Blindness in (post)colonial settings: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s « Desertion » (2005)

Introduction

In 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” (Svenska Akademien, 2021). Some of his novels are partly inspired by his own life, as he fled Zanzibar shortly after the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 ((During the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) overthrew the mainly Arab government of the Sultan of Zanzibar Jamshid bin Abdullah, which led to the massacre of up to 20,000 Arab and Indian civilians and the exodus of about 10,000 people.)) and settled in England as a refugee. Desertion (2005) is his seventh novel and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Similarly to his previous novels like Pilgrim’s Way (1988), Paradise (1994), Admiring Silence (1996) or By the Sea (2001), it deals with issues of displacement, exile and belonging, but places two romances at the heart of the story.

Desertion is set in Zanzibar ((Zanzibar is an archipelago in the Indian Ocean that was a British Protectorate from 1890 to 1963, when it became independent from the United Kingdom as a constitutional monarchy. In 1964, it united with Tanganyika, the mainland territory, to form Tanzania. Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous region within Tanzania. This article will follow Abdulrazak Gurnah’s appellation and the novel’s denomination of the territory and will use the term “Zanzibar” to refer to colonial Zanzibar and postcolonial Tanzania.)), in coastal East Africa, and spans two timelines. In the late 19^th century, while Zanzibar is still a British protectorate, Martin Pearce, a British writer and traveller, collapses in front of a mosque after being stranded in the desert. Hassanali, a local shopkeeper, finds him as he is about to make the call to prayer and brings him to his home. His wife Malika and his sister Rehana are reluctant to welcome him, but Pearce soon recovers and goes to stay with Frederick Turner, a British colonial officer. Some time afterwards Pearce and Rehana fall in love and move in together in Mombasa, in Kenya. However, Pearce eventually leaves her and returns to Britain. A second storyline begins in the mid-20^th century and follows the lives of two brothers, Amin and Rashid, before and after the independence (1963) and the Zanzibar Revolution (1964). Amin falls in love with Jamila, a divorcee who happens to be Rehana and Pearce’s granddaughter, but societal constraints and shame around her white European ancestry bring their relationship to an end. As time goes by, Amin becomes blind, just like his mother, Mwana, who had been diagnosed with glaucoma. Rashid moves to England for his studies and never returns home due to the post-independence political situation. He reveals himself to be the narrator of both storylines and reflects on Amin and Jamila’s doomed love. In hindsight, his writing becomes an attempt to bridge past and present and captures how the political and the personal are enmeshed.

In Desertion, colonialism appears as a literal and metaphorical disease that weakens the material body and creates disabling conditions that deepen physical and cultural vulnerabilities throughout generations. In addition to being an ailment, the blindness that affects Mwana and Amin serves as an allegory of pre- and post-independence Zanzibar, where desperation becomes such that vision, instead of blindness, turns into a curse. Not only is blindness used as a narrative device, but it also has a metanarrative function: the narrator and the author embrace blindness within the narration in order to subvert colonial settler writing. 

1. The vulnerability of the material body under colonialism

From the beginning of the novel, colonialism is presented as a disease. When Martin Pearce first appears, his identity is unknown but what is stressed about him is the weakness of his body and the threat of potential illness. Pearce is reduced to a “bundle groaning at his [Hassanali’s] feet”, a “moaning body” (7), and in the following pages he is often referred to as “the sick man” (7). Rehana reprimands Hassanali for bringing Pearce into their home because were he ill, he could contaminate them: “A sick man turns up from who knows where, with who knows what disease, and you bring him straight to our house so we can all die of what he is dying of? […] Have you touched him?” (12). Physical distance thus becomes essential to protect oneself from diseases. In addition, Pearce is believed to be ill not only because his body is covered in bruises and cuts, but above all because he is a “sick stranger” (9). His strangeness stems, firstly, from the fact that Hassanali struggles to understand “what kind of man went wandering alone in the wilderness” (9) and, secondly, from an indication of otherness encapsulated by Pearce’s whiteness. The colour of his skin, described as “ashen-complexioned” (6), quickly becomes a manifestation of difference as other characters call him “mzungu” (16), a Bantu word which originally meant “wanderer” and was applied to the first European explorers, and which, in Swahili, refers to a foreigner and a white man. Through his whiteness, Pearce personifies British colonial presence in Zanzibar. However, such descriptions bring about a reversal of the colonial gaze: whereas whiteness usually has normative power within the Empire, here, a white body poses a threat of contagion (Pujolràs-Noguer, 2018, 5). Pearce’s body and his physical condition therefore embody the metaphorical disease of colonialism.

Moreover, colonialism creates an environment in which losing control over one’s body is exacerbated by a lack of infrastructures of care. Mwana and Amin both lose their eyesight, and their blindness underlines the practical and psychological difficulties of living with a disability in a colonial and postcolonial country. In “Disability and the Postcolonial Novel”, postcolonial and disability scholar Clare Barker defines disability as “diverse forms of bodily variation: physical and sensory impairments, cognitive and learning differences, mental illness, chronic conditions, and differences in appearance (birthmarks, for example) that may not limit a person’s functions but subject them to stigma and discrimination from others” (2016, 101-102). In the novel, blindness is depicted as an impairment that is highly medicalised. When Rashid and Amin’s mother, Mwana, learns that she will go blind, descriptions abound with medical terms. These include “glaucoma”, “hypertension”, “prognosis”, “specialist”, “medication regime” (154), whose technical tone contrasts with the intensity of Mwana’s emotional response. Moreover, as literary critic Ato Quayson points out in “Aesthetic Nervousness”, “every/body is subject to chance and contingent events. The recognition of this radical contingency produces features of a primal scene of extreme anxiety whose roots lie in barely acknowledged vertiginous fears of loss of control over the body itself” (2013, 203). This explains Mwana’s emotional reaction – she is described as “distraught”, “irritable”, “weeping” (154) – and her fear of losing control over her “useless body” (154) even seeps into the narration, which qualifies her prognosis as “horrific” (154).

Furthermore, her and Amin’s blindness highlights what Clare Barker names “inaccessible environments” (2016, 101) and what Ato Quayson identifies as “corporeal difference” as “part of a structure of power” (2013, 203): a lack of effective infrastructures of care. The latter becomes evident when Rashid learns from his father that following the Zanzibar Revolution, “many things have changed. Ma has not been able to get medicine for her eyes and her sight is troubling her” (221): even in a postcolonial setting, the consequences of colonialism magnify the vulnerability of the material body.

2. “In the country of the blind”: blindness plaguing the body politic

In Desertion, blindness is a metaphorical device that highlights national anxiety and disorder. The characters’ blindness corresponds to what Mitchell and Snyder, in “Narrative Prosthesis”, call “the materiality of metaphor”: when “disability also serves as a metaphorical signifier of social and individual collapse” (2013, 222). Mwana’s blindness thus seemingly represents colonialism infecting both the material body and the body politic, while Amin’s blindness, being hereditary, underlines the continuity of national disorder beyond decolonisation. Indeed, blindness acts as an allegory of the disillusion following independence. This is made evident when Mwana describes the country itself as blind: “When Ba is at home, he often puts the radio on, and then she spars with the announcers, challenging their views and catching them out on the lies. In the country of the blind, who needs eyes, she tells the announcers” (253). Here, the metaphor of blindness is twofold: it applies to a postcolonial society suffering a political breakdown and to the characters, whose disability is a “fleshly example of the body’s unruly resistance to the cultural desire to ‘enforce normalcy’” (Mitchell and Snyder, 2013, 223) – normalcy here being understood as compliance to the new regime.

The expression “in the country of the blind” in the novel exemplifies the use of blindness as a national allegory. The phrase seems to come from the adage “in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”, popularised by Erasmus and then by H.G. Wells’ short story “The Country of the Blind” (1904). The adage originally means that someone with a limited advantage will still dominate among people with fewer abilities. In H.G. Wells’ short story, the expression is subverted: when Núñez, the protagonist, encounters a community of blind people, he believes that his sight will enable him to become their king; however, his sight isolates him, and after a failed attempt at conquering them, he abandons his beloved and the country of the blind. Thus, in the short story, vision is not an empowering tool, and Desertion seems to follow that interpretation.

The phrase appears twice in the novel: firstly, when Amin tells his brother that his blindness will almost be a blessing “in the country of the blind” (231) and, secondly, when Mwana criticises journalists on the radio. In both instances, the nominalised adjective “blind” refers to a category of people that is opposed either to the “one-eyed” or to the fully sighted. At the national level, “the blind” are the new government after the Zanzibar Revolution: Mwana and Amin imply that independence has not born fruit, and that it is perhaps better to be ignorant than enlightened. Additionnally, Desertion contains many references to “the blind” and “the one-eyed” that apply at the family level and suggest that “the blind” are also those who live in the country, not only those who have authority over it. For example, Amin remembers when their mother was appalled by Rashid’s marriage with Grace, an English woman, and asked Amin to help her send him a letter of complaints: “Then she dictated ugly words and threats which I pretended to write down. The blind talking to the one-eyed” (252-253). Here, “the blind” and “the one-eyed” are to be understood literally and metaphorically, since Mwana’s cultural prejudices impel her to disregard her son’s happiness. These two examples underline that, while cultural and political blindness are implicitly criticised, Amin’s metaphorical sight remains a burden, since his ability to see beyond cultural bias alienates him from his mother.

3. Embracing blindness as a narrative device

In Desertion, blindness not only has literal and metaphorical functions, but it also plays a role in storytelling. Because it is present in the novel as a medical condition, an allegory and a narrative device, blindness escapes essentialisation. In their analysis of literary depictions of disability, Mitchell and Snyder find that often, disabled characters “are indentured to their biological programming in the most essentializing manner. Their disabilities surface to explain everything or nothing with respect to their portraits as embodied beings” (2013, 225) However, in Desertion, the characters’ blindness is neither at the centre nor at the margins of the story. Mwana’s and Amin’s blindness is rarely mentioned and it is implied that it has become part of their day-to-day life: for instance, after Mwana is given her diagnostic, “life became pleasingly chaotic again if rather more subdued” (154). Blindness is instead woven into the narration through allusions to Mwana’s medicine, to “the blind” and “the one-eyed”, and through repetitions (“in the country of the blind”). Just as it forms part of Mwana’s and Amin’s lives, the presence of blindness in the narration redefines normalcy at the personal and interpersonal levels and can be interpreted as a device through which social, cultural and political insights emerge.

Furthermore, Rashid could represent the sighted originating from the country of the blind: geographical distance, as well as his status as the narrator of the story, enable him to gain sight of what he was previously blind to – British imperialism, his brother’s relationship with Jamila and the way past and present are entangled. His life in England opens his eyes to power relations between Britain and its (former) colonies, and their impact on knowledge production: “So I had to learn about that, and about imperialism and how deeply the narratives of our inferiority and the aptness of European overlordship had bedded down in what passed for knowledge of the world” (215). Migration also enables him to gain perspective and conduct genealogical research: as professor Folasade Hunsu notes in “Autobiography and the Fictionalization of Africa in the Twenty-First Century: Abdul Razak Gurnah’s Art in Desertion”, “until his travel to Britain, Rashid was like the others, one-eyed or blind. Vision is enabled by his location outside Zanzibar and dislocation becomes an advantage not a disadvantage” (2014, 86). It is in England that he is able to trace the parallel genealogies of, on the one side, Jamila, and on the other, Martin Pearce’s daughter that he had with a white English woman, Barbara Turner; and to understand how colonialism allowed for the relationship between Rehana and Pearce to be the origin of Jamila’s corrupted ancestry. As a character and a narrator, Rashid enjoys the privilege of critical vision on the impact of colonialism on personal histories; but as a biographer, he is confronted with a narrative form of blindness, namely his partial knowledge of Pearce and Rehana’s love story.

Although Rashid has marginal knowledge of the past, Abdulrazak Gurnah embraces this narrative blindness and turns it into a metanarrative act of defiance against colonial love stories. In the chapter titled “An Interruption”, the reader discovers that the story is told by an intradiegetic narrator: Rashid. He acknowledges his subjectivity – “There is, as you can see, an I in this story” (120) – and recognises the limits of his knowledge – “I mean that even with very incomplete knowledge, we can imagine what might have been, and how it might have come about and proceeded, but I find that in the case of Martin and Rehana I cannot settle on a sequence of events that seems likeliest” (110). Faced with his ignorance as to why Rehana and Pearce’s relationship ended, Rashid embraces this blindness and reflects on his writing process. In an interview with Risha Jones, Gurnah explains that Desertion offers a different perspective on the “romanticised and eroticised” trope in settler writing of the European man meeting a native woman where the violence of the relationship and the hardships it brings are silenced (Jones, 2005, 38). Rashid becomes Abdulrazak Gurnah’s double, insofar as he imagines what could have happened between Rehana and Pearce until he is compelled to abandon his narration, lest his ignorance of the facts leads him to the same failings Desertion means to avoid. Therefore, blindness serves as a metanarrative device that both brings to light the difficulty of piecing together lost histories and subverts the glamorisation proper to colonial writing.

Commented excerpt

In this passage from the final part of the novel, Rashid learns that his brother Amin is suffering from the same infection as their mother and will soon become blind. This epistolary exchange underlines the heredity of blindness as a physical and metaphorical disability.

In this excerpt, blindness is portrayed both as a physical impairment and a socially created disability. The polyptoton of the word “blindness” (“blind”, “blinded”, “the blind”), accentuated by the present continuous in “was beginning to go”, indicates that the infection will inevitably worsen. The focus is drawn onto the physical aspect of blindness through the repetition of “infection” and words reminiscent of the medical sphere (“medicine”, “hospital”, “cure”, “doctor”). Amin’s blindness is also shaped by a “disabling environment” as defined by Clare Barker: it is implied that the lack of competent infrastructures of care has condemned Amin to complete blindness (“he said it was too late, the infection could not be cut out any more”).

This leads to an opposition between “here”, England, which offers solutions to Amin’s blindness, and “there”, Zanzibar, where the heredity of the infection is inevitable. The parallelism “there was no medicine or hospital there to cure him as there hadn’t been to cure her” emphasises that Amin’s worsening condition is not due to the absence of a cure but to the absence of appropriate infrastructures of care and underscores the continuity between colonial and postcolonial times. Yet, the extract points to other forms of collective care within the family (“he could not leave Ba on his own”) that had also been alluded to earlier in the novel, when Mwana’s family had consoled her about her diagnosis: “They sat with her and comforted her, crying themselves because they too had no doubt that she would go blind” (154). 

The geographical distance between the two brothers is also a psychological one: Amin seems resigned and downplays the gravity Rashid attributes to the situation (“old men’s grumbles about declining bodies”). This discrepancy is heightened by the layered narration. Amin’s remarks are first expressed through Rashid’s voice, who is the main focaliser of the chapter. The shift to italics introduces Amin’s point of view and brings to light the contradictory positions of the two brothers. Rashid’s active stance is conveyed by the imperative mode (“come”) and the use of the modal auxiliary verb “will” to form the future tense (“I’ll get a loan”, “we’ll get you seen”). On the contrary, Amin focuses on the fatality of the past and the present (“not any more”, “over these last few years”). The italics also bring forth Amin’s social commentary on “the country of the blind”: he implicitly criticises the current political situation and deplores even his partial vision, as his social and political clarity isolates him. Their mother Mwana believed that her blindness was a “curse” (154) and this extract portrays its culmination as a hereditary physical impairment worsened by colonialism, and as a metaphorical blindness to social and political despair plaguing the body politic. No solution is offered for literal and metaphorical blindness, that is to say for the infection pervading the material body and the body politic: as the blind spots in the narration suggest, “postcolonial histories are still unfolding, conflicts are still unresolved” (Barker, 2016, 113).

Bibliography

BARKER, Clare. 2016. “Disability and the Postcolonial Novel”, in Ato Quayson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel. Cambridge University Press, pp.99-115.

GURNAH, Abdulrazak. 2005. Desertion. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

HUNSU, Folasade. 2014. “Autobiography and the Fictionalization of Africa in the Twenty-First Century: Abdul Razak Gurnah’s Art in Desertion”, Brno Studies in English, volume 40, n°2, pp.77-89.

JONES, Nisha. 2005. “Abdulrazak Gurnah in Conversation”, Wasafiri, volume 20, n°46, pp.37-42.

MITCHELL, David and SNYDER, Sharon. 2013. “Narrative Prosthesis”, in Lennard J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader. Routledge, pp.222-35.

PUJOLRÀS-NOGUER, Esther. 2018. “Desiring/Desired Bodies: Miscegenation and Romance in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, volume 59, n°5, pp.596-608.

QUAYSON, Ato. 2013. “Aesthetic Nervousness”, in Lennard J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader. Routledge, pp.202-13.

Svenska Akademien. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. 7 October 2021, https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/press-literatureprize2021.pdf.

WELLS, Herbert George. 1904 (2015) The Country of the Blind. Xist Publishing.

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Inès Roche, Blindness in (post)colonial settings: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion (2005), La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), décembre 2025. Consulté le 12/12/2025. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/litterature-postcoloniale/blindness-in-post-colonial-settings-abdulrazak-gurnah-s-desertion-2005