Autobiography and the fictionalization of Africa in the twenty-first century: Abdul Razak Gurnah's art in Desertion

This paper maps a category of writing in twenty-first century African literature that rejects the reduction of humanity into simple racialized groups by constructing the stories of the past with its fragmented and complicated strands to form contemporary stories. It illustrates this point by critically examining the craft of Abdulrazak Gurnah in his eighth novel, Desertion as a novel in which the auto/biographical is underlined in order to reveal how (dis)located subjects negotiate their identities and transform themselves within and outside a multi-racial coastal region of East Africa. The paper concludes that rather than attest to a mono-racial African past and present, the novel is successful as an African production because it reconceptualizes migration and identities among others, in twenty-first century Africa.