'A sideshow to the great tragedies in Europe’: colonialism and Holocaust in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

Abstract

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2023 novel Afterlives traces a direct line between the history of German colonialism in East Africa and the Holocaust. The act of drawing such connections has been subject to fierce debate in Germany in the Historikerstreit 2.0. Gurnah’s work calls attention to the Afro-German victims of the Holocaust. This essay examines his method of refractive storytelling, arguing that it provides an effective counter to the linear and hierarchical structures of colonial ideology that led to genocide in both the African and German contexts. Fiction here becomes an important means of recuperating the stories elided by a history of colonialism.