Memory And Cultural Identity In Gurnah’s By The Sea

Abdulrazak Gurnah,the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature,was born in Zanzibar,Tanzania.Upon the transition of Zanzibar from British colonial rule to being merged with Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanzania,Gurnah was forced to leave his hometown and go to Britain to seek a stable life.Gurnah delves deeply into exploring memory,leveraging his personal experiences of displacement to create stories about African diasporas who are caught between different cultural backgrounds.An exemplary illustration of this is Gurnah’s work,By the Sea,whose narrative depicts the diasporic lives of its protagonists,reflecting not only Gurnah’s own personal experiences but also embodying the plight of African refugees.By the Sea goes deeply into the challenges confronted by refugees of mixed Arab-Islamic,African,and Western cultural backgrounds as they endeavor to establish a sense of cultural identity.According to the database search,the current academic researches on Gurnah mainly focus on themes such as refugee crises and spatial displacement,while limited attention has been given to the aspect of memory,indicating a research space for further exploration and systematic criticism.However,memory is a core element of Gurnah’s creations.Gurnah has once acknowledged that he made an effort to “retrieve something worth reporting from memory and imagination” to break free from the identity crisis constructed by “a new,simpler history”.Memory,in this sense,serves as the driving force for him to assist African refugees in their search for cultural identity.Hence,this thesis aims to investigate the intricate interplay between memory and cultural identity crisis within the context of African diasporas,with Gurnah’s novel By the Sea as the primary text.The thesis draws upon Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann’s cultural memory theory as the main entry point for constructing cultural identity,combined with traumatic memory theory to explore the unique process of alienating and awakening cultural identity among African refugees.By conducting an in-depth analysis of memory content,this thesis endeavors to explore how African refugees reshape their memories through the selection,presentation,and representation of their past experiences,and how these processes ultimately contribute to the reconstruction of cultural identity.The thesis is composed of five chapters,separated into three parts: introduction,body part,and conclusion.The first part is the introduction,chapter one.Firstly,it briefly introduces Abdulrazak Gurnah and his work By the Sea,and then it reviews the research status and study trend of Gurnah’s work By the Sea both domestically and internationally.Next,it explains this thesis’ s main theoretical basis.Finally,it discusses the research significance and innovation points of this thesis.The second part is the body part of the thesis,a total of three chapters.Chapter two,from the perspective of individual memory in the novel,explores the origins of the cultural identity crisis,analyzing the influences of the family and educational environment during their early stages of individual growth on cultural identity,specifically manifested in the alienation of the African cultural identity and the inclination of European cultural identity.Saleh’s individual memory then promotes the awakening of social memory,specifically the shared traumatic memory about colonization and the coup in Zanzibar.Therefore,chapter three,from the perspective of social memory in the novel,examines the distortion of memory caused by a series of harmful events triggered by colonization and the coup and deeply analyzes the fundamental threat of social pain to the construction of African cultural identity.Further,social memory is sublimated into cultural memory under the influence of the medium,and thus chapter four,from the perspective of cultural memory in the novel,traces the protagonists’ journey from passive forgetting to active recall after going into exile in England,exploring how mediated memory leads them down a path of cultural root-seeking.The final part is the conclusion,chapter five,which summarizes the core ideas of this thesis.Firstly,it summarizes the first four chapters,stating how the macro map of memory and cultural identity is constructed through the interconnection of individual,social,and cultural memory in By the Sea.Additionally,the subsequent segment of the concluding chapter highlights the significance of exploring memory in explicating the cultural identity crisis confronted by African refugees: The current research on memory strongly promotes the inheritance of culture,activation of group consciousness,and construction of cultural identity in the face of historical and temporal disjuncture and continuity;furthermore,it provides a way for reflection on issues of the modern refugee crisis,thus emphasizing the significance and responsibility of literary criticism.