POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATION, WESTERNISATION AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’S THE LAST GIFT

Abstract

In recent times, migration has become a postcolonial leitmotif due to the unsettling and unnerving sociopolitical and economic snares ravaging African postcolonies. On a daily basis, Africans are forced to flee in droves from their homelands to the West in search of safety and security. On getting to the West, African immigrants are often disappointed and disillusioned by the realities they encounter. From hardships, to racial hostilities, cultural displacement, identity rifts, alienation, estrangement, and so on, the African immigrant is thrust into a predominantly white space that threatens to shrink and silence them. Hence, this essay, by deploying the postcolonial theoretical framework, examines postcolonial migration, Westernisation, and identity formation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift. From critical textual analysis, the essay reveals that migrancy has been engrained in the consciousness of the African body politic as an escape route to the West in hope of better living conditions. Through the tragic life and symbolic secrecy of Abbas, postcolonial migration is revealed to dislocate and shroud indigenous identities and true selves. African immigrants are not only physical but psychological refugees straddling two cultures—the root culture and the foreign culture. Consequently, they become subjects of Westernisation, often as a survivalist strategy, which, in the long run, engenders the corrosion of their indigeneity and distortion of their sense of self. The essay concludes that Africans, in a hegemonic world, must strive towards cultural assertion. One such way is that African immigrants should (re)articulate their cultural heritage especially to the next generation who must seek creative means to store, preserve, and broadcast these narratives of truth (in books, films, pictures, documentaries, researches, songs, et cetera,) for the sake of posterity, against the machinery of epistemic violence.