Negation and Silenced Love: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift

Abstract

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift revolves around delicate existential issues migrants face living abroad. This study highlights the expression of love particularly the paradox of its manifestation in a foreign land. The word ‘silence’ appears eighty-two times and is integral to the silencing of love. Abbas has the rare opportunity to attend school and relish the potential opportunities which a Western education portends but he is restricted by a forced early marriage to a girl he doesn’t know. Abbas’ life comes spiraling after this. Ironically, he becomes silent after getting married to the girl he truly loves and bottles up his past, particularly about running away from a previous marriage, which he felt was a trap till his dying days. Through Leslie Jeffries ‘Negating’ as a textual conceptual function tool, this study presents the paradox of love and its silencing in Gurnah’s text as ‘negating has the effect of producing mental images of both the negated and the positive proposition’.