Desertion

The Colonial Encounter

In 1899, a British officer named Martin Pearce collapses in the street in a town on the Zanzibar coast, delirious with fever. He is found and brought inside by Hassanali, an Indian merchant, and nursed back to health over several weeks. Hassanali’s household includes his sister Rehana, who is beautiful and educated and whose life has been constrained in the particular ways that a young Indian Muslim woman’s life was constrained at the end of the nineteenth century on the East African coast. Pearce falls in love with her. She falls in love with him. The circumstances that make their love possible — his helplessness, the household’s hospitality, the brief suspension of colonial hierarchy that illness produces — are not circumstances that can be sustained once he recovers.

Gurnah renders the 1899 setting with the dense particularity that characterizes all his Zanzibar novels: the layered communities of the coast (Arab, Indian, African, increasingly British), the smells and sounds of the market town, the specific social codes that governed what was possible between a British colonial officer and an Indian woman in a Muslim household. The romance between Pearce and Rehana is not a fantasy of colonial transgression — Gurnah is too careful a historian for that — but a study of what genuine love looked like in a context that was constitutionally hostile to it, and what happened to the people caught between their feelings and the world’s refusal to accommodate them.

What happens to Pearce and Rehana is not fully disclosed until the novel’s second section, and the withholding is deliberate: Gurnah wants the reader to experience the gap between what the first-generation characters lived through and what the second generation could reconstruct. The colonial encounter generates a story, and the story is then distorted and partially lost in the passage between generations, exactly as colonial history itself is distorted and partially lost.

The Long Shadow

Decades later, in the 1950s, the novel shifts to Rashid and his sister, descendants of Hassanali’s family, who have grown up knowing only fragments of what happened between Rehana and Pearce. Rashid is educated, politically aware in the way that young Africans and Asians educated by colonial systems in the 1950s were politically aware — shaped by the very culture he is coming to see as an instrument of his subordination. His relationships, including a love affair with a woman whose situation echoes Rehana’s in ways that he recognizes too late, are haunted by a history he does not fully know but cannot escape.

The novel’s title names what connects the two generations: desertion. Pearce deserts Rehana — or is compelled to, or chooses comfort over love, or all three. Colonialism deserts its subjects — builds roads and systems and obligations and then leaves, taking everything portable and leaving the consequences. Rashid, in his own way, also deserts. The word accumulates meaning across the two time frames until it describes not a single act but a pattern of behavior that the colonial structure makes almost inevitable: the withdrawal of people, of promises, of presence, from lives that had been changed by their arrival.

Gurnah’s prose in Desertion is among his most controlled — sentences that carry the weight of historical knowledge without becoming lectures, dialogue that reveals social position through the specific forms of its evasion. The Zanzibar he creates in 1899 and in the 1950s is continuous across time in the way that places are continuous: the same streets, the same sea, the same light, but the human arrangements entirely transformed. The romance plot is, by Gurnah’s own design, less resolved than romantic fiction conventionally provides — because the point of the novel is precisely that colonial encounters do not resolve, they persist.

Gurnah After the Nobel

The Nobel Prize committee awarded Abdulrazak Gurnah the prize in 2021, citing “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” Desertion was published four years earlier and sits near the center of his body of work, sharing concerns with Paradise (1994) — his Booker-shortlisted novel about a young man traded as a debt in colonial East Africa — and By the Sea (2001), which deals with the Zanzibar community in contemporary England.

Within the Gurnah catalogue, Desertion is best approached after By the Sea, which provides more immediate access to his characteristic concerns and prose style. Paradise should come before or alongside Desertion for readers who want the fullest historical context. His most recent novel, Afterlives (2020), published the year before the Nobel, is in some ways his most ambitious synthesis of these historical concerns and makes an excellent endpoint for a reading sequence that begins with By the Sea.

What all Gurnah’s novels share is a refusal to simplify the moral landscape of colonial East Africa: neither the colonizers nor the colonized are rendered as purely villainous or purely innocent, and the communities he depicts — African, Arab, Indian, British — are shown in their full complexity and their entanglement with each other. Desertion is the novel in which this complexity is most fully articulated through the form of romantic love, which is why it endures as one of his most emotionally resonant works.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Gurnah’s most romantic novel is also one of his most structurally sophisticated: a colonial love story whose second-generation aftermath makes clear that desertion is not a personal failing but a structural condition that colonialism built into every relationship it touched.