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3.1 Pre-Colonial and Colonial History, Identity Crisis and Yusuf’s Arrested Development in Paradise

“History has widely been viewed as being an essential ingredient in the formation of identity” (Wertsch 5). It is exactly the case for Gurnah. In his creation, historical writing is not only artistic, political and social issues, but also an important ingredient in the formation of identity, although the formation in the colonial context might not always be a successful one. In colonial context, historical writing itself is a complex issue, because it is concerned with historical discourse of power. In Paradise, Gurnah’s concern about the impact of history written by colonizers on younger generation of Africa is echoed in a character, Hussein’s words: 

And these young people will lose even more. One day they’ll [Europeans] make them spit on all that we know, and will make them recite their laws and their story of the world as if it were the holy word. When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves. (P 87) 

What Gurnah implies in the above statement are at least two points: (1) Man’s identity is a “product of shaping discursive and ideological forces” (Griffiths 314), or in other words, man’s identity is shaped in a “national-historical” framework; (2) the colonized Africans have fully realized the importance of power in writing history and they try to create “their own history all the time and not just as objects for foreign explorers” (Bardolph 80). The conflict between the different political discourse in colonial context and the paradox of being between what the colonizer what to shape and the colonized what to be form a unique state of development suspension in colonial context which influence decisively the formation of youth in colonial Africa. The conflict and paradox are exactly what Gurnah wants to make a response in Paradise. Lost as he is in the eternity of a search for who he was, Yusuf speaks to the predicament and frustration of many colonial and postcolonial Bildungsroman protagonists, who are perhaps destined never to stop searching who they are and where they belong. 

Conclusion

Paradise, Memory of Departure and Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah are the representative works of African Antibildungsroman. This thesis analyzes the three novels in a comparative and genealogical way to explore how the state of development suspension is formed and in what way the initiation of African youth is influenced in colonial and post-colonial context. 

On the one hand, the three novels depict the disruption of childhood and the failed journey of growth, revealing the limited opportunities for African teenagers to achieve self-realization and reconcile with the society in colonial and post-colonial context. On the other hand, the historical narrative in the three novels highlights the relationship between personal “degeneration” and national crisis by combining the “national-historical time” with “personal-autobiographical time” in colonial and postcolonial context. On the border between pre-colonial state and colonialism or at the transition point from independence to domestic revolution, the interaction between the dramatically transformed world and the African teenagers is more of a vicious circle than growing together.&nbs本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。