writing as a process of world-making across waters in tandem with the biopolitical technologies that reoriented lives in shifting geopolitical territories. Oceanic border thinking enables one’s sense of the world not only in water but onwards into the land, whether in Africa, England, or continental Europe. Transferrable and dissident, this method helps with the exploration of how cartographic, literary, and imaginative conceptions of the border, as observed from water, bear the potential to trouble easy categorizations of borders and the histories associated with them.