TRADING PLACES IN ABDULRAZAK GURNAH'S PARADISE

Abstract

Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel, Paradise (1994), provides a narrative reversal and revision of Conrad's canonical text, Heart of Darkness (1902), self-consciously returning its colonial gaze from a postcolonial position. The article begins with the contrived narrative optic of reversal in Conrad's novella, and proceeds to examine the similar narrative structure of privileged and obstructed sightlines, and gazes knowingly and unknowingly returned, in Paradise, showing the intertextual relationship between the two works. Paradise narratively re-maps Conrad's colonial route to an African ‘heart of darkness’, but from the east coast of Africa westwards, and both recreates and subverts the ‘topotropography’ of Conrad's work and reconfigures the darkness at its heart. Gurnah's narrative about the last of the great East African trading caravans retraces one of the major trading routes from the coast into the interior around the Great Lakes, which in the nineteenth century had become one of the axes of the slave trade. In his fictional transaction with Heart of Darkness, Gurnah shows in Paradise that the corruption of trade into subjection and enslavement pre-dates European colonisation, and that in East Africa servitude and slavery have always been woven into the social fabric.