Abdulrazak Gurnah's postcolonial counter narratives show a wider world,
whose multiple identities and overlapping landscapes reveal the hybrid
subjects and complex geographies of globalisation. In his novels Gurnah
represents the diasporic conditions of modernity, exploring the issues of
belonging and unbelonging and the anxiety of alienation and loss. By the
Sea (2001) portrays migrant characters revealing both rootlessness and
nostalgia for their homeland, Zanzibar, and effectively investigates the
motifs of displacement and memory. It is a paradigmatic novel dealing
with the contemporary postcolonial condition, representing transnational
movements as well as the double consciousness of diasporic subjects.
Ethnic solidarity as well as storytelling provide the means to overcome
loneliness and fear.