Literature as Resistance: Social Transformation and Structures of Power in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Fiction

Page No. : 32-41

Abstract

Narratives of transformation have long served as powerful literary spaces through which societies examine change, authority, identity, and resistance. Literature does not merely represent human experience; it also questions the systems that organize, control, and often silence human lives. In postcolonial writing, this function becomes especially significant because literature records the hidden consequences of colonial rule, migration, displacement, and unequal political power. This paper examines these concerns through the fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose novels explore the complex relationship between individual lives and larger structures of power. By focusing on selected works such as Paradise (1994), By the Sea (2001), and Afterlives (2020), the study analyses how Gurnah portrays social transformation through migration, memory, colonial violence, exile, and survival. His narratives reveal that power does not operate only through formal institutions such as colonial administrations, governments, courts, or armies; it also functions through trade, family relations, language, religion, cultural memory, and social hierarchy. Through qualitative textual analysis, this paper argues that Gurnah’s fiction presents literature as a form of resistance, not through loud political slogans, but through the careful recovery of suppressed histories and marginalized voices. His novels show how ordinary people negotiate oppressive structures, endure historical trauma, and create new forms of identity and belonging. The study concludes that Gurnah’s works invite readers to rethink the relationship between literature, governance, and social justice by demonstrating how storytelling can expose injustice, challenge dominant histories, and imagine more humane forms of social transformation.