A Postcolonial Study Of Silence In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British writer and scholar,and the laureate of Nobel Prize in 2021.He is good at depicting the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.The Last Gift is his eighth novel,describing the life of an immigrant family and how their destinies unfold against the background of grand historic event,revealing the predicaments of immigrants in different times and spaces and the ways in which immigrants can exercise their subjectivity to escape their predicaments.From around World War II to the post-millennium period,from Zanzibar to Britain,from family to society,the Abbas family was subjected to malice and oppression from various parties at all times,depriving them of the opportunity to tell their stories,express their emotions and voice their demands,and the only way to have a chance of survival is to remain silent.This thesis,based on postcolonial studies and using “silence” as a starting point,discusses the personal experiences of the four main characters,different social environments they were in,and how these factors had impacted on them.It also explores the connotations behind their silence,the reasons for their silence.Their silence was the result of a combination of multiple factors,which intertwined and merged to create multiple oppressions against them,and in turn led to their silence.In reality,some immigrants who have awakened are not willing to “keep silent” and are looking for ways to break the silence for themselves and their community.Abdulrazak Gurnah is one of them.In The Last Gift,the four main characters also awakened and began to break the silence,but due to their different life experiences,the ways and scope of their breaking the silence varied.Abbas and Maryam,as first-generation immigrants,broke the silence in a simpler way;the scopes of their voicing were limited to the family;Hanna and Jamal,as second-generation immigrants with higher education,broke the silence in a way that involved more complex human activities and extended beyond their families to society.Jamal,in particular,as the incarnation of Gurnah in this novel,was a professional academic,concerned with the plight of immigrants,aware of their feelings.He used the way of researching and writing to “break the silence” on a broader level,exposing the immigrant issue to the world and making the silence of immigrants heard by the world.