By the Sea

Two Men, One Secret

Saleh Omar arrives at a British airport carrying a mahogany box containing a piece of oud wood—fragrant, ancient, untranslatable by any customs category the system has available. He claims not to speak English. He is processed through the machinery of the asylum system: the initial interview, the temporary accommodation, the waiting. Gurnah renders this process with a precision that is accurate rather than sentimental—the welfare officials are not cruel, they are bureaucrats doing a bureaucratic job, and their job requires Saleh to be transparent, to explain himself, to produce the documentation that allows the system to place him in a category it already has a response to.

Saleh’s silence is deliberate. He has learned English—we understand this gradually—but he does not deploy it yet, because the moment he speaks English he becomes available to the system in a way he is not ready to be. Latif Mahmud, a Zanzibari exile who has lived in England for years, is brought in to interpret. Both men are from Zanzibar. Both are in England as a result of forces neither fully controlled. What Latif does not initially know—though the reader begins to suspect it—is that he and Saleh are connected through a specific and painful history: a dispute, a debt, a moment of betrayal in the Zanzibar of decades before, which left one family damaged in ways the other family caused.

Gurnah structures the revelation with care, letting the reader understand before the characters do that the shared history exists, then letting each man circle toward acknowledging it at his own pace. The two voices are distinct. Saleh’s sections are lyrical and digressive, rooted in sensory memory—the smell of the sea in Zanzibar, the light, the texture of specific rooms. Latif’s sections are more analytical, more conscious of the ironies of his position as a long-term exile asked to mediate between a new arrival and the country that has absorbed him. Together they construct the exile’s double consciousness: the world carried inside and the world actually stood in, with a gap between them that never quite closes.

Zanzibar, Revolution, and the Diaspora

The 1964 Zanzibar Revolution is the historical event that underlies everything in By the Sea. The revolution ended the Zanzibar Sultanate, overthrew the Arab-African ruling class, and reorganized Zanzibari society with considerable violence, stripping established families of property and position and creating an exile community scattered across the world. Gurnah himself left Zanzibar for England four years after the revolution.

The specific event that connects Saleh and Latif—a piece of furniture, a debt called in at a moment of maximum vulnerability, a family destroyed by the combination of revolutionary upheaval and personal betrayal—is Gurnah’s way of showing how large historical forces enter and destroy particular lives. The revolution did not merely change who governed the island; it created the conditions in which ordinary people did things to each other that peace would not have required, and the memory of those things traveled with them into exile and has never stopped traveling.

The England that receives Saleh is rendered with a deliberate flatness that contrasts with the richness of the Zanzibar sections—and this contrast is intentional. England is the asylum system, the welfare accommodation, the bureaucratic categorization. It is not a place that asks what the arrivals have brought with them or who they were before they arrived. The oud wood sits in its box, fragrant and patient, waiting for someone to understand what it is.

Reading Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah received the Nobel Prize in 2021, and By the Sea is one of the novels that best demonstrates why. It is formally inventive—the two-voice structure, the gradual revelation, the way the same events look different from inside different lives—and it addresses a subject, the asylum experience, that almost no serious literary novelist had approached with this kind of precision and patience.

By the Sea works well as a first Gurnah for readers who want an immediately contemporary entry point: the asylum setting is recognizable, the structural hook is clear, and the Zanzibar backstory is revealed progressively rather than assumed. Readers who want to go deeper into Gurnah’s historical world should follow it with Paradise, which immerses them fully in the East African world that underlies both novels. His 2020 novel Afterlives, which follows several characters through German colonial East Africa and its aftermath, is also essential.

Gurnah’s prose style is quiet, precise, and patient—he does not announce meaning, he accumulates it—and By the Sea is a good demonstration of what that approach can achieve. The novel’s final pages, in which the shared history is finally acknowledged between the two men, carry a weight that is entirely the product of everything that has come before: two men, one secret, and the long journey that brought them to the same English room.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A quiet and formally inventive novel about exile, memory, and the bureaucratic machinery of asylum—Gurnah’s most contemporary subject treated with his characteristic patience and precision, and essential reading after Paradise.