The Concept of “Home(lessness)” in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novel By the Sea

Year 2026, Issue: 5, 147 - 159, 26.01.2026

Victoria Bilge Yılmaz

Abstract

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea (2001) is permeated by a sense of insecurity, homelessness, and estrangement. The child characters of the novel are prematurely drawn into the chaos of violence, humiliation, paedophilia, insecurity, and death. While the physical home provides one of the protagonists, Saleh Omar, with the images of multiple deaths, another protagonist’s, Latif’s, image of his physical home is one of drunkenness, cheating, child abuse, hatred, and revenge. As the narration progresses, the characters are withdrawn from these houses and pushed into the sense of unbelonging and rootlessness marked by their metaphorical homelessness. This article analyses the concept of home(lessness), in both physical and metaphorical terms, in Gurnah’s novel By the Sea. It explores the characters’ transition from their insecure houses to their mental states of migrant unbelonging. Hence, the article’s point of departure is the idea that the protagonists have been deprived of a peaceful sense of home in their childhoods, and that they carry this burden of infantile deprivation of basic needs of security throughout their adult lives.

Keywords

Abdulrazak Gurnah , By the Sea , Zanzibar , home , homelessness , alienation , insecurity , violence

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