A Borderless Solitude: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea

In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s quietly stunning novel, By the Sea, the act of telling one’s story becomes both confession and resistance, a way to reclaim dignity in the face of dislocation. First published in 2001, and more widely rediscovered following Gurnah’s 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, the novel remains a vital meditation on exile, identity, and the subtle violences of borders; those drawn on maps, and those drawn in hearts.

Set between Zanzibar and a gray English seaside town, By the Sea centers on Saleh Omar, a retired merchant who arrives in the United Kingdom as an asylum seeker, carrying nothing but a false identity and a carved incense box of oud, the scented relic of another life. In the immigration hall, he remains mute, his silence both protection and refusal. But Gurnah, ever the patient storyteller, slowly coaxes out the reasons behind this silence, weaving a narrative that glides between memory and present-day reckoning.

Omar is not alone in the novel’s architecture. Soon, he is joined by Latif Mahmud, a younger academic also from Zanzibar and exiled in the UK. Their lives are braided by a family feud, colonial legacy, betrayal, and longing. But this is not a novel of revenge or even reconciliation. It is about the fog that descends over personal history when forced to flee one’s home, and the painful clarity that emerges when those histories are finally laid bare.

Gurnah’s prose is elegant and undramatic, charged with a quiet lyricism that draws the reader in gently but unrelentingly. He does not shout; he murmurs, allowing emotion to build slowly in the spaces between what is said and unsaid. His sentences often meander; long, meditative streams that feel as if they have washed up with the tide. It is a stylistic choice that reflects his characters’ inner landscapes: haunted by memory, displaced from time, caught between longing and resignation.

What sets By the Sea apart from other novels of migration is Gurnah’s refusal to sentimentalise exile. Saleh Omar is not heroic, nor is he entirely sympathetic. He has made mistakes, very costly ones. He has also suffered injustice. But Gurnah gives us no neat moral binaries. Instead, he asks us to sit with the complexity of displacement, to understand that the exiled are not only victims of bureaucracies or war, but often complicit in their own ruin, burdened with choices made under duress and decisions that cannot be undone.

The novel is suffused with a postcolonial melancholia that lingers like incense smoke. Zanzibar, the characters’ shared homeland, is depicted not as a paradise lost but as a site of layered pain: once colonized by the British, then violently revolutionized, then abandoned by history. Yet, in exile, Zanzibar remains vividly alive in language, food, gesture, scent. It is, as Latif says, “a place inside me,” an echo that refuses to fade.

Indeed, memory is the novel’s true terrain. Gurnah unspools past and present not in linear fashion but in recursive spirals. Saleh Omar recalls his life not chronologically, but in fragments; flickers of joy and betrayal, moments of intimacy and rupture. Through these recollections, we begin to understand how history, both personal and national, collapses into the psyche of the displaced.

The tension between Saleh and Latif offers one of the novel’s most poignant threads. Both men are wounded by the same conflict, yet their ways of coping differ starkly. Latif, articulate and bitter, has found refuge in literature and distance. Saleh, older and more weary, seeks solace in the act of retelling. Their dialogues, sparse but loaded, offer insight into intergenerational trauma, and the uneasy fraternity that sometimes binds immigrants from the same place, but who have taken vastly different routes to survive.

It’s worth noting that By the Sea is also a deeply political novel; quietly so. Through Omar’s Kafkaesque experience with immigration authorities, Gurnah exposes the indignities faced by asylum seekers in the West: the skepticism, the dehumanizing paperwork, the bureaucratic suspicion that often replaces compassion. Yet he never writes polemic. Instead, the critique emerges organically, through the weary patience of a man who has nothing left but his memories and a suitcase of incense.

In this way, the novel gestures toward the ethical responsibility of listening. To read By the Sea is to be implicated, not just as a reader, but as a citizen of a world in which borders are increasingly weaponized and refugee crises continue to escalate. Gurnah does not offer solutions; he offers stories. And in doing so, he reminds us that storytelling is itself a form of justice.

There are moments of tenderness in the book that astonish with their emotional clarity: the remembered embrace of a child, the scent of cloves in a sunlit garden, the casual cruelty of colonial laws, the heaviness of a forged document. Gurnah’s great gift lies in his ability to make such details shimmer, to suggest that exile is not just the loss of home, but the slow erasure of such sensory anchors.

By the Sea also challenges our understanding of identity. In Saleh Omar’s impersonation of another man, a desperate act meant to survive the immigration system, Gurnah explores the fluidity of selfhood under pressure. Is identity a passport, a name, a set of memories, a shared language? Or is it, as Gurnah implies, something more fragile: the story we tell about ourselves, reshaped by who listens and who believes?

This novel does not rush toward resolution. Even by its final pages, the past remains open-ended, fraught with ambiguity. Saleh and Latif do not embrace, nor do they fully forgive. But there is an act of recognition, a faint thawing, a shared understanding that even bitterness can be borne if one knows its shape.

In an age saturated with loud narratives of displacement, where the refugee is often reduced to a statistic or a symbol, Gurnah gives us something infinitely more humane: a quiet portrait of two men carrying the weight of their histories with dignity, shame, and occasional grace. He gives us silence, and then teaches us to listen.