Abdulrazak Gurnah's 2001 novel, By the Sea, begins with the interrogation of a Zanzibari Muslim, Saleh Omar, who arrives with false papers at Gatwick Airport. Having escaped possible imprisonment in Zanzibar, he hides his knowledge of English culture and language, only responding with the words refugee and asylum to questions about the purpose and circumstances of his travel. A contemporary reader may be inclined to anticipate anti-Islamic insinuations of terrorism from the suspicious border agent—a now routine expectation for many Muslim travelers. But the events in the novel, published months before the attacks on the World Trade Center, begin well before the global post-9/11 border regime had become a quotidian aspect of international travel. By the Sea expands outward temporally and spatially from late-twentieth-century Britain to make the astonishing historical connections that distinguish Gurnah's oeuvre, both in broad temporal sweeps and in minute interpersonal disputes. The hostility with which the border agent responds to Omar's asylum request indexes a much longer history, reminding us that the twenty-first-century “crises” of mass refugee migration and Islamophobia in the Global North are mired in ideologies and institutions of subjugation whose origins can be traced back through hundreds of years of colonialism.

Published two decades later, Gurnah's most recent novel, Afterlives (2021), offers something of a prehistory of Omar's predicament in By the Sea. It relates the story of two young Tanzanian soldiers, Hamza and Ilyas, recruited into the German colonial Schutztruppe—the military regiments that operated in the German East African colonies from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War I. Gurnah chronicles Hamza's and Ilyas's fates throughout the twentieth century, from their service in the German colonial military to their migration to the German metropole. The novel thus explores the corrosive aftereffects of the purported altruism that undergirded the European project of dominating the rest of the world: spreading the gospel of European values through the colonial “civilizing mission.” Afterlives illustrates how insidious colonial power dynamics persist throughout the proxy battles in Africa during World War I that left Germany defeated, and how these dynamics continue despite the disintegration of European empire after the next global war. By contrast, By the Sea explores the subsequent era of post–World War II, postcolonial mass migration into Europe from the former colonies along the routes first carved out under empire. Though By the Sea and Afterlives depict characters at different historical junctures and with different personal circumstances, together they show us the implicit and explicit violence of assimilation into European culture—whether forced on imperial subjects in the colony or on postcolonial migrants in the metropole.

The interrogating border patrol agent in By the Sea, Kevin Edelman, eventually grants Omar entry, but not before issuing a threat parroting the discourse of the United Kingdom's National Front—the far-right political party first formed in response to Britain's mid-century influx of nonwhite, postcolonial migrants. He initially notes that his own “parents were refugees from Romania,” a disclosure that leads Omar to conjecture that the agent may have Jewish heritage and to imagine an exilic genealogy that parallels his own. But Edelman draws a clear distinction between Omar's situation and that of his family, emphasizing that “they are European, they have a right. … You don't belong here, you don't value any of the things we value. We don't want you here. [We'll] make you suffer indignities, even commit violence on you” (12). The first of the refugee's foretold “indignities” begins in the airport when, as a representative of the British state, Edelman confiscates the most precious of Omar's few possessions: a valuable box of incense called ud-al-qamari, thus levying an unofficial tax on a former colonial subject seeking asylum in the metropole.

A merchant by trade, Omar immediately recognizes the border agent's pilfering as a colonizing gesture. “[My countrymen] did not have the same obsessive need … that my European customers had—to acquire the world's beautiful things … and possess them, as … trophies of their worldliness and their conquest of the multitudinous parched savannahs” (21). Edelman implicitly presumes that postcolonial migrants and asylum seekers like Omar have the same will to invade and dominate that nineteenth-century European imperial powers did when divvying up the rest of the world. He thus asserts his legitimacy as a white citizen who “belongs” to the modern European nation by doing what its members are supposed to do: confiscate (and thus colonize) the properties of the inferior races. Edelman distinguishes himself from the refugee identity of his parents—exhibiting his full assimilation to a British model of cosmopolitan worldliness—by performing this small act of colonization. Omar responds internally to these proclamations on belonging by dubbing the agent “the bawab of Europe, and the gatekeeper to the orchards in the family courtyard, the same gate which had released the hordes that went out to consume the world and to which we have come sliming up to beg admittance” (31). The logic that justified the hegemonic brutality of European colonialism is the very same logic that sees the people seeking asylum from the chaos of its aftermath as a potentially ravenous horde, equally driven to consume the world whole—in other words, a logic that interprets formerly colonized refugees as potential colonizers. By stealing Omar's container of ud-al-qamari, Edelman effectively turns back the imperial “boomerang effect”—Hannah Arendt's term describing the metropolitan development of authoritarian control mechanisms in the colonies (Origins 155)—upon the formerly colonized subject once more. The strategies of imperial subjugation that boomerang from the African colony back to the European metropole (in the form of totalitarianism) now flip around to turn those very strategies once more on postcolonial migrants, only this time within the bounds of the metropole. In this scenario, the only way out of being colonized is to become a colonizer. Thus, the assimilation of a once-subjugated population into the European majority can be achieved through deliberate acts of colonization, be they vast or miniscule.

In By the Sea's establishing scene of late-twentieth-century interrogation, Edelman reasons that people like Omar (i.e., postcolonial, nonwhite non-Europeans) “don't value any of the things we value,” notwithstanding his assessment of the refugee's only thing of value as being worthy of confiscation. So, what exactly are the Europeans’ values? Presumably they are rooted in Enlightenment-born concepts of modern civilization—that is, liberalism, individualism, secularism, universalism. But, as Lisa Lowe argues, “the genealogy of modern liberalism is simultaneously a genealogy of colonial divisions of humanity. … Elaborations of racial difference were not universal or transhistorical [but] local, regional, and differential, articulated in dynamic, interlocking ways with other attributions of social difference within various spaces in an emerging world system” (7). The “world system” of colonization and the spread of its foundational values were predicated on cementing racial difference in the service of subjugating, enslaving, or eliminating genotypic or phenotypic non-Europeans. Through the characters of Hamza and Ilyas, Afterlives depicts the dire outcomes for a colonial subject who embraces these double-edged Enlightenment values. They are trained as askaris—that is, native soldiers who were notorious for their extreme tactics and thus highly valued by the European colonial powers to fight their proxy wars on the African continent. Ilyas's uncle, Khalifa, objects to his nephew's enlistment in German skirmishes against British colonial forces that have little to do with the Africans doing the fighting. “This is between two violent and vicious invaders. … They are fighting over who should swallow us whole. What has this to do with you?” (Gurnah, Afterlives 42). Khalifa's protestation against Ilyas's joining the German colonial Schutztruppe sounds similar, in many ways, to Edelman's logic when hesitating to grant Omar asylum in By the Sea. Both Khalifa and Edelman fear a mass invasion of foreigners “pouring in here without any thought of the damage they cause,” as the border patrol agent puts it (By the Sea 12). The difference is that Edelman only imagines a future Europe decimated by nonwhite infiltrators, whereas Europeans have already wrought centuries of damage upon the African continent when Khalifa admonishes Ilyas in Afterlives.

Ilyas's Schutztruppe cohort, Hamza, falls under the tutelage of his superior officer, the Oberleutnant who professes faith in the imperial Zivilisierungmission, or “civilizing mission.” Appreciative of Hamza's capacity to learn, the Oberleutnant explains that Europeans have come to Africa “to bring you this, mathematics and many other clever things that you would not have without us. … We have come here to civilize you” (Gurnah, Afterlives 65). The novel's depiction of askaris deployed as brutal yet expendable mercenaries against other colonial forces reveals how false the premise of the European “civilizing mission” is, especially amid the violence of World War I's African theaters. Near the end of World War I, the narrator of Afterlives informs us that “most of the soldiers engaged in combat were … from Nyasaland and Uganda, from Nigeria and the Gold Coast, from the Congo and from India. … Later these events would be turned into … a sideshow to the great tragedies in Europe, but for those who lived through it, this was a time when their land was soaked in blood and littered with corpses” (91). The goal of “civilizing,” in part, was to inspire enough loyalty in one surrogate colonized population to persuade them to battle another surrogate colonized population to death, disposable pawns in a distant, metropolitan game of global chess. Afterlives elucidates the impossibility of assimilating into a civilization that was founded on own's oppression or elimination; this failure was written into the colonial project itself. Were it to be completely successful, the “civilizing mission” would require the formerly “uncivilized” to sign on to the righteous belief in their own figurative and literal annihilation.

Arendt makes a similar claim in her essay “We, Refugees,” written in 1943 as the catastrophes of World War II raged but full knowledge of the Holocaust was not yet widespread throughout Europe. She assesses assimilation as a survival strategy for Jewish Germans escaping the murderous Nazi regime, whether it be in France, the United States, or any other nation where persecuted Jewish people could seek refuge. She refers to the figure of the “ideal immigrant who always and in every country into which a terrible fate has driven him promptly sees and loves the native mountains. But … it is hard to convince people of the sincerity of our repeated transformations” (272). Assimilation into a civilization that tends toward the violent rejection of people who are inherently dissimilar is a self-defeating endeavor. Arendt illustrates this predicament through the example of 1930s and 1940s France, where, despite any commitment to performative Frenchness, Jewish German refugees are seen as boches, or German enemy aliens (270). Yet under the Vichy regime they legally revert back to the category of Jewish rather than German, thus remaining enemies in the new political configuration. This situation bears unmistakable resemblance to the impossibility of colonial subjects’ ever being fully accepted as civilized, and furthermore translates easily into the impossibility for post–World War II migrants and refugees from the former colonies to assimilate to the norms and standards of their former colonizers. Assimilation is a transactional process—it does not work if the host culture refuses to accept the migrants’ efforts to conform.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt draws a direct connection between the brutality of colonization and the political upheavals that produced huge numbers of Jewish refugees during World War II. She argues that “African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in this process, one might push one's own people into the position of the master race” (206–07). Arendt's assertion that Nazism is a natural extension of European colonialism in Africa (and, presumably, South and West Asia, North Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas) resonates with the argument in Aimé Césaire's 1950 text Discourse on Colonialism. Césaire charges Europeans with the offense of willed ignorance, decrying the apparent surprise at the “supreme barbarism” of Nazism, since “before they were its victims, they were its accomplices.” What is unforgivable for ethnic Europeans about Hitler's systemized mass murder of Jewish people and other so-called “degenerates” is “not the humiliation of man as such, it is … the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for [colonized Arabs, Indians, and Africans]” (36). The greatest offense for Europeans, according to Césaire, is not the scale or brutality of Nazi violence but rather the fact that its victims were other Europeans rather than “uncivilized” colonial subjects.

Césaire also notes the Nazi regime's goal to reclaim the lost East African colonies. Referring to the nineteenth-century theorist of nationalism, Ernest Renan, Césaire indicates that justifications of colonization based on race science have always been part and parcel of the nation as a civilizational unit. Suggesting that Renan prefigures Hitler, Césaire quotes Renan at length: “We aspire not to equality but to domination. The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs. … It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into a law” (37). In the paragraphs preceding the one Césaire quotes, Renan argues that “[l]a colonisation en grand est une nécessité politique tout à fait de premier ordre. Une nation qui ne colonise pas est irrévocablement vouée au socialisme, au guerre du riche et du pauvre” (“grand scale colonization is a political necessity of the highest order. A nation that does not colonize is irrevocably doomed to socialism, to the war between rich and poor”; La réforme 92–93; my trans.). He further asserts, using India under the British Raj as an example, that “[l]a conquête d'un pays de race inférieur par une race supérieure” (“the conquest of an inferior race's land by a superior race”) is not shocking but rather a mutually beneficial enterprise (93; my trans.).Footnote ¹ The condition of European national cohesion is, by this logic, dependent on the colonization of the rest of the world. The very concept of the modern nation-state is contingent on the creation of a minority population that can never be assimilated and, presumably, must be colonized instead.Footnote ² For a member of the seemingly colonizable races, assimilating to the modern nation-state means accepting the notion that one's own person is inherently inferior, if not entirely negated.

Arendt and Césaire, from differing perspectives, establish that in the mid–twentieth century the institutionalized racism and brutality of colonial subjugation has “boomeranged” back into the European metropole in the form of Nazism. In the 1990s Étienne Balibar reflects on the case of postcolonial migrants arriving en masse in the European metropole after World War II, tracing the historical transition of institutionalized racism from nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial subjugation to World War II Nazism to anti-immigrant sentiment in postcolonial Europe and the United States. He argues that the subjugation tactics of Nazism (the “internal racism” of “extermination or elimination”) and colonial imperialism (the “external racism” of “oppression or exploitation”) never exist “in the pure state: thus Nazism combined extermination and deportation … and slavery, and [European] colonial imperialisms have practiced … forced labour, … ethnic segregation and … the systemic massacre of populations” (40). In Afterlives, we see these tactics overlap in the ways Ilyas and Hamza are coerced into joining the ranks of the askari and, most potently, in Ilyas's migration to the German metropole just as the Nazi regime gains power. The historical progression of racism from colonial subjugation to Nazism to anti-immigrant sentiment also informs the hostile confrontation between Omar and Edelman at the European border in By the Sea. Gurnah's novels give narrative substance to the notion that, as Balibar asserts, “the identification of racism with … Nazism … organizes racist thought by giving it its conscious and unconscious models: the character of Nazi extermination … [appears] within the contemporary complex as the metaphorical expression of the desire for extermination which also haunts anti-Turkish or anti-Arab racism” (45). Thus, the imperial boomerang returns once more, repeating the power dynamics of colonial racism in the space of the metropole itself: “external racism” now doubling back and accelerated by the legacy force of Nazism's “internal racism.”

At the close of Afterlives, Gurnah completes this historical circle with a shocking set of revelations about Ilyas's demise after the fall of German East Africa. While in Germany doing archival research, Hamza's son learns of the surprising twists of fate that eventually bring Ilyas to a Nazi death camp. Ilyas, when joining the Schutztruppe as an adolescent, defends the Germans’ reputed cruelty to their subjects thus: “They have had to be hard in retaliation because that's the only way savage people can be made to understand order and obedience. The Germans are honourable and civilised people and have done much good since they have been here” (42). Ilyas's belief that the inherent savagery of his own people must be “civilized” away by the colonizer effectively renders the mission accomplished—at least for one individual subject. After World War I ends, Ilyas disappears while Hamza continues a civilian life in Tanzania, raising a son named in Ilyas's honor. On scholarship in Bonn, the younger Ilyas goes searching for the rest of “Uncle” Ilyas's story and discovers Kolonie und Heimat (Colony and Homeland), a publication revived during the Nazi era by the Reichskonolonialbund (Reich Colonial League)—the organization that “campaign[ed] to get back the colonies taken away by Versailles” (271). A photo therein captures “Uncle Ilyas … marching with the Reichskolonialbund. … The Nazis wanted the colonies back, and Uncle Ilyas wanted the Germans back, so he appeared on their marches carrying the schutztruppe flag and on platforms singing Nazi songs” (275). By portraying the elder Ilyas joining the Nazi effort to recapture German East Africa during the interwar period, Gurnah shows us the hazards of becoming fully “civilized,” as it were. Ilyas's conversion to Nazism is in effect no different than his deployment to fight against African and Indian colonial subjects of rival empires in Europe's proxy battles. The distinction is that the “civilizing” guise of the colonial “mission” has been discarded entirely.

The elder Ilyas's fate in the German metropole during World War II foreshadows, too, what assimilating to the norms of the former colonizer will cost for the waves of postcolonial migrants who arrive on European shores in the decades following World War II. For the crime of having a white lover as a Black man in Germany, “Uncle Ilyas,” despite identifying as a Nazi himself, “was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp” where he “and his son Paul died … in 1942” (275). In Ilyas, Gurnah paints a portrait of the most extreme assimilationist imaginable, and thereby issues the bleakest of warnings about the completion of the “civilizing mission.” This disturbing coda to Afterlives serves as an equally unsettling prequel to the interrogation scene that begins By the Sea. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it becomes entirely conceivable for Gurnah to portray a child of Eastern European refugees—likely members of the very population that spurred the United Nations to create international juridical categories of asylum and human rights—evidencing his assimilation by threatening to refuse entry to an African refugee based on a notion of “belonging.” Such are the contemporary fruits that the colonial “civilizing mission” bears.

In By the Sea Gurnah seems to gesture toward a means of escape from the violent trappings of the colonial civilizing mission and its malignant postcolonial iteration as assimilation. The scene of airport interrogation is intercut by Omar's internal monologue, in which he gives a deeply historical account of expansionist trade and palimpsestic conquest. The narrative thus interrupts the conflicting and corrosive drive to belong exhibited by both the refugee and the second-generation Briton. It is Edelman's confiscation of Omar's ud-al-qamari that cracks open the temporal and spatial boundaries of their encounter. The significance of this late-twentieth-century confrontation between an assimilated European gatekeeper and an African Muslim asylum seeker is rendered infinitesimal in relation to the millennium's worth of trade, migration, exchange, and imperial rise and fall in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Levant, and the Indian subcontinent that predated any British, German, or French missions to “civilize” these long-existing civilizations by eons:

With his reverie, Omar opens the novel's scope beyond the era of European colonization and its aftermath and thus moves it outside the metropolitan gaze that determines legitimacy through its juridical categories of asylum and refugee. By doing so, he diminishes the impact of Edelman's act of small-scale colonization—that is, the imperial boomerang returning to recolonize the formerly colonized with updated terms and means. As other scholars have noted, the ud-al-qamari's value derives not from “its connection to … a culture of home and belonging [but] from the fantasies associated with the trader's stories of places beyond Zanzibar” (Olaussen 227). The story “of exchange [itself] is a materiality through which … the Indian Ocean world come[s] into being as the product of trade diasporas, Muslim networks, slave systems, indenture economies, and multiple empires” (Cooppan 174). Were Omar able to keep the ud-al-qamari, a stabilizing link to the generations of travel and transformation that precede him, he would perhaps be able to find the pleasure in exile, knowing that “home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both,” as Edward Said puts it (185).

But Omar is denied the privilege of bringing this thousand-year history into Britain with him. Ultimately, the multilayered symbolic history conjured by the ud-al-qamari's redolence is “left at the immigration desk when [Omar] enters Britain” (Olaussen 227). The novel proceeds to depict the consequences of the personal and political compromises Omar makes in exchange for entry into European civilization. He jealously guards his own truth by seeking asylum under a false identity, only revealing in fits and starts the complicated personal saga that drove him to escape Zanzibar. By the Sea's opening scene illustrates the steep cost the formerly colonized must pay for assimilating into European civilization, the price too often being historical amnesia and negation of personhood. And in Ilyas's fate in the coda of Afterlives, Gurnah shows us the most extreme version of this cost at a moment just before the juridical categories of refugee and asylum were written into international law.

By the Sea and Afterlives both reorient modern conceptions of belonging and exile by digging through accreted historical sediment, linking the contemporary plight of postcolonial migrants and refugees to the era of colonial subjugation and, further back, to the epoch preceding European imperial expansion. Together, the novels reveal the disquieting truth that the mission to civilize and the injunction to assimilate are both avatars of colonization. Perhaps even more unsettling is what Gurnah's work shows us about the “success” of these residual colonial projects: that they inevitably create new forms of colonization and serve only to hasten the eternal return of the imperial boomerang.