Violence and Trauma in Colonial East Africa: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives as a Case Study

Abstract

Colonialism has always been discussed in the field of literature as a paramount historical set of events and cultural facts. AbdulrazakGurnah'sAfterlives, a recently published work of fiction, provides a story of colonialism that has been neglected in Anglo-postcolonial studies, which is the German colonization of East Africa. It represents the different strategies of colonialism in controlling Africans; it also uncovers the different effects of colonialism on them physically and mentally, in addition to the different social problems among African subjects themselves. For that reason, this dissertation aims to investigate the different kinds of violence in the novel, which vary between colonial and social. It also attempts to foreground the multiple traumas brought about by violence in the context of the novel. This study adopts postcolonial and psychoanalytic literary theories and related concepts in order to explore how Gurnah represents the manifestations and repercussions of colonialism in Tanzania. This research is divided into three main chapters: the first provides a historical, theoretical, and conceptual framework; the second discusses the theme of violence in the novel; while the third examines the theme of trauma in it. The dissertation aims to demonstrate how Gurnah’sAfterlives, as a literary work, reveals the complex and multi-dimensional experience of violence and trauma in colonial East Africa, hoping to shed light on an overlooked but significant chapter in the history of colonialism.